Fear

Fear is a recurring spiritual and practical state in which danger seems louder than hope, circumstances appear beyond control, and people are tempted to withdraw from God rather than seek Him. The book’s central answer is not denial of danger but a disciplined refusal to let fear have the last word: prayer, repentance, faith-filled speech, and persistent fellowship with God are presented as ways to oppose intimidation and recover courage.

Fear as Silence and Separation

Fear becomes most dangerous when it produces silence. The book asks what happens when people refuse to pray about their families, a rebellious teenager, financial trouble, sickness, or a troubled marriage. In each case, leaving the matter unspoken allows the negative situation to sound louder than the hoped-for answer. The argument is that whatever people remain silent about, God is treated as though He must remain silent about as well; the remedy is to make the cry of faith louder than the circumstance declaring that there is no hope.

This pattern is applied to the public shock that followed the September 11 attacks. Churches and prayer meetings filled as people searched for stability and called on God in unprecedented numbers, but the renewed dependence lasted only briefly. The book identifies this crisis-driven spirituality as risky because people may regard Jesus as Savior without committing themselves to Him as Lord. Fear therefore exposes a fragile relationship with God: people seek Him intensely when trouble arrives, then return to ordinary independence when prosperity returns.

The deepest form of fear is imagined as life without God. During a conference, the minister began changing the message he believed God had given him because he wanted the approval of well-known people in the audience. He sensed the Lord’s anointing lift and experienced himself as standing alone before the congregation. Afterward, he returned to his hotel room, fell onto the bed weeping, and repented for replacing God’s words with an attempt to please people. The episode turns fear inward: fear of human judgment had temporarily displaced reverence for God, and the resulting loss of spiritual confidence showed him that separation from God was more frightening than rejection by an audience.

Fear in Crisis and Collective Risk

The book also links fear to large-scale danger, including war, terrorism, hurricanes, tornadoes, and medical catastrophe. After American troops seized Baghdad in twenty-one days, the narrator later watched a radically different phase of war marked by soldiers dying and violence spreading. He interprets the contrast through the book’s theology of prayer coverage, arguing that people had stopped praying for military personnel and had consequently left the matter exposed. Whether the reader accepts that causal explanation or not, the narrative clearly transforms public risk into a test of sustained communal responsibility: an initial mandate to pray had weakened, and fear returned when that attention faded.

A similar pattern appears in Florida. In 2004, the narrator prophesied back-to-back hurricanes and said that prayer could keep them away. Many prayed, but the storms still came, which the account treats as evidence that prayer needed to rise to a higher level rather than as a reason to abandon prayer. The following year, he named a storm and a particular month in advance; hundreds prayed fervently and determined that the storm would not come in as before. It never struck them. He later reported that in 2006, after years of record hurricanes, people collectively and individually prayed and declared peace over the storms, and no major hurricane hit the United States. Fear is thus answered through persistence, but failed or partial outcomes are interpreted as calls to greater determination.

The narrator’s account of a tornado near his home reveals the bodily immediacy of fear more candidly. During one storm, sirens sounded, the wind intensified, and a television report placed the tornado less than a mile away. He and his wife spoke to the tornado and commanded it upward, but a large branch immediately struck the house; they screamed and ran to the basement, later laughing at their inadequate confidence. In another storm beside a medical office building, they told nearby doctors that Jesus would calm the storm, spoke to it, and then went indoors as the tornado dissipated. The two episodes are deliberately contrasted: one response seemed ineffective, while the other appeared successful, yet neither result was allowed to end the practice of speaking with authority.

Fear, Prayer, and Protective Action

The book’s preferred response to fear is active persistence rather than passive reassurance. When a newly formed church was told that its Sunday services could no longer continue in its rented space, only a few days remained before the doors would be locked. The members prayed for direction and refused to give up until God intervened. An unknown business professional negotiated on their behalf, and the property manager offered a larger, more expensive space elsewhere in the strip mall. What first looked like eviction became expansion from one small bay to three bays, eventually reaching seven times the original space. Fear of losing a meeting place is therefore recast as a moment in which persistent prayer creates room for unexpected growth.

