The Fear of the Lord VI: Our Growth | Behold Your God Podcast

Media Gratiae

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:09

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with Chuck Baggett again, and we're looking at our last episode on the theme of the fear of God, of standing you know, in a sense, awestruck, filled with a sweet reverence for the

00:28

God that is infinitely bigger than we ever imagined and astonishingly kind to those who don't deserve

00:37

His kindness. And when those things grip us then we can be called people who are God -fearers.

00:43

And we've been talking about that, the nature of it, the command to do it, but in the last couple episodes we've been looking at some of the motivation and that is how is this in itself a sweet blessing from the

00:55

Lord? And so we looked at how it's a gracious gift that God gives and it's also not only a gift that God gives but it's a gift that God Himself prizes.

01:06

Having given it to us we see that God delights in it. And we saw that in the way that the

01:12

Lord Jesus Christ delighted in the fear of the Lord and the Father perfectly delighting in the in the humanity of our

01:20

Lord who lived in, you know, obviously in that uninterrupted submission to His Father.

01:26

So we want to pick up with that theme and look at a third and fourth way of seeing that this is something that is a blessing from the

01:37

Lord and then we'll try to bring it together with some applications. So the third thing is this, that the fear of God is a treasure to those who possess it.

01:48

What you treasure really says a lot about your character. You know, I mean different people like different things, but some people like some pretty strange things.

01:57

This is really obvious when we look at kids, you know, they have a child's view of what's valuable.

02:03

In the sermons that you gave you mentioned your little boys treasuring frogs and your wife and you having grown out of treasuring the frog.

02:13

And so not really appreciating the frog being in the bedroom. When I was young, I remember my family, we lived in an apartment complex in the city of Columbus, Ohio.

02:23

And I had, you know, escaped my mother's care again and was out in playing with the kids in the apartment complex.

02:31

It was quite a hodgepodge group. And I'm probably was about four years old and we lucked up.

02:38

We found a dead squirrel. So all the boys, there's about five of us.

02:43

So we all claimed it as ours. No, I saw it first. No, I saw it first. No, I'm the one that pointed it out. So the only way to settle this was a fight.

02:51

So it turned into a tussle and the last man standing got the squirrel and I happened to be the last man standing.

03:00

So with some bruises and scratches, you know, I carried the trophy home.

03:06

Grabbed that dead squirrel by the tail. It was all stiff. And I came into the house and so I'm like,

03:13

I bust in the door just ready for my mom to just say I'm about the greatest kid in the world and I can't find her.

03:19

Well, I hear the shower running. So I knock on the bathroom door. Mom, I got to show you something.

03:26

And she's like, John, can you not leave me? I'll be out in a minute, you know. I don't remember exactly what she said, but whatever she said,

03:33

I probably didn't listen. I opened the door and stuck my arm in the bathroom and said, look what

03:38

I brought you. And I hear this, John, get that dead squirrel out of this house.

03:45

And I was, I said, mom, I fought for it. I won it. And so, you know, of course she won the argument and I had to take it out and the boys were out, you know, looking, still waiting for me to come out and play with them.

03:56

And I had to admit that I was, even though I was the champion, I wasn't allowed to keep the trophy. And so guy number two got it.

04:02

I don't know what his mom thought, but yeah, what you value. So when we talk about the fear of the

04:08

Lord and, you know, in a serious way, is it the kind of gift that you would value? Sometimes people give you something and they think it's wonderful, but when you get it, you think

04:18

I'm not going to put that up where anybody can see it, you know, or I'm not going to use it.

04:24

And so how do we, one way we know that this really is a blessing is that the Christian, the only people that possess this gift, they do value it.

04:35

And when the Christian sees things clearly, as a Christian only can see, they do see that this is a gift of immense value.

04:43

And I would say that as we grow as Christians, as our eyesight gets clearer, as we mature in our understanding, that only increases, it doesn't decrease.

04:52

I don't know any Christian that's walked with the Lord throughout the lifetime. And at the end said, you know, the fear of the

04:57

Lord really isn't all that I thought it was. You know, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. I haven't found that to be a happy life, quite the opposite.

