Sermon Date 08-18-2013 Fear (Chuck Gohn)
If you have your Bibles please open them to 1 John 4:7. As you know, we have been going through the sermon series called “Do not conform. Be transformed.” As a refresher, in this series were are exploring the idea that there are various negative patterns in the world and that there are consequences to following those patterns. What we are looking at a biblical response to those negative patterns. Again, Romans 12:2 summarizes that response: “Do not conform to the patterns of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Today what we are going to be looking at is a pattern that I think most of you would recognize. It is called the pattern of fear. Many people are obsessed with a lot of different fears. Fears that are real, unreal, imagined, or whatever. A lot of them are just the basic everyday type of fears like fear of spiders. Is anybody afraid of spiders here? What about mice? What about snakes? Even some of the men are afraid of snakes, including me. Snakes are one of the greatest fears according to a recent survey. The second greatest fear among Americans is public speaking. How many of you are afraid of public speaking? A few of you. I have my hand raised because you terrified about public speaking. I wouldn’t say I am terrified. I have moved from general terror to just extreme anxiety, especially on a Saturday night when I don’t have my sermon finished. I am getting through that. But anyway, the way I began to get over my fear of speaking was being part of a Toastmaster’s group. It is a group that you meet in a restaurant once a week and you sit around and you basically give each other speeches. I started in the Toastmaster’s group and then I began to just put myself in environments where I was forced to speak in front of a group of people. Over time, I became more comfortable with that. I still have a little bit of fear of public speaking. There are other fears that are less external. There is a fear of being judged by others. There is fear of failure. Fear of getting an F in class or experiencing failure in some sort of a work environment. On the other extreme, there is also fear of success. Sometimes getting that A in school or getting that promotion at work because all of a sudden you find yourself in a place where there are new levels of expectations that are placed on you. We have those types of fears that we are dealing with. Because of September 11, 2001, we have a whole other range of fears, of things to be afraid of. Obviously, we are afraid of terrorists, but what happened too is that now we are not only afraid of terrorists, but apparently there are a lot of people that have a fear of flying. In fact, a large percentage of people still have a fear of flying and a lot of that has to do with the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The consequences of fears are many. Starting with the health consequences. If any of you have experienced fear, you know that it can involve something as simple as a little bit of stress or it can begin to develop into some sort of a panic attack where you find yourself short of breath, maybe your heart racing, the possibility that you experience insomnia, you can’t sleep, or possibly lead to even other form of behavioral health issues such as depression or some sort of a phobia. There are very clear health consequences associated with obsessive fear.
But as bad as the health consequences are, one of the biggest consequences of being obsessed with a fear or multiple fears is the fact that you never really engage life to its fullest. A simple example: if you do have a fear of flying, which I suspect some of you do, you are really limited in what you can do as far as where you can travel. Really you are pretty much limited to where you can travel across America. Yes, you can drive but some may never drive to California because it is too far. But it is unlikely that you will ever make it to Hawaii unless you take a boat. So you miss out on the beauty of Hawaii. Hawaii is a beautiful place. There is no place like it on earth. You never get the opportunity to fly to Europe or see the sights of Europe because you are afraid to get on an airplane and fly over the ocean. That is a very common fear, but it restricts you, as It keeps you from fully engaging life.
Then you have people that are fearful of getting into a new relationship, especially if it is someone who was possibly burned in a prior relationship or possibly someone who experienced the death of a loved one. They don’t want to get into a new relationship because they are fearful of experiencing that hurt over again. They go the rest of their lives never experiencing the joy of love again. Then you have people that are just fearful of social environments. They are just fearful of engaging any sort of people. They avoid places where they would have to be sociable and have to meet new people. What they are doing is restricting the wonderful things of life of meeting a wide variety of people and of learning about other people because they have limited their acquaintances to a small group of people. They really have restricted their life. Then you have people that are fearful about switching jobs because if they think about switching and they go out looking, they might not be able to find a job or if they find one they like they might be rejected. And because they have this fear of rejection they spend year after year in the same job because they are afraid to move. So again, as we know, there are patterns of fear and there are consequences to fear.
