Perfect Love, Fear, and Self-Protection
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4:1a
Confession: I hate having someone take advantage of me. I am self-protective, afraid of someone using me and getting away with it. Pride? Absolutely. Fear? Well, afraid of my pride being hurt. What is it that drives this self-protection and what are the consequences?
According to John, "perfect love casts out fear". Taking that as a true statement, then the presence of fear and the soul's natural responses, self-protection and self-preservation, indicate that the person who has sustained fear is not receiving, or at least, not accepting the perfected love that God offers through the Holy Spirit.
Perfect love and a self-protective spirit cannot coexist, just as it is impossible to experience joy and analyze its development at the same time, or, a less introspective example, impossible to perform athletically at peak skill at the same time one is thinking about the mechanics. Processes that can achieve perfection do not do so through understanding at the moment they are being perfected.
There may be, in the case of the athlete, hours and days, months and years, that are full of study, practice, analysis of mechanics and introspection on motivations that lead up to the moment of perfect performance, but in that moment, all of the preparation is synthesized into the product in a way that really defies understanding. In fact, if in mid-performance the athlete begins to analyze their actions, they will certainly begin to fail in achieving their goal.
The same can be said about the experience of feeling joy. Joy is a spontaneous product, an outgrowth of a series of circumstances that have coalesced to bring a person to a pinnacle in a moment of life. Like the athlete, the joyful person may have spent hours, days, months and years in living a life that leads to joy, though joy often appears to occur in a seemingly spontaneous way without an obvious antecedent. Regardless of its evolution, analyzing joy while experiencing it is to end it. Joy, experienced in the soul and spirit, is not understandable, though, like the athlete, we may later recognize components of the experience and preparation that led to that perfect moment.
Perfect love is a gift of the Holy Spirit, most vividly experienced when we are totally immersed in worship and adoration of the Father and the Son. In those times, we lose awareness of the natural world in a manner of speaking. We are not unconscious, but we are not focused on the world around us. In those times, we are not concerned about "us" or protecting "us", not prideful, for we know we have no basis for pride, and therefore are not self-protective in a manner that is destructive to our relationship with God and, at times, with others.
I do not know that I have been around anyone who is perpetually experiencing perfect love; Jesus was the only person who was in constant communion with the Father, and even He had moments of dread in the Garden.
We are constantly experiencing the world through all of our senses, recognizing the threats that our fallen world presents, and constantly tempted to fear, whether in response to physical threat, injury to our pride, fear of failure--the list could go on.
Our battle is to remember. Remember to surrender, lay down our defenses and look to Him; to ask for His Spirit to soak into our spirit and bond our soul and spirit to service for Him; to obey His leading, His written word, His Word in the flesh; and to believe He is Who He say He is.
If we are focused on these actions, fear has no place to enter. When we look down from Him and see the waves, as Peter did, we will be distracted by fear. The battle is also not to condemn ourselves for failing in that moment, but to immediately look to Him and surrender, ask, obey, and believe.
Easier written than done; our efforts will be imperfect for now. We are practicing for a day to come when 1 John 4:1 will be the eternal reality.
