DAILY BYTE
Yesterday we spoke of how fear forms a huge part of all our lives. It shapes how we think, how we react and how we emote. Fear can hold us prisoner, even more than prison walls can. This is the powerful idea of the movie, ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ which had the tagline – ‘Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.’
In the film, one of the characters was a guy named Brooks Hatlen. He had spent most of his life wasting away in prison because of a reckless act of violence that he committed as a teenager. At one point in the film, after over 40 years of incarceration, he is finally released to enjoy the freedom for which he always longed.
There’s just one problem though ... he’d forgotten how to be free.
He’d grown so accustomed to the structure of jail that his new life on the outside scared him to death. He tried to think of ways to violate his parole just so that he could get locked up again. Eventually, Brooks ended up taking his own life because he could not handle the uncertainty and vulnerability of life on the outside any longer. In a letter to his former cellmates Brooks writes, ‘It is a terrible thing to live in fear.’
It is indeed.
Fear is, along with love, one of the most powerful human emotions. That is why I find the combination of them in today’s focus text to be so fascinating – ‘perfect love drives out all fear,’ or as The Message translates it more effectively – ‘well formed love banishes fear’.
Although they are not exactly opposites, in that you can experience both of these emotions at the same time, it does seem that love actually opposes fear in so many different ways. Fear makes cowards out of us; it cripples us emotionally, stops us from stepping out, stifles us from growing and shrinks us into ourselves. Fear, if it is left unchecked, unacknowledged and unguarded, can make us terribly self-preserving and selfish.
This is why love opposes fear!
For if fear makes cowards out of us; then love is that quality that makes heroes out of us! And if fear shrinks us into ourselves, then love is that quality that draws us out and challenges us to reach beyond ourselves.
Love drives out fear not by removing it, but by removing its power over us. Love defeats fear not by removing the cause of our fear, or even the emotion from us, but by ensuring that we have reason enough to face up to our fears. As Jesus once said: ‘Greater love has no one than this; that they lay down their life for their friends’ (John 15.13).
We will be exploring this concept in more detail tomorrow. But for now think about some of your life’s greatest fears and think about how love might give you the courage and will to overcome those fears.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Love drives out all fears. O Lord we know that you love us, and that your love can inspire us to overcome all obstacles and fears. We pray that you would help us to see how destructive our fears can be if they remain unchecked, but we also pray that your love would inspire us to creatively face our fears head on. Amen.
FOCUS VERSE
1 John 4. 18 NIV
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
