Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon: The Fear of the Lord
*Pastor Dennis Tuuri*

Um, today’s topic is—or sermon rather—is a topical sermon on the topic of the fear of the Lord. The first of at least two, maybe three sermons. And so I’ll begin with a scripture reading that is actually the first verse we’ll be considering as we talk about this subject of the fear of the Lord. Acts Chapter 9:31. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. And the context of this particular verse is the conversion of Saul.

So Acts 9:31: “Then the churches throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and were edified. In walking in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures and we thank you, Father, for giving us here a summary designation of who we’re to be as a church of Jesus Christ. Those who walk in the fear of the Lord and as a result of that are multiplied and grow in the context of this earth. We thank you, Lord God, for the topic before us. We pray that you would help us at the beginning of this new year to seek out, develop, and desire greatly to have a proper fear of you. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Yeah, please be seated. Couple of weeks ago—I don’t remember which sermon it was following—but in a conversation in the fellowship hall with Juanita and my wife Christine, they were talking about the problem in our world today is an absence of the fear of God. And I thought about that. I thought, you know, that’s really true and it is very significant. You know, we are hearing more and more discussions from talk show hosts, friends. You know, “I want the world the way it was back again, you know, when we were kids, the older folks around here—we didn’t have to be fearful of our children walking the street or this or that or the other thing.” And what’s the difference?

Well, there’s lots of things that are different, but certainly this particular topic, the fear of the Lord, the fear of God, is a very significant change in our world. A part of the reason this has happened is because we’ve moved away from the fear of any secondary authorities as well. I believe that the elimination of capital punishment in most of the world is one reason for an absence of the fear of God. But in any event, that’s what we find ourselves in. We find ourselves in a world where people don’t really fear the consequences of sinful actions, and because of an absence of that fear, they do things wrong more and more and more. You know, this isn’t because the world leads the church. This is because the lousy theology of the last 100 or 200 years of Christendom, particularly in America, and then spreading over the world, has brought this to pass.

Common terms when we began this church: Dispensationalism is a particular brand of theology that was made popular by a man named C.I. Scofield, and he produced a Bible with footnotes. These footnotes and this idea of dispensationalism—that there are these different dispensations, and we would call them covenants, but in each one of them the way people get saved is different—and so the end result of dispensationalism was to teach that the Old Testament was full of law and the New Testament is a time of grace. So the Old Testament was a time of fear because the law brings fear, and the New Testament is a time to forget any kind of fear because the New Testament is a period of love and grace. And so this was the basic teaching of dispensationalism.

Um, Scofield, commenting on Psalm 19:9—”The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever”—C.I. Scofield in his notes said this: “The fear of the Lord is a phrase of Old Testament piety.” Old Testament piety. And the implication is that it’s not a phrase of New Testament piety. So this breaking apart of the Old and New Testament is what led the modern church, and most of the churches around us, whether we call them Baptists or evangelical or—for the most part all the rest of the denominations—have become more and more Arminian or dispensational in their theology. We’ll be talking about Arminius in the next few months as well, because I think that, you know, we have a whole generation of young people here that really don’t understand the horrors of Arminianism and how it leads to most of our problems.

Our church is distinctive in that—from many churches that we came out of—because it doesn’t believe that there’s this big distinction between the Old and New Testament—law and grace. There’s one word from God and each of these covenants were covenants of grace. We’re told that quite explicitly. This is not a difficult thing. It’s just difficult because it’s so much a part of the way we think in America.

It’s not difficult to go to the Bible as we’ll do today and see that the fear of the Lord is something we ought to have. The thing that makes it difficult, and what shoves it to the back of our mind and our practice in the context of the church, is this bad theology that’s produced the context for what we have. One of the big problems we have is we don’t read our Bibles a whole bunch, and we certainly don’t study them much. And as a result, we’re sort of formed by the ethos of the Christian culture we’re in. And that ethos is one where fear is not important. In fact, it’s seen as kind of an Old Testament piety in contrast to the New Testament. We believe differently. And we’ll see today that quite clearly. It’s not difficult. I mean, we’re read—for instance, well, one of the secondary things that happens is when you start to point to these verses about the fear of the Lord as we’ll do in a minute—in the New Testament—well, then the response is, “Well, that just means reverence. It doesn’t mean, you know, shaking sort of fear. It means reverential fear, just an awe. Gee, God is so great.” And there’s something about that name. And that’s kind of what it is. And I don’t—I shouldn’t make fun of people that sing this stuff. I’m sure their piety is real. But the end result has been that somehow the word fear has been redefined.

God could have, if he wanted to, used two different words. There’s one basic word for fear in the Old Testament. There’s one basic word for fear in the New Testament. It’s phobos—phobia, claustrophobia, fear of small places, etc. So agoraphobia, fear of wide open marketplaces. So fear. God could have used a word for reverence and awe and a different word for the kind of, you know, bad fear that clearly we read about. And in the responsive reading we just read, did you notice? I see—I’m looking at all this stuff. I’m looking through the lens of what I know I’m going to preach on: the fear of God.

Now, verse 4 of Psalm 34: “You said that God delivered me from all my fears.” God delivered me from all my fears. And so that’s the view of some who are supposedly New Testament perspective. But here we see that it’s an Old Testament book that affirms the absence of all my fears. And yet, as the verse goes on to say, “The angels of the Lord encamp around all those who fear him.” So we get rid of an improper fear, but we replace it with a proper fear. And it’s the same word. So, you know, if we can’t get rid of the fear of God altogether in evangelicalism, then they’ll say—they’ll just redefine what fear is and means: it means this reverential awe of God.

