SERMON: A Fear That Leads To Joy

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.

Every one of us have fear. Fear is one of the most instinctive and primal forces in the human body.

It's innate to our nature. We are born afraid. From the moment we grasp our first breath, we are assaulted by a bright world of extraneous stimuli that overwhelms our senses and makes us scream.

And in this way, none of us had to be taught how to fear. It came preloaded into the software with no firmware upgrade required.

And one of the most paralyzing features of fear is that it often bypasses the intellect because it takes time to think about and process things.

And if you're in a moment of true panic, if you think about it too long, you might be dead.

So if you see a snake, your body lunges before your mind even has time to catch up. If you see a spider drop from the ceiling, maybe you're like my wife and you say, ah, sorry.

You jolt back without even thinking. You climb a ladder, you step on a roof, you look over the edge to assess your height and if you're safe or not.

And then all of a sudden your stomach starts to tighten and the knots and you're afraid. Even if you know you're safe, you quiver, your palms sweat, your heart rate changes, your body tells you something is wrong before you even have words to put into it because it's innate to us.

We're afraid. We're afraid of many things. And because of that, we chase all kinds of padded comforts.

We shop with safety in mind. We buy the extended warranty. We buy the insurance.

We install the locks. We schedule routines. We curate our environment. We do anything that we can to help us wage our fears at a safe and a manageable distance.

And what kind of fears do we have? They are legion. We fear pain.

So we avoid conversations we know that we've had to have for years. We avoid them.

We fear loss. So we stay in jobs that we hate, relationships that are hollow, routines that are killing us slowly over time because it's familiar.

We fear embarrassment. We rehearse conversations in our head, crafting text messages and phone calls endlessly.

How many times have you re -recorded the same voicemail over and over and over because you're afraid that you sound like I do when

I leave a voicemail? We fear being exposed. So we keep our sin vague.

We confess struggles, but never specifics. We fear conflict. So we let bitterness harden inside of us.

And because that marriage is cool and friendships drift and churches often become divided. We fear discipline.

So we skip prayer when it feels awkward. We neglect scripture when it confronts us. We sanitize spiritual laziness by saying we've just been busy.

We fear being out of control. So we obsess over our calendars and our schedules and we refresh our bank app and we refresh our 401k to see where's it at today.

We hover over our children because we're afraid of the worst case scenario playing out over and over again.

We fear stillness. So we go to sleep with the lights on or the TV on or the phone light on. We fear quiet.

So we fall asleep, doom scrolling. We fear being alone with our thoughts. So we feel every moment of our life with some kind of noise or music or podcast or something else.

We fear facing our fears. So we numb ourselves with alcohol, with sugar, with pornography, with sex, with shopping, with endless entertainment.

And whatever it is, it's gonna take the edge off of that fear. And yes, we fear

God. But because we've been so discipled by our culture and by all of our aberrant fears, we do the same thing to Him.

Instead of allowing our fears to cause us to run towards Him, we allow our fears to let us spend most of our time running and avoiding

Him. And we do this by keeping God theoretical, theological, manageable, transcendent in the distance.

We talk about Him, but we avoid standing before Him. So we run, we run from God, we run from our conflicts, we run from creepy things, and we spend our lives running from things that we consider dangerous only to flee into the arms of things that are damaging.

What do I mean? Well, instead of running to God, we always run to something else.

We spend a tremendous amount of energy and effort running away from the things that make us scared and running into the arms of things that give us scars instead of running to the only thing that is true, sacred, and holy.

We run away from holiness and we run towards comfort. We run away from accountability and we chase distractions.

We run away from safeguards and leap into the arms of pleasure. And we run away from anything that threatens our sense of control into things that we think we can more rightly manage.

For all of us, fear is so utterly repulsive that we've trained ourselves to either flee from it, suppress it, medicate it, or live in denial of it.

And we do that by running into all kinds of things that will not satisfy us.

But here's the question that I want us to consider this morning. Have we gotten this whole thing wrong?

Is there a kind of fear that's actually good for us? Is there a kind of fear that instead of running from it, we should be running to it?

And if yes, then is it possible that that fear could do more than just disturb us, but could actually lead to delighting us?

And that's what we're gonna be looking at today as we look at how does fear actually propel us towards love?

