By Faith - Fearless

Good morning.

Jesus, thank you so much for being here, for your presence, being alive and in this place.

And Lord, I know there's some of us that maybe are here for the first time and we just feel something.

We just feel a life in this place that maybe we haven't felt in a while.

And we just want to acknowledge that that's you.

The Holy Spirit, we ask that you would speak to our hearts, that you would teach us and draw our attention to what we need to have our attention drawn to as you speak through your word.

And we ask this all in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Well, for the last few months, we've been on a bit of a faith journey.

We're in the middle of a series called By Faith.

We want to learn how to grow into people who live our lives by faith.

Our foundation verse is 2 Corinthians 5.7, which says that we live by faith and not by sight.

We live by faith and not by sight.

And that's definitely easier said than done.

Because living by sight, that's pretty natural.

We don't have to try very hard to live by what we see.

We live by what we can experience.

We live by our senses.

Even if we can't see, we can live by what we hear, we can live by what we feel.

I have a daughter that's one year old, and she is beautiful.

I told the first service, if you don't believe me, I can back it up with a lot of pictures.

Don't make me do that because I will.

She's gorgeous, she's wonderful, she's my first daughter, and I absolutely love her.

She's also tiny.

I mean, extremely tiny.

I know one-year-olds are supposed to be small, so I understand that, but even for a one-year-old, she is super small.

And it doesn't make any sense to us because if there is one sense that my daughter lives by, it's taste.

My daughter eats more than it even makes sense for a one-year-old to eat.

She, every single night at dinner, she easily eats more than our five-year-old son.

And it's not even close.

And yet she's so small.

She's in this phase right now.

I know parents, many of you have had children in this phase where she is eating anything she can find.

If she sees it and it's big enough to fit in her mouth, it is in her mouth, and she is trying to eat it.

Last week or a couple weeks ago, we were outside playing, and you know how if you take your eyes off your kids for like two seconds, it's all it takes, two seconds, and disasters are brewing.

All of a sudden we hear our son yell and he has this commotion going on.

He's like, Dad, mom, dad, mom, look at Lily.

And we look over, and I didn't notice anything at first.

She was a little messy, but we were outside.

That's that's normal.

And then I realized what was happening, and Liam said it right as I realized it.

He said, Lily's eating dirt.

And he was not exaggerating.

She was scooping up huge handfuls of dirt, putting it in her mouth, and she wasn't like spitting it out, going like, ooh, this is dirt.

She was consuming dirt.

Consuming dirt.

And I don't know how much she ate.

I felt really guilty, but then I just remembered dirt is organic.

And now I can finally say that we feed our children organic things.

So that's good.

Right?

It also lowers the bar in the kitchen because we know as long as we cook something that's better than or equal to dirt, she will eat it.

So it's it's nice to have that pressure lifted.

She just she lives by taste right now, that's what she does.

We live by our senses.

And so when we say that we want to live by faith, not by sight, that's a little risky.

Because sight we understand.

Faith, living by something we can't see, putting our faith in a invisible God, a God that we don't hear with our ears really, like, that seems risky.

That seems like a stretch.

Living by sight seems safe.

And I understand that if that's where you're at this morning, if you're here and you're like, hey, I'm open to the whole God thing, but just living by faith and faith alone, I don't know.

I understand that.

I guess I just challenge that thought with one realization I've had is that living by sight is risky too.

We might feel like living by faith is a big risk, and living by sight, that's easy, but living by sight is just as risky because we put a lot of confidence into what we see, but our eyes can be easily fooled.

Easily fooled.

Have this image that's gonna come up on the side screens.

You may have seen this before, so if you have, don't ruin it for the people around you.

All right, just a very simple picture of two squares.

And the question is which one is the darker shade of gray?

Now you probably realize there's an illusion and this is a trick, and you're right, but let's just say that for the sake of humoring me, which one is darker?

The one on top, right?

Well, in reality, they're the exact same color.

It's just that that middle section, it plays a trick on your eyes.

If we block that out, you see that they're 100% the same.

But if we take that away, you'll find that your eyes see it differently.

Even though you know now they're different colors, you cannot see it that way.

Because your eyes can be fooled.

Living by sight is just as risky as living by faith.

As part of this series, we've been going through Hebrews chapter 11, this chapter in the Bible that gives us a synopsis of these amazing men and women who have lived by faith.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

We want to learn from their example.

And it just so happens that the people whose example we're learning from today were people who lived a life of great risk.

I'm gonna talk about being risky.

What they did through faith was about as big of a risk as you could take.

It's Hebrews chapter 11, verse 23.

Hebrews 11:23

It's one verse.

It's a huge story, though.

It was by faith that Moses' parents hit him for three months when he was born.

They saw that God had given them an unusual child, and they were not afraid to disobey the king's command.

So if you know the story of Moses, a lot of this probably makes sense.

If you're new to that, though, it's okay.

We can set this up really quickly.

Moses was born 1400 BC, give or take.

At that time, Egypt was easily the most powerful nation in the world, and the people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years.

But the Egyptians were starting to get a little nervous because the number of Israelites in Egypt had grown, and it had grown exponentially, to the point that the Egyptians felt with within a few generations they would outnumber the Egyptians so severely that they could easily stage a revolt.

And so the Egyptians took action.

Pharaoh issued a decree that all Israelite boys ages two and under had to be put to death.

He basically decided to wipe out an entire generation.

And the order specifically was that all Israelite boys two years old and younger had to be thrown into the Nile River.

And so people complied out of fear.

People were forced to comply, but Moses' parents did not.

They hid Moses for three months, and when it was impossible to hide him any longer, they put him in a basket.

They sent that basket down the river, they sent their daughter Miriam to follow that basket to ensure its safety.

And that basket ends up making its way, in an amazing act of God's providence, to the palace in Egypt.

And Pharaoh's own daughter finds Moses, adopts him as her own, and he is raised as a prince in Egypt.

He would grow into a man who would defy Pharaoh, who would lead his people out of captivity from Egypt for good, but none of that would have ever happened.

None of that would have taken place if his parents were not willing to disobey the king.

And they crossed a Pharaoh, and no one crossed Pharaoh.

The Pharaohs of that time believed that they were gods.

People believed that they were gods, and so they exerted a godlike power over people's lives.

And if you crossed a Pharaoh, you were not simply in danger, but your entire family.

By taking this risk, they put their own lives in danger.

They put the lives of their other children in danger, their entire community in danger.

But they did it anyway.

They overcame whatever fear they should have had for Pharaoh, and how did they do it?

By faith.

They did it by faith.

If we live by faith, fear loses its grip on us.

And let's be honest, we've all been afraid of something.

Fear is a pretty major influence in this world.

You might even say fear oftentimes is the dominant influence in this world.

How many decisions do people make out of fear every single day?

How often are the major choices that we make in our lives, at the very least, influenced by fear?

And what would life look like if we were not afraid?

What would life look like?

What would our marriages, our careers, our relationships?

What would all those aspects of life look like if fear did not play a part in our thought process and our decision-making process?

Most of us have experienced some type of fear.

Fear is so pervasive in our world that if something new is invented, there will be a fear that goes along with it without very much time.

There are people that are deathly afraid of flying on airplanes.

That fear didn't exist before there were airplanes.

But people invented airplanes and a fear popped up to go along with them.

There's actually a new phobia that scientists have been studying.

You've probably never heard of it, but you may have it.

It's called nomophobia.

Gnomophobia is the fear of not having your cell phone.

There is now a phobia, an actual scientific phobia, of not having your phone.

And so if you ever check your pockets and you go, oh no, I don't have my phone, and you're feeling really nervous and anxious, and you're kind of running around frantically, you might have nomophobia.

We don't have a support group for that yet.

I'm sorry.

We'll try, we'll try our best, but just pray about it, right?

That's how pervasive fear is.

When I first got married, I had the chance to go on a vacation with my wife's family.

We went along.

It was actually the first time that my wife and I had ever gone to the beach together.

I was really excited about that.

But I don't really love the beach very much.

I got in the water and Meggie could tell I was a little anxious.

I was kind of like looking around and just sort of hanging out, like, yeah, this is great, this is awesome.

