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8th July 2026
WednesdayReflection
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John Piper
founder and teacher of Desiring God.org
"Perfect Love Casts Out Fear"
.... 1 John 4 v 17-19
In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.
Verse 17 tells us how to have something everybody wants to have.
And verse 18 tells us how to get rid of something everybody wants to get rid of.
In verse 17 John tells us how to have confidence or boldness on the day of judgment.
And in verse 18 he tells us how to cast fear out of our lives.
These are simply positive and negative ways of saying the same thing: getting rid of fear is the negative way of saying become confident.
So the main point of the text is clear:
John wants to help us enjoy confidence before God.
He does not want us to be paralyzed or depressed by fear of judgment.
Nothing would make John happier than to produce a generation of Christians who were utterly confident that God would accept them on the judgment day.
I hope we all take the day of judgment as seriously as John does.
I sometimes wonder if we have abandoned real belief in God's judgment and in the torment of hell which our Lord Jesus spoke of so vividly and so often.
The word "hell" (gehenna) is used twelve times in the New Testament - eleven of them on the lips of Jesus.
For example, Jesus said to his disciples:
And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.
The Lord has warned us so clearly: it is appointed unto man once to die and after that comes judgment.
He has spoken vividly of the horror of hell,
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
One of the reasons I say I wonder if we really believe this is the public zeal with which so many Christians warn against the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and how earnestly they work to avert it.
And I ask, "Does the coming holocaust of divine wrath at the final judgment startle us as deeply and mobilize us dramatically?"
"Perfected love is the love of God expressing itself in our love to each other."
The nuclear holocaust is only a possibility; but the holocaust of divine wrath is a biblical certainty.
The nuclear holocaust would only snuff out life that is temporary and earthly; but the holocaust of divine wrath will snuff out eternal life and will bring a misery to unbelievers that is worse than any disease caused by nuclear radiation.
So I hope we all take the day of judgment as seriously as John did.
I hope that when your heart recoils at the tragedy of a possible nuclear holocaust, you will let that legitimate concern overflow the limits of earthly considerations and take in the tragedy of eternal divine judgment as well.
I hope that when you feel an impulse to save the world from the bomb, you will enlarge your heart to long for the eternal salvation of your neighbour and the millions of unreached peoples of the world.
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This is an edited version.
The full article is avaiable on request
"John Piper"
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God:
Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently
Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy
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