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. — 1 John 4:18 The man who wrote those words did not begin there.
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.— 1 John 4:18
The man who wrote those words did not begin there.
When Jesus first named him, the name was not gentle. Sons of Thunder (Mark 3:17). That was what He called John and his brother James. When a Samaritan village refused to welcome them, John’s question was immediate: Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them? (Luke 9:54). Thunder was his native language. His instinct, when rejected, was fire.
Something happened to him over a long, slow stretch of years. By the night of the Last Supper, this same man was leaning against the chest of Jesus (John 13:23). Later, when the other disciples fled, John stayed. He stood at the foot of the cross. And from the cross, Jesus looked down and saw him there, and entrusted His mother to his care. Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother (John 19:26-27). In His final moments, with everything else stripped away, Jesus looked down and gave her to the one who had stayed.
John watched what love looked like when it went all the way.
The man who wrote there is no fear in love was the same man who once called for fire. He knew, because he had watched love do it to him, slowly, at close range, over years.
I find that more persuasive than any argument I could make.
For most of human history, people approached their gods afraid. The ancient world ran on appeasement. The gods were powerful and unpredictable, quick to anger, impossible to fully satisfy. Blood had to flow. Offerings had to be precise. One wrong move, one missed ritual, and the disaster you had been trying to prevent might arrive anyway. The logic was always the same: keep the god appeased, or face whatever it decides to send.
This is not relationship. It is transaction. The posture of people who are never quite sure they are safe.
The God John describes turned this upside down. He did not demand blood. He gave His own.
God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. — Romans 5:8
Not after we got our offerings right. Not after we had crossed whatever threshold we imagined love required. While we were still wrong, still reaching for fire in all the wrong directions.
Every other religion says: bleed for your god. The gospel says: your God bled for you.
That reversal is where fear begins to lose its ground.
Most of us know a particular kind of fear. It arrives at 3am without warning and hands you a list: everything you’ve done wrong, everything you might lose, the version of yourself you are afraid is the real one.
The writer of Hebrews does not soften what that fear actually is. People were subject to lifelong slavery through fear of death (Heb. 2:15). Not just afraid of dying. Enslaved by it. Arranging their entire lives around the one thing they could not prevent or control.
The 3am list is just the surface. Underneath it is the oldest fear of all: standing before God one day and not being enough. Not just failing here, but failing finally. That is what John means by punishment. Not the small verdicts. The last one.
That is the fear perfect love casts out. Not only the manageable ones. The one with no bottom.
Peter had lived this from the inside.
The night Jesus walked toward His disciples on the water, Peter climbed out of the boat. For a moment, he walked. Then he saw the wind, he was afraid (Matt. 14:30), and he began to sink. Across Scripture and the ancient world, the sea carried the image of chaos itself, the deep that swallows, the world in its most threatening form.
He did not sink because the water changed. He sank because he looked at it.
When his eyes were on Jesus, he walked on what should have drowned him. The moment he turned toward the chaos, the wind, the waves, the sheer impossibility of what he was standing on, fear rushed in and the water won. The sea had not moved. Peter had. His gaze had.
This is what fear does. It turns our eyes toward the very thing that terrifies us, and then tells us that what we see is the final word.
But the story does not end in the water.
After the resurrection, at dawn, on a beach, Jesus made a fire. He called Peter to it. Three times He asked the same question: Do you love me? (John 21:15-17). Once for each denial on that last night before the cross, the night Peter had stood by another fire, in another courtyard, and said three times that he did not know the man.
Each time, Peter gave the same answer: You know that I love you. Not a defense. Not an apology. The third time he added one thing: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you (John 21:17).
This is not just an appeal to omniscience. It is something deeper. You know everything means: you see every denial, every failure, every moment I stood by a fire and chose myself over you. You see all of it. And you are still here, asking. Peter’s certainty did not rest in his own faithfulness. It rested in being fully known by a love that had not moved.
From that morning on, something had shifted in Peter. The man who had been paralyzed by the question of a servant girl later stood before crowds, before councils, before death itself, and did not flinch. Tradition holds he was crucified upside down, at his own request, not feeling worthy to die the same way as his Lord.
The water could not hold the man who had learned where to fix his eyes.
Fear of death could not hold him either.
The 3am fears are real. The fear underneath them is real. But perfect love is not a strategy for managing fear. It is something that arrived before we were ready, on a cross we did not ask for, through a resurrection we could not have imagined, and it speaks directly into the deepest fear we carry.
Try harder won’t do it. Be less afraid won’t either.
There is only one way fear is finally cast out: come to Jesus. Not with an offering in hand, not after you have gotten yourself ready, but as Peter did: to a fire He has already made, to a question He is already asking. Stay long enough to know His love. Let it reach the places where fear has been living.
That is what John meant. Perfect love casts out fear. Not our effort. Not our resolve. His love alone. The love that bled for us, that knows us fully, that asks do you love me? not to condemn but to restore. That love is the only love perfect enough to do what nothing else can.
Do you love me?
We were not made to stand before that question afraid. We were made to answer it the way Peter did, from the inside of being known and loved: You know. You know that I love you.
And if you are reading this carrying something you haven’t told anyone, a fear with no bottom, a verdict you have been dreading: come to Him first. Let His love reach you there.
The perfect love that defeated death has already found you.
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