Sermon Title: What do we do with fear?

Sermon Text: Revelation 21, Psalm 34, 1 John 4

Sermon Date: April 29, 2007

She can’t help herself. She is scared. Not just a little afraid but scared, living in terror of her neighbors. If she is out watering her flowers and they come outside, she runs in and bolts her door while peeking out of her windows to watch them. She has lost weight, can’t sleep and when she does, she has nightmares. This started after 9-11. She was nervous about terrorists but it didn’t affect her daily life. Then “they” started moving into the neighborhood. People of color and different religion. Women who wear scarfs. Men who speak other languages. Children with dark skin, hair and eyes. And now Koreans….like that man who shot those students in Virginia. She is terrified of them.

We can’t deny it. We are living in difficult and uncertain times. That isn’t news to anyone. 9-11, Columbine and Virginia Tech have changed our complacency about living in the safety of the United States of America.

These are scary situations. And I can stand up here and toss you scripture verses telling you how the Bible tells you to deal with this or that situation, but you might say….”yes, but what about…..my situation? What about my fears?”

I can say to you, “Just look at Psalm 34 and you’ll read, “I prayed to the Lord and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears.”

Great. Wonderful. Okay, it says God can free us but maybe you are thinking, “I already knew that. I know God can handle the stuff around me. The problem is…I can’t. I can’t let go of the fears that surround me and knowing that God can help, doesn’t always work. Not for me. Maybe not for you.”

If we were talking about the broader subject of fear we might say that fear has its good points too. Fear of illness motivates us to change our eating habits. Fear of losing a relationship can motivate us to explore marital counseling. If we face our fear of dying we can be moved to embrace life fully and passionately and stop wasting time. But fear of other people because of their skin color, their language or their religion doesn’t do anything at all for the kingdom of God.

Unfortunately there are pastors out there today preaching on the opposite. They are encouraging people to be mistrustful of Muslims but that isn’t of God. If our fear causes us to mistrust someone because of their religion or the color of their skin, it isn’t of God. And God doesn’t want us to go there.

Let me prove it to you. We have in the back of our bibles three short letters from John – maybe John the writer of the Gospel, maybe not, written about A.D. 100, some 70 years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. In the first epistle our writer stresses that there are two commands – to believe in God and love one another.

1 John 4 - God's Love and Ours

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

    God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 18 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.

19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another. (Today’s New International Version via www.Biblegate-way.com)

Those who love God must also love one another. What John is saying to us is that the opposite of fear is not courage. The opposite of fear is love.

Here is what I think God wants us to do with fear --- put it in its proper place. Fear alone isn’t a bad thing. Fear motivates us to change our lives, as I mentioned earlier. Fear is also what urges us to be cautious when walking alone on a city street or sending our children out to play.

But fear can be debilitating and that isn’t of God. Being cautious is one thing; allowing fear to control your life is another. I don’t want to make light of fear because I have my own, but I have to wonder if there aren’t times that not being fearful is a decision.

I talk at weddings about love ultimately being a decision and not a feeling. I warn the couple that the day will come when they will wonder why they married that person and that they will not have the warm and fuzzy feelings they have on that particular wedding day. However their decision to marry is based as much on their commitment as their feelings. The feelings can return if the commitment is there.

Maybe it is the same with us and fear. Perfect love drives out fear. Perfect love pushes you to get to know those neighbors who don’t look or talk like you do. Perfect love pushes us to accept them for who they say they are until you have evidence to the contrary. Just because they are Muslim doesn’t mean they are extremists or terrorists anymore than being a Baptist means you belong to the church in Kansas that protests at soldiers’ funerals.

Perfect love pushes us to accept people for who they are, to help when we can and to love them with God’s love even if you can’t love them with your own feelings. If you believe in God’s perfect love, you have to believe that God loves everyone. Not just you. God’s love doesn’t work that way. Never.

Corrie Ten Boom told a story I’m sure I’ve told you but it is worth hearing again.

Corrie’s story is that she and her family lived in Amsterdam and helped Jews escape after Holland surrendered to Germany. Eventually arrested, she and her sister Betsy were sent to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp. Betsy died and because of a clerical error, Corrie was released the week before all the women her age were killed. Corrie told her story to millions during her lifetime…of God’s love and grace.

Once she was speaking in Germany about how God’s love had sustained her during those awful years and how God’s forgiveness is permanent. Afterward she says a man came toward her with his hand outstretched and tears rolling down his cheeks. His smile was tremendous but she was struck with shock. This was the cruelest of the prison guards at Ravensbruck. And he wanted to shake her hand. Inwardly she shuddered and thought, “No, I cannot do this. Not with this horrible man who helped to kill my sister.”

But she remembered that she had just told the audience how when God forgives, our sins are tossed out into the winds, never to return again. How could she not follow through with what she just said.

Not realizing that she recognized him, he said how badly he needed to hear her words of forgiveness. But Corrie was all the time thinking, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this”……and finally she said, “Okay Lord, I can’t but you can. I’ll put my hand out and you do the rest.”

When their hands met she felt God’s love envelop both of them and she forgave him, just as God had. (I read this in a “Chicken Soup for the Soul” years ago but don’t remember which one.)

What do we do with fear of people in our midst? We decide that it will not control our lives. We decide that we will use it to motivate us and keep us cautious. We decide that if God loves everyone else, we can too.

Let me close with Today’s thought from Pastor Charles Swindoll:

Genuine New Testament Christianity doesn't hang out at headquarters;
It gets into the trenches with the wounded and weary.