Fear of the Lord II: Daily Life | Behold Your God Podcast

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Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm John Snyder and with me today again is

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Chuck Baggett, co -pastor at Christ Church in New Albany. Chuck and I, as we mentioned in the last episode, have been friends for some time.

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Now TJ helps us, you know, with our notes. So here's our notes. And these are

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Chuck's notes. It's his content. But TJ gives us little hints and one of the hints last week was that Chuck should maybe talk and mention, you know, things from our college days, but we feel that this is would be really not prudential.

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So we're going to move right on to the better content. Last week we looked at the fear of the Lord and it was just the first of a number and we tried to clarify why the scripture would it sometimes give a command not to fear the

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Lord, fear not. And then other times, so sometimes fear is forbidden and then other times the fear, the fear of God in particular, is presented as such a beneficial thing.

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And we'll talk about this in further episodes. What makes it, what makes the fear of the Lord to be a thing that's linked with a man's happiness?

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But one of the things is how practically impactful, how beneficial it is in such common ways that we might not think of.

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So while last week we talked about servile fear, the terror that the unbeliever feels when he knows that there's a holy

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God and he has no right to draw near to him and there's no way to cover the shame of his rebellion, compared to the the filial, the family fear, the childlike reverence for an infinitely great

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Heavenly Father and yet it's not just who the Father is, His bigness, but what the

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Father's done, His goodness that causes Him, we find Him irresistible and with that new heart that He's placed within us, the new nature, with that newly born soul, while we find

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Him to be amazing and we do tremble at the thought of Him, we are attracted to Him, you know, and so we we tremblingly but joyfully draw near to Him through His Son.

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And so the the childlike reverence for a father as a just as a picture of, you know, how do we understand that healthy fear?

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This week we want to look at just some examples of everyday aspects of life that are directly impacted by the fear of the

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Lord. So so as to help maybe motivate us to really cultivate that in our life because it is so wonderfully practical.

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So Chuck, why don't you start us off? Well, it is practical and in so many ways it's a practical overarching idea to help guide us.

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It prompts us to holiness. In 2nd Corinthians 6,

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Paul calls believers to holiness and he gives arguments for why we should be a separate people.

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And he gives this promise from God in chapter 6 and verse 18 of 2nd Corinthians. And I will be a father to you and you shall be sons and daughters to me says the

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Lord Almighty. And so with that promise and view that I will be your father, he continues in chapter 7 and verse 1 and says, therefore having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

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And so this pursuit of holiness is to be done with the fear of God in view.

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It motivates us and calls to us.

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You were just talking about it being attractional. It draws us to God. And in that way it promotes holiness.

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So when we think about holiness, it's often easy to think of the category of like glory, wonder, you know, of God.

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And when we think of if someone asks you like, are you a holy man, Chuck Bagot? Do you live a holy life?

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It is so easy to kind of immediately go into the ethereal, you know, and to think of like, are you saying like, am

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I super spiritual? No. Do you live a life separated unto

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Him? And if and as we all, every believer, you know, when we look in the mirror of Scripture, we say, well, yes,

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I am separated unto Him. And yes, I want to live like that. But I want to,

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I don't want to stay where I'm at. I want to make progress in that. And one of the most practical things is to cultivate this fear, the

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Lord, this view of God that is so clear from Scripture that there is this awe and reverence and love.

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And it's not, and we don't want to leave it up in the categories of, you know, the ethereal, but very practical, down to earth things.

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So listen to what Paul says to the young Colossian believers about the fear and practical everyday things.

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He says this in Colossians 3, verse 22, Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters on earth, not with external service, as those who merely please men, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the

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Lord. I doubt that we often remember that when we get up and go to work on Monday, how we drive, how we walk into the office, how we speak to the people we work with, how we do the work that the boss has given us to do, how all of that is directly impacted by whether we fear the

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Lord or not. You know, that flavors everything. Of course, there are a thousand other motives to work hard to get ahead or not to, but the fear of the

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Lord is a fuel that Paul says, this ought to move you now that you belong to Christ, this ought to change the way you work.

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We were talking before the podcast about the book of Leviticus. TJ has been going through that in his own quiet time and Chuck and I were talking about how so many specifics are given there.

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I mean, you think if you're reading through the Bible in a year, you hit Leviticus and immediately, you know, you go

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Genesis, Exodus. Those are pretty big pictures of what God's doing. And then Leviticus becomes so precise that sometimes people get discouraged.