In a separate confrontation, the narrator faced a threatening man and his gang. Afraid but convinced that he needed to act in the power of the Spirit, he pointed at the man. The group suddenly fled, causing several minor parking-lot collisions before nearly disappearing. He attributes the deliverance to the authority of God and possibly to angelic protection, invoking the image of an angel encamping around those who fear God. The scene does not portray courage as the absence of fear; the narrator explicitly remembers being afraid. Courage consists in acting despite fear and trusting that divine protection can operate around people who remain close to God.

The same theology is applied to Moses and the crisis involving the Israelites. When God’s anger threatened judgment, Moses did not withdraw in intimidation. He pleaded with the Lord and appealed to the agreement made with the people, arguing that the Egyptians might misinterpret their destruction. The book presents Moses as changing God’s mind by refusing to accept the threatened outcome. His intervention becomes a model for confronting fear with argument, covenant memory, and persistence rather than surrender.

Authoritative Speech Against Intimidation

Fear is also opposed through a “holy attitude of victory,” a posture that refuses to grant an obstacle ultimate authority. David’s challenge to Goliath and the angel’s declaration to Zerubbabel supply the book’s main images. The angel’s words address the obstacle as a great mountain and announce that it will become a plain, ending with the repeated command of grace. The book turns that declaration into a model for readers facing a blocked breakthrough: speak to the mountain, command grace to the situation, and refuse to treat intimidation as an immovable fact.

This emphasis on speech becomes especially strong in the account of Elijah. He declared that there would be no dew or rain for years except according to his word, and the book uses that statement to argue that words spoken from faith can affect the course of nature. The narrator then recounts preaching in a drought-stricken nation where no rain was forecast. During worship, he prophesied that rain would come within twenty-four hours as a sign of blessing and answered prayer. For hours nothing happened; the sun seemed to contradict the prophecy. Later, clouds formed, heavy rain fell, thunder shook the buildings, and flooding spread through the streets. The delayed result intensifies the fear of having spoken falsely, but the eventual storm becomes confirmation within the book’s framework that faith-filled speech can overcome visible evidence.

The book does not present this authority as effortless mastery. It repeatedly acknowledges delay, apparent failure, and the temptation to panic. The instruction to continue lifting the “rod of power” is therefore a command to develop progressively—from revelation to revelation and from faith to faith—until fear no longer dictates the response. The language of a rod converts inner courage into an instrument: words are treated as an extension of spiritual authority, while silence leaves the threatening circumstance unopposed.

Fear, Illness, and the Refusal to Abandon Hope

The most severe personal crisis described is the illness of the narrator’s father-in-law. During a family camping trip on July 4, the man developed a fever of 104 degrees. Doctors initially failed to identify its cause, and although antibiotics controlled the fever after three weeks, he remained weak. By early December, the fever returned violently; he woke faint and seeing spots, and an ambulance took him for emergency care.

The medical findings made fear concrete. Doctors first suspected a heart problem, but exploratory surgery revealed diverticulitis and a ruptured bowel. Months of undetected infection had produced septic shock, and he was near death within hours. Surgery repaired the bowel, yet his poisoned body swelled to three times its normal size, his fever reached 105 degrees, and nineteen intravenous bags supplied medicines, fluids, blood, and food. Eight physicians treated him while his liver, kidneys, and lungs began shutting down; he required dialysis, a ventilator, and a medical coma because of multiple organ and renal failure.

The family answered this crisis with prayer around the clock. The surgeon gave less than a 50 percent chance of survival, but the mother-in-law responded that her God was bigger than that and chose to remain on the positive side of the probability. Fear is not erased from the scene—the medical facts make the threat unmistakable—but it is denied the power to define the ending. The account places faith beside clinical uncertainty as a competing interpretation of what remains possible.

Across these episodes, Fear functions as both threat and diagnostic signal. It reveals where people have stopped praying, where human approval has displaced obedience, where public danger has weakened communal attention, and where circumstances have begun to sound louder than faith. The book’s repeated counter-movement is to remain engaged with God: to pray before tragedy rather than only during it, to speak against intimidation, to remember covenant promises, and to continue until the crisis changes or hope is restored. Fear may announce separation, defeat, or death, but the narrative insists that persistent communion with God keeps those announcements from becoming final.