Daily Manna · Day 95 · April 5
Delivered from Fear
“I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.”
Fear does not always look like fear, so you may have stopped calling it that. Sometimes it looks like rereading an email nine times before you send it. Sometimes it looks like snapping at your children, or lying awake building arguments for a conversation that may never happen.
Think of fear as water slowly rising in a room. You do not bump into it the way you bump into a wall. It rises evenly and gets into everything, and after a while you get used to it. You stand in it so long that you can no longer tell how deep it is. David had lived like that for years. David had been running from King Saul. The heading of this psalm ties it to the day he escaped from a Philistine king by acting like a madman. First Samuel says he "scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard," and the king had him driven away. That is the man who says, "I sought the LORD, and he heard me." It is not a heroic story, and David does not dress it up.
Notice the order, because that is where the help is. David sought, God heard, and God delivered. The danger had not gone away. Two verses later David calls himself a poor man: "This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles." He sought God first, while everything still looked bad. Notice too how far the help reaches: "from all my fears." That means every one of them, including the fears that would embarrass him.
So come back to the water. It does not drain away because the weather gets better. It goes down because Someone opens a way for it to drain, and the psalm says plainly who that is. It also says that the asking came first. Take the fear you would be most embarrassed to name, and pray it to God in the exact words you think it, without tidying it up. Then go and do the thing that fear has been making you put off. The Lord who heard David in his worst hour hears you too.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 95 is To Whom Shall We Go (John 6:68).