The Fear of Pain

I’ve written several posts here about how the Lord has been speaking to me and setting me free in the area of fear.  Recently, my husband Joe and I spent some strategic, focused time in prayer to seek the Lord for greater freedom and deliverance in areas of our lives where we were feeling oppressed or attacked by the enemy, so of course, on one of these nights we talked about the issue of fear.  Joe asked me to describe to him what I was afraid of, and as I thought about it, I was able to boil the majority of my fears down to the fear of emotional pain. 

For example, if I am afraid of my daughter dying in her sleep, I am actually afraid of all the emotional pain that will come with that event – the loneliness, guilt, missing her, combined with feeling the burden of everyone else’s pain, like my husband’s, son’s, parents’, etc.  In my imagination, all I can see is how painful it will be and I’m afraid that I won’t have the fortitude to endure it and that I will completely fall apart and collapse into a deep pit of depression.  Woah.  Kind of crazy!  In all my fearful imaginings about things that will probably never happen, I completely forget about the fact that God will be with me in my pain and bring comfort, strength, and even joy in the midst of it.  He will not abandon me, leave me or forsake me and He will be faithful to bring me through every circumstance, no matter how painful.

But as we were praying, the Lord brought something else to my mind from the book Fearless by Max Lucado that I read and reviewed on this site last fall.  In it, Lucado painted a picture of the garden of Gethsemane that I had never seen before.  In Mark 14:32-36 (Amplified) it says,

³²Then they went to a place called Gethsemane, and He said to His disciples, Sit down here while I pray. ³³And He took with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be ^[a]struck with terror and amazement and deeply troubled and depressed. ³⁴And He said to them, My soul is exceedingly sad (overwhelmed with grief) so that it almost kills Me! Remain here and keep awake and be watching. ³⁵And going a little farther, He fell on the ground and kept praying that if it were possible the [^[b]fatal] hour might pass from Him. ³⁶And He was saying, Abba, [which means] Father, everything is possible for You. Take away this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You [will]. (emphasis mine)

Lucado comments on how the disciple Mark ”paints the picture of Jesus as pale faced and trembling. ‘Horror . . . came over him’ (Mark 14:33 NEB). The word horror is ‘used of a man who is rendered helpless, disoriented, who is agitated  and anguished by the threat of some approaching event.’” (Fearless, 82) He goes on to say…

We’ve never seen Christ like this. Not in the Galilean storm, at the demoniac’s necropolis, or on the edge of the Nazarene cliff. We’ve never heard such screams from his voice or seen his eyes this wide. And never, ever, have we read a sentence  like this: “He plunged into a sinkhole of dreadful agony” (Mark 14:33 MSG). This is a weighty moment. God has become flesh, and Flesh is feeling fear full bore. (Fearless, 82)

The  cup equaled Jesus’ worst-case scenario: to be the recipient of God’s wrath. He had never felt God’s fury, didn’t deserve to. He’d never experienced isolation from his Father; the two had been one for eternity. He’d never known physical death; he was an immortal being. Yet within a few short hours, Jesus would face them all. God would unleash his sin-hating wrath on the sin-covered Son. And Jesus was afraid. Deathly afraid. (Fearless, 83)

For me, it was hard to imagine that Jesus actually felt fear and was afraid of pain, just like me!  Yet Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.“  So, Jesus really truly knows and understands how I feel, because he felt it!  When I hope to avoid painful circumstances, Jesus also asked His Father if He could possibly avoid enduring the pain of the cross.  However, Jesus did not let His fear completely cripple or immobilize Him, nor did He allow His fear to cause Him to sin in any way.  Neither did He allow His fear to keep Him from completely fulfilling and obeying the will of His Father.  He did not get angry at God or accuse Him for allowing Him to endure pain, but He brought His fears to His Father in prayer and supplication, asking for the strength and help to make it through. 

There’s probably a lot more that could be said about the way Jesus prayed, how He recruited His friends to pray with Him, how He had faith in His Father’s perfect will, how He trusted His Father, how He set His gaze on the reward of His suffering, and who knows how many more great lessons from this story, but for the time being, I am simply encouraged and comforted by knowing that Jesus can sympathize with me in my weakness, because He knows what it felt like to be afraid.