June 27, 2025 Show with David M. Cook on “Standing in Awe: Meditations on Fearing God

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 27th day of June 2025.

I'm thrilled to have today a first-time guest whose name is David M. Cook. He's pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Greenwood, Indiana, whose preaching can be heard on the Calvary Greenwood Preaching Podcast, and he's an author, and today we're going to be addressing the theme of his new book, Standing in Awe, Meditations on Fearing God, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David M. Cook.

Oh, thanks so much, Chris. I'm really honored to be here.

And I'm honored that you accepted my invitation. And tell our listeners something about Calvary Baptist Church of Greenwood, Indiana.

Well, I mean, other than just how deeply I love these people, they're just the best people to go to church with. Our story is that I came here in 2019, and before that, the church had had a very hard decade.

The short version is that we went from 400 to 100 people in 10 years. And you can imagine a lot of things that would go along with that, a lot of hardships. But I came, I visited, met the people, and just fell in love with them and said, if I can't lead these people, I can't lead anybody.

And from largely on that deep love, and then just a sense that the church didn't need, like, rock star, draw a bunch of people in leadership, which I can't do. They just needed a faithful shepherd that loved them.

And I thought, well, with God's help, I can do that. And so it seemed like a good fit. So we came here in 2019, my wife and I and our four kids. We had a very good first year, then of course COVID after that.

And since then, the Lord has been slowly growing the church and just doing a whole lot on the inside to strengthen the people. We've seen some baptisms, growing student ministry, a growing nursery. And we're just really thankful to see what the Lord is doing.

It's brought a lot of rejoicing to the older folks in the church and excited to see what He does next.

Great. Well, can you tell us something about the theological background of the church?

Yeah, well, the background has, I don't know if it's so much a theological background as a leadership background. The story has been one of very, almost alternating, very dynamic, you know, draw lots of people in pastors.

And then a few times the bottom's kind of fallen out after that pastor has left. And that's left a mark on the church, most certainly. The background as far as emphasis and theology, a huge one on missions.

It's always been a church deeply involved in missions, especially with the immigrant populations here in the community. Indianapolis has lots of immigrants from all over the world. And so over the years, we've hosted many different church plants.

Right now we're hosting a Spanish-speaking church plant. Over the years, been several Burmese churches that have gotten their start here, a Korean church, and a few others as well. So the emphasis through the years has been on reaching the nations.

Right now, there's probably a fresh emphasis on building godly leaders, which you can find that theme in my writings, too. Because, you know, when I arrived, most of the members were 65 and older. For whatever reason, the Lord is bringing in—well, at first it was largely 20-somethings, now 30-somethings as well.

And with a gap like that in the middle, we have just needed to raise up leaders quickly. So some of our older folks are very ready to hand their positions to the next person. The younger people are willing but, you know, don't have the training and the experience left.

And so we've spent a lot of time on leadership development as well. Our emphasis now, we emphasize theologically a singing culture. It's not much of a rock concert-type atmosphere here. We want our people singing.

We emphasize biblical expository preaching. I preach almost always through books of the Bible, though right now I'm doing a series on the gospel. And then there's, I would say, probably just because of me being me—and we'll get to this—there's a big emphasis on the fear of God and just a deep, connected reverence to him.

Tom, amen. Well, I'm assuming, since the book we're going to be discussing was published by Reformation Heritage Books, the publishing ministry started by my long-time dear friend, Dr. Joel Beakey, I'm assuming that you folks believe in the doctrines of sovereign grace?

Yeah, we have a wide net here. It's a Baptist church. That's the net. And so there are a variety of perspectives on that, I would say here. Our statement of faith is just the Baptist faith and message, which does include election, predestination, the free choice of man, you know, that harmony between the two.

And so all of our members affirm those doctrines. But we aren't particular on the five points or things like that, as a church especially.

