Fearless, reckless love

Make no mistake, however. Christian ascesis is not only, or even especially

about moderation, self-control, wisdom.

It is the folly of those who in Christ fling themselves into the furnace of the spirit,

of those who have something in common with fire. Olivier Clement

     I started on the issue of fear in my last post and I thought it might be helpful to someone if I continued on the subject of fear a bit. (Btw, Marshall liked some of these ideas of mine! :) )

     As I briefly mentioned in another post, I had a couple of bad experiences as a teenager with sexual predators and one since then. So when I was in college and working a night-job as a waitress I dealt with fear walking home alone at night. But I knew that God didn’t want me to live in fear. So, one night when I had gotten off from work a bit early, I decided to confront with Him these demons head-on. I took my one-person tent and headed up to the mountain park behind my town to sleep and pray my way through the night. After praying and trusting the Lord and receiving His peace and sleeping most of the night, I didn’t struggle with fear nearly so much afterwards. (I don’t counsel anyone else to do this, though.)

     We don’t want to make decisions based on fear. I once wanted to write a book about fear, and still might some day, because this is a mark of His disciples—fearless, reckless love. Paul counsels the Philippians that we should be

not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. Phil 1:28

This word translated here as "frightened" or as “intimidated” is "extremely rare, found nowhere else in the entire Greek Bible. But it is used on occasion in classical Greek of timid horses that shy upon being startled at some unexpected object (LSJ). Perhaps by the choice of this unusual word Paul shows himself anxious that his friends should not 'break loose in disarray' (Martin [1976], 84) or lose control of themselves as a result of the attacks of their adversaries." (Hawthorne, WBC Vol. 43). We don’t want to be startled or lose control of ourselves, our presence/carriage/comportment in the Lord, by acting on fear.

     Jesus’s students were fearless, too. Remember that it was Peter and John’s courage that caused the Sanhedrin to realize that they were Jesus followers.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13, NIV)

     So how do we receive from the Lord this fearless love? “What’s the worst that can happen?” is a question I refer to to be able to face up to fears. Then, with the Lord’s guidance, I determine whether I could face/trust those results with Him. Once when we were facing being evicted, a friend who had experienced such a thing said to me, “You live.”

     So when you encounter a fearful situation, of whatever kind, a person first has a physical reaction. It’s natural. After waiting through that rush of the body’s chemicals and their effect on your nervous system—through prayer, singing and listening to Christian songs, distractions like funny movies, scents like candles, speaking in tongues (which I recently described to a non-Christian as kinda like meditation), whatever—you can proceed to getting the Lord’s guidance.  We can also be inspired here by the testimony of the early Christian martyrs and Hebrews 11’s heroes.

     After this, I find that it’s important to differentiate between certain feelings and thoughts. We lived in a house on stilts in Virginia Beach and we had a Nor’Easter hit one night. The house was shaking so badly the fan on the ceiling was swaying. So I had an occasion to deal with fear! Once I could work through the physical sensations, I could analyze the situation with the Holy Spirit. I felt the Lord say to me—“Caution is not the same thing as fear.” I realized that I could figure out in the Holy Spirit what belonged to the area of caution, like, would the house fall down for which the answer was probably not, and what belonged to the area of fear, like the half percent chance that the house would go down! Caution is important; taking precautions against putting yourself into dangerous situations, locking the door, etc. But the other side of this is that every day we have the possibility of having bad things happen to us—if we listen to those voices we’d never go out the door. (As a side note, sometimes we have to walk in blind faith, not understanding what's going on, but just based on His leadings.)

     Other Christians have equally good ways of dealing with fear, but these principles work to deal with most forms of fear for me. When I worked in DC I frequently was in discussion meetings with some of The Most Powerful People in the world, staffers of senators, the men and women leaders of the world’s most influential organizations, etc. DC is actually a pretty small community;  I now see people I’ve talked to almost every other time someone has a news program on. For me, one who has very little knowledge of politics and government, even opening my mouth and offering suggestions was a miracle from God.

     Blessings.