If we are not careful what happens is those fears begin to take control over us. They begin to basically direct our lives. I bet if you were to examine some of your fears, you would see that the fears basically direct and control and cause many of your decisions that you make throughout the day. There was a writer and a theologian named Henry Nouwen who writes about this when says “Often fear has penetrated our inner selves so deeply that it controls us, whether we are aware of it or not, most of our choices and our decisions. Untamed fear can become a cruel tyrant who takes possession of us and force us to live as hostages in this house of fear.” That is heavy stuff. When you think about it that is true. What happens is when we begin to fear and we have all these fears, all these walls begin to come around us to protect us from encountering those fears.
I would like to think that this is just a problem of non-Christians, but really we know it is a problem for Christians too. We know that most Christians experience the same sort of fears as non-Christians. Unfortunately, that is the truth. But for Christians those consequences are compounded by the fact that not only do their fears cause them to not fully engage life, it causes them to not fully engage their calling. In other words, the specific purpose that God has designed the person for. If you have been here around here long enough, you know the one thing I continue to preach about is the idea that I believe every Christian has a calling. Every Christian has what I call a spiritual profile. They have unique gifts. They have unique talents and they have a unique personality and a passion to do something for God. God has wired him or her in a very specific way for a very specific calling in the world that will help him expand his kingdom realm out into the world. When we experience these obsessive fears what happens is we restrict that calling. Thinking again about those examples; if you have a fear of flying, as a non-Christian that means you can’t go to Europe or Maui or whatever. But as a Christian, what if you know that your calling is to reach the world, to be an evangelist but you can’t get over the fear of flying? Sure, you could stay in the United States and justify it by verbalizing that evangelists are needed here too. But what if you really feel that God is calling you to a specific country, but you are so terrified of flying that you can’t make that trip and you can’t answer that call. Let’s say God has given you the gift of mercy and he wants you to go minister to the inner-city kids. But you somehow can’t get past the fear that if you go to the inner city you are going to be robbed or you can’t get past a personal prejudice that you may have because of a person of a certain ethnicity or color of their skin. A prejudice is nothing more than a fear. So again what you have is you have restricted your calling, the unique purpose that God has for you in this world. Even outside of direct ministry. There are many people that are called to be professionals. People that are called to be businesswoman, businessman, teachers, to be out in the world in various environments. Let’s say you are gifted in your particular skill or trade, but for some reason you are fearful about advancing up the corporate ladder because you are fearful that if you get up to a certain level that means that you are going to have to be able to make presentations and be in front of people and be more polished. So you have this fear of this so what happens is you restricted your calling and you are never able to become the person of influence in that particular environment for Christ. What we see is those obsessions with fear is bad for the non-believer, but it is doubly bad for the believer. The bottom line is that if you are living in a house of fear and you are a Christian, you are never going to fully experience your calling. Because your calling always involves a certain degree of risk.
When we think about the biblical response to fear, the most obvious answer is that you have to have faith. In fact, throughout the Bible, throughout the New Testament, throughout the gospels, we see basically the answer to fear is always to have more faith. Last week I told the story from the gospel of Mark where Jesus was on a boat in the Sea of Galilee with the disciples and this huge storm came up and was crashing over the boat. Pretty soon the disciples were fearful that the boat was going to sink so they went looking for Jesus. Where did they find Jesus? They found him in the stern of the ship on a cushion sleeping soundly. The disciples in their panic said Jesus don’t you care we are about to drown. Jesus said to the disciples “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” Throughout the New Testament and throughout the gospels in particular, we see this connection between fear and lack of faith. It would seem like the obvious answer to the problem of fear for Christians anyway would simply be to have more faith. To pile on the faith so to speak. While that is true, it is not totally true. You see what happens is some people have faith in faith. In other words, they just ask God for more faith. They don’t even know what they are asking for. They are just asking for more faith or more courage or whatever. What we have to realize is it is not faith in faith that we need. It is faith in the person behind the faith. It is faith in the triune God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is what we are talking about when we talk about faith. It is faith in the God. Specifically, it is faith in the loving God behind that faith.