Well, one question I would have, if you’re thinking about yourself, is: well, do you have that even? You don’t have, you know, we generally don’t have the fear of God that strikes us with terror should we disobey him or not obey him or not do what he wants us to do. We don’t have that kind of fear of God. We want to replace it with some kind of reverential awe. But do we even have that? When was the last time your comprehension of God caused you to get down on your knees in reverential awe? We don’t have that either. You see, they’re not that dissimilar really. Reverential awe has an implication of actual fear—the way we think of fear. But you know, the first question to somebody who makes this shift is: you know, the first thing to point out is there’s one word of God, and we’ll look at many verses that image the Old Testament teaching of the fear of the Lord. And the second thing to point out is that you don’t even have what you claim the fear of the Lord really is—a reverential awe that leads to obedience. So in two parts it breaks down.

And plus we read, for instance, that we’re to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Philippians 2:12. So this is not, you know, what God’s going to deliver us out of. This is the sort of fear of the Lord that’s proper. And it says we’re to work out our salvation. We’re to live our lives working out salvation—outward the salvation we’ve got—with fear. And what kind of fear is it? Is it a reverential awe that just leaves us struck with God—in the sense of, kind of, he’s great and cool and wonderful? No. It’s the sort of fear that makes us shake. The word trembling here means to tremble, to shake in dread of something.

So the sort of fear that we have of God is not—you know, the Puritans called it a “filial fear,” and you know, we don’t know what that means anymore. But it means this: the fear of a son for his father. That doesn’t help us a lot either, because when we took the word of God and got rid of the fear of the Lord, we then produced a culture that got rid of the fear of God, and we got rid of judgments. You know, in the Bible, law is statutes and judgments. We’re left with statutes and very little judgment. If you don’t have a judgment to a law, there’s no law according to the Bible. If the law is not enforced and has penalties attached to it—judgments—then it’s not biblical law. It’s just pious ideas or suggestions for how to live your life. And increasingly, that’s what our laws are.

Is it wrong to copy a CD, and you get a little CD from the library, you copy it to your computer—can you listen to it? Well, you don’t know. We don’t even know what the laws are. But are they really laws? Are they being enforced? And if there’s no judgments, there’s no law. Well, in God’s word, there’s a judgment attached to it. And so it has this connotation of a fear of the judgment of God upon us if we do what’s wrong. And so this trembling.

So we get rid of capital punishment. We get rid of corporal punishment. We get rid of temporal punishment in the context of, you know, beatings and stuff from magistrates to people. The Bible speaks about that clearly. We get rid of all that stuff, and we’re left with kind of a fearless culture where nobody fears anything. And of course, the end result is a breakdown of civil order, and we end up then—in our families, our Christian families—we apply the same idea, right? Because the father is like the father in heaven. And if we’re not supposed to be fearing the father in heaven, we don’t want our children to fear us. And so we’re their best buddies.

Now, I believe dads should be the best buddies of kids, particularly as they grow up and mature. But there’s something other than a best buddy. And we should regularly tell our kids, “We’re not your best buddy. We’re your father. We’re your mother. You’re to have a proper fear of us.” I’m getting ahead of myself, but the point is we’ve created a culture in our families, in our churches, and in the world around us—based upon an improper view that Scofield gave us—that the fear of the Lord is part of Old Testament piety. That’s a lie from the pit of hell, and it has had hellish results in the context of our world. And so we want to move away from that. We want to have a degree of trembling before God.

We want to have what Hendrickson said. Reformed people are a lot better than the non-reformed people in this subject. You’ll see good sermons and articles by reformed guides. Hendrickson said that this fear of the Lord includes being afraid to offend God in any way. Being afraid to offend God in any way. These two fears are seen in Exodus 20:19-21 as well. I know my introduction is taking a little long, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

“Then they said to Moses, ‘You speak with us and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die.’” So, you know, there God’s on the mountain, all these manifestations at Sinai. And of course, again, we remind ourselves very quickly that this is our kind of stuff, because Zion is more fearful than Sinai. That’s what Hebrews says. We preach through that, right? “You haven’t come to the mountain that can be touched. You’ve come to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. Therefore, you should have more fear, not less fear. Things are more dangerous now. God is closer to us now.”

Well, anyway, so the contrast here is Sinai. And Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, and that his fear may be upon you so that you may not sin.” So a fear of sinning, a proper fear of God, and a casting off of an improper fear. So “perfect love casts out fear,” not all fear—because we’ve been reading already and we’ll see a ton of verses in the Old and New Testament where we’re supposed to have a fear of God. But it casts out the wrong kind of fear. So Moses has no trouble using the same Hebrew word, saying, “Don’t fear. God is here so that you would fear him.” Replacing improper fear with proper fear.

I’ll look at a text here in a minute. I’ve got a chapter on anger in a book that Jack Phelps has put together—The Seven Deadly Sins, you know. And we have Christians going around telling people how to get rid of all anger in your life. That’s a mistake. You’re supposed to be angry over certain things. “Be angry, but don’t sin.” We tend to take these kind of things and just categorize it all as sin. Well, the same thing here. “Be fearful, but don’t be fearful in a sinful way” is what Moses is saying and what John is saying in his letters, etc.

So when we come to this topic, we come already having to adjust our brains. Remember, we’re not just in—we’re not Sapiens or homoerectus or all the things that we do—and how we’ve lived in the context of our Christian culture. No matter how old you are, you’ve had this effect on you of getting rid of the fear of the Lord. And it’s going to be hard to layer it back in our families, in our lives. It’s hard, but it’s very important. So just because I tell it to you today doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to do it. And it’s a process. But I want us today to end with a renewed commitment from each and every one of you to desire zealously the fear of God that you might see the importance of it in your life.