And she asked me, What's wrong?

You seem nervous, you seem anxious.

And so I divulged a little secret of mine.

I told her, I said, okay, don't laugh at me, don't make fun of me, but I'm I'm kind of afraid of sharks.

Okay?

I don't know if it's because I saw Jaws at a young age or watched one too many episodes of Shark Week, but I'm just a little nervous about sharks.

She said, Well, why?

I said, I don't know.

I just don't like the idea of being in the water and the possibility that something very dangerous could be like two inches from me, and I have no clue.

That's a little unsettling to me.

And she went into explaining all these statistics about how your odds of being attacked by a shark in the ocean are like less than being struck by lightning.

But do you know what your are your odds of being attacked by a shark are if you don't get in the ocean?

It's like zero.

Zero.

You stay on the beach, you have no fear of sharks.

No fear whatsoever.

And I can back this up with scripture.

Jesus walked on top of the water.

Moses, Moses, right?

He parted the sea.

They were smart.

They were smart.

They're like, ah, no reason to jump in with the sharks.

We can just go through it or go over it and we're good.

I want to live like Jesus and Moses.

I want to get in the water.

And Megan, she just kind of laughed at me and said I was being silly.

And so I sat there and I endured it for her sake.

And then, and I'm not not lying about this, just the timing of it's too good.

I was attacked.

I was attacked, not by a shark.

That would be really epic, right?

That would have been perfect.

But no.

I was attacked by jellyfish.

Which did not enhance my fear of sharks.

It just reminded me that there are other things in the ocean to be afraid of as well.

And so I do not enjoy personally going to the ocean.

And that's a fear.

And it's a fear I can laugh at, right?

It's a fear we can all look at and make jokes about.

All of us have those fears.

Some of you might be afraid of spiders.

You should laugh at that fear just a little bit.

Because imagine what a spider would do if you told it you were afraid of it.

You're like 3,000 times its size.

And if that spider could process the fact that you're afraid of me?

Okay.

Alright.

Don't know why, right?

It's a strange fear.

We should just be able to laugh at those fears, but there are also fears that we do not laugh at.

There are fears that are very emotional, fears that run deep, fears that we may have dealt with our entire lives.

The fear of failure.

Maybe that fear has been present in your life and you are so afraid to fail that you do not take chances.

And you've passed up opportunities in your life because you were worried about what would happen if it failed.

Maybe it's the fear of rejection.

You've been so afraid of being rejected in your life.

Maybe you had experiences when you were younger and you dealt with rejection, so it's better to just keep people at a safe distance than be rejected.

Maybe it's the fear of being alone.

So there are relationships you have in your life that you don't need to have.

They're not healthy relationships, but better to be with someone than with no one.

Better to have someone around than to be alone because you have a fear of being alone.

It could be a fear of loss, whether that's the loss of material possessions or the loss of loved ones.

Fear can be a crippling influence in our lives.

It is for most people.

And yet God calls us to live lives without fear.

God calls us to be fearless people.

If you do a Google search of the phrase, do not fear in the Bible, you will have your choice of verses to read.

Because it's a constant theme that runs through Scripture in Joshua chapter 9, chapter 1, sorry, verse 9.

Joshua 9 · chapter mention

God says this to Joshua, this young man that's about to take over for Moses.

He says, This is my command.

Notice it's not a request, it's a command by God.

Be strong and courageous.

Do not be afraid or discouraged.

For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Matthew 14, Jesus is walking on water, like I mentioned.

Freak some people out because you just don't see that every day.

And his disciples, panicking when they see him, get calmed down by Jesus because he says this to them in verse 27: Don't be afraid, take courage, I am here.

It's the same message Jesus gives to his disciples that God gave to Joshua, it's because they're they're God.

Don't be afraid.

Take courage, have courage.

I'm here, I'm with you.

God calls us to be people that live our lives without fear.

And by faith, we can be fearless.

Because faith is the solution to fear.

Knowledge is not the solution to fear.

Sometimes the more we know, the more it makes sense to be afraid.

Faith is the solution to fear.

Fear and faith, they cannot coexist.

Faith is the antithesis of fear, it is the solution.

