God’s Love that Eliminates fear

1. It’s great to be here with you George. We’ve never met like this before, I think. We sang here, “You’re all I want”. This week we’re coming close to both Eva-Lena’s and my birthday, so, we asked each other ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ And both of us actually said, and no pressure for who said it first, ‘I don’t really need anything.’ And I was thinking, if there is something we need, it’s God, wherever we are in our lives, it’s Him we need. You’re all I want. And it’s so easy that life gets filled up with so many other things, but if we don’t know that we have Him in our lives, life is pretty empty. And even birthday presents can’t fill the void.
2. Last week, we heard a sermon about ‘Love’, and I thought what better continuation than to talk about fear and anxieties. The angle that I’m going to take is how our God’s love touches our fears, and everything we struggle with. Is there anyone here that’s never been afraid? If so, we can scare you. We can try. If you’ve never been afraid then nothing scares you. Most of us suffer from fear, and struggle with anxieties and worries, and it can be cockroaches, it can be little things, some of them are big, or it can be the wars that we are surrounded by. The changes we see in our climate, the droughts, the fires, the floods, and we wonder what will happen. What will it be like?
3. And all kinds of things, and I will tell you a secret – I have a fear, I don’t know the name of the fear in Swedish, or in English, but there’s a Greek name for it – as it is with many things there’s always a Greek name for it, and I don’t know if I pronounce it right, ‘Koumbofovia’, I think it means the fear of buttons. Maybe, you don’t think it’s true but it is true. Buttons make me feel uncomfortable. But it’s not something I really suffer from. But I’ll tell you a secret, well it’s not a secret, you know Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, and who is behind iPhones and all these things. He suffered from the same thing, and you can see the results of this on the phones, they don’t have any buttons anymore. So, something good can come out of this.
4. No, but I think fear and worry, we can laugh at it, some of the things are stupid. But it can be very real, very crippling. It can result in a lack of sleep, it can result in a difficulty to have relationships with other people, and it has a very negative effect on our lives. I can’t say that the buttons have had a negative effect on my life. You know, sometimes the worries are not very rational, it doesn’t really make sense. Some do, of course, but many people suffer from this. We can deal with it, or we can try to deal with it, and we can do things to improve the situation.
5. We can talk to our friends, those who are close to us, we can practice something that we can call ‘mindfulness’, take control of our thoughts and not let them be controlled by our words. We can manage our stress with different activities and techniques, we can take care of our health, how we eat, how we exercise as well, we make sure we get good sleep. So, there are things we can do about our fears and our worries. That helps.
6. But is God interested in our fears? Yes, He is! I read something, I think it was this week, about 100 years ago, there was a big find of manuscripts, papyri, in the Egyptian desert. They were from the 2^nd century, so, like 100 years after Jesus had lived on earth. There were so many, and it’s taken a long, long time to go through all of them and try to translate them and understand them. Last week there was one that they managed to translate and restore some things that were missing. This was a very early collection of the sayings of Jesus. It was not a manuscript of what we know today as the Bible. But it was interesting in what we’re talking about today, it was about when Jesus spoke about the worries of life, and how God cares. So, people in those days were struggling with the same issues that we struggle with today. God cared enough that Jesus would speak about it. It touched people, so that they wrote down what He had said. And it is very similar to the passage that we will read from what we know today as the Bible.
7. It’s in two of the Gospels, in Matthew and in Luke. We will read from Luke 12:22-31.  ²² Then Jesus said to His disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. ²³ For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. ²⁴ Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap; they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! ²⁵ Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life^[a]? ²⁶ Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest? ²⁷ “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ²⁸ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will He clothe you—you of little faith! ²⁹ And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. ³⁰ For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. ³¹ But seek His kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
8. Jesus knew what it was like to be a human being like us. And He could sympathize with our situations, with everything in our lives. He knew what it was like to be a person like you and me. He knew that people worry, and I think life was pretty hard in those days. Many people were poor, many people lived outside of society and were cast out for different reasons. But He says don’t worry. And He asked a good question, that I think we can ask ourselves, ‘Who, by worrying can add a single hour to your life?’ Sometimes we feel that if we don’t worry, something bad will happen. I don’t know if you recognize yourself in that. What if I stop worrying, something bad will happen in my life. But it doesn’t work like that. Worrying our whole life will not add even one hour to our lives.
9. So, we can know intellectually that it is not a good idea to worry. We can know that it is not necessary to worry about a cockroach. They cannot do much harm to us. But still our lives are filled with worries and fears. So, we will look at what John wrote in 1 John 4: 16-19, ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.
10. I think the best remedy for fear, is not just trying to be strong. We may not look fearful on the outside, but it doesn’t get rid of fear in our hearts. John here talks about the cure for fear and worries. He starts out by saying, ‘We have come to know Him’ or rather he is saying, we have come to know ‘Love’, and we believe in it, we rely on it. When we know Jesus Christ in our lives, we come to know love, what it really is. We can rely on it, we can believe in it, we can throw our lives on Him. It says ‘God is love’. There is a difference in saying God is loving, I can say that Leto is a loving person, is that right Stavros? But to say that God is love, is a different thing. That’s God’s essence. God has a lot of attributes, but there is something different in how love is described in relation to God. He is love – He’s not just loving.
