The thing you may have to change is your philosophies of life. Do you believe that the circumstances of your life are random? Do you believe in bad luck, bad karma, or bad fate? What is your philosophy for why certain things are happening to you? Do you feel that God is after you for some reason? Do you believe that God is punishing you for something you have or have not done? Your philosophy for why things are going the way they are is CONTROLLING your reactions to the events of your life.

Part of the power that is motivating your difficulties with fear is a lack of control over some circumstance or some person. This causes feelings of helplessness in being unable to protect yourself from that person or event. If you are the only one that you can trust to protect you, care for you, and watch over your safety, then fear stays with you all the time.

When you feel vulnerable, helpless, or as a victim to something or someone, it can open the door to concerns that don’t come from God. All concerns that don’t come from God cause suffering, torment, debilitation, and feelings of helplessness. Concerns that come from God are simply warnings that you are about to WILLFULLY do something that He knows isn’t good for you; these concerns need to be listened to but not worried about.

God will help you avoid damage from making wrong moves by simply supplying you with a concern that makes sense. If you are taking a chance, climbing too high, putting your body at risk, pushing to hard, or making an error in judgment, He will send you some kind of emotional warning. However, Jesus will help you defeat emotions that keep you from living a normal life, keep you from succeeding, keep you from doing the right things, or hamper your spiritual growth.

The first issue Jesus will be dealing with is the fear source. You may believe that all you have to do is make up your mind and you will be able to defeat fear. But, even if you decide you aren’t going to let things bother you, you will often find yourself worrying about them anyway. Fear is an emotion; and, emotions come from your heart. Your mind thinks logically and if you can come up with a good reason, you can change your mind; BUT, that won’t work on your heart. Your heart decides how you feel about the events of your life; AND, your heart can’t be reasoned with.

Your heart isn’t easily changed or handled; that is why all your trying to think your way to freedom isn’t working. It is much more in control of you than you are in control of it. That’s why you can’t just bully it into stopping sending you fear signals. It processes with emotions; it makes all its decisions based on how it feels. Emotions are all it understands; so, when you try to use logic, reasoning, facts, and proof, it is like trying to talk to it in a foreign language.

Your heart has the assignment of protecting you from danger. If something has hurt you in the past, it stores up the feelings you had from that event. Then it sets up security systems around anything that is similar to that event. If it feels something is happening in your life that is like some other bad event, it will send you fear, anger, being offended, depression, or some “appropriate” emotional reaction to the event. If it is convinced that something is a hazard to you, it will MAKE you react to it in a negative way. You may not agree with your feelings on the matter; but, you heart is trying to protect you from bad events.