And if we can live lives by faith, fear dissipates.

Fear goes away.

We don't live with fear any longer.

And it doesn't matter how intense that fear might be, and one of the greatest fears anyone deals with is the fear of death.

Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

The Bible says, Because God's children are human beings made of flesh and blood, the Son also became flesh and blood.

For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil who had the power of death.

Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.

I'm 31 years old, and it seems kind of strange at my age to say this, but I've spent most of the last decade as a slave to the fear of dying.

See, when I was 21 years old, I had a doctor's appointment.

And I went to that doctor's appointment, it was a physical of some kind.

I can't even remember why I was going.

But when I went to the doctor, they did some blood work, and the doctor asked to meet with me.

He had some concerns, so I went in.

I wasn't really sure what he was going to talk about.

He said, Justin, do you know much about cholesterol?

I said, Yeah, it's something that like older guys than 21-year-olds think about.

He said, Well, your cholesterol is 291.

If you know much about cholesterol, that's really high for like a 60-year-old man.

And I was 21 years old, I was in good shape.

I had played basketball and done sports most of my life.

I could probably have stood to lose a few pounds, but it was just genetics.

My grandfather died of a heart attack at a young age.

His father died of a heart attack at a young age.

My father had heart problems when he got to be in his mid-50s.

And so I heard that news and I said, Oh no, I got it too.

He said, Well, hey, you're young.

There's some things we can do about this.

Walk me through your daily routine and tell me what your diet is like.

And I said, Well, I work at a restaurant.

I was in college at the time working at Chili's, babyback ribs.

And so um, he said, Okay, so tell me about your daily routine at Chili's, because I work there almost every day.

I said, Okay, I go in, and please don't judge me.

I uh I go in first thing before my shift, I grab a plate of fries and then a cider ranch dressing for my fries.

To dip the fries in the ranch dressing, I eat that.

He said, Okay, not good.

What's next?

I said, All right.

When I'm off my shift, I uh I order boneless buffalo wings, and then I get blue cheese with those because I already had ranch dressing with the fries, I don't want to overdo it on the ranch.

So I have fried chicken dipped in blue cheese, and that's kind of how I finish my day.

He said, Anything else you want to tell me?

I said, Yes.

Sometimes I get a cheeseburger about halfway through my shift.

And, and I'm just gonna be totally honest with you, I didn't even say this in the nine o'clock service, so you're special.

Um, I also ate off people's plates every once in a while if I was really hungry.

Okay?

Full disclosure, it was mainly it was those boneless buffalo wings because I would look at the plate and people wouldn't eat all of the wings, and I would be like, Why would you leave perfectly good boneless buffalo wings on your plate?

And I'm guessing you didn't like touch them because it's kind of a food that you just grab one as you need it, so I would take it to the trash and I just pop one in my mouth right as I did that.

Sometimes, if they left a lot, I would sneak a to-go box and put it in there for later.

I'd take it home.

And you think I'm joking, but I'm not.

My wife, guys, my wife almost killed me our first year of marriage because she knew I did this, we worked together, and it grossed her out.

I don't know why.

And so she flipped out one time when she saw me doing this, and so one day, how I'm still married, I do not know.

But we were young, right?

I was young.

She wasn't working, I was, and I had a table that ordered Cajun chicken pasta, which was my wife's favorite thing on the menu.

They took like two bites and they didn't want it.

And I said, You want me to box it up?

They said, No.

I was like, Really?

It's perfectly what's wrong with you people?

You paid for this.

So I took it back and I put it in its go-box, and I brought it home.

I gave it to my wife.

And she said, Oh, you're so sweet, it's my favorite, I love you.

I said, Yes, and she ate it, and then when she was done, I said, Hey, you want to know something?

And you can just imagine how the next 20 minutes of my life went after that.

You see Megan today, just if you see Megan, do me a favor and say, You ate off people's plates?

That is gross.

Say that to my wife.

See what she does.

So suffice it to say, my doctor, after hearing about my eating habits, said, Yeah, we've got some room for improvement.

There's some things we can change.

And at first I was motivated.

At first I was like, hey, I'm 21, I can do something about this.

