“The righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance. He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.”

(Psalm 112: 6-7)

Does the sight of a yellow envelope delivered to your door by the Western Union boy put panic in your heart? Does the insistent ring of the telephone deep in the night waken you to a startled fear? Are you ever afraid of evil tidings: Afraid of hearing alarming news in a doctor’s report, afraid of word coming that someone dear to you is not measuring up to life?

The Psalmist talks about a man who is “not afraid of evil tidings.” What kind of a fellow is this? Wouldn’t we like to know! Or better still, wouldn’t we like to be such a person ourselves!

The late Dr. Harris Kirk, renowned minister of Baltimore, confided to a colleague in the Presbyterian ministry that in the latter years of his pastorate he closed every service of worship by adding to the customary benediction: “and the Lord give you courage both now and forever,” because as a pastor he became more and more aware of how many people were fighting a losing battle with fear.

Furthermore, “it has been said by many psychologists that it is not the outward storms and stresses of life that defeat and disrupt personality but its inner conflicts and miseries.” (Phillips — Your God is Too Small) And one of the most destructive of these inner enemies is “fear of evil tidings.”

Yes, the fellow who is not afraid of evil tidings — there is an enviable character for you — there is the specimen who is thoroughly competent for the nerve jangling times in which we live. But really there’s nothing very miraculous about such a person. For fears of evil tidings rise principally from two sources. Just find out what these are and how to deal with each and we can ourselves by God’s grace be that blessed personality celebrated in the Psalm, “not afraid of evil tidings.”

In the first place there are fears of evil tidings which rise from an uneasy conscience. When God sought Adam in the Garden of Eden at the close of day, God could not find him. Why? Why, Adam was hiding himself from God in the shrubbery. At last God finds Adam and rebukes him, but Adam explains why he hid himself: “I was afraid.” (Genesis 3:10) Why was Adam afraid? Oh, because it is the day of his first disobedience. Fear comes with disobedience. Conscience makes cowards of us all.

The man who has done wrong and violated his conscience lives in the fear of being found out, of having his shame whispered behind an upraised hand, of receiving the just punishment he daily expects from his sinful deed. He lives in the fear of evil tidings. The chap who’s failing those who believe in him, letting down those who are counting on him, lives in the fear of evil tidings that at last he’s been found out.

Deliverance from fear of evil tidings which rise from disobedience can be dispelled only by repentance and obedience. See how the Psalmist describes the kind of person who is not afraid of evil tidings: he is “the righteous and upright man … who delighteth greatly in the commandments of the Lord.” (Psalm 112)

No amount of turning the wheels of ecclesiastical rituals or engaging in learned disputations on subjects theological will turn the trick and banish our fears. Nothing but obedience. Speaking to the St. Andrews students in 1869, James Anthony Froude, the celebrated historian said: “We have had thirty years of unexampled clerical activity among us. Churches have been doubled; theological books, magazines, reviews, newspapers, have been passed out by the hundreds of thousands; while by the side of it there has sprung an equally astonishing development of moral dishonesty. We have false weights, false measures, cheating, and shoddy everywhere. Yet the clergy have seen all this grow up in absolute indifference and the great question which at this moment is agitating the Church of England is the color of the ecclesiastical petticoats. Many a hundred sermons have I heard in England, many a dissertation on the mysteries of the faith, on the divine mission of the clergy, on apostolic succession, on bishops, and justification and the efficacy of the sacrament; but never, during these thirty wonderful years, never once, that I can recollect, on common honesty or these primitive commandments ‘thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal.’”

The tensions, the anxieties, the fears that play the mischief with human happiness and human usefulness in our times root back again and again to disobedience of God’s unchanging moral code. “As a race we are not even stray sheep,” said P. T. Forsythe, “or wandering prodigals merely, we are rebels taken with weapons in our hands.” We shall never know deliverance from fear of evil tidings until we repent and throw down our arms and become humble obedient children. From one point of view, the fear of evil tidings is a horrible blessing a loving God has thrown into our disobedient lives, to shake us into salvation’s acceptance. “Remorse,” said Kierkegaard, “is one of God’s emissaries to man’s soul calling him back home.” And so it is.

The law of God is steadfast and man’s steadfastness, if ever he enjoys any measure of it, comes from obedience to it. “The heart that delights in God’s established commandments is established by them and, sooner or later, will look in calm security on the fading away of all evil things because it rests on God. He who builds his transient life on and into the Rock of Ages wins rock-like steadfastness and some share in the perpetuity of his refuge. Lives rooted in God are never up-rooted.” (Alex. Maclauren — Expositors Bible — Volume 3 p. 281 — Sunday School Board of Southern Baptist Convention)

But there are fears of evil tidings which rise from another source to plague us — from unfounded worries born of our lack of faith. Dr. Walter Lingle in his Memories of Davidson College wrote that as he looked back over a long life he could single out many worries which cost him great pain and anxiety, but the disconcerting thing to him was that the unfolding of his life revealed that he rarely if ever worried about the right things. “I could have done a much better job of worrying,” says Dr. Lingle, “if I had just known what to worry about. Most of the evil tidings I feared never came.”

