What does First B Jackson teach about fear vs faith?

At First B Jackson, the teaching on fear versus faith starts with a straightforward claim: these are the only two options available to us. Pastor Karl and Pastor Josh both worked through Hebrews 11:23-31 on the Sunday after Christmas 2019, tracing a string of Old Testament figures who all faced the same choice. Moses' parents defied Pharaoh's death order not because they were bold by nature, but because they feared God more than they feared the king. Moses himself walked away from a position of enormous earthly power, identifying instead with a slave people, because faith sees what is not yet visible. The people who encircled Jericho followed a battle plan that made no military sense at all, and they did it anyway. In every case, the teaching presses the same point: faith is not the absence of pressure, it is choosing what God says over what the circumstances in front of you are saying.

Brad Yates approached the same tension from a different angle in his 2023 Labor Day sermon on the parable of the talents. The servant who buried his money was not punished for wasting it on sinful living. He was judged for doing nothing, and Brad tied that inaction directly to fear. Drawing on Romans 14:23, he argued that whatever is not from faith is sin, and that the servant's fear, whether of the master, of failure, or of the work itself, drove him to the very outcome he was trying to avoid. Fear, Brad said, is a powerful motivator but an unstable one, and it burns out fast. The two faithful servants, by contrast, simply got to work with what they had been given, and the master's response to both of them was identical praise.

Taken together, these messages teach that fear and faith are not just emotional states but orientations that shape everything a person does or refuses to do. Fear keeps people compliant with the wrong authorities, idle with what God has entrusted to them, and looking backward instead of forward. Faith does not require perfect theology or complete understanding, as the woman who touched Jesus' cloak showed, but it does require acting on what God has said rather than waiting for circumstances to feel safe. The reward the Bible holds out for that kind of faithfulness is not comfort or recognition but more responsibility and the joy of the Master, and that, the teaching here argues, is more than enough.

Taught from Hebrews 11:23-31 · Hebrews 11:6 · Romans 14:23 · Matthew 25:14-30 · Joshua 6:1-27