Love vs. Fear
Love Without Limits, prt. 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
January 2, 2010
1 John 4:18 (TM)
18 There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
This is not a sermon about fear, it is a sermon (in fact an entire series) about love. I have talked to you enough about fear in this past year and I frankly don't think fear needs any more air time. :-) But today I want to talk to you about love and contrast a life of love with a life of fear. I have said before and I'll say again, I believe fear is one of mankind's primary emotions. We've gone over the devastating effects of fear in previous messages, and one thing we know fear does is it keeps us from being vulnerable. There are so many movies and TV shows that are based around a man (or less often a woman) with a fear of commitment. A fear of commitment is a fear of giving one's self to another. If one never gives one's self to another, one can never be really loved. For me to be really loved, I must commit to someone and allow her to know me. When I do this, she will soon see parts of me I'd rather she not see. She will see my insecurities, my fears, my doubts, my darkness, my idiosyncrasies -- basically, she will soon come to see that I am broken. It will be not long before she comes to know how truly I have fallen and cannot get up.
Fear is a barrier to love. If I am afraid to be vulnerable to another person and allow her to love me, than I will also be afraid to love her deeply. Loving someone deeply requires intimacy, doesn't it? And intimacy, again, requires vulnerability. If I try to love Christy deeply, then she may try to love me deeply in return. So if I fear being deeply loved, I will avoid deeply loving others. So fear is a barrier to love, keeping us both from fully loving and from fully being loved.
Now the strange thing is, nearly every person will tell you that all he/she really wants is to be loved. But we don't so much want it as wish for it. When you wish for something, you hope someday, some way, by some chance, it appears like magic. Your wishes require nothing of you. But when you truly want something, you set a goal, and begin working toward getting what it is that you want. Your wants cost you something. Sometimes a lot. So it is true that nearly every person wishes to be loved, but I don't think many people actually want it. And the proof that most people do not actually want it is that even though love is available to them (from God, from friends and family who care for them, etc.), they refuse to live in it, and/or are unable to see it all around. Many people, in fact, mistake the love of others for manipulation. Rather than receiving and living in love, they are actually suspicious of it. Suspicion of the love of others can only occur in the heart that itself does not truly love.
So all of this is why the Apostle John wrote those words,
1 John 4:18 (TM)
18 There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
There is no room in love for fear. We are not reading here simply that love diminishes the hold of fear, or that love makes fear appear less desirable, or that love is better than fear. What we are reading here is that there is no room in love for fear. What we are reading here is that the more you love, the less you will fear, and the more you fear, the less you will love. This connection between love and fear should not be taken lightly. It is easy to gloss it over, but what if we take it literally?
Next time you are arguing with someone you claim to love, and you find yourself feeling defensive and hostile, that is fear. Make no mistake - it is already down there. Then you hear words, or catch a look, which creates fear in you - fear that you are not loved, fear that you are not respected, fear that you are not taken seriously, fear that you are being shut down, fear that you are being misunderstood or taken for granted. This fear is already there. Now if we are feeling fearful, chances are very good that the same fear we are already experiencing will keep us from simply coming out and saying, "I am feeling fearful right now that you do not respect me, or fearful that you do not really love me." We will almost certainly not say this because that would increase our vulnerability, so we cover our fear with anger. We lash out at the other person. We criticize or blame them, anything to get the attention off of us and onto someone or something else. Scripture says fear is crippling, and so it is. At that moment, in the presence of someone who loves us and is committed to us, we become fearful that we are not really loved. We actually feel unloved even though we know the other person loves us. And so, in the presence of one who loves us, we are crippled by our fear (and that other person often is as well), and we respond with hurt, with anger, with hostility, irritability, defensiveness, blaming, or whatever tool we can find on hand at the moment. Sometimes we can't think of any other tool to use, and that's when we take what we often call a cheap shot. It's some random, hurtful thing we say that is designed for only one purpose - to hurt the other person and get the uncomfortable spotlight off our ourselves and our own behavior. When we take cheap shots, we reveal how desperate we are, as we flail around for anything at all we can use to fire back.
Do you see this connection between fear and love? There is no fear in love. When I am in the place of love, I am not having anxiety about whether I am loved, whether I am secure, whether I will be exploited, or whether something I say is going to become ammo for someone else's next nasty comment. Those defensive, suspicious things are just not compatible with a spirit of love, as we see in the love chapter, 1 Cor. 13.
Have you ever thought of this before? Have you ever considered that the root cause of so many of the arguments we have with our loved ones is actually lack of love? I'm talking both about not fully loving the person we are arguing with, and about not feeling like that person loves us. It's an inability both to give love and to receive it. But more than an inability, I consider it a disability that afflicts the whole human race -- a wound dealt to my psyche and to yours in the fall -- when we somehow lost our identities as those who are,
Colossians 3:12 (TNIV)
12 ....God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved...
My love disability affects my wife, and her love disability affects me. My love disability affects my kids, and it affects all of you, because I do not always love you as I should. Your love disability affects me.
James 3:2 (TNIV)
2 We all stumble in many ways...
So here we are, this loved-disabled people. We crave love. We wish to both love and be loved, yet we dreadfully fear it and I'm not sure oftentimes that we really want it. The person who truly desires to be loved will have no choice but to learn to truly love others, for the words of the scriptures are true.
Luke 6:38 (TM)
38 Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.”
We will not be loved if we do not learn to love. I don't know that I have ever seen a couple in my office that understands this. Every couple in crisis comes in seeking for his/her partner to love more deeply, thinking if the other person would just love more deeply, then everything would be great. But the truth is that we will be unable to receive love to the same degree that we are unable to give it. If you truly want to be loved more deeply, you will have to learn to love more deeply. When you learn to love more deeply, you will be loved more deeply. If at this moment you are holding out, waiting for your spouse or someone else to step up and love you better, then you are already incapable of receiving their efforts. Increase your capacity to love and you will increase your capacity to receive love and live in it.
So I have addressed love vs. fear on an individual level. Now remember that the church is simply a collection of people -- all of whom are afflicted, to some degree, by the love disability we have spoken about. The Christian church, which claims as its founder the greatest proponent of the law of love in history, has in fact struggled severely to love all through its history and two weeks ago I pointed out many of these struggles. The church has been built by people with duplicitous hearts. How could it be otherwise, for that is the only kind of heart human beings possess. Some people have been largely well-intentioned. Others have been largely ill-intentioned. But the fact is as it stands. All you have to do is read just a tiny bit of church history to come to see this with penetrating clarity. If you believe the church of today has been built mostly upon foundations of love and goodwill, you are sadly mistaken. Even many of those who were well-intentioned are among those we now judge to have been terribly mistaken. (BTW, since this is true, what sacred cows do we cling to in our beliefs right now that are going to look completely ridiculous to people just one or two generations from now, and will look as obviously wrong to them as the church of the early-mid 20th century's lack of support for civil rights looks to us now? That's why this whole thing darn well BETTER be about love and not just about who's beliefs are "rightest.")
Those who lead the church have never been immune from fear. Most of them have never subjected themselves to the rigors that are required to move beyond fear as a motivator. Therefore, the church in general today has an approach to ministry that springs not from a basic attitude of love, but from a basic attitude of anxiety. Just like we tend to want to control other individuals in our personal lives, institutions also tend to want to control people, and fear is behind it all, whether personally or corporately. Remember this because this is going to be hugely important as we proceed in this series: Jesus himself -- a person not under the control of fear because he lived in perfect love -- never started a church. We are in church today not because of Christ's efforts, but the efforts of those who came after him, every single one of whom was in fact subject to love disability. I'm not saying that because Jesus never started a church none of us should be in church. I'm just saying that the institutional church was not a creation of Christ's, but of human beings who have never known how to love properly and therefore live in many ways subject to fear and anxiety. (Heck, even if Jesus ever DID found a church, it would have started going off the rails the first time anyone other than him was in charge. )
What I'm telling you now is fact, not opinion. It is history, and these facts have strong implications. First, we should live with much greater humility than we do. It's usually pretty disturbing to me when Christians get absorbed in politics, not because Christians shouldn't get into politics, but because Christians rarely get into politics without the same anger, fear, and paranoia displayed by everybody else. Most of which comes from fear - fear of the other side, fear of what happens if the other guy makes the rules, fear of losing face, or losing money, or losing power, or even just losing the argument. How can we have political opinions, and carry them forward, and be active, without making the mistake of thinking God is a registered Democrat or Republican, or that this side or that side is more "Christian" than the other? The beliefs we have, even the ways we read and understand and interpret scripture, were all TAUGHT to us, delivered to us by people with certain points of view, so it is vain for us to assume that the reason others disagree with us is because we get it and they don't.
