Category: Fear

Power for Abundant Living…

On By Papa TonyIn belief, believing, Fear, freedom, Thought11 Comments

advanced-intermed-pfal-class-syllabus_1_511ebb705420de7d6d9ed68e3e37889d-3In the Spring of 1982, I was a young college student when I first experienced the class that would change my life forever called, “Power for Abundant Living.” Having grown up with no religious training, I was fortunate not to have any compulsive, well schooled creeds to unlearn, except for one – fear. And, like most people, you would never know this by observing me. I said all the right things and generally made sure it appeared like I had it all together. However, underneath that deliberate facade, I was afraid of everything.

One of the first lessons from this class about the Bible was that fear is always wrong. (If you just mentally rehearsed some scenarios where fear is good, you need the class!) Fear has defeated more people’s lives than any other thing in the world. Fear always encases, always binds, always limits what you can and cannot do. Fear steals away your energy. Fear lowers your vitality. Fear produces inertia and eventually stops your life from moving forward as it should. “Fear is sand in the machinery of life.” Accordingly, “fear not” is the number one admonition in the Bible.

Fear is not simply an emotion or a sense of healthy caution that keeps you from walking off a cliff. Fear is a negative form of believing. What you believe in the depth of your being is what you receive or experience in this life, including that which you fear. The fears you unknowingly cling to either from wrong teaching or ignorance serve only to limit and thwart your life. When and where you have fear you have defeat in your life. Just as a person positively envisions some goal with the expectation of achieving it, fear is negatively envisioning something bad with a fearful expectation of receiving it. No-one would purposely expect bad things for their life and that’s why fear is always wrong! If you look for it and if you are honest, the places where you struggle the most have some fear interspersed in there. However, just as you began life without all of these fears, those fears can be overcome!

Fear, like any negatives that assault your life, doesn’t just show up overnight. Rather it begins as a process from which you are likely unaware. (If you knew it you wouldn’t participate…) Fear always begins with a doubt. Doubt appears following an uncertainty concerning some aspect of your life. The uncertainty you are experiencing leads to feelings that you have to “figure out” the source of your uncertainty. (This is a typical human response and why the technique is so effective.) As you begin in earnest to figure out the source of your uncertainty, you have to mentally entertain the troubling thought while you try to figure it out. Entertaining the troubling thought, though you are sincerely trying to solve a problem, now transitions into worry. Worry is dwelling on difficulties or troubles, always following uncertainty. “Dwelling on the darkness won’t bring forth the light!” Dwelling on and considering “potential” troubles doesn’t actually help to solve those troubles, but rather serves to entrench those troubles into your thinking. Entrenched worries now turn into fear. Fear means the devil is already inside the door. Fear is a hole in the hedge of God’s protection around your life. Your fear has now become a strong expectation for your life and if persisted in, will bring that negative potentiality into your life. Then you may exclaim, “I knew it!” and you would be correct but before it happened you had another choice! Get rid of fear in your life!

As frightening as this all sounds, it has been going on almost since the earth began, when another power gained access and began bringing fear into people’s lives. It continues to this day because it works wholly by deception. The reason you cannot solve the sudden uncertainty you are experiencing in your mind is because the uncertainty wasn’t true to begin with! You begin your attempt with a wrong starting premise. By entertaining the wrong idea, no matter your good motive, you are acknowledging it as true; as a real possibility for your life. In that you have already been defeated! If you start wrong you will end wrong. Instead of allowing the doubt to persist, leading eventually to worry and finally issuing in fear, you have to learn to control your thoughts and refuse to entertain the negative possibility! This is not an easy thing to do. You are going to feel real, real tempted to take that thing on in your mind. You’ll feel as if you cannot let it go and have to think about it. Well, it’s a trick and will always end badly. It’s not your job to protect yourself from all negatives and evil, it’s God’s job. Let God do His job while you do your job…

Power for Abundant Living taught me how, for the first time in my life, to completely rid myself of worry and fear. The class focused on the greater (greatest) power – God! It taught me how to understand the Bible for myself including those things written for my learning and those things directly applicable to my life. Ultimately the class taught me how to “receive” God’s power into my life via holy spirit and begin utilizing that power in my life, leading to power for abundant living! As vividly as I recall receiving God’s power into manifestation in my life, I also vividly recall and embrace being fear-free for the first time in my life! And although fear would continue its assaults on my mind and at times gain a little access, I continue to feel monumentally grateful for having learned these principles and to now experience my life as a son of God!

