Day 3476 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 John 4:18 NIV

Perhaps to be afraid is to be alive as there is here plenty of fear meaning thus maybe to be alive is to be afraid. And yet, as proven in Christ, love is life and too has no fear, so perhaps to be alive and afraid is really no life at all.

And yet we still seem so able to assume ourselves thriving within this land so losing in terms of public insistence and insinuation incessantly suspecting the injecting of another’s perspectives into our own for fear of our home here being otherwise lost to the cold and alone we so fear. For there it is again, fear, the worry of walking a world without another upon whom to lean or to whom we might look when life wanes lean and leaves us in need of a hand to help or an ear to hear.

Indeed, we seem convinced that comfort is proven only in community, and whilst this may be plausible to a certain degree, considering the downfall and decay displayed all around anymore, perhaps a bit more care should be given to our comraderies than we have before.

For the past has been paved for each of us along a lane looking to others to instruct or inspire or intercede or interject or interrupt or intervene with something seen and sown inside another self in which we’ve long assumed our best ideas and most wonderful outcomes to be waiting. That is the way of life as lived in this land so lost, each of us looking to someone else to be whatever we’re missing. Which ironically is indeed a confession of sorts that says that we are aware that we have indeed lost something ourselves.

The insanity then found in this communal concession that whatever we’re missing can only be a matter of something we’re needing from whatever other to whom we’ve gone in search of their fullness overwhelming our hollowness, rather than the blatantly more obvious in that whatever we’re missing is merely whatever we’ve forgotten or gotten rid of thinking it not needed at some point.

Because that is by all means a far more tragic typicality than we’d likely like to assume. It’s unfortunately something that yet again has grown into what is but another fear found and felt down here. It’s this audacious humility that proclaims the brutal honesty of our honestly having always been the ones to undermine ourselves. For all of life has thus far been a choice and that we’ve chosen so many of the moments so monstrously mistakenly only proves undoubtedly that we’re most certainly the only ones to blame for all this rain that just keeps coming down.

Alas, our pride has come to inspire a special sort of fear, somewhat like that we talked about yesterday in the fear of man which proves a contrivance to our presently standing call to advance beyond what all we’ve already lost of life. Only this fear is one we inflict upon ourselves as pride is an altogether personal affair in that it at first originates from within a person long before it’s able to be seen by those who so clearly wish to see another having gone under for the sake of the fear of failing their pride that so many are sort of ashamed about themselves.

Because we all have pride, ego, vanity and greed for all the above in fact. And yet somewhere deep down we know that it isn’t right at all to be or become so enslaved to serving self for sake of something by which to assuage the gauge by which we measure our own growth via goals and gold that glitter as we teeter upon the edge we can’t admit that we’ve at times wanted only to finally careen over so that the fears we’ve felt might be over as well.

Indeed, we don’t any of us wish to confess that we’ve become so complacent in a life that has never been alive thanks to such a rampant existence of so many fears and even more failures to fight beyond them. Because that would make us look bad, and whatever makes us look bad makes us feel bad, and whatever makes us feel bad tends to make us look bad and this cycle we know far too well is one that plays out only before the very same audience that we’ve come to fear for sake of either falling into their favor or rather out of the same.

And yet within this I suppose we see yet another reality won by the warning against the impossibility of our serving two masters. For just as much as one cannot love both God and money, nor can any fear both God and man.

And that means any man, ourselves or otherwise.

No, for fear only blinds eyes to the life alive in love, leaving one long since dead or so it seems as it seems here that we’re told that to fear is to be unperfected in regard to love for perfect love is supposed to cast out fear and thus if fear is either found or felt within our lives then love is somehow still somewhere outside and thus still hammering away upon the door of our hearts asking to come in and make Himself at home via the Spirit that He sent to lead us home in what becomes a hope that no fear held here can hollow.

For such is perhaps the point perfected in Paul’s writing of Galatians 5:1 in that most joyous reminder of what we’re supposed to do based upon why Christ did what He did in what is a love unlike any other can ever possibly discover, for greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend, but in Christ we see that He is indeed higher than human as He laid down His life for an onerous heathen bound and broken in enmity against the Creator of everything.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

Such as an enslavement to fear perhaps?

Indeed, I do believe that fear would fall into that group of things we’re called to not again be burdened by. Sin, shame, staying the same. Fear, failure, failure to fight beyond whatever of which we fear. Complacency, comfort, a considered necessity of the worst kind of community. A life lived without love but rather an abundance of all that isn’t, such as fear. Because again, fear cannot be alive as it binds us to immobility, something we most definitely do not see in He who set us free.

Because Christ had every reason to fear what He faced on our behalf. But He didn’t. No, rather than giving in to the worry He carried that weight and welcomed the fullness of the wrath of both God and man and thus remains forever the epitome of both life and love as in His love He laid down His life that we might have the chance at the hope to not only live ours again but to, in Him, live them forever with Him. And simply put, that sort of love can be nothing but life as that is why He died and rose again.

To invite us to do the same.

But rather than the proverbial phoenix rising out of the ashes we instead remain complacent here in this dust and rust of a life well past ruined thanks to the fear found in sin which finds sin a friend that makes friends far more easily than the truth ever could. And thus we sit inside the ashes afraid of who we might annoy or disappoint should we stand up, brush ourselves off and kick some dust as we leave for the home that far too few here find any reason to even imagine.

