How fear is the opposite of love
Love is again in the air as Valentine’s Day rolls around. The mini-circus of cards, chocolates, flowers and phone calls are annual exhibits once more.
But one of the gnawing emptiness of modern relationship battles seem to be that a growing number of couples in our society are not just into marriage and are content to live together.
Seen as an outdated institution, couples give diverse reasons for not formalizing their cohabitation by signing on the dotted lines of “just a piece of paper.”
However innocuous that explanation might sound, behind it there often lies a lurking fear of the unknown — of commitment and, thereby, of an imperfect love.
The growing tension between discovering each other’s mind and a reluctance to face it drives away many from the eagerness, the desire and the longing to “do it right.”
One might be getting afraid because the pull of God’s will is going to be difficult for him to bear. The obedience that God asks of us is going to be a hard thing.
Apostle John, perhaps drawing from the scenarios of failed or unrequited human love stories, penned an alluring sentence of both challenge and comfort to human love and commitment when he wrote:
“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).
“Fear involves punishment.” The meaning behind the word “punishment” is a sense of restraint.
All of us know something about fear. What is there that constitutes the essence of fear?
One may be fearful because of an insufficiency for which his soul is afraid.
One might be getting afraid because the pull of God’s will is going to be difficult for him to bear. The obedience that God asks of us is going to be a hard thing.
We might think of the loneliness that it might lead to, the high standard that God requires.
If we knew we could not swim, we would be more than a little bit frightened if we were in a boat which was sinking.
And then, we look into our own hearts and experience and see there the utter insufficiency, the inability even to think of entering into God’s will.
If we knew we could not swim, we would be more than a little bit frightened if we were in a boat which was sinking.
But there is another element in fear and its tyranny: the insufficiency of which my soul is aware and an imagination in which my thought is active.
A tremendous part of fear is built up by the imagination and, therefore, unreal.
Situations are pictured and conjured up which never materialize. Experiences are imagined which are never encountered.
Have we ever had to have a shot? Did we not have it more than once? We might even have had it six times before the needle touched our skin.
So often in life our imaginations are active and our thoughts busy, and we can build up a whole experience of fear which is based upon unreal imaginings.
We must all have faced a situation we were afraid of — an interview or a surgery.
Our imagination was active but when it was all over, did we not say, “It was not half as bad”?
There is another element that creates fear leading to imperfect love: The intention of which our hearts are afraid.
It sometimes happens that we find ourselves in the hands of others whose intentions we are not sure of.
When we were young students, we perhaps received an invitation from the school principal of whose intentions we were not quite certain.
The fact we were uncertain of his intentions made that day rather miserable until the interview was over.
And then our mind was at rest, even if our body was not.
Friendship can come into a girl’s life and, with it, possibly, love — love on her side.
She knows that but she is not quite certain of the intention on the other side. Is it just friendship or is it going to be the fulfilment of her dreams?
The very uncertainty makes her afraid.
So, there is a great and complex element entering into the tyranny of fear: “Fear involves punishment.”
How many of us are under that tyranny in relationships just now?
We are not quite certain what the intention of God is and we are more than a bit afraid of a whole realm of the intention of the will of God of which we feel we know nothing of.
Though the above verse in John’s writing speaks of a tyranny, it also speaks of a remedy.
Marriage is a biblical picture of man’s relation to Christ.
We read there not only that fear has punishment, but that “there is no fear in love.”
There is no fear in pure, real love.
Marriage is a biblical picture of man’s relation to Christ.
Just as a man receives his wife and a woman her husband, people in Jesus’ time lived with him, followed him, listened to his teachings, obeyed him, and committed themselves to him.
Let the patron of love of affianced couples, the engaged couples, and of happy marriages, Jesus, with his outstretched arms of agape love, extricate fear from love, leading to total sacrificial commitment in marriage and love life.
Narayan Mitra is the pastor of Merritt Baptist Church at 2499 Coutlee Ave., Merritt.