05:05

So let's think about some things that make a gift valuable to us, something we want to really treasure.

05:11

And one of it, one of the things would be its scarcity. You know, something is rare, so it's valuable.

05:17

So it's not just something that's good, but it's something, you know, because it has a good purpose or it's beautiful, but it's unique.

05:27

You know, so it's a piece of art that we like, but it's an original. It's a thing that does something that's beneficial, but it's a rare thing.

05:34

Other people don't have this. And so we know that we should probably treat it carefully. A somewhat silly illustration, but one

05:41

I think that everyone on planet Earth can understand right now and it will stick in your head is toilet paper.

05:48

All right. So during covid, you know, it's everyone's going to have to be self isolating.

05:53

You're going to have to. And so everyone rushes to the supermarket and they buy up everything that they think they will need.

05:59

And one of the things that they're sure they're going to need is toilet paper. And so toilet paper becomes non -existent.

06:05

And, you know, suddenly something is rare. And I remember that in the first days of this, my wife went to Walmart, you know, where we live,

06:14

I think. And so there wasn't any toilet paper. So then she went to Dollar General. Well, people hadn't thought of that yet.

06:20

So she bought like 16 rolls of toilet paper. And I said, what are we going to do with this? She said, well, we can give it to the church members when they run out, you know, and and so for about three months, the trunk of my car was full of toilet paper.

06:33

And finally, we got it given out to anybody that wanted it. Well, toilet paper seemed really valuable for a few weeks because of its rarity.

06:41

And now it's just back to toilet paper. When we think about the fear of the Lord, it is something that only exists in one type of person.

06:50

The person has been born from above. It is a rare thing. And there is a value in it.

06:57

Even in our eyes, we can see it's rare. And that gives it a value. Another thing that makes something valuable to a person is who gave it to you.

07:08

There are things you were mentioning, gifts that you received that you wouldn't show anyone. We've just had Father's Day. You know, what father doesn't have some hideous tie or something like that?

07:17

Their kid's given to them. Maybe it hangs in the closet because you can't throw it away. Your child gave it to you special because of that.

07:24

Even if you wouldn't wear it in the top drawer of my dresser,

07:30

I have an old pocket knife that my grandfather gave me and it's worn out. The blade is loose in the handles.

07:37

It's not something that you could use any longer, but it's made a bunch of moves with me.

07:42

And it sat in that dresser drawer for many years because my grandfather gave it to me and he's no longer with us.

07:48

So it's special to me for that reason. When we think about this again, it's a gift and it's one given to us by God himself.

07:57

And so we should prize it because of who has given it to us. God himself has seen this as a treasure to be entrusted to us.

08:07

And for that reason, it is special. Another is reliability. There are some things that are cheap and they might do the job once, maybe, but you don't really count on them lasting and doing the job repeatedly.

08:23

And because they're not reliable, they're not treasured. They're disposable.

08:30

But there are other things that you buy and you spend a little bit more money and you expect that they're going to last a lifetime.

08:37

And you take care of them because it's meant to last a lifetime. It's reliable.

08:43

God is reliable and he shows his reliability, his faithfulness to his children who fear him.

08:54

In Isaiah 33, there's this passage about God who is coming to the rescue of Israel when they have, again, they're being faced with the

09:06

Assyrians. We've talked about this in a previous episode. They're being faced with the Assyrians and they have no hope.

09:13

They've not looked to God and so they don't have hope in him. They've looked to other places.

09:19

Other places, though, have not been able to give them any sense of security, haven't been able to come to their rescue.

09:26

And now, finally, they are starting to turn and look to God and to fear him more than they fear the

09:34

Assyrians. And verses 5 and 6 of Isaiah 33 say,

09:40

The Lord is exalted, for he dwells on high. He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness, and he will be the stability of your times, a wealth of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge.

09:53

The fear of the Lord is his treasure. And so, here in this scene as the people are expecting disaster and they begin to cry out to God, he's described as being exalted, a king sitting on a throne, gloriously transcendent, and yet he's near to them.

