What are you afraid of?

There I was, clutching the top of the 30-foot pole as tightly as I could. All I needed to do was to go from the last spike, which I used to effortlessly climb the pole to that point, onto the flat top. My then 6-year-old son pleaded with me to do what he had seen other do already: jump from the top onto a trapeze swing just 15 feet away. Besides, I was safely cinched into a harness and had an experienced assistant belaying me from the ground. But there I was frozen. I came down because I couldn’t get over my fear.

1 John 4 verse 18 tells us, “There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” (The Message) Fear of what God thinks of you is crippling. The Gospel is supposed to be freeing, but the story many have received as the Gospel only adds to their fears.

“God is an angry God,” many hear, the statement being taken from the famous 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon. “Your sins have separated you from God,” is the scriptural warning. This concept of God comes in defiance of what the church preached for 1700 years. The writings of Ireneus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexandria are consistent in telling us that all of humanity has been joined to God. God loves us.

Jesus himself talked about how we are in the Father and the Father in us (John 14). We find our very being held together, “for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’” (Acts 17:28, The Message)

But fear became the common concept. Where this came from, I’m not sure. Some blame Augustine whose constant battle with what he had done in his past often choked his writing of a loving, forgiving, accepting God. Some blame Western theologians who either mistakenly accepted Augustine’s neo-Platonist duality where spirit was good and flesh bad, or were power hungry trying with all their might to maintain control over the minds and hearts of lesser educated Christian laity.

Wherever it came from, however, it is contrary to the basic idea of God’s love for humanity. (Psalm 103) He longs for us to return to him for he doesn’t hold our sins against us. He understands our blindness and sin. He doesn’t condone it. (John 8:11) He loved us enough to send Jesus, not to condemn us, but to save us from the doubt and fear that is the basis for all sin.

In Genesis 3 we see that Satan used doubt to sew the seeds of fear against God in Eve’s mind. He tells her God is holding back. He says God can’t be trusted. She shares this with Adam and they take things into their own hands. Next, we see the two cowering in the bushes. Since they can’t trust God anymore, they believe that revealing themselves would cause God to act in an unknown way.

Since most of us hold onto that Augustinian/Western concept of duality and separation, we act much like our forebears and have a wrong concept of fearing God. We believe God can’t stand us because we sin. We avoid church or use it as a measuring stick to show how much more worthy we are to God than someone else. 

But fear is a useless enterprise. It does not draw us any closer to God. Fear does not draw us closer to each other. Fear separates. It destroys. It keeps us from moving forward, much as I could go no further up that pole. 

As far as the church thing goes, I’d like to have a dollar for every time someone said to me, “I need to get my act together before I can go to church.” I’d be cash rich. My portfolio is another story. But since we are at it, is the downturn in economy causing you to fear? Do you question whether God loves you? Do you think a declining portfolio value is a sign of God’s rejection?

Only when we recognize the reality of the Triune God can fear be overcome. We can only move forward when we realize that God is saying to us, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” Some believe that the woman who was caught in adultery is the same one who anointed Jesus with the expensive ointment just prior to his own death. She felt free from her own past and free from the worry of what “wasting” her portfolio of ointment.

Only when you understand that God in his mutual indwelled self is love (1 John 4:8) can you release your fears about Him, your fears about life. Only then will you realize that God is out to get you, get you to realize that in Jesus he has collected you in His arms to tell you, “I will never leave you or forsake (reject) you.”