Tell Your Soul

We pick up our series on fear with the second half of Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones' counsel. We must not listen to ourselves, but we must also fill that space by speaking to ourselves.

Dr. Lloyd Jones explains:

"Our fears are due to our failure to stir up--failure to think, failure to take ourselves in hand. You find yourself looking to the future and then you begin to imagine things and you say: 'I wonder what is going to happen?' And then, your imagination runs away with you. You are gripped by the thing...this thing overwhelms you and down you go. Now the first thing you have to do is to take a firm grip of yourself, to pull yourself up, to stir up yourself, to take yourself in hand and to speak to yourself."

"Talk to yourself out loud, if you have to" a pastor once advised me in the midst of one of my particularly intense battles with fear. So if you ever catch me muttering to myself, you'll know why.

And what exactly should we say to ourselves?

"Faith reminds itself of what the Scripture calls 'the exceeding great and precious promises' says Lloyd Jones. "Faith says: 'I cannot believe that He who has brought me so far is going to let me down at this point. It is impossible, it would be inconsistent with the character of God.' So faith, having refused to be controlled by circumstances [or feelings!], reminds itself of what it believes and what it knows."

Tell your soul--out loud if you have to--what it believes and what it knows.