Fear of Love

By F. L. Lemley

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     The "apostle of love" assures us, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). But a legalistic clergy combined with a dictatorial eldership finds it necessary to invoke and promote fear to keep the membership in line. The fear of being mistaken is constantly drilled into the minds of the members along with the false assumption that every mistake is fatal.

     Mistaken teachers are equated with false teachers and every godly, consecrated soul who falls into intellectual error is forthwith consigned to hell along with those whose hearts are depraved. This form of legalism so blinds its victims that they cannot discern by the fruits, the criterion which Jesus gave by which to judge a tree (Matthew 7:20). This was the mistake of the Pharisees. They held that doctrine, as defined by themselves, was more important than good fruit. Consequently, when Jesus healed a man on the sabbath and went through the fields plucking heads of grain and rubbing them in his hands, the Pharisees

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automatically denounced him. They carried a doctrinal yardstick (which is best designated a "mint and dill" stick) and it mattered not how many were healed of leprosy, how many were cured of blindness, how many were raised from the dead. Jesus violated their doctrine of the sabbath so he had to be crucified. Love (a fruit) should take precedence over our inferences, deductions and interpretations, but those who trust in legalism, do not judge by love.

     When it is urged that we seek by love to remedy some of the schisms among us, there are those who falsely assume that if we enlarge the circle of love to take in a brother with whom we have a derived doctrinal difference, we must therefore enlarge the circle to take in unbelievers. This is clearly an appeal to prejudice and fear. Impassioned warnings about making our circle of love too large will cause many to fear to recognize brethren who have obeyed the same gospel as ourselves, and that same fear will cause them to treat such brethren as pious pagans. A pious Buddhist would get as much recognition in some of our assemblies as would a member of another branch of the "restoration brotherhood."

     Those doctrines arrived at by a process of human reasoning are not as important as fruit. All of the doctrines over which we divide are derived by human reasoning, or misreasoning. Conclusive arguments for or against "our issues" are impossible for the simple reason that God is silent on all of these matters. It ill-becomes us to make fear of enlarging our circle of love to include all of God's children, a rationale for rejecting them. Good fruit is vastly more important than humanly-derived doctrines, so let us not discount fruit in favor of such doctrine. It is a sin to destroy fruit through fear.

     Obviously, we must not enlarge the circle to include unbelievers in our fellowship, but our brethren are not unbelievers. They are children of God and to deny them is to reflect against their parentage. "Everyone who loves the parent loves the child" (1 John 5:1).