Fear in pandemics on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

And we are certainly facing problems in our culture today. As we talk about pandemics, what I'm

referring to, at least in our current cultural context, is COVID-19, the coronavirus. We have

become very accustomed to those words and that language and describing

this virus. And, you know, it's interesting to me as I sit and contemplate what I'm watching

happening around us, how easy it is for us as a culture. When we think we're in control of something, we have a facade

of peace. When we see that control slipping away, it begins to reveal what we hope in. And the

response, when we trust and hope in this facade of having some semblance of control of our own health,

something as small as that that can slip away, we begin to fear. We respond in fear. And fear is

that symptom to demonstrate we've been trusting in the wrong thing, right? So when we think about

COVID-19, it's just a new name for a different type of pandemic.

This is certainly not the first pandemic that our world has ever seen, and we are not the

first Christians to walk through such a dangerous prognosis of what could be. But I want to

encourage us today on the podcast to think a little bit

about this idea of fear. And what we're seeing, I think, are sort of two extremes, or what I

would call two manifestations of fear. We're seeing a response in two different ways. And I think

this is similar to the way we think in counseling a lot, where we see

heart attitudes and heart issues that manifest themselves in a bunch of different ways.

And so at base, we want to target the heart with the scriptures, because at base,

these are the same ideas that begin to dispel the different

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