Overcoming Fear with Love

If you can, let's open our Bibles back to Hosea and find with me chapter 4.

Last week we began a new five-week series for Lent called, Freed in Love. The series is to show us that when we receive God's freely given love, He desires for us, in His love, to become faithful. Faithful love is steadfast and loyal love.

But what we realize is that we're not always faithful, are we? Did you know that the season of Lent is the season of examination and repentance? That for forty days, God calls the church to really examine the idols in their life. Which is why so many people seek to give something up during these forty days before Passion Week.

When we examine our lives, what we can realize is that not only are we unfaithful individually, but our individual unfaithfulness can lead to unfaithfulness as a church body.

Individual Unfaithfulness · Hosea 4 and 5 Let's begin with our individual faith. Look with me in Hosea 4 and find verse 14.

Hosea 4:14 "People without discernment are doomed."

Now turn one chapter over with me to chapter 5, and find verse 4. What's the issue with living in unfaithfulness? Hosea 5:4 "Their actions do not allow them to return to their God, for a spirit of promiscuity is among them, and they do not know the Lord."

Two things here before we move on to the book of Revelation. And I just want to give you a little context on Hosea first, because this verse is not talking about one bad decision. Hosea is exposing a people whose repeated unfaithfulness has made them unable to see clearly anymore. This is what a pattern of sin does over time. It does not just affect behavior. It dims the eyes.

When sin goes unchecked it does not stay contained. It blinds us to our own patterns. And a blind person walks blindly. Whatever we refuse to face in ourselves we will pass on to everyone around us.

Whatever is unfaithful in me leaks. Into my family. Into my friendships. Into this church. There is no hiding it.

The Church That Lost Its First Love · Revelation 2:1-5 Let me show you a church that this happened to. Turn with me to Revelation, chapter 2, and let's read verses 1 through 5.

Revelation 2:1-5 "To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."

What we see in this letter to the church, it commends the believers for their hard work, their perseverance, and their rejection of false teaching. But then Jesus says the thing that should stop all of us cold. You have forsaken the love you had at first. Not your doctrine. Not your discipline. Your love. The thing that started it all. Have you ever thought about why the lampstand matters? The lampstand represents the church's place as a witnessing people before Christ. Its presence. Its spiritual authority in the community. And Jesus is saying, a church can keep doing activity and still lose its witness. Keep doing faithful things while losing the faithful love underneath them. And when that happens, He will remove it. Not because He stopped loving you. Because a church that has lost its first love has nothing left to give the world.

And here is the thing I want you to sit with. Most of us do not even know we have drifted. We are still showing up. Still serving. Still singing. The lights look on from the outside. But somewhere along the way the love underneath it all got quietly replaced by habit. By duty. By obligation. And we did not even notice.

We say the right things. But our hearts don't always match what we are saying. And that gap, between what our mouths confess and what our hearts actually hold, that is exactly where fear moves in and love quietly moves out.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth and he called some of them fleshly Christians. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 3.

1 Corinthians 3:1-3, NIV "Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly, mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly."

Now Paul is not saying they are unsaved. He is saying they are fleshly. Still Spirit-indwelt. Still belonging to God. But still operating out of the old nature. Saved, but not yet fully surrendered to what the Spirit is trying to do in them.

And I want to make a distinction here that I think changes everything. A pure heart and a mature character are not the same thing.

A pure heart is about full surrender. A mature character is about formed consistency. The thief on the cross shows us that grace can purify a heart in a moment. In his last breath he turned to Jesus and said, remember me. And Jesus said, today you will be with me in paradise. That man had a pure, surrendered heart. In a moment.

But if that thief had come down from the cross and lived another twenty years, grace would not have left him unchanged. He would have had to learn how to forgive. How to speak without destroying. How to stay faithful when Jesus felt far away. How to let his surrender shape his money, his mouth, his marriage, and his hidden thoughts. That is mature Christian character. A pure heart says, Jesus I am completely yours. A mature character learns to say that with every part of your life, over time.

A pure heart can happen at the altar. A mature character is proven after the altar.

I have seen young Christians, six months in, rough around the edges, still learning, still awkward, and yet their heart is fully surrendered to Jesus. And I have seen people who have been in the church for thirty years, know every song, know the language, know how to serve, know how to look the part, and still be divided underneath. Time in church does not automatically make the heart undivided.