10:13

He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness, not just far off and unconcerned by our lives, but because he is both a

10:24

God who transcends everything, a king, but also one who cares about us and is near, the truth that God reigns as the stability of your times is one that is a treasure to us.

10:36

He is a wealth of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge because he cares for us. And so, the fear of the

10:42

Lord is his treasure, the treasure of the person who fears him. These people had no security, but now

10:49

God has promised to be their security and the stability that they've longed for. And in fearing him, they've found him to be these things.

10:58

I think one thing we could say about the value of a thing is that it is valuable in part, in connection with how many circumstances of life it can benefit us in.

11:10

So, there are some things that we think are really valuable until we lose our health and then we say, why did

11:17

I even think that was worth having or pursuing? You know, now that I've lost my health and it's kind of put things in perspective,

11:26

I don't even care about this anymore. Or if you lose a loved one, you know, a spouse, a man loses his wife, a wife, her husband, and then, you know, she comes back to the home after the funeral, she looks at all these nice things that they collected in their home and she thinks, these are worthless, you know,

11:44

I would give them all if I could just have another day, another year with my best friend.

11:51

So, some things are valuable in some situations and then other situations, other places in the journey of our life, we find that they have no value whatsoever.

12:02

But the fear of the Lord has value in every circumstance, whether it's in the most pleasant moments of the

12:07

Christian life or whether it's right in the thick of the battle and, you know, or in the valley of the shadow of death, you know, whether we are enjoying honor because we're walking with the

12:22

Lord and people see that or whether we're being persecuted for loving the Lord. You know, through all the changing scenes of life, the fear of the

12:32

Lord is equally a blessing, a source of happiness to us.

12:38

And that's really wonderful because there's some situations where, you know, where we might think, okay, the fear of the

12:44

Lord's wonderful, you know, following Jesus is wonderful, all that religious talk is good, but I'm in a really hard situation here,

12:50

I need something more practical. And you can think about, you mentioned Isaiah, but in Isaiah, King Hezekiah is tempted to lean on Assyria for some help, like his dad before him.

13:02

And that isn't something that he's able to do. And so, you know, the

13:07

Lord himself delivers Israel. And that really is a kindness of the

13:13

Lord because if you can find situations where you can say, well, I don't really need the Lord, you know, for this,

13:19

I can go to other things. And so you're really not living in the fear of the Lord. He's not the source of security, the source of life, the source of wisdom and hope.

13:30

And so you say, Jesus is nice, but I need Jesus plus. And so you lean on the plus. If you make it through that hard time, you've missed the great treasure of going through that hard time with God.

13:44

You know, so you've really have not, you've really robbed yourself of what could have been a period where you walked with the living

13:52

God. Or like, you know, the psalmist in Psalm 73, when he says that the nearness of God is my good, that's my portion.

14:01

And so, you know, it's a good time to stop and ask ourselves, can we say that? Can we say, I want the nearness of God through every circumstance, you know, more than just the desire to get through it.

14:13

And at the heart of that is being a person who lives, who stands in awe and filled with reverence for the bigness and the goodness of God.

14:26

I think of Paul in prison writing and saying, I've learned to be content in whatever circumstances

14:33

I am. How can he say that? Is it that he is guilty and he knows he deserves to be in prison?

14:39

And so he's kind of surrendered himself to the circumstances or not guilty, which he wasn't guilty of anything but preaching.

14:47

But not guilty, but again, just kind of giving up. You know, you could in despair just kind of quit.

14:54

Is that what he means? No, but in the grip of God and trusting that he is where God has allowed him to be.

15:03

He is content knowing that God cares for him. He fears the Lord in a way that allows him to do that and to see

15:12

God as Hudson Taylor would later describe him as the one great circumstance. Yeah.

15:19

Another thing we could say about the fear of the Lord is that it is the fountain of life to the believer.

15:28

It is at the heart of all this happiness. It's not just, we could say it this way.

