“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
So wrote John, one of the disciples of Jesus towards the end of his life. While initially, he was known as a loud, perhaps even obnoxious person…willing to mix it up verbally and probably physically–his teenage nickname, paired with his brother James, was “sons of thunder–by the time of the twilight of his life he was simply a voice of love.
Boy do we need this today. The pastor at the church I am now attending has been teaching on this since the turn of the year. I don’t think he is trying to speak to our political climate, but its still a worthy point on that subject. All the consternation and protest, both Democrats today and the Tea Party conservatives back in 2009-10, comes from fear. Fear of change, fear of difference, fear of seeing something you value taken away from you.
The pastor’s point has been that we most usually hide behind masks, and we do so because of our own fears. Usually, fears that you may find out about my bad traits, my unfortunate previous decisions or my own shortcomings. Fears that if you knew all of that stuff then you wouldn’t want to be my friend. And I guess, perhaps that is true from time to time. We get transparent with someone that we think is our friend and it all goes horribly wrong. So, we build up a scar and bury it all deeper, determined to just run solo from here on out.
Where does the perfect love come from? Well, most of you know I am a Christian and thus believe the only “perfect” is in Jesus. John said as much in the previous sentence: “as we live in God, our love grows more perfect.” So, God loves me first, calling me into a relationship with Him. I agree, submitting to His ways and thus building the relationship deeper. As I live His ways, then of course I exhibit this to others by how I treat them.
In one sense, what John is saying is that if we don’t build this perfect love, this relationship with God through Jesus, then fear is really my reality. No matter how much you protest, how much you say that you certainly can love without God…fear sits on us without perfect love. Christian or not…if you hide from God, pull back from going deeper in His ways to learn from Him, you can’t fully get away from the fear.
And if the idea that is inherent in other non-Christian faith groups is true, to “love your neighbor as yourself”…then how can I love them if I don’t ever really get to the honest place in my own soul?
Well, there is more to dig in here, but I’ll leave that for another time. It just hit me this morning as I thought about the many protests we are seeing, and have been seeing. They aren’t all based on fear, but there is fear breeding, and seems to me to be dominant in the voices I hear and read. What we need right now is that fear to be cast out, driven away.
Moving closer to God in order to better grasp the meaning of love is the answer.