Now is the time to abandon a life of worry, anxiety and fear, and launch into a life of faith, boldness and power!
Transcription
Carlie Terradez:
Did you know that God has not given you a spirit of fear? He’s given you a spirit of a power and of love and of a sound mind. We’re talking today about how to overcome fear.
Speaker 2:
Why live a normal life when you could be living the abundant life? Welcome to the Abundant Life program with Ashley and Carlie Terradez.
Ashley Terradez:
Hello, and welcome to Abundant Life. We’re so glad you joined us today, praise God, in the lounge. And we’re talking about being fearless, living a life without fear, not letting fear torment us and affect our decisions and even motivate us, and get us out of faith, really. And we’ve been looking at lots of different things in this series, praise God, so-
Carlie Terradez:
We’ve been sharing a lot of our personal examples.
Ashley Terradez:
We’ve been sharing a lot of personal examples. A little too personal.
Carlie Terradez:
A little bit too much.
Ashley Terradez:
Some of them would begin about how situations where we may have been embarrassed and things like that, but really fear of man, fear of public speaking, fear of shame and things like that, I mean, these can really affect people.
Carlie Terradez:
They do.
Ashley Terradez:
All the way through to fear of disease and fear of sickness and even fear of death and things like that, fear of lack and things like that. The whole purpose, if you like, the mandate for fear is trying to get us off of the Word of God, trying to get us out of the faith, and trying to hinder us and stop us being motivated to do what God wants us to do.
Carlie Terradez:
Right. One of the tactics of fear is it will make us look just to ourselves, our own insecurities, our own failings, our own weaknesses and our own shortfall. Isn’t that just like the devil? I mean, he’s just the author of lies, and when he comes, he’s the accuser of the brethren, so he accuses us with fear. That’s one of his techniques. And he’ll say, “You can’t do it. You’re not strong enough. You’re not smart enough. You don’t have the resources,” or, “Look at the mess you made last time.” Then he’ll show us, he’ll throw up in our face all of our past mistakes, all of our shame, all of our guilt. And then it’s like, “Well, what will other people think about you? What will other people think?”
Ashley Terradez:
He’s very self-focused, and he’s sort of looking at us-
Carlie Terradez:
He’s very selfish, really.
Ashley Terradez:
… and us without Christ, we could do nothing, right?
Carlie Terradez:
Right.
Ashley Terradez:
Because we’re helpless without Christ. What happens is we get looking at ourselves in the natural and we’re not looking at … Fear won’t say anything about God. It will put it all onto us. Like you were saying, you won’t be able to do it, you won’t be able to receive it, whereas faith puts the focus on God and who are in Christ, who Christ is in us, with a focus on God. So, it’s opposite.
Carlie Terradez:
You know, I remember one time a pastor friend of ours telling us this story, and we’ve done this similar thing ourselves, but his story was cooler. But he was in the supermarket with his four year old and she wanted some sweets or a toy or something.
Ashley Terradez:
Candy or whatever, yeah, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
And he’s like, “No, we’re not buying that today,” and she threw herself on the floor and started just pounding the floor with her fists and her feet. And I mean, everyone was looking. I mean, it seemed like everyone was looking, was watching, I’m sure, and thinking what a bad parent he was. And he tried to get her up and he couldn’t console her. I mean, she was having a full-on temper tantrum on the floor of the supermarket. And so, in the end, he just threw himself on the floor next to her and started beating the floor as well-
Ashley Terradez:
Did the same thing.
Carlie Terradez:
… doing the same thing, just imitating what she was doing. And this just shocked his daughter out of it, and she stood up and she says, “Daddy, get up. You’re embarrassing me.” And I just thought, “It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?” [crosstalk 00:03:22]
Ashley Terradez:
You got to have no fear of man to do that, though. I’m not sure I’d be able to do that in the middle of a supermarket. Just-
Carlie Terradez:
But isn’t that just what fear does?
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
It accuses us. It says, “Oh, my goodness. Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.”
I remember with our own kids, we’re in the supermarket or maybe a restaurant or somewhere where there is a public place … If you’re a minister and you have kids, the last place you want your kids to act up is at church. Trust me. Right? Because there’s that pressure that thinks, “Oh, my goodness. What is everyone thinking?”
Ashley Terradez:
It’s true.
Carlie Terradez:
I cant-
Ashley Terradez:
First, you had to drag your kids to church there anyway, because they’ve been … want to sleep in and things like that. You know that there’s that song, Easy Like Sunday Mornings-
Carlie Terradez:
There’s nothing easy about Sunday mornings when you have kids.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah. If you’ve got number of kids, you try to take them to church, there’s no such thing as easy Sunday.
