Fear or Love: Which Defines Your Identity?

by Danny Silk
Spring 2017

I often say that I really only have one message, and I just keep teaching it over and over in different ways: Lower the fear. Increase the love.

Fear and love are mortal enemies. They have completely different goals. Fear drives us to protect ourselves. Love drives us to protect others and our connection with them. Every day, we choose which goal we will pursue in our relationships with God and others. Whichever goal we choose determines the spiritual reality we’re drawing from, which will ultimately influence our behavior.

Over the years, I have worked with countless people — couples, parents, leaders, employees — who are sitting in the tragedy of huge personal mistakes, betrayals, hurts, and broken connections. My goal in our conversation is always to help them uncover the root issues that have created these problems. Again and again, when we finally identify these issues, I hear the same things:

“I feel scared.”
“I feel powerless.”
“I’m afraid of being punished.”
“I’m afraid of losing something.”
“I can’t trust people.”
“I don’t really believe people care about me.”
“I just can’t forgive that person.”

This is the spirit of fear talking. It is also called the orphan spirit. These two are one and the same. The orphan believes, “Life is a battle for survival, and I’m alone in that battle. Therefore, I must protect myself at all costs.”

Since sin entered the world, every human being on the planet has inherited this orphaned identity. Most of us have grown up never really knowing our Father. We’ve never experienced a permanent safe place, a place where we are accepted, known, and delighted in for who we are. Instead, we’ve experienced a fallen world full of sin, pain, and alienation, and it has taught us to live in fear.

As long as we remain thinking and living like orphans, we will never experience the beauty and power of real love, God’s love. This is exactly why Jesus came to save us. While many Christians think the point of the cross was to commute our sentence to hell and let us into heaven when we die, I see a different theme in the New Testament. Everything Jesus did was to show us the Father, and restore us to the Father. He came to destroy the orphan spirit, the spirit of fear, once and for all, and to give us His Spirit.

Paul explained this in Romans 8: “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’” The Spirit of adoption is the opposite of the spirit of fear. The Spirit of adoption gives us a new identity, and a new set of experiences to go with it. You know the Spirit of adoption is at work in your life when you start to think an entirely new set of thoughts:

“I am loved by the Father.”
“I feel safe with the Father.”
“Papa delights in me.”
“The Father won’t withhold anything good from me.”
“I’m never alone; Papa is always with me.”
“I trust the Father and He trusts me.”

This is the spirit of sonship (and daughtership). The son or daughter believes, “Life is about living in the Father’s perfect love. Therefore, my goal is to receive His love and learn to love like He does.”

So how do we lower the fear and increase the love? It all comes back to our relationship with the Father. No matter the problem in your life — a broken relationship, a sin issue, or some other kind of emotional or relational pain — the solution lies in your connection with Him. Run to the Father, and let His love overcome all fear in your life.

The following is an excerpt from Keep Your Love On by Danny Silk, Red Arrow Publishing, 2013, used with permission.

The Battle Between Fear and Love

How is it that two people who vowed to love and care for one another for a lifetime, …end up slowly moving away from one another, until the goal and practices of disconnection become entrenched in their relationship? Do people just decide one day to stop loving one another?

The answer, sadly, is yes. But it’s usually not a conscious decision. Most often it is a reaction to pain or the fear of pain.

Pain teaches us to react from the moment we enter the earth. The first reaction we have to pain is to cry. As newborns, when someone bigger responds to our cries by doing something to make us feel better, we learn that crying is a helpful reaction to pain or discomfort.

As we grow up, our reactions teach us how to avoid pain. As a child, even though my mother told me not to touch a hot stove, I had to satisfy my own curiosity. “Hot” is bad? Then I experienced the blistering effects of a second–degree burn and learned that “hot” was indeed “bad.” After that, my behavior around hot stoves was instinctively driven by the goal of pain avoidance.

Human beings generally develop three classic reactions to the threat of pain — fight, flight, or freeze. All of these reactions have the same goal: distance! We want to get away from scary things that can hurt us. Take rattlesnakes for instance. While few of us have ever been bitten by a rattler, we all know what would happen if we were. Unsurprisingly, very few of us keep pet rattlesnakes in our homes. Those who handle rattlesnakes do so with instruments of control and violence, such as cages, prods, guns, and gloves. No one is looking to create a loving, lasting, intimate relationship with a rattlesnake. It’s a basic human instinct — when the threat of harm is high, the level of love is low.