That is what we are going to look at in today’s passage. In today’s passage, it speaks about not simply faith. It speaks about the love of God and how the love of God is really the key to dealing with any sort of fears. What we are going to do is read through this passage one time. There is a lot of scripture here starting from verse 7 all the way down to 21 and then we will go back and I will just highlight a few of them before we get out of here. Reading from 1 John 4:7. (Scripture read here.)
As a side note, the word love is mentioned about 25 times in that section. We see that this passage is about love. To be honest, it is a very thick passage. In fact, it is so think I thought I can’t even go there. There is just too much stuff in here. But once I realized I was going to discuss the pattern of fear, I had no choice because I believe again that this passage holds the key to dealing with the problem of fear. John’s logic in here is pretty deep, but it is not that difficult to follow. What I want to do is, if you will allow me, I am going to jump around in a few different passages and basically present what I think is John’s argument for why we should not be afraid. We are going to present a couple key points.
The first point that we see over and over in this passage is that God is love. We see it at the beginning and we see it also in 1 John 4:16. If you have done any sort of reading of the Bible and look back in the concordance and you look up love, you are going to see I think a couple hundred passages that deal with love, specifically God’s love. When we read about God’s love it doesn’t just mean that God was loving sometimes. He was a nice guy sometimes. He loved when he felt like it. He was always loving. His love is unfailing. We sang that song and there is passage after passage that speaks of God’s unfailing love, his never-ending love. This one I like is Psalm 90:14. He says “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days.” God is not just loving, he defines love. In other words, that is his key attribute. Because he is love, we know that he is geared toward love and that he cannot not love. It pushes out. Love comes from him. It comes out in many different forms. When we think about it, it really comes out in forms of his goodness, his mercy, and his grace. His favor upon us. One of my favorite passages is John 1:16 that says “From the fullness of his grace, we receive one blessing after another.” In other words, it is like the valve of God’s grace is open and it is just pouring out. It is just pouring out all over us but we just can’t open our eyes and we can’t see it. But he says satisfy me in the morning with your unfailing love. Wake up, take a breath, and say thank you. That was love. That is an act of God’s love that he gave you a breath that morning.
Again, we see that God is love and God’s love is manifested in so many ways, but we know as Christians, we should know by now, that the greatest manifestation of that love is by sending of his son Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for our sin. Many of you are familiar with John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have eternal life.” John wrote the gospel of John and he wrote the letter of John, and he says basically the same thing here. He says “This is how God showed his love amongst us. He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
As a side note, we are not used to using the word atoning, but it is not that difficult of a word if you break it down. It just comes from the idea of atonement which basically can be broken down into “at-one-ment”. When Christ came and took our sins upon the Christ, we became at one with God. We were separated from God because of our sin. It was like we were on one side of this great divide and God is on the other. When Christ came down basically he was our atonement. He made us one back with God. That is a gift that God offers to everybody if you choose to receive it. The good news is that not only when we received the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross that we receive forgiveness of sins but it also means that we really do experience a new unity with God that didn’t exist before. We really do become one with God in a very mysterious way. He goes on to say it. “If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the son of God, God lives in him and he in God.” That is deep stuff. “God lives in him and he in God.” The key word is IF. “If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the son of God, God lives in him and he in God.” In other words, we move into his house and he moves into ours. It is very mysterious. We know that when Jesus walked this earth, he walked it as a man. In John 1:14 it says “The Word” being Jesus “became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us.” He walked as a man. When he left this world, what happened is he sent his spirit to live with us. So that unity continues. Really even Christ refers to this himself when he says in John 14 “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Isn’t that amazing? The spirit of the living God is dwelling in you and you are dwelling in God.