Some of us are asking God for maturity when what He is first asking for is surrender. The question is not, how do I become more consistent. The question is, has there been full surrender. Because God is not waiting for a better performance. He is waiting for an open hand. And some who surrendered years ago are now being asked, will you let me keep forming that surrender into character. Because love received in a moment must become love practiced over a lifetime. And character has to learn how to live without reaching back for fear. That takes abiding. That takes repentance. That takes the Spirit forming us in the ordinary places, not just at the altar but on a Tuesday when nobody is watching.

The Ephesus church had mature-looking character. Years of hard work and endurance and doctrinal correctness. But Jesus saw beneath all of that and said, your love has moved. Which means maturity without love can become machinery. Discipline without love can become duty. Orthodoxy without love can become cold correctness. A church can have mature-looking character and still have a divided heart. And when the heart is divided, even faithful-looking work starts running on the wrong fuel.

So here is the framework I want you to walk away with. The thief on the cross shows us that a heart can be made pure in a moment without mature character. The church at Ephesus shows us that a people can display mature-looking character while losing purity of love. And the call to us is this: receive the pure heart by grace, let the Spirit form mature character over time, and keep returning to your first love so that maturity never becomes machinery.

And this is where I want us to let Scripture diagnose us. Not condemn us. Diagnose us. Because James says the tongue has a way of revealing the heart. James 3:9-10, NIV "With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God's likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be."

James is making a simple observation. The mouth reveals the heart. What comes out of us when we are disappointed, when we are frustrated, when we are hurt, that is not an accident. That is a window. And what the window shows is what economy we are actually living in. If it is the wage economy, the words will sound like it. If it is the gift economy, the words will begin to sound like that too.

And love sounds different than fear. Fear speaks to protect. Love speaks to restore. Fear accuses. Love confronts and stays. Fear defends. Love repents. If we are honest about what our words have sounded like lately, that is one of the clearest diagnostics we have.

So the question is not only, do I believe the right things. The question is, what is my life producing. What are my words revealing. Is my mouth bearing witness to perfect love, or is my mouth exposing a fear that has not yet been surrendered.

So let me ask you something honest before we go any further. Is what you are doing for God coming from love, or is it coming from obligation? Is it coming from a heart that has been with Him, or a heart that is just keeping the schedule? Are you a fleshly Christian, saved and Spirit-indwelt, but still operating out of the old engine?

And if the answer is yes, or even maybe, I want you to know that is not the end of the conversation. That is exactly where repentance begins. Not for the person who walked away. For the person who has been faithfully showing up and just got honest about what has been powering it.

So do not run from what you just felt. That feeling is not accusation. That is the Spirit doing what He does.

John 16:8, ESV "And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment."

Conviction is not condemnation. Condemnation crushes. Conviction calls. And what it is calling you toward right now is repentance.

What Holds Us Back · The Wage We've Been Drawing Billy Graham said, "Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged."

What holds us back from repenting? I believe fear does that.

If I was a betting man, there is a lot more fear in us than we know. The problem is, we've turned our fear into faith.

I want to tell you about something that happened this week. I was sitting with Pua on Thursday. And as we were talking I was already thinking about this sermon, already sitting with this question about fear and faith. And his son Uele walked in. Blue sunglasses. Sitting like he owned the room. And on his shirt it said, Faith Over Fear.

And underneath that it had a Scripture. Psalm 118:6.

Psalm 118:6 "The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?"

I sat there and I thought, that is the question right there. Not just faith over fear as a slogan on a shirt. The psalmist does not say, I worked up enough courage. He does not say, I tried harder. He says, the Lord is on my side. That is the swap. Not willpower over anxiety. The swap happens when you finally believe that God is actually for you. And that is exactly what the wage economy robs from you. When you are always working to earn love, always performing to maintain approval, you cannot fully believe that God is for you. You are too busy trying to stay on His good side to rest in the fact that He already put you there. In Christ. At the cross. Before you did anything to deserve it.

Fear is what we earn when we are not sure God is for us. Love is what we are given when we finally believe He is.

Look with me real quick at Romans chapter 6, verse 23.

Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Paul sets up what should be a parallel sentence. The wages of sin is death. Your brain is already finishing it: and the wages of righteousness is life. Paul refuses. He writes the free gift of God is eternal life. He took the word wages out completely and replaced it with gift. He killed the parallel on purpose. Because the gospel is not a better wage. The gospel is the end of wages altogether. Two different economies. Two different masters. The first runs on what you have earned. The second runs on what you have been given.