Carlie Terradez:
It’s like taking goats to church.
Ashley Terradez:
It doesn’t happen.
Carlie Terradez:
They just want to eat everything.
Ashley Terradez:
By the time you get to church, everyone’s a little bit highly strung already, and then there’s acting up.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. And I mean, and then we’re thinking, we’re trying to try to keep our kids quiet. I think we’ve all done this as parents, but I remember my mom saying to me one time, “Just wait.” I think I was acting up in the supermarket, I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, and she wasn’t going to spank me then and there in the middle of supermarket, so she said to me, “Just wait till I get you home.” And that stopped me in my tracks, and you know what it was?
Ashley Terradez:
The fear of-
Carlie Terradez:
The fear of punishment coming.
Ashley Terradez:
… the punishment was worse than just the punishment right then and there.
Carlie Terradez:
I’m like, “Just spank me now. I can’t wait.”
Ashley Terradez:
You have to wait for your spanking.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. But fear will make you respond differently. It’ll change your words and it will change your actions. And even in your day-to-day interactions, we’re just using some fun parenting trials, I’m sure you’ve got your own stories, but it’s true, isn’t it, that fear, it’s subtle, but it’ll infiltrate all different kinds of areas of our life.
And you know, it’s really the opposite of how God wants us to respond. In 2 Timothy 1:7, it says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” You see, fear has no place in the heart of a believer, because God wants us to understand that He loves us so much, He wants us to come boldly towards Him without an ounce, without a trace of fear, with complete intimacy.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
When we have fear creeping into our life, it actually robs us of intimacy in relationships.
Ashley Terradez:
It really does, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
It makes us hold people at arm’s length or put on a mask and change how we act or how we say. And if we’re not careful, we’ll act one way in front of people, and another when we’re at home, and then we become like two different people, right? We have a public face and a home face or a phone voice.
Ashley Terradez:
Right. And that’s fear, yeah, and that’s fear. That’s fear of man and fear of rejection, fear of failure, things like that. And it really does, it can be subtle. Sometimes we can have these things motivate us without even realizing it, and sometimes, maybe through the past experiences we’ve had, we may not be able to trust God like we want to trust God because we have that fear of, well, maybe if God’s like my natural father or my natural parent, maybe he’ll let me down too, and things like that. And without realizing it, we’ll have these fears that we haven’t really exposed, but they’re in there and they’re working in our soulish realm.
In our spirit, it’s all fine. It’s our soul realm we got to work on. That’s where fear will try and come in, and the enemy will try and give us thoughts that we can meditate on that will put us in fear, and whatever that is, fear of lack, fear of failure, things like that.
Carlie Terradez:
I think it’s really interesting. If you’ve ever watched little, little kids, they love to show you stuff. They love to act things out. They love to do the role play. They love to get up on stage and sing, even if they’re really bad at singing or really bad at playing a musical instrument or whatever, they’re really proud of their … They just love to show you. They have no fear of people. They have no fear of-
Ashley Terradez:
Right. When they’re little, When they’re little, yeah, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
When they’re little, they have no fear of public speaking, right?
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
They’re just out there doing their thing, right, and they just don’t care. They’re acting as little kids would act. But as we get older, we start to let fear creep in, and the opinions, and maybe it’s from experience more, but people have said unkind things or they’ve rejected us, whatever it is, but that insecurity that wasn’t present when we were little children starts to grow in us.
You see, when we’re in an environment like the world and we start to absorb the natural fears, the phobias, the insecurities of the world, if we’re not careful, and you can see this as we mature into adulthood, those fears that we didn’t have as a child are very present. We used this example last time that most people don’t like public speaking. Now when they were five, you put them on stage, they think they’re the world’s best ballerina. But we lose that as we get older, don’t we?
Ashley Terradez:
Being in front of people, yeah, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
But that’s not … Part of our character, part of our new nature is to be at peace, is to be bold. It’s to be confident in the Lord, in the Jesus that’s in us. I want to start looking at this in … Let’s look at Isaiah 53, actually.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah. In Isaiah 53, we know this is prophecy about what Jesus was about to do, what he’s going to redeem us from and the things he did. And Isaiah 53 is so powerful.
