To the Anxious Hearts: A Personal Letter to Empower the Fearful Believer

By hannah crocker

Have you ever feared death? Have you ever found yourself awake at night, thinking over every worst-case scenario for your situation? Have you cried out to God, Will I be in this season forever? Fear is a crippling effect of this fallen world, but God did not design you to carry its weight. When your questions isolate you, when your thoughts overwhelm you, your Father God upholds you with his righteous right hand, arming you with a two-edged sword. God never once left his believers abandoned, nor did he doom you with anxiety for life. Your freedom from fear is yours to claim from the nail-pierced hands of your Savior. Through stories and scriptural study, this book encourages believers with assurances from their King and teaches them how to daily claim their heaven-won victory over anxiety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973609629

hannah crocker

Hannah Crocker is a graduate of Dallas Baptist University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Communications. Since graduation, she has spent years in Christian non-profit work especially focusing on counseling. She knew the heart of ministry growing up in a ministers home, but in her career, she saw firsthand the crippling fears and heard the hard questions of the lost and saved alike. She began to use her education and passion for writing to reach those people through a counseling training curriculum, devotionals circulated among ministries and churches, and even yearly theatrical scripts performed at First Baptist Church of Pasadena, TX. She strives to breathe Christs life into the weary through her work, writings, and relationships. Her and her husband, Chase, currently reside in Plano, TX.

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Copyright © 2017 hannah crocker.

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The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-0961-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-0963-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-0962-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017918192

WestBow Press rev. date: 2/24/2018

Contents

Introduction

A Right Start

Standing On Scripture

What If I Don’t Know How To Pray?

What If I Struggle With Fear Forever?

What If I Don’t See That God Is Working?

What If I Die?

What If Evil Keeps Winning In Our World?

What If ______ Happens?

What If I Don’t Know What’s Coming?

What If I Stay In This Season?

Final Thoughts

About the Author

For the glory of my God and for the

heart of His anxious child.

Introduction

I’ll admit that I’m a little old-fashioned. At least, that’s the nice way of saying what other people call Granny or other equally fun terms to call a twenty-something. I cook full meals every night. I bake fresh rolls and cookies and cakes all from scratch. I knit by hand. I sew. I wear dresses to church every Sunday. I send Valentine cards every February. I would rather watch an animated movie than a PG-13 movie. I would rather read classic Literature than anything written in the last fifty years. I mean, none of that is weird, right?

Another old-fashioned hobby I love is handwriting letters. Absolutely love it! I love writing them. I love receiving them. An annual Christmas card is nice in the mail, but if the sender didn’t write anything in his own hand, did he really send it? An email is certainly more efficient, but anyone can send those!

There is just something about a handwritten letter. I know that the sender cared enough about me that he or she actually sat down, found paper, an envelope, even a stamp, and wrote out words to me. It wasn’t a group text typed up in 30 seconds. It wasn’t empty small talk in a hallway when I happened to pass by. It’s time. It’s resources. It’s care. I love that. The world needs more of that.

In college, I started to collect addresses. I even wrote down the dorm numbers of my girlfriends, so I could clip letters to their doors. Of course, those envelopes were taped up coloring sheets because…I just am who I am, ok?

Throughout college up until now, I’ve written letters to close and not-as-close friends, close and not-as-close family members, and people who I knew would never respond or acknowledge my letters. I ask for addresses. I buy nice stationary. I keep my stamps stocked. I emboss my monogram on the back of every envelope before mailing.

I just know that I can’t do a lot for others in the grand scheme of things. I can’t afford to buy people great gifts all the time or buy a plane ticket to visit. But I can write out prayers, encouragement, or just reassurances to people.

When I started writing these pages to you and honestly all throughout writing it, I doubted my ability to write eloquently enough. I’ve written a lot of articles and devotions, but a full book? That’s huge! I’m not a novelist in the least. A book sounded big and scary! Surely I didn’t have that much to say! Surely people didn’t want to read that much of what I had to say!

One verse carried me through this book, though.

One verse caught my old-fashioned heart and kept it writing words on the paper.

Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.’ Isaiah 35:4

Say to those with an anxious heart. Tell them to be strong. Tell them that they don’t need to fear. Tell them that their God is coming even now to save them personally.

That’s what this book is. It’s my letter to you. I’m pretending we’re old friends, sharing our embarrassing stories one moment and agonizing struggles the next. So here I am now. I sat down, found paper, and wrote out every word in this book to you. Together, I want to confront those big What If questions you have inside of you. Maybe my words won’t be eloquent. Maybe my sentences won’t have perfect grammar. Maybe it won’t reflect my English degree in an amazing way. That’s not what I wrote it to be anyway. I wrote it in my own voice by my own hand as a personal letter from me to tell your anxious heart to be strong!

