FAITH: The deliverance ‘perfect’ love provides

Various expressions of love remain in the air after Valentine’s Day.

The mini-circus of cards, chocolates, flowers and phone calls were again on display, but a growing number of couples are not into marriage, content to live together.

Marriage is seen as an outdated institution and couples give diverse reasons for not formalizing their cohabitation by signing on the dotted lines of “just a piece of paper.”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 often lies a lurking fear of the unknown — of commitment.

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.”

Apostle John, perhaps drawing from the scenarios of failed or unrequited human love stories, penned an alluring sentence of the challenge and comfort of 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).

The meaning behind the word “punishment” is a sense of restraint. All of us know something about fear, but what constitutes the essence of fear?

One may be fearful because of 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 or her 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 and demands. And, then, we look into our own hearts and experience and see the utter insufficiency, the inability even to think of entering into God’s will.

If we know we could not swim, we would be more than a bit frightened if we were in a boat that 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, is unreal. Situations are pictured and conjured up, but they never materialize. Experiences are endured, but never encountered.

Have we ever had to have a medically required shot? Did most of us not have it more than once? We might even have had it six times before we felt that the needle actually touched our skin.

So often in life our imagination is active and our thoughts busy, so that we could build up a whole experience of fear, which was based upon unreal imaginings.

We must all have faced a situation we were afraid of, perhaps a job interview or a surgery. Our imagination was active, but when it was 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, of whose intentions we are not sure.

When we were small and at school, we perhaps received an invitation from the principal, of whose intentions we were not quite certain. The fact that 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 person’s life and, with it, possible love — love on their side of the game.

They know that, but they are not quite certain of the intention on the other side. Is it just friendship or is it going to be the fulfilment of their dreams? The very uncertainty makes them 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 right 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.

Though the above-mentioned verse in John’s writing speaks of a tyranny, it also tells us of a remedy. We read that not only fear has punishment, but that “there is no fear in love.”

The same numbers of letters are in the words “love” and “fear” and, if I were teaching a Sunday school class, I would have the “fear’ spelled out on separate cards: F-E-A-R is the tyranny. Then I would take the four other letters, L-O-V-E, and put L over F, O over E, V over A and E over R. There is no fear in pure, real love.

Marriage is a biblical picture of man’s relationship to Christ. Just as a man receives his wife and 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 engaged couples and 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 a volunteer chaplain at Thompson Rivers University. KTW welcomes submissions to its Faith page. Columns should be a maximum of 700 words in length and include a headshot of the author, along with a short bio on the writer. Email editor@kamloopsthisweek.com.

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