How does the fear of God fuel us towards joy because that's so interconnected with our worship? So if you will,

I'm gonna read some passages. I always wanna say turn with me, but I have more passages, so I'm not gonna punish you with that.

So I'm gonna read a few passages, we're gonna pray, and then we're gonna examine how fear and joy, fear and worship are interconnected.

Proverbs 14, 26 through 27 says, in the fear of the Lord, there is strong confidence, and his children will have refuge.

The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. Proverbs 18, 10, the name of the

Lord is a strong tower, and the righteous run into it and is safe. Proverbs 19, 23, the fear of the

Lord leads to life so that one may sleep satisfied, untouched by evil. Proverbs 23, 17 through 18, do not let your heart envy sinners, but live in the fear of the

Lord always. Surely there is a future and your hope will not be cut off. We're gonna go through more verses than that today, but our goal is to look at what the book of Proverbs says about worship, and today, the aspect of worship we're gonna be looking at is how does fear lead us to joy?

So let's pray. Lord, you say in the very beginning of the book of Proverbs that the fear of the

Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You say later that fear of the Lord leads us to all knowledge.

Lord, today, let us understand how the fear of the Lord leads us also into all joy. Lord, help us as people who are averse to fear, who run from fear, who placate our fear, excuse our fear, medicate our fear, and do everything else to our fear.

Let us be a kind of people today that sees this fear, this fear of God is so central to our life that we would not avoid it, we would run to it.

We would embrace it, and Lord, that that would give us great joy. And it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Right fear of God leads to true joy. When God is feared rightly, when the fear of God is rightly ordered in our life, we will not run away from God as he is a threat, but we will pursue him as he is our greatest treasure.

And that will bring limitless amounts of joy and also sweeten our worship. That's the thesis that I'm trying to argue for today.

And I think in this way, we can at least make the claim, and again, I think I can at least stand upon the thesis that God wants our worship to be a threat to be good.

I think that that's demonstrable from the scripture that God doesn't want our worship to be dull, that God doesn't want our worship to be lifeless, that God doesn't want our worship to be disheartened, that God wants our worship to be filled with joy.

So with that, I believe God is also worthy of our best worship because he is worthy of all things.

He is worthy of everything. So not only does God want us to have joyful worship, but God is worthy of our greatest joy for worship as well.

And I think that God is not honored in our begrudging half -hearted worship that we often give.

So the question is, how do we have both the fear of God and the delight of God? How do those things coexist?

It's like saying, I want you to go left, right. I want you to go north, south.

It doesn't make sense, but the scriptures actually without hesitation and without apology, unite these two thoughts together.

For instance, Psalm 37, four tells us that delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart, amen.

He wants us to be delighted. Proverbs 1, seven, fear the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, amen. He wants us to have fear.

But both verses, but there are some verses that put these things together simultaneously. For instance,

Psalm 21, 11 says, worship the Lord with reverence. That word is fear. Worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice with trembling.

Worship the Lord with fear and rejoice. Psalm 128, one, how blessed is everyone who fears the

Lord and walks in his ways, blessed. The Hebrew word underneath blessed is happy.

How happy are those who fear the Lord? Doesn't it seem like a paradox? Doesn't it seem oxymoronic?

Psalm 112, one, praise the Lord. How blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.

And it's not just the Psalms. It's actually, you know, you could accuse the Psalms of being poetic, musical.

You know, David, of course he like killed Goliath and ripped apart lions and stuff.

But he was a guitar player. He was a little emotional. You could accuse him of that.

Okay, Deuteronomy 10, 12 through 13. And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you?

And by the way, this is one of the most important verses in all of the book of Deuteronomy and in all of the Torah. This is a verse that Israel looked to time and time and time and time again.

It was central to their identity. And guess what? Fear and joy show up together. And now

Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you? But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in his ways and love him and serve the

Lord with all of your heart and with all of your soul. Fear God, but have your entire heart, the every bit of your emotional capacity enthralled in joy as you fear him.

So, as we go back to the book of Proverbs and we see how these concepts are connected together,

I want us to see how that joy and fear not only coexist. I think that we've proven that now.

But how do they coexist now? That's what the book of Proverbs is gonna teach us. And the book of Proverbs is gonna teach us this almost like a staircase.

