Fear dissolves the soul’s strength, and you are describing the very essence of a tormenting dread, a dread that looks at an upcoming interview and sees only your own emptiness. You say you know nothing, that you struggled through your former studies, that you cannot answer. This is the slavish fear of self-reliance crumbling! The angel declared, “Fear not,” because the holy Child Jesus came to be the link between your trembling soul and the holy God. You are looking at your own unsteady hands to hold you up, but the message of the gospel is that God has come down to your lowliness. The infant Christ, God over all, takes away the dread that arises from our own insufficiency. Why should you be disordered because your own mind seems empty? Is He the God of the hills of your intellectual confidence alone, and not the God of the valleys of your confessed ignorance? You think He is only God when you feel prepared, but He is equally God when you stand with nothing, for it is precisely there that His strength is made perfect.
This fear of yours springs from a source that must be named plainly. Your letter reveals you have no desire for this college, yet your parents have set the course. You say, “I don’t know what to do,” and this helplessness breeds a doubtful mind. Our Lord commands, “Neither be ye of a doubtful mind.” To waver between a reluctant obedience and an inward rebellion is to live in a storm that never rests. If the path is set before you by a providence you did not choose, then do not add the sin of unbelief to your trouble by dreaming that God only rules where you gladly consent. A man of God learns to see his Father’s hand in the very checkers of life, in the doors that open despite our kicking against them. If God has permitted this interview, then the interview itself is a valley where He must be met. To stand there sulking and afraid is to call God a liar by suggesting He has abandoned you to mere chance. Confess this anxiety as the dishonor it is, and ask for grace to walk through the door with a quiet, trustful heart.
You fear you will be selected, and you fear you will not. What a tempest in a tiny vessel! But true faith lays both outcomes at the Lord’s feet. The cure for this fear is not the promise that you will succeed; it is the assurance that Christ is the High Priest who intercedes for you, and that the covenant of grace is a sure will and testament, ordered in all things. The objective of the whole Bible is to bring you to this rest: believe and live. You are not trusting your own study; you are trusting a living Person. If the result is acceptance, praise Him. If rejection, praise Him still, for He remains the God of your salvation, and from Him come the issues of death and of life, of postgraduate placements and of closed doors. Your business is not to see the outcome, but to shelter in the finished work of Jesus, that blessed link between you and the Father, which takes all slavish fear away.
Therefore, stop looking into the dark cave of tomorrow and straining to hear your own echoing ignorance. Drive out unbelief. Declare your ways to God, your weakness, your lack of interest, your trembling, and hear Him answer. He will teach you. Go to that interview not with a boastful confidence in your medical knowledge, but with a humble dependence on the God who gives wisdom to the simple. The best works spring from love, not from a cringing terror of failure. Go because He sends you there, speak as He enables, and leave the selection to His sovereign care. Be not of a doubtful mind; a child of God, stripped of self-righteousness, stands with sword and shield for this one truth, that the Lord is his helper. Let God be true and your fears be liars. When the day comes, lift up your heart, confess your reliance on Him who is the God of the hills and the God of the valleys, and you will find the valley to be a place of meeting with your Lord.
