On the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, the world we live in gives us more than enough reasons to be afraid.

Most of us will never see the worst-case scenarios we hear so much about. Yet many still live against a backdrop of persistent, unspoken fear.

Living in fear means living with constant tension; it wears us down. Sustained fear causes our adrenal glands to secrete more than the normal dose of certain chemicals, which exhausts our nervous and immune systems. We get sick faster - both physically and mentally.

Persistent fear reduces our self-esteem and leaves us with a paralysing sense of impotence and fatalism. It kills our confidence. We stop trying new things, we stick to the predictable instead. We stop experimenting and growing.

In the Christian Scriptures, only one kind of fear is seen as healthy for us: it's called the 'fear of the Lord'. The term has a special meaning. Have you ever looked up at the night sky and been awestruck at the sheer magnitude and magnificence of space? At the same time you sense just how small you are in the grand scheme of things.

That's what the 'fear of the Lord' means. It also means, as one Jewish rabbi put it, living with 'a trembling awareness that life has meaning. [and that the] Divine presence is around you all the time.'

In the Christian view of things, it was when men and women stopped fearing God that they started to fear everything else.

One of the leaders of the early, first-century church, wrote a letter to a group of Christians who were suffering persecution. He reminded them of the heroes of faith who'd gone before.

These people had faced beatings, stonings, poverty and torture, yet they were able to overcome their fears with a boldness that really defied explanation. He told his persecuted friends that they should never throw away their 'fearless confidence' (Amp).

The word he uses for confidence means nothing like the soft, fuzzy self-confidence we read about in self-help books. It has a hard edge to it - it's very aggressive, in-your-face. The closest word we have in English is a word the rappers gave us -- 'attitoood'.

He's saying that faith gives us an uncompromising and bold confidence, even in the face of our greatest fears. I suppose that some people will equate Christianity with weakness. They'll hark back to Marx who said that religion is the opiate of the masses.

But look at history: Christian faith has led some pretty ordinary people to change the world, often in the face of terrifying opposition.

For me personally, it's a lot easier to find my confidence in surface issues - my status, my abilities or my possessions, for example - than it is to look outside myself for the kind of confidence the writer of Hebrews is talking about.

Self-confidence is all very nice, but it's so fickle - because I'm so fickle. The writer of Hebrews was talking about facing fear with a very different brand of confidence, different because it's not based on me at all.

This confidence, this 'attitoood' runs way deeper than my self-belief. It taps into what Christ has done for me. Yes, it's a spiritual confidence, but it seeps out into every other part of my being. After all, if I can be confident that I'm now God's friend and my life is safe in his hands. If I can be confident that nothing will ever separate me from his love...

If I can be confident in all that, I can be confident in my relationships, my work, my studies, in everything.

To rise above the rising waterline of fear in our world, we need to dig for something deeper than our own self-confidence; to reach higher than the fears we face.