Love and Fear
Love and fear are not emotions, but conditions of the heart that drive our very existence. Every thought we have, every word we say, and every decision we make, begins with the choice to love or the choice to fear. Love brings life, joy, unity, and peace. Fear brings death, torment, division, and strife. Love strengthens our communion with God. Fear distorts it.
The biblical “fear of the Lord” is a reverent awe and surrender to the God of the universe. For Christians, true fear of the Lord should not include anxious emotions or fear of wrath and punishment. This kind of fear does not belong in our relationship with the Lord. Believers who relate to God by fear and rules are still in slavery to the flesh ( the mindsets and behaviors that characterized fallen humanity before life in Christ). If we don’t believe that intimacy and union with God have been made possible in Jesus, our relationship with Him becomes based on our ability or inability to obey the words of the New Testament. This is to revert to life lived “under the letter,” rather than enjoying the liberty and freedom that come from living in the Spirit.
In “under the letter” Christianity, the Bible has taken the role of the Holy Spirit in the divine Trinity. The Holy Spirit is given lip service, but He is not truly regarded as a personal being who facilitates our union with Christ and heaven. Rather, His role is largely limited to the conviction of sin. This form of Christianity exalts biblical legalism while shunning experiential relationship with God’s empowering presence. The good news is Christ is still being preached. The bad news is this Christianity often produces an unhealthy mindset that it is ultimately our performance that determines our righteousness before God. Some Christians spend their entire lives striving for a sense of God’s approval through religious works and zealous devotion to the words of the Bible. This is bondage to religious legalism, not the liberty afforded to us by the Holy Spirit. We are slaves of whatever has mastered us. It is very easy, especially in the performance-driven mindset of the West, to slip into a faith that is tainted with legalism. Legalism will always breed shame. Shame breeds sin. Christians mastered by shame and sin are not sons, they are slaves.
Slaves live under a shadow of fear their entire lives, wondering how their master will respond to their performance and behavior. Fear is, inherently, a lack of inner peace. Love, on the other hand, is the presence of peace. When we feel a lack of peace in our relationship with the Lord, it is usually a good indication that we are still thinking like slaves. The Holy Spirit is addressing thinking patterns in us that still belong to the realm of the flesh.
1 John 4:16-18 (NKJV) “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.”
In this passage, John tells us “there is no fear in love.” Because we abide in God and Him in us, our portion is total peace. We have been made like Him, in that our humanity has been united to His - “as He is, so are we in this world.” Anything less than the experience of total peace isn’t the gospel, but a compromise with the flesh and the thinking patterns that characterized the age before Christ. John tells us that boldness should result from our full identification with Christ and the new creation. Our boldness on the day of final judgment will not be based on what we did or didn’t do as Christians during our time on earth, but on who we have already become and are becoming in Him.
What does it mean to be “made perfect in love?” The verb for “make perfect” is derived from the Greek word teleios, which means “lacking nothing necessary to completeness; perfect.” Our perfection and wholeness are not found in what we do as Christians, but in His grace. In Christ, we have already been brought to perfection and completeness because of our union with Him, enacted by Jesus in the crucifixion and resurrection. We no longer live independent of Christ, but have been drawn into union with Him. The life we live on earth is in Him, by Him, and through Him. This perfection and completeness do not negate our desperate need for Him. Our perfection is directly dependent on and bound up in our union with Christ. To reject Christ is to step outside of the perfection of His life in us. We are to abide in Him as He does His work in us. To be “made perfect in love” is to be brought to wholeness in mind, body, and spirit through our union with Christ.
A slavery mindset invites the oppression of fear, guilt, and shame into our Christian journey. This mindset is empowered by fear of punishment for wrong behavior, or the belief that the Christianity is a list of dos and don’ts. Fear is not God’s motivator for right behavior - love is. We love because He first loved us. We obey Him because we love to, not because we have to. If fear of punishment is a motivator in our relationship with God, we will experience the “torment” that John writes about. We can never be free as long as we think like slaves and not sons.
The mind-renewal process draws us out of the thinking patterns of the old age and into the reality of our divine sonship. This sonship is characterized by peace, rest, and our union with Christ. Fear is the great enemy in our faith journey, preventing us from entering the promised land of our heavenly inheritance. His work in us drives out all fear and unrest, bringing our mind, bodies, and spirits into alignment with who we are in Him.