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Such precision about which animal gets sacrificed when and in what way. What about the clothing of a priest?

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What about the furniture of a tabernacle? You know, and is this really very practical for the

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Christian? But if you keep reading Leviticus, it moves beyond those wonderful pictures of God's holiness to talking about how that impacts not just worship and those big pictures, but the everyday things, everything from how we keep the

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Sabbath. So worship, but also whether you glean the field completely or not.

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So you're a farmer and you're harvesting and you you purposefully leave some behind for the poor people.

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That was a command. And the fear of the Lord is a motivation to do that because I belong to that kind of a

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God. I want to do these deeds of mercy. I want to leave extra behind for others. He goes on, you know,

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Leviticus, we're not to steal because we belong to this kind of a God, but we're also not to slander.

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And, you know, I mean, so just how we use our tongue, how we act at work, how we deal with deeds of mercy or, you know, activity of worship on the

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Sabbath. Everything is influenced by this wonderful quality that God puts in our hearts and we cultivate the fear of the

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Lord. Yeah, John, another area that this touches on is how we do missions and evangelism.

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And I tend to think about how it affects both our message and our motives. Certainly the fear of the

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Lord should affect our message. We are often tempted and even guilty of trying to adjust

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God to make him more palatable to people so that he doesn't sound so offensive.

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But the Bible doesn't do that. The Bible presents him as he is. And if we if we have a right view of God, if we fear him, then surely we'll want to be careful that the message that we proclaim is one that he's given to us to proclaim.

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And not adjusted by us to spin it. In the book of Revelation, chapter 14, verses 6 and 7, the

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Bible speaks, John speaking, says, I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to preach.

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So here's a messenger with the good news. He's coming to preach to those who live on the earth and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people.

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And he said with a loud voice, fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come.

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Worship him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and spring springs of water. So this angel with an eternal gospel comes and the message he proclaims is fear

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God, give him glory, worship him. Surely the fear of the Lord then is not incompatible with the gospel.

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It's really, I think only, maybe some people think of it that way because of a category error.

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You know, we think that the fear of the Lord is maybe in the category of law. And if we've moved away from the law and it has nothing to do with the gospel, then maybe we could say that.

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But if we see the law as a schoolmaster leading us to Christ, to the gospel, then surely the fear of the

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Lord plays in there. But also understanding the fear of the Lord, not just as the servile kind of fear, but the family kind of respect and awe toward the

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Father. It has to affect the message there also. So the message, but also our motives.

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If we don't live with an awareness of God and a fear of him, then we're often guilty of fearing people.

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And if we fear people, surely that affects our evangelism. Maybe we don't even do evangelism because we're afraid to offend someone or to say something that would be misunderstood.

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It touches our motives also perhaps in this way. Some people, perhaps from a more of a servile fear, approach evangelism as though God is overreacting to our sin and angry and we don't know why.

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And if there are these people that if only they knew the gospel, surely they'd respond. And so our motive is to go and warn them and to tell them that they need to get right quick.

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And certainly God is angry at sin and people do need to turn to him and away from sin.

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But our motive has to be not only the good of people, but the glory of God. And if we approach it with wrong motives and wrong message, then we rob

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God of glory, even if we are warning people. And so the Apostle Paul in 2

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Corinthians 5 speaks about a coming judgment seat of Christ that we must all appear before.

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And in verse 11 he says, Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men.

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It was the knowledge of who God is and that we will stand before that God that prompted him to be bold, urging people to repent.

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Yeah, so who would think that a lack of evangelistic zeal might actually be not primarily motivated by a lack of love for the lost.

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But what if it's motivated or sustained, this lack of zeal sustained by a lack of fear of the

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Lord. You know, not in the grips of who it is that the world is living against and who it is that has offered them the hope of the cross, you know.

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Changes everything from a humanitarian effort to being a part, a co -worker with God himself in the unfolding of his son's kingdom.

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Another area that the fear of the Lord impacts is worship. And we already mentioned that a little bit when we talked about how we treat the

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Sabbath in the book of Leviticus. But, you know, when we think of the boundaries that are set, does the fear of the

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Lord affect how a person worships? Well, yes. You know, we're not flippant.

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I remember being in youth groups growing up and the youth director, you know, occasionally we would have kind of a visiting youth speaker or a new youth director.

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And it would be a little shock to my system because I grew up in a home where my mom and dad took the

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Lord pretty seriously. And but I remember a youth director one time talking about, you know, real flippantly kind of talking to God about the pizza that we were about to eat, you know, and just the way he talked to God.

