Jeff Durbin || The Fear of the Lord(Proverbs 14:27)

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If you would open your Bibles to the book of Proverbs chapter 14, Proverbs chapter 14.

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We are in such a special series right now at Apologia. It's an expositional working through the book of Proverbs, God's book of wisdom from above.

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How do we live? How do we live as God's people? How do we live like Christ? What was he like?

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You find it in these pages. And so we're in Proverbs chapter 14 today in an important foundational part of what wisdom and knowledge and life is all about for the people of God, for the world really.

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Proverbs chapter 14 in verse 27, hear now the word of the living and the true

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God. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life that one may turn away from the snares of death.

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Thus far as the reading of God's holy and inspired word, let's praise his people. God, we come before your word recognizing the weight of this promise and Lord as a man, as a creature, there is no way for me to impress upon the hearer, the value, the power and the glory of this word.

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I can't do it, Lord, apart from your spirit. So I pray that you'd please by your spirit today, move through the proclamation of your truth and your word, grant to us fear of you.

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Lord, get the teacher out of the way. Glorify your name today in Jesus' name. Amen. The fear of the

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Lord is a fountain of life that one may turn away from the snares of death. This has to be a text that transforms us.

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If you're in Christ today, this is a glorious promise. It is where your life is found.

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It's the start of it all. If you're not in Jesus today, I pray with all of my heart that through the proclamation of this word today, your eyes would be opened through God's glorious gospel by his spirit, that your heart would be changed and that your life would be completely made new today through the proclamation of this truth.

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The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. It's interesting because you can do this very easily.

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Just look up fear of the Lord in the book of Proverbs and do a search. You'll see that this is actually repeated a number of times.

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And if you've been here since the beginning, everybody knows that really the book of Proverbs starts with that foundational verse,

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Proverbs 1, 7, that we should all have memorized by now. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, right, or knowledge.

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That's what the text says. And so the book starts with, you want wisdom? You want to know where it's found?

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You want to understand the rest of these words from God? Here's a starting point. Here's where you plant your feet.

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It is the fear of Yahweh, fear of Yahweh. And it's interesting because this wouldn't have been such a unique or a startling thing only generations ago.

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I mean, if we were in the time of the Puritans preaching in this nation that we're living in, it would have been standard fare, understood, fear

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God, keep his commandments. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the fountain of life.

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It was understood throughout really Christian history that we're called to fear God, to fear the

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Lord. But we have to recognize, even today, doing a series like this is unique.

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We know, and I even see every Sunday morning, my wife will always say, why are you watching that? I'm just like, well,

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I'm just doing a check -in. I have a lot of the local sort of mega -churches somehow on my page, and so before I'm prepping and praying for the rest of the sermon today and doing final work, and Lord, do

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I have anything else? I'll check in of what's being preached at sort of the local churches in the area.

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And today, just today, I sort of clicked on one, and Candy was sitting next to me. I think we were feeding the babies, which is what my life is all about right now.

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It's feeding babies 24 hours a day. It's one baby, then the next baby, then the next baby again, and my life is feeding babies.

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So pray for us, we're still not sleeping, amen. So Candy's sitting next to me, and local churches, big mega -churches on, and she gets about three minutes in and she goes, why are you listening to this?

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And what's he even talking about? And it was just sort of personal life stories, and we're gonna find a way in 30 minutes to like get to a

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Bible verse, but it's something that's just gonna be uplifting and encouraging and sort of focusing on making your life the best life, and those sorts of things.

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And to come into a church like ours, in the modern context that we're in, where we don't care about the size of the church,

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I don't. I care about faithfulness. I would rather shepherd a church of 12 faithful disciples than a church of 1 ,000 hypocrites.

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We don't care about programs, we don't care about church size, and we'll preach the word, not because we're great or we're so spectacular or we're called to this as pastors, but preach the word faithfully, and I don't care what happens as a result of it.

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I don't care. If the church falls apart through a faithful proclamation of the word, then

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I will go back to teaching karate and loving Jesus, sound good? And I mean that.

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You preach the word, you preach it faithfully, and you let God do what he's going to do through a faithful proclamation of his word, and it is unusual today to walk into a church that is going to tell you that you must fear the

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Lord. That is the beginning of understanding, the beginning of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom. You have to fear

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God. That is the fountain of life. That's the starting point. And so a lot of times it's unusual today.

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I recognize that everyone wants to see God as this amazing sky daddy, and he's my broseph, right?

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He's my chum, he's my bud. And so you'll see even — I always have such a hard time with this.

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I'm really letting you see inside me right now. I have such a hard time. I even saw like a local pastor and doing his prayers for a church, and I noticed that there's a pattern in even how he prays, where he's sort of flippant in how he talks to God.

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He's like, hey God, hey God, hey God. It's like, hey bro. And it's just this sort of like, it's no reverence for a holy

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God. I mean when Moses is doing the whole thing at Sinai, and he's receiving the tablets and the

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Ten Commandments, and he wants to see God. And God won't even allow him to see him, because he's like, you won't survive seeing me.

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So I'll put you in a cleft of the rock, and I'll cover you with my hand to guard you from my glory. You as a creature can't take this.

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And Jesus said, in terms of speaking of the Father, no one has seen God at any time.

