Fear… Or Father's Embrace
What would your life be like if you had no fear?
What if you had no fear of man? No fear of what others think about you because you are secure in the love of your heavenly Father and in His kind thoughts toward you? No fear of opening your heart to truly experience the depth of God’s love so that you could live and give away that love to the next person you meet? What would your marriage be like? What would your family life be like? Your other relationships? What if you were not afraid to trust, to become vulnerable, to reach out and touch others, and to let them touch you? Fear paralyzes us. Fear can stop us from making choices that will bring us warmth, security, and abundant life full of love, peace, and tenderness.
What would your church be like if you had no fear? What if everyone in your local body of believers was set free of the fear of trusting, the fear of rejection or abandonment, and the fear of opening their hearts to love and intimacy? Fear disables us. We can know all about the things of God and yet our fear of trusting and of intimacy can hold us back from receiving the benefits of what Jesus died for—to bring restoration and healing in our families and our relationships. So many of us Christians do all the right Christian “stuff,” yet fear continues to hold us back from casting ourselves fully into our loving Father’s embrace.
Do you rise up every morning feeling like a son or daughter secure and confident in your Father’s love, and living to give that love to others? Or do you get up every day feeling like a slave, struggling constantly with fears of failure or rejection, unable to trust and wondering what you have to do to appease the Master today? Moving from slavery to sonship or daughtership is a matter of reaching the place where you get up in the morning feeling so loved and accepted in your Father’s heart that your whole purpose for existence becomes looking for ways to give that love away to the next person you meet.What would your life be like if you had no fear?
We either live our life as if we have a home, or we live our life as if we don’t have a home. We either live our life feeling safe, secure and at rest in Father’s heart, experiencing His love and giving it away, or we live our life with apprehension and uncertainty, struggling constantly with the fear of trusting, the fear of rejection, and the fear of opening up our heart to love—the three fears common to all people.
So many of us have hooked our lifeline (sense of security) into “counterfeit affections,” that sooner or later will entangle us in unrealized hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Instead of drawing our energy and our source of life and peace from the love of God, we try to find them in these counterfeit affections of performance, the passions of the flesh, power and control issues, possessions, position, people, or places. Somehow we think that unless we have these sources of comfort in our lives, we simply can’t go on.
Let’s be honest—we all have counterfeit sources of comfort, don’t we? Every one of us has people or possessions we turn to or attitudes or behaviors we fall back on when life does not go the way we want it to. Counterfeit affections exert a strong pull, even when we realize they are counterfeit. Sometimes it is easier to hold onto the familiar, and make it our lifeline even if it does not satisfy, than to risk letting go in order to grab hold of something else that will. When you’re out on the bow being tossed by every 20-foot wave and with sleet whipping against your face, it’s easy just to grab hold of whatever you can find and say, “I’ll just ride it out right here.” But unless you let go—unless you relinquish your grip on your false sense of security and comfort—you may never attain the true warmth and security of Father’s embrace.
Living life as if we have a home means living to experience God’s love on a continuing and ongoing basis and making that love known to others. As Christians, we are sons and daughters of God, yet so many of us live as if we don’t have a home. We live, think, and act like fatherless orphans because we have never truly embraced Father God’s love on a personal level. The storms, setbacks, and disappointments of life have made us afraid to trust, afraid to let go, afraid to risk becoming vulnerable by believing God when He says, “I love you.” Because we do not love ourselves, we feel unlovable and find it difficult if not impossible to believe that anyone else could love us, including God. The thought of Him loving us personally seems too good to be true...and much more than we deserve.
And that’s precisely the point: It is much more than we deserve. But it is also true. God Himself said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness” (Jer. 31:3b). Take that verse personally because God means it personally. God never created you to be an orphan with no home. He created you to be a beloved son or daughter who has found a home in His embrace.