And most of us are running both at the same time. We say we believe in the gift. We sing about it. But when something goes wrong, when someone hurts us, when God feels distant, we go right back to work for the first one. We start performing. We start trying to earn our way back into safety.

The wage economy produces fear. The gift economy produces love.

When love has to be earned it stops being love and starts being a contract. And a contract will always make you afraid of the fine print. Afraid of what happens when you cannot hold up your end. Afraid to come back, afraid to repent, afraid to be honest, because somewhere underneath all the church attendance and service there is a quiet terror that you are not enough.

This originates from many different sources. Our personal experiences can cause us to turn fear into faith. There was a time I was hurt by a church that Alicia and I were attending, and my first response was to leave. I was mad. I was hurt. And as I began to become unchristlike in my speech, my wife sat me down and said, Hunny, we're not gonna leave the church. In that moment, Alicia led me into repentance and helped me realize that I was being held accountable.

Truth is, accountability is not church hurt. But church hurt can cause one to turn away from accountability. And fear can become so normal that we mistake it for just the way things are.

Perfect Love Casts Out Fear · 1 John 4:18 Before we go, can I share with you how one lives by faith while overcoming fear in love?

1 John 4:18 "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."

Perfect love. John said perfect love comes from God, and it drives out fear. When we are abiding in God and His love, what we find is the strength and courage to face our fears rather than hide them. Perfect love comes from God and is not something we can generate on our own.

Charles Spurgeon said, "Perfect love is not found in the world. It is an exotic plant that does not grow in earthly soil. It is a gift from God, and is only to be found in those who are born of the Spirit and who have the mind of Christ."

Do you see that? A gift. Not a wage. Not something you produced. Not something you earned by showing up enough times or serving enough Sundays. A gift from God, freely given, freely received.

How does one begin this journey? It begins with repentance. But hear me, because this is important and I don't want you to miss it. Repentance is not just the door you walk through once and forget about. In our tradition we believe in initial salvation, the moment God meets you and brings you from death to life. But we also believe in ongoing salvation, the daily work of the Spirit sanctifying and shaping and deepening what He started. Repentance is not a one-time event. Repentance is a way of living. It is the posture of a heart that stays close to God. That keeps saying, here I am. All of me. Whatever you find.

That is what the church at Ephesus lost. Not the moment of conversion. The daily returning. The ongoing repentance that keeps the first love alive.

Let me just inject a question right here. Does your life show a posture of repentance? Not a moment. Not a memory of a moment. A posture. The way you carry yourself toward God every day. The way you respond when the Spirit puts His finger on something. The way you come back when you drift.

Is that who you are? · Is that how you live?

Because here is the difference. A moment of repentance says, I am sorry for what I did. A posture of repentance says, I am staying close enough to God that when something is wrong, I know it, and I bring it. One is a transaction. The other is a relationship. One happens once. The other happens every day for the rest of your life. And it is the second one that keeps the lampstand burning.

But I know what some of you are feeling right now. Because I have felt it too. The reason most of us don't live with a posture of repentance is not stubbornness. It is fear. We are afraid of what honesty will cost us. Afraid of what God will do with what He finds in there. Afraid that if we really open up, if we really let Him see all of it, the love might be withdrawn. So we manage God instead of meeting Him. We give Him the version of ourselves we think He can handle. We show up to church and we perform the right things and we keep the locked rooms locked.

And then we wonder why the fear never goes away.

Here is what I want you to hear. And I need you to really hear this.

Christ did not die so you would have a religion to perform. He died to reconcile you to God. To forgive your sin. To break the power of death over your life. To make you holy. And in doing all of that, He made honesty possible without fear. He made repentance feel like coming home instead of walking into a courtroom.

The cross is the proof that God already knows the worst of it and came anyway. He saw every locked room. He knew every fear you have dressed up as faithfulness. He saw every moment you performed for Him instead of running to Him. He saw all of it, at Calvary, before the nails went in, and He went through with it. Which means you are not going to surprise Him. You are not going to show Him something that changes His mind about you.

He died for this. He died so that you and I would never have to manage God from a safe distance again. He died so that honesty would not be dangerous. He died so that the posture of repentance would feel like coming home instead of walking into a courtroom.

He died for our unity. He died so we could feel safe enough to be honest with our own hearts.

