Articles By: Alan Fadling

In one word, a primary theme for me in 2011 was fear and overcoming mine. Perhaps there are some for whom fear is not much of an issue. I don’t seem to know too many of them. And I’m not one myself. Fear has always been a deep struggle for me. It’s probably good, as someone has counted, that the word to “fear not” occurs 365 times in the Bible. I need at least that many reminders.

In Luke 1:72-73, Zechariah recognizes that Jesus will be one who God uses “to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This last line helped me remember that God enables me to minister 1) without fear 2) in holiness and righteousness 3) before him 4) all our days.

I have lived a relatively pain-free life so far, at least physically. (Writing about emotional or spiritual pain would be a different subject…and post). But three years ago, my wife suffered what we came to call the “summer of pain.” One day she was leaning over to make a bed, a few weeks later she was crumpled on the bed in overwhelming sciatica pain. Watching someone you love endure great pain is its own kind of suffering.

Over the years, we hear hundreds, then thousands of messages, talks or Bible studies. Of course we don’t remember them all. The ones that stick for me have usually been profoundly simple, and often involved a memorable metaphor.

In twenty years of training Christian leaders in leadership development rooted in spiritual formation, we at The Leadership Institute have learned that the negative perception of Christians is an unfortunate result of professed but unpracticed faith. Even Christians affirming spiritual formation ideas may be little changed unless they engage in spiritual formation practices.

For example, the regular practice of solitude and silence coupled with prayer has become a place of deep transformation, producing hypocrisy’s opposite—integrity. Hypocrisy is a dissonance between profession and practice. In regular solitude, God uncovers our pretending, our appearance managing, and our malformed images of Him. More genuine communion with God develops a growing likeness to Him in us.

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