Serve Him without fear

To grant us that we, Being delivered from the hand of our enemies, Might serve Him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life. – Luke 1.74-75

As a result of God’s visitation and His redemption there are some things that need to follow. Remember, the Jews didn’t know it yet, but that visitation and redemption was not to be for them alone, but for all mankind.

Like most prophets Zechariah probably did not know the full extent of what he was saying. Sure, one day the Messiah who John would announce would deliver Israel from her enemies. But we know in retrospect that Jesus did not deliver Israel from Rome and her other enemies during His first earthly ministry.

So I think there is an application for us that Zechariah and the hearers of this prophecy did not understand. We do know that there is an enemy that Jesus did defeat while He was here the first time.

Apart from Christ sin reigns supreme. I will look at that a bit more tomorrow, but for now we know that in Christ sin no longer has dominion over us. Sin was our enemy, but it has been vanquished. We were delivered from both the penalty and power of sin at salvation (more on that tomorrow). However, we still have to deal with sin in our lives. The penalty and power are gone, but the presence of sin remains.

That could be scary for the believer. We are supposed to live for Christ, but sin still dwells hidden and lurking in our flesh? You can almost see a scary film being made here with darkness and shadows and eerie music.

Sin is real. It resides in the body of our flesh. If not controlled it will act and make us do things we would never do otherwise.

But we need not be afraid of sin. The penalty has been paid. The power has been vanquished. Sin need no longer reign in our bodies because greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world.

We need to reckon these things as true. We need to know that sin needs to be recognised, but not to be feared. It is sort of like electricity. When a person understands electricity he always respects its power, but he does not need to be afraid. The same is true with sin, when we understand the fullness of Jesus visitation and redemption we will always recognise the danger of sin, but we need not fear it.

If we try to serve in fear we will be powerless – if we recognise what Jesus has done we do not need to be afraid.