Welcome back on this Friday.

On Wednesday last time we met in APJ 1925, we looked at the cloud of anxiety that can encroach

into our lives of a feeling you sometimes get, but can't quite put your finger on.

One that makes you just feel tense and anxious that something is going to go bad today.

Christians can find themselves inside such a fog of anxiety.

In fact, some Christians struggle a lot with daily anxiety, but should we?

Hasn't the Holy Spirit delivered us from anxiety altogether?

As we saw on Wednesday, the Apostle Paul claims that, quote,

God gave us a spirit not a fear, but of power and love and self control, end quote.

That's second to the one seven.

So why would any spirit in dole Christians still struggle with anxiousness?

That's Eric's question.

A listener to the podcast, Pastor John, hello, if God does not give us a spirit of fear,

but of power and love and self control to Timothy 1, 7 again, then why am I as a believer

still struggling to overcome fear?

Shouldn't the spirit's presence in me be the end of all my fearing?

One of the reasons I'm eager to tackle this question is because even though it is specifically about fear or anxiety,

the principle that it's wrestling with relates to almost every area of Christian ethics or Christian virtue or sanctification,

the principle, namely, of being made decisively new in Christ because of God's legal act of justification by faith

and because of God's transformative act in the new birth and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

And yet in our actual daily lives, realizing that we are not yet completely new, not completely transformed.

That's the tension that we all live with.

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