I encourage you my dear friends, no matter which path you may take, to learn for yourself the truth of God’s Word; to learn how to receive God’s power into your life; and to learn how to rid yourself of all fear in every category of life!

Life without fear is just the sweetest thing ever and God would have it no other way…

Just some good thoughts…

 

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What Is Wrong With Me?

On By Papa TonyIn Fear, Thought2 Comments

Have you ever arrived at the place where things don’t seem to matter much anymore? You are tired of the routine of life and there’s nothing new under the sun? It’s sort of like life has lost its point somewhere or if it has a point, it somehow snuck by you. You are stuck in a giant bowl of “who cares” and can’t seem to navigate your way out of it. You search for clues in the physical realm like maybe you aren’t getting enough sleep or you’re dehydrated or something. No matter what words you use to describe it, it feels like “blah” and calls aloud for a remedy. What the hell is wrong with me?

Life is best summarized by these two giant life forces working behind the scenes influencing people to decide to move in a certain direction. One force for good is always working to provide you with clues about how to think and where to take your thoughts while the other one seeks to hijack your thoughts and move you forcefully towards a certain path. One motivates by love and the other motivates by fear. Imagine that life is like a race and as long as you keep running you will arrive at a good destination. Your pace of life fluctuates with your mind. When your mind is functioning properly without fear or other constraints, you are able to run effortlessly towards your hopes and dreams. But, when fear forces its way into your existence, there’s an immediate drag on the system and life begins to slow down. Lowered energy, lowered vitality, low capacity to give a damn, all point to fear that has forced itself upon you. You may feel your situation is much more complicated than that, but it isn’t so there’s no need to perplex your mind any further. More rest isn’t going to fix it. Eating better is not going to solve it. Exercising and losing a few pounds isn’t going to correct it. It’s fear, fear, fear and it will suck your life out from underneath you!

Fear is a slippery character and it’s hard to put your arms around it. It moves in quietly without fanfare in the form of a few doubts and maybe some worry here and there. Then, as you unknowingly give it space in your thinking, it gains a little traction and starts occupying a place. It’s like a breeze blowing in your face while you’re running. It’s not enough to stop you, but it is enough to slow you down. You can tell that you’ve slowed down because you are no longer looking forward in your life. You’re no longer focused on your destination, but instead you begin looking all around you. The more you slow down and the more you start looking around, the more potential difficulty you begin to see. It’s also like your life is a huge room with an infinite number of doors you can travel through to get to different destinations. Fear starts closing off the doors, one by one, until your life seems to have very few options or remaining opportunities. The doors aren’t really closed, but fear gives the illusion that they are and as long as you sit there in “it” you aren’t going to see the way out.

Fear at its basis is pure illusion. It isn’t the negative, disastrous outcome, it’s the threat of the disastrous outcome! It’s the ultimate energy suppressor. It feeds on your energy like a parasite as it has no real life of its own! It exists by permission only which its host is unaware it has given away. It can only gain energy from you by your insistence on letting it stick around. You don’t willfully allow it to remain, but you feel compelled to give it mental space as it has suggested some unreasonable outcome from which you wish to escape. Its illusion shines the most brightly as you foolishly decide to engage it with your human logic and understanding. It’s a wrong starting premise which cannot end successfully in any scenario. In the middle of his nightmare Job said, “I have no ease, I have no quietness; I cannot rest; turmoil has come upon me.” The hallmark of fear, if you are still in denial, is no ease, no quietness, no rest and the feeling that trouble has landed upon you! What is wrong with you? Fear has descended upon you and you need to escape its grasp!

If you want your life to return to you. If you want to experience your former energy and vitality, you have to rid yourself of fear. You have to eradicate it from your life like the plague! You’ve got to clear out both the obnoxious and the subtle. You’ve got to learn to hear its words inside your head and begin the process of refuting them! You must find some promise of God that overcomes that fear and hurl it on the fear thoughts like dry chemical carbon dioxide!  Maybe there is some action you need to take or some consultation you need to attend, but whatever it is, take that action! Then, once you’ve refuted it and coated it with God’s promises and taken action against it, let the damn thing go! Nothing kills off fear faster than your personal decision to refuse it access to your thoughts! Resist the urge to reason it out, it has no reason behind it. Quote the Word and let it go!