Our relationships with people are a lot more complicated than our relationships with rattlesnakes, because other people offer us both comfort and protection from pain as well as the threat of pain. The mom who fed you and changed your diaper in response to your cries is also the one who yelled at you and slapped your hand away from a hot stove. The dad who taught you to ride a bike is also the one who could never tell you, “I love you.” And the wife or husband who promised you unconditional love is the person who could break your heart with rejection and betrayal.

The question at stake is how you will react to the pain you experience in relationships. If you fall back on the classic fear–driven reactions, you will necessarily start treating people like rattlesnakes. You will either run away or try to control people so they won’t hurt you. The problem is that neither of these options will help you pursue and protect the goal of connection in a relationship.

Unfortunately, many people grow up in relational cultures that used “rattlesnake” tools to deal with pain and the fear of pain — tools that control, manipulate, remove freedom, threaten, and withhold love. These are the tools of powerlessness. The message they instill is “It’s my job to control you. If you don’t let me control you, then I will introduce pain to teach you that lesson.” I’m not talking about parents protecting their children from harm or introducing appropriate consequences for their choices in order to help them learn. I’m talking about parents who believe it is their job to make their child’s choices and to punish them when they don’t comply with their orders. They may have said, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” but what their children learned was that if they didn’t surrender control, the most powerful adult in their life would get mad, threaten, withhold love, or hurt them in some way. They learned that in any given relationship, only one person at a time gets to be powerful. And ultimately, they learned to believe the lie that drives and protects the cycle of fear, control and punishment, and disconnection in relationships — the lie that we can and should control other people.

Unless they repent from this lie, they cannot help but bring controlling behaviors into their adult relationships. Plenty of people grow up saying, “I am never going to be like my parents. Never!” Yet, the first time they run into a scary or painful relational situation, they find themselves spouting out the same exact words, making the same faces, and dragging around the same manipulative, fear–inflicting tools that once caused them so much pain. They may have tried to learn some new relational tools, but the minute they got scared, their real beliefs were unmasked. In the face of pain, they align themselves with the goals of fear — distance, control, and punishment.

Again, it’s important to remember that fear–based reactions to pain are instinctive, which means that they operate at a very different level in your brain than conscious, rational choices. You execute them without thinking. And because they come so naturally, they seem normal.

One expression of this natural, fear–based human “normal” is that you tend to surround yourself with people who feel safe. “Safe” people are those who agree with you and reinforce what you already believe about the world. If you were to take a survey of all the people close to you, then you would probably find that they share similar core values, political affiliations, education, and social or economic status. When you get around someone who doesn’t support your worldview, it usually triggers your defenses. Whether you know it or not, your brain is saying, “I don’t want that person around. They scare me. I want them far away because I want to be comfortable in my beliefs bubble.” It’s human nature to maintain your comfort zone.

Nevertheless, as natural as it is, this fear–based “normal” is a major problem. Instinctive reactions to pain do not bring out the best in human beings. On a social level, oppression, injustice, racism, war and most other social evils can be traced back to the instinctive fear of people who are different. On a personal level, fear–based reactions cause most misunderstandings and hurt in relationships.

If you want to preserve relationships, then you must learn to respond instead of react to fear and pain. Responding does not come naturally. You can react without thinking, but you cannot respond without training your mind to think, your will to choose, and your body to obey. It is precisely this training that brings the best qualities in human beings — like courage, empathy, reason, compassion, justice and generosity — to the surface. The ability to exercise these qualities and respond gives you other options besides disconnection in the face of relational pain.

Powerful people are not slaves to their instincts. Powerful people can respond with love in the face of pain and fear. This “response–ability” is essential to building healthy relationships.

Created for Freedom

In order to begin training yourself to respond in love, the first thing you need to accept is this truth: You cannot control other people. The only person you can control — on a good day — is yourself.

This is a fundamental principle of human freedom. We were designed to be free. How do we know this? God put two trees in the Garden. He gave us a choice. Without choice, we don’t have freedom, and more importantly, we don’t have love, which requires freedom. God chose us, loves us, and wants us to choose Him and love Him in return. So He gave us a free choice, even though it necessarily meant risking our rejection and the devastation of a disconnected relationship. The tragedy of the Fall actually proclaims that He does not want to control us. He didn’t control us in the Garden, and He doesn’t control us now.