Second, the fact that much of the church has been run from fear and not from love should cause us to look closely at where and how that might be true. Instead of hunkering down to defend the church, right or wrong, we should simply be open to the truth. We have nothing to fear from it. There is no fear in love. We don't need to make the church look good, or cast it in any certain light.
Third, we must consider how a local church committed to love instead of fear might look different. Let me propose to you a few ways.
a. Anxiety seeks control, but love seeks contemplation. Typically the church, as I said, has been about controlling people, defining which behaviors are right and wrong, making sure to strongly disapprove of wrong behaviors so no one even gets the impression that we condone them (a classic sign of legalism), and even trying to strongly control the personal lives of its members. I would lump into this the church's excessive focus on making people into Christians. Love seeks contemplation. You know, when you first fall in love with someone, you just want to be with them, just contemplate them, take them in, breathe in the air around them. We defined this last week as being present to them. That's what love does. Fear seeks to control, love seeks to contemplate, so it's not about making people into Christians, it's about learning to be present to one another and to God because the Holy Spirit is already here doing the work none of us can do.
b. Anxiety seeks professionals, but love seeks processes. A fear-ridden church wants to know who is the expert that can come in and fix our church, because problems cause uncertainty and uncertainty causes fear. A love-based church wants to know what we can do together -- all of us -- to uncover and live out the Jesus way of life.
c. Anxiety wants products, but love desires presence. A fear-based church puts a lot of energy into the question of what book, video, or curriculum will bring God to people. What can get the job done and eliminate ambiguity? A love-based church simply seeks people who will bear God's life in their own lives and invest in others.
d. Anxiety lifts up gurus, but love relies on guides. Gurus are pied-pipers. Charismatic, dazzling people who can draw people to them. If we can find gurus, we can eliminate the uncertainty and fear that people will not come, will not be dazzled and impressed, and our church will not grow. A love-based church simply says, "Who has the gifts, passion, and desire to live alongside our people and guide them with his/her own life?"
e. Anxiety rests in results, but love rests in relationships. Again, the results thing is where we fall prey to, "How many people accepted Christ today? How many recommitted their lives? How many signed cards and made this or that commitment? How many signed up for the mission trip, or showed up to our event? After all, we gotta get results right, or what are we doing this for?" The answer is relationships. A love-based church loves people and invests in relationships with them and between them. It does not fear lack of tangible "results," or that others might not view them as successful. They know that the most important things God is doing in the world are things that cannot be seen or measured, including his work of salvation! (Parable of the wheat and tares)
f. Finally, anxiety seeks conformity, but love brings out creativity. An anxious church will constantly ask, "Is everybody doing exactly what they're supposed to do? Are they meeting our expectations? Are they following the rules?" They want everyone to dress and think and talk the same. That's fear. "What if someone gets out of line? What will we do?" But that's no basis for a relationship! Do relationships between human beings work when each is constantly concerned with telling the other what to do? Of course not! Love-based churches, like any good love-based relationships, look for independence and creativity. They ask, "In what fresh way is God challenging us as a church through what's happening in our people?" This is scary, because when you think this way you won't be able to call all the shots and control everything. Life will be unpredictable. Then again when life is always predictable it isn't life, but just laws.
Control vs. contemplation. Professionals vs. processes. Products vs. presence. Gurus vs. guides. Results vs. relationships. Conformity vs. creativity. Anxiety-based churches embrace the first in all these couplets because it gives them control and rules out unpredictability. This helps to manage fear. Love-based churches embrace the second in each couplet because there is no fear in love -- they are willing to take the risks that love requires.
So today I've talked about our desire for love, our hesitancy to become people who can love deeply, the fear that underlies this hesitancy, and how this fear manifests itself in the church as an organization. Next week I want to talk to you directly about this:
Ephesians 3:14–19 (TNIV)
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
I cannot wait to talk to you about the limitless love of God.
