Chase the Lion (part two)

Chasing Lions (part two)

“Benaiah son of Jehoiada, a valiant fighter from Kabzeel, performed great exploits. He struck down Moab’s two mightiest warriors. He also went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion. And he struck down a huge Egyptian. Although the Egyptian had a spear in his hand, Benaiah went against him with a club. He snatched the spear from the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.”

· Easy to read that passage and overlook the fear factor

· I’m sure Benaiah had to of been a little scared.

· The thing that sets lion chasers apart is they do not run from the thing that scares them.

· Easy to look at our own fears in terms of phobias.

· But what if we looked at our fears through the lens of conditioned response.

· What if we fear because we have programmed ourselves to?

· During the 1890s Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was looking at salivation in dogs in response to being fed, when he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food.

· Pavlov (1902) started from the idea that there are some things that a dog does not need to learn. For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is ‘hard wired’ into the dog.

· However, when Pavlov discovered that any object or event which the dogs learnt to associate with food (such as the lab assistant) would trigger the same response, Pavlov knew that somehow, the dogs in his lab had learned to associate food with his lab assistant.

· In his experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in             salivation.

· So the dog had learned an association between the bell and the food and a new behavior had been learnt. Because this response was learned (or conditioned), it is called a conditioned response.

· What if because of something that has happened in our past we fear something now?

· Ex. My fear of heights

· If our experiences condition us and effect what we are afraid of, could the same be true with our failures?

· John 18 tells story of Peter denying Jesus, rooster crows 3x

· Every time he heard a rooster crow it was a reminder

· We do the same (thought, smell, song, action, words, etc)

· John 21 - post denial, went back to fishing, old life.

· Jesus Reinstates Peter

· Early in the morning, when does a rooster crow?

· God wants to recondition our guilt with grace!

· He wants to recondition our fear with faith!

· See we’ve been programmed to run based on a past failure.

· F. Scott Fitzgearld - “In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

· We’ve all failed and we’ve all been hurt. And those reminders often keep us from chasing lions.

· It’s not easy (I’m sure Benaiah had some cuts, bruises, scars)

· It may take time (ex. Wrong exit, 2 mile mistake)

· Don’t let your fears due to past pains determine your future.

· Don’t let the lions you face in this life keep you from experiencing everything God wants to do in you and through you.

· You can be a lion chaser, but it may mean facing your biggest failure.

· May God take your biggest failure, which has become your biggest fear, and turn it in to your biggest victory