So let’s move in now. And actually, I was going to have one sermon, and I was going to say, “Well, let’s first look at a few New Testament verses because it’s important to understand that it’s a New Testament characteristic.” And well, there’s so many of them, and I thought they were so important, I don’t want to miss them. I still haven’t included everything in here, but I thought it’d be good. Just to—let’s talk about the New Testament.

Next week is Anti-Abortion Day of the Lord. A day that we hope eventually becomes a day to strike fear into the heart of abortionists and civil governors who rule not for God. And we’ll look at the importance next week according to the Old Testament of the fear of the Lord for judges specifically. And so we’ll look at Old Testament verses next week. This week we’re looking at New Testament verses. And I’ve just kind of made summary comments. And I’ve got the actual text in here for you to make it easy for us to move through this material.

All right. So first of all, the fear of the Lord is a New Testament characteristic.

First of all, from the verse we just read, Acts 9:31. My comment is that its presence is a summary description of the church. So it wants to wrap up now a little period of church history and say, “Well, the church is like this.” And so a summary description of what the church of Jesus Christ is: that there are those who walk in the fear of the Lord. Do you walk in the fear of the Lord? That’s a summary description of the church and of people that believe in God. So, you know, it’s not just some little thing. You know, there are individual elements of our Christian faith, character, etc. But this is a prime virtue—to have the fear of God. It’s going to lead to all kinds of other virtues. That’s the point here. It’s a summary description, and it’s put in parallel with the edifying, strengthening work of the Holy Spirit.

Okay? So there are those who have peace, were edified. They’re being built up, walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit. Now, this word comfort is another one that, you know, if we think that the comfort of the Holy Spirit just means like the Holy Spirit comes to you and says, “Oh, it’s okay. I know it’s tough,” and pat you on the back—kind of like, you know, some kind of comfort—well, no, that’s not it. I mean, it’s partly that, but the Holy Spirit strengthens you for the task. This is very clear in Jesus’s prayer in John 17: that the Holy Spirit is the strengthener of the church to go through persecution correctly.

So the fear of the Lord is a result of the abiding work of the Holy Spirit in our lives—strengthening us. So how does he strengthen us? Well, part of the way he strengthens us is to cause us to fear—a proper fear with trembling. Yes, reverential awe, but more than that, a fear of offending God. So it’s put in parallel with this edifying, strengthening work. They were edified, built up. You want to be edified? Walk in the fear of the Lord. You want to be Spirit-filled? Pray that the Spirit of God strengthen you to the end that you would have the fear of the Lord in the context of your lives. And the end result is peace. The end result of this description is that the church has had peace.

We want peace, right? And there’s not peace. There’s not peace in the churches right now. There’s not peace in the Reformed churches, and not peace in our world. We don’t see it much. We have some elements of peace. This church has had relative peace for over a decade. If you want peace, then the way the text tells us that you have to have your life characterized is to be one who fears God. The fear of the Lord is a key to having peace.

In Revelation 19:5, we read the same thing about this being a characteristic of God’s people: “Then a voice came from the throne saying, ‘Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great.’” Chant version. Wonderful chant. And we’re reminded, as we sing that—we sing that chant a lot at Kings Academy. I think it’s great to sing it in your homes. We’re reminded that the parallel designation of the servants of God are those who fear him. This is Revelation. This is not Old Testament. This is New Testament, right? Who are we? Who are the servants of God? If you don’t have the fear of God, then you’re not a servant of God as described by this text. That’s what it says. Do you have a problem with that? It’s not my problem. It’s a problem you have with the word of God.

Then I got a little thing from next week—Old Testament verse. This is an interesting verse. It results from a Spirit-filled angry man who put the elect in mind of the judgments of God. 1 Samuel 11:5. You know, the people won’t go out and do battle with Saul and Samuel against God’s enemies. Verse 5 is the context. “Now, behold, Saul was coming from the field behind the oxen. And Saul said, ‘What’s wrong with the people that they are weeping?’ So they told him the news of the men of Jabesh—that they wouldn’t come out to fight. And the Spirit of God…”

Okay, so what’s going to happen here is a result of the Spirit of God rushing upon Saul, empowering him, overcoming him, causing him to do what happens. “When he heard these words, his anger was greatly kindled.” The Spirit of God came upon him, and the result was anger. All anger is not bad. Okay? And in fact, if you never get angry, there’s something wrong with you. Particularly in the light of our world today, anger is important because it moves us to action. And it did with Saul.

“The anger was greatly kindled. So he took a yoke of oxen, cut them in pieces, dismembered them, sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hands of messengers, saying, ‘Whoever does not go out with Saul and Samuel to battle, so it shall be done to his oxen.’ And the fear of the Lord fell on the people, and they came out with one consent.”

Spirit of God produces the fear of God through a demonstration of temporal judgments. So Spirit encouragement—the end result is going to be peace. They’re going to move against their enemies. It’s going to be the peace of defeating enemies, not of coexisting with them and becoming like them. And so the fear of God is a result of a Spirit-filled guy moving in anger, dismembering cattle. Fear of the Lord. All right.

Secondly, the fear of the Lord—its absence is a summary description of fallen man. And we’re real familiar with Romans. Well, some of us are real familiar with Romans 3:9-19. By the way, I say some of us because, you know, it’s very important for us to recognize that our children do not get our theology and our teaching by osmosis. It doesn’t just sort of happen. We have to tell them things. God wants us to speak to them the word of God. And most of the adults here are familiar with Romans 3. Maybe a lot of the kids are not. This is what fallen man is like. Okay.

Both are condemned: both the Jew and the Gentile. And in verse 12: “They have all turned aside. They live together become unprofitable. There is none who does good. Not one. Important when we get to talking about unconditional election. It’s not based on anything you’re doing because this is who you are in your fallen nature. You’re horrible. ‘Your throat’s an open tomb. Your tongues they have practiced deceit. The poison of asps under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and mercy are in their ways. The way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.’”