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No creature on this side of heaven like this can see God, because you would be consumed.

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So scripture says, fear God, and we see God as just our bro. He's just love.

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God has one attribute today. The only real attribute of God is that God is love.

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He's just love. And the answer is, yeah, God is love beyond our capacity to even begin to comprehend.

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That's the truth. He is love by his very nature and character. That is absolutely true.

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But God is not just love. He is also angry with sin and filled with wrath and righteous indignation.

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Now, his wrath isn't like yours. It's not like mine. Even God's wrath is not out of control.

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It's not overblown. It is his settled opposition against evil. But God has attributes that go beyond simply love.

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And we walk out to the world today, and we think we can sell the Christian faith. We're just selling the

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Christian faith. We just want people, we want to dumb the Christian faith and the glory and the knowledge of God down to this, just the bottom shelf only, and we go into the world and we want to placate to unbelievers.

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We placate towards them. We want to flatter them and think that if I flatter them and I placate towards them and I sort of diminish the glory, holiness, justice, righteousness, and power of God, then we're going to convince a lot of people to fill our churches.

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If we could just bring it down to the bottom shelf and get God to just be this really loving, sky daddy, broseph, if I could just get

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God to be my buddy and just tell the world, hey, he loves you unconditionally. We tell unbelievers that as Christians.

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He loves you unconditionally. And that is a lie. It's a lie.

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Nowhere in Scripture does God say that he loves the unbeliever unconditionally. But we teach that today.

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We tell people that today. We lie to people about God and so people aren't even afraid of God.

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No one wants this fountain of life. No one wants to escape the snares of death if they think that God is just fine with them as far as it goes.

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He's loving. He loves them unconditionally and maybe they're going to be fine as far as it goes. Maybe I'll make it to the end of my life and he's just going to let me get a pass for my life of rebellion and hatred of God, for my love of sin and lawlessness.

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And so yeah, yeah, today saying that the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life is a hard thing in terms of the modern context in how we view

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God. And it's interesting because we forget that God is holy. Scripture teaches this through and through as much as it teaches that he's love.

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God is just. God is righteous. God is always good.

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God is, again, angry with sin. God hates even the wicked,

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Scripture teaches. And that's the context we find ourselves in as we get into a passage today about the fear of the

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Lord is the, is a fountain of life. Dr. Sproul, when speaking on the fear of the

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Lord, said, and I think it's perfect, he said, that God's kingdom isn't

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Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. God's kingdom isn't Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. It has a holy and righteous king, a father who is blameless, a father who is a consuming fire.

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And so when you hear that, the fear of the Lord, I recognize something. All of us should. All of us should. You hear that we're called to fear

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God and you think to yourself as a Christian, but wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I, I, I was told in Scripture that God calls me his child.

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And the answer is yes. You've been adopted into God's family. He calls you child. You call him father.

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I was told that God sings over me. I don't even know what that sounds like. It's unbelievable, but he sings over me.

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And that's true. I was told that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

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And that's true. And that I have peace with God. And that's true. And that I have eternal life. And that's true. And I've passed out of death into life and all of that's true.

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But it does not remove the truth about who God is by nature.

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It does not diminish or wash over all of the true attributes of our

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Father and it does not remove the call of God for God's people to actually fear God, to fear him.

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And we're afraid to think about fearing God as Christians because we rightly should see

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God as Father, as the one who doesn't condemn us, as the one who loves us with an everlasting love who will keep his covenant and will never perish.

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And so we're afraid to see God as a God to fear because, if we're honest, when we've experienced fear in relationship with another person in this life, we've had a bad way.

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Many of us have had terrible, scary experiences at home with our own father.

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Many in this room, you've experienced abuse at the hands of a father or a loved one and so when

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I say fear God, we think, well, I'm supposed to fear like I feared my dad where I'd come home and he was unstable.

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Maybe he was a drunk. Maybe you weren't allowed to make eye contact with your dad because he would fly off the handle.

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Or maybe there was furniture thrown or holes in the wall. Maybe there was abuse. Maybe there was excessive discipline and so when you hear, hey, we need to fear

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God. God commands that. It's a fountain of life. We're afraid to go that way because we're like, I have to see

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God as my horrible father or maybe for some women in this room, you've experienced abuse, physical abuse or sexual abuse or emotional abuse at the hands of a terrible boyfriend or husband.

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And so when you're being told we need to fear the Lord, it's a fountain of life, we don't know how to contextualize that because in our own personal relationships, we've had relationships where we feared another human being, but here's the, here's the answer to that.

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That fear of another human being is fear of an unstable person, of a person who isn't good, of a person who isn't righteous, of a person who isn't unchanging and so when we're called to fear

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God, it's not the same way. Actually, Scripture would define, here it is, the definition,

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Scripture would define the fear of the Lord as something wholly different than thinking about the fear of a horrible father or the fear of a horrible husband or boyfriend or the fear of some evil thug.

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Scripture would define the fear of the Lord as a trembling, as a trembling before the

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Almighty. It would describe the fear of the Lord as a reverence for God or an awe before God.

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That's how Scripture defines the fear of the Lord, a reverential awe of the

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Almighty, of the Eternal One, of the Transcendent One, of the One who's not like me, of the

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One who's not like us. The fear of the Lord is a trembling, a reverence and an awe, not the fear of an imbalanced person.

