H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Spring Presbyterian
May 14, 2006
LEAVING THE LAND OF LOOK-BEHIND
I John 4:7-21
Ann Landers made a prosperous living out of common sense. She received thousands of letters each
month from people who described their problems and asked for advice. In an interview, Ann Landers was
asked if there’s any particular kind of problem that stands out above all the rest. Without hesitation the
columnist said that the problem that dominates all the others is fear.
And what is it we fear? Mostly we’re afraid on not being loved. Very few people would admit that. Instead
we say we’re afraid of failure, or afraid of rejection, or afraid of ending up alone, or afraid of what others will
think of them, or afraid the truth will come out, or afraid to be ourselves, or afraid to commit, or afraid to face
God.
Maybe at first glance, those all seem very different, but if you listen with your heart, what you’ll hear is
people saying, “I’m afraid nobody loves me.” Or “I’m afraid if I do this or don’t do that, I won’t be loved.” Or “I’m
not worth loving, and I’m afraid people are going to find out.”
If fear is the great problem and if not being loved is the great fear, then John the Elder has given us the
great answer. In love, says John, there is no room for fear, because perfect love casts out fear.
When someone really loves you—and you know that they love you—then it takes away the fear of letting
yourself be yourself. In that relationship you don’t have to be afraid of being branded a failure because you’re
not earning enough money. You don’t have to work so hard to appear younger than you are, or smarter, or
more sophisticated.
I remember being in a writing group a few years ago, and one of the women in the group had written a
scene in which a young woman meets an attractive man in a coffee shop. And in the story the woman is
mentally reviewing her looks as she chats with this man. Is this dress flattering? Is my hair all right? Will he
think my nose is too big? And I said, “Come on, Mardi, nobody sits around worrying that their nose is too big
when they meet someone.” And Mardi said quietly, “I do.” What she was really saying was, “I’m afraid the way I
look will keep people from loving me.”
Love sees things differently. It’s not that love is blind. The one who loves you may the one who is trying
the hardest to get you to quit smoking, or to lose weight, or to go back to school, or to find a better job. Real
love sees our warts and accepts us anyway.
There’s a cute story about a little boy who wanders into the lingerie department in search of a Mother’s
Day present. He’s looking at slips, and the sales person is helping him choose the right one. She says,
“What size is your mother?” and he says, “Oh, my mother is the perfect size.” So the boy carries home a size
32 slip, and the next day the mother comes in to exchange it for a size 54. The little boy didn’t measure his
mother against the standard of some half-starved fashion model; he measured his mother by the yardstick of
love and found her just right.
But the problem is, the story of the little boy notwithstanding, human love falls short of perfect love. Even
if we are blessed with wise, loving parents and a compassionate life-partner, by the time we are adults, we
have so many doubts about our own worth, so many sore spots where we feel we have let other people down,
so many memories of the times we have failed to measure up.
Did you ever hear of the Land of Look Behind? Sometimes on old maps of Jamaica, you’ll see an area
marked Land of Look Behind. In the old days, escaped slaves in Jamaica headed for the mountains. The
government sent hunters to bring them back, so runaway slaves were constantly looking over their shoulders,
so that mountainous area came to be called the Land of Look Behind.
I’ve never been to Jamaica, but I am a frequent visitor to the Land of Look Behind. I look behind at the
feelings I’ve hurt, the dumb things I wish I hadn’t said or hadn’t done, the stuff I tried to do but failed, the
embarrassments I can’t quite seem to forget, the times when I was the butt of somebody’s joke, the promises
I’ve broken, promises to myself, even promises to God. But I probably don’t have to describe the terrain in the
Land of Look Behind. You’ve probably been there. Maybe you own a condo there.
But we don’t have to live in the Land of Look Behind. We don’t have to be afraid that love is going to
weigh us in the balance and find us lacking. We don’t have to fear that God is going to sort through our
secrets and then turn away in disgust, saying, “Whoa! That is one sick soul! Even I can’t love somebody like
that!”
There is a cure for what ails us. The cure is God’s love. Not the love we have for God, although that’s
important. No, the cure is the love that God has for us. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved
us and sent Jesus Christ to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Now wait a minute. That means God loved us before we even had any love to give back. So this is not
tit-for-tat. This is no strings attached. God loved us before we got our lives straightened out. After all, it says
that God already loved us before Jesus Christ came. It was because God already loved us that God sent
Jesus to clean up our sins. So we don’t have to be good enough to cajole God into caring about us. This love
of God doesn’t go searching for somebody worthy of love; instead it creates worthiness in the one who is
loved.
John talks about perfect love here, which is a little misleading in English. The Greek word for “perfect”
actually means complete or whole. God’s love for us is perfect because it is complete, because God holds
back nothing, because God loves us without reservations, without conditions.
John talks about God’s love being perfected in us. What does that mean? God’s love is perfected in us
when we completely accept that God completely loves us. And in the completeness of that love, all fear is cast
out. Perfect love casts out all fear of unworthiness, all fear of guilt, all fear of discovery, all fear of rejection, all
fear of abandonment.
If God has accepted you, then surely you can accept yourself. And if you can accept yourself in the light
of God’s love, then maybe it doesn’t matter so much whether others accept you.
You know, I feel like I’ve taken a lot of words to say something very simple. But then Jesus spent his
whole life trying to say this one simple thing: God loves you and me.
We can doubt that love. We can run away from it. We can reject it. We can struggle to earn it. And then
we can write to Ann Landers and tell her how much life scares us.
Or we can accept God’s love. We can accept that in God’s eyes you and I are wonderful, beautiful,
infinitely precious, even lovable.
That’s how God sees you and me.
And why would we want to argue with God?
Soli Deo Gloria!