That’s the summation. There’s a set of descriptions that lead up to that last verse, and—well, actually, it leads up to verse 17: “The way of peace they don’t know.” And again, just like the text we looked at before in Acts, peace—the way of peace is connected to the fear of the Lord. But the basic point here is: when God wants to describe the ungodly, the summary description of the church is godliness with fear of God; the summary description of the ungodly is that there is no fear of God before their eyes.

Now ask yourself: is there fear of God in my life? And see, if there isn’t, well, then you’ve slipped into some kind of way of being that is highly displeasing to God. If there’s no fear of God before your eyes, then you’re in that category of people that really are exhibiting their fallen nature.

Three, it’s commanded of us. It’s commanded of us. It manifests itself in sincere obedience towards God’s image bearers. It’s tied to judgment of our works. All right. Colossians 3: “Bond servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service as man pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God.”

He’s giving servants—employees, functional inferiors—a command to obey. And he commands them to obey from their heart, fearing God. So it’s not now a demonstration of what happens under certain conditions. Now it’s a command to you and to me. We’re supposed to be obedient to secondary authorities in the fear of God, from our heart—not with an external, man-pleaser sort of thing. No, coming out of our heart, with the fear of God.

“Whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. For you serve the Lord Christ. But he who does wrong will be repaid for what he has done, and there is no partiality.”

See, this is the other big problem we’ve got. If we just have cheap grace, and there’s no fear because God’s not going to judge our actions, and we believe justification by faith and there’s never any kind of eternal judgment of our works—we first of all deny Scripture because this is what it says. I can’t, you know, it’s not my job to take what the Bible says and make it compatible with what you think or what other parts of the Bible say. I can help with that somewhat, but I’m not going to get rid of one half of this stuff because it bothers me or might interfere with some abstract conceptual doctrine I’ve got about how we’re saved by grace.

If the Bible says that we’re going to be judged by our works, we’re going to be judged by our works. I have no problem with that. Now, I know that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be my righteousness that saves me. That’s clear. But we can agree on that, right? We can stipulate that. And still we have to say that somehow, you know, when God judges us after our deaths, there’s a judgment of our works, and we’re repaid for those works somehow. Okay? It just is, because God is not partial.

God doesn’t say, “Well, it’s okay for Christians to sin and to disobey me and do this, that, and the other thing.” No. It’s not okay for us to do. He’s going to judge us just like he judges the nations. Okay? Partiality and judgment in our culture—and it’s filled with it—is a result of the church having partiality in its understanding of who should fear God and who shouldn’t. We all should fear God. That’s what he’s saying here.

So it’s a commandment. It manifests itself in obedience to authority—God’s image bearers. And it’s tied to a judgment of our works. And, you know, I could say that the commandment refers to everything because we love the verse: “Whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not to men.” That’s great. But right before that, the whole point is to do it heartily. The heartily is described as fearing God from your heart.

1 Peter 1:17 says, “Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s works impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverential fear.” Now again, the fear is tied to the judgment of God upon our works. God is not happy when we sin. God will judge us. So that judgment of works is essential—that we understand we’re supposed to live our whole lives in reverential fear. Why? Because God will judge what we do and what we say. And this judgment, this fear of the Lord, has to be demonstrated in a fear toward men—a proper fear of man, not an improper one.

You know, it’s just like in 1 John. “Well, you say you love God, but the proof of that is whether you love the image bearer of God.” “You say you fear God, but the proof of the fear of God is a fear of some men in their proper role before God.” It’s the fear of your master. The fear of God causes you to want to please your master. Okay?

In Leviticus 19, it’s the middle of Leviticus thematically. It’s the law at the center of that whole book. It’s a sermon of 70 specific commandments—that’s a sermon on the Ten Commandments, giving 70 commandments. And it starts this way: “The Lord spoke to Moses saying, ‘Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.’”

Great. Okay. We’re supposed to have holiness. And here comes that’s a general statement for what follows. What is holiness? Well, here’s what it is. “Every one of you—how does he start?—every one of you shall fear…” Now my translation says “revere his mother and his father and keep my Sabbaths. I am the Lord your God.” But it’s the same word. There’s no reason to, you know, translate it “revere” here and not “fear.” I mean, there might be a reason because you want to include this idea of reverential fear. But children, if you think you fear God and do not fear your parents, you’re wrong. And if you think you can be holy without having a fear of your parents, a fear of displeasing them, a reverential awe, a love—a deep love—for their care for you, absolutely! The fear of the Lord involves that.

But it also—what I’m speaking to is what we tend to not want to include in that fear. And that is a fear of displeasing them because there’s going to be judgments that come upon us, both from God and temporally through our parents. You know, again, here we live in a culture where we got rid of the fear of God in the church, and then we got rid of the fear of God in families, and now we’re making the fear of God in families illegal. You make your—if your parents, if mom and dad cause their little children to become fearful of them, this is abuse now. This is what they see as abuse. This is bad. They never, they’re never supposed to fear you like that. They show you the commercials: the father hovering over the child, and you know, an ungodly fear that our children—I mean, driving our children the sort of you know, servile, slavish dread of us.

This is bad. But please, there’s got to be something in the middle—of that without going to the other ditch with the removal of all fear. That’s where our culture is. We don’t want fear. We don’t want fear of the death penalty. We don’t want fear with corporal punishment. We don’t want fear with loud voices coming forth from mom and dad or stern punishments and judgments. We don’t want fear with dads being made known that when you displease them, they’re going to bellow at times from heaven.

