Fear Is Where You Are Looking

I fear God, dear Abner, and have no other fear. 
~ Jean Racine

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us. 

~ from The Beloved Disciple, in 1 John 4

There is beloved, a deep problem in our lives. The very thing G_d has implored us not to do hundreds of times in His written Word, and in His promptings in our spirit – is the very thing we are most likely to do.


Fear.


And fear is not just being afraid for our safety, or the necessary impulse to protect ourselves from imminent physical danger. Fear is the anxiety that comes when we look on a situation and feel the sense that all will not be well; that we may lose our comfort or position or reputation. And in doing fear, it seems quite reasonable. Because, everywhere we look, the impulses for fear abound.


Fear is not actually complicated. Fear is where we are looking.


Fear is the focusing of our own resources on a problem. We become uneasy because we know, deep down inside, we really can’t fix anything on our own. Our lives and the history of mankind prove this to be true. And this fear actually becomes (rightfully) abject terror when we look forward into the eternity we have had implanted in our hearts – and we see Him.


And this abject terror is the best news many of us will ever receive.


For in focusing our entire self only on G_d, we do indeed fear one thing. Him. But in focusing on Him, we are also seeing the Solution to any problem we could imagine. When we both suddenly and finally stop seeing G_d through the lens of our own weakness, and simply allow ourselves to see Him for who He really is – something astounding happens.


We see that the One Person we really should fear is the One who has made fear irrelevant. By His own power, in real Love, He has both Designed us for, and enabled us to have a relationship of communion with Himself. And in coming into communion with the One who we – at first – rightly feared, we are now turn around and look back on the other things that used to scare us.


They are gone.


Can we see it? When we are afraid, we are simply being sent a signal. Move closer beloved. Your Beloved Loves you, and the only way to chase everything else away is to begin to finally, really truly profoundly come to rest on the truth that we are Loved with a great and unending Love by an eternal and unchanging and omnipotent G_d.


Said simply: We gotta believe. Because if fear is coming back into the life of a believer, he is looking in the wrong direction.


Beloved, may this fool of a writer preach for a moment? The Love of G_d is utterly and completely real. And i like how a dear brother of mine puts it: 


“I think it’s (the Love of G_d and the attendant purpose of mankind) more like each Person of the Trinity conspiring to out-give the Other. Their interactive Agape drive Their desires. So what can the Father, Son and Spirit cook up as a gift to one-another? Additional partners in their Love-Group, namely us. This drove our design. Just like the Father is like a really involved Neighbor, Who is leaning so far out of His window into the Son’s Kitchen as to be present in His Son and so forth, so we were created with a place into which the Son can similarly lean into and live.”
~ Hermann Weidemann

What if we lived like we knew we were Loved this way? What might change about how we live? Yeah, that is a rhetorical question.

So, do we fear G_d? Yes, that we might come to see who He truly is. Everything thing about Him is fearfully wonderful and awesome beyond anything we can comprehend. And the core of who He is is a fearsome Love which tears us apart in its grip and makes us new in Him. However, in the fearful shredding of our former existence comes a freedom from all the things we used to fear in the past. And now, in Him, we turn our face to Him and find that the fear is gone from that direction of our gaze as well.

The fear of G_d is the last fear you will ever have. And then that too is gone. Then, finally, we begin live as He has commanded us to live: Be not afraid, for I AM with you.

Anxiety has its use, stimulating us to seek with keener longing for that security where peace is complete and unassailable.
~Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

2 Comments

  1. Patti Blount December 12, 2013
  2. Makala Doulos December 12, 2013