What is wrong with you? What’s wrong with the whole world and its quest to recover its former life? You’ve fallen victim to fear in some capacity and it is eating away at your life. Get rid of it. Squash it! Stomp it out! Get back to running in your own race of life, effortlessly toward the things that matter most to you! Your condition isn’t permanent no matter how long you’ve been living this way. You not only should get rid of every fear, but it is your birthright as a human being to do it. Your life without all the fear is your real existence. It’s the way God intended for you to live. Let Him take on all the so-called threats to your existence. Let Him do what He said He would do! No fear…none!

Just some good thoughts…

 

 

 

The Psychology of Fear…

On By Papa TonyIn belief, facebook, Fear, ThoughtLeave a comment

imagesIt’s ironic to me that fear, which exists only in the mind of man, has such a powerful influence over the American people of today. Good ol’ Murica is literally scared to death. When fear is introduced, logic leaves the building. There’s no more sound thinking, rational thought or anything that even resembles a normal cognitive process. And, during this woefully sad circus called election season, the only real threat to so-called “ruining” our country is fear.

Fear in its true essence is nothing more than false evidence appearing real. It’s false evidence because that which people fear has not happened yet. But, in order for false evidence to gain a foothold in people’s minds it must also appear real. Fear has not always been a part of man’s existence. It first entered the scene when the original man separated himself from God and in so doing allowed entrée to a manner of thinking which formerly didn’t exist. And, ever since that fateful day, fear has been hard at work ruining people’s lives. Fear demands you react to a problem which isn’t yet a problem. The choices you make in response to fear are always wrong! However, the illusion of fear, once believed, is on its way into becoming a reality. What a person believes, they will receive into their life, positive and negative alike and the false evidence then, frightfully, turns into real evidence.

Nothing lights a fire under the American people faster than fear. The message of fear threatens your existence, your happiness, your peace. So, if you want to garner votes, simply scare the hell out of the people. Tell them of dangers that don’t exist. Carefully craft your messages and add in unhealthy doses of pending doom and disaster. When someone questions your message, accuse them of lying and then get back to the business of fear. Sound familiar?

The tenuous threat of fear aside, the ultimate trouble comes from the illogic that naturally follows it. Absent logic, the only choice left is insanity. Insanity and illogic is exhausting. Every parent knows that reasoning with a child whose not yet capable of reasoning is a foolish endeavor. Yet, that’s exactly where we are today! What would be considered horrible or distasteful or just plain wrong, somehow becomes acceptable because fear and illogic are at the helm. Without sound reasoning in place, up becomes down, left becomes right and black morphs into white. And, in a world where things no longer have meaning, what would you expect?

What I’m setting before you today folks is much bigger than politics. This is about your life, your freedom, your ability to pursue happiness. The reason America became great is because of the collective beliefs of its citizens. Its forefathers had the holy boldness to pursue a new way. They weren’t afraid to break away from the regimes of fear and bondage. They envisioned a land that would be tolerant of all people and all beliefs and fought hard to obtain it. And now, this great empire is threatened, not from factions of terrorists or illegal aliens or even racism, but more directly from the individual fears of the citizens united together to become collective fear, which however false, will become reality if persisted in. The psychology of today’s America is fear!

The solution to this grand dilemma is not found in arguing, fighting and threatening. However much you want to slap the good sense back into people, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Once people are afraid and continue to feed on that fear, their minds have become unstable. Just look around you. It’s pretty obvious in’t it? Instead, your job, your only reasonable job is to refuse to be a part of their fear. Once fear exits the picture, sound thought returns. I certainly don’t purport to be the smartest person around, but one thing I’m not, is afraid! The only true solution to your own fear is a return to love; to compassion; to sound thinking. Stop being so damn worried about some segment of society that’s going to get you! Nothing is going to get you if you trust God. It really doesn’t matter if the whole damn thing goes to hell if God’s got your back! He’ll make a way for you, no matter what it looks like.

You sir, you madam, get out of the fear business! Put love back into your heart. Return yourself to kindness, to encouragement, to love. Quit letting the great societal fear make your decisions for you. Stop stockpiling your weapons and preparing for Armageddon. Cease in your doomsday preparations. The wheels haven’t fallen off the bus yet, they just want you to think they have. You, in your life, decide the wheels are still on the bus. Be honest with yourself. Is your life, the way you have been living, really so awful? Is your corner of the globe really a “disaster?” Is the America where you reside truly been ruined by a neighbor that wears a turban? Does someone’s different beliefs threaten your beliefs? Is the truth of God somehow negated by another person’s error? Illogic people, you must rid yourself of the insanity.