Carlie Terradez:
We usually use this just for healing, don’t we? But-
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah, we use it-
Carlie Terradez:
… but it’s more in there than that.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah, there’s more than just healings. This is Isaiah, and the whole of 53, it’s a short chapter, but it’s well worth reading the whole chapter. It’s powerful because the armor of the Lord it talks about is Jesus, obviously.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah.
Ashley Terradez:
In verse 4, so this is Isaiah 53:4, it says, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” This is talking about Jesus taking on our grief, our sorrow, our pain at the cross, and you know that’s the gospel, right? It’s the great exchange. We get his health and healing and wholeness and peace, and he took our anxiety and griefs. And in these words here, if you actually … Verse 5, I’ll go on to verse 5, “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.” And it says, “The chastisement of our peace was upon him. By his stripes, we were healed.”
But some of these words here, I want to point out to you, the word for grief here in verse 4, the word for grief also means calamity, it means mental anxiety, so it’s not just grief, it’s-
Carlie Terradez:
Mm. The anguish.
Ashley Terradez:
… anguish, mental anxiety, as well as a sickness of our thoughts. That’s grief. And then also-
Carlie Terradez:
Right. Actually, it’s in the mind, yeah.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah, and then sorrows can mean pain, grief, affliction, and it could also mean a lack of peace in an area, a lack of mental peace, affliction. So these words, Jesus redeems them. He redeemed us from anxiety. He redeemed us from fear. He redeemed us from having that fear come on us, that irrational fear that’s hindering us. 1 John talks about it being torment. It torments us, and Jesus redeems us from that curse. Jesus redeems us from that anxiety and that fear.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen. And I see a lot of people that are dealing with mental illnesses that have their roots, ultimately, in fear. In Proverbs, it says, “Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression.” Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” So as we take a seed, we allow a seed of fear, to come and take root in our heart, maybe it’s through a traumatic experience or maybe it’s just words that people have said, or something somehow that we’ve received and we’ve taken it into our heart and meditated on it, anything that you magnify becomes bigger. And-
Ashley Terradez:
Whatever you focus on becomes bigger, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
… whatever you focus on, whatever you think about, what we meditate on, becomes bigger. As we start to focus on that fear, it starts to grow. And really when we see anxiety, anxiety is something that has come from a meditation on a fear. If we meditate on something that initially caused fear, we’re going to have anxiety. We’re going to have worry. We’re going to have depression. We’re going to have all kinds of mental illnesses that progress from that seed of fear.
But I think it was at the very beginning of our series, we started talking about how Jesus in Hebrews chapter two, actually I think it’s verse 14 and 15, has delivered us from the fear of death, that the death has no power. It has no hold of us anymore. But there are people that through the fear of death were, all their lifetime, subject to bondage. You see, no one can break this bondage, fear’s bondage, and no one can break the fear of bondage in our lives but Jesus.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
And that’s what this passage in Isaiah 53 is talking about. He has taken our fear. He has taken the bondage of fear far away from us.
In Acts 2:24, and this is talking about Jesus’ resurrection, it says, “Whom God raised up,” Jesus, “by loosening the pull of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it.” In other words, it’s talking about, Jesus could not be held in the grave because death didn’t have enough power to hold him there. Now whatever it is that we were afraid of, well, even if it’s death itself, it’s not as bad as death. Death is the ultimate consequence, right?
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
Whatever happens in this life … Now, if you still got a pulse, you’re not dead yet, right? You’re not dead yet.
Ashley Terradez:
There’s still hope.
Carlie Terradez:
So, let’s put things into perspective, whatever it is that you might be afraid of, what might happen, it’s not death. The very worst case scenario has been defeated because death itself did not have the power to hold Jesus in the grave. And you know, that same power that raised Jesus from the dead now lives in us.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
That same power that it talked about in 2 Corinthians … in 2 Timothy 1:7, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power,” that’s miracle-working power, “and of love and of a sound mind.” All of those things, miracle-working power, that the love of God and freedom from mental anguish, a sound mind, peace in our minds, that’s now part of who we are. But I’m a believer that the root, the very root … Where does fear come from? It comes from insecurity. I started to study this out and I found the very first instance of fear in the Bible. When did fear first show up in the scriptures?
Ashley Terradez:
From Adam, when he was … I’m just guessing, because I really don’t know your notes. I’m just guessing.
Carlie Terradez:
Oh. Well, you’re right.
Ashley Terradez:
With Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Carlie Terradez:
It was with Adam. It’s with Adam and Eve. Let’s look at this. This is in Genesis, and we’re going to look at the full in Genesis chapter three. This is where fear first snuck in. And we can find out that it’s not from God.
