Homegrown Fears

Some social scientists maintain that there are no inherent fears except two; the rest are acquired. The two inherent fears, they say, are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises.

I read of some psychologists who examined five hundred people and found that, between them, they had about seven thousand fears. The theory that we inherit just two fears, of course, is not a proven fact, but if that happens to be so, then those five hundred people were loading themselves down with hundreds of unnatural and useless fears!

Once when I was in India, I was told of a caste where the women on each of their birthdays add four rings of heavy brass—one on each ankle and one on each arm. By the time they are in middle age, they walk with great difficulty under this senseless burden. But this is no more senseless than weighting oneself down with useless fears: fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of the future, fear of growing old, fear of what people might think, and so on. Most of our fears are homegrown—they come out of wrong home teaching and example. Parents who try to control their children by fear often succeed too well; their children grow up being controlled by the fears themselves.

A woman wrote to me and said: “All my life I have been a victim of fear. My nightly prayer was: ‘Lord, thank You for not letting anything too bad happen to me today.’ You said if I turned to Christ, He would rid me of all fear. Well, I have—and He did.”

Further Study

Ps 23:4; 34:1-22; Pr 9:10; 19:23

What was David’s testimony?

How can we find freedom from our fears?