Constant Goodness

Fear No Fear is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that reject fear and champion faith in God. It explains that fear is a spiritual force used by Satan to keep people down, but perfect love casts out fear. The transcription also discusses God's goodness and his desire for fellowship with his children. It emphasizes that God's power is unmatched and that we should align ourselves with his will. The transcription also explores the concept of sin and punishment, highlighting that God wants to punish sin, not us. It concludes with the message that God sent Jesus to pay for our sins and restore the relationship between God and humanity. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Genesis 43.23 He said, Peace be to you. Don't be afraid. Your God and the God of your father has given you treasure in your sacks. I received your money. He brought Simeon out to them. The problem with God is that he's good. Why is this a problem? Because our minds are wrapped up in guilt, fault, and blame. It's been that way before time was reckoned as time. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the snake, and the snake shrugged his shoulders and said, I was just talking about fruit. Everyone wants to be not in trouble, which means we're always concerned with trouble. Where is it? What is it? And who's in it? Especially if we are. God isn't like that. We sinned, rebelled, committed treason. God was wrathful, not toward us, toward sin. Sin cannot exist with God. God is total, pure, unadulterated righteousness. Sin ceases to exist in his presence. If we remained in sin, we would cease to exist when we got around him. That's why he kicked them out of the garden. If they ate from the tree of life, they would exist in sin forever, Genesis 3.22. Bye-bye paradise, and hello opportunity to get right with God, to return to fellowship. Standing in the way, though, was God's wrath toward sin. Just sin, not us. But still, wrath and the payment of the price, which is death, Genesis 2.16-17 and Romans 6.23. The cross took care of all of that wrath, price of sin. We don't need to try and blame anyone anymore. He isn't blind to anything. But thanks to the resurrection of Jesus, he sees the best. God doesn't look at sin anymore, because in Jesus, he doesn't have to. He sees things not as they are, but as they can be, 1 Samuel 16.7. Us, those around us, and the situations we find ourselves in, and he does things. Right from the beginning he did them, John 17.24. Always moving, doing, and creating, Psalm 90.1-2. He loves it. It's part of who he is. But we just don't understand it. We can't. We think on the level of dust. We toil, strive, struggle, sweat, and blame everyone so we don't get punished. God thinks in the multidimensional level of metaphysics squared. Isaiah 55.8-9. It isn't the same. We're still playing the blame game. God isn't. We see the impossible, the improbable, and the plain old weird happen when we deal in the presence of God. When we dwell in the presence of God. And why shouldn't we? He's mighty, holy, and about a thousand other words just off the top of my head. He's impossibly big, improbably magnificent from our point of view. And beyond our ability to describe in words, he is, for lack of anything else, awesome. He's also a father who wants to play with his kids. Give us a hug, read us a story, tell a dad joke. Believe me. I was searching for my commentary of the book of Genesis to look up something. I didn't understand it, I couldn't find it. It was right there, just the other day. Searched the house, tore things apart. Zilch. Nada. I was frustrated. I called out loudly, God, I need a word of revelation about where Genesis is. The immediate response, it's at the front of the Bible. Ha, ha, ha. I smiled, you know, nice, thank you, very helpful, har har. But in a little bit, when I went back to my neat workplace, I moved a stack of books that were on the floor. The bottom book was my New International Version Study Bible. And in front of that, underneath the coffee table, my commentary on Genesis. Right in the front of the Bible. Ha, ha. Could he have just told me? Of course he could, but this was punnier. And he does love to laugh. It was also true, unexpected, and out of left field. Much of what God does can seem that way, and that is very, very good news. Why is that? Well, look at what humankind has discovered. What we've built, accomplished, and learned. Amazing things. The pyramids, airplanes, artificial organs, ramen noodles, space flight, virtual reality, electric cars, human rights, and duct tape. They all pale to what God has done, what God understands, and what God can do. He hung stars, designed cells. Have you ever seen the inside of a cell? It's city-level complexity in there. Check out the sciences sometime. They're a textbook on the glory of God. There isn't a single thing that science can tell us that doesn't wow on the God level. Look at the laws he set up. The minuetta to existence. The way everything is kind of connected to everything else. Aerodynamics, the age of rocks, fossils, development of a species, seeds, and how they produce the speed of light inside an atmosphere versus the speed of light outside an atmosphere, etc., etc., etc. It's amazing stuff. And there's more that we don't even know we have yet to discover about what he's done. The moment man sinned, he was under a penalty of death, Genesis 2.17. It was inevitable. But God didn't enact the punishment immediately because then we would be dead. Instead, he found a way to save us, to bring us back from where we put ourselves if we let him. You see, he didn't want us in darkness and ignorance. He wanted us in light, in knowledge, all that amazing stuff. He wanted us to experience it and more. And he wanted us to experience it with him. He gave us choice and restriction in order to confer on us authority so we could walk in what he'd made for us. And he didn't take it away as soon as we messed up. We still have the choice and restriction. We have the right to choose. We can choose to worship things that don't live, aren't real, or are a false power. We can choose not