Oh, man, if you think about it, getting up in front of a crowd to speak like this can be pretty scary. What if my brain goes blank in the middle of a sentence? That’s happened to me. Even when I was in my 30s, one time I was wrapping up the worship service and I got halfway through the benediction and my mind went blank. And all I could think to say was, “My mind just went blank, but God bless you all anyway.” I was embarrassed but the older folks loved it.
What if somebody doesn’t like what I’m saying in my sermon? The Bible talks about real life issues, deep things that really matter. There are many parts of the Bible that really demand that we change our ways and there will often be people who don’t want to change and they’ll take it out on you.
But what if God doesn’t like what I say? My job is to preach the eternal word of God. There’s a big temptation to sugar coat it. Am I being faithful to God above all else?
So, public speaking can be scary. Who wants to be up next week?
I found a wonderful Bible verse that helped me get on top of my fears years ago. It’s 2 Timothy 1:7. “for God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
When I was nervous about a sermon I needed to preach, I would repeat to myself the 3 things that Paul says that God has given us.
Very quickly, he has given us a spirit of power. Fear makes me feel vulnerable, a potential victim. But when I am doing God’s will, I can trust that his grace will be with me, taking the feeble things I do and empowering them. When I keep that in my mind, my confidence goes way up. The Apostle Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” God is here to give us a spirit of power.
God has given us a spirit of love. Fear makes me worry about what happens to me, imagining many things that might go wrong to me, maybe even striking out at the things I fear. Love makes me be concerned about other people and focus on what blessing I can bring to them. That changes everything. God is here to gives us a spirit of love.
God has given us a spirit of a sound mind. Other translations say self-discipline. Sure, I’m human, I’ll feel afraid sometimes. I should be afraid sometimes. Voices in my head will tell me to give in to those fears. But if I choose the discipline of listening to God’s still, small voice of hope, I can have the mindset to do the right thing, even when I’m afraid.
I hope that verse will be helpful to anyone who is struggling with fears today. But that’s not my main sermon text. Let’s look at 1 John 4:7-19 and talk about the dynamics of love and fear in a broader sense.
Can we recite that verse together a few times?
“for God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Our main text for today is from 1 John, chapter 4. It says more about this battle between fear and love:
“7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. 15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us.”
That passage could give us 6 sermons, but today I want to focus on just one statement, verse 18,
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
This dynamic of the battle between living in fear and living in love permeates our lives and our society.
In our text, John is talking about the fear of God’s judgement for our sins. If you only think about your sins, things will look pretty dark. And we need to think about our sins, very seriously, but at the same time we need to think about how much God loves us and let our love back to God take root in our hearts and then love will cast out that fear.
But the love-fear dynamic shows up in other places. A parent can panic in fear that their child is going to get out of control, and in that panic overreact, with harshness, breaking their spirit with painful words, shutting down communication, driving the child further away. Or the parent can respond in love, listening, trying to understand, and looking for constructive ways to move ahead from a bad situation to a good situation. I remember when I messed up as a kid, my mother would say, “Let this be a learning situation.” I’m glad she kept her cool, at least most of the time, and helped us through our mistakes.
There is a specific fear that I have on my heart this morning. It’s the fear of immigrants, people who come to America from other countries. We have leaders who get attention for themselves by stoking fears of immigrants, slandering them with all sorts of distortions. This is personal for me because, we have spent a lot of time with immigrants now that we are retired.
Once or twice a week we join a group that tutors immigrants who are preparing for the interview to become US citizens. They have to have a basic command of the English language. They have to be able to answer 100 questions about US government and history and citizenship. Do you know what year the constitution was written? 1787. Do you know who wrote the Federalist Papers? Alexander Hamilton wrote most of them. It’s a lot for them to learn, especially because they are doing it in a second language. These people are really determined to become good citizens of the United States. It’s a joy to get to know them.
Yesterday morning I worked with a man from Myanmar, in south Asia. It used to be called Burma. The dominant tribe, the Burmese, are historically Buddhist They control the government. And they have waged war against smaller tribes, the Muslim Rohingya, and the Christian Karin and Chin. My brother was showing me the Facebook page of a Karin woman whom he has tutored in English. We scrolled through happy pictures of family gatherings. Then we came to pictures of dead bodies on dirt roads back home. Can your heart go out to someone whose village has been attacked by military helicopters and burned by government soldiers, who escaped through the jungle and spent years in a refugee camp, barely daring to dream of a better future? Will we be like the Good Samaritan, who saw someone in trouble and stopped to help? Or will we be like the priest and the Levite, who passed by on the other side of the road? There is nothing to be afraid of here. The man I worked with yesterday, like many refugees from Myanmar, is a devout Christian.