Really what we are talking about here is when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord, we begin to move from a house of fear into a house of love. We move from the house of fear that we have created, the walls we have created, into the house of love that is run and organized by God because God is love. You would think, as you know if you live in a loving environment, particularly a loving family, you cannot help but begin to have that love begin to rub off on you. Ideally you take that love and you begin to give it out to others, which is really my fourth point here. The natural outcome of the love of God is to begin to love others. He writes “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God but if we love one another God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” This is again where it gets a little bit difficult to understand. He is saying you live in love and that love rubs off on you and you begin to carry that love into the world and somehow when you do that, God’s love becomes complete in you. Really, the underlying Greek word for complete is teleios. It basically is also translated in other parts of this passage as perfect. God’s love has been perfected in you.
As a side note, this is one I struggle with. I am not saying that God’s love is not perfect because God’s love is perfect. We can’t even compare God’s love to earthly love because earthly love is all tainted by sin, tainted by personal agenda, tainted by personal motives. Love in the earthly realm is often used as an instrument of abuse or an instrument of control. God’s love is perfect. It is free of all those things. What God is trying to do now that we have moved into his house of love, he doesn’t want to just give us any love. He wants to replace our tainted love with his perfect love. He wants us to learn over time what it means to love others in a perfect way. That takes a long time but that is really what happened. We are moving from a house of fear into a house of love and we are taking that love into the world.
Just to kind of recap the four points that I have given already. God is love. God demonstrates that love by the sending of his son Jesus Christ. When we accept Jesus Christ as Savior, we receive him into us and we go into him and his love. Finally, it is demonstrated that we are in God’s love by beginning to share that love with others. Some of you may be asking what does this have to do with fear. I am glad you asked that question. Hopefully some of you are thinking that because I am going to answer it. It has a lot to do with fear. In order to show you that, I need to pull in another short verse. 1 John 4:18 says “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” This is a little bit complicated but he is talking about the key to dealing with our fears is this perfect love; the perfect love that is demonstrated in the four things I just told you. Another side note, we have to remember who John’s audience was. He was dealing with people that were living in a certain place at a certain time dealing with their own set of fears that were in some ways similar to ours but most of the ways not. He wasn’t dealing with people that were worried about whether they were going to have enough money in their IRA to retire. He wasn’t dealing with people who were afraid what college their kids were going to get into. He wasn’t dealing with people who were afraid they were going to get some position in life or be able to pay that month’s rent. But he was dealing with people who every single day were facing the reality that they could be tortured or killed for their faith. I was reading through the book of Hebrews and you see line after line how these people were dealing with so much. You go back and you read the history books and you see the early Christians had real fear. They had to be in fear of not only losing their jobs and their homes but being thrown into a coliseum and being burned at the stake or being attacked by wild animals or in some cases even sawed in two. They were dealing with real fears. I read that this week and I was thinking our fears can’t even compare to that sort of thing. John’s solution is not saying here is what you need to do to get rid of those fears. You need to diversify your portfolio. Make sure you have a well-balanced portfolio so that if the market does tank, you are not going to lose all your retirement. He didn’t say that did he? He didn’t say you are fearful that you are going to be broken into your house so you need to go get a new alarm system or you need to live in a gated community so you are protected. No he didn’t say that did he? He didn’t say I know you are having a problem with these phobias so you really need to go find a new therapist, meditate more, or get a new drug that is going to help you. He didn’t say that. What he said is “perfect love drives out fear.” That is what he said.
You say I still don’t follow you. I will be honest, I had trouble tracking John on this, but I need to show you the rest of this passage because to me it holds the key of how they were able to deal with their fears and even today how we are able to deal with our fears. The last section of this particular passage says “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment.” Now I will be honest, I was fearful to preach on this passage. I knew I wanted to preach on the pattern of fear. I knew the answer was perfect love, but I wanted to leave out this last section “because fear has to do with punishment.” But because there wasn’t a period after fear, I had to deal with it because I felt like if I didn’t deal with it I not only would be unfaithful to the passage, I would probably be unfaithful to you. This to me holds the key again to how we might be able to deal with some of our fears. When we think about it, when he is talking about punishment here, he is connecting with people on a theological level. The punishment he is talking about is eternal damnation, separation from God, hell. That is what he is talking about here. Today, in church, we don’t like to talk about hell because hell is not a pleasant topic. It’s not. Talking about money and talking about hell are the least favorite things that I like to talk about. We don’t even like to talk about it in Christian circles. It is just not popular. It is kind of like hell has gone out of vogue. We don’t really want to see that anymore. From the pulpits we don’t even want to talk about it. But we need to talk about it. John felt we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it because it makes sense when you follow his logic.