We're gonna go to the first step and then we're gonna go to the second step and then we're gonna go to the third step. And as you go up the staircase, every step is important in getting to your destination.

The fear of the Lord is the bottom step. And then what's the next step? How are all of these things connected in a single linear direction?

Well, for those who fear the Lord, the book of Proverbs tells us that they will have confidence.

If you fear God, you will have confidence. That's an if -then statement. If you fear God, you will have confidence.

Proverbs 14, 26 through 27 says, in the fear of the Lord there is strong confidence and his children will have a refuge.

The fear of the Lord is the fountain of life that one may avoid the snares of death.

So, if you have fear of God, you will have confidence. And if you don't have confidence in God, it's because you don't fear him.

That's the point that Proverbs is saying. And here's the thing that it strikes at, because it strikes at our

Americanism, we think confidence comes in financial padding or predictable routines or strong personalities.

Have you ever been around someone who has a strong personality and they say something, you believe it's true and you don't even fact check it because you're like, oh man, they must know.

Look at how confident they are. We think confidence is in backup plans and strategies and backup plans to our backup plans.

And fear, we're told, is something that undermines confidence, aren't we? You're afraid, that's because you're not being confident.

That's not what the Bible says. The Bible says the fear of the Lord needs the confidence. In the fear of the

Lord there is strong confidence. It doesn't even say confidence, it says strong confidence. It says in the fear of the Lord there is strong confidence.

Like unshakable, unquakable, unflappable confidence from the fear of the Lord. You like the synonyms?

Which means that true fear is not the enemy of courage and confidence. It actually is the soil in which it grows.

Proverbs does not say true fear produces anxiety, paralysis or hesitation.

It says the fear of the Lord brings confidence and strength. And that doesn't mean the kind of folks who have a kind of hyped up confidence and arrogance even that I would characterize as bravado and blowhards.

You don't get loud men or flagrant risk takers and say well that's confidence. That's actually compensation.

Because they're insecure and afraid underneath. They act like that because they're afraid of something.

The fear of the Lord is not their fear. And because of that they don't have real confidence. It's a show. This proverb describes a man who is secure in God.

And because of that he's utterly unmovable. And not just him, did you notice? It's not just him, his entire generations are unmovable as well.

Solomon says that his children will have a refuge because he fears God. That is astounding.

And it's not about swagger and it's not about your game and it's not about the amount of product that you put in your hair or anything else.

Your confidence in this book is in God and he is a strong shelter.

To fear the Lord is to live in a world that is unstable and yet be stable in Christ.

It's to be in a world that feels like it's falling apart and you not be falling apart. I remember Charles Spurgeon once said that a

Bible that has fallen apart is often belonging to a person who isn't. Because the man who fears the

Lord, the woman who fears the Lord, who looks in the mirror every day has already accepted the most destabilizing truth that no carnal man could ever accept and that is

I am not God. And once that truth is accepted, everything else in your life begins to settle and have peace.

Because it's exhausting to think that you control everything. That you have some kind of self sovereignty.

When that comes to an end, you're no longer trying to invent meaning out of your circumstances. You're no longer trying to justify yourself.

You're no longer trying to hold your entire world together with your energy and effort, which ends anxiety.

It ends frantic fear. The fear of God admits that he is

God and because he is God, I don't have to have everything figured out. And because of that,

I can have great confidence. And this is why this proverb immediately expands beyond the individual to the family.

His children will have refuge because a man who fears the Lord is gonna live like a man who has confidence in God.

He's gonna live like a man who has got his shelter in the most high. He's gonna live like a man when the family goes through problems and trials and pain.

He's gonna look at his children and he's gonna say, we trust in God. We're not gonna freak out right now.

We're not gonna get upset. We're not gonna turn on each other. We're gonna hold hands and we're gonna pray and we're gonna trust our

God. And you don't think that that impacts a child's life for the rest of their life and roots them in true faith in God.

You teach your children when you fear the Lord that you and they will not be ruled by their circumstances, that you will not collapse when the market shifts, that you will not unravel when your plans fall through, that you will not need to dominate others or to take control of things in order to find your identity and your security.

The man and his family who have all they need in God have true confidence because they have everything they need.

That's why Solomon says that the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. He doesn't say that it's a dam of sitting water.

He doesn't say that it's a pool of stagnant pond water. He doesn't say that it's even a reservoir. He says that it's a fountain because it's constantly flowing and running and available to you.

If your foundation is the fear of the Lord, then you are drinking from the blessings of God, the fountain of God.

It's a fountain unto you that gives you confidence, not today, not just tomorrow, but your life. The fear of God opens up the supply of God and gives you the confidence of God because you sit downstream of his ever -flowing mercies.

And that's why so many people today are afraid because they don't fear God. To the degree that a society turns from fearing

God will be to the degree that that society also falls apart and their confidence shakes and they become broken.

And we've seen this play out in front of us. During the COVID era, many people's confidence was exposed as being rooted in the wrong things.

Did that, was it not? My confidence in government. Well, it's hard to have confidence in government when you watch them tell you, if you go get your

COVID shot, then we'll give you a free thing of French fries. That was

New York City. Or if you get your COVID shot, you can get a six pack of Budweiser, which by the way turned, look how that turned out.

Confidence in the experts disintegrated as well, right? I thought the doctor told me the truth.

After COVID, questions started coming. Is this really for my good or are they just in it for the money?

All of you felt that way. Confidence in churches began to shake because why are they closed?

Why are they following after men like Fauci who have no idea what they're talking about?

Yes, of course, I'm not dismissing the virus as fake. I'm saying that they closed down churches and churches out of fear went along with what the government said and that's wrong.

And because of that, many people lost their faith in the church or in the community of God. We've seen it utterly erode.

We've seen the fragility of many people who now are running to all different sorts of various things to find their comfort and their hope, but they won't find it apart from God.

They will continue to spiral into more and more medications, emotional and psychological issues until the society fractures and breaks apart because a society without the fear of God can have no confidence.

But for you and I, our confidence is not rooted in these things. At least it should not be. And thank

God for a moment like COVID where we got to see that where our faith actually should be rooted, where our confidence actually should be rooted.

Because a world where God governs everything and a world where nothing ever takes him by surprise is a world that you and I can actually go to sleep in and rest in because we know that he is in control.

And because we fear him, we can have that great confidence and hope. We can be like the apostle

Paul that says, to live is Christ, to die is gain. How can he say that if he didn't know and fear God that this guy, this guy, this guy,

God who I'm serving, if they kill me, you'll raise me. The worst thing they can do to me is put a hole in my chest.

Okay, I get a new body anyway. Try harder. Which brings up a question.

As we fear God and we gain this great confidence in him, what do we do with it? Well, obviously we don't sit with folded hands and we don't rest on our laurels and we don't do nothing, double negative, which means we must do something.

And I might also add that we don't do what we once did where we go running to every idol and comfort and error just to pacify our heart.

If you fear God, you will have confidence. And what do you do with that confidence? You run to him.

That's the next step on the staircase. You fear God, you have confidence.

As you have confidence, you run to him, which again is counterintuitive. I love the

Bible so much in so many different ways, but one of the reasons I love it is because of the paradoxes.

I'm confident, let me run. That seemingly doesn't make sense because we think of confidence as not immovable.

I'm gonna stand up to every threat. But actually, biblically, confidence that comes from the fear of God causes you to run, but not run in terror, run to him.

Proverbs 18, 10 says, the name of the Lord is a strong tower and the righteous run into it and they are saved, which means that confidence does not stay theoretical very long.

As soon as life kicks you in the teeth, you will understand what you're trusting in because we as people are like oranges.

When you squeeze us, you will see what comes out of us and what is in us often isn't good. But when you fear

God, you'll have true confidence. And when life happens, and when pain happens, when trial happens, when you run to God as the first thing that you run to, you'll understand that you had confidence in God.

You'll understand that you were fearing God because fearing God produces confidence and confidence leads you to run to him.

You can tell what a man truly trusts and where his confidence truly lies by watching where he runs and where he goes when life quakes and shakes.

This is why Proverbs does not only describe confidence as a destination, but also as a direction.

The name of the Lord is a strong tower. It's the destination. And yet the righteous man runs into it.

It's a direction. Notice what Solomon is assuming. He's assuming that your confidence is not static.

Biblical confidence is not just a destination, it's a direction. And when you run there, no matter where you are running from you will find safety in him.

And that is where we often need a little bit of retraining. Because most of our life we've been taught that fear causes us to run everywhere other than God.

Into fright, into flight, into freeze, into fleas. But the kind of fear that Solomon is talking about here is not a fear that stands still and it's not a fear that runs after the flesh.

But it's a fear that runs to God. Not to entertainment, to the bottle, to the pills, to the distractions, to the avoidance, to the manipulation, to the panic, to the control, to the despair, to the hopelessness.

You run to God. Solomon doesn't say that the Lord has a strong tower.

He says that the Lord is a strong tower and that you run to him. Which means that confidence is not a possession of God.

It is who God is. And the only way you're gonna have it is if you have him. And this is really helpful because the concept is easy or simple.

I'm not saying that it's easy. It's simple to understand. When trouble comes, run to God. When you feel afraid, run to God.

When you feel unsure, run to God. When you feel tempted or tested or whatever else, run to God. When you don't know how you're feeling, run to God.

Refuse your impulse that says, I need to run back to and pine away in and hide myself in the things that I once ran to.

Resist that urge to go back to the website or to chase someone else's approval or to go back into the arms of addiction or to do the thing that you know that God doesn't want you to do, but you do it because you're afraid.

Instead of that, run to him. Instead of sitting in static where you're not doing anything, but you're sitting and you're waiting.

You're saying, God, I don't know what you want for me. Are you reading your Bible? Are you praying? Are you part of the church? Are you participating at a local level?

Like these things are things we can do in order to run to God. We don't run to the flesh and we don't sit in our pouting disappointment.

We run to him. So the fear of God produces confidence.

Confidence produces a running to God. And what happens when we run to God? We have rest.

Proverbs 19 .23 says, the fear of the Lord leads to life so that one may sleep satisfied and untouched by evil.

I love that. The fear of the Lord produces sleep. That's another counterintuitive one.

When you're afraid and panicked, you often don't fall asleep. I remember when I was on guard duty in Iraq and you couldn't even light a cigarette.

Not that I ever did that when I was in the military. You couldn't even do that because that would be seen for miles away.

So you're just sitting there, staring across the horizon in the blackness with maybe your night vision goggles on and you're waiting just for a mortar round to fall on your head or you're waiting for a bullet to come that you didn't see in time and you're done.

You're waiting with a kind of fear and the sleep is the last thing that was on my mind. And yet it says here that the fear of the

Lord leads to sleep. That is satisfying. Now notice what

Solomon does not say. He doesn't say that evil will not exist. He says that you will be untouched by it.

Kind of like David, you prepare me a table in the presence of my enemies. Because fear is a governing principle that moves man somewhere.

Fear is a catalyst. Fear is the energy that gets man moving. And the question is, where is he moving?

Well, if he's moving towards God, he will have a kind of sleep and a kind of rest that is satisfying.

Now, I am not talking about here, like you bought a brand new mattress and it's the best sleep of your life.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying that the fear of God will produce confidence in you.

That confidence will cause you to run to him. And as you run to him, you will have less stress. You will have less anxiety.

You will have less fear, which will actually have a profound impact upon your life. But it's even more than that.

It's not the totality of what Solomon is even saying. He's saying that underneath all of that, that you will also have a deep kind of abiding rest that no one else can have unless they have

Christ. Because you can fake even the fear of God on Sunday.

You can come to church, you can fake it, and you can do all kinds of things to convince everyone else but God.

You can actually fake confidence on Monday. You can go into work and say, great, ready to start my week.

You can fake confidence in that way. But when the lights go out and the house goes quiet and you're left with just yourself and just who you are in the quiet recesses of the cover of the night, you enter into a place in that moment where you can no longer fake it.

Rest and sleep is where the sovereignty of God in your life is tested. The man who cannot rest when the lights go out, the woman who cannot rest when the lights go out, who's still playing back that conversation in her head from earlier, still watching on a

TV screen because they can't rest, the one who can't stop scrolling, the one who doesn't even like being alone with himself.

Have you ever felt that way? I know I have. That person has not yet put down their striving to rest in God.

They've run to something else. You'll know when you can't rest that you're resting in something other than God. That will not be enough.

When you're still clinging to those things, they will afflict you. When you're still clinging to control, the most terrifying reality that you can face is that you're not enough.

You're not. I know you're special. I know you're wonderful. I know you're beautiful in every way, but you're not enough.