Well, I just want to, first of all, before we get into your personal testimony of salvation, which we always have first-time guests do here, I'd like to give our audience your website for your church—and I will be repeating this, God willing, later—cbcgreenwood .com, cbcgreenwood .com, which stands for Calvary Baptist Church, Greenwood, Indiana.

That's us. And I'll be repeating that later, as I said. And now we would love to hear a summary of your salvation testimony, the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which you were raised, and what kind of providential experiences and circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

Salvation Testimony and Early Christian Formation

Yeah, those are really one of the same. The religious influences when I was young really were the experiences and conditions the Lord used to draw me to him. So my story is, you know, less dramatic and interesting than a lot of people's, but I found it is sometimes very helpful to certain people.

And that's because I don't really remember the moment that I came to Christ. And I find a number of people have the same experience and feel troubled by it sometimes. The reason—well, I'll go back to the beginning.

I was raised in a United Methodist Church growing up. It was a rather conservative United Methodist Church, but it was Wesleyan doctrine and teaching and the revivalism and things like that, a large emphasis on God's love, but it did not hear as much about judgment or the fear of God or things like that there, although I would learn it later.

A church that really emphasized the importance of Jesus himself, the importance of the scriptures, and that they loved me. And so I had just rock-solid foundations, and Jesus, Bible, I was loved growing up.

I think I came to Christ when I was 12 years old at a summer camp, but the memory is very fuzzy. I can remember it was answering an altar call at a, you know, a kind of a big, energetic, emotional-type altar call, kneeling there at the altar, praying, telling the Lord that this Jesus that I just heard that man talk about and the kind of relationship he talked about, I want that with Jesus, and came back and told everyone I had come to Christ there.

It was not, though, the kind of environment that was especially careful about that, you know, just praise the Lord, hallelujah, somebody came to Christ, which, of course, we should do. And so between my memory being really fuzzy, what I know of myself then that, you know, I didn't, I'm not sure I saw myself as a sinner who needed to be saved.

I just knew I wanted to follow Jesus. So if I could pinpoint a moment, it would be right there when I was 12. However, I do know that slowly through the years, what was most lacking in me, that sense that I was a sinner that needed to be saved, the Lord did teach it to me over time.

And that's really, in my early years, the biggest thing that I needed to repent of. You know, some of the kids in my church were bad kids. I was a good kid. That's good. But the mistake I made is that I thought I was better than them.

I thought they needed to be saved. And it just took time for the Lord to teach me that I needed to be saved. So through the years, He taught me that and a deepening gratitude and thankfulness for what He did for me on the cross.

So that's how I came to Christ. Later on, I went to college with that foundation, began studying the Bible myself. For a while, I had a hard time finding a church at first for a number of reasons. And that begins another story of how I became a Baptist and how I was called into ministry that we might get into later.

But that's at least how the Lord drew me to Him. It was through childhood with parents that loved Him and modeled Christianity well, and a church that just loved me so much.

Praise God. Well, how did you realize you had received a call from God to become a pastor?

From Worship Ministry to Preaching and Pastoral Calling

Yeah, that was a slow experience as well. So I went away to college knowing how to play guitar, thinking, you know, I think the Bible is the Word of God, but I'm not totally sure. I better look up every book and make sure we know who the authors are.

So not convinced of inerrancy yet. Convinced of Christ's lordship and of the gospel. Spent some time reading the Bible on my own, and it was not really a proof that convinced me of scriptures inerrancy.

It was just reading it and hearing the voice of my shepherd in it. Later on, Wayne Garuda would say something very similar that happens to a lot of people, which brought me a lot of comfort. So I was playing guitar and often did that in campus ministries.

Went to school for graphic design and advertising and really enjoyed it.

So did I. Oh, yeah.

Great.

Same thing.

Farmingdale College in Long Island.

Oh, excellent. Yeah, I went to Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. So opposite end of the country down south, but similar study fields.

So, yeah.

So I was leading worship for groups like InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, and it dawned on me that as much as I loved doing design and advertising, probably the work I was doing leading people in worship would have a more lasting, eternal impact.