15:33

It's not just one of the happinesses, you know, but it's the soil. It's the source.

15:39

It's interwoven with every lasting, you know, unpolluted happiness that God is giving us.

15:47

Um, two verses we could mention. One is Proverbs 14, verse 27, and the other is

15:53

Proverbs 19, verse 23. Proverbs 14 says this, the fear of the

15:58

Lord is a fountain of life that one may avoid the snares of death. So positively and negatively stated there.

16:06

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

16:14

Earlier, I asked the question why someone wouldn't pet a rattlesnake. And, you know, the reason is because reasonable people have a reasonable fear of rattlesnakes, of petting rattlesnakes.

16:26

And the proverb here is speaking about more than avoiding those kinds of snares of death.

16:32

It's really speaking of avoiding sin. And so the fear of God is a fountain of life and that it helps us to stay away from sin.

16:40

And, um, the consequences of that sin, we learn to have a reasonable fear of sin because we fear the

16:51

Lord. I think about Mr. Roberts' definition of sin as being a thief of God's glory.

16:58

And the believer who loves God and desires to see him glorified, surely in the fear of the

17:05

Lord, the love of God would then want to avoid that, which robs him of the glory that's rightfully his.

17:12

So we stay away from it for that reason. The psalmist said it in this way in Psalm 4, for tremble and do not sin.

17:20

Meditate in your heart upon your bed and be still. So don't sin.

17:27

That sounds reasonable enough, but how do you avoid it? The psalmist tells us to fear God, tremble.

17:35

The danger that the proverb speaks of, not just physical danger, but spiritual. And the death that the proverb speaks of is not just a physical death, but also an eternal and spiritual death.

17:47

So if the fear of the Lord really is a gift to be treasured and cultivated and protected, we want to kind of bring this down in application to this question.

17:59

How do I get more of it? So first of all, for the unbeliever, because the fear of the

18:04

Lord is a gift that you cannot work up on your own. You cannot birth yourself spiritually on your own and you can not change your nature and you can not go from being a person who lives in the grip of your own imagined bigness and significance to a person who lives in the happy grip of the reality of God's bigness.

18:29

Go from orbiting self to orbiting God and to be glad to do that. That doesn't happen on your own.

18:37

So what do you do? You don't just sit back kind of fatalistically and say, well, what can I do?

18:42

The Bible says that we're sinful in the God. Bible says we don't fear him. Well, the thing to do is to go to the one that the

18:49

Bible says gives this. You know, you don't want to waste any time. You can go to a lot of places to try to get this and you could get a book on the fear of the

18:56

Lord. You could say, well, I'll start being really religious and certainly reading a good book on it, you know, going to church and hearing the truths of God.

19:05

Those would be great things to do. But ultimately, you go to God himself and you plead with him,

19:15

God, I don't have that kind of heart, but I want that kind of heart.

19:22

And you are the only one that gives that kind of heart. And you can lay out your arguments.

19:28

One of the great arguments is this, God, you would receive much more glory. People would see your goodness and your greatness more clearly in my life.

19:38

If you gave me that kind of heart, then if you damned me forever, you know,

19:44

God, you are the only hope I have. And you don't leave him alone until for his honor's sake, for his namesake, he gives you the kind of gift, the fear of the

19:56

Lord, the new heart that only he can give. The believer also, that's a good starting place for them in the sense that we are dependent upon God.

20:07

There are certainly means that he's given to us that we can employ. And we'll talk about a couple of them.

20:13

But if God doesn't bless those to us, if he doesn't make them effective, you can read your

20:22

Bible and not grow in the fear of the Lord. So ask, believer.

20:28

Again, quoting Mr. Roberts, Richard Owen Roberts, the way in is the way up. He said to us many times, the same faith that introduces us to the kingdom is the faith in which we grow.

20:41

And so by faith, by dependence upon God, we look to him and cry out to him, God, help me to grow in the fear of the

20:48

Lord and help me to see you more clearly so that I will fear you as you deserve.

20:57

So we are dependent upon him for this increase. One of the means that he has given to us, though, is his word.