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And this is really important too. When we talk about fearing the Lord, it's not the fear of the unknown.

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And that's what we typically do when we think about the fear of an unstable, imbalanced person, a person that is violent or we think about this person that I fear, whether it's the personal relationship or the guy that was following me down the street in the dark and I was terrified, whatever the case may be, we're not talking about fearing the unknown, we're saying we fear the

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Lord because of the known, because of what is actually true about God.

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What is known about God? God is holy, God is righteous,

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God is perfectly just. God has wrath towards sin and evil.

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God is eternal. God isn't dependent upon anybody or anything.

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God sustains all things. God is the sovereign, so when we say fear the

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Lord, tremble before the Lord, have reverential awe before God, it's because of what is known about God.

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We need to fear him because of what is true about him, what we know about him, not the unknown.

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And so scripture says this so much and I was tempted just to like overload us to convince the world that scripture commands us, calls us to fear

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God, but just a smattering of scriptures today to buttress the point of what we see today in the book of Proverbs, many scriptures, but here's one, one of my favorites actually, this one,

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Ecclesiastes 12, 13, it says this, the end of the matter, all has been heard, here it is, fear

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God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

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So everyone says like what's the snapshot, what's the bottom line, what do I have to do with, what's the Christian life all about, and the writer of Ecclesiastes says this is the whole thing, all has been heard, this is the main thing.

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Fear God, keep his commandments, that's your whole duty. Simple, right? So just write that on your mirror, write that on your wall, whatever you have to do, kids don't write on your walls without permission, okay, sorry.

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Fear God, keep his commandments, that's your whole duty, that's it. Distill the entire Christian life down, fear

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God, keep his commandments. Psalm 33, 8 says, let all the earth fear the

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Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

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There it is, that reverence, that awe, that's the kind of fear that we have for God. Luke 150 says, and his mercy, and his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

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Deuteronomy 10, 12 says, and now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you?

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But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the

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Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Psalm 25, 14, the friendship of the

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Lord is for those who fear him. You want to be a friend of God? Want to be a friend of God?

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Fear God. Fear him. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him and he makes known to them his covenants.

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Psalm 34, 9, oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack.

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Psalm 86, 11, teach me your way, oh Lord, that I may walk in your truth, unite my heart to fear your name.

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Proverbs 3, 7, you've been here before, be not wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and turn away from evil.

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Philippians 2, 12 through 13, therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

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For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

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Last one, Psalm 34, 11, come, oh children, listen to me,

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I will teach you the fear of the Lord. And so, I think we can be in agreement that this is a theme throughout scripture, that the people of God are called to fear the

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Lord. Scripture teaches that. And it is interesting, and I give you just a start of this main discussion here.

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Scripture actually goes two ways with this all the time. You will see it everywhere.

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The call to fear God, the call to fear the Lord, the friends of the

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Lord are those who fear him, God's children fear him, fearing God, no lack, all those promises, fear

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God, fear the Lord, fountain of life, and so the call is fear God. And then the other direction, the other way, the other route, it says do not fear.

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Well do not fear what? Do not fear the world. Do not fear man and what man can do to you.

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Do not fear the future. God even calls his people, don't even worry. Don't fear.

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Don't be anxious about anything. Well that's a tall order in a fallen world. There's a lot of things to be scared of, and God says fear not, neither be afraid, do not be anxious, and so isn't it interesting, actually

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God's calling us one way. He's saying fear me, not the world. Fear me, not the future.

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Fear me, not the evil man. Scripture calls us fear God, don't fear anything else.

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So all the awe, all the reverence, all the trembling is not supposed to be before man and kings and princes and bosses and thugs and the evil or the future.

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All the fear is supposed to be trembling before him, and God says I'll free you of the fear of the world, and so isn't it interesting that it works like this.

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The more I fear God, fear God, the more I fear him, the less

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I fear man, and the more that people fear man and what man thinks and what man can do to you, the less we fear

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God. Why is there a lack in American pulpits? Why is there a lack of conviction and powerful preaching?

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And the answer I believe with all of my heart is we have pastors behind the pulpit that fear man rather than God, and because we fear man, we don't honor

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God, we don't love him with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we don't obey his commandments because we don't fear him, and I'm so afraid of what man thinks of me that I'm not actually afraid of what

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God thinks of me. Fear God, you won't fear man. Fear man, you won't fear

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God. That's how Scripture would put this, but it's interesting because I think today, because we have such an emphasis upon the person in the pew, what makes your life better, and how

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God just wants to just give you your best life and all the rest, we don't actually hear oftentimes what

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Scripture actually says about God. We don't know the stories from our Bibles because we don't read our

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Bible like we're called to. We don't know the stories that tell us about the holiness of God and that God is a consuming fire.

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We don't read the stories about God killing his enemies. We don't hear the stories about the wrath of God because we only want to hear the good things, the uplifting things.

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I want to come to church and I want to just hear about how great I am and how good my future's going to be and how much just God is only for me, and we don't want to hear about God as God is so that we worship him and know him as he truly is.

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We don't know about sections of Scripture like the book of Isaiah chapter 6. Go there. Now as you get there,

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I'm going to remind you, it's Isaiah chapter 6, of course. Chapters and verse subdivisions are a modern innovation.

