Fear Podcast Episodes

What if I’m going to have to go through something really, really hard here? And by the way, God never promises that we won’t, but he always says, I’ll stay with you the whole time. Hello everyone. And welcome to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. 

I’m Matt Kaufman. And with me today, I have our own clinician, Roger Gasser. He has a satellite office in Paulding, Ohio, so today we’re taking this interview by way of phone. Welcome, Roger. Thank you, Matt. Nice to be here. Roger, here we are in this Christmas season and end of the year, and I think one of the verses that we have very closely tied to the Christmas narrative and that we all know by heart is, fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great joy. 

I’m going to use that as a bit of a backdrop to our conversation surrounding fear. Roger, I’d love to pick your brain and have a conversation regarding that. And let’s just start out with does that hit right, Roger, to say that people struggle with fears? Oh my, yes. It seems to me like when God appeared to the shepherds in that Bethlehem scene, he asked them to think radically. 

When he said, fear not, it seems like that’s equally radical as to loving your enemy. And it is so common. We just tend to fear many, many things and over and over and over again in Scripture, we’re taught not to fear, which seems radical. It seems not like us at all. They had to completely ignore what their senses were telling them in that moment. 

Right? All right. Oh, yes. They had to distance themselves and say, okay, I’m going to think differently about this experience that I’m having right now. And how closely tied is that really to our experience when we are afraid? Break down fear. What is it? How does that affect our thinking in, in those moments? 

It can have a couple different definitions. If you’re looking just at a scholastic definition like in psychology or counseling, fear and anxiety are somewhat different. One has a definite threat, like a fear. A lion is chasing you. And one has more of an unsure and anxious outlook, like, I don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m scared, but I don’t know why. 

And so, I think that would be anxiety. Roger, what do you think? Do you think there are any truly fearless people? I mean, I think we have in mind a big macho man. We might say they’re fearless and I think we’re fearless in some areas. But do you think anybody is completely without fear? 

Or if we were all honest with ourselves, we would find that there would be fear in us. What’s your thoughts on that? I believe we all have fears. David wrote a a couple neat Psalms, 56 and 57. And I often think of 56:3, what time I am afraid I will trust in thee, it doesn’t say since I’m never afraid, I won’t have to trust, but when I am afraid. 

So, I think that indicates it is a pretty common occurrence that we’re scared. Would you say it’s a healthy personal exercise then to seriously ask the question to ourselves? What am I afraid of? Sure, that would be a good exercise because we do know that we are to have a fear of God, and this is an awe and a reverence and then if we have a fear of people or a fear of events. 

That’s something he invites us to take to him. What earmarks or indicators would a person have that would point them to their fears? So, for a person who’s saying no, I don’t think I have any fears, what would be some things that manifest a fear? I think if a certain resource that they are counting on is suddenly removed from them, they are going to fear. 

I remember the day when I was young and healthy, and I gradually lost my health, and the doctor thought I had arthritis. And then in one short call, it turned into cancer. And then I was just terrified. And so, my health was taken away quickly. And I realized that every day I lived, I was on somewhat borrowed time. 

Let me pause you right there if I can cut in, Roger, because I think what you’ve just put your finger on is the key. Here, you didn’t realize that you had a fear because your certain supports were not taken out from underneath you. In those moments, you wouldn’t have necessarily said, well, I’m not a fearful because I’m strong and healthy. 

You didn’t realize how much meaning health had in your lack of fear at that moment. But when that was removed then, oh, you were very fearful. So really what you’re challenging us with is to consider what you are leaning on? What crutch, could we say it that way? What is it that props us up that might point to what we fear? 

Is that true? I think that’s true, although in my opinion, I’m not sure we know the crutch until it’s removed. It could be a sickness. It could be a problem with our parenting. It could be a problem with one of our children. It could be a problem with a relationship. Our house could burn down. We could lose our jobs. 