Jesus’ rebuke to his frightened disciples in the storm swept boat on Galilee links their fear to lack of faith: “What are you so frightened about — you little faiths?” he asks them. That’s what he calls them — “little faiths.” The terms on which we have this life are just one day at a time, minute by minute. Whether or not we get the next one and whatever it brings is in God’s hands, not ours. So we just must trust His wisdom and His goodness to provide, rather than worry our poor souls with fears of evil tidings which may never come.

A woman was living under a daily dread, an aching fear that was eating all the goodness out of her life and leaving her just an empty, worthless shell. What was she afraid of? She really didn’t know. There was no particular thing. Just everything. Every moment was consumed with fear of the unknown, but surely expected evil tidings the next moment would bring. What was the source of her misery? Why, she had lost the day to day, moment by moment contact with God — the conditioning of her soul in love and trust upon a loving heavenly Father. Long, too long, she had trusted in self and when self failed, there was only fear left in her empty soul.

What did she need to be delivered from fear of evil tidings? Why, just what everyone needs — what David needed when alone, hiding from innumerable enemies in the dark forest of Ziph and his friend, Jonathan, came to him, and in the beautiful expression of the Scripture “strengthened his hand in God.” (I Samuel 23:16) It was not so much outward reinforcements as inward assurances that David needed, and we are of that same human nature.

“When dangers gathered round David, Jonathan came to him and ‘strengthened his hand in God.’ He put David’s hand, as it were, into God’s hand, in token that they were one, in token that the Almighty was pledged to keep and bless him, and that when he and his God were together, no weapon formed against him would ever prosper. Surely no act of friendship is so true friendship as this. To remind our Christian friends in their day of trouble of their relation to God; to encourage them to think of His interest in them; to drop in their ears some of His assurances — ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee’ — is surely the best of all ways to encourage the downcast and send them on their way rejoicing.” (Expositor’s Bible — Volume 2 — p., 93 — The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention)

A Christian woman, recovering from an illness, the deadly dangerous proportions of which she knew by virtue of her professional training, wrote in a letter to a friend: “Although those high powered drugs do seemingly perform magic, I knew I was in the hands of ‘the Great Physician’ and was not afraid.” Yes, this is the victory, even our faith!

St. Paul, in his Corinthian correspondence, was telling about a dangerous experience he had just passed through in Ephesus, and seeing it against the backdrop of innumerable stonings, beatings, shipwrecks, and imprisonment he had suffered, lays bare the secret of his courage and of how he is delivered from the fear of evil tidings: “He rescued me from so terrible a death, He rescues me still, and I rely upon Him for the hope that He will continue to rescue me.” (II Corinthians 1:10 — Moffatt) Looking back across his life the intrepid apostle could see dangers and difficulties aplenty, but these did not daunt him for, more plainly even than the past difficulties, he could by the eyes of faith and experience see God always there, always amazingly sufficient, always opening up a way of escape or giving him the victory. So he could face the future with steady eyes, unafraid of evil tidings.

But please note that the Psalmist does not say that God removes all evil tidings from his obedient and trusting servant. God does not take away the harsh and tragic events from life so that the life blessed of God escapes disappointment, failure, defeat, and inhuman injustice. Oh, no. Even the blessed of God does not lead a charmed life.

What the Psalmist does say of the believing and obedient man is that he is not afraid of evil tidings. He knows that he must face, for himself and his dearest, death and disease and defeat, for a season, but he knows that none of these can completely and ultimately undo him, for his life is hid with God in Christ. He knows that the grace of God is always sufficient for every need that has arisen in the past or can arise in the future. He trusts that his wonderful God will open a way of deliverance for him and his beloved “in the nick of time” as the author of the Hebrew Epistle puts it — not a month before the need arises, nor even a moment too late, but in the nick of time.

So his present moment of life, the great now, the eternal here, is delivered from the storm clouds of worry, anxiety and fretfulness. He is delivered from the fear of evil tidings, so that the beauty of God’s creation is not hidden from his sight by the fogs and mists of unbelieving worry. He actually sees and loves his familiar friends and family as he meets them and breaks bread with them in joy from day to day, not missing the person to person heart relationship of the burning present, because his mind and spirit are absent — off on a worry trip into the future, the soul’s jet propelled jaunt into outer space to hunt for imaginary hobgoblins to fear which make of today’s life a colorless nightmare of dream walking. The man of trustful obedience lives life abundantly in the living present, unafraid of evil tidings.

In the second century, at a time when Christians were throughout the Roman empire suspect, hunted, profaned and brutally handled, Justin Martyr wrote his famous Apology and in it said this about current customs in Christian worship: “On the day called Sunday, there is a meeting in one place of those who live in the cities or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. When the reader has finished, the president in a discourse urges and invites us to the imitation of these noble things.”  (First Apology of Justin — paragraph 6-7 on p. 287 — Early Christian Fathers — Library of Christian Classics — Westminster 1953)

For your own deliverance from the destroying fear of evil tidings I urge and invite you today to an imitation of these two noble, but simple things: “obedience and trust.” The old gospel song puts it squarely and truly: “Trust and obey, there is no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” So — and only so — are we not afraid of evil tidings.

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome;

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home.

1. K. Chesterton