What are you afraid of?
Being alone?
Being inadequate?
Failing at your job, marriage, parenting?
Judgement?
Death?
Do these fears hold you back in life?
The answer is undoubtedly, yes.
Fear always holds us back from living life to the fullest. But Scripture teaches that God does not want us to live a life captive to fear. Fear is the result of living in a fallen world – things are not as they should be – including us! This is why God sent his son to redeem us. We learn in 1 John 4:16-20 why there is fear and how it is cast out of our lives:
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
In other words, it is through our acceptance of God’s love and by abiding in relationship with him that fear will find no place in our lives. Fear has to do with punishment, but when we abide in Christ there is no punishment, no fear. We can have confidence that we’re right with Him!
Abiding in Christ is something we have to do day-to-day. As we grow in our relationship with him we will continue in the redemption process, one that dispels fear and replaces it with God’s abounding love.
Remember, we are secure in him.
Make Psalm 139:23-24 your prayer today:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Learn more about:
Abiding in Christ
Keeping an Eternal Perspective in a Temporal World
Trusting by Faith
