Spirit-Given Power

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Sound mind is one Greek word, sophronismos, and it appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Translators have struggled with it: self-discipline, self-control, a sound mind, prudence. The root combines saving and mind, and the sense is something like a mind kept in its right proportions. It is not calmness and it is not intelligence. It is the faculty that keeps a thing the size it actually is.

Which is exactly what fear takes away. Paul is writing to a young man who has gone quiet, and the next sentence tells you the specific quiet: be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner. Timothy's mentor is in chains and it has become expensive to be associated with him, and Timothy has started to shrink. What Paul sends is not encouragement about his gifting. It is a list of three things God supplied, deliberately arranged. Power, so the speaking happens at all. Love, so it is not a performance. And sophronismos, so it is not a rant and so the risk stays its real size instead of the size fear reports.

Fear is the only item on that list God did not hand over. Which does not mean you are not afraid. It means the fear is not the equipment.

Somebody you see every week has never once heard you say it. Nobody is going to make you, and there is no schedule attached to this. But the equipment was handed over, all three pieces of it, and fear was the only item on the list God did not send. Whenever you are ready, one true sentence about what he has done in your life will do, with your voice unsteady if that is how it comes out.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 91 is Where Art Thou (Genesis 3:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna