The Bible Study Podcast, episode 495. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues a study on Christian maturity and fear.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. This is one of those

episodes where when I thought about Christian maturity and I wanted to think about what

makes Christians mature, this one may seem a little odd because we're going to talk about

prayer. We're going to talk about community. We're going to talk about Bible study or did last week,

rather. But this one is about fear, which is not a mark of maturity, but I wanted to talk about it because I sometimes see that we as a culture who are living in a culture of fear don't incorporate what the Bible has to say about fear into our lives in a way that we should as mature Christians.

When I say we live in a culture of fear, remember that with the nightly news or the news in general or politics or those sort of things,

there are people who gain from our fear in the sense that in the news, if I want you to get interested

in watching the news every night, there is some reason to not show you every plane that lands

safely, to not show you every kid who's growing up successfully, but to show you those things

that are newsworthy, that are unusual,

and that changes our perspective.

It makes us think that crime, for instance, is on the rise when it's dropping often, or it makes

us think that planes fall out of the sky every day, even if it happens in the U.S.

once every four years, or those sorts of things, it can

change our perspective, and it can lead to fear.

It can lead to fear of a number of different things or a number of different people or a

number of whatever, people not like us.

So anyway, we have that, and then we have, what does the Bible say about fear?

And I want to deal with it in a couple different segments.

First, fear in terms of our relationship with God and how that is not supposed to be a relationship of fear.

And we're going to go here to 1 John 4.

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