And so I wanted to invest in that. So when I graduated, I applied to Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky for their worship and arts program there. I was accepted and moved up there and studied worship ministry there.

And the reason really was that I knew how to play guitar and I kind of knew how to sing, at least well enough that they would let me do it, although I was never a star. But I didn't really understand the biblical dynamics of worship.

Like, how does this work? What's the right way? It's got to be more than just strum and sing and get everybody to sing. How do we do this with a theological depth to it? And their program had the right mix of that.

I thought I would learn that well there. So I went off to Southern, was learning how to lead worship biblically there. And the idea then was, you know, I'll probably just graduate and volunteer doing this and work in the field that I was trained in.

I was content with that. What happened, though, was that being around professors that loved the church and young men like me who loved the church—they loved the church a lot more than I did at that time—it instilled in me just a really high value of shepherding God's church and the idea of pastoring.

And so the Lord used that, their example, both to mature me as a man—I was very immature at the time and very silly in a lot of ways—to mature me and to give me a love for both the church and the work of shepherding the church.

And so when I graduated, through a lot of prayer, just had that, you know, what is called in either Timothy—I guess it's 1 Timothy—that desire to elder and shepherd a church and was called up to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as a worship pastor.

So I was working full time there as a worship pastor. So I was there for five years and then did the same thing in another church for four years. While I was there in Massachusetts, my job was—part of it was to preach four times a year.

And after a few sermons, my lead pastor, preaching pastor, who had a PhD in homiletics, was an excellent preacher. He sat me down and he said, you know, I think there's something here in preaching for you.

I want to mentor you and teach you preaching. So we worked together for five years. He taught me a lot about preaching. And really the leadership of that church were the first ones to kind of push me down a path of not so much music but preaching for the church.

So then I moved back to Kentucky, was there for four years at a church as a worship pastor there as well. And realized that, you know, I kept being asked to lead in the church, and the Lord seemed to be opening doors and moving me more and more into leadership in the church.

And I had really outpaced my ability to lead. I don't want to say rank, but the calling in the church, what I was being asked to do was far beyond my ability to lead other people. And I was just very burdened by that and realizing that I'm making a lot of mistakes, I'm not leading well, what should I do about that?

And the Lord used that to bring me back to Southern. I went there for a doctorate in leadership, so worked on that for a while. And then when I was close to finished with that, the time just seemed right on the advice of friends and talking with my wife and praying through it.

That was the time that seemed right to begin looking for a preaching pastor position. And so that's what brought me up here. And the Lord used that to introduce me to these folks up here. And the rest is history.

Praise God. Well, we're addressing a theme today that most programs in Christian media would never want to address, whether that's print media or audio media or video media, whether it is even churches and parachurch ministries.

The fear of God is probably described by many, if not most, evangelicals as a buzzkill. Why are you bringing that up? We should be rejoicing in the Lord as if this is antithetical to fearing the Lord.

And obviously, many churches gear so-called preaching towards doing nothing but lifting up the spirits and encouraging the listeners and the audience. Now, obviously, I believe that is an important element.

We are not to have nothing but doom and gloom in the sermons of the church, and we're not to be pessimistic. But at the same time, the fear of the Lord is a vital element of knowing who God is. In fact, a classic text in Job 28 .28, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.

Obviously, if the God-breathed words of Scripture tell us, behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, the fear of the Lord is something that we should be taking seriously. Perhaps you could even define that, because people may have all kinds of unbiblical and incorrect understandings of what exactly that means, which may be why a lot of preachers stay clear from even talking about it or preaching about it.

But start with defining that, and tell us why you had a burden placed on your heart to write about in this devotional.

The Fear of God as Joyful Awe and the Beginning of Wisdom

Yeah, well, if it's all right, maybe I'll answer those in reverse order. The burden was because of just what you said, that it's essentially a forgotten teaching in the church. And like you said, most people don't know what it is.