And when a room full of people are all living that way, not performing for each other, not managing their image, but genuinely honest before God together, that is where real community happens. That is where the first love comes back. That is where the lampstand stays lit.

2 Chronicles 7:14 "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Humility. That is the word. Not performance. Not production. Not a longer quiet time or a better church attendance record. Humility. The posture of a heart that has stopped pretending and started coming honestly.

It begins with Him. God told us in Hosea that He will freely love them when they repent from their iniquity.

1 John 4:19 "We love because he first loved us."

John 15:4 "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me."

Living in perfect love means actively seeking to love God and others with our whole hearts. Not because we are afraid of what happens if we don't. Because we have received something so real, so costly, so freely given, that love becomes the only response we have left.

Matthew 22:37-39 "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Why Do I Keep Living This Way But before I close I have to ask the harder question. Why do I keep living this way?

I mean, if perfect love casts out fear, and God's love is freely given, and the gift is right there in His open hand, then why am I still afraid? Why do I still wake up on Monday morning and go right back to performing? Why does repentance feel so hard? Why does coming back to my first love feel like climbing a mountain every single time? Can we be honest about this? Because I think we have been giving ourselves a cheap answer to a very deep problem.

The cheap answer is this: I just need to try harder. I need to be more disciplined. I need to show up more, pray more, serve more, give more. And if I do those things consistently enough, the fear will go away and the love will come.

That is not the gospel. That is the wage economy with a Christian label on it.

The real answer is harder than that. The real answer is that sin is deeper in us than we think it is. Not just the sins we commit. The sin underneath the sins. The condition beneath the behavior. The thing the theologians call the carnal nature, the bent in us that curves inward, that defaults to self-preservation, self-justification, self-promotion, that reaches for control before it reaches for God.

The reason fear stays is not lack of effort. It is something older and deeper than that. There is something in the human heart, the theologians call it the carnal nature, that does not trust the gift. That cannot receive what it has not earned. That would rather manage God from a safe distance than surrender to Him completely.

And a pastoral note here before we go further. This is not talking about the fear the body feels when real danger is present. It is not talking about fear that comes from trauma that needs patient and gentle healing. That is real and God meets people there. This is about the spiritual fear that keeps the soul hiding from God. The fear that turns religion into performance and repentance into a transaction.

And here is the thing about cheap grace. Cheap grace says, God loves you, so relax. Don't worry about it. You're fine. It receives the forgiveness and refuses the transformation. It says yes to being saved and no to being sanctified. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ. Because cheap grace does not cast out fear. It just covers it over. The fear is still there underneath, still running, still drawing its paycheck.

Real grace is costly. Not because it can be purchased. Christ paid that cost at the cross. But the grace that forgives also claims. It heals. It calls to surrender. Real grace does not leave a person where it found them. It does not just forgive the debt. It moves the soul into a different house entirely. Not a worker trying to earn their keep. A beloved child who has already been given everything. The root of fear is this. A heart that does not fully believe the love is free. Underneath the theology, underneath the church attendance, underneath the service and the giving, there is a place that is still waiting for God to change His mind. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Still convinced that if He really saw everything, the love would turn out to be conditional after all.

That is the root. That is where the fear lives. And no amount of trying harder pulls that root up. Only the Spirit of God, given access to the deep places, invited in with honesty and humility and real repentance, can do that work.

Fear is what we earn. Love is what we are given.

Not cheap love. Not easy love. Not love that winks at your sin and sends you on your way unchanged. The love that went to a cross. The love that absorbed every wage the slave master ever wrote your name on. The love that says, I know everything about you, every locked room, every hidden thing, every fear you have dressed up as faithfulness, and I am not walking away. I am not changing my mind. You are mine. Now let me in.

That is the love that casts out fear. Not because you finally got it together. Because He finally got all of you.

Closing So the question before we close is simply this. Is this church standing in God's light or living in darkness? Is there a posture of repentance here, or has the lampstand quietly gone dim? And if so, is there a willingness to face the fear, to kneel in humility before a holy God and come back to the first love?

Fear never stands a chance when we stand in God's perfect love.

The wage has been drawing fear out of you for a long time. But the gift, the free gift of God, is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. You don't have to keep cashing that old check. You can open your hand and receive what He has already decided to give. Come back to your first love. Repent. Receive. Abide.

Falcon Community Church of the Nazarene · Peyton, Colorado