Breaking Free From The Spirit Fear Part 1 by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Fear Is Not Small

Revelation 21:7-8

"He that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful and the unbelieving and the abominable and murderers..."

God categorized the fearful alongside murderers, sorcerers, and the unbelieving. That word — fearful — translates in the Greek as cowardly.

Fear is a major sign of unbelief.

More than that: fear is idolatry. If God demands fear — reverence and trust — and that reverence is directed at something else, that is worship given to a false object.

Faith and fear operate the same way. Faith is belief on the side of God. Fear is belief on the side of the enemy. Both are projections — both are evidences of pictures held in the mind. Someone in faith believes and acts. Someone in fear believes what they dread, and so they don't act.

This is not a minor issue. When someone is in fornication, people recognize it as sin. But when someone says "I'm just a fearful person," it is treated as a personality trait. God does not treat it that way.

How Fearful People Sound

Fear rarely announces itself. It shows up in language patterns. These are the markers:

• Fearful people speak in protective language — They talk more about what might go wrong than what God has said
• Fearful people speak in limitations — "I can't." "It won't work." "It's not possible for people like me."
• Fearful people speak in delay — "Not now." "Later." "When things are better."
• Fearful people speak in excuses — They spiritualize fear by calling it wisdom or caution

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• Fearful people speak in self-preservation — They choose safety over obedience and comfort over calling

The Bible says whoever seeks to keep his life shall lose it. The difference between people who accomplish great things and those who don't is not intelligence. The only thing consistently working in the lives of those who build and expand is audacity. They are bold enough to take a risk on themselves. And the cautious, brilliant people who overanalyze every move end up employed by the audacious ones — helping them carry out their vision for a token.

The Slave Mindset

The children of Israel were in the wilderness for 40 years. They were supposed to be there for 40 days. That delay was the product of fear and unbelief.

Slave mindset is a mindset that rejects ownership but wants a better condition in bondage.

When they were crying to God in Egypt, they were not saying "Take us out of Egypt." They were saying "Increase our salary." That's the nature of a slave mindset — it cannot picture itself in ownership. Breakthrough is not conceived as starting something; it is conceived as someone giving you something. Favor is not pictured as helping another; it is always pictured as being helped.

God told Moses: "Let's kill them and start something fresh with you." Why Moses and not Aaron? Aaron was older. But God wanted to write the law — and Aaron could not write. The Lord was looking for a mind that could receive and carry ownership.

When they reached the Red Sea — trapped, with Pharaoh's army behind them — fear began to speak. "Why did you bring us here? We had cucumbers and melons in Egypt." The person with the right mindset in that moment knew that when you don't know what to do, the safest thing is to stand still and see the salvation of God. Whatever is in the hand — five loaves, two fish — if given to Jesus, he multiplies it. The first thing God wanted to confront after Egypt was fear.

That same dynamic shows up in a man bailed out of jail by a stranger, who then begged to go back. His response: "I'm homeless. I don't have anywhere to go. It's cold out here." Prison had become comfortable. He could predict prison. Freedom was unknown, and the unknown was more threatening than the cage.

If you are not constantly stretching, you are stagnant. And stagnant means you are dying.

People feel comfortable in bondage when they can predict what is happening — more comfortable than being in freedom with an uncertain next step.

Fear Is a Sign of a Defeated Thought Life

2 Timothy 1:6-7

"Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God which is in thee... For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind."

This text reveals two things:

• Fear comes because of inactivity — The instruction is to stir up the gift. If the gift is not being stirred, fear will fill the vacuum. An unstirred life creates a fearful life.
• Fear is a spirit, characterized by three absences — the absence of love, the absence of power, and the absence of a sound mind. To be in fear is to be operating outside of at least one of these three things.

Romans 8:5-9 — "For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh... for to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."

Fear is a manifestation of a sense-controlled life.

When the senses become the primary source of input — what is seen, heard, felt — fear is the natural product. A person led by what they can perceive and predict will always be more afraid than a person led by what God has spoken.

How the Devil Steals the Word

Luke 8:11-12 — "The seed is the word of God. Those by the wayside are the ones who hear, and the devil comes and takes away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved."

The question is: how does the devil steal the word?

Mark 6:2-3 — When Jesus began teaching in the synagogue, many who heard him were astonished: "What wisdom is this? What mighty works are done by his hands?" While they were receiving, miracles were happening. Then someone spoke up: "Is this not the carpenter's son?" That reminder — one piece of information — stole the word from them. The miracles stopped.