I bellow at my kids sometimes. And it’s not because I lose control. Sometimes it is shameful. I’m shamed before God for those times. But there are other times when it is intentional and is proper to get our children to fear us. That’s what Leviticus 19 says. The beginning of holiness is fearing, reverential awe, with trembling, of your mother or your father rather, and your mother. And it’s tied to a fear of God that causes you to revere the Sabbath day.

Sunday school curriculum right now: the Westminster Catechism question about what’s the requirement of the Fourth Commandment. It talks about keeping the whole day holy to God. That’s what the Reformed people have always taught. We’re to have a fear of God of displeasing him by trampling on his day. Proper fear. We’ve talked about that lately. And a proper fear of our parents because the fear of God is tested according to the representatives of God in the context of our life.

1 Peter 2:13-18 says this: “Therefore, submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme or to the governors as those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. So God is providentially using sinful men in sinless ways to punish evildoers. Still does. It always has. It uses the Assyrians, using the Muslims, used the north, the ungodly north to combat the more godly south. That’s just the way he works. It’s his way of bringing judgment, punishments, onto his people.

“For this is the will of God that by doing good you may put to shame the ignorance of silent men, as free—yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bond servants of God. And then the summary of this is: ‘Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.’”

Okay? Honor all people, love the brotherhood. Those match up—general categories. Fear God, honor the king. Those match up—representations of God’s rule in our country. Civil authorities, parents, masters at work, elders in the church, deacons in certain areas of the church. Fear God. Honor the King. It’s a New Testament deal, fearing God. And it’s New Testament to see it played out in a proper fear of men who represent God.

“Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh.”

We have a proper fear in all these relationships.

Four, it’s the necessary precondition for receiving God’s mercy. We’ll see this. I’m going to read lots of texts at the communion table from the Psalms about how God showed his covenant, feeds those, you know, shows his mercy. And what’s the characteristic there? Fear—those who fear him. Luke 1:50. You know, the Magnificat. Still thinking about Christmas. “And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.”

Right? That’s the Magnificat, chant version. We should sing it in our homes. Do it all the time. And then we would remind ourselves if we were singing Revelation, if we were singing Luke, if we were singing the text of Scripture, we would have regular reminders of the fear of the Lord. His mercy is upon generation after generation toward those who fear him. Now, that’s a logical statement. His mercy is on those that fear him. No fear of him, no mercy. Get it? So it’s a requirement. It’s a condition for the mercy and grace of God being upon us. A proper fear of him—not a once-for-all fear that brings us to salvation, but an ongoing fear. We want his mercy being shown to us repeatedly, right? That means our fear has to be maintained—a proper fear of God.

Five, it’s a basic motivation for our ongoing sanctification, and it’s not rather antithetical to the promises of God. It’s not law, grace. You know, law and then promises. No, it’s the one thing together. 2 Corinthians 6:11-7:1. You’ve got it there in front of you. Or I’m sorry, 6:11 through 7:1. That should say—well, anyway, let’s just read it.

“Oh Corinthians, we have spoken openly to you. Our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections. Now in return for the same, I speak as to children—you also be open. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

Another text I’ll preach on in the next few months. Why not marry a non-Christian? Is it okay to marry a Baptist, Charismatic, Nazarene, Mormon? Well, Mormon I can say no. The others I can say sometimes, sometimes not. What do you mean, Dennis? Well, this says, “Don’t be unequally yoked together.” Well, marriage is certainly a yoking. It’s the ultimate yoking in the context of our lives on this globe. Don’t be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

“What fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? What communion has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? If the Baptist gal or the Baptist guy, or the Nazarene boy, or the Charismatic spouse you’re interested in—or kid you’re interested in—is an antinomian, doesn’t believe that God’s law is for us, that it’s all grace and no law, no—you shouldn’t marry him. What concord have you with lawlessness? It says, and if the person doesn’t believe that the Scriptures are the sufficient word to run our lives by, that light is only found in them, that their knowledge is brought in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ, no—don’t marry them. I don’t care what they call themselves. I don’t care if they go to church every Sunday. If they don’t believe that light comes from the word of God and no place else, forget it.

And if they don’t acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ—Christ with Belial—then they got to acknowledge lordship of somebody else. And they’re going to be foolish sinners the way the sons of Belial were. So this text is telling us that, you know, who you link up with—not just in marriage, but in all kinds of things. There’s got to be a commonality of knowledge, of life. There’s got to be a commonality of how you consecrate your lives together as a couple to the Lord—priestly nature. There has to be a commonality of who’s king—king our kingly aspect. So prophet, priest, and king is talked about in this text.

So but anyway, the point is that we go on from that. Then that’s the context. As we go on, then he tells them, you know, “Well, you got two kinds of things going on here.” And he says, you know, well, you got to come out from them. My people. In verse 17: “Be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you. There’s the promise. Ah, that’s it. That’s the great thing. God will be a Father to us. You shall be my sons and daughters.”

Just like the Old Testament, by the way, that was the repeated refrain, right? I’ll be your Father. You’ll be my sons and daughters. I’ll be your Father. You’ll be my people, says the Lord Almighty.

“Therefore, having these promises—not putting them aside, having these promises—let us cleanse ourselves in terms of sanctification, from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness.”

So this is about the promises and our ongoing sanctification of our lives. But how do we perfect holiness? We perfect holiness in the fear of God. It is an essential element of our sanctification and our growth in grace. If you don’t fear God, that’s probably why you’re not growing a whole bunch. That’s probably why you’re having trouble with holiness. That’s probably why you’re not experiencing the promises because the promises are to those that fear him. And sanctification happens as a result of fearing God.

From next week in aids to our sanctification, Proverbs 16:6: “In mercy and truth, atonement is provided for iniquity, and by the fear of the Lord one departs from evil.”

How do you stop sinning? Get frightened. Get very frightened of what God will do to bring judgments upon you. Fear of the Lord is what causes us to depart from evil.