There are just so many ways our world can be shaken up. And once it is, then we realize that we have depended on some crutches. Yeah. They’re not always going to be there. When I hear you give those lists of things, those are some things sometimes we wrap our identity into, right? Those things that we associate ourselves with. 

I am a smart person, for example, right? Well, until I have a disease that makes my memory fade, all of a sudden, who then am I? So, all of a sudden that fear becomes realized. Is that the beautiful link then, to the fear of God and our settled place in him and that he is our crutch, for example. He’s the one who supports us and who we lean on. 

I think that’s a fine picture of life here on earth. And I think if you asked a mature believer, 80, 90 or more years old, many crutches have been pulled out through his or her life. That person has experienced the loss of this or that or the other thing, which maybe a young person has not. 

Now the young people can lose things too. I am not implying that a young person can’t lose anything, but successfully navigating life with Jesus at our side does amazing things in strengthening our faith and trust in living day by day. Sometimes people try to numb their emotions with a variety of things. 

And it could be an addictive substance or behavior so that they don’t feel anything. Someone who might think they don’t have any fears has perhaps just numbed themselves to the point where they’re not sensing fear. So perhaps there have been things that they have cloaked that fear in, and they’ve lost perspective of that fear. Is that what you’re suggesting. 

For example, an addiction could mask fear. Is that true? Sure. An addiction can be the result of fear. Yeah. And it can also create fears. I mean, it’s a double-edged sword. And I just know from personal experience as well as parenting experience that working with fear is incredibly difficult. 

I’ll give you an example. We had high winds here just this morning at our house. And I’ve got a child who’s very much afraid of high winds. I’m at a bit of a loss, Roger, because I can’t make it not windy outside. And so, we move on with this fearsome reality. And sometimes it seems like there’s nothing to do but cope. 

One of our thinking errors or misbeliefs that we tend to use is sometimes called emotional reasoning. We think that we feel a certain way, therefore we are a certain way. We realize that the people in the Bible we respect, and revere had fears just like we do. And it’s not like they were these superheroes that just never were scared. 

They were asked to do incredibly difficult things, and it’s amazing that they were able to perform what they did, but the Bible says very little about describing how they felt when they did this. Abram was called to go up a mountain to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and he went. We are not told all the thoughts that went through Abram’s mind at that point. 

We just know he was going to follow through. God had told him to do this. He implicitly trusted God. And so, he was able to do it. Yeah. So now you’ve provided this concept of trust and the role that trust plays with fear as you work with people and walk through fears. 

Is trust a major fence post? Trust is a huge issue and lack of trust leads to more worry more fear more anxiety because I am not sure if God knows what he’s doing in this circumstance. Now, I’ll never leave thee nor forsake thee. We can take that to the bank. That’s a promise of that God made. He’s going to keep it and he does keep it, but we tend to want comfort. We tend to want assurance. We want certainty. Certainty is not what God offers. He says, I want you to walk by faith, not by sight. And so, he’s asking us to do things one step at a time because he is pleased with faith, and he is pleased with trust, and we walk by faith not by sight. 

I’m cluing in on something through here that you’ve said and I’m wondering how significant this is. I noticed that you don’t absolve the threat. You didn’t necessarily say X, Y, or Z will not happen. I think you said they might happen. And I find myself very much wanting to try to take away the threat, and even though I know in my mind the likelihood is very small that the fear will really be realized. 

Right. In the case of my child, the tree is going to crash through the roof. And I find myself very easy saying, it’s not going to happen to try to take away the threat. But what I hear you saying is walking with people in fear is not just taking away threats. It’s not necessarily that the threat will be removed. When the disciples were in fear and Jesus was sleeping in the back of the boat and I’ve often wondered what would have happened if the disciples would have just let the Master sleep, but they woke him in great fear and they said Master carest thou not that we perish? So, he was able to calm the storm and quiet the waters down and then he turned to them and said, where is your faith? 