21:05

And so believer, we should regularly expose ourselves to God's word and not just read it as like you might read the newspaper, but then adjust ourselves to it.

21:17

It is God's word. It's not a work of fiction. It's not some person's, a nonfiction, but some person's philosophical ideas that you might read and disagree with.

21:30

We don't get to judge it that way. And so we come to it and we read it. We understand it and we make application of it and adjust ourselves to it.

21:40

This is necessary for so many reasons, but one is because the world has a numbing effect on us.

21:52

We look around us and there are things that we are not shocked at that we once would have been shocked at.

21:58

This happens. We have so many voices screaming ideas that are contrary to godly ideas.

22:10

You hear it at work. You know, you go to Walmart and you see it in the magazine racks, the television, social media, which really has moved away from being, you know, seeing your friends and pictures of their kids kind of thing to more and more being a source of news, people's opinions about the news.

22:32

And so much of it is devoid of God. And so you have all of this information coming at you and, you know, hours.

22:40

How many hours do you spend looking at Facebook in comparison to hearing what

22:46

God has to say? And so you're inundated with godless propaganda, if you will, information constantly, and it has a numbing effect on you.

22:57

And then you have a heart that's deceitful and desperately wicked. And you need to regularly come back to God's word as a plumb line and hold yourself against it and hold what you're hearing against it so that you're seeing things the way

23:16

God sees it and not the way the world sees it. Another thing that we can do is to live in the conscious awareness of God's presence.

23:30

And so we use the scriptures, as you mentioned, you know, we can look at all these descriptions of God and how they all to affect us.

23:37

But we can also focus in on the fact that God is present.

23:44

And when we think about that, we want to not just be childish about that. We want to think of the perfections of God, the attributes of God that are described in scripture.

23:53

Think of God's self -descriptions. And then you do have to work at this to actively bring them down into the environment that I'm in right now and saying, this is the

24:03

God before whose face I'm living. And so that does alter, that does fuel and cultivate a life that lives in the grip of God's greatness, you know, that happy fear of the

24:17

Lord. And it also, you know, and that aspect of love, this is the God I delight in and I stand in reverence before him, but I do delight in him.

24:26

So when you think of the presence of the Lord, one of the things that the scripture speaks of frequently is what we could call the immensity of God, that God is overflowing every boundary that we put.

24:39

You know, if we talk about any perfection of God, any one of God's attributes, we stretch out the container as far as we can in our mind.

24:47

And then we have to say, but he kind of, he spills over all the edges, you know, so we can only go so far.

24:52

And then we have to stop and say, I cannot even imagine further bigger measurements than this, but God goes beyond my measurements.

25:00

So think about the immensity of God. Solomon, when he builds this wonderful temple, exactly how

25:06

God wanted it built. And yet when he dedicates the temple, he says these wonderful things.

25:12

He says in 1 Kings 8, 27, But will God indeed dwell on the earth?

25:20

Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house which

25:27

I have built. All right, the immensity of God. Or think of Paul preaching to the brainy philosophers in Athens on Mars Hill who don't really understand the nature of deity.

25:38

You know, they think they can make an idol. And he says this, he says about the true

25:44

God, In him we live and move and exist, all of us, not just the

25:50

Christian. You know, we want to put to death what I would call the idolatry of a localized

25:58

God. That is, well, I know that God lives in certain places. God lives at churches, but not mosques.

26:05

God lives in Christians' homes, but not the homes of a drunk. You know, God lives in a

26:11

Christian nation, but not in a pagan nation. You know, as if God is limited. So the presence of God is immense.

26:18

God fills every place, whether it's believers or unbelievers. Not in the same way, but God is there and God is observing all, and God is the environment of every being, you know, in every place at all times.

26:36

If we stop there, though, and just think about him being immense, we could get the idea that he's far removed and that he's so big and there's so much going on that surely he could overlook me.

26:53

So when we think about God's presence, he's immense, but he's also imminent.

26:58

He is near, and not just near to me, but near to you. And so kind of what you were saying a moment ago about not being localized, he's near to the person in China or the person in India.

