Fears are very useful tools for driving rebellious souls back into submission. But they are equally useful in pushing the obedient on to deeper levels of communion with God. When God boxes you in with fear, it’s like He’s pulling you into a small dark closet with Him and saying, “There are some important things that I want to discuss with you.” Intense fears act like the limiting space of that closet: they sharpen our focus on God and motivate us to really listen to what He has to say. Often what God wants to teach us are deeper concepts which will take years for us to get a firm grip on. Not because the concepts are complicated, but because fully absorbing them requires a radical change in how we think. God will go over and over the same principles with us and use the pressure of fear to help us stay focused. Once the fears have served their purpose and God has moved us on to a deeper level of communion with Him, He will take them out of our lives. Eventually we’ll be able to look back and see radical shifts in our thought patterns—shifts which seem almost impossible to explain. Concepts which positively terrified us before simply don’t threaten us anymore. We have become free, and we know that it was God who freed us—a God who we now know much better than we did before.

Fears make total sense to us when we are caught in the midst of them, yet they keep us in a state of misery that we eventually get tired of enduring. Fears start off as oppressive burdens, but they morph into golden opportunities for us to develop deeper communion with God. Every negative element that God brings into our lives is like a priceless gift that’s wrapped in very ugly paper. Instead of pushing these things away from us, we need to ask God to unwrap them for us and show us the good gift that He has hidden away inside. It’s all starts with submitting to Him as the Supreme Authority in our lives and being willing to believe that He really is as good as He claims to be.