Fear and Love

     Fear and love,  Those ideas have been in the front of my mind the last few days. The more I thought about it the more I saw how they are connected. When we love there is no room for fear. 1 John 4:18 " There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."  When we love someone we trust them, leaving no room for fear, but fear destroys trust and smothers love. In the movie Star Wars episode 1: The Phantom Menace Yoda says to young Anakin Skywalker, in the evaluation if he should train as a Jedi, “Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” This is a fact that we see every day. We fear those that are different, so we get angry. Then that anger grows and becomes hate. That hate festers and boils till it bubbles out of us and we hurt those we fear and sometimes those who are totally innocent. Which just breeds more fear, the the cycle counties. To stop the cycle we need love, perfect love. So what is "perfect love"? Perfect Love is everything 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 says " Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,  Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.  Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." Perfect love is a sacrificial love, John 15:13 "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." From these two passages we see what perfect love is, I could go on all night, so I will close this post with this thought. The perfect example of this kind of love is found in Jesus Christ. He loved us so much at the cross, that 2000 years later fear still can't survive at the foot of the cross. 

brokenness

        Broken, defective, out of date and just plain wrong. Those are just a few of the reasons we give for not liking, returning and trowing out the material things in our lives. The sad thing is these are also the reasons we give for not loving, caring, and doing away with the people that come in to our lives. What a sad picture! This world is full of people hating others for being different, full of abortion of kids that might have a "defect", and full of humans being thrown to the side because we have deemed them to far broken.
        What if we could take the picture and flip it? Just like we can take the material things that get broken and fix them, might  I say restore them. What if we had a place where the heart of  the issues in this world could get fixed, restored?  You laugh and say "There is no place that all of the things we call defects and brokenness in a person could be fixed." I tell you there is. Now it might not be a place one can physically see, but a place of the soul. That place is at the feet of Jesus. We are told that one day God will make a new heaven and a new earth with no suffering, no tears, and no pain. So we need to sit and wait for this future day when God make all things new? NO! We don't. We cannot change the everything right now, but what if we changed the way we look at life? What if we look at others as God looks at us? What would happen if instead of broken we saw the healing God could do? Instead of defective we saw God's strength? How this world would change! The bible tells many many stores of how God took the weak and even the broken to accomplish great things. So I pose rather then looking at the world like men that we should look at men with Gods eyes.