Think about what are the things that people are really the most fearful about: death and damnation specifically hell. A lot of people don’t want to admit that, but I bet if you were to really look back at your fears and really sit down in the quietness of your soul some night and think about death. You don’t like that part. But think about the fact what happens after death. I guarantee you will probably scare yourself if you think about it long enough because upon death there are basically two options: there is either nothing that follows death other than decay or there is your creator standing there saying “Welcome, we need to have a talk.” That is a scary, scary thing if we are honest with ourselves, but we try to stifle that away. I suspect that even the most committed atheist or agnostic struggles with this. Again, they don’t believe in God. I guarantee in the quietness of their soul when they are lying in bed or lying in a hospital bed and something crosses their mind that suggests that they may possibly die; they may begin to ask themselves some questions such as: What if I am wrong? What if there really is a God? What if when I cross over into the other side and instead of nothing there, my Maker is there and I have to face his judgment? I not only have to face him, but I have to give him some sort of explanation for the unholy life I lived, and worse than that I have to give him some sort of explanation for not believing in him and more importantly I have to give him an explanation why I didn’t want to believe that he sent his own son to die on a cross and suffer on the cross for my sins, and in spite of all the proof, and I denied it. That is a scary thing for an atheist.
It is not pastor Chuck up here trying to frighten you because Jesus does a pretty good job himself. You can look back in Luke 12:4-5. This is pretty direct. Jesus is speaking here. He says “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has the power to throw you in hell.” That is Jesus talking. We don’t like that Jesus. We like the nice Jesus when he is asking the little children to come around, and the Jesus we see displayed on the felt board in the children’s classroom. We don’t talk about hell downstairs too much do we. But hell is a very real thing and even though we don’t believe it. Even though we don’t buy into the fact of it, Jesus bought it. Some of you might be saying that is not fair. I just don’t like that part of God. I don’t like that part of Jesus. It’s just not fair. I stand here and say I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t make the rules around here. I am just the messenger. I could probably spend more time and I could probably unpack why I think it is fair. Because I have always said hell is just giving you what you want. If you want a life without God, then he says I love you so much I am going to give it to you. That is all hell is. A life fully separated from God. But I am not here today to talk about hell. I am here to talk about perfect love and that is what John is here to talk about.
At the risk of being redundant, again those four things I have already mentioned: God is love. And God so loved you that he sent his only begotten son to die on the cross for you, and because you have accepted him as Lord into your life you are now live in the love of God, so you feel the love of God. And you prove that love by sharing it with others. What that means is that when you get in front of God one day, you do not stand as an enemy, you do not stand as a stranger, you do not stand as an alien, you stand as a child of God. And you say “Hi daddy. I’m home.” And like a good daddy, he might have some strong words for something you did, but he is not going to kick you out of the house forever. He is not going to exclude you from his life. Really that is what we are talking about here. As I begin to wind it down, some of you may be thinking that is good. I am a Christian and I really don’t have a fear of hell. I really believe that because of Jesus Christ, I am saved so I don’t have to fear that hell. What I want to know is how can I use that knowledge and begin to make it work for me right now. In other words, how can I use that knowledge that I live in the presence of the heavenly Father to help me get through my fears now. At this point, I am taking a little bit of liberty because I am attempting to extract why John said this. He is speaking to a different group of people that are dealing with different sorts of fears, but I think the logic can apply to our lives today. When you think about it, we know that we are in love. God is love. Love is in us. We live in his house of love. When you live in a house of love that is consumed by love, you can’t help but begin to feel safe and secure in that family under that father. When you go through life and you are hitting all this stuff, these little annoyances that are coming through life, these little bitty fears that are come into life you begin to say this is no big deal. I can deal with this because I have a father that loves me. I have a father that trusts me. I don’t have to fear anything. Romans 8:39 that says nothing can separate us from the love of God. Reading from Romans 8:35-39 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long. We are considered a sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” What more do you want? What more insurance do you want?
