[This post is part of a series of notes from Catalyst 2011]

Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, led session 7 at Catalyst.  He opened with a simple question that would shape much of what we would talk about over the next hour.  What are you afraid of?  Is it failure, conflict, criticism, money.  The truth is that fear in the mind causes stress in the body; fear taxes our bodies.  Not only what are you afraid of, but who are you fraid of?  Who do you need to please?  Whose opinion matters way to much?  Are you overly devestated by criticism?

Fear is...

• Fear is vision without hope.
• Fear is not rational, but it is powerful.
• Fear is not getting what you want.
• Fear preaches a false gospel.
• Fear turns us into false prophets.

And the Bible tells us more than any other commandment...fear not.  All throughout the Bible, repeatedly God tells us do not be afraid.  What do we have to fear?  God is with us.  The worst-case scenario for any Christian leader is death, which means Jesus comes sooner.  We need to reset our worst-case scenario because it isn't that bad.

Mark ended with a story about his son, who feared going on his family vacation at the time, because he had fear built up that he was going to be traveling in a foreign country alone.  How often do we fear that we our going through life alone?  How often are we looking at our stress and our circumstances and overwhelmed with fear because we don't realize that our dad is coming with us?

"Fear not your daddy's with you." - Mark Driscoll