Dispelling Fears

Wheaton College experienced a remarkable revival in 1950. A letter from psychiatrist and professor of psychology, Philip B. Marquart, M.D., was sent to Dr. David Howard. It illustrates how the fear of God is the one fear that has the potential to dispel all other fears:

Now here are some astounding psychological facts [coming out of the revival] . . . Several dozen cases of emotional problems melted away in the revival. I lost all my student counseling interviews. One by one they came around and declared that they were cured. So I merely asked them to return once more to give their testimony – which I wrote down in my revival notebook. That means that if we had continuous revival all over the world, believers would need psychiatry much less than they do. I began to wonder whether the Lord wasn’t rejecting, for me, the idea of psychiatry of any kind.

Then I began to get an avalanche of new patients. Most of them were under conviction – and in conviction it is possible to get every kind of mental abnormality, as long as they resist. One student who had scoffed at the revival became beset with a serious phobia – a fear that he might be catching epilepsy. This phobia was the punishment for his scoffing. Secular methods were of no avail. Finally, I led him to confess to the Lord. Here he resisted. He had scorned the revival in the first place, because he was against confession. As soon as he confessed, his phobia left him.

You will not be fearful of any other fear object or be anxious for tomorrow if you choose to believe that your omnipresent and omnipotent heavenly Father is with you all the time. He promises to never leave you or forsake you. Would it help your fears and anxieties if you heard Jesus praying for you in an adjacent room? Distance makes no difference. He is praying for you. “Therefore He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25).

Dr. Neil

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