Perfect Love Casts Out Fear

Checking the locks twice. Rehearsing the conversation in the shower. Keeping people at a distance where they cannot leave you. From the inside none of it feels like fear. It feels like being careful.

The word to hold is torment. The Greek is kolasis, a hard word; it is the term for punishment, used elsewhere of penal suffering. John says fear hath torment, and what he means is that fear carries the punishment inside it. Fear is already administering the sentence you are afraid of. Which 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.

And read the sentence just before, because John is not discussing fear in general. He is being specific: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment. The fear he is treating is the fear of standing in front of God and being found out, and he treats the smaller fears as branches of that one.

Which is why John writes that he that feareth is not made perfect in love. Made perfect means completed, brought to its end. That is a diagnosis rather than a scolding, and the treatment is not trying harder to be brave.

So here is the question to sit with instead of answering quickly. In the place your fear actually lives, the money, the health, what somebody thinks, being found out, what exactly do you expect God to do to you there? Answer that honestly and you will usually meet the older fear underneath it, the one that has been quietly working the locks all along.

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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