To the Heart: Fear! and Fear Not!

If we were to identify one of the biggest obstacles to experiencing on a daily basis the presence of God in our lives – I would have to say that that obstacle is fear.

We fear losing our jobs or having our income reduced. We fear the price of gasoline going up. We fear being alone. We fear being too intimate with anyone. We fear for our children. We fear for our retirement. We fear for our health. We fear going to the gym. We fear not having any meaning in our life. We fear the meaning and purpose we hear from God.

In fact there are so many things we fear – or phobias – that we now have a name for each of our fears. Consider some of these and see if you can guess what they are:

Agrizoophobia The fear of wild animals
Anthopophobia Fear of people
Atychiphobia Fear of failure
Bromidrophobia Fear of body odor
Chorophobia Fear of dancing.
Gamophobia Fear of marriage.
Hypnophobia Fear of being hypnotized
Syngenesophobia Fear of relatives.
Phobophobia Fear of phobias!

(from The Complete List of Phobias
www.officediversions.com/discover/modules/news/article.php?storyid=398)

With all of this fear that we experience in life how is it that there is any room left for us to experience the kingdom of God?

Jesus wants for his disciples to live without fear – or as he says in our passage this morning from the Sermon on the Mount – without worry.

Indeed, Jesus looks to the sparrows of the air and the lilies of the field as an example of how to live day-to-day under the provision of God. The birds, he says, “do not sow nor reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” The flowers of the field, he says, “do not labor or spin” and yet they are more beautiful than Solomon in all of his riches and wealth.

So is Jesus’s answer to our stress and worry for us to simply give everything over to God and not worry about anything?

Well, yes and no.

As I was studying this week preparing for my message this morning, one thing kept recurring in scripture over and over. It was so obvious that I couldn’t dismiss it as a scriptural anomaly. It was too big and too important.

This was what I found. We are to have fear in life. In fact, there’s a pretty big fear we’re to have. We are instructed in scripture to live under this fear and let this fear give our lives direction and purpose – even to the point of ordering our days and lives.

Dt 6:1 These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, 2 so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. 3 Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.

So that’s it. That’s the fear we’re supposed to have as children of God. The Israelites as they were beginning to enter the Promised Land and into the inheritance that God had promised them hundreds of years before were told that as long as they feared God things would go well with them in their new land.

But that was the catch wasn’t it. Not long after they had conquered the land of Canaan and made it their own they were becoming like those who they’d conquered.

Look at what God says later in Deuteronomy warning the Israelites against this very thing.

Dt 28:64 Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. 65 Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. 66 You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.

If I were an Israelite given this warning, I think I’d choose the Lord.

Note some of the things here that come when we don’t live in fear of God and instead give other things priority in our life. They will have no repose or rest. They will have an anxious mind. Their eyes will be weary with longing and their heart will despair. They will live in constant suspense and dread their days. They will have no confidence in the direction their life is taking.

Sound like anything you’ve experienced before?

Certainly, that’s a clue to the root behind why our lives seem so anxious and stressful at time. Could it be that our priorities are misplaced? That we’ve put all the wrong things before our love and obedience to God? That rather than fear God we fear the things of the world?

And let’s talk about what it means to fear God. It may seem unfashionable to talk about fearing God. That seems so Old Testament when the God we want to believe in and serve is the loving and merciful God of the New Testament who – we mistakenly believe – makes no demands on our life. That’s the God we think we prefer and we’ve been taught in our culture that exists. A God that demands obedience to his will and expects us to actually fear Him– well, that seems a little inconvenient to us right now. We’ll get back to you on that, God.

But if we take the time to actually read what the Bible speaks of the “fear of God” we see that it is described mostly in life-giving terms. To fear something that is rightly to be feared is to move in the direction of real life!

For instance, Ps 34:9 Fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.

Ps 85:9 Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,
that his glory may dwell in our land.

Pr 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline

Pr 8:13 To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.

Pr 10:27 The fear of the LORD adds length to life, but the years of the wicked are cut short.

Pr 14:27 The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, turning a man from the snares of death.

Pr 19:23 The fear of the LORD leads to life: Then one rests content, untouched by trouble.

Job 28:28, “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”

So rather than “fear” fearing the Lord – if the outcome of fearing the Lord is LIFE then fearing the Lord is something we should seriously consider SO THAT we can live our lives WITHOUT fear! Does that make sense?

Fear, of course, can mean terror and dread at the idea of something. We can fear God’s wrath on our lives when we make choices that stand in rebellion to God’s way of love, life, and community. Often, the consequences of rebellion against God will seem like what we call “natural” consequences. If you don’t spend time with your spouse you’ll find yourselves having marital problems. If you aren’t intentional in the way you raise your children, then you’ll have children who lack respect for authority or lack a solid work ethic. If you aren’t honest and lack integrity then you’ll suffer the consequences of people not trusting you. God’s laws are like natural laws like gravity and the speed of light. Try to violate them and there will be unpleasant consequences.

Fearing God is supposed to keep us living within what we know to be God’s moral, ethical, and communal laws. Laws that aren’t so much laws in the legal sense as they are just good sense and describe simply the way people work and live together when they are living at their best.

