1 John: Fearless - Audio
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If you rewind a couple of weeks, I do want to thank Scott. It's Scott here. Thanks, Scott, for preaching last week. First of the first week with the chairs. Thank you, sir. I listened to his message. And man, the whole bit about the hooker is pretty great. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should go back and listen to it. It's available on our YouTube channel. But if you cast back three weeks ago, we talked about John telling us what the love of God is. And we found that the love of God is always on mission to rescue, save, liberate, forgive, redeem. It's always on mission. And also, the love of God always costs. It hurts a little bit. It costs us something. And so today, John's going to just tell us a little bit of the good news about what that means. A little side bit about some good things that are the side effect of loving the way God loves. And so let's just look at, it's just two verses. Let's take them apart. This is 1 John 4, 17 to 18. This is how love has reached its goal with us. So we have confidence in the day of judgment that we are just like Jesus in this world. Fear is not in love. Instead, mature love drives out fear because fear carries punishment, whoever is afraid, has not yet reached love's goal. This text is actually very difficult in Greek. Greek was John's second language. And so sometimes when he's writing, it gets a little confusing about what he's trying to do. And so I've tried to separate it out here to make it very clear that that bit about the confidence in the day of judgment, that's sort of like a parenthetical. So what we want to take a look at first is what does it mean for love to have reached its goal with us? Other translations might say things like when love has become perfect, mature. But really, there's two Greek words that are in the background of this text. They get used over and over and over again. They're the verb and noun forms of telos or telo, tel, tel. And what that means is it means goal reaching, maturity, getting to the end, the end of what you're aiming for. So when we hear the word perfect,
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The love of God is always on mission to rescue, save, liberate, forgive, redeem. Today, we learn from John some of the good things that are the side effect of loving the way God loves.