Perfect Love Casts Out Fear

Some people check the locks twice. Some practise a hard conversation in the shower. Some keep others at a distance so they can never be left. From the inside, none of that feels like fear. It feels like being careful.

The word to hold on to in this verse is "torment." The Greek word is kolasis, and it is a hard word. It is the word for punishment, the same word Jesus uses when He speaks of "everlasting punishment" in Matthew 25:46. So when John says "fear hath torment," he means that fear carries its own punishment inside it. Fear starts carrying out the sentence you are afraid of before anyone has passed it. That is why the man who checks the locks twice is not calmer than anybody else. He has been punished several times before anything has happened.

Now read the verse just before, because John is not talking about fear in general. He is talking about love made perfect "that we may have boldness in the day of judgment." The fear he has in mind is the fear of standing before God and being found out. He treats all our smaller fears as branches growing out of that one.

That is why John says, "He that feareth is not made perfect in love." "Made perfect" means completed, brought to its full end. John is naming what is wrong the way a doctor names an illness, so that it can be treated. And the cure is not trying harder to be brave. The cure is love: "perfect love casteth out fear."

Think of the place where your fear really lives: money, your health, what somebody thinks of you, being found out. What exactly do you expect God to do to you there? Answer honestly, and you will usually find the older fear underneath, the one that has been quietly checking the locks all along. Then bring that fear to God. The very next verse says, "We love him, because he first loved us," and that love is strong enough to drive the fear out.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 197 is The Dust of His Feet (Nahum 1:3).

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