Our other project is that we have sort of adopted a refugee family from Rwanda in Africa. The husband’s entire family was wiped out in the Rwandan genocide. He met his wife in a refugee camp in Mozambique, where they lived for 15 years in a mud hut that would collapse if it rained too much.
So our government helped our Rwandan family come to the USA 20 months ago. The wife is learning English rapidly. It’s slower for the husband. But he’s not stupid. Do you want to know how many languages he already speaks? He already speaks Swahili, Kirundi, Portuguese and some French. Their kids arrived, not speaking any English, but now they speak English easily with their friends. The kids are doing well in school. The father goes to work in a factory early in the morning, an early 1st shift. His wife works the 2nd shift, both doing work that we wouldn’t tolerate and receiving wages that none of us would tolerate. They can just barely pay the rent for a small apartment. The father never drove in Africa, so learning to drive was a big step, but he has his driver’s license and they have bought a car and he’s doing well. They are required to pay the government back for the cost of their air fare from Africa and they haven’t started receiving the bills to pay back their airfare, but they keep asking me to help them get their repayment started. The mother wears beautiful African dresses for church each week, with wonderfully colorful, bright patterns. The endurance and character of these people amazes me. There is nothing to be afraid of in these beautiful people.
There is a lot of fearmongering about immigrants these days. Have you heard the statements? They come from toilet countries. That really hurt our African friends, that their country would be spoken of in such a way.
You’ve heard the slanders: They’re sending us their worst, rapists. They are terrorists. They are vicious drug gangsters from MS 13. That sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it?
When you hear that stuff, remember that these are people who want the same things for their families that we want for ours.
When we look at our world maps, everything is divided up by national borders, with different countries in contrasting colors. But when God looks down from heaven, he doesn’t see national borders. What do national borders mean to God? Nothing, absolutely nothing to him. All God sees are his children that he loves, and he doesn’t care what color their skin is or what language they speak. When I was a kid we used to sing that song, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are……… precious in his sight. Can we see them with God’s eyes?
My family history isn’t that much different from today’s immigrants. I have Quaker ancestors who were thrown in jail for their faith in Britain in the early 1600s. You had to be really desperate to cross the Atlantic in those little wooden sailing ships and build a new life in the Pennsylvania wilderness. My ancestors came here in desperation. Have you seen the desperation of many immigrants today?
My great grandfather, Jonathan Grundy Aram came to the US from Yorkshire, England, right after our Civil War. I found a digital copy of the passenger list of his ship online. It showed the names, ages and occupations of each passenger. The record for his family showed the correct names and ages for his wife and baby daughter. For Jonathan Grundy Aram, his last name and age matched our family records. But Jonathan lied about his first name and his occupation. When I found that I wondered what was going on. Years later I found his name in an English newspaper, advertising that there would be a sale of all his assets to pay off his debts. He had gone bankrupt. And the sale was after he left the country. So it sure looks like he was travelling under an assumed name to run from his creditors. So he arrived in America in shady circumstances. Technically, it looks like my ancestor was an illegal immigrant! Please don’t try to deport me.
They lived with his brother-in-law in Neponset, Illinois, for a short time. You know these immigrants just cram into their houses. He found a job in a wagon factory in Cordova, Illinois, for a while. They moved to Moline, where he started a small business, selling coal and firewood. Then he expanded to repairing wagons. He expanded again to grinding grain. Immigrants are often the best entrepreneurs. As a wagon maker he would have used a lathe to make wooden wagon spokes. He invented a multiple lathe for turning out wooden wagon wheel spokes 5 at a time instead of one at a time and made some good money from his invention. His kids all went to college. Have you heard that kind of rags to riches story in America before? Let’s look forward to hearing it again and again.
My mother’s maiden name was Dellinger, a German name. Her ancestor, Jacob Dellinger, came to the US sometime in the mid-1700s. Not long after he arrived he enlisted to fight for his new country in the Revolutionary War. I could almost become a member of The Daughters of the American Revolution. There are really a lot of immigrants serving their new country in the armed forces today, keeping us safe.