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When Isaiah wrote this, he wasn't writing it with chapters and verses, he was giving you a word from God, revelation from God.

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Now as you get to 6, remember something, remember something. That Isaiah 1 starts off with a jolt.

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It starts off with a serious jolt to the people of God. In Isaiah chapter 1,

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Isaiah comes in as a prophet giving God's revelation to his people and this revelation is undeniably divine and glorious.

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It is all about Jesus. The book of Isaiah is Jesus, the portrait of Jesus from different facets and angles, suffering servant, conquering king, the one who justifies the many, prophecy about God coming as a man, as a son.

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It is an amazing, amazing book. However, it starts with a jolt.

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It starts with God calling the covenant people of God, Sodom and Gomorrah and it starts, listen, listen, it starts with God telling religious people, church -like people, people who are doing all the stuff, the religious ceremonies, everything they're doing looks so Christian and so religious, they look like believers on the outside.

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And God says to them, he says, I hate your worship.

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Your hands are full of blood. He says, if you pray to me,

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I won't listen. He says, everything you're doing in all of your festivals and all of your worship, he says,

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I'm going to hide my eyes from you. I won't listen to you. And so he calls them to turn and he says, cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause.

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He says, come now, let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins are as scarlet, they'll be white as snow.

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That's that famous section. But it starts with a jolt. It's not a happy Sunday morning service.

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It's a hard word to the covenant people of God. And that's how it starts.

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The holy God, the only God, the true God saying to the people of God, the professing people of God, I don't want your worship.

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I will not listen to your prayers. Your hands are full of blood. And he says, repent. That's how it starts.

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That's God. And then in Isaiah 6, you have this incredible scene that I don't think that we could really understand and plumb the depths of as creatures, but we can get,

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I think, the gist of what's going on here with the glory of God. In Isaiah 6, verse 1, it says, in the year that King Uzziah died,

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I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

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Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings. With two, he covered his face, and with two, he covered his feet, and with two, he flew.

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Now we're not unpacking all of Isaiah 6 here today, but it is interesting that even the angels before the presence of God are covering their face, covering their face in reverence and awe and respect for God's majesty and glory.

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The angels aren't coming up to God, hey, bro, hey, God. They have their faces covered, their feet covered.

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So the seraphim are before the glory of God, covering themselves, and one called to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the

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Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. If you're new to the faith and you didn't know this, this is interesting.

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There's no punctuation in the Hebrew, right? No periods, exclamation points.

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If you want to emphasize something in the Hebrew text, you say it, you mean it, writing it, saying it.

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But if you want to emphasize it and really put a punctuation mark on it, if you really want to exclaim it and you want to shout it, you say it twice, holy, holy, it's shouting it, it's screaming it.

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That's not what happens here. Holy, holy, holy.

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It's emphasizing this aspect of who God is by an angel who's covering his own face before God.

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Holy, holy, holy. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.

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Do we see God like that? Are we telling the world that God is like that?

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Is that the message of the Christian church today? And we wonder why there's so much decay, so much rot, so much evil and spiritual darkness around us.

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Perhaps much of it is actually our fault. They don't fear him because we don't.

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They don't fear him because we're giving them a totally different portrait. We're giving them a totally different portrait of who

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God is and what God is like. Here's what scripture says. When Isaiah, who gets this revelation from God, gets this vision of God and his glory and his holiness, his response, his response is not to fist bump him.

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His response is not a high five. His response is not simply to puff his chest up before God and say, hey

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God. No, his response is very different. It's a response filled with the fear of the

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Lord. He says this when he sees this glorious vision.

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He says, whoa, it's me. For I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the

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Lord of hosts. Isn't it a powerful thing to reflect on the fact that Isaiah the prophet, who is getting revelation from God, when he gets this vision of the holiness and righteousness and power of God, his first response is to recognize immediately his own wickedness and sin and how far apart he is from God.

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Not like God, not holy like God. He's calling down the curse of God onto himself.

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He's not self -righteous. He's not blind to his own brokenness and his own failures. His first response is to say, whoa, it's me.

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Now if you don't know this, when Scripture declares a whoa, it is a very serious charge.

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When you say whoa to somebody, that's — it's calling down the curse of God. It's calling down condemnation.

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Whoa to you is death to you. He's basically saying, God, kill me. Kill me.

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I don't deserve to be in your presence. He recognizes immediately, I'm a man of unclean lips.

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I'm guilty in your eyes, I'm not holy like you. He recognizes immediately his lips, the things that he says.

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He's guilty just with his mouth. And then he goes beyond himself and he says, not only am

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I guilty in God, please curse me, kill me. Don't even let me live, he says. My lips are unclean and I live in the midst of a people with unclean lips.

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He recognizes in God's holiness, his sin and the sin of people all around him.

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That is the kind of response that we will have before the throne of God and his glory, especially without Christ.

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Because as a child of God, what do you know you have? What do you know you have? What do you have?

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You're adopted. God adopted you. You once were far off, scripture says, but you've been brought near by the blood of Christ.

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You were strangers and alien and aliens to the covenants of promise, but now you've been brought near.

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God took somebody that wasn't a part of his people and he took you and said, you're mine, you're my daughter, you're my son, you're my child forever.

