"The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid"?
(Psalm 27: 1)

A certain teacher scheduled a "Fear Party" for her fourth grade pupils.
It was a session at which all the youngsters were told to express their fears, to get them out in the open where they could talk about them freely.
The teacher thought it was so successful that she asks: "Wouldn't it be helpful to all age groups if they could participate in a similar confessional of their fears and worries"?

Dr. George W. Crane, a medical columnist, thinks it would.
He says: "That would reduce neurotic ailments tremendously.
Each week an estimated 20 million patients call upon us doctors.
Of this number, 50%, or 10 million patients have no diagnosable physical ailments whatever.
They are 'worry warts'.
Yet they keep running from one physician to another, largely to get a willing ear who will listen to their parade of troubles.
One of the most wholesome things you could schedule in your church would thus be a group confessional where people could admit of their inner tensions".

We are evidently trying hard to think of new ways to deal with the problem of fear these days.
It must be getting more serious.
People are giving their doctors a hard time.
One doctor made a careful survey of his patients and the reasons for their troubles, and he reported that 40% of them worried about things that never happened;
30% of them worried about past happenings which were completely beyond their control;
12% of them worried about their health, although their ailments were imaginary;
10% of them worried about their friends, neighbors, and relatives, most of whom were quite capable of taking care of themselves.
Only 8% of the worries had behind them real causes which demanded attention.

Well, most of our fears may be unfounded, but after you discover that fact, you have something else to worry about: Why then do we have these fears?
What is the real cause of them?
What is there about us that makes us so anxious?

Look at the things we do to escape our fears and to forget our worries.
We spend millions of dollars every year on fortune tellers and soothsayers.
We spend billions of dollars at the race tracks, and more billions on other forms of gambling.
We spend billions of dollars on liquor, and many more billions on various forms of escapist entertainment.
We consume tons of aspirin and tranquilizers and sleeping pills in order to get a moment's relief from the tensions that are tearing us apart.

A visitor from a more peaceful country across the sea was taken to one of our amusement parks, and after he had seen it all, he said to a friend: "You must be a very sad people".
"Sad" was not the right word, of course.
He should have said "jittery", for that's what we are.
And that's worse than sad.
Watch people flock to amusement houses, cocktail lounges, and night clubs that advertise continuous entertainment, which means an endless flow of noise and frivolity by paid entertainers who are supposed to perform in those incredible ways which are designed to give men a few hours of dubious relaxation -- watch them and you can tell that many of them are running away from something.

In one of his writings Pascal speaks of this mania for diversion as being a sign of misery and fear which man cannot endure without such opiates.
Yes, and as tension mounts in this world, fear is increasing.
Does that explain why there is now such a big boom in the bomb shelter business?
We have so many new things to fear in this age of nuclear weapons, dreadful things which are too horrible to contemplate.
I doubt that "fear parties" and "group confessionals" will help very much.
Suppose we do get our fears out in the open, what then?
Isn't that where most of them are already -- right out on the front page of our newspapers?
Maybe we are talking about them too much.
The question is: what are we going to do about them?

Meanwhile, the enemy will capitalize on our fears, if he can.
Hitler did just that 23 years ago, building up tensions that first led to a Munich and then to a world war.
The fear of war can make us either too weak to stand and too willing to compromise, or too reckless and too nervous to negotiate for peace as long as there is any chance to negotiate.
It is said that fear in human beings produces an odor that provokes animals to attack.
It could have the same effect on Communists.
The President of the United States has said: "We will never negotiate out of fear, and we will never fear to negotiate".
That is a sound position, but it is important that Moscow shall recognize it not merely as the word of a president but as the mind of a free people who are not afraid.
And that's another reason why it is imperative for us these days to conquer our fears, to develop the poise that promotes peace.

Turning to the Word of God, we find the only sure way to do that.
In Psalm 27: 1 you read those beautiful words which you must have in your heart if you are to master the fears that surround you, or to drive them out if they have you in their grip: "The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid"?

Well, you say, those are beautiful words all right, but it was easy for the psalmist to sing them in his day.
He didn't live in a world of perpetual peril like ours.
He didn't know anything about the problems we face today.

No?
Read the next two verses: "When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident".

That is almost a perfect description of the predicament in which we find ourselves today, isn't it?
Our enemy is also threatening to devour us.
He has already devoured huge areas of the world, putting men behind concrete walls and iron curtains and barbed wire, reducing them to slavery, systematically crushing not only their bodies but their souls, and shooting them to death if they try to escape their prison.
Yes indeed, we too can see a warlike host of infidels encamped against us.

What a terrible thing, that "wailing wall" in Berlin!
A man with a baby in his arms stood there pleading for his wife who is on the other side with the rest of the family.
Another man tried to swim across the river from the East to the West, but was shot and killed.
A middle aged woman opened a window on the third floor of her house which was behind the wall, she threw out a few belongings and then jumped;
she was fatally injured.
The entrance to a church has been walled up, so that the congregation, most of which is in the western sector, cannot worship God there anymore.
Practically everybody in Berlin has relatives and friends that live in the opposite part of the city.
People stand at the wall giving vent to their feelings, weeping, pounding it with their fists, pleading for loved ones.
But the enemy answers them from loudspeakers that pour out Communist propaganda with a generous mixture of terrible profanity.
There is only one escape left, a tragic one, and too many people are taking it: suicide.
The normal rate of suicides in East Berlin was one a day, but since the border was closed on August 13 it has jumped to 25 a day!

These things may be happening many miles away from us but really they are right next door.
We are all involved in them, deeply involved.
And nobody knows what comes next.
We live from crisis to crisis.
And there is only one way for a man to conquer his fears in such a world.
He must learn to say with true faith what the psalmist said in a similar world: "The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid"?

Notice that this man had a threefold conception of God which is the secret of his faith.
First, "the Lord is my light".
He lived in a very dark world, but he was not in the dark.
The same God who called this world into being when He said: "Let there be light"!
-- those were His very first creative words -- He began the world with light -- this God still gives light to a world which man has plunged into darkness.
For those who put their trust in Him He still says every day again: "Let there be light"!
And there is light!

In fact, He came into this world Himself, in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, who stood here amid the darkness of human sin and said: "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life".
The psalmist could say that God was his light even though he could only anticipate the coming of Christ.
He lived in the dawn;
he could only see the light coming over the horizon.
We live in the bright daylight of that great event;
for us it is a fact in history.
Why should we not have the same faith, and an even greater experience of the light which it gives?

This is the faith that moved the psalmist to add his second conception of God: "The Lord is my salvation".
He knew that his God would save him from his enemies because He had saved him from his sins.
If God could do that, He could do anything.
The enemies at his gate, threatening to eat up his flesh, were nothing compared with the enemy of sin within his own soul.
And God had conquered that one by His grace!
So why worry about all the others?

The apostle Paul said the same thing in the language and faith of the New Testament: "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things?
If God be for us, who can be against us?
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword"?
(Romans 31, 32, 35)

Salvation!
This is the key to the conquest of fear.
This gets down to the heart of our problem, for it reconciles us with God, whom we fear most of all because we have sinned against Him.
When that fear has been removed by faith in Jesus Christ, when we know that He is our Savior, that He has paid our debt with His blood, that He has met the demands of God's justice and thus has turned His wrath away -- when we know that, we have peace with God in our hearts;
and then, with this God on our side, we can face the whole world without fear.

And so the psalmist gives us one more picture of God: "The Lord is the strength of my life".
The word is really "stronghold".
It recalls those words of another psalm: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations He hath made in the earth.