And I think they were in awe that the Lord Jesus could actually stop the wind, stop the storm. And he can at your house, he can stop that wind and just make a great calm. Although he seems to be honored when we trust him through the storm even though the waves and the wind are still blowing. Yeah, you’ve mentioned, I think, a classic example of fear played out in the Scriptures with Jesus. 

And I find it interesting in that account where the disciples say, carest thou not that we perish, right? They only had one category for a person going through that storm. And that is that person must not care that they were going to die. Yet, Jesus was able to sleep through the storm because he knew something that they didn’t know. 

You know what I’m saying? Sure. And I think those are two different buckets for dealing with fear. Either we don’t care, and we don’t fear, or we know something. Is that one of the powerful ways to overcome fear, Roger? To ride out waves, to ride out the storm, and that will make you approach the storm the next time through a different lens. 

That’s for sure. In counseling highly anxious people, we never suggest that avoiding a problem is the solution. So, facing the fear, as the saying goes. Facing fear is the best way that we know of in dealing with a potentially fearsome situation. You had mentioned in one of your comments here a while back, you cast the kind of the vision that God gives us incremental steps, one step in front of the other, as opposed to seeing the long-term trajectory. 

Is that another element of helping people with fear and helping them focus on the right things and helping them not focus on the unhelpful things, if that makes sense? Sure. If we can help take one step at a time, that’s very useful. And we find in Scripture that’s often the way that God works. When God struck Saul down on the way to Damascus, God had lots of plans in mind for Saul or Paul throughout his life, but he told him a little bit at a time. 

Paul probably couldn’t have believed him if he had said the whole thing at once. But he said, go into Damascus and it’s going to be told you there the next step. And so then was another step and then was another step. And none of us, if we’re a counselor and we’re dealing with a client, we have no idea what they’re going to end up doing or how God is going to lead their life. 

But what we can say is trust God for the first step ahead and he’ll show you the next step and the next and the next, and pretty soon it will seem like that isn’t so bad. The way that God led me was a good path. And looking back on it now, those of us with any kind of age on us can see that God meant it for good. 

You know, we began Roger with the angels and the shepherds there on the hillside said, fear not. And that baby, that Christ child who they were announcing that day grew up to say let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. And that I think kind of wonderfully pairs up what you’ve said there about fear and trust. 

That Jesus was stepping into fear by being the answer for it. Jesus solved the fear problem by taking it on himself. Thanks so much, Roger. Thank you to our listeners. We trust that this has been a blessing to you and help. 

We often use the analogy to an iceberg in that what you see in somebody’s behavior is on top of the water. However, we know that 90 percent or more of that iceberg is underwater. I think there’s wisdom in seeking what’s under the surface, and it could be a fear. Welcome to the show, everyone. Today, we’re finishing up the second part of the conversation that I had with clinician Roger Gasser. 

Regarding the topic of fear, you know, you speak of heroes in the Bible. Pull one out that especially speaks to fear that maybe you might use with a person that’s experiencing fear. I think of Gideon a lot. The Bible tells the story. Well, the Lord talked to Gideon and said, I’m going to save Israel by your hand. 

And Gideon said, I don’t know about that. Let’s do a test. Let’s do a test with fleece. So, Gideon had a chance to move forward in his faith. And then the Lord turns around and quickly reduces the size of Gideon’s army. He says, you got way too many people here. So, he whittles it down to several hundred and in Judges 7:10, the Lord talks to Gideon and says, you’re going to do this, but if you fear Take Phura thy servant and go down to the host. 

And we know Gideon feared because he took Phura down to the host and he heard somebody telling a dream that Gideon is going to defeat the army. So, he comes back and has more faith then. God understands our frame, and he was really sympathetic towards Gideon and his fear. Gideon, if you’re fearful, here’s what I want you to do. Because I’d really rather you go through this experience and not be fearful than win the battle and be fearful. I mean, he’s going to win the battle either way, right? So that was actually an act of God of sympathy. Let me just put it this way. Do you see that God wants us to step into these areas of fear in our life? 

