You're Afraid of the Wrong Things - Righteous Fear of the Lord

You think of fear as like a t- a, maybe a kid with a, with an abusive father or a super critical baseball coach that wants to embarrass him in front of the whole team.

You think of that, like you, that's what fear is to you.

Well, when the Bible uses fear in this context, that's not what it's talking about.

It's not talking about being afraid of God.

All right? It's actually the opposite.

Listen to Proverbs 14:26-27.

"In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge.

The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death." Now, one of the things that the word of God is meant to do in us is to change our thinking, rearrange our thoughts.

Now, when I hear the word fear, I, I think bad things.

But in those two verses, fear sounds like a good thing.

The fear of the Lord produces strong confidence.

It gives you and your kids a refuge, a safe place to land when everything else in the world is going sideways.

It says the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life and keeps us from the snares of death.

Now, that's not a picture, you know, of a man cowering in a corner afraid that God's going to smash him.

That's a picture of a man who's actually grounded, secure, and free.

So what i- what is the fear of the Lord then? If, if it's not terror, if it, if it's not being afraid of God, what is the fear of the Lord? Well, s- in Psalm 33:8, David writes, "Let all the earth fear the Lord.

Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him." Here we have a synonym for the fear of the Lord, standing in awe of him.

See, David pairs fear with awe.

Now, you might know what awe feels like if you've ever stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or you've watched your kid being born, or you've seen something just that, that blows your mind, like you're, you, you go to the mountains of Colorado and you stand before them, or you get to the top of a fourteener and you look off and you're just in awe and it makes you feel really small.

Like you, you forget about your to-do list, you forget about your ego, and it just makes you kind of feel small, and you're just kind of in this place of grandeur and you're blown away by it.

I remember a few years ago, took my family down to Gulf Shores, Alabama, and one night, um, I, I woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't sleep, and I go outside and there's this wicked lightning storm.

I'm talking nonstop lightning for like two hours and it's going across the sky and it looks like it's going up, it's going down, it's going everywhere.

And I had never seen anything like this before, and I just sat there for like two hours in wonder.

It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Well, that's, that's a sense of what awe is, and that's a sense of what the fear of the Lord is.