So here it is in verse one, “Now the serpent was more subtle …” Fear is subtle, isn’t it?
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
It’s not always obvious. It’s subtle. It creeps in. “… than any of the beasts of the field which God had made. And He said to the woman, ‘Has God said, “You shall not eat of the tree of the garden?”‘” Now remember, when Adam and Eve were created, they were made in God’s image, and they were made just like God. And they were given a job, and their job was to go and subdue and take authority, take dominion, over the birds of the air and the creatures on the ground. Anything that was of the earth, they had the power and dominion, authority, over. Right?
Now, when the instructions about the tree were given, Eve wasn’t there, right? She gets it second hand, right?
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
But it says, “And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit from the tree of the garden, but from the tree, from the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, “You can’t eat that. Don’t even touch it, or else you’ll die.”‘”
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
Right? So if we don’t get things firsthand, we can easily get things twisted.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah. Because that wasn’t-
Carlie Terradez:
We can pervert them.
Ashley Terradez:
God never said to Adam he couldn’t touch the fruit. It was just, “Don’t eat of the fruit”-
Carlie Terradez:
“Don’t eat it.”
Ashley Terradez:
… is what He says. Because Eve didn’t hear directly from God herself, she took it second hand, then she added to it and there was parts of it that weren’t true.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. And this is one of the tricks of the enemy. He will take a little bit of truth and he will twist it.
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
And he’ll pervert it, and that is where fear creeps in. A perverted form of truth. We really are perverted from the truth. It’s just a lie. It’s either the truth or it’s not the truth.
Ashley Terradez:
Right.
Carlie Terradez:
Right? If it’s got just a little bit of a lie in truth, it makes it a lie. It ceases to be the truth. So, Eve had believed a lie in the first place. It was subtle, remember.
“Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will surely not die, for God knows that the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.'” This was also a lie. You see, they were already like God. They were-
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah, created in His image.
Carlie Terradez:
Exactly. But because Eve wasn’t there from the very beginning, she didn’t have the same security that Adam would have had. There we see, the enemy is crafty. He comes to attack us in the realm of our identity as children of God. That was the very first attack on the children of God in the garden, “Are you really who God said you are?”
Ashley Terradez:
And if you think about it, Jesus, when he was tempted, you can look this up in Luke 4-
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah, this is in Luke 4.
Ashley Terradez:
… when Jesus was tempted in Luke 4, the enemy came to Jesus and he used this statement over and over, “If you are the Son of God. If you are the Son of God.” It was attacking Jesus’ identity as the Son of God.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. You see, the enemy, Satan, couldn’t stop us getting born again. He couldn’t stop us becoming children of God. But his lies and his deception, and his M.O., if you like, is fear. And if he can undermine our relationship with God, our identity as children of God, then he robs us and it incapacitates of our power to use our authority. That’s really what he wants. He wants our authority.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah. And what he’s doing is, he hasn’t got any power over us anymore. Jesus defeated the devil, praise God. And so the only power that the devil’s got over us is deception. The only thing he can do is deceive us, and if he deceives us into thinking we haven’t got what we’ve got, or he deceives us into thinking that we have to be fearful of something, and something might happen, then we can actually turn on ourselves and self-destruct. Because we can actually … Those thoughts can hinder us.
The devil can’t stop you doing anything. I mean to tell you, we blame the devil for a lot of things. You know, the devil hasn’t got that power anymore. If you’re born again today, if you’re a believer in Jesus, you have everything you need to succeed and you can do anything God’s called you to do. Nothing should be impossible for those who believe.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen.
Ashley Terradez:
But if we allow the devil’s thoughts, if we meditate on those thoughts … See, when the devil tempted Jesus, he just gave him thoughts. He gave Jesus thoughts, you know, “If you be the Son of God, then do this, do that.”
Carlie Terradez:
“If you really are …”
Ashley Terradez:
“If you really are …” And it was thoughts, and Jesus could have acted on those thoughts and thinking, “Yeah, I need to prove myself. I need to do something.” And that’s what the devil is trying to do. He’s trying to deceive us. And a lot of the time we get defeated because we start to think on these things and we meditate on the wrong things, and what happens is then it’s our own authority that we’re using. It’s not the devil. The devil’s done.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. The devil doesn’t have to do very much.
Ashley Terradez:
That’s right.
Carlie Terradez:
We were our own worst enemy sometimes in the way that we think, and those thoughts produce negative … they perpetuate that cycle of fear.