Again, we are talking about the love of the Father. I know it is hard for some of you to grasp because some of you didn’t grow up in loving homes. Some of you grew up with fathers who were probably jerks. Some of you grew up in homes where fathers were alcoholics. You didn’t know when you got home whether he was going to smack you across the face or give you a hug. Some of you never even know who your father is. Some of you, like me, just never heard the words ‘I love you’ from their father. I don’t remember one time my father saying ‘I love you’. I think he loved me, but he was a grouchy old German who just couldn’t say ‘I love you’. I think about how many of my fears, how many of my insecurities are due to the fact that I never felt loved by my father. I have no idea. But the bottom line is when you live in a home where you know you have the love of the father and you are safe and secure, I think what happens is you become more confident in life. You become more bold and more confident. If the love of an earthly father is so important and can do so many things for making us confident in life, imagine what the love of the perfect Father in heaven can do for you. The untainted love of the Father in heaven. When you have a deep understanding, a deep sense of the communion that you have with God, when you have that in you, you begin to feel confident. You begin to hit these little blips in life and slowly by slowly, these fears just kind of go away. They just go away because you are confident that no matter what happens, even death cannot separate you from that love. I quote Henry Nouwen again. He says “When we begin to understand at a deep spiritual level that we live surrounded by love and in communion with God, no matter what the external circumstances, we can let go of the fear that lurks on the outskirts of our minds. We do not have to live in fear. Love is stronger than fear.” That is it right there.
In closing, if you are living in fear, you haven’t experienced perfect love. What makes up the perfect love is the idea that God is love. Maybe you are dealing with that. You just don’t understand. You haven’t grasped the concept that God is love. Or maybe you are dealing with the fact that you don’t appreciate it. Possible you have not accepted that God so loved us that he sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. You haven’t accepted that aspect of love; the most loving act of all of history and for some reason you can’t buy it even though it is from a loving God who is defined by love. Maybe you don’t have faith in the fact that when you did accept Jesus Christ as savior that God in some mysterious way entered into you and you entered into his love. That is a faith act. I think most people walk around and they don’t think they have the spirit of God living in them because they don’t experience any of the power of God. It is a faith issue. Finally, maybe you are dealing with the fact that you don’t feel very loving. You don’t make an attempt to even be loving to your family let alone the community, let alone the world. If you are experiencing fear in your life, you could probably pin it to one of those things. That is why it goes back to even last week when I talked about the need for being with Jesus before doing for Jesus. When you are with Jesus in the quietness of your heart, when you are willing to slow down from the distractions and sit with Jesus, not for five minutes or ten minutes, but sometimes hours at a time, not just once a year, but sit with him on a regular basis and sit and really listen and read some of these passages and think about some of these things. Ask yourself if you really believe that God is love. If you don’t believe that, go back and read all the passages about his unfailing love. Get yourself in the mood of a convincing state where you can receive and believe that love. If I don’t buy into the whole idea of God sending his son as some sort of atonement, then do some homework and figure out why this makes sense. If you feel like you don’t really feel this communion with God and that you have this intimacy, this one-to-one connection with God, then again ask the spirit of God to make himself known in your life in many ways that you can begin to witness that love of God. Ask Him to fill your mind with the knowledge of that love, and that no matter what happens, nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And if you do that what you might begin to find yourself experiencing a slow movement out of a house of fear and into a house of God’s perfect love. A perfect love “that drives out all fear.” Let us pray.