Proverbs 23:17: “Do not let your heart envy sinners. Be zealous for the fear of the Lord all day.”

How do you prevent yourself from becoming like the world and envying sinners? Have the fear of the Lord with you all day long. You see, it’s so important. It’s necessary for our sanctification.

Again, in 1 Peter 1:15-17: “But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Leviticus, right, 19 again, because it is written, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’ And if you call on the Father who without partiality judges according to each one’s works, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear.”

Conduct yourselves throughout the sojourning of you here in fear. And this is the key to our sanctification. This is the key to being holy in all of our conduct. The Bible commands us to this fear of God. This is the key to our sanctification.

When we sin, we should have a proper shaking. I remember a particular sin I was tempted to—oh, I don’t know, it’s probably been 20, 25 years ago. And I remember getting physically ill. Should I describe it? People don’t like these. I could describe it by the same word that I probably used improperly last week to try to get across, you know, what is spread on our face. Well, that’s what happened to me because I was so fearful. I was about ready to do something that was really bad—not, you know, God was displeased with it, and I felt I got physically ill. Well, you know, that’s what this is talking about. We’re supposed to depart from evil, be holy in the fear of the Lord, live that way.

All right. Six. It’s the context. Oh, I wanted to read here a quote from John Murray in his Principles of Conduct. By the way, for those of you adults who like to read books—good theology books—this is a good book, and it’s one I’d forgotten about for 15 years. It’s called Principles of Conduct. Greg Bahnsen always recommended this book. Principles of Conduct, written by John Murray. So John Murray in Principles of Conduct says this:

“The fear of God is the soul of godliness. If we are thinking of the marks of biblical piety—now remember, see there he said biblical piety. I said piety. If we’re thinking, he says, of the marks of biblical piety, not Old Testament biblical piety, not just Old Testament piety—none is more characteristic than the fear of the Lord. The most characteristic designation of biblical piety is the fear of the Lord.”

Principles of Conduct begins with a proper trembling, a fearful anticipation of God’s judgments upon us when we sin against him.

Six, it’s the context for our new creation, mutual submission to one another. We’ve already sort of seen that in the texts about employers, etc. And it’s linked to thanksgiving in the beautiful musical work of the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Well, those are concepts you don’t normally put together much, but this text does, in Ephesians 5. It’s describing the new man. Put off the old man, put on the new man. Who is the new man? He’s the one that speaks to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. So being filled with the Spirit means regurgitating the word of God, so to speak, by singing these wonderful chants in our homes to each other, speaking to one another based on the Scriptures. The Spirit speaks by means of the word. So be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. There’s joy involved in all of this.

“Giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Submitting to one another in the fear of God.”

And we wouldn’t put that in there in a string of verses about joy and being filled of the Spirit. You’re giving thanks, and there’s great rejoicing. You’re singing songs. Everything’s great. And then it says that you’re to submit to each other in the fear of God. That’s the basis—the new creation command—that he then goes on to talk about immediately: that wives are to be submissive to their husbands as unto the Lord in everything. But the proper understanding of marital submission is the mutual submission that husband and wife have to each other in the context of God’s word.

Now see, again, it’s like, you know, the judgment of works, things, and all that—we like to—we don’t like tension, but it’s there. Before he says, “Wives submit to the husbands,” he says, “Be mutually submissive to each other in the fear of the Lord.” You see, so again, it’s a characteristic of our joy, our being filled with the Spirit. This fear of God is then the basis, the context, for mutual submission to one another.

So if you have a hard time taking advice from other people, check out your fear of the Lord gas tank. Is it empty? Is it full? Is it half full? That’s got something to do with it.

Seven, it’s a motivation for evangelism. Oh, okay. So we always ask, “What’s why don’t we ever evangelize?” Well, this is going to tell us why. It’s tied to a judgment of works once more, and once more it’s also tied to courage and strength.

2 Corinthians 5:6-11. “So we are always of good courage.” So we’re courageous. We’re strengthened by the Holy Spirit. “We know that while we’re at home in the body”—so he talks about his own death. It’s okay to die. We have good courage even if we have to die. “Be away from the bodies, at home with the Lord.”

Verse 9: “So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please God. Ah, general picture of the Christian life. We want to please God. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body.”

That’s pretty comprehensive language. We all have to appear before the judgment seat of Christ, at which the things we have done in the body, you know, here on earth, are going to be judged. And as a result of this, this pleasing God, this is our goal, has a recognition that we’re all going to have to appear before the judgment seat, the judgment of works.

“Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord”—that’s the translation; same word, but here the emphasis: knowing the terror of the Lord. A proper fear of the Lord. Then “we persuade men, but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences.”

So the basis for his evangelism—he says the basis for persuading men of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the fear of God. If we don’t evangelize, you know, we can work up all kinds of techniques, but if our fear of God, you know, gas tank is empty, we’re probably not going to feel too compelled to go out there and do a lot of, you know, evangelism. And we’re not going to feel too compelled to grow in sanctification.

Eight, it’s a general description of the elect Gentile. As such, it is tied to the basic disciplines of almsgiving and prayer. And you know what we have here is a description of Cornelius in Acts 10:1-2.

Who is Cornelius? “He’s a devout man, one who feared God with all his household.”

So, technical thing: you got the fear of the Lord and the fear of God. Well, Lord was the covenant name to Israel in the Old Testament—Yahweh. And so it’s his covenant name. God (Elohim) means “strong.” It’s the general name for God amongst the Gentiles. So in the Old Testament, the Jews are known as Yahweh-fearers, and the Gentiles are known as God-fearers. So you know, many of us have heard this from James B. Jordan and others: a general designation of Gentile believers in the Old Testament—and there was a ton of them, unlike what we’ve been told, a lot of them—is that they are Gentile God-fearers.