I ate really healthily, I worked out a lot, I got in really good shape that summer.

It was a good start, but eventually, eventually that fear started to take hold.

And instead of thinking, hey, I can do something about this, there are so many solutions for this, I started to think I was doomed.

I really did.

I started to think things like, oh, genetics, you can't escape genetics, you know, there's no way to get away from this.

And it got really bad when my son was born five years ago.

I was never really afraid of me dying in the sense that, oh, what's gonna happen to me?

I know I'm gonna see God.

I can't wait for that day.

But when he was born, I started to go, oh, I could miss his life.

And I would calculate in my head, this is so awful.

I would calculate, well, if I died at 40 this, he'd only be this old.

So I would probably miss his wedding, and I probably miss his children.

I started to become afraid of all the things I could miss.

And that fear, it did not have the effect on me that motivated me to do better.

It actually had the opposite effect.

I felt hopeless, so I just kind of quit.

I gained a bunch of weight, started eating really poorly, and every time I'd eat something, I would feel guilty and I'd feel afraid.

It sounds really cheesy and sappy, but that's just how I felt.

But I'm not afraid of death anymore.

I'm not a slave to dying.

And it's not because I'm I'm doing better, I am doing better, I eat way less.

In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had a boneless buffalo wing, and that makes me kind of sad.

Actually, I do remember.

It was like two months ago, though, so it's good.

I'm doing better, that's great, but my my release from the fear of death has nothing to do with me.

It has nothing to do with the fact that I can eat better, work out more, blah, blah, blah.

It has to do with faith.

It's God.

I had a friend that was praying for me, and uh, I didn't know this.

This is a friend that I don't know really well.

But they let me know that they were praying for me, and God gave them a very specific verse in scripture that they felt like I needed to hear.

God wanted me to hear this and read this and know it was for me.

And it was Psalm 91, verses 14 through 16.

Psalms 91:14–16

The Lord says, I will rescue those who love me.

I will protect those who trust in my name.

When they call on me, I will answer.

I will be with them in trouble.

I will rescue and honor them.

I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.

I read that last part.

I will reward them with a long life.

And it shook something inside of me.

It released something for me.

I realized in that moment that my perspective was totally off, that I had forgotten that my life is in God's hands.

I belong to God.

I have given my life to him, and God actually says in Scripture that we belong to him.

In other words, he's taken ownership of us, but this is a good thing because in taking ownership of our lives, he has taken responsibility for our lives.

Our lives are in God's hands.

Jesus said it this way in John chapter 10.

John 10 · chapter mention

No one can snatch them, and that's us, away from me.

For my father has given them to me, and he is more powerful than anyone else.

No one can snatch them from the Father's hand.

And what Jesus is really saying in this scripture is that when we put our trust in him, when we give our lives to him, we are in his hand.

And he is in the Father's hand.

And no one could take us away from Jesus if they wanted to.

No one can take us away from God either.

So we have this double protection.

We belong to Jesus.

We also belong to God, and nothing and no one can snatch us away from God.

Our lives are in God's hands, and there is nothing that scares God.

He loves us, he wants to help us, he wants to deliver us from our problems.

That's not to say that we're never gonna encounter difficulty.

That's not to say that we won't ever have to experience even death in this world.

Absolutely.

But we are in his hands, he is in control.

I used to read scriptures that would talk about that with this fatalistic view, like, oh, I'm doomed, see?

It's all gonna end soon.

Job 14, 5, this is the one that used to get me the worst.

You have decided the length of our lives.

You know how many months we will live, and we are not given a minute longer.

I would read that in my old mindset and go, no, not even a minute longer, God.

Come on.

A minute.

And I would focus on the wrong thing.

Our lives are in God's hands, and you know what?

He's in control.

We may not live a minute longer than he has determined for us, but we will not live a minute shorter either.

Because we belong to God.

And see, when we live with that perspective, when we understand that we are his, we belong to him, we are in his hands, he is in control, and there is nothing in this world that intimidates him.

There's nothing in this world that can take us from him.

We can live by faith.

That's why the parents of Moses weren't afraid of Pharaoh.

Because who is Pharaoh to God?