And that, as we talked about yesterday, is exactly why we cannot settle for the snare of fearing men who have perhaps refused their welcome into the salvation that is by all means the only hope that any of us have. For we cannot allow a world content to stay so dead in sin and alive in fear to keep us here trying to please those who cannot possibly help us in regard to the eternity that they themselves are anymore unable to care toward.

We cannot allow a world afraid of the truth simply because it’s spoken out in the light of the One who is the Life to inspire us to conspire against Him again and consider instead staying here where we don’t belong as there is here only figments and fragments of the indeed kind of free for which He came for you and me. Because He did indeed lay down His life, unashamed and unafraid, because He knew that that was the only way to both get through to us and then to get us through what is still ahead of us.

Because this life is one in which fear will always be there insisting that we let it in.

We know this because we’ve done this. We’ve all of us allowed in so many worries that are in every way only worldly and thus we know the reality of fear and just how quickly it’s felt within this place. But friends, that’s just it, we’re told that in Christ there is no fear as His perfect love for us casts it out, and thus fear is only felt here. And thus if agree with the many who live as if this is their home, we’ll only be along with them bound to a continuation of the worry and waste we’ve already won that’s left us so worn.

For as much as there is no fear in love nor love in fear, and since His love was given to set us free, well then nor is there any freedom in fear, and thus we cannot be fully free if anything here that we’ve come to fear is left of any focus or importance in our eyes, our minds, our lives.

Thus I find myself reeling within this reality in which all of the sudden God’s gift of the Son has yet again grown into another miracle that I’ve not before imagined possible. Because we think of things like fear and love as mere emotions that have little bearing upon much of anything beyond the moments in which we feel them. And yet, what we see in this verse here is an altogether different sort of suggestion as it seems to hint at everything from life to the freedom in which we were created to live it, and having not done that, called in Christ to live it yet again.

In freedom, not fear.

Indeed, we’re told here that there is no fear in love, but that rather perfect love casts out fear. And so those who do fear have not been perfected in love, thus meaning that love perfected is not in them and thus Christ remains outside of them as He is love perfected. But those who have been perfected by God's perfect love as sent and seen in Christ alone, for them they are finally able to live free indeed as His perfect love has cast out all fear from their lives, thus freeing them from all they may have once feared in life.

And thus they are for once alive having not known life without fear before Christ’s perfect love came to cast it out, bringing them also back to life from their lives lived lost in the death of sin and enslaved to fear, thus meaning them never before free.

For the fact is that there is no fear in freedom and so nor then will freedom abide by fear. For if we ever again agree to fear anything other than God alone, well then we’ve then proven ourselves not perfected in His love and thus too knowing nothing of the freedom for which He laid down His life to achieve on our behalf from the sins which once bound us to a dead way of life lived apart from God and outside of His perfect will for us as proven priceless within the spotless Lamb of Heaven laying down His life to free those He loved enough to offer such a costly sacrifice.

And if our freedom to live by faith without then needing the praise or approval of mankind which uses still fear to manipulate was worth enough to Him to both warn us against making friends with a world that sees Him as their enemy and also to die in order to show us we can again be part of His family, if that was worth it to Him to lay down His life, well then I'll not let this world tell me how to live mine. John 8:36

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

Indeed, freed from fear, freed from sin, freed from selfishness, freed from shame, freed from society and their often sick and twisted assumptions or insistences, freed from the substance of things wanted or wished for, indeed, freed from want and wish as we know that we who are in Him finally know that He is all that we need to one day be where He brought us this hope to go. And that all of this freedom from everything from fear to faithlessness was achieved only by His immeasurable love for us, well that just proves that love is so perfect as to both give life and save it too.

And so perhaps in that we can agree to no longer waste this life upon such lifelessness as the fear of anything. Because to fear anything, anyone other than Him as done out of a growing reverent respect for all He’s done to give us the hope of not merely some ordinary life as we’ve already lived it and lost it to fear and sinfulness, that is simply unacceptable. For He died for far more than our returning to fear or failure as found in and founded by our foolishness and frivolity.

Thus we cannot stay the same for His perfect love has cast out all reason to worry that we might not make it to where He’s called us to come.

And so let nothing worry you on the way home. Because while we’ll most assuredly lose and feel lost at times along this lane, and while we’ll watch others leave and be left then feeling alone along this line, and while that will hurt in ways that physical pain cannot mimic or mime, and while that is easily one of the last things that any of us want to endure in life let alone embrace in life, perhaps in doing so we’re finally sharing in that lack of fear that His perfect love proved upon the cross.

So let us never be afraid of taking up our own, even amongst a mankind which will mock the act, and welcoming all the similar losses that such a life lived will bring. For only in doing so will we be among the few brought both back to life and led to life eternal when at last the last are finally proven first while those many who feared not being first are found only the first turned away from the right side of forever.

Do not risk that just because fear asks you to. Because fear has no say in our lives anymore, not if the perfect love of Christ has been welcomed into our lives allowing His perfect will to remove all worry as we leave this world behind.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold