Wiley’s Musings - Faith or Fear

As always, use as you will. Thank you for your amazing witness and service to God, to Mars Hill Church, and to our community.

Cleaning out boxes today, I ran across my last sermon as Pastor of Mars Hill Church. The Scriptures were I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath and Numbers 13-15, where Moses sends out people from each ancestral tribe to explore the land of Canaan. The spies come back with a double message. The people’s reaction determines the course of the next 40 years for the people of Israel.

The last paragraph of the sermon may be worth repeating in the world, national, community, and time of Lent in which we find ourselves:

"The choice today and every day for you, for me, and for Mars Hill Church is whether we will be ruled by fear or faith. If we choose to live by our fear, it will tie a very strong and small knot which will suffocate our lives, our hope, our joy. If we choose to live our faith in God’s love and purpose, that faith will banish the rule of fear and open our lives to vistas and possibilities known at this moment only to God. I pray that we will dare to continue to choose faith, as you have time and time again for the past two years. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”