He's a man.

I can't go to God and say, God, I know you're in control, but cholesterol.

It's a big deal.

It's not to God.

God is in control.

And if we live our lives with faith, a faith that requires an acknowledgement of the power of God and an understanding that He loves you, that He wants to protect you, that He wants to deliver you, that He wants to answer your call for help.

When we live with that kind of faith, fear goes away.

Because fear, it's an illusion.

Fear is an illusion.

It's every bit as much of an illusion as that one that we looked at just a few moments ago.

If we go back to Hebrews chapter 2, we looked at this a few moments ago.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

Only as a human being could Jesus die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil who had, past tense, the power of death.

Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.

This verse starts to paint a picture for us of how fear really works.

Fear is not meant for us.

We're not meant to be afraid of life.

We were actually created by God to rule over life.

Fear is a tool used against us, it's a tool used against us at the hands of Satan himself.

Now I love that the Bible's full of all kinds of really practical teaching.

You can read the Bible and know how to handle your money, how to deal with conflicts with friends.

And then there's these things in the Bible that are not practical at all.

And sometimes in church culture, we can have a tendency to focus so much on the practical that we just ignore the rest.

We can't do that.

I love the practical stuff.

We talk about it often here.

But we get to these other things, things like the existence of Satan, and that's not that practical.

Ephesians 6, 12 says, we're not fighting against flesh and blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.

And you read that and you go, okay, what do I do with that?

I mean, I'm afraid of sharks that I can't see.

You're telling me there's spiritual forces that I cannot see or discern, really, and they're coming against me, they're attacking me.

Jesus, what do I do with that?

How do I stand up to that?

Fear is a tool of Satan himself.

How could I fight Satan?

Colossians chapter 2.

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

Here's the answer.

You were dead because of your sins, and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away.

And then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all your sins: past, present, future.

He canceled the record of the charges against us, and he took it away by nailing it to the cross.

In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities.

He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.

How do we fight Satan?

Guys, he's already defeated.

Jesus, he fought that battle.

It's a battle we couldn't fight.

Jesus fought that battle and he won.

That word disarmed, it's a very specific word in the Greek language that this was written in.

See, when Rome would conquer an enemy, they wouldn't just leave all the weapons and the armor of their defeated foes lying on the battlefield.

That would be wasteful.

The resources that it took to mine metals and refine it and create weapons and armor, it was expensive, it was lengthy.

And so they would take all of the weapons and all of the armor from the battlefield to use themselves or to melt down and reuse to repurpose.

That was called disarming your foe.

That's the same word that is used here talking about Satan.

So what it means is that you disarm an already defeated enemy.

The enemy has already been defeated, and then just to add insult to injury, you take the weapons away.

That is what Jesus did to Satan.

He defeated Satan once and for all, and then he disarmed him.

So Satan's not even armed.

He has nothing to use against us.

He has no weapon that can harm us because we belong to God.

We are in the Father's hands.

What he does have is lies.

He has illusions.

He has fear.

That's all he's got left.

He's the ability to make us afraid of nothing.

When we choose to be afraid of an illusion, that illusion gains power, but we're the ones that give it that power.

In and of itself, it's powerless.

One of the greatest military victories in the world, in history, was won thanks in large part to an illusion.

About a year ago, I was doing a wedding and I met this older gentleman.

I think I shared about this a little while ago on a Sunday.

He's a man that stormed the beaches of Normandy.

And I got to look him in the eyes, and I felt this incredible sense of debt to this man.

As I'm sure all of us would.

It was won in large part because of another operation, something called Operation Quicksilver.

Operation Quicksilver saw General Patton go to England with this massive force.

A massive force of armored vehicles, of tanks.

Patton was known to be a brilliant tactician in tank warfare.

The Germans had intelligence on this operation.

They had footage from the sky, from spy planes that saw this massive army that was gathering at the English Channel, very close to the border of France, about a few hundred miles away from Normandy.

And so Hitler was convinced that that's where the attack on France, that Germany controlled at that time, was going to happen.

So he sent his largest force to that place, the place where Patton was going to attack with the force he was commanding.

