Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Location: Montgomery, Ala.?

Genre: Sermon

Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Career in Ministry

Details

King delivered “The Mastery of Fear” as the second in his series on “Problems of Personality Integration.”1He kept the following three handwritten documents in the same file folder. In each, King urges his listeners to openly confront their fears. He incorporates quotations found in Harry Emerson Fosdick's sermon “The Conquest of Fear,” Fosdick's essay “Dealing with Fear and Anxiety,” a newspaper column by Benjamin Mays, and Robert McCracken's sermon “What to Do with Our Fears?”2

The Mastery of Fear, Sermon notes

They are part of the fee we pay for [citizen?]

  1. Of primary importance in dealing with fear is making a practice of looking fairly and squarely at the object of our dread.3 Emerson “He has not learded the lesson of life who does not eveyday surmount a fear."4

    One of the chief services of ministers and psychiatrists is to be listening-posts, where crammed bosoms, long burdendd with surreptitious fears, can unload themselves.5

    Fear of dark, of water, of closed places, of high place, of cats, of Friday, of walking undr a ladder, fear of resposinblity; of old age and death6

    Get them in open and sometimes laugh at them. Dr Sadler said “Ridicule is the master cure of fear and axiety.”

  2. There is an area of fear which mist be mastered with goodwill and love.

  3. It is overcome by possessing adequate interior Resources

The cure of fear is Faith7

"The Mastery of Fear," Sermon outline

  1. Int. There is probably no emotion that plagues and crumbles the human personality more than that of fear. Every where we turn we meet see that monster fear; every road we travel we meet that monster fear. Fear expresses itself in such diverse forms—fear of others, fear of oneself, fear of growing old, fear of death, fear of change, fear of disease and poverty; Russia fears America and America fears Russia, the young lady fears that she will not be married, the impure wrongdoer fears that he will get caught.8 Every where we turn we see that monster fear; every road we travel we meet that monster fear. Fear begins to accumulate to the point that at last many face what psychiatrists call phobo‐phobia, the fear of fear, being afraid of being afraid.9 Fear of death. The terrifying spectacle of atomic warfare has put Hamelet's words “To be or not to be” on millions of trembling lips.10 Fear has risen to such extensiv propotions in the contemporary world life that one of the leading psychiatrists of the world has said: “If fear were abolished from modern life, the work of the psychotherapist would be nearly gone.”11
  2. Text: It seems that Jesus had an amazing insight into the tragic and ominous effects that can flow forth from fear. He was continually saying to his followers “fear not” “Be not afraid” Be not anxious”
  3. Now we must make it clear that the admonition Be not afraid does not mean get rid of all fear. Without fear the human race could have never survived Fear is the elemental alarm system of the human organism which make it sensitive to the first sign of danger. Fear of darkness, fear of pain, fear of ignorance, fear of war.12
  4. Fear is a powerfully creative force. The fear of ignorance leads to education etc … Every saving invention and every intellectual advance has behind it as a part of its motivation the desire to avoid or escape some dreaded thing. And so Angelo Patri is right in saying, “Education consist in being afraid at the right time.”13 So if by “a fearless man” we mean one who is not afraid of anything, we are picturing, not a wise man, but a defective mind. There are normal and abnormal fears
  5. So the difficulty of our problem is that we are not to get rid of fear altogether, but we must harness it and master it.14 Like fire it is a useful and necessary servant, but a runious master. It is fear when it becomes terror, panic and chronic anxiety that we must seek to eliminate
  6. How do we master fear
    1. Of basic importance in mastering fear is the need of getting out in the open the object of our fear and frankly facing it. Human life is full of secret fears.
    2. A further step in mastering fear is to remember that it always involves the misuse of the imagination

"Mastering Our Fears"