My son, Cade, is fearless. At just under two years old he has zero fear of licking or eating ANYTHING. When we go on walks and encounter ferocious dogs barking and clawing at us through the fence he laughs in their face. He has no fear of the road no matter how fast the cars go by. The kiddy pool bores him; he wants a real swimming pool. Forget walking into the shallow end one step at a time; he goes straight for the deep end and jumps in! Cade would totally own Fear Factor if that show still existed.
In his world, Cade has no boundaries. To him, the angry dog wants to play; the poop in the grass is a brownie; the fast cars are just oversized Hot Wheels; the deep end is just a waterbed.
What Cade doesn’t realize is that if Daddy wasn’t already in the deep end to catch him, he would drown. If Mama didn’t watch him like a hawk, he would get a piece of that “brownie” or snag a ride with an oversized Hot Wheel. Cade is oblivious that it’s the fence between him and the dog that keeps him from being on the menu. He is completely unaware that it is the boundaries that keep him safe. It is the boundaries that keep him alive.
Boundaries separate life from death
Within the boundaries that my wife and I have placed for Cade, he is not only safe, but entirely free to run and play. He is happy, content, and everything he needs is provided for him. For some reason though, he still will contend with the very boundaries that keep him safe. When this occurs Cade gets flat out angry and immediately treats us as the bad guys.
No matter how much Cade will disagree with the boundaries given to him, the boundaries do not change because we love him. In example, even though Cade disagrees that he should not play in the road, out of love, we do not allow him to. He can kick and scream at us and treat us like bad guys all he wants, but we are there to protect his life.
Boundaries Exist Because of Love
From the instant he came in this world, Cade was born to instinctively break boundaries. He was born to accuse and fight anyone or thing that gets in the way of what he wants to do even if it kills him. I was born that way too, so was my dad, and so were we all. We all are born masters of justifying sin…because that’s all we know. That’s the norm because it is our nature, the core of who we are.
All we know is SIN and DEATH and when something foreign like TRUTH and LIFE are presented to us we automatically get angry and offended and treat it like the bad guy…and that’s ok. It’s normal. The Word of God is a scary thing to us because deep inside we know that Its boundaries separate the path of life from death, and we just don’t like boundaries. We disagree and contend with any boundary that we do not create ourselves. The boundaries we create are ones made out of sin because it’s all we know.
God created boundaries from life untainted by sin and they exist for us because of the GREAT LOVE He has for us. He doesn’t want us to drown or get hit by the car or ravaged by the dog. He loves us so much that He designed boundaries to protect us from a life of death and placed them in The Bible. And if you’ve never heard or read the Gospel of God’s Word, He took it a step further…
God sent Jesus, His Son, to be tempted in every way that we are and even though Jesus perfectly showed us how to live within the love and freedom of God’s boundaries, He chose to become sin and death so that we could choose truth and life. It gets even better… Jesus came back to life, as He said He would. And now if we surrender to Him our nature forged from sin and accept Him, Jesus imparts to us the same power that rose Him from the grave. Our sin nature becomes a thing of the past and God creates within us a BRAND NEW nature, one of life and truth.
Nowell Hardin 