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It wasn't familiar in the sense of like what in an appropriate and appropriate way, but more of a joking way to be cool with the youth.

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And I just felt like, man, you're talking wrong, you know, like, like somebody went against the grain.

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How does our view of God and our childlike standing in awe of our heavenly

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Father, who he is and what he's done for us, how does that affect the way we worship? Well, I can't imagine an area in our life that would be more impacted, you know, more directly, obviously, an expression of what we really think about the

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Lord than our worship. Obviously, how we approach worship is determined by who we think we're approaching.

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So if it's the God of the Bible, then biblical types of worship will surely be what guide us.

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Now, we have a theological phrase that has become, that's a good phrase, and it's become pretty popular, especially among reform groups, and that's the regulative principle.

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Now, I don't know about you, Chuck, I mean, but Chuck and I went to college together. We also went to seminary together. But I don't remember hearing about the regulative principle in seminary.

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OK, so we didn't go to a seminary that would necessarily have talked about that a lot. It had some good points, but that wasn't one of them.

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Regulative principle is a good term. It means that we only do in worship what

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God prescribes, not the other, where the other approach is that you can do anything the

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Bible doesn't forbid. So it's two different approaches, and I think that the regulative principle is the better choice.

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I think it's the biblical choice. But when we established the work here 20 years ago now, nobody knew the words regulative principle when we started it.

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But we did have something, even though we lacked some knowledge in that way. We did have a fear of the

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Lord that made us want to do only the things that he in Scripture expressed that he wanted us to do.

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Like, you know, so the question was always like with music and what we sing and how we pray and what about preaching and what about fellowship meetings and what about the kids and educating them.

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I mean, we didn't answer the questions perfectly, obviously, but we tried to answer them with this in mind. What would he like?

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Not what would they like? And so the fear of the Lord was at the heart of so much that we tried to do.

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You know, and recently we had a family visit from out of town and they were talking about they appreciated that we follow the regulative principle here.

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And I was thinking, well, I guess we do. I hope we do. But that never really I told him that's not how we approach it.

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How we approach it is this. God is worth worshiping, and if he's worth worshiping, let's remove everything that would be a distraction.

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That's not essential. And and so boil it down to the essentials so that we don't have any distractions when we seek the

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Lord's face. And it ended up that path led to the regulative principle.

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You know what the Scripture says God delights in and not adding to that. So worship obviously would be affected.

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Listen to what the writer of Hebrew says in chapter 12 in verse 28 and 29.

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It says, therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

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And thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and all.

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For our God is a consuming fire. So wonderful New Testament passage. We might think that that sounds like an

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Old Testament passage. You know, if I would have said, well, from Leviticus, we read, you know, and if you weren't familiar with Hebrews, you might think, well, that sounds like an

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Old Testament passage. Fiery God, be careful. But it's not. It's a

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New Testament out of gratitude. Let us be careful. Let's serve him with reverence and all with fear and all reverence and fear.

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Because he is a consuming fire still. In the Old Testament, we have an example.

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You know, you remember Aaron's sons and they come to God and they they do.

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Leviticus tells us they offer God strange fire. In other words, they alter the way that God wanted them to bring incense in the worship.

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And they alter that. They kind of do their own thing. They're innovative. And God strikes his son dead for that.

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So, you know, that might seem to us to be a bit of an overreaction, but it's not when we think of who

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God is. So a right fear of the Lord and we take worship seriously.

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We don't come to him with cool, new, innovative ideas that we say,

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God, I think this would be even better than what you told us to do. You know, a New Testament example of that,

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Ananias and Sapphira offering their their gifts. But in the way that they offer them, obviously, they're dishonest and they want to make much of themselves.

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And God is offended and they're struck dead. So while we draw near to God through the new covenant, finished work of Christ that has not dimmed his glory and it has not made him manageable, you know, so there is still that wonderful quality of a childlike reverence and all.

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C .S. Lewis kind of touches on that, I think, in one of his

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Narnia tales where he's talking about Aslan. And there's the question about him being a lion and whether or not he's safe.

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You remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is he safe? No, he's not a tame lion.

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And there's one scene where... He's not safe, but he is good. Right, yes. So he's good, not tame. There's one scene where the little girl is dying of thirst and there's one stream.

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There's only one stream and the lion is standing there by the stream and she asks the lion to promise, you know, not to do anything.

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And he says he makes no promises. Well, then I won't drink the water. Well, then you'll die. There is no other water, you know.