But here, back in the garden, it says, “‘If you do this, then your eyes will be opened, and you’ll be like God.'” And because she didn’t understand that she was made in the image of God, the enemy was trying to convince her to do something in order to get something that she actually already had. And you can look at this in the context of healing or prosperity or many other different ways, but we’ve already been deposited on the inside of us because of what it says in Isaiah 53. He’s talking about the atonement of Jesus.
Because of what Jesus did, we already have every good and precious promise that we’re ever going to need. Everything we were ever going to need to live successful, happy, healthy lives has already been deposited on the inside of us by the power of Jesus. If we’ve received Jesus into our hearts, that means we have Jesus on the inside as well when we’re walking around. We are carriers of the King of Glory. We are blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. We are above the circumstances and not beneath them.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
We have life and death on the power of our tongue, and we have faith that moves mountains.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
No weapon formed against us can prosper. Man, we were victorious from before we were even born. But what the devil was trying to do here with Eve was trying to convince her she had to do something in order to get something that she already had, because she didn’t realize that she already had it. She was already like God.
Ashley Terradez:
Wow. Colossians 2 really fits into this. Colossians 2:9 says, “For in him,” talking about Jesus, “in him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” And then verse 10 says, “and you,” he’s talking about us as believers, talking about you at home, if you’re a believer, “you are complete in him.” You are complete in Jesus-
Carlie Terradez:
Amen.
Ashley Terradez:
… lacking nothing, “who is the head of all principality and all power.” So it’s kind of like saying, “We already have it. God’s already given us everything we need in our spirits to live everything we need to live out.” And what the enemy comes along and says is we haven’t got it, and he’s trying to get us to run after something we’ve already got.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah. He’s feeding us the lie to see if we’ll buy it. That’s what he’s doing. But look on down here, “Then the woman,” this is in verse 6, Genesis 3:6, “Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and it was pleasing to the eyes.” So, she saw something and said, “Mm, that looks tasty,” right? And she says, “‘Is it desirable to make one wise?’ She took its fruit and ate it and gave it to her husband, and he ate it.” Now, at that moment, he needed to show some leadership. This is a whole nother message, but you know, we need to make sure we’re following somebody that has the truth down on the inside of them. Otherwise, if we don’t … And this is true in our own families as well. The truth and peace flow from the top, or fear and torment flow from the top down.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
Whatever that leadership is, if you’ve been working for an employer and their leadership style is fear, guess what you’re going to have manifesting in your body? Fear.
Ashley Terradez:
If you don’t actually guard against it-
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah, unchecked, unchecked.
Ashley Terradez:
… yeah, you just let it, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
That’s a natural consequence. And so we need to be aware of these different styles of leadership as well.
Anyway, it says, “The eyes of both of them were open and they knew that they were naked.” Look at their response, “So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” And here it is, “Then they saw the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees. The Lord called to them, ‘Where are you?'” In verse 10, he says, “‘And I heard Your voice in the garden and was afraid.'” There’s the first instance of fear in the Bible, right there. “‘I was afraid because I was naked, and so I hid myself.'”
You see, insecurity, it comes from a lack of identity. When we don’t really understand who we are in Christ and what that really means, and the person that we’ve become, and the power that we now contain in Jesus, we’ll start to, if we don’t really understand those principles, we’ll begin to get insecure. And we won’t operate in the authority that is ours, but we’ll actually start to let fear creep in, and it will separate us from God. God doesn’t back up on us, but fear will make us afraid to be vulnerable. It’ll keep people, it’ll keep God himself, the very answer to our insecurity, at arm’s length, and we’ll start to cover up. We’ll start to cover ourselves up. We’ll start to try and hide things in our life. You see, fear leads to shame, and shame is what causes people to hide themselves and separate themselves, and that just perpetuates that torment.
And so then he says, “‘I heard Your voice in the garden and was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.'” I mean, God is the very answer, and He’s the very solution to the issues, the roots of fear that we deal with in our life. He’s the only one that can bring that healing and bring that deliverance. And so if we try to hide, we try to cover up our fear, by putting on a brave face, or sewing together fig leaves and making ourselves a nice outfit or whatever it is, different ways that we cover up our shame, it’s like we’re putting a mask on and we’re not letting God get to the real heart. He wants to be the healer of our hearts. Amen.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
But if we hold him at arm’s length and put up a front and don’t ever really deal with the fears that are in our hearts, then we won’t be able to receive His comfort and His deliverance.
Ashley Terradez:
Right. That’s good. This is Hebrews 4:15. I think this fits in here.
Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a High Priest,” he’s talking about Jesus, “we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” So, Jesus was tempted to get into fear. Jesus was tempted in his identity. When the devil said to him, “If you be the Son of God,” Jesus had that temptation. He had that thought. He was tempted, but he overcome it. Right? So even though he was tempted, “yet without sin,” so yet he wasn’t overcome.
And then in verse 16, it says, “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace.” In times like this, when we’re feeling like this, that’s when we need to be going to God. Adam needed God more than ever right then and there, and God was there for him.
Carlie Terradez:
He didn’t leave him.
Ashley Terradez:
He didn’t leave him. God didn’t leave Adam. Adam left God in the end. What happened was Adam hid himself from God, and you know, God was right there for him. God is a God of grace and a God of love, and He loves us. He says, “Come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in our times of need.” So the thing is, the very time when we need God the most, if you like, is the time when often fear will stop us going to God and being vulnerable to God and having that intimate relationship with Him because you think, “Oh, we’ve messed up,” and we know we have shame and stuff. And it’s like you said, we try and cover ourselves and hide things.
Carlie Terradez:
Yeah, and we read that scripture in Isaiah 53 that says that he’s taken our sorrows. Jesus took our sorrows to the cross. Another place for that is guilt. Grief and sorrow is mental anguish, is guilt. Maybe some of the roots of fear in your life have come from guilt. They’ve come from shame. They’ve come from things that you’ve done in the past. Well, when we look at that story of Adam and Eve, God was still walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, even after they ate the apple.
Ashley Terradez:
Yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
I mean, there is no shame, there is no guilt, there is no past mistakes that we need to bear on the inside of us that should ever hold us back from God. God still wants to have a relationship with you. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, doesn’t matter what you’ve said, where you’ve been, who you’ve hurt, how badly you’ve messed up. When He sees you, He sees Jesus. Amen. He sees you in your full potential. He doesn’t see you in fear and failure. He sees you as a success, as a party waiting to happen. He sees you as His complete mirror image, made in His image with all of His authority, with His name, with His power, His passion for your life.
He has a plan for you that’s good. Amen. And His perfect plan is for you to throw yourself and all of your fear and all of your failing and all of your mental anguish on Him.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
And let Him, because He has carried that away for you so that you don’t have to. Amen. And so today, if this has touched you, if you recognize that you have been carrying around fear and torment, and it’s been affecting not only your life, but the people that have been around you, maybe you’ve acted or spoken in fear and you don’t want to anymore, you recognize that this is real to you, it’s real and it’s happening, but you don’t want it anymore, we want to help you. I’m going to pray for you that you can cast this onto Jesus. Amen. And invite him in to your situation today. Let’s pray for the people, Ashley.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen. Amen. Father God, right now I thank You, Lord, that You take this away from us. Lord, I thank You we can come to You openly, boldly. I thank You that You’re a God of grace, a God of love. And I thank you, Lord, that our identity is in You. I thank You, Lord, that we are secure in You.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen.
Ashley Terradez:
And I thank You, Lord, that we’re not focusing on the fears. We’re not focusing on these lies, but we’re focused on the truth and who You say we are. Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen. We give You fear. We give You failure. We give You mental anguish [crosstalk 00:26:30]
Ashley Terradez:
[crosstalk 00:26:30] anguish, yeah.
Carlie Terradez:
We give it to You right now, and we receive Your healing in Jesus’ name.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen. Amen.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen.
Ashley Terradez:
Amen. Thank you Lord. Praise God.
Carlie Terradez:
Amen. That’s powerful.
Ashley Terradez:
God’s awesome. Praise God. Awesome. Well, we’re glad you joined us today. We’ll be back real soon. We’re out of time this time. We’ll be back real soon, but remember, until next time, don’t just settle for living a normal life because you could be living the abundant life. We’ll see you soon.
Do you know, when we was believing for our daughter Hannah’s healing, we love God and we love the Word of God, but because no one taught us the truth, we didn’t see that manifest until we understood the truth about healing.
Carlie Terradez:
Our whole family has been impacted by this understanding of what Jesus has already done, and so now we’re living life out of victory rather than living life out of defeat.
Ashley Terradez:
And that’s why we’re so excited here at Terradez Ministries. We want people to be empowered, to walk in the promises of God.
Speaker 2:
Visit our website, TerradezMinistries.com, to get more resources that will help you live an abundant life.
Ashley Terradez:
God wants the best for everybody. He wants the abundant life for everyone, and we want to help people walk in those good things.