(Isa. 51:7; refer in this text to 3 Ne. 22:17.)
Most fears … do not, as a rule, just happen. We nurse them and feed them until, from as inconsequential trifle, they have grown to monstrous proportions… .
A young man told me that he could not sleep. He gave me a long psychological explanation of how this had come about, “Can you help me get rid of this obsession?” he asked. “No,” was my reply. “Then what can I do?” he implored. “Run around the block at night until you are ready to drop. What you need is exertion. You have put too much of your physical energies into imagining things. If you run hard enough, you will automatically relax and go to sleep. You have thought yourself into this fear with your mind, you can run yourself out of it with your legs”—and he did… .
It is … true that many people who are obsessed by nagging fears might find a new interest in life if they became concerned about other people through participation in community activities… .
Every step in the conquest of fear requires, at the outset, an act of will… . As Emerson said, do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Actually our fears are the forces that make us, when dealt with by decisive action, or that break us if dealt with by indecision, [or] procrastination … at the bottom of most fears, both mild and severe, will be found an overactive mind and an underactive body. Hence, I have advised many people, in their quest for happiness, to use their heads less and their arms and legs more—in useful work or play. We generate fears while we sit; we overcome them by action. Fear is nature’s warning signal to get busy.
In its mild and initial stages, fear takes the form of … criticism of, certain activities and people… . The world is full of malcontents … who, because they will not change themselves, talk about changing the entire system… . Through conversation they rationalize their anger with the world, instead of becoming enraged with themselves and flying into worthwhile action.
(Henry C. Link, Ph.D., Getting The Most Out Of Life, An Anthology from The Reader’s Digest[Pleasantville, New York: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1946], 85–88.)
You were not born with the worry habit. You acquired it… .
Worry … is derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to choke.” If someone were to put his fingers around your throat and press hard, cutting off the flow of vital power, it would be a dramatic demonstration of what you do to yourself by long-held and habitual worry… .
Fear is the most powerful of all thoughts with one exception, and the one exception is faith. Faith can always overcome fear. Faith is the one power against which fear cannot stand… . Master faith and you will automatically master fear… .
Fear something over a long period of time and there is a real possibility that by fearing you may actually help bring it to pass. The Bible contains a line which is … terrible in its truth: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me …” (Job 3:25) Of course it will, for if you fear something continuously you tend to create conditions in your mind propitious to the development of that which you fear. An atmosphere is encouraged in which it can take root and grow. You tend to draw it to yourself.
(Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking [New York: Fawcett Crest Book, 1952], 122–26.)
Let us recognize that fear comes not of God, but rather that this gnawing, destructive element comes from the adversary of truth and righteousness. Fear is the antithesis of faith. It is corrosive in its effects, even deadly.
(Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1997], 220.)
Fear … is a principal weapon in the arsenal that Satan uses to make mankind unhappy. He who fears loses strength for the combat of life in the fight against evil. Therefore, the power of the evil one always tries to generate fear in human hearts. In every age and in every era fear has faced mankind.
(Howard W. Hunter, The Teachings of Howard W. Hunter, ed. Clyde J. Williams [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1997], 83.)
When I went on a mission, my father gave me a little card with a verse from the New Testament, the words of the Lord to the centurion servant who brought news concerning the little daughter of the centurion. Those words, “be not afraid, only believe.” I commend those words to each of us, my brothers and sisters. You do not need to fear if you are on the side of right.
(Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley, [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1997], 221.)
So many of us are fearful of what our peers will say, that we will be looked upon with disdain and criticized if we stand for what is right… .
We need not be [afraid]. We need not slink off in a corner, as it were. We need not be ashamed. We have the greatest thing in the world, the gospel of the risen Lord. Paul gives us a mandate: “Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord” (2 Tim. 1:8).
(Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1997], 222.)
Dr. Joseph F. Montague, … says: “You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you.”
More than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous troubles. Yet, when the nerves of these people are studied under a high-powered microscope in a post-mortem examination, their nerves in most cases are apparently … healthy… . Their “nervous troubles” are caused not by a physical deterioration of the nerves, but by emotions of futility, frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, defeat, despair. Plato said that “the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!”
