November 29, 2006

• Love...

  I've been thinking some today about this verse -

  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. 1 John 4:18

  I suspect that this is closely related to how Jesus summarized the whole of the Law:

  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost commandment.
  The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
  On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." 
  Matt. 22:34-40

  This "lack-of-fear" (e.g. for God) is not because God is some jolly old grandfather who loves everyone equally / in the same way...  on the contrary, just eight verses before 1 John 4:18, we read that "...God... sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins".   The Biblical God is a God of "wrath"  and "vengeance" as well as love, who cannot ignore sin, but who (at infinite cost to Himself) chose to pay the sin-debt Himself, on my behalf.

  But with that understood, once we have humbled ourselves and begged God to save us, and once we have subsequently been immediately adopted into the "family of God" and been given an inheritance and all the privileges of sonship, why do we fear?   Why do I fear?

  Fear for the Christian is a symptom that there is something wrong...  the normal Christian life is a life of trust and belief, belief and trust, synonymously...  not a life of fear.

  Because really, if God is the one looking out for me, if everything that happens in my life is first "approved for entry into my life" by a perfectly loving God, then there is no reason to fear.

  ...just something I need to keep preaching to myself all day long, every day, because I forget it so easily...

   

  "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

  For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

  What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

  He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

  Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies;

  Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.

  Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

  Just as it is written,
  "For your sake we are being put to death all day long;
  We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered."

  But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.

  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."  -  Romans 8:28-39

   

  • 6:33 pm
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