Perfect Love Drives Out Fear

I’ve been thinking of 1 John 4:18 a lot lately. A lot of people are familiar with part of this verse, “Perfect love drives out fear.” That’s not the entire verse, though.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.”

Too often, when things happen like what has happened with my family and Nathaniel, it gets interpreted as a punishment. It was a question that I know has crossed both Lesley’s and my mind, “What did we do to deserve this?” The question, “Why is God doing this to us?” is much like it, often asked out of a sense that God is heaping troubles on us because we did something, even unknowingly, to deserve it. Even the question, "Why would God let this happen?" suggests the idea that God, although passively, has something to do with the cause of our suffering. Many people have that image of God as the punisher, wreaking vengeance for everything in our lives we’ve done that’s wrong.

If we believe that God’s love is perfect, this is unacceptable. In an earlier post, I discuss the biblical Truth that all suffering is a result of original sin. Nathaniel’s hemophilia and lung problems are due to the fact that we are separated from God while we live in this world. They are not punishments from God.

I have no need to fear, because I am doing the best I can to remain in right relationship with the God who loves me. Is my love perfect, as 1 John 4:18 requires? No, but God’s love is. I’ve moved past the being angry at God phase of all that's happened over the last six months. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been angry with Him. In faith, though, I know that He is the source of everything good that has kept Nathaniel alive. How can I be angry with a God who has been so active, even before Nathaniel was born, in giving us what we’ve needed to enjoy him in our lives?

It wasn't easy moving beyond the anger I felt for what God allowed to happen to my little boy. It took a great deal of faith and reflection. God's permissive will allows suffering, because for him to remove suffering would be for him to rescind his gift of free will. God passively allows suffering, because it is the result of original sin, the consequence of humanity's choice as a whole to separate ourselves from Him. God actively works to be there with us through our suffering, though, so that we can lean on Him for wisdom, awe, reverence, strength, understanding courage and knowledge. (Get that, the gifts of the Holy Spirit). God joins us in our suffering so that we can experience "the peace that surpasses understanding" (Phillipians 4:7).

God has not left us in our pain. God joins us in our suffering. That's the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ.

Hemophilia is not a punishment. Nathaniel, certainly, is not.

One of the most important things I know as a parent is that my children’s self-concept is formed by my belief in them. If I think of my children as cursed, as their hardships as punishments, their needs as awkward, their quirks as weird, however you want to put it, that’s what they are going to think of themselves. Children do not know what to think about themselves. Whether it’s something as simple as Jacob needing to wear a “pirate patch” because he has anisometropia and anisometropic amblyopia (the doctors' fancy way of saying his left eye sees better than his right eye), or something as complex as managing Nathaniel’s hemophilia, they will form their thoughts about it according to the way Lesley and I think about it.

If we make out that it’s weird and awkward that Jacob has to wear a patch for a few weeks to correct his vision, he’s going to believe that HE IS weird and awkward. I prefer to think of it as kind of cool. He’s got a doctor’s order to be a pirate for the next 2 months. If truth be told, I'm a little bit jealous.

If we think of ourselves or Nathaniel as being punished by God because Nathaniel has hemophilia, even if I never say a word about it to him, he’s going to develop a sense that HE IS a punishment to us, a curse to us. I prefer to think of him as a gift. That’s what he really is.

God gave him to us, and… “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11). Nathaniel is our “gift from God.”

And so are Jacob and Caitlin.

Perfect love casts out fear, because I don’t need to be afraid of being punished. I don’t love my God perfectly, but I believe in His perfect love. And I believe in His desire to help my love for Him to grow. After all, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). So while I cannot trust that a gene on an X chromosome won't mutate to cause a life long, difficult to manage illness in an infant, I can trust that God will be there next to me and Lesley and, more importantly, next to Nathaniel, for as long as he has to manage it. I can't trust that Nathaniel's lungs will ever be healed, but I can trust that God's breath of life will lift him up for eternity.