Many people find this difficult to believe. If you were raised with a powerless, fear–driven mindset based on the belief that you can control people and they can control you, then you will naturally perceive God as a controlling punisher. You will take the laws of the Old Testament — all the verses and stories about wrath, judgment, and the fear of the Lord — and conclude, “See, God wants to control us, and we need to be controlled. Our hearts are desperately wicked and we can’t be trusted, so God uses the threat of punishment to maintain the distance between us and Him.”

The problem is that the Bible doesn’t show us a God who is pursuing the goal of distance between Himself and a bunch of scary sinners. Instead, the Bible reveals a God who is relentlessly closing that distance and paying the ultimate price to repair the disconnection we created in our relationship. God’s number one goal with us is connection, and nothing — neither pain nor death — will prevent Him from moving toward us and responding to us with love.

His perfect love for us is absolutely fearless. He is not afraid of us, and He never will be. His Gospel message is, “I love you no matter what. I am not afraid of your mistakes, and you don’t have to be afraid of them either. You don’t have to be afraid of other people’s mistakes. They may be painful; many things in this life may be painful. But pain and the fear of pain no longer have the power to control you. You are always free to choose. So, what are you going to do? Remember that I am always here for you, whatever you choose.”

God is continually moving toward you in love and giving you the choice to love Him. He never takes your choices away. 2 Corinthians 3:17 says, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” The more God fills your life, the more freedom you will have.

Fear is Your Enemy

While God is not afraid of sin or sinners, most of us are. We’re afraid of people’s mistakes, and we’re afraid of our own. It’s no wonder our entire society, including our court system, is set up in such a way that fear and punishment are the solutions to bad behavior. And as long as we operate out of fear, we will inevitably continue to reproduce distance and disconnection in our relationships with God, others, and ourselves. The cycle can only be broken by repenting from the lie that we can control other people and by accepting the truth that we must control ourselves.

As soon as you begin to believe this truth and stop trying to control people, you’re going to be confronted with a lot of resistance from the old normal. And it won’t give way to Heaven’s normal without a fight.

[…My friend Dave found it hard to] tell me that he loved his wife. The minute he turned from the goal of distance and disconnection to the goal of connection, he was plunged into a battle against fear. This is because fear and love are enemies. They come from two opposing kingdoms. Fear comes from the devil, who would like nothing more than to keep you permanently disconnected and isolated. Love comes from God, who is always working to heal and restore your connection with Him and other people and bring you into healthy, life–giving relationships.

Fear and love have opposite agendas and opposite strategies for achieving them. They cannot coexist in a person, relationship, or culture.

God is very clear that the Spirit He put in you is not the spirit of fear, but the Spirit of love: “You have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7) He’s also clear that partnering with the Spirit of love is the way to displace fear in your life. John wrote, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18) If you want to partner with the Holy Spirit, then you must have a strict “no tolerance” policy about fear and punishment in your life and relationships. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve used those tools — they have got to go!

Learning to partner with the Spirit of love requires you to become powerful. That is a serious challenge. When Paul told Timothy that the spirit of love is also the spirit of power and a sound mind, he implied that its opposite, the spirit of fear, is a spirit of powerlessness and a weak, divided mind. When you grow up partnering with the spirit of fear, as most of us do, you learn to simply hand over your brain and your power, letting fear take control. But as soon as you decide to partner with the spirit of love, you have to think and make powerful choices.

[My friend Dave and his wife] couldn’t even remember making a decision to listen to fear and turn their love off. But in order to turn their love back on, they had to marshal their internal resources to think, decide, and act. They had to become powerful and exercise self–control in order to say, “Yes, I love my spouse.”

The choice [they] made to turn their love on in my office that day was, in a way, even more powerful than the choice they made to get married in the first place, because they made it after experiencing a history of pain with one another. They no longer had illusions about the worst fear and pain could bring out in them. They knew that their choice to love one another could not be conditioned by what the other person did or did not do, and that it had to be strong enough to withstand the fear and pain that derailed them in the past. They understood better than before just how powerful they needed to be to make that choice. And wonderfully, they decided to be powerful, to respond in love and cast out fear in their relationship. They did it — and so can you!

Danny Silk is an author, speaker, and President and co–founder of Loving on Purpose. Both he and his wife, Sheri, will be speaking at Captivate 2017.