Fear and love
From Miss Rachel Tingle Sir: Martin Sullivan is right in saying that fear and love are constantly rattled round in religious vocabularies, but he fails to make clear the important distinction that Christians are to love and fear (revere God) and that one of the first, steps towards becoming a Christian', is an awareness of our sinfulness and Of how far short of God we fall as revealed by his law which leads to us being in fear (afraid) of God.
The way of overcoming fear in the latter sense is through Jesus Christ who alone is the, perfect love which casts out fear.' He takes our own sin upon Himself, thereby allowing us to approach God directly without being afraid. That perfect love was also concerned that through truth in him we should be afraid of nothing, as is made clear in this well known exhortion to fear not, for even the hairs on our heads are numbered by our Father in Heaven who knows all our needs.
Martin Sullivan asks how we can rove -God whom we have not seen and of whose voice we hear but a Whisper. Through the pages of the Bible, however, we can come to know Jesus who was the perfect image of God and who was himself God, and as we are driven daily by our own sins to the cross for cleaning we come to appreciate increasingly the enormity of His sacrifice which could have been made only through the depth of His love for us. It is because He first loved us in this way that we long to repay Him, but we have nothing to offer in return apart from our love to Him. It is this love for Him and His Spirit within us which then enables us to start to enjoy the relationship with God which the Jews found unattainable through the law, and at the same time to begin ourselves' to obey the law. It is truly as we come '16-"feirai-id understand as all God's' Ellitdren --s-hciulT,how long, how wide, hovir deep, and how high His love really is, and to experience this love for ourselves, though it is so great that we will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it" that we cease to be afraid of God but come into a deep reverence of God our Father.
Rachel Tingle 'Flat 8, 14 The Paragon, Blackheath, London SE3
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