Is that something he’s aware of and sees reason there for him to intersect with us? I think so. And I think that if we don’t step in, he works it out. So, I think there’s few of us that get the choice to be able to get through this with no fear. And so, I think he puts us in situations where he is our only hope and our only trust, and we’re going to fall flat on our face unless we rely on the King of Heaven. 

Roger, I’m curious about you. Have you been a fearless person or have you had your own bouts with fear that you’ve had to work through? I have not been fearless. If you use the term fearless, you can’t use it in my company because that doesn’t describe me. And I think that we all have had fears, and I think they start very young. 

And not a lot of people know this, but I had a near drowning experience. I thought I was going to drown. Probably I was in deeper water than I was fit to be in because I was playing a game of tag with my friends and I was it, and they knew how to avoid being tagged. So, they led me out into deep water. It so happened that there was a lifeguard that day at that pool and she fished me out of the water and saved my life that day. 

And I can still remember the terror of believing that this might be my last day on earth. I might drown in this swimming pool. So, I always had a fear of that and overcame that by actually taking swimming in a college physical ed class. I knew I had to take some physical education classes. I chose something that I was very weak at, swimming. 

And so, there’s this guy standing by the side of the pool at the deep end. And he’s telling me how to tread water. And he says, okay, jump in. And so, I think to myself, how likely is it that this big guy standing by the pool is going to let me drown in this class and this water. And so, I jumped in, and it worked. The technique he had taught me worked. This is like we learn as we study the Bible. How this big guy, this Lord Jesus Christ, can jump in and really rescue us when we get in deep water. I think that’s often the case. And so, yeah, I’ve had lots of fears. The list could be quite long, if you ask me to list them all. 

I had a conversation with a counselor, and this was, I would say, the first moment that I learned the impact of fear. When this counselor said, I have learned that when I am working with an individual, that there are fears guiding their behavior. And if I can uncover that fear, then we can move forward. 

And his point is, a great deal of the decisions that people make are in orbit around their fears. What kind of impact does fear have on people, the decisions they make, how they live life? Fear can paralyze people. We tend to be these comfort loving people who don’t want to have any painful emotions, but all that the emotions do, they’re just feelings that signal something is happening and it’s okay. 

When a lion is chasing us, it’s okay to run. It’s just that sometimes we act like the lions are still chasing us and they are not. It might be the deadline for an assignment. It might be somebody we need to talk to; we know we should talk to, but we don’t want to. It might be a confession we have to make. We know we need to make it, but we just don’t want to do it. And there are a lot of situations where we are asked and we know we need to step forward in faith and do something, but we don’t want to do it, and therefore we’re just stuck in kind of paralysis. You know, almost as if we don’t make the best decision because we’re going to take the safe decision. 

Now, you mentioned the lion, and I think that wonderfully raises the point that God did give us fear for a reason. And so there would have to be an appropriate space for fear. Am I right about that? That is correct. And we need to fear when we’re being chased by a lion, for instance. The fight flight response is a survival mechanism. 

We are given strength to run faster than we have ever run before. Our heart rate will increase. Our breathing rate will increase. We need more oxygen to our lungs and all our cells. And in the meantime. That breakfast we ate this morning does not need to be digested right now. That can wait because, remember, we’re running from a lion. 

The main job here is to survive, not to digest our breakfast. And so, the problem is, when the threat is over and we’re starting to calm down a little bit, if we don’t calm down, and if we stay stuck in fight flight, we have lots of stress, lots of anxiety, lots of worries. And this can go on for a long time. 

And our bodies are not reacting very well to this. There are chemicals put out in our bodies, such as cortisol, which is detrimental to physical processes. And actually, as we age, there are a lot of physical problems that happen when we are under constant stress. We need to be able to take the rest that God offers us. 

Jesus said, come to me and I will give you rest. And what he really means is why would you worry 24 hours a day? I offer you rest. You need to take it. You need to trust that I’ll stay up all night for you. I’ll stay awake so you can sleep. You know, never before have I really quite put this together with fear until you just shared all of that. 