On the other hand, it's, as you said, the beginning of wisdom. So if you want to grow in wisdom, you must have the fear of God. And even more than that, it's in the end of Ecclesiastes and in Peter's words in Acts chapter 10, it's the shortest summary that I have seen in the Bible of what God wants of humanity.

Ecclesiastes says, fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man. So you have one job, it's to fear God and keep his commands. In Acts, Peter says, anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.

Anyone from any nation. So it's that important. It's the foundation of everything godly in a believer's life. And most of us don't know what it is. In fact, we have even a misinformed definition of it.

So I wanted to recast that foundation and give to readers a very thorough, but very accessible, you know, multifaceted look at the diamond from every angle kind of view of the fear of God. In order to make up some of what was lacking there in the church.

So that was the burden. Hopefully describing it like that makes your listeners eager to hear the definition now and want to know how important it is. I define in the book, for a believer, now it's different for an unbeliever, but for a believer, it's a joy-filled, awestruck, trembling before God.

To maybe describe what it feels like, if you've ever stood at the edge of the ocean and just been in awe of how big the ocean is, there's a feeling that goes along with that. Or recently, I was out in the middle of the night on a clear night and just looked up at all the stars and just tried to drink it all in.

You know, if you stood in front of the Grand Canyon or seen the sequoias and the redwoods out in California, there's a feeling there of awe and wonder, where the thing you're looking at is so much bigger than you and you feel so small, but you're very happy.

And that is what the fear of God feels like. It is to get some sense of how incredible He is and to feel very small next to His greatness. But to be very glad and happy, that's the heart of our godliness, that everything good that the Lord does in us starts with Him giving us that kind of heart in the Christian life.

So one of the reasons that confuses people is because, obviously, I'm talking in very positive terms, joy, awe, and the word is fear. And so people will say, wait a minute, fear is a negative word. Why are you using positive words?

The thing that we have to understand about history is that our modern English is really one of the first languages to only use the word fear negatively. Most languages, including Old English, use the word fear negatively and positively.

Just like the word awful that is in many of our hymns, the immediate definition that pops into people's head is not full of awe. It's horrible. That's terrible. And that's why even many hymnals have changed the word awful in various hymns to awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's so hard to find a good word for it because the deep-sounding words sound negative now, and the positive-sounding words all sound trite. Awesome just sounds like, I think, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I hear the word awesome.

It doesn't have the awe before the Lord in me. And so it's so hard to find a good word. Really, it's just worship. But the word worship has been so overused as well that it doesn't really ring the way that it should when we talk about it.

So in Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew as well, the word fear has both a positive and negative use, and it's for anything that just overwhelms your heart. Now, that can be negative. You can be overwhelmed with something that you're scared of, and that would be fear.

But also, if you just have a deep respect and admiration for a person, you might say fear that person. And that reverent, respect-filled awe and worship that we give God as His children who are safe in His arms, we're not scared.

There's an instance where both uses are used together in the Bible. Right after the Lord gives the law in the book of Exodus, it's a terrifying sight. There's trumpets blowing, the mountains are shaking.

If you go on the mountain, you will die. I mean, just, you know, awe-filled sight for sure. And the people are terrified. And they say, basically, Moses, don't ever let Him do that again. Like, you go talk to Him, but we cannot bear to be before Him.

And He says, do not be afraid or do not fear. The Lord has done this to teach you to fear Him. So He uses that word twice right there, negatively and positively. Don't be afraid of this God. But He is doing this to teach you to revere Him, to have a great sense of awe before Him, to worship Him and to obey Him.

And that's what He calls it. He doesn't call us to be afraid of Him, if we're His people. He calls us to worship and love and adore Him. And that is the most thrilling, I think it's the happiest that a human can be, is to feel that before God.

Amen. And we have to go to our first commercial break. If you have a question for Pastor David M. Cook about his devotional standing in awe, 31 Meditations on Fearing God, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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On Thursday, September 18th at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville. Then, on Sunday, September 21st at 1 30 p .m., I'm speaking at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle on the theme, Can We Trust the Bible is the Authentic and Inerrant Word of God?

I hope you can join Chris and me for both events. For more details on the Free Pastors Luncheon, visit ironsharpensironradio .com. That's ironsharpensironradio .com. For more details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, visit trbccarlisle .org.

That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, I'll see you in September in Pennsylvania for these exciting events.

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That's CVBBS .com. And we're now back with David M. Cook. And I want to repeat our email address if you have a question. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

One thing I think that we should return to at least momentarily, just so there's no confusion here, when you were talking about don't be scared of God, do fear God. Isn't there a sense, though, when people, when Christians are in the current state of rebellion, because all Christians sin, and some Christians wallow in that sin for at least a season before they return to their senses and they fall to their knees and cry out in repentance.

Don't you think that there is, unless I'm misreading what James writes when he says, you say you believe in one God, you do well, but even the demons believe and tremble. It's as if he is saying that these people who are professing Christians who do not produce any good fruit in their life, it's as if, when I read that, I think James is saying, the demons are trembling, you should be trembling.

Am I off base there?

No, I don't think you're off base. I think the key is that people in that situation should be scared, but the reason they should be scared is that they may not be Christians, and so they may not be saved.

That's very different than being afraid that the Lord might not be merciful to you if you were to go back to him. So yes, to the extent that you don't have assurance of your faith, you will naturally be scared if you sense how great God is and how powerful he is.

A Christian who has assurance, on the other hand, has nothing to be afraid of. I'm trying to remember where it is. There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear. So if you have confidence in God's love for you or assurance, then you have nothing to be afraid of.

But if your lifestyle is reflecting that perhaps you've deceived yourself, perhaps your conversion was not genuine, then yeah, that's scary, and yeah, you should be scared.

Tom, one of your meditations is, Fearing God Inwardly Means Worshiping God Out Loud. If you could tell us, first of all, what do you mean by fearing God inwardly and how that would lead to worshiping God out loud?

Fear That Overflows in Worship and Evangelism

Well, the Scripture speaks of a believer's fear of the Lord in kind of two senses, internal and external. So sometimes he says to fear me by keeping my commands, and other times he says that fearing him leads to keeping his commands.

So what happens on the inside comes out. Jesus says, Let the tree be good and the fruit be good, or let the tree be bad and the fruit be bad. James says near where you quoted a moment ago that good water and polluted water don't come from the same spring.

It's one or the other, and it's based on the state of the heart. So what's in the heart comes out. And when I say fearing God inwardly, I mean the heartfelt awe and reverence before God. When we feel that on inside through the gospel of Jesus, we sense our safety before Him and we love Him, that is going to lead to praise that comes out of us.

If the tree is good, the fruit is good. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. You see this all the time with other things. When my friends go and visit state parks or national parks and they see incredible sights, they come back and they can't help but tell me all about it.

If you get a new piece of technology that does some wonderful thing or you realize that chat GPT can do some incredible thing you didn't realize it could do before, you just can't help but tell somebody.

When your heart's full of awe, it just comes out of your mouth. And the same thing happens when we feel that way before the Lord. When our hearts are full of awe before Him, when we fear Him and revere Him in our hearts, we can't help but praise Him.

That's the very next thing that's going to come out of us.

Amen. And that seems to militate against a phrase that actually makes me nauseous when I hear Christians repeat it joyfully, a phrase that has been accredited to St. Francis of Assisi, but there seems to be dispute among historians whether he actually said it.

But the citation or the quote is, preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words. I get angry when I hear Christians say that, because other than the foreordination of God the Father to sacrifice His Son, other than that, if Jesus did not use words, He never would have been crucified.

And His disciples that were martyred never would have been killed if they were not using words and they were only doing good deeds and so on. The Romans would not have been bothered by that. The Jews would not have been bothered by that.