You're not enough to calm your own fears. You're not enough to stop your tears. You're not enough to fix your shame.

You're not enough to cleanse your stains. You're not enough to fix your past. You're not enough to control your present, and you're certainly not enough to ensure your future.

You're not even enough to keep yourself alive when you sleep. I think about this all the time. I'm going to sleep. How do

I know I'm gonna breathe? I didn't do anything. How do I know my heart's still gonna beat? I didn't do anything with that either.

How many times have you thought about, okay, I need to make sure my heart stays beating? By the grace of God, every cell in your body fires, and it's not because of you.

You're not enough. You're not enough. The man who fears the Lord, who has confidence in the

Lord, who's learned to run to the Lord and lean on Him rather than everything else will be the kind of man, will be the kind of woman that lies down at night and can sleep and can rest.

Because you're no longer thinking that you're enough, you're thinking that He's enough. That God is the only one who can redeem your past.

He's the only one who can sanctify your past. He's the only one who can sanctify your present. He's the only one who can glorify your future. He is enough in your troubles, not you.

He's enough for you in your pain. He's enough for you in your shame. He's enough for you in everything. And when you believe that, it actually causes you to rest.

And when you're not resting, it's because you're not believing that. I'm not saying you're not a

Christian. I'm saying you're not believing it. I'm saying that you're acting like an atheist, even though you have the

Spirit of God. Because when you know who God is, when you know who He really is, and the amount of control that He has, and you know that nothing happens in your life that doesn't come from His hand, how can we fear?

I'm not saying that we don't fear. I'm saying, how can we actually fear without some kind of cognitive dissonance?

How can we not fear without doubting who God is? If we don't fear

God, we will be afraid of everything else. We will have no confidence. We will run to the wrong things, and we will have no rest.

And you can see it. You can see it in the life that is clung to their own self -sufficiency for a lifetime.

And spiritually, and often physically, they are haggard and tired because they're not enough.

When you have the fear of God, you have the confidence of God, and you run to Him. Then you will sleep. Your burdens will be light.

Your light and momentary afflictions will not even be worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in the day of Christ, an eternal weight of glory.

Like James says, count it all joy when you suffer. That's a paradox. How many of us have suffered and said, count it all joy?

But it says it. And why does it say it? Because when you suffer, Christ is crafting you.

He's shaping you. He's molding you. He's making you. What it means is everything in your life, even the pain that you've interacted with, even the very hurtful things that you've had to endure is from a good

God who loves you, who has not made a mistake, and He's not forgotten you, and He's not looking at you and saying, oops,

I forgot to make sure of that. Nothing happens to you accidentally or by chance, which means that you can receive everything, even the pain, as from the hand of a good

God who wants to shape you into His good image. And when you know that, you can rest in that, and you will not be troubled when the day of trouble comes.

Tomorrow is gonna hold a million billion uncertainties that you don't even know yet.

How many times have you went to sleep not knowing the tragedy that was gonna happen the next day?

You don't. You have no idea what tomorrow holds, but you know who holds tomorrow.

You have no idea what tomorrow holds, but you know who holds tomorrow. And when you do that, when you cling to God, you'll have confidence, you'll run to Him, and you will have rest.

That's the third step. The fourth is that you will have a hopeful future. Proverbs 23, 17 through 18 says, do not let your heart envy sinners, but live in the fear of the

Lord always, because surely there is a future and there's a hope that will not be cut off. When the fear of God has done its full work in us, it gives us confidence, it makes us run to Him, it makes us rest in Him, and it makes us content with our circumstances, which is the opposite of envy, isn't it?

Solomon is telling us that the wrong kind of fear will lead you to insecurity instead of confidence, it'll lead you to run to idols instead of God, it'll lead you restless instead of having peace, and it will lead you to compare and be jealous and envious of what everyone else has.

In that way, envy is not primarily about wanting someone else's possession, it's a kind of false worship that wants another man's destiny.

What do I mean by that? When we envy the wicked, we're not admiring their morality, we're not longing for the same outcome as they have, we're wanting the same comfort and ease and success that they seem to have when it feels like we're striving and losing.

Their apparent freedom from consequences. And Solomon says, don't do that!

Because while the wicked may live in relative comfort now, where they are heading is to a permanent and total collapse where they will be thrown headlong into eternal suffering.

