Overcoming the Fear of Man
          by Greg Trainor,  Catholic Lay Evangelist

Most Christians genuinely desire to share their faith. God has touched their lives in a profound way. They would love to tell others about salvation and living in the kingdom of God. But, somehow, they rarely ever talk about the Lord around other people. Allowing God to make you bold and overcoming fear will make the difference between wanting to evangelize and actually doing it!

The Baptism in the Holy Spirit changed my life dramatically. When I prayed and asked God to fully release the power of the Holy Spirit in my life, I began to experience the love of God in a way that I never dreamed was possible. I was overflowing with the love, peace and joy of the Holy Spirit. I was so in love with Jesus. I knew that I had to tell others about God and his goodness. The Holy Spirit had convicted me of the need to evangelize. Deep within me, I knew that I had to share with others how to have this personal relationship with Jesus.

At the time, I was finishing school at the University of Florida. Each day I would walk past hundreds of people. I could see the emptiness in their eyes. I knew that, if I could share with them what I had found, their lives would be changed. Yet every time that I found myself in a situation to share the Good News of the Gospel, I chickened out. I knew that the person that I was talking to needed to hear about Jesus; I knew that God had brought them there specifically for that reason. I would talk with them about our class assignment, about the school football team, about the weather, about anything but Jesus! When they would walk away, I would think, "I blew it again. I’m sorry, Lord. Bring them back, Lord. I’ll tell them this time!"

Witnessing Requires Boldness

When I was praying, the Lord showed me that I had the desire to tell others about him but I lacked the boldness. So I prayed and asked the Lord to fill me with a boldness to tell others about him. He began to fill me with that boldness. Then, after talking to someone about everything under the sun, before I let them go without saying anything about the Lord, I would get in a "God bless you" or "I’ll pray for you." I was getting bolder!

Each day I would pray for more boldness. God showed me a promise in his Word: "If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you." (James 1:5). God taught me that all we need to do is ask him for whatever we need to do his work (whether it be wisdom, boldness, faith, or forgiveness). As Psalm 84:11 promises, "No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly." God will make us into the servants that he has called us to be. We need to recognize the ways that we need to change and to ask God to change us. We must surrender as his power transforms us. Each time that you fail to share the Gospel with someone that God sends to you, ask him for another opportunity and a greater outpouring of his grace in your life to be obedient the next time.

I would like to say that I no longer miss opportunities to witness, but it’s not so. But I have been asking God to change me and he has been doing it. With each passing month, God increases my boldness. He has turned my desire to share him with others into reality. Each time that I see someone prays and commits their life to Jesus as their Lord and Savior, whether it is on a street corner, in a living room or in a church, it builds my faith as I get ready to witness to someone else.

2 Timothy 1:7 (NKJV) tells us: "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." This scripture gives insight to a spiritual principle: when we allow the power and love of God to flow in our lives, the forces of evil will come against us. We have become a threat to Satan and his dominion. One of the ways that the forces of evil try to defeat the work that God is doing in our lives is by sending an evil spirit of fear to come against us. When we succumb to fear, we are not moving in the love and power of the Holy Spirit.

It is precisely this bondage to fear that robs many Christians of the freedom that God intends for them to have in life. Fear also severely lessens their effectiveness in reaching the lost. These things are true wether the source of the fear is an evil spirit or the weakness of the flesh. One of the ways that fear comes against us is in the fear of man.

Fear of Man

One of the most basic problems to overcome in sharing the Gospel is worrying about what others will think if you share Jesus with them. What has helped me to overcome this fear is that God revealed to me that there is nothing that we could ever do for anyone that is more loving than sharing Jesus with them. Even if we are rejected by the person that we reach out to, we must always see their salvation as the most important thing. We should not be so concerned with what the other person might think about us. Rather, we should ask the Lord in what way he desires to use us to bring that person closer to him.

In my last year of teaching, I taught in a public high school. That year I taught science to all of the special education students in the school. Frequently, as I was teaching, God would inspire me to share something with the students. I remember one day when the biology lesson that I was teaching was about hearing. The closing paragraph in the chapter went something like this: "Your hearing is a beautiful thing. Take good care of it. Once it is gone, it is gone forever." As I read that sentence aloud, God impressed upon me that I should share what he had done at church the night before.