A Right Start

Before you read these words, I want us to literally and metaphorically start on the same page. I greatly want to share scriptural promises and speak biblical truths over your struggle with fear, but first, I want to be 100 percent sure that you are 100 percent sure of where you stand with God. I could give you every assurance in the Bible, but they would be fruitless unless you first accepted His Fatherly offering of salvation. Know His pursuit for you.

God created a perfect world with Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:1, 27). Because God is perfect and holy, He can only have a relationship with perfect and holy people (Genesis 2:7). That’s His standard, and if He accepted anything less, He wouldn’t be perfect and holy anymore (2 Timothy 2:13; Psalm 18:30; Matthew 5:48). So in the beginning—in the Garden of Eden—God had a relationship with Adam and Eve, but He did set a boundary of protection, one to guarantee His best for them. He instructed them to not eat from just one certain tree among a garden literally full of other fruitful trees (Genesis 2:15–17). Obedience would protect their perfection and thus protect their relationship with God.

But Adam and Eve didn’t trust that plan. They didn’t trust God at His word or at least, not enough to be content in what He gave them, so they ate from that forbidden tree (Genesis 3:6–7). It was tangible. It was understandable. A fruit was easier to grasp than direction from God. Know that it wasn’t that this fruit had some mystical powers, and it wasn’t the actual fruit that changed mankind forever. It was just the fact that they went against God (Romans 5:19). They did what they knew they weren’t supposed to do.

That defiant decision changed how we could relate to God as His creation (Romans 5:12). We no longer had the tendency toward God. We no longer had the perfect nature given by God. Because of that initial disobedience, we now had a tendency to stray away from Him (Galatians 5:17). It compromised our relationship with God, our access to Him. Where God remained at His perfect standard, we as mankind fell far short (Romans 3:23).

From that point forward, in order to have any kind of relationship with God, our wrong decisions had to be paid for. They had to be covered. God couldn’t ignore sin, so one wrong action, word, or even attitude that wasn’t 100 percent pure deserved death, and it deserved judgment (Romans 1:32, 6:23). That’s how serious God’s standard has always been.

All throughout the Old Testament, you’ll read stories about people doing something wrong, going to the temple, following a lot of rules, sacrificing an animal, and then being on okay terms with God (Romans 5:16; Hebrews 10:1–3). Only then was that death and judgment price tag paid for. But, of course, the next day, those same people would do something wrong again, and they would have to repeat the whole process. A relationship with God was constantly back and forth. It was constantly working to do the right thing to earn God’s favor. It was constantly broken and mended because it was based on humans: what we did wrong and what we did right to fix it. If it’s based on us, then a relationship with God is going to be broken because we’re an inconsistent people.

God didn’t want it to be that way. He wanted a permanent relationship with us—one that was lasting—so He found a way to pay for all of the punishments we had earned (Psalm 103:13–14). He’s still God, so He can’t ignore those wrong things that we’ve done because that would make Him less than perfect and holy. So in order for Him to have a relationship with us, all those wrong things had to be paid for.

For example, I think about all the wrong things that I do in one day. Obviously, I’m not killing people, but God has a set standard of perfection. Any words I say, thoughts I think, or even attitudes that I have that fall anywhere near or far below that standard of perfection, deserve death and judgment (Romans 3:23). So I think about how many of those I do in one day, then a year, and then my whole life? And then consider the entire world, past, present, and future? How many deaths would that be? The only way to cover that high of a price was the death of the Son of God. His death would be enough to pay for all of the deaths that we deserved, and out of His great love for us, God saw that price as worth it, just so a relationship with us could be possible (Romans 5:15; John 3:16; Romans 5:8).

In the New Testament, we see that plan come to earth. Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph (Luke 2:6–7). As I’m sure you know that’s why we see mangers and why we celebrate Christmas. Know, though, that this wasn’t necessarily a silent night. The Son of God coming to earth was a declaration of war. God planned His redemption for man, His victory against Satan, and those newborn screams from a lowly stable of the inn were battle cries.

Jesus grew up just as we grow up in that He was a baby, a toddler, and a teenager. He was human, just as you and I are human—but He never did anything wrong (Luke 2:52; John 1:14; Hebrews 2:17). He was perfect, just as God is perfect (Matthew 5:48). He was 100 percent man and 100 percent God on earth.

When He reached adulthood, He began His ministry. Those are the stories in the Bible about Jesus raising the dead to life, healing the blind, and preaching to thousands. Know that none of this was from an angry place (Mark 5:41–42; John 9:1–6; Matthew 5:1–7:29). He wasn’t pointing His finger, saying, "So typical. I had to come and save you because