The Bible Study Podcast, episode 366. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of Psalms with Psalm 27.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen, 366. You now have an episode for every day of the

year, even on leap years. We're going to do Psalm 27 today. I'm going to skip over Psalm 26. I

suspect as we get further and further in the book, we'll skip more and more as we get to familiar

themes. And I found Psalm 26 to have a very familiar theme. Psalm 27, the Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked advanced against me to

devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me,

my heart will not fear. The war break out against me.

Even then, I will be confident. As I look just even at these first three verses here, clearly

this Psalm is about fear, or specifically the lack of fear. And fear is an interesting thing because I know people, some of them Christians,

who are, to varying degrees, held captive by fear.

And we can be held captive by fear in a lot of different ways.

Obviously, we can be held captive by fear if we huddle in our house

and are too afraid to go out. We can be held captive by fear if we huddled in our town or

our country and are afraid to venture out. There are places that we may not go because we are

afraid to. Now, there are places probably that we shouldn't go or that we should be afraid.

So how do we know when we should fear?

And I think that's a difficult question.

One of the things that I think that I've always heard about fear that I believe very truly is,

if I am in the place where God wants me to be, then I shouldn't have reason to fear. That's easier said than done. But I think of my

personal experience for me, for instance, although I'm surprised to say it, considering that it's

not what I expected when I got into it in prison ministry, I think some people don't get into

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