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So you're a child of God, that's what you have. And you're not condemned. You have the righteousness of Jesus.

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When the Father sees you, he doesn't see your failures and your sins and your falling short and all your evil and all your past or present or future.

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He sees the righteousness of Jesus. That's the truth. But can you imagine, can you imagine this moment for a person who's not adopted by God, who's not justified, who hasn't received the gift of eternal life, the person who's lived in rebellion against God and his holiness their entire lives.

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Can you imagine that moment, that person stands before a holy God? What terror, what absolute terror, what condemnation.

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Our God is a consuming fire. And so scripture says, fear the

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Lord, it is a fountain of life. God is omnipotent.

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So fear him. All powerful is what that means, all power.

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He lacks in nothing. I don't comprehend that. And guess what, neither do you. To be limitless in power, that nothing is beyond your abilities, nothing, nothing.

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Some of us are pretty good at some things. Like there are so many skillful and talented people in this room.

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I know many of you. I know what you do for work. I know your, your specialties and your gifts and it's impressive how much you know and how good you are at what you do.

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And isn't it funny when you, you meet somebody who's like really great at something like how'd you get like that? Like how long did it take you to master that, right?

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And you feel like just in awe of their gifts and abilities because you don't know what they know and you can't do what they do.

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And so sometimes some of us are good at just like a handful of things, right? We're great at some things, but even the good things that we're great at, we're still not limitless in our abilities in those, those that we're still limited.

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Even the greatest person at a particular field is still limited and they don't know everything.

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God is not like us. He's all powerful. Nothing's beyond his control and his ability.

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He is all powerful. He can do anything that he pleases. So he's not like us.

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So we fear him. We have awe before him. We tremble before an all powerful God. God is omniscient, meaning he's all knowing.

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Now this should cause us instantly to fear God, to fear him because of his omniscience, his all knowingness.

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Nothing is outside of his knowledge. From all eternity to all eternity, God doesn't even have to think and go through the file cabinet to remember anything.

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God knows all things forever. Why should that cause us fear of God?

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Because if you know your thought life from just last week, you know you should fear

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God. You should fear God. He knows even the things in terms of our own sinfulness and our own failures that we aren't even aware of, that we neglect to even understand are sinful or falling short.

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He knows everything. And here's one terrifying thing for the unbeliever, not the believer, that everything that has ever even been whispered in terms of sinfulness is going to be shouted on the last day, shouted before everybody.

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Your secret thoughts, my secret thoughts, your fallen heart, my fallen heart, outside of the atonement of Jesus Christ is going to be something on full display before the watching world.

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Every deed, every thought, every idle word and idle thought,

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God's omniscience, his all knowingness is something that ought to cause each and every single one of us to fear

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God. God is eternal. He's eternal. He's never started. He didn't grow.

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He wasn't born. He wasn't created. He's always existed forever ago and there's another incomprehensible aspect of God's nature and what he's like that is something that we can't even begin to plumb the depths of.

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He's eternal all the way back forever ago. He needed nothing. Nobody started God. He didn't need help from anybody.

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Nothing's above him, below him, in front of him, behind him. He is the eternal God. He's not dependent upon anybody or anything.

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He doesn't take counsel from anybody. He doesn't have to ask questions or to learn things and when it comes to the future itself,

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God is the sovereign determiner of what will and won't happen in his universe. He declares the end from the beginning.

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Nothing surprises him. He's not dependent upon anybody. He's holy. He's separate.

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He is perfectly just and this is the glorious thing about God is that there is a final day of judgment ahead of us, a final day of judgment where everything wrong will be made right.

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Every right answer will be given. Nothing will be covered. Everything will be exposed and God, when he responds to the evil that is left, that has not been dealt with in his son, he will respond with furious, perfect justice.

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Now if you've been abused or harmed in this life, that ought to give you peace.

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Nothing's going to be neglected. Nothing will be forgotten by our good father in heaven. He is just.

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But for those who don't know Jesus, who have not experienced the wrath of God passing over them and given to Jesus Christ, for those that don't know that truth, they don't know the

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Savior, that day of justice will be a terrifying, awful day and it will only be the beginning for them.

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So we should fear the Lord. It's the fountain of life. God is the creator of all things.

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He's the sustainer of all things. He's the sovereign over all things. He's the judge of all things.

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And what's interesting here is I think many people would recognize, right, you look in the Old Testament and you're like, my goodness,

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Pastor Jeff, you're right, it's everywhere. Fear God. Keep his commandments. Fear God.

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Hold duty of man. Fear the Lord. Fear the Lord. Fear the Lord. People of God, this is your duty. Fear the

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Lord. It's everywhere. Fear the Lord. But maybe that's just the Old Testament God. Right?

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Maybe that's just that Old Testament side of things. Because Jesus, in him, we have the happy God.

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Right? And Jesus, I know the fear of God stuff, the law of God stuff, the justice of God stuff,

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Old Testament, but with Jesus, isn't it the happy God now? Doesn't Jesus save us from all that awful law stuff and fearing

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God stuff? Well, let's go to the Incarnate One and let's see what he says in Luke chapter 12.