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If we think of the fear of the Lord, having right views of who God is, it focuses the mind in worship.

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So it's not all about us. It's not primarily about community. It's vertical.

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It's about Him. Second, it does fill the heart.

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I mean, it really satisfies us to be self -forgetful if there is someone that much greater than us.

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If there's not, it's pretty hard to think of somebody else other than you, you know. But the other thing, as we mentioned, is it does guide the expressions.

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I want to express love to Him today. How do you do that? Well, you're not left to your imagination. God has spelled out in scriptures the things that He's pleased with as we draw near to Him.

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In Ecclesiastes 5, there's a warning about coming to the house of God. And Solomon writes and says that as you approach, he basically says be careful and don't come with lots of words, empty words.

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Don't come thoughtlessly. Don't make a bunch of vows you won't keep. So empty promises.

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And he concludes that section by saying rather fear God. So there again, the fear of the

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Lord, putting boundaries around worship and how you approach Him in worship.

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Yeah, yeah. So not a straight jacket of legalism, but a heart in the grip of the majesty of the person we're approaching.

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You know, it's two totally different approaches. Chuck, we've got one more. Child -rearing. How does that affect the way we rear our children?

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Yeah, so it affects that much as it affects every other relationship. If we have a wrong view of the fear of the

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Lord, or if we don't understand this concept at all, then we might try to protect our children from that idea and present a view of God that's one -sided.

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We want to attract them to God. And so we may try to present Him only as loving without ever showing that that's part of the picture, but it's not the full picture.

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But we don't see that being worked out that way in Scripture. In Psalm 3411,

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David says, Come, you children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord. And then in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 6, a very familiar passage, verses 4 through 7,

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Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.

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These words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

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And Moses introduces that in the previous verses this way. Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the

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Lord your God has commanded me to teach you that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the

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Lord your God. So teach them these things so that they'll keep God's commands so that they and you will fear

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Him. So nothing impractical about the theme that goes from Genesis to Revelation, that God is a

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God worthy of that deepest, you know, most gripping sense of His majesty and His love.

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And one practical area that we could think about that is in the area of authority. Why do you obey your parents, children?

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Why do you obey the teacher? Why do you obey the policeman? Because God is

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God and He delegates authority. He's put these people as authorities in your life. So obey because you want to obey

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God. Well, thanks for joining us. We're going to continue this again in our next podcast as Chuck Lee just through some other aspects of this biblical theme of the fear of the

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Lord. And we're really glad to be able to have a chance to do that. There are many ideas about God in our culture today.

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Many are not grounded in scripture and some are actually the opposite of what scripture teaches. The best way to identify these ideas is to go back to the

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Bible and allow God to speak for Himself. Learn how God describes His character, His work in salvation,

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His definition of repentance and much more through the 12 -week multimedia Bible study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically.

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The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook participants study at home in preparation for the small group session.

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Each session is led by a video containing three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you were studying that week.

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Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more or to see what others are saying about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit mediagracie .org

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or click the link in the description of this episode. Well, as we bring this podcast to conclusion,

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I wanted to ask Chuck a question. What resources would you be able to recommend?

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What helped you when you were studying the theme, these passages on the fear of the Lord? Yeah, there's a few that I would point you to.

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One is a work that John Bunyan wrote, and I don't remember the title of it, but as you said, they'll be there in the notes.

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It's not as easy reading as another I'll recommend, but it was helpful. Bunyan covers it pretty thoroughly.

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But a more popular, in the sense of readable and accessible perhaps, work is the work by Jerry Bridges titled

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The Joy of the Fear of God. I believe that's the correct title. And he writes in a very simple way and yet covers this,

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I think, very well. One other that I would mention, I think I may have already mentioned it, but Albert Martin in the 70s preached a series on the fear of God, and it is available on Sermon Audio.

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Yeah, and you mentioned earlier as well when we were talking between sessions that John Flavel has a great sermon on that.

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And T .J. will give you all of this in the show notes. Well, as we close down, let me read a prayer by Henry Law.

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Henry Law wrote, Oh God, the Father, our great creator, our gracious preserver, who is ever loading us with loving kindness and tender mercies.

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We bless you. We praise you. Oh God, the Son, who by the shedding of your most precious blood have made us your purchased possession and have redeemed us from all iniquity.

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We bless you. We praise you. Oh God, the Spirit, who has taught us our need as sinners and has revealed the finished salvation to us and has enriched us with