When the invasion of Normandy began, Hitler was convinced that Normandy was a diversion.

And so for days he refused to send reinforcements and send his force that was waiting for Patton because he was convinced that all of that was just an illusion to distract him, but it was the opposite.

It was the other way around.

Operation Quicksilver was the diversion.

Normandy was the real attack.

In fact, the illusion was so great that even the vehicles, the tanks, all of it, it was just for show.

We have footage of this now.

It was unearthed in the 90s when this file became declassified.

You can see some of the aerial shots of this is what Hitler would have seen with the spy footage, but in reality, all the tanks, all the armored cars, they were just balloons.

United States Army had employed some of the best talents in Hollywood to make props.

And even up close, they looked pretty convincing.

From the sky, there would be no way to tell.

And so Hitler lost World War II in large part because he was afraid of balloons.

It's pretty awesome.

When we become afraid of an illusion, the illusion has power.

Those inflatable tanks were every bit as powerful as a real tank because the German force believed they were real tanks.

And when Satan lies to us and tempts us with fear, as if he has some kind of power over our lives, if we believe those lies, if we buy into that fear, then we are giving power to Satan.

But Jesus has defeated Satan and he's disarmed him.

Satan's coming against us with balloons.

That's all he's got.

He's got illusions, he's got lives.

So we are not to be afraid.

We are called to be a people who live fearless lives.

Because Jesus has won.

We sang about that earlier, the victory.

Jesus has won.

He's not just winning.

His win is not imminent.

He has won.

I love watching sports.

I've got a few teams that I root for really passionately.

My favorite kind of game to watch is one that's already happened.

I love it.

I love watching a game that I've DVR'd because I missed it, and I know the score, I know the outcome because I just sit there and I'm like, this is great.

I feel no fear at all.

I feel no tension.

I know the outcome.

We know the outcome.

If you've given your life to Jesus, this is the outcome of your life.

The victory that Jesus won belongs to you.

You will look God in the eye one day, and he will say the same thing to you that he said to his son Jesus.

You are my child who I love.

I'm well pleased with you.

You bring me great joy.

Because Jesus won that favor with God that he earned on his own.

He won it for you.

So what do we have to be afraid of?

This morning I ask you to think of one thing.

To search your heart and to think of that one fear that affects your life the most.

That one fear that makes you consistently anxious, you find your thoughts drifting to the what-ifs.

That fear is a balloon.

It's an illusion.

And when that fear enters your mind, if you stop in that moment and you say, no, no, no, God's in control.

God is in control.

The same God that can make it rain torrentially for what feels like an hour.

The same God who stood on a boat and told that rain to stop, and it stopped.

God is in control.

And he loves you.

He loves you.

One other thought before we pray and wrap up with some more worship.

I know that we can say, hey, there's no reason for us to be afraid, there's no reason for us to live in fear, and it sounds nice, but sometimes it's harder to live out than we think or we feel in these moments.

I'm going to share one more verse, 1 Peter 5, 8 and 9.

Stay alert, watch out for your great enemy, the devil.

He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour with his balloons.

Stand firm against him and be strong in your faith.

Remember that your family of believers all over the world is going through the same kind of suffering you are.

You're not alone.

So if it takes you time to really get over these fears and to pray through that, that's fine because you're not alone.

We talk about the home groups that we have here at this church and how important they are.

They're important for that reason.

Because you're not alone.

When Megan and I had Liam and he was in the NICU for the first two weeks of his life, I was blown away by how many people came out of the woodwork to say that they were in the same exact position.

They were there and they said, it's gonna be okay.

You're not alone.

So as a church, we're gonna be fearless people.

We're not gonna believe lies and illusions, and we're gonna stand with one another always, always as we live lives free of fear.

You with me?

All right.

Let's pray.

Jesus, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Lord, for your love.

Thank you so much for the fact that you have won a battle that we could not have won.

And Lord, we refuse, in your name, Jesus, we say this: we refuse to be afraid of an illusion.

We refuse to give Satan any iota of power when you've disarmed him completely.

So, God, be with us.

Calm our fears, make us fearless people.

And we love you so much, and we praise you for all you've done for us.

Amen.