Our great God that made America great isn’t out of business. But, your fear will negate His ability to protect you and help you. Don’t allow false evidence to turn into real evidence. Stop looking over your shoulder for something that is going to get you. Instead, walk out boldly with your head held high knowing that it is God who watches over your life. Refuse the psychology of fear and return to the true essence of being an American. Be a badass!

It is election season, so get your butt out there and vote. But, more important than deciding on a candidate, decide on what it is you will and will not believe. The individual believing of one person can turn the whole world right-side up. Imagine the possibilities if the majority of us believe.

Replace the psychology of fear with the psychology of love. You won’t be sorry. You’ll be blessed!

Just some good thoughts…

 

Closed Doors and Fear of the Future…

On By Papa TonyIn Fear, ThoughtLeave a comment

door-closed-w-little-boy1There are so many people living today who aren’t really living anymore. Sure, they wake up in the morning just like we do. They shower, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. When you see them at work they look just like everyone else. They pause at lunchtime for a sandwich and nothing seems amiss. After work they make their commute home and once at home they change clothes, eat a little dinner and hit the couch for a night of mindless television. It’s just a typical day in the midst of a typical life. Nothing is particularly wrong but nothing is particularly right either. The fire on the inside still burns, but hasn’t been ablaze for years. The lights are on, someone is home, but there’s precious few reasons to open the door. Something went wrong, but not anything you could put your finger on. Slowly, imperceptibly something closed all of the doors and now it seems there’s no way out.

Here’s a thought. When was the last time you woke up excited for the day and what it might bring? Can you remember when you last had solid objectives; not vague, ill-defined goals, but a real plan for your future? How about when you last felt the energy of your convictions and looked forward to making a difference in the world? If those things have become strangers in your house, you’ve been stolen from and I bet you don’t even know it. No-one knows it because if they did they would be on the look-out. The trouble never just shows up one day, it happens over time; lots of time and finally reveals itself in lost hopes and broken dreams.

I’d be the first to promote living in the moment and not wasting time in the past or the future, but have you ever thought how both rob the life you live right now? Despite your lingering bad feelings, the past is already passed, but fear of the future stops your movement today. Fear pulls down the shades one window at a time until the whole house is dark. Once it gets dark enough, it starts locking all the doors. Your options narrow, your energy slows, your pace grinds to a standstill. Your interests dwindle, your motivation wanes, your desire fades. You wonder what’s the matter with you. You can’t pinpoint the cause because it happened long ago. All you know is that you don’t feel like doing anything but settling in for a long dull ride.

Fear is at the root and eliminating it is your only option. You have to figure out what you are so afraid of. It shows itself in a million disguises but it only has one purpose; to stop you and your life in its tracks. Life is fluid and full of movement and activity and change and growth! You can spy fear out when you become settled and stationary, static and the same, day after day after day. You’ve stopped progressing and instead of staying the same, you are digressing, albeit very slowly. The things you used to do when your future was free no longer make sense because your future is no longer free. It’s like traveling down the freeway of life and noticing way up in the distance that the road is closed. There’s just no point in driving then. Have you stopped driving?

So, I ask you again. What are you so afraid of? Is it that you won’t be successful? Is it not having enough money? Is it not making a difference in the world? Is it mediocrity? Is it some looming disease or sickness that will cut your life short? Is it being found out as a charlatan? Is it in not reaching your dreams? Is it too late for you? Is it the loss of a good job or maybe not getting a good job? Are you not smart enough, strong enough, liked enough? Are you too fat, too thin, not pretty enough? Are you too old, too young, too inexperienced? You see, all those stupid things are fear; fear talking you into to being something less than what you really are; less than you know you can be! And every one of those fears takes you away from the things you really want. At best they serve simply to stifle your movement, guaranteeing you won’t actually get anywhere. To get anything in life you have to move towards it. I’ll say it again! To get anything you want in life you have to move towards it! Fear has got you on the couch…

It’s time for you to start living again! It’s time for you to wake excited for the day because the day is filled with unlimited possibilities if you’re looking for them. It’s time to make real plans, extravagant plans to be someone incredible, not just successful. It’s time to stop making excuses and procrastinating and get out there and make something happen. It’s time to give the TV a break for a minute and make productive use of your time. It’s time to look your fear in the eye and do something about it! You didn’t start life with that fear and you don’t have to live with it now!

Once you figure out how to get rid of your fear, you’ll see all of your doors opening again; swinging wide open with latent possibility!

Just some good thoughts…