Worry can make even the most stolid person ill. General Grant discovered that during the closing days of the Civil War… . Grant had been besieging Richmond for nine months. General Lee’s troops, ragged and hungry, were beaten. Entire regiments were deserting at a time… . Grant was in hot pursuit, banging away at the Confederates from both sides and the rear… . Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, fell behind his army and stopped at a farmhouse. “I spent the night,” he records in his Memoirs, “in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.”
The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the thing that cured him was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman galloping down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to surrender.
“When the officer [bearing the message] reached me,” Grant wrote, “I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note, I was cured.”
Obviously it was Grant’s worries, tensions, and emotions that made him ill. He was cured instantly the moment his emotions took on the hue of confidence, achievement, and victory.
(Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950], 19–22.)
We live in a day when the moral and spiritual values of the world are pretty tough. We can look forward with great yearning, and hope things get better. Well, they are not going to get better! The trend that is happening all around us—in society and government and education and all else—is a continuous trend.
And yet with all of that, I stand with great hope and great optimism. I have no fear. Fear is the antithesis of faith. With all that is happening and with all the impossible challenges that we face, we have that supernal gift of the Holy Ghost conferred upon us. And yet, for the most part, we know it not. It’s interesting how in our lives we are operating, to an extent, as though we had not received it.
We have so much that is available, and we shouldn’t fear! …
I remember sending some elders over to Harvard University to meet with someone—the home of a professor who was going to entertain himself at the expense of a couple of our missionaries. They begged me to go with them. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to face Harvard professors! If I had gone, I would have robbed them. I knew that.
I said, “You just go. I know they will belittle you and ridicule your beliefs. Just remember, bear your testimony; just bear your testimony.”
Well, interesting! One young man particularly—who was from a little town in southern Utah, hardly old enough in maturity to be a missionary—went there with great fear.
The next morning they came into my office. They were walking on air above the floor, speaking figuratively.
I said, ‘What happened?’
He said, ‘We confounded them! We confounded them!’
You do not need to fear. Be a Latter-day Saint.
When I was in the military, I was put together up at Washington State University with a group of young men. There were about ten of us in an apartment in Stimpson Hall. We were there for some special pilot training. They began to introduce themselves. I was at the end of the row. As they went around the circle, I began to shrink. They had all been to college except me. I had barely escaped from high school. One of them mentioned that each summer his family had gone on “the Continent.” I didn’t know that meant they had gone to Europe. Another one was a son of a man who had been governor of Ohio and at that time was one of the cabinet members in the federal government. And all of them, it seemed to me, had everything to recommend them, and I had nothing.
It came to me, and I said, “I come from a little town in northern Utah that you have never heard of. My dad runs a garage. I come from a big family, and we have the blessings of the Church.” I said another thing or two.
To my great surprise, I was accepted. They didn’t care that my father wasn’t a member of the president’s cabinet or that our family hadn’t gone on “the Continent.” I learned something. Since that time I have had no fear of meeting people of high station or any people, and I have felt the confidence that comes when you have the gift of the Holy Ghost… .
Go forward without fear. Do not fear the future. Do not fear whatever is ahead of you… . And the Spirit of the Lord will attend you, and you will be blessed as it was intended that we should all be blessed by this supernal gift of the Holy Ghost.
(Boyd K. Packer, “‘And They Knew It Not’”, Satellite Broadcast: 5 March 2000, Utah Valley State College, [Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2000], 4–7.)
Don’t ever try to frighten anyone into the celestial glory. Joy is the pathway to the celestial glory—joy and happiness… . I have in my office every day good and faithful members of this Church who are depressed, who are frustrated, who think they are not being saved, and most of those people whom I see are just as worthy as I and some more worthy. Why they are frustrated, I don’t know, unless someone is trying to scare them into the celestial glory.
(Matthew Cowley, Matthew Cowley Speaks [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1954], 133.)