I found Jacob Dellinger’s family listed in the records of their Lutheran church in Pennsylvania. All the records are in German. The first generation spoke German. Some of the English speakers didn’t like that. But what about their kids and grandkids? You can bet that it wasn’t long before they were totally assimilated and fully Americans.
During the two world wars, when we fought against the nation of Germany, a lot of things were said to demonize the Germans living in America. But my wife is 100% German ancestry as near as we can tell, and she’s really not bad at all.
When Ireland suffered the horrendous potato famine, we were flooded by desperately poor Irish immigrants for a few years. A lot of Americans were really afraid of them. Did you know that the big Marshall Field store in Chicago once banned Irish from working or shopping there? Are there any Irish here? They don’t look too dangerous to me.
The way you look at the world really makes a big difference. You can look at the world with rose colored glasses, ignoring real problems.
That’s no good. We need to do better along our southern border. When children arrive without their parents, it’s really hard to take proper care of them. It’s important that everyone in the country has proper documentation. There may be a limit to how many immigrants we can absorb each year, although Canada is receiving twice as many immigrants as we are, in proportion to total populations, and they aren’t very worried about it at all. But immigration is a real issue and it needs to be addressed, so rose colored glasses don’t help.
But we really don’t want to look at the world through dark glasses, either. Dark glasses cast a dark shadow over everything, seeing the worst in others, assuming that the worst will happen, filling our minds with resentments against people who are different. That’s no good, either. That is not God’s way to see the world.
Let’s look at the world through God’s eyes of love. Let God’s love cast out our fears. The number of people crossing our southern border has actually gone down to less than half today of what it was a decade ago. We don’t need to panic
What would God’s eyes of love see? Well, Jesus gave us one simple way to see how to treat other people in the Golden Rule.
If you were a mother of children in Honduras, with horrendous poverty and government corruption, with drug gangs threatening your children, what would you want someone to do to you?
I would really appreciate it if a big neighbor country like the US would help out.
Anybody in this room can pray for God to bring peace for the families of Central America and the opportunity for each family to support itself.
The United States could provide scholarships for promising students to get a good education so they won’t join gangs for the money and, instead, become productive members of their communities, even providing good jobs for others.
Up here we have farmers and factory owners who can’t get enough workers. We really need to increase the number of visas for unskilled workers, so they could enter the country legally and work to support their families.
We could provide training for the police to learn how to keep order with respect for their communities. We could make financial aid contingent upon the government improving human rights and services.
All that would be cheaper than building a wall across our southern border. And I think we owe them something. A lot of their political corruption is the aftermath of our support for vicious dictators in Central America during the cold war. A lot of the money that feeds the drug gangs comes from our out-of-control drug habit here in the states. We ought to deal with the problem down there.
If you were a mother with children, crossing the border, how would you want to be treated? How would you want to be treated?
God’s eyes of love would certainly see the pain that has driven them to leave their homes, their families and friends to take a long, dangerous journey. International law and common decency require that we give those who are fleeing to protect their lives a proper hearing.
A lot of the problem along the border is that we don’t have enough judges to process amnesty requests promptly, so there is this huge backlog of people waiting to be processed. If we looked at these families through God’s eyes of love we certainly would not separate young children from their parents. We used to have a program where they would be released with a case worker, similar to a prisoner being out on parole, who has to report in weekly and wear an ankle monitoring device. That program has been dismissed as ‘catch and release,’ but the reality is that vast majority complied with the terms of their release.
If you were an immigrant who was legally admitted into our country, what would you really appreciate? Just a smile in the grocery store would mean a lot. When I was pastor in Harvard, which has many Mexicans, it would be distressing to me that, when I passed them on the sidewalk, they would look at the ground. I mentioned that to a second generation Mexican immigrant and she explained that they don’t think they are worthy to look at me, a white American. I started just greeting them with “ola” and a smile. And they would look at me with a big smile and answer back. That’s such a little thing.
Our Northern Illinois Conference has just received a special offering for refugee ministries.
Best of all, there might be places near here where you could volunteer for direct ministry to immigrants. We do tutoring with immigrants who want to learn how to be good Americans so they can become citizens. That happens through the Christian ministry of World Relief. Our church has teams that adopt a refugee for their first year in the country, to help them get the kids to doctor’s appointments, practice speaking English, learn their way around town, get their kids registered for school. Maybe this church could do that. It would be a great adventure. Our Rwandan family is so appreciative.
Love casts out fear. Love opens the door for good things to happen.
Would you join me in praying together the Prayer of Saint Frances?
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