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It's a powerful section of scripture. Luke chapter 12, verse 1. This is, as you get there, on the tail end in Luke's Gospel, where the scribes and the

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Pharisees are beginning to try to press Jesus, to try to provoke

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Jesus, and to get him to say something that can catch him in. They're already ticked at Jesus.

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They're upset with him. He's exposing them. He confronts them. They're these people of religious accolades and authority.

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People love the Pharisees. They're actually rigorous. They respect the law of God, right?

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They have a high view of the law of God. They've even added some of their own, right? They love God's law so much, they add some more, right?

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Just to help God out a bit. But people love these guys because they're rigorous, they're disciplined. We see them many times today as Christians in the 21st century as the bad guys, but we need to understand that in the 1st century, these are seen as the revered, religious, like highly disciplined guys.

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And here comes Jesus on the scene in his ministry confronting them.

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Confronting their hypocrisy. And so this is right in the midst of that, in chapter 12, verse 1. It says,

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In the meantime, when so many thousands of the people had gathered together, that they were trampling one another, he began to say to his disciples, first, beware of the leaven of the

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Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known.

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Therefore, whatever you've said in the dark shall be heard in the light. And what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.

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I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more they can do to you.

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They can do. But I will warn you whom to fear. Fear him who after he is killed has authority to cast into hell.

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Yes, I tell you, fear him. Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies and not one of them is forgotten before God?

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Why even the hairs of your head are all numbered, fear not. You are of more value than many sparrows.

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This is powerful, it's amazing. It really is amazing because here you have Jesus saying something that should cause every sinful person to tremble before a holy

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God. And it's just what we've already talked about. Whatever you've said in the dark shall be heard in the light.

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And what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. No secrets. It's all coming out.

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God knows. He'll expose it all. That should cause everybody to have reverence and awe and trembling before God.

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But then Jesus does something interesting. He says, ready, do not fear, all right, so there's what we talked about.

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Do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more they can do.

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So here's where scripture, again, is that constant theme, gives us the constant theme of don't fear man, don't fear what man can do to you, don't fear what man thinks of you, don't fear the world, don't fear the future.

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And so Jesus says, ready, do not fear, don't fear the people who can destroy your body and kill you.

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Because that's it. That's all they've got. And this is, by the way, why in Christian history, and if it ever happens to us, we're going to need to depend upon the spirit of God and the strength of God in these moments in the same way the saints have done before us.

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But in Christian history, there's such strange and unusual stories of God's people standing for the truth, standing for the nature of God, the glory of God in whatever context or controversy, bringing the gospel to pagans and being killed, or standing for the truth in the midst of the gospel and dying as martyrs in such glorious ways.

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I mean, have you heard the stories of Christians being burned at the stake, set fire to, and they're singing their way to heaven while they're burning to death?

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And you know, sometimes we think about burning to death in terms of, well, maybe it's just a quick thing, like the fire burns me and I, I go out quickly.

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Sometimes this lasts on and on and on and on. It's not a quick death.

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And we have Christians that have died in flames singing songs and hymns to God. How's that happen?

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How's that happen? How do people stand before people with power and stand boldly for the truth of God and God's kingdom and God's gospel and say, go ahead and kill me,

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I have no fear of death. You're just giving me my pass right into the presence of my Father, the one, the lover of my soul, the one that I live for, the

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God that I know, the God who saved me. People just die these glorious deaths knowing

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Jesus with no fear because Jesus says, don't fear the people who have the power to take your life because that's it.

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That's all they can do. But rather, Jesus says, I will warn you.

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I will warn you whom to fear. Fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell.

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Then Jesus says it again, yes, I tell you, fear him.

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So when we think about this weird way we cause a disjunction today between the

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Old Testament and the New Testament in such a perverse, non -Christian, unbiblical worldview way, we try to break the

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Testaments apart and like, oh, the fear of God stuff, justice of God, that's all the stuff in the past there. No, no, Jesus in his earthly ministry said this, don't fear them.

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I'll tell you who to fear. I'm gonna warn you who to fear. Fear the one who will kill you and then send you to hell forever.

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Yes, I tell you, fear him. These are the words of Jesus.

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This is God. This is what he says. We don't think about that, do we? Like, we don't want to think about future.

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We lie to ourselves about how much time we have left in this life or we lie to ourselves about how good we really are.

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We think we're kind of special in ourselves. Maybe we don't really need Jesus. We don't need to respond to God.

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Maybe I just have more time to think, more time to live for God's glory. Maybe that will be something I decide on in the last few minutes of my life or later on down the road.

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I'll get to that. And Jesus says, no, here's what you need to be afraid of is that God can kill you and then throw you into hell forever.

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So yes, I tell you, fear him. So ready? In this small section we have

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Jesus, the incarnate one, God walking among us saying, don't fear these people over here who can simply take your life because that's all they have.

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And you have eternal life with your father. And all they can do is take your body. And this is not all there is. You have eternal life.

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You have presence of God for all eternity. Joy and happiness in heaven forever. So take your life.

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What am I afraid of? No fear in life and no fear in death. Don't fear them. He says, fear the one who will kill you and throw you into hell forever.

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So then Jesus does something for you. For me. He says this, yes,

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I tell you, fear him. Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?

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It's like worthless. Right? It's like nothing. And he says, and not one of them is forgotten before God.

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Why? Even the hairs of your head are all numbered.

