There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

I John 4:18 NKJV

When I was growing up, I was haunted by verses like John 14:21: He who has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. What is His command? To love the Lord Your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. (Matthew 22:37) These kinds of verses haunted me because deep down, I knew my obedience wasn’t fueled by love. It was fueled by suffocating fear:

Fear of what would happen if I suddenly decided to STOP obeying.

In 1 John 4:18, the apostle John describes the relationship between fear and love in a profound way: Perfect love casts out fear. The Greek word used to describe fear in this verse is actually the same word we use to describe oil’s fear of water: phobos. I still remember how powerfully this verse hit me one morning during my quiet time when I finally realized: my outward “obedience” fueled by my fear of punishment wasn’t really love at all. Outwardly, I was checking off all the spiritual boxes I was supposed to. But inwardly, I felt like an empty, hollow fraud. All of my external behavior modification was just a cheap excuse for the real thing.

Profound fear can inspire profound obedience… but it can never inspire profound love. If God had given me any other command to obey, then fear would have worked just fine as a primary motivator, and I would have kept checking off my spiritual boxes of external behavior modification indefinitely. But instead, He gave me the ONE command that all of my fear was incapable of producing: to love Him with my entire being. Just like oil has no choice but to be expelled in the presence of water, all the self-serving fear in my heart had no choice but to finally flee in the reality of God’s all consuming, self-sacrificing love (Romans 5:5). Only God is capable of producing His supernatural, selfless love in our hearts. It is only then that we can truly experience what it means to love fearlessly.

Hannah