And here is one in the New Testament. You see, this is an Old Testament term. It’s being used in the New Testament to describe a Gentile elect person—someone who’s elect but who’s not of the priestly nation of Israel. Now, you know, at the coming of the New Testament, they go away. But up to now, they’re separated. And what’s the general way you talk about who a Christian was? We would say, “Who was a believer if he was a Gentile in the Old Testament, and in the time of the writing of the New Testament? Well, he’s a God-fearer.” And we know that. Some of us know that. Some of us are familiar with that term, but we just blow right by it. It is a name. It’s like Christian. What do you call a Christian? You call him a God-fearer. That means that the fear of God is not just some kind of little aspect of who we are. It means our entire walk of obedience to God and belief in him can be characterized by the fact that we fear God. It’s very significant. This is a very significant title, and it should. We’re Gentile converts, all of us. And you’re only a Gentile convert if you’re a God-fearer. Otherwise, you’re not. You may believe in Jesus, whatever that means. But if it’s not the Jesus of the Bible, doesn’t do you any good.

And the Jesus of the Bible, if you have a proper belief in him—King of Kings, Lord of Lords, rod in his hand, kiss the Son, lest he be angry and yet perish in a way when his wrath is kindled. But a little. Those wrath, that wrath is still evident. That’s the whole kind of subtext of all this: is that those Old Testament curses are still around, and they’re in a heightened form. Hebrews tells us God-fear. That’s the general designation. How do we know what’s his evidence? What’s his bona fides that he was one who feared God? “He gave alms generously to the people (that’s to the Jews) and prayed to God always.”

The basic disciplines of the Christian life should be evidences of fearing of God. And when we’ve got—and we do have, even in this church—when we’ve got a generation of Christians who do not engage in scripture memorization, who don’t engage in regular helping poor people with alms, who—when the mission alms form is circulated, we get very little participation from our children or young people or middle-aged people—that’s not the only way you can give alms. If we don’t have a generation who have regularly trained themselves in the discipline of prayer, meditation, it’s probably because we have a generation arising that doesn’t fear God anymore.

Because the fear of God here evidences itself in trying to help people who need help, financial help, the poor people in churches in Poland and Russia and India, and by prayer, by praying to God always.

So nine, its foundation is a proper dread of the one who can punish temporally and eternally. And now I’m going to read a long text of Scripture, and I know you’ve been here a while—maybe you’re sleepy. Gird up the loins of your mind. Rouse yourself because you need to hear what happens. You and I both—I speak to you, I speak to myself. We need to hear what happens when we don’t obey God. And this is from Deuteronomy 28, beginning at verse 15.

I watched Children of Men yesterday. Like most future movies, the future’s always bad. Men have no hope because the church has no hope. The church has lost its postmillennial hope. So the thing just kind of falls apart, and there’s bad things. But I’ll tell you what: if they made a movie of these curses, it’d be much worse. Couldn’t show it, probably. It’d be NC-17 or whatever it is. Wouldn’t let them show it.

Let’s hear what God says will happen. These are the temporal judgments that come upon us when we break God’s word.

“It shall come to pass if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God to observe carefully all his commandments and his statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city. Cursed shall you be in the country. This is talking to us. We’re not New Testament Christians. We believe the curses of the covenant remain with us. That’s the basis for the fear in the New Testament.”

Cursed shall be your basket, your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send on you cursing, confusion, rebuke, in all that you set your hand to do until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken me. The Lord will make the plague cling to you until he has consumed you from the land that you are going to possess.

The Lord will strike you with consumption, with fever, with inflammation, with severe burning—fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish. And your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under your feet shall be iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and to dust. From the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed.

The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them. You shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away. The Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt, with tumors, with the scab, with the itch from which you cannot be healed.

The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, confusion of heart. You shall grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in darkness. You shall not prosper in your ways. You shall only be compassed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you. You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not gather its grapes.

Your ox will be slaughtered before your very eyes, but you shall not eat of it. Your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you and shall not be restored to you. Your sheep shall be given to your enemies. You shall have no one to rescue them. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people. Your sons and your daughters given to another people.

Boy, that’s going on, isn’t it? It is.

Your eyes shall look and fail with longing for them all day long, and there shall be no strength in your hand. A nation whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually. So you shall be driven mad because of the sight which your eyes see.

The Lord will strike you in the knees and on the legs with severe boils which cannot be healed, and from the sole of your foot to the top of your head. The Lord will bring you and the king whom you set over you to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone. And you shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations where the Lord will drive you—Christians, by words—it’s mocking.

You shall carry much seed out to the field, but gather little in, for the locust shall consume it. You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worms shall eat them. You shall have olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil, for your olives shall drop off. You shall beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours. They shall go into captivity.

Locust shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land. The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head. You shall be the tail.

Moreover, all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you. They shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder and on your descendants forever because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for the abundance of everything.

Therefore, you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of everything. And he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you.

The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand, a nation of fierce countenance which does not respect the elderly, will show favor to the young. They shall eat the increase of your livestock, the produce of your land until you are destroyed. They shall not leave you grain or new wine or oil or the increase of your cattle or the offspring of your flocks until they have destroyed you.

They shall besiege you at your gates until your high and fortified gates in which you trust come down throughout all your lands. They shall besiege you at all your gates throughout all your lands which the Lord your God has given you. You shall eat the fruit of your own body, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you in the siege, desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you. You’ll eat your own children.

He says, the sensitive and every refined man among you will be hostile toward his brother, toward the wife of his bosom, toward the rest of his children whom he leaves behind, so that he will not give any of them the flesh of his children whom he will eat, or even share that flesh, because he has nothing left in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you at all your gates.