to believe everything, to fight back and kick and scream against deity. We can choose any path but his. These are all options. The human mind is infinitely willing to entertain thoughts of the supernatural until you get to God. Then things get real and rejected quick. But that is our right, our gift from God, choice. He loved us then. He loves us now. And he will continue to love us no matter what we do, say, or believe. The hard and sad truth is that he will love us as we choose to walk into hell screaming and flipping the bird at him. He will love us for eternity, no matter what we choose. We will either be saved through the blood of Jesus or we will shed our own blood. Either way, sin is going to be punished. We get to choose which way it is. You see, God is ultimate power. God is the only power, really. All other power in the universe is just a reflection of his power. You're a witch. You're using power to accomplish things. It's reflected God. A spiritual entity is reflecting it to use it like you can take a mirror and reflect sunlight. And just like sunlight can fry an ant, the reflection of God's power is an abomination and the resulting sin-light will fry both you and the supernatural entity reflecting it. Deuteronomy 18, 10-12. Witchcraft, sorcery, and everything else like it is rebellion against God. It's the devil using the fallen world around us to sell us what could be had for free in the kingdom of God. And that right there is his entire plan for everything. You see, in the kingdom of God, we can speak to mountains and they will move. Mark 11, 23-24. Alongside God, hand in hand, we can do anything because when we do them with God, nothing is impossible. Matthew 19, 26. So, why don't we use this world-changing, physics-ignoring power to alter what is around us all the time? That restriction part. You know, choice and restriction? Because it's God's power, not ours. We need to move aligned with his will, not ours. We're, I want people. God is biggest possible picture ever, and I'm connecting everything with everything, people. When we do it his way, all things are possible. When we grab it to do it our way, it's witchcraft and sin. So, why does he allow all of this? Why does he let the world prosper in sin? Why does he let people steal from him? Why does he give us choice? Love. It's because of love. He doesn't want to punish us. He wants to punish sin. You see, hell was made for the devil and his angels. It was not made for us. He wants us to realize the error of our ways and the foolishness of our arrogance and come to him. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come into him and will dine with him and he with me. Revelation 3, 19-20. God wants us with him, but he's not forcing us. He wants us with him. That's why he doesn't strike us dead. That's why he sent the law to point the way to the need for Jesus. Salvation and glory and power belong to our God for his judgments are true and just. Revelation 19-1. He could use that power to harm us, hurt us, control us. Face it, we would in his place. But he doesn't. Thank you, God. You are so good to us. He sent Jesus and Jesus volunteered to pay for sin and wipe that whole thing away, remove the barrier, the wrath. Now it's all back to the way it was and should be. God and us together in Jesus. We are together in Jesus. It's the way it should have always been. He gifts us, hugs us, makes us smile, kisses our wounds, heals, nurtures, and a dozen other things. He is good. And he does good things. Most of which confound us either in why he would, why he thinks we deserve it, or how he pulled it off. And that makes him smile. He loves to make complicated things and then watch us unfurl them and figure them out and then realize just how simple they really are. Because they weren't complicated, they were just complex. Because he's a God of details as much as he's a God of giggles. Joy unspeakable, full of glory, above all, and with us every day, every minute, no matter who we are or what we are doing. Have you ever played with a baby? Have you ever made a baby giggle? Have you ever made a baby laugh? That pure joy, laughter, that's us. That's God and us. He never leaves. And he always blesses and almost never in ways that we understand. And thank God for that too. Ah! Life would be so dull if God wasn't God. Our daily affirmation of God's love is Psalm 86, especially verse 5. God abounds in steadfast love. He is copiously supplied with immovable love that isn't subject to change. Sometimes we doubt this. What do we hear? God says, don't do this, do this, or that thing is wrong. God says, Jesus is the only way to get into heaven. And we balk. How could a loving God say that or not let everyone in? Well, you know, I don't let my kids do anything they want. I have boundaries to protect them or to protect what's around them. God is love and he loves us even though his word goes. Even though it isn't always what we want, feel, or understand. It isn't God keeping us out. It's God letting us in. Sin keeps us out. Jesus came to remove that barrier, to restore relationship with the Father, to enable Holy Spirit to live inside us. God is about being with us, not gatekeeping. We don't see it from that position because we're selfish. We're all about flesh and explanation and proof. The fact that faith is foreign to us should be all the proof we need that we start in sin and are in sin until Jesus cleanses us. It should be all the proof we need that we need him to. The truth is that God has incredible amounts of determined and unchanging love for us no matter where we are, how we are, or what we're doing. And it's free to pick up. Grab yours today. There's enough for everyone. As we close, remember that you have birth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love and no end to the things about you that he loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent his only-born Son into the world, that we might live through him. And this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin. And it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because he first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.