The devil does not come in the night to extract what was planted. He uses other words. A sermon heard on Sunday encounters a social media post on Monday that reframes it. A truth received in prayer meets a conversation at the office that quietly undermines it. The information placed in front of a person after they receive the word is the primary mechanism of theft.

The people around the word carry it or corrupt it. People can preach fear — and transfer it. Goliath stood in the valley and preached. He gave a speech every morning and every evening for forty days. The Bible says when Israel heard his words, they were dismayed and greatly afraid. He was not fighting them yet. He was just talking. And fear entered through their ears and sat in their hearts.

The problem is not always the giant. The evil report is: we are grasshoppers. It is the interpretation that defeats before the battle. There is a problem — and then there is the preaching about the problem. The stomach pain is the mountain. But when someone begins to describe it — "this is what killed my grandmother, this is the fourth time it has happened" — the mountain grows. Keep the issue what it is, and speak to it from what God has already done.

How to Break Free from the Spirit of Fear

1. Guard Your Heart

Deuteronomy 1:28 — "Our brethren have discouraged our hearts, saying, 'These people are greater and taller than we.'"

The heart is a land. If nothing is being planted, something is still growing — weeds fill untended ground. Many people look like what others have spoken over them, because they left the land of their heart unguarded and others came in and sowed.

Fear is learned. A goat tied to a rope for a long period learns to walk only within the radius of its rope. When the rope is removed, the goat never goes beyond where the rope used to end. And when the goat gives birth, its young — who were never tied — also never cross that line. Not because of biology. Because of what they observed.

Fear can be inherited by observation, by relationship, by environment. A home that has never seen wealth does not produce it — not because wealth is impossible, but because the environment never cultivated a belief that ownership was available. To put it plainly: marrying a pessimistic person is dangerous. That environment will compress vision.

Even the devil has a vision. He has a plan that he believes he can execute. There are some believers doing less than what the devil expects from them.

You have to actively plant into your heart. What is heard shapes what is believed. What is believed shapes what is possible. A five-minute clip can change a day. A church culture can change a life — for better or worse.

The story of a man who was told to resign a top-level position at a reputable company because his church taught that a believer cannot work there — he obeyed, and years later was still unemployed, rejected for most positions as overqualified. The doctrine that led him out was not wisdom. It was fear wearing spiritual language. The story of a woman who followed a doctrine that God would show her future husband in a dream — and spent decades following a man who married someone else, moving cities whenever his job transferred, still unmarried at 59, still told by her pastor that "God cannot lie." These are not edge cases. They are the product of landing in a church that amplifies fear instead of faith.

If you join the wrong church, you are finished.

The word of God must be rightly divided. A teaching that sends you in the wrong direction does not feel like error while it is happening — it feels like encounter, like confirmation. What is placed before a person multiplies. That is why what is heard in the place of worship matters more than most things.

2. Join a Church Where the Pastor Dispels Fear

Jeremiah 23:4 — "And I will set up shepherds over them which will feed them and they shall fear no more."

God's design is that shepherds feed people in a way that removes fear. If the church environment is constantly planting anxiety — about the economy, about enemies, about spiritual attacks — the congregation will walk in fear regardless of how much they pray. The atmosphere of consistent, faith-filled, rightly divided teaching is not incidental to freedom from fear. It is the mechanism.

A Dimension of Faith That Rests

There is a dimension of faith that does nothing — not passivity, but rest after obedience. After prayer has been prayed, fasting done, confession made, and God has spoken — there is a time to simply stop and let God work.

The man by the pool had been there thirty-eight years. He had accepted the situation for what it was. When he released that grip and stopped striving, Jesus came to him and asked, "Will you be made well?" He answered with what he believed — "I have no man to help me into the pool" — and Jesus healed him on the spot. He did not need to get into the pool. The one the pool pointed to was standing in front of him.

A person in deep need looking for a savior has two problems instead of one — the need, and the search. The savior is named Savior. He comes. He seeks. The only requirement is to be found where faith is — positioned, not striving.

Closed doors are protection. The thing that does not come through may be the mercy that keeps someone from what would have destroyed them.

Let God take charge. It is only one life.

Father, in the name of Jesus, Lord, we ask for boldness — the way you gave it to the disciples in Acts 4. Lord, give us boldness to witness, to step out, to obey.

Show us that there is no reason to fear, because our lives are in your hand. Thank you for the supply of your Spirit. Thank you because we will be courageous and meditate on your word. Your word will become real in us. In Jesus' mighty name. Amen.