The tender and delicate women among you who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because of her delicateness and sensitivity—those wonderful women will refuse to the husband of her bosom and to her son and her daughter her placenta which comes out from between her feet and her children whom she bears, for she will eat them secretly for lack of everything in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you at all your gates.

Never seen that in a movie. It’s right here in the word of God. It says it’s what God’s going to do when we displease him. This is the God we must fear.

“If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in this book that you may fear his glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues. If you won’t fear the name of God, great and prolonged plagues, serious and prolonged sicknesses.

Moreover, he will bring back on you all the distresses of Egypt which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. And also every sickness and every plague which is not written in the book of the law, will the Lord bring upon you until you are destroyed. You shall be left few in number, whereas you are as the stars in heaven in multitude, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.

And it shall be that just as the Lord rejoiced over you to do good and multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and bring you to nothing. And you shall be plucked from off the land which you go to possess. The Lord will scatter you among all peoples from one end of the earth to the other. And there you shall serve other gods which neither you nor your fathers have known, wood and stone.

And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the soul of your feet have a resting place. But there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, anguish of soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you. You shall fear day and night and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, ‘Oh, that it were evening,’ and in evening you shall say, ‘Oh, that it were morning,’ because of the fear which terrifies your heart and because of the sight which your eyes see. And the Lord will take you back to Egypt and ships, by the way of which I said to you, ‘You shall never see it again.’ And there you shall be offered for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, that no one will even buy you.”

Brothers and sisters, I tell you—I tell myself—these are the judgments of God that come to us if we don’t fear him. And as a result of that fear, walk in sanctification, obedience to the law of God. And those are the judgments that are coming upon this Christian nation, even as we speak.

Those pale, however, in comparison to the other thing we’re supposed to fear. These are judgments against our bodies, right? These are temporal judgments in the earth. But our Savior tells us in Matthew 10:28: “Don’t fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. And don’t tell me I prayed the prayer. I don’t have to worry about hell.” Hebrews says otherwise.

Hebrews says if you don’t have the fear of the Lord, and if you turn your back on his word and you live your life the way you want to live it, you forget doing reverencing your parents and his Sabbaths—he says that you can go over that slippery slope and you’re going to end up in hell. You don’t go to heaven because of an intellectual idea you have about justification by faith. You go to heaven being united to Christ, believing him, obeying him, and fearing him.

So those punishments are bad. Eating the afterbirth—that’s horrible. But more horrible is that God can throw you body and soul into hell, eternal damnation. Punishments the likes of which we’ve just read are the mere foreshadowings of.

Again, in Luke 12:5: “I will warn you whom to fear. Fear the one who after he has killed or he does all this stuff has authority to cast you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”

The fear of the Lord must be ours, brothers and sisters.

Final point: the fear of the Lord, its presence is eminently reasonable. Eminently reasonable. “Who shall not fear thee, oh Lord, and glorify thy name?” If we understand he’s the one who can cast both soul and body into hell and will and threatens us with it, then who shall not fear thee, oh Lord, and glorify thy name?

The thief, the thief on the cross, comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, but the other one mocks him. The other one rebukes the other one, or the other one, and says he rails against Jesus and says, “If you’re the Christ, save yourself and us.” He’s hanging there, dying, about ready to go to hell, and he’s mocking the Lord Jesus Christ. And the one that believes in Christ says the other one answering rebuked him saying, “Do you not even fear God?” What’s that—that’s a question to us today. Do we not fear God? Do we not even fear God anymore?

It’s evidently reasonable. “Who shall not fear you, oh Lord?”

Now, you know, I hope that the end result of this is great motivation to develop in us individually, in our families, and in this church a proper fear of God—a fear of his temporal and eternal judgments. Great blessings to those who fear God, right? Great blessings. Great cursings to those who don’t. I’ve got on the bottom of your outline: you know, you may be despairing.

I’ve had men come to me counseling in my office in the last few years, you know, “I just don’t fear God. I don’t know what to tell you, Dennis, but I just don’t.” Well, you know, the wonderful thing is that the fear of God can be taught and learned. Psalm 34:11 says, “Come, you children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord.” Fear comes through the hearing of his word and the instruction in that word.

So we can be taught the fear of the Lord. It’s not like, you know, if I don’t have it, I’m really in bad shape. I’m going to hell. No, no, wait a minute. The fear of the Lord can be taught to you. And that’s what we’re going to try to do next week and perhaps the following week. And it can be chosen.

Proverbs 1:29 says, “Because they hated knowledge, the wicked did not choose, did not choose the fear of the Lord.” Well, you choose today the fear of the Lord. That’s all you got to do. Come forward with your offerings. If you don’t have offerings, sit in your pew while the song’s being sung. Choose today the fear of the Lord and desire to be taught how that fear works and what it is in your lives. If you don’t choose the fear of the Lord, it’s because you didn’t choose Jesus. Okay? Because they’re united.

The last set of texts on your outline: Isaiah 11:2-3. Again, the great verses from Isaiah about the coming of Christ. We meditate on it, the Lord during Christmas season: “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.”

Summary of the Spirit’s work: fear of the Lord. Jesus—this is talking about his delight—is in the fear of the Lord. “And he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears.”

He delights in the fear of the Lord. And then in Isaiah 33:6: “He shall be the stability of your times, a wealth of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge. The fear of the Lord is his treasure.”

Jesus’s treasure. The Spirit of God was upon him. Jesus is the fear of the Lord that we need. He has it. He’ll give it to you. Choose it. Seek it. Highly value it, and may the Lord God grant us its possession.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for correcting us, Lord God, from the ethos of our Christian culture in this now more and more sinful country. Help us, Lord God, to choose even now that we would indeed desire and seek from you a proper fear of who you are. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.