27:09

He's near to everything and everyone because he's omnipresent. And we're not going to really get into manifest presence, which you've talked about in other places, but he's everywhere at the same time, and he sees everyone and is aware of everything.

27:26

He is present. And this is a very personal idea because he sees me.

27:36

The Proverbs say it this way in chapter 15, verse 3, the eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good.

27:47

Well, that ought to scare anyone. I mean, really, if we don't have other verses that tell us that he also forgives, that really should frighten us.

27:58

You were talking again about him not being localized or how he's in the church and in the mosque.

28:06

He's also, you know, he's in the chair in which I do my Bible reading, and he's in the chair in which I look at the internet. He sees the good and the evil.

28:16

So he's not watching us at a distance. Have you ever gone to Google Earth and found your address?

28:25

You know, you can look down from Google Earth and you can magnify and get as close as it will and make out your house and trees.

28:34

And I've been able at times to say, OK, they took this picture at this time of year because of the leaves on the tree or not, or we have a trampoline and we moved the trampoline at this time, but it's still in that old spot, that kind of thing.

28:46

Every now and then you can see a shot and you'll see a shadow and you know there's a person standing right there and wonder who it is.

28:52

It's not enough detail really to see that. And maybe some people have the idea of God that he's like Google Earth. You know, he sees us from this distance and there's not a lot of detail.

29:01

Maybe there's shadows and can't really make out everything. That's not what the Bible tells us.

29:06

He is near to us. He's watching, he sees, he's right here, right now.

29:13

In Leviticus 19, there's a verse that understands this.

29:22

It says, "...you shall not curse a deaf man, nor place a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall revere your

29:30

God or fear your God. I am the Lord." Now, why would he say all this?

29:36

Don't curse a deaf man. On one hand, you could say, what good would it do to curse a deaf man? He wouldn't hear you. But that's kind of the point too, isn't it?

29:42

I could curse him and he won't hear me. He's not going to turn around and curse me back. If he's bigger than me,

29:48

I don't have to worry that he's going to turn around and beat me up. He won't hear me. But God hears me.

29:55

Don't put the stumbling block before the blind man. You can imagine tripping someone who's blind and knowing they'll never know who it was.

30:04

And there's times in our lives, unfortunately, we might have thought that was funny as children. But even though that person will not know who it was,

30:14

God knows who you are. He sees it. He's near. He's not blind to that, even if the blind man is.

30:21

He's watching. And so he's imminent. He's near to us.

30:27

He's aware of us. And we need to live with the awareness that he's aware of us.

30:33

And to be aware of him. Who were the Puritans?

30:39

Is the reputation deserved? And is there anything they had that you and I might need?

30:49

Are you interested in knowing the Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul?

30:59

Then you're going to want to get to know the Puritans. To learn more about Puritan All of Life to the

31:06

Glory of God, visit MediaGracia .org or click the link in the description below. So Chuck, how would you just sum up the ways that we can cultivate this?

31:20

Yes, so there are many, but here are three to get us started. We can ask him because we are dependent upon him.

31:28

And if he doesn't help us, we will not fear him. It's a gift that he gives. Second, we expose ourselves to God's Word so that we see him and see his character and respond to it.

31:40

And we adjust ourselves to what he says to us. And then third, we live with a conscious awareness of his presence.

31:50

Well, this is the end of our short series on the fear of the Lord. And again, there are many good books out there.

31:58

Bunyan on the fear of the Lord. We mentioned a couple in a previous episode. So TJ can put them in the notes again.

32:04

I want to close with a prayer by Robert Hawker. And this is what he says. Dearest Lord, when my heart is cold, my mind barren and my frame lifeless, you make me rejoice in warming my frozen affection, making fruitful my poor estate and putting new life into my soul.

32:26

Oh Lord, all I want is a frame of mind best suited for your glory.

32:33

Truly, when I have nothing, feel nothing, can do nothing and am worse than nothing, that then even then

32:41

I may be rich in you amidst all my own bankruptcy. This, dear