Especially, I’m using that metaphor of the lion chasing you. That fear really is a motivator. Isn’t it? Sure. It motivates us, in fact, to make hard choices and to do difficult things. That interplay of the decisions that we make when we’re in fear is quite interesting. We can be tempted not to make the best decisions when that fear is irrational. 

Or imaginative. Right. And you mentioned the word irrational. That’s a good word because there are times when fears are rational. If you and I were involved in a very traumatic accident or very traumatic situation, it is normal. It is usual. It is typical that we’re going to recall, we’re going to associate that past event with something terrible. 

And when we get an association like that, we’re going to fear again because we don’t want to relive that. Yeah, that’s interesting now to pair that against the fear that’s never been realized and yet it’s a fear. Right? Such as the tree falling on my house. It’s never happened. And so, we might say it’s irrational in that sense. 

And we, as you mentioned, lean into the fear by maybe exposure or facing that fear and incremental steps in this hypothetical situation. But what you’ve just shared there are some people dealing with trauma whereby the fear has all been too realized. And that’s very vivid. I would imagine that makes for a different recovery path. 

Is that true? It is true. People who have been through trauma find it hard to trust, and they find it hard to feel safe, and we can understand why. Because they don’t want to get hurt again. Roger, can a person who really struggles with fear, make good steps forward? And what I’m thinking about is the phrase, well, I just worry a lot, or I come from a long line of worriers, and we have a bit of a predisposition for fear and anxiety. 

And that makes sense. And I’m curious if we are bound to that fate? Or is there a path forward, and I do not want to discount the influence of personality here, or of tendencies, family tendencies, let’s say. There is such a thing as concern, and not having any concern is not a responsible position to take. 

We are also aware of the Scripture, be careful for nothing, which I think actually means don’t be over anxious about anything. And so, I think it’s possible to be overanxious. So, where that line is, I’m not sure, but I think that it’s too easy to become overanxious about something rather than let the Lord take care of what is his, and that we then can just take care of what is our responsibility. 

Yeah. You know, a word that came to me as you were making that description is the fine line between respect and fear. As I drive down the road, I have a good respect for the great harm that could happen if I didn’t maintain my attention, if I didn’t watch and follow the rules. I think that’s probably fear in a sense. 

There’s a fear there, but there’s a healthy respect. But yet I’m not petrified in fear or else I would never drive down the road because, my goodness, all that could happen. Sure. Of course, in the Bible, many times, I don’t know how many times, hundreds, the word afraid is used and fear not is used. 

And there are many, many times, however, we’re also aware of Scripture that says fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man. And also, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And when we’re talking about that fear, which we want to have, and which we should not discount, that’s an awe and a reverence that we need to have in our lives. 

We need to have this awe and reverence for God. And if we have that reverence for God, then it’s going to be marked by a high trust of him. And that high trust of him allows us to not fear in the other sense that he’s going to do something nasty to us because he doesn’t like us. But if we have this awe of God and he is such a great and a big God for us, there’s all kinds of Scripture that’s a comfort to us that God is looking for our good. 

And so, I think it’s inaccurate to just say we should never have any fear. We need to have a fear of God, but we do not need to have a fear of man. Roger here in closing. Have you seen people overcome fear in important ways? Yes. And I don’t need to go far in my own situation or my family’s situation. 

There would be examples where we ended up facing what we thought was a fearsome situation, it turned out not to be so fearsome and we look back on it now and we say that was a good thing. Thank you, Roger, for that example. And thanks for providing so much insight into this topic of fear. And I think in closing, as we reflect on the example that you just gave, when you start to stack experiences after experiences where God has been proven trustworthy, trust will beget trust, faith will beget faith, and our fears will be calmed. 

Thanks for that, and to each of our listeners, thank you for being along. We trust and pray that this has been helpful.