The night before there was a healing service at our parish. Lydia and I prayed as one of the prayer teams. A lady who had come up in our prayer line was totally deaf in one of her ears. When we prayed for her in the name of Jesus, she was instantly healed and her hearing returned. I related this incident to the students. I told them that we do need to take good care of our hearing but, if anyone ever loses it, there is always another chance with Jesus. Just then, one of my students blurted out, "Oh, come on man! You’re supposed to be teaching us biology and all you ever give us is Bible, Bible, Bible. Don’t you know that I could have you fired?"

Several days later, I had a message in my mailbox that one of the assistant principals wanted to see me in his office "before I did anything else that day." It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he wasn’t going to give me the Teacher of the Year Award or an all expense paid vacation to the Bahamas. Either one of those could have waited until clear past lunch time. This meant trouble. As I walked to his office, I prayed. I remembered the words of Luke 12:11-12: "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say." I told the Lord that I was depending on him to give me the right words to say in this meeting.

As I sat down in the assistant principal’s office, he said, "I hear that you have been teaching the Bible in your classroom. Is that true?" My heart almost stopped. It was easy to depend on the Holy Spirit for the right words to say because I was speechless. "Yes," I said, "that’s true." Then the assistant principal asked, "Don’t you see that teaching the Bible in the public school could lead to serious problems?" If I ever needed inspired words, I needed them then. "Yes," I said, "I can see that teaching the Bible in the public school can lead to serious problems." The serious problem that came to my mind most immediately was my getting fired. The assistant principal seemed satisfied with my answer and let me go on to class. I thank God that he didn’t want me to tell the assistant principal that I would never again speak the truth of the Gospel in my class. Otherwise, we would have had a serious problem that very morning.

As I walked to my classroom, I prayed: "Lord, help me to follow your perfect will. If there is something that you want me to say in my classroom, let me know. Give me the courage to speak it out." I asked God to help me know for sure when he was leading me or when I was speaking on my own. After all, I figured, if I was going to lose my job, it ought to be over something that God wanted me to say and not over something that I had conjured up on my own. As the weeks went by, God continued to give me things to witness about to the class. Most often, the leading to witness would come during the biology class from which the complaint had come. I would pause for a minute, ask God to give men the courage to speak out, and then say what I felt God wanted the students to hear. I kept expecting another note in my mailbox, but it never came.

One day, while we were in a meeting at church, a girl from the youth group came in and told me that there was a boy who wanted to talk with me. It was Tom (not his real name), the boy who had complained about me to the administration at school. He was too shaken up to talk. Tom’s friend (also a student of mine) had come with him. The friend spoke up, "Mr. Trainor, I brought Tom here so that you would talk to him. He told me that he is going to kill himself tonight. He said that he’ll listen to what you have to say."

We went back to our house. Lydia and I talked with the two of them. We told Tom that God loved him and had a beautiful plan for his life. We explained the Gospel message, telling Tom that he could share life in heaven with Jesus forever. We told Tom that God could greatly change his life that night if he would open his heart and give God the chance. Tom let us pray with him.

I thank God that he gave me the courage to continue to witness to my class in the face of the fear of losing my job. I know that, because I was able to speak up, there is one young man who is alive today and walking with Jesus Christ. Shortly after that night, he was baptized in one of the Christian churches in our town. Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ!

When I think of how many people die every day without ever coming to know Jesus as their Savior and Lord, the fear and pride that try to keep me from witnessing seem trivial. The Word of God tells us: "Nevertheless many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God" (John 12:42-43). I pray that I will always be obedient to God’s leading to share his love and his Word with others, no matter what the cost. Jesus gives us a beautiful promise in his Word: "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven." Matthew 10:32-33.

Prayer: Dear God, I want to be a witness for you and your Gospel. Make me bold, deliver me from the fear of what others think, and use me to proclaim your greatness. Amen.

Also in this issue of the newsletter:

In His Word: Overcoming Fear (topical Bible study)

from the bookshelf (upbuilding quotes from books)

a note from Greg (a note from Catholic evangelist Greg Trainor)