11. John says that we live in love, we live in God and God lives in us. So, we live in love and love lives in us. It says that it is a perfect love. It’s a love without borders. When Jesus tells us to love, He doesn’t say only love those that are nice to you, love your family, even love your neighbor, if he’s nice to you, but don’t love the bad people, don’t love your enemies. That would be kind of human, normal, wouldn’t it? But God’s love is perfect it’s different, and it tells us ‘Love your enemies’. The people we feel bad about that have done bad things to us. This is the kind of love that God shows us. God loved us even when we were still sinners. He didn’t start loving us when we thought, well we better start clearing up our lives and become a good person, and then God starts loving us – No! If you think of the worst day in your life, when you did the worst thing, if you ever did something bad, the thing you’re most ashamed of, maybe that no one knows about, God loved you. That’s how much He loves us.
12. God’s love is made complete among us, it says in this passage. It’s a perfect love without end, without borders. It’s enough for all of us. No one is left out. Paul writes, that to understand God’s love, that is beyond understanding, we understand it best together. The breadth, the length, the height, the depth. It’s impossible on our own to understand. When we meet together and there are all kinds of people, and we see that God loves them, and God loves me, we understand more of how vast His love is. But it is beyond understanding, it is beyond what we can understand together.
13. It says here ‘That we will have confidence on the day of judgement’. Fear has to do with punishment. But God, when we encounter His love, we can be released from that. And it says here, I had to look it up in several Translation, it expresses it slightly differently, but it says, ‘In this world we are like Jesus’. It says basically the same in most translations, but it hit me in my face, that, ‘In this world we are like Jesus’. And of course, this is our calling to be more and more like Him. And I think, the most obvious way to show if we are becoming more and more like Jesus, is – do we love like Him.
14. I know that a message like this about God’s love can feel very ‘fluffy’ and floating on the clouds and everything is nice and cozy. But loving in difficult circumstances, loving when we’re hurt, loving when things or people go against us, it’s not always so cozy. It’s hard, but it is the way of God, the way of Jesus Christ.
15. There is no fear in love. And most of us, we struggle with fear, and to me it says that we need more of God’s love. Love starts in God, with God. We know that it starts in the Trinity. It’s His essence, it’s who God is. And it’s what we are created for, to be recipients of this love and to reflect His love to others, to love Him back. This is our destiny. But it starts with Him, that’s why we can talk about, ‘Perfect Love’. And God wants to draw us into that love, this circle of love, where we are in Him and He is in us.
16. So, how does this happen? If you’re like me, my generation, whoever that is, we were taught in church a lot, that we should not rely on our feelings, but we should rely on the Word of God. Whatever it says, is true, and I don’t care what I feel like. And that’s something like you said Eva-Lena, at the start of the service, and I think it is very true – if we just go with our emotions, we get lost. But we are human beings, created with a mind, emotions, with a body, so, we need to experience God as well. Not just with our mind. We can read Jesus saying, ‘Don’t worry’, and we want to believe that, but it doesn’t touch our whole being. But God doesn’t want us just to read and know in our minds that God is love. He wants us to experience it.
17. So, how on earth do we experience God? God that we cannot see, God that we cannot touch. Well, I’m not going to give a full answer to that. But there are ways that we can experience God, that are meaningful. We meet Him through what He says in His Word. It touches our mind and it touches our heart. We meet Him when we gather together, when we worship, when we pray, we connect to Him. I’m trying to work this out in my life, when I pray, I often come with a list of things I want God to do for me. However, it’s good for us to just sit down and not have an agenda, but just to sit with God, speak from our heart, but also being still and listen to Him.
18. We meet Him when we take communion together, when we remember what He did for us, when we physically take part in the bread and the wine. It’s a place where we can experience and meet God. We can meet Him in nature – He has created everything – it is His. Actually, we can meet God anywhere. Jesus talks about going into your room, and pray to your Heavenly Father there. But what I want to say most, is that it is one thing to know that God is love, but it is another thing to experience it. And I think that all of us have in some way been touched by God’s love.
19. But there is more. His love is perfect. He loves us even on our bad days. He wants to pour out love to wash away fears. Perfect love drives out fear. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. It is the height of God’s love. God who is love gives us His only begotten love, His Son, for us, to us. It’s like God’s love is without end, it is so vast, but it is concentrated when Jesus comes and gives His life for us. In His love, love is personified. This love is directed to each one of us, to you and it’s an explosive gift.
20. When we know God’s love in our hearts, it changes everything. It has the power to change everything; a hardened heart, a person that is doing evil things, God’s love breaks those things. I hope that you feel that, ‘You’re all that I want, You’re all I ever needed’. I think whatever your need is, if you experience God’s love, it’s a good start to seeing your need being met. And I think there is always more room to know more of His love.
21. What we will do now is sing a song. Sing it to God, make it a cry that you want more of His love, and I know for us men, guys, maybe it’s hard to talk like this, and express ourselves to God like this, but we need just as much of God’s love as anyone. Maybe even more so. Because sometimes we haven’t had the same experience of emotional love. But God loves you. He wants to wipe away fear, He wants to wipe away worries. You cannot add a single hour to your life by worrying. So, let’s sing and turn to God before we leave this place.