".you will be seated in the high place" Proverbs 29:25

How does fear and intimidation work against us in our daily lives?  It has many faces that try to stop us from being confident in the Lord.  

The enemy of our soul uses our everyday circumstances to inflict intimidation and fear into our lives using our health, our jobs, even our spouses to tempt us to take our eyes off of the fact that we are dead to the old life and we have new life in Christ.  

We have been transformed into a new man with a different perspective, not controlled by old human nature but instead controlled by the Spirit of God.

We are no longer held captive to the things which hold us back, we can rise above the words and thoughts of fear and intimidation and recognize that we have higher thoughts, higher motives, and higher goals.  

Our new purpose is to be transformed into Christ-likeness, it doesn’t mean that we start walking around with long hair, tie-dye t-shirts and sandals carrying big bibles, it means our minds have been awakened to a new perspective of life.  Our old nature has been put to death and this new man emerges.

We have a new outlook on life because we have been taken into the very near presence of the Lord Himself.  He literally causes us to be “born again” into this new life of awareness of what we were made for.  We have been made to love Him and to know what real love is all about, for Jesus is the exact representation of love.

The one who doesn’t love has yet to know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8 (TPT)

We are not just led into just walking out the Christian life without being empowered, our empowerment is an essential part of this relationship with Christ.  

This empowerment is transformational, no longer do we see life from only our desires and our ambitions, this is part of the old nature that is put to death with Jesus on the cross.  Or, we can say our old nature is buried with Him in baptism, as we put our old nature under the water in death which is set against God and His purpose for us, we come out of the water raised to a new life in Christ as a new man transformed and reborn.

This is a reckoning, a decision to place the old life to death and receive the new life in Christ as the new reality in which we live.  If that were all that was required then it still would not be enough, for then we need the Spirit of God to empower us to live this new life in Christ.

It is from this point that we can overcome all of the fear and intimidation that the world and its ways throw at us.

Fear is elusive and it hides, it isn’t always upfront and exposed.  It hides in dark corners of our minds where there are memories or feelings which are based on past experiences which were either painful or damaging.  It takes courage to allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate these areas of fear with light to reveal that these memories are only powerful in our lives because we permit it to have power.  When we confess these fearful memories God can begin to clean up these areas of our lives to reveal what true power is, the power of life to fill those dark memories with hope and love and forgiveness.

Intimidation is more of a matter of loss of identity.  When we are intimidated, we lose the perspective that we are God’s children, we have ultimate resources at our side and we can call upon those resources to counter anything or anyone that intimidates us with the truth of God.  We are more than conqueror’s in Christ.

Yet even in the midst of all these things, we triumph over them all, for God has made us to be more than conquerors, and his demonstrated love is our glorious victory over everything! Romans 8:37 (TPT)

God’s love has made us more than conquerors in four ways:

1. No situation in life can defeat us or dilute God's love. (Romans 8:31-39)
2. We know that divine love and power work for us to triumph over all things. (2 Peter 1:3)
3. We share in the victory spoils of every enemy we face (Isaiah 53:12).
4. We have conquered the Conqueror with merely a glance of our worshiping eyes. We have won his heart (Song of Solomon 4:9; 6:5).

So as we put our confidence in the Lord we are lifted into a high place.  The Hebrew utilizes the word: “sä·gav'” which means a place too high for capture, an exalted position, inaccessible to the enemy.  It can also mean to “be excellent”.  

To put this into a sentence:  

We have Christ residing in us which is our confidence and we are lifted to an exalted position in Him, inaccessible to the enemy.  We are excellent in His eyes, and we lack no good thing in Christ, for we know Him and love Him.

Be Blessed;

Stephen Barnett