Do not envy them now, their comforts and their possessions and their freedoms and their lack of consequences are mulling them into destruction.

The man who fears the Lord has no need to envy anyone else because you know that the

Lord who loves you has given you what you need. When a man or woman fears the

Lord, they don't have a fragile future, they have a sure and certain future with God. That's why

Solomon says, your hope will never be cut off. Which means that obedience today is not wasted, your restraint today is not foolish, your suffering today is not meaningless, your patience today is not just naive and Pollyanna optimism.

The fear of God, when it has worked its way through you is gonna train your heart, train your body, train your soul to be grateful and thankful for whatever

God has given you. And knowing that, that that's the end of your story will actually make you confident in the

God who writes your future. This is why the fear of God cures envy.

This is why the fear of God fears insecurity. This is why the man who fears the Lord no longer waits and wants the same things that the sinners have because he wants what they can never have.

And that leads to the final step. Fear produces confidence, confidence makes us run, running makes us rest, that makes us hopeful for the future.

And then fear when it is eternally completed leads to everlasting joy.

Proverbs 10, 28 says, the hope of the righteous is gladness.

And that is both gladness now and gladness forevermore because fear no longer assaults us.

Everything we've seen this morning that fear, the confidence, the running to God, the rest, the hope and eternal gladness is not for nothing.

It's for something because he stored up these treasures for us in heaven forever to be with him. And this, of course, leads to the very gospel of God.

Everything we've looked at today borrows from the gospel, doesn't it? Because you and I have not feared the

Lord rightly. And because of that, you and I have not had the confidence in God that we ought to have had.

Because we've not had the confidence in God that we ought to have had, we've not run to God like we ought to have ran.

And because we've not ran to him, we've not rested. And because we've not rested, we've not had hope.

And yet there is one who came and who feared God perfectly.

And there is one in the midst of the most horrifying trials that a human being can ever walk through had confidence in God, even for the joy set before him, he endured the cross.

And in his confidence, he rested. Can you think of a scene where Jesus is resting where it's utterly paradoxical?

A storm falls down upon the Galilean Sea. The boat is about to be capsized. Jesus is snoring.

Because his fear is in the Lord. Because he knows that this will not end in his death.

Because he knows that this is a part of God's plan and God's will to show him, show them, his disciples, his glory.

And because Jesus feared God perfectly, because Jesus had confidence in God perfectly, because Jesus ran to God perfectly, even running to his own death.

Now, because the spirit of God has been given to us, brother and sister, you are called to walk in these things too.

So if you don't have hope today, fear God. If you don't have confidence today, fear

God. If you don't have joy in your life today, fear God. Because the fear of God produces confidence, that confidence makes you run, that running to God makes you rest, that rest makes you secure, and that security gives you joy.

So if you don't have joy, go back and look at those five things. Fear God.

And it will lead you into the kind of joy that you can't explain, you cannot manufacture on your own, but you'll have because you fear him.

And that will transform not only you, but it will transform your worship. When we look at what worship is, worship is having joy in who

God is. How do you have joy in who God is? Fear God. Have confidence in him, run to him, find your security in him, and have your joy in him.

And when that happens, that is worship. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much that you accomplished for us what we could not accomplish for ourself.

Lord, we thank you that even now, as we struggle to do this well, as we struggle to have joy, as we struggle to trust, as we struggle to not run back to the pig pens and the feeding troughs that we used to run to when we were an unbeliever.

Lord, help us to remember that all of this was won for us and purchased for us on the cross of Christ.

And the spirit of God was given to us so that we could grow in this, so that we could become and begin to look like Christ and talk like Christ and walk like Christ and trust like Christ and fear like Christ.

And Lord, I pray that you would invigorate us down to the very marrow of our bones, that we would put all our energy and all our effort and everything that we do into fearing, loving, worshiping, adoring you.

And Lord, let us, no matter what happens to us, no matter what our circumstances hand us, no matter what life throws at us, let us be a people who have great joy, the kind of people who sing in prison, the kind of people who praise when they're beaten, the kind of people who say to live as Christ and to die as gain, the kind of people who go to their deathbed swinging with a smile on their face saying,

I'm going to see my King. Lord, let us live that way. Let us have that joy.