A Scream of Fear & A Shout of Faith

Psalm 47 says:
1 Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. 2 How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth!... 5 God has ascended amid shouts of joy, the LORD amid the sounding of trumpets. 6 Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. 7 For God is the King of all the earth; sing to him a psalm of praise.

In this Psalm, we see a number of ways to offer praise and worship to God - to clap our hands before Him, to shout out to Him with cries of joy, to sing unto Him.   The Lord is pleased as we offer Him praise - no matter what the method, it's acceptable to Him as it's offered from a pure heart.   And when we are paralyzed by fear or held in bondage by any number of things, it can be helpful to verbally call and cry out to God, to quote His word, and to worship His name.

We read in 2nd Timothy 1:7:For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

CNN.com reports that a pastel version of "The Scream", a painting by Edvard Munch, was sold for nearly $120 million to an anonymous buyer Wednesday at Sotheby's in New York, setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction.

Experts had expected the masterpiece to break new ground at the famed New York auction house; its presale estimate of at least $80 million was the highest ever listed at Sotheby's.

It has been dubbed "the portrait of a soul" and "the face that launched 1,000 therapists."  The painting depicts a distorted human figure -- hands flat against its sunken face, eyes and mouth wide open -- in the foreground of a nightmarish landscape.

Munch had said the inspiration for the painting was a moment of fear, during which he heard the "enormous, infinite scream of nature".  Sotheby's spokesman David Norman said, "The Scream has really entered the collective conscience, whatever nationality, whatever country, whatever attitude or age, it really sort of speaks to that sort of existential terror that everyone experiences in the world."

And that is a compelling statement of why we need the gospel.   That may be hyperbole, but the world can be a fearful place - people are in fear of economic disaster, afraid perhaps of circumstances of relationship struggles, and perhaps thinking the other shoe is going to drop.   You may have been there at one time or the other - but the good news is that hope comes through Jesus Christ and we can rise above the fears that hold us captive.   He can replace the "scream" of fear with the "shout" of faith - the expression of worship that can enable us to align our perspective with God's and to give us a sense that He is with us.   Fear brings oppression, but faith brings optimism, as we hold fast to the promises found in God's word.