1Jn 4:18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment; and the one fearing has not been perfected in love.
Fear. It's everywhere. Fear of the future. Fear of the past. Fear of a person. Or a creature. Or an idea. Fear of the unknown. It's controlling.
Why do we fear? What is it about human nature that makes us fear?
What if we were designed to fear? I believe we were designed to have that healthy awe, that shake-in-our-socks respect, that fear of God.
But like every other sin we twist God's design. We manipulate His perfect plan until our version is hardly recognizable as a mutilation of the original. We forget the truth about the nature of God and His promises and convince ourselves that we have a reason to be afraid of something other than our God.
We don't trust Him. We don't believe that He is who He says He is. We don't love Him the way we were intended to love. And we tremble. We feel the knot form in our guts as we forget who we are in Christ. We hide in our dark corner and begin to think that nothing can make our lives better.
Then God reaches out and picks us up from where we are hiding. He wraps His arms around us and whispers His truths in our ear. It's grace. God's unmerited favor for us. Nothing we have ever done or could ever do would make us deserve it. And we begin to understand. And we begin to see God with the awe we should always have. And our love grows.
The more we love, the less we fear. The more we love, the more we understand the One we love. And our love is perfected. And perfect love casts out fear. That irrational, cowardly, pathetic, doubting fear cannot live alongside real love. That's grace.
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