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Fear not. You are of more value than many sparrows. So do you see?

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Fear God and all fear goes away.

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Why? Because you have a heavenly father who has every hair on your head numbered and counted.

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For some of you men, that's easy. I just,

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I just, I'm just going to make a curse upon myself, it's going to happen to me soon. But that's, here's the point, ready?

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Insignificant nothing. Right? Five, two coins, whatever, sparrows, who cares about sparrows?

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God says, God knows about every one of them. Not one of them falls from a branch, but apart from your father's knowledge.

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And he says, and you, and you child of God, here's why you shouldn't be afraid.

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Because God has every single hair on your head numbered. You're of more value than all the sparrows.

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You belong to God. Fear God and you don't need to fear anything else. That's the point.

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So it says in Proverbs, the fear of the

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Lord is a fountain of life. How is that? I'll just say this part quickly. It should be rather obvious to us.

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On the one hand, the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. It is just pouring out, pouring out life, life, life.

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And one element of that clearly, clearly, without question in this book of wisdom, we've already been here.

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The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. How so? Well, even in the rudimentary things of basic life, the fear of God will keep you from the path of the world and the path of the wicked.

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The fear of the Lord will keep you from the adulterous woman. Yeah. Fearing God will keep you away from the pornography.

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It'll keep you away from the sexual immorality. Fear of God will keep you away from the adulterous woman.

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In the end, listen, every sexual sin, all of that pursuit of the adulterous woman, all of it will have its genesis in forgetting

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God and no longer fearing Him. You want to get free from that stuff?

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Yes, Scripture says you're seated with Christ in the heavenly places, you're filled with the Spirit of God and to put it to death. But in putting it to death, the very thing at the front of putting it to death is because I fear

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God. It's because I fear God. Fear of God will keep you from the adulterous woman.

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Fear of God will keep you from being a divisive man.

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It'll keep you from the divisive man. It'll keep you from being a scoffer, an unteachable person, because you'll be humble and trembling before God.

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The fear of God is a fountain of life. The fear of God will keep you from lying lips and all the destruction that comes from that.

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The fear of God will keep you from slander and slandering others. The fear of God will keep you from poverty and sluggardness.

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There's more we can do. We've already been reading about it in the Book of Wisdom of how the wisdom of God preserves your life.

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It keeps you on a path of light and righteousness and keeps you away from the path that is a pit of death and darkness.

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We've already seen that through the Book of Wisdom. And so the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, yes, in those ways in this life.

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However, the fear of God will lead you ultimately to eternal life and you will escape, the text says, the snares of death.

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The Apostle Paul, in his explanation of the good news of God, like what is so good about the good news?

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Why is it good news? In Romans, he identifies something really important.

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I want you to see this with your own eyes. He identifies something about the nature of the person who has fallen.

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And I want you to see how he identifies it and he wraps it up as a climax. Go to Romans chapter 3 when we talk about the fear of the

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Lord being a fountain of life and allowing us to escape the snares of death.

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In Romans chapter 3, he's indicted at this point everybody, Jews and Gentiles.

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Everyone's in the same place, Jews have no special righteousness or place before God, they need

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Jesus. The Gentiles are lost, they're haters of God, enemies of God, they're lost, they've got nothing and so Jews and Gentiles, equally condemned before God, they all need

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Jesus. That's Paul's point. But when he identifies what is true about Jews and Gentiles, he says, verse 10, chapter 3, as it is written, none is righteous, no not one.

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No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless, no one does good, not even one.

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Their throat is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips, their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.

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Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery and the way of peace they have not known.

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And here's how he summarizes. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

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The Apostle Paul, under divine inspiration, summarizes the plight of the rebel and the hater of God, the spiritually lost person, the person who doesn't know

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God, and he tells the whole story about each and every one of us. And here's, if you didn't know this, if you don't know

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Jesus, this is your description. It's how

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God sees you outside of Jesus. There's not somebody out there always talking about them.

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This is the indictment upon all of humanity, meaning if you don't know Jesus, this is you.

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It's how God views you. That God we talked about from Isaiah 6, the one that is holy and the angels are covering their face, and all that story of woe is me, that God you will face as the

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God -hater, the non -God -seeking, the not -righteous, the not -good, the venom of asps under your lips, mouth full of curses and bitterness.

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And here's what Scripture says as a summary, as a climax, as a cherry on top of the description of the fallen, is it says, there is no fear of God before their eyes.

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So the friend of God fears God. The enemy of God has no fear of God.

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They don't fear him. That's Paul's identification of the lost, but it's interesting because we could do this study for a long time.

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We could talk about how the fear of God would have kept

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Adam and Eve from the snares of death, right? Think about it.

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How simple that was. This but not that. Very simple. God says, the beginning of humanity, this but not that.

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And if they would have feared the Lord, if they would have trembled and been reverential towards him and in awe of him, nothing would have stopped them from obeying his commands.

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But if they feared God, they would have been kept in life, but they were trapped by the snare of death.

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Fear of God would have kept the world from perishing in Noah's day. And think about the ark being built and all the people mocking

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Noah and all the rest. Fear of God would have brought more people into the ark, amen?

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But they didn't fear God, and then the day of judgment came, it swept them all away.

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Fear of God would have kept Israel from perishing in the wilderness. Fear of God would have kept Israel from perishing in battle.

