1 John 4:18 English Standard Version (ESV) There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
When we love someone we do not want that love challenged. It hurts hearing a loved one saying “You don’t love me any more.” Those are words we do not want to hear our Lord say to us.
We fear that our sins say to our Lord that we do not love Him perfectly. If we allow fear to influence our image of ourselves in Christ this is true, we are not perfect in love.
Perhaps we should define sin in a way that we now longer fear sin.
What is sin?
One definition is a law breaker. If we break God’s law we are a sinner. Do we know all of the law? Which laws, man’s, God’s or both? One answer to that is that we are no longer under the law but under grace. Does grace have a law? Does being gracious mean we are keeping the law of grace? What does that mean? Does it even exist?
This leads us into the trap of performance based quilt. Guilty consciences lead us towards repentance and seeking forgiveness. Those are emotions based on our perception of sin.
Most of us do not know about a law until we are caught violating that law. We are ignorant of many laws. We are not ignorant of perfect love because we have been told in 1 Corinthians 13 how love acts.
If we focus on what love is and how it acts we will stop thinking about sin. It still exists but it will not be our focus. Thinking about sin does not prevent us from acting on it. Likewise focusing on perfect love does not guarantee we will perform it perfectly. It will however give us a measuring stick to gauge our performance.
Some have described sin as missing the target of perfect love. We aim to love and perfect love is that little red circle in the middle of the target. If we hit it we feel good, if we miss it we feel bad. We tend to believe that practice makes perfect. If we practice more we will get better scores. That is just a mechanism for making ourselves feel good emotionally.
Here is a secret for hitting that perfect love target.
Get closer.