I love Jesus. I love that every day with Him is better than the last. Some of these things sound so very cliché but are also very true. As long as I decide to follow Him through each season of my life, His glory will always be revealed more and more with each season. I have a promise that the fruit of the Holy Spirit will become more and more evident in me throughout my life. If I follow Jesus, I will always have the opportunity to have a better relationship with Him tomorrow than I had today.
I will also have less fear. Perfect love casts out fear. If I am truly following Jesus, then I have a guarantee that I will experience less and less fear as my life on earth continues. Maybe there will be a season when the devil will attack me with doubt and fear as his weapons, but overall I will have less fear tomorrow than I have today. It’s a given.
And I do. The amount of fear I experience today cannot compare to what I once had on a scale of 1 to 10. If I once experienced a 10, I now experience a 0.10. Fear doesn’t rule my decisions. Joy and love has begun to do so instead.
I am currently on a trip that I take once a year. I am noticing how much less fear I have on this trip than last year and the year before that and so on and so forth. Life is radically different. Fear no longer reigns. I have begun to know love. Perfect Love has cast out fear.
Recently someone told me that they were terrified of me. First it had me wondering if there was truly something the matter with me. Trust me when I say I have repented from everything I know how to repent of in this relationship. I have begged God on my knees to show me if there is anything I have left of which to repent. A long time ago, He told me I had done my work. The situation was no longer my fault. Sometimes I wish I could make a situation my fault, just so I could take ownership and repent and so reconcile with the other party. Unfortunately for the sake of this relationship, that’s not how life, righteousness and reconciliation work.
Then I started to laugh because I recognized the lie both the other person and I was believing. I wasn’t the source of the person’s fear. They were. I used to be really afraid of people. It wasn’t the other person’s fault. I generally have recognized this ever since my salvation experience because I started this journey afraid of literally everyone. (I don’t think that is an exaggeration.) But I took ownership of my fear and recognized that this feeling originated with me and not the object of which I was afraid. Taking ownership of my fear is the reason I am no longer very afraid today. I could change because I recognized that I was the problem.
Fear comes from two sources. It is either from the devil or my sinful flesh. Except in the case of “the fear of the Lord”, it can’t be a part of my new nature. This week I considered whether perhaps fear of a lion or tiger could be godly and originate in the new me. I decided it was contextual. Should I meet a lion in Africa, a godly response would be to be filled with adrenaline and run away fast. However, if I was in the middle of an arena with a lion about to kill me because of my faith in Jesus, I would have no reason to fear the lion.
When I fear something, it never says anything about the object or event I fear. It only says something about me and where I am on my journey of Jesus casting out my fear. I have a long way to go on this journey of love casting out fear. I look forward to the day when on a scale of 1 to 10, my fear is a 0.001. That day isn’t today; but if I walk in the Spirit as I follow Jesus, someday it will surely come. How well I will love people in His name then!
What do you fear? Is the level of fear in your life increasing or decreasing? Do you take ownership of your fear or do you blame that which you are afraid of for your fear?
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