So what does it mean to fear God?

First, it means to place God back in His rightful place as Lord and Master of your life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in his book The Cost of Discipleship, “It is senseless to pretend we can make provision because we cannot alter the circumstances of this world. Since we cannot take care, since we are so completely powerless, we ought not to do it either. If we do, we are dethroning God and presuming to rule the world ourselves.” (Bonhoeffer, 179)

In other words, who’s Lord of your life? Is it God? Or is it you with all of your desires and wounded-ness and cravings?

If it is me – if I’m Lord of my life – then I will always be frustrated by my own inability to satisfy my desires for all the things I think I deserve from life. If it is me – if I’m the Lord of my life – then my life will always – without exception be structured around filling the needs I think I have or constantly striving to fill the emptiness that I experience in my life.

Only God can give me the things I truly need. And God will only give me the blessings He believes necessary for my life and my life’s mission. Indeed, nothing is wasted in God’s economy. And still, the voice we hear to become the Lord of our own lives so often sounds to us so very reasonable and logical.

Leanne Payne in her book The Healing Presence describes the voice we hear tempting us to become the Lord of our own lives. “The tempter of our souls now says to us: ‘I want you to see yourself walking alongside yourself; I want you to gain a sentimental view of yourself as noble, or great, or tragic. I want you to gain a dramatic view of yourself as the center of all things, and then pity yourself when you are not.’” (Payne, 72)

Fearing God means that we fear the consequences of NOT obeying God. Jesus says, Lk 12:4 “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. 5 But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”

Many of us have already experienced the results of leading a life oriented away from God rather than oriented toward God. We’ve become in that time well acquainted with despair and depression. We’ve known all too well the emptiness of being our owns gods, of feeling addicted to being loved or feeling good or being satiated only to find that there is no end to that addiction. For many of us those experiences would be the closest thing here on earth that we would come to describe as “hell.”

And the mere memory of those times in our life is enough to make us RUN the other direction toward LIFE and obedience and Christ-like love. Who wants to experience that level of pain and frustration again when we know what will set us back on the right path of life!

Having tasted what it’s like to know God, there’s nothing that can compare to being filled with the Holy Spirit, having the confidence of God’s love, and knowing that God is the source of every blessing. With that knowledge of what’s real, there’s no desire to substitute it with anything else – anything “less than” – our desire is only for the REAL LIFE we have in God.

Joyce Meyer in her influential book Battlefield of the Mind says,

“It is clear that God’s children are not to be like the world! The world seeks after these things, but we are to seek the Lord. He has promised that if we will do that, He will add to us all these things he knows we need. We must learn to seek God’s face and not His hand! Our heavenly Father delights in giving His children good things, but only if we are not seeking after them.” (Meyer 123-124)

Fearing God also means living in awe of what God has done and is doing in history. It is living with the recognition that God chose a people to be his own to be a living witness to his love for creation – to serve him in righteousness – and to live in their inheritance. It is to know that even the called out of God sometimes disobey and have their blessing removed until that time they are ready again to live in that blessing. It is knowledge that God sent his son so that everyone may enter that blessing – that everyone might receive the call to holiness and righteousness and experience the good things God has made in this world. It is the recognition that God is at work even today in human history and is still the Lord of world events and of the salvation of all humanity through the church.

Fearing God means that we see our own part in that awesome plan. It means that we surrender ourselves to that plan willingly because we know deep down – in a way that only the Spirit can confirm in our hearts – that God is good, His plan is good, His blessings are good, His kingdom is good, His holiness and righteousness are good things. We are awed by the work of God as we put on “new eyes to see” what God is doing in the world.

Marc Jolley in the Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible observes, “To fear God, then, is to be completely devoted to his will and its rewards while knowing the awesome consequences of not fearing him.” (EDOB, 457 “Fear”)

This morning, the scripture we looked has Jesus telling his hearers not to be anxious for anything in their lives. Jesus’s way of saying Fear! and Fear Not! Is to say, “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all the things that you worry about, all the things that cause you anxiety, all the things that keep you awake at night, all the things that are the true and good desires of your heart – fear God, seek his kingdom and these things will be given to you as well.” (Mt. 6:33)

What is left for you to surrender to God? What areas have you kept to yourself to remain under your control? This morning what areas are you ready to let God take over and say to him, You’re the Lord of my life – all of my life – and I give everything I am to you. I am ready to live in your blessing and to no longer fear anything that comes my way. Because today, I know that you are God. Not me, but you. And with you as Lord, I have nothing to fear. And with nothing to fear, I can live life with joy and purpose and boldness.

This morning you have an opportunity to make a decision. I don’t care how long you’ve been a Christian or how spiritual your walk with God has been this morning is an opportunity being given to you by God to hand over everything in your life to Him and claim HIM as Lord of your life!

Maybe you’d like to give your life to Jesus this very day. As we take communion together, I’d like to invite you to meet with one of our prayer partners up front here and tell them that you’d like to pray for God’s salvation this morning.

Let us pray.