A Kettle and Two Sachets

It is the same tray in every hotel in the country. A small white kettle with a lid that has to be pressed twice. Two sachets, one of which is decaffeinated and which nobody has ever knowingly used. Two of the little pots of milk. A wrapped biscuit that is either a great pleasure or a disappointment and there is no third option.

Two nights, for work. She has done a great many of these.

The room is fine. There is a picture of a bridge on the wall, and the radiator is on a system nobody understands, and the window opens about four inches for reasons of health and safety.

She used to pray last thing at night, in rooms like this, for years.

It was the best praying of her life, honestly. Away from the house, nothing to do, nobody to be anything for, and forty minutes with the light off before sleep. She would have told you those rooms were where she knew God best.

That stopped about eighteen months ago.

It stopped because she read a verse and heard it as a verdict. She read that perfect love casts out fear, and that he that feareth is not made perfect in love, and she is a person who is afraid, most nights, of a thing she did a long time back, and she read that clause and understood it to be saying something about her that finished the conversation.

So now she lies in those rooms braced, with the four inches of window and the noise of the road, and she does not pray.

Sit down on the end of the bed with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a good while ago, took it to God straight and meant every word, and has read one clause as a ruling on herself.

And before you brace: naming it is not a condition of anything here, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not have that said.

Whose completeness the verse is talking about

Here is the whole verse, because the whole verse is the answer.

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 4:18

The word behind perfect is teleios. It does not mean flawless. It means complete, finished, brought all the way to its end. It is the word you would use of a thing that has arrived at what it was for.

Now read the subject of the sentence. It is not you. It is love. Perfect love casteth out fear. The love is what does the casting, and the completeness in question is love's completeness rather than yours.

And John has spent the whole chapter telling you whose love he means. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us. It is His love that is being described, and His love is not partial and not unfinished and not waiting on your condition.

So the last clause is not a verdict on the frightened. It is a description of what happens where that love has not yet been received all the way through: fear is still there, because the casting has not yet reached that far in.

That is a statement about ground still to be covered, and it is not a statement about who you are.

You are loved by a love that is complete in itself, and you were never the one whose completeness was in question. I am not softening the text. The written word makes love the subject and the caster in that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman lying in the dark in a room with a picture of a bridge on the wall.

Fear has a punishment in it, and that is the diagnosis

Now the middle clause, because it is the kindest one and everybody reads past it.

Because fear hath torment. The word is a punishment word. It means a penalty, a chastisement, something that hurts on purpose.

John is not telling you that fear is naughty. He is telling you what fear does, which is that it carries a punishment inside itself, and that anybody living under it is being punished by it.

That is a diagnosis and it is spoken with sympathy, and it explains exactly why love is described as casting the thing out rather than persuading it to leave. You do not reason with a thing that is punishing somebody. You get it out of the house.

You are being carried toward a place where a punishment is thrown out of your house, and you were never the one holding the door for it. Scripture puts the casting in love's hands and calls fear a punishment, and it is His Spirit, not eighteen months of trying harder, who does the removing.