'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.'--1 John iv. 18.
John has been speaking of boldness, and that naturally suggests its
opposite--fear. He has been saying that perfect love produces courage in
the day of judgment, because it produces likeness to Christ, who is the
Judge. In my text he explains and enlarges that statement. For there is
another way in which love produces boldness, and that is by its casting
out fear. These two are mutually exclusive. The entrance of the one is
for the other a notice to quit. We cannot both love and fear the same
person or thing, and where love comes in, the darker form slips out at
the door; and where Love comes in, it brings hand in hand with itself
Courage with her radiant face. But boldness is the companion of love,
only when love is perfect. For, inconsistent as the two emotions are,
love, in its earlier stages and lower degrees, is often perturbed and
dashed by apprehension and dread.
Now John is speaking about the two emotions in themselves, irrespective,
so far as his language goes, of the objects to which they are directed.
What he is saying is true about love and fear, whatever or whosoever
may be loved or dreaded. But the context suggests the application in his
mind, for it is 'boldness before him' about which he has been speaking;
and so it is love and fear directed towards God which are meant in my
text. The experience of hosts of professing Christians is only too
forcible a comment upon the possibility of a partial Love lodging in the
heart side by side with a fellow-lodger, Fear, whom it ought to have
expelled. So there are three things here that I wish to notice--the
empire of fear, the mission of fear, and the expulsion of fear.