Facing the Future Without Fear Dr. Fred Lowery January 10, 2010 Psalm 27:1; Psalm 34:4; Psalm 56:3; 2 Timothy 2:7; Hebrews 13:6; Jeremiah 29:11; Deuteronomy 31:8; Psalm 118:6; Hebrews 13:5-6 Since I promised last week we are going to talk about fear and facing the future without fear because one word summary of the past decade would be greed. Greed. But the word for this decade to this point is the word fear. As you look back Time Magazine called the last decade the one that we just finished, the Decade from hell. And they said that because of all the things that have happened, the trials and the tribulation, the natural disasters that have happened in this decade. Earthquakes have killed tens of thousands in Iran and China and Pakistan. The shuttle explosion, you remember when the shuttle came over East Texas and exploded, the astronauts lost their lives. The war in Iraq, the war with terror has cost us 945 billion dollars. We’ve lost 5,300 soldiers, another 35,000 injured in this war with terror. The Tsunami, we’d never heard that word, at least I hadn’t and certainly didn’t know you spelled it with a t and yet 230,000 people were literally swept away and lost their lives. Then the fires across California and other places, its amazing destruction. And the floods. We’ve had a lot of flooding here and across the country. And of course the hurricane, Katrina, and the tremendous damage and the loss of nearly 2000 lives with Katrina and that storm forever changed the landscape of the state of Louisiana and parts of Mississippi. And of course the recession which started in 2007 and grew as Wall Street literally imploded in a series of scandals and corporate greed. And we begin daily to have something else coming apart or finding out about the CEO’s who while their companies were going down they were taking millions of dollars in bonuses and then of course the corruption and the greed is from Washington to Wall Street and state capitals, the country was just in such, it didn’t take much to shake up this whole country and it became a global issue. All because of greed and corruption. One powerful thing we learned from the last decade is the destructive power of greed. Greed can destroy a person, a family, a church, a state, a nation. And this thought that America is too big to fail, too strong to threaten, too wealthy to be broke, those myths have been shattered. We know now that we are vulnerable to just about anything. The fact that the myth that America is untouchable, that we are exceptional, that we are above everybody else, that myth has been shattered. It was shattered on September 11, 2001 when four planes were hijacked and two of them as you know of those planes went into the World Trade Center, those two towers and one into the Pentagon and the fourth plane, if you remember the story of how actually some passengers were able to overtake the hijackers and were able to crash that plane because it was headed for the ...
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