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Fear of God will keep you from the snares of death only in Jesus Christ.

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And it's interesting because today we like to dumb down the status of a person in front of us, the person who doesn't know

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God, the person who is lost. We like to try to minimize the damage. Sometimes we even like to flatter the unbeliever.

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Sometimes we like to diminish the attributes and the character of God and the holiness of God because we just want to, quote, win souls.

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So we don't tell people the truth, we don't tell them what's really wrong. We don't even allow them to get to a place where they are afraid of God, where they see that they're fully broken and they need redemption, they need

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Jesus, and they want to fall on Him completely. Jesus wasn't afraid for people to turn away from Him.

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Jesus would have massive crowds and He would turn and He would whittle it down to nothing again because He always told the truth and He would tell them what it costs to come to Him and to follow

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Him and He would tell them, count the cost or don't come. Jesus never placated,

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Jesus never flattered, He told the truth. And it's interesting because His disciples understood the message.

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They did fear the Lord, they understood what they needed and so when Jesus says to His disciples that are left, you know the story,

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He would say, do you also want to go? And they would say, because they understood the problem, where are we gonna go?

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You have the words of eternal life. They knew they needed that fountain of life and they knew

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He was the only way. You know times have changed significantly. Theology has changed in our nation, public theology has changed so much in this generation.

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And it is an answer for what is so broken out there. We think about how's the world gonna transform, how's the world gonna change?

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We've lost so much and the answer is yes, we have, but the gospel is still the power of God for salvation.

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We have the same gospel, the same word and the same spirit of God. Maybe it's actually not the power of God, maybe it is our preaching and the message that we're delivering to the world.

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Maybe that's what's wrong. Maybe we need to allow people to come to a place where they are convicted over their sin and they realize their desperate need for that cross and what

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Jesus accomplished on that cross. Maybe we should talk about our condition and the holiness of God in the old school way, in the biblical way, in the way that preachers did in the past and you would see revival breakouts.

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Hearts would be transformed, people would be in tears, people would be trembling because they feared the

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Lord. Maybe we need to preach sermons like Sinners in the

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Hands of an Angry God, a sermon, a famous sermon that used to actually be studied in public schools.

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Did you ever study in public school? Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards.

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Here's just, if you haven't read it yet, by the way, please do. It's not very long.

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It's a sermon that God used to bring about awakening, true spiritual awakening in this nation because it told the truth about God and our condition.

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Here's what Jonathan Edwards said. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.

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His wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.

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He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight.

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You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than to, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

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You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince. And yet, it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.

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It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night.

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That you was suffered to wake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep.

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And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning.

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But that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful, wicked manner of attending his solemn worship.

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Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

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O sinner, consider the fearful danger you are in. It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell.

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You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and to burn it asunder.

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And you have no interest in any mediator and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done, nothing you can do to induce

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God to spare you one moment. Where is that preaching?

01:03:43

We wonder what's broken in us and in the world around us. We wonder how come people are so flippant about the holiness of God just because they don't know about it.

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How come people don't fear the justice of God? We're not even warning them of a day of judgment.

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How come people don't fear God because they aren't even allowed to get to a place, because of our preaching, where they say, woe is me, woe is me.

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If you're here right now in this room and you're trusting in Jesus, then you've had that moment, haven't you?

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You've been there. I know I have. You've been there where all of a sudden the lights came on in your soul and you realized he is holy and I am not and I'm unworthy of him and I don't know him and I'm a rebel against him and his wrath towards me is right.

01:04:52

And that brought you to a place where you were filled with woes. What was me for my sexual immorality?

01:04:59

What was me for my lying tongue? What was me for my sinful thoughts? What was me for my idolatry?

01:05:05

What was me for my drunkenness? What was me? And you're filled with it. And maybe it happened in a flash, but then you found yourself in a place where you went to the fountain of life and you said,

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Jesus, you're all I have. You're my only hope. You're the only way. Because I fear

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God, I recognize that there is only one way to be right with him, and that is through the work of God, the son, his perfect, obedient, righteous, blameless, holy life in my place.

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Live for my benefit. And that death, receiving the real wrath of a holy

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God because of me. Because of me. To think about Jesus dying on that cross, being brutalized and experiencing the wrath of God and the justice of God for me so that I could know

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God, so I could have peace with God, so that all of my sin would be taken away and God would call me son.

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And then Jesus rises again in victory over death, showing that he will conquer all death one day, including mine.

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You see, that is the glory of the gospel, and that is where the fountain of life in is. If you want to escape the snares of death, there is only one fountain of life, true fountain of life, and that's in Jesus.

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There is only eternal life in him. It is the only way to escape the justice of God and hell for all eternity.

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That is the truth. But it all starts with fear of the

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Lord. May God grant to us that fear every day of our lives.

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Amen. Let's pray. Lord, I pray that you'd bless the proclamation of your word as it went out today for your glory, for your kingdom, for your purposes.

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Father, please grant to us husbands fear of you, grant to us fathers fear of you, grant to us men fear of you, grant to us women fear of you, grant to us wives fear of you, grant to us mothers fear of you, grant to our children fear of you, grant to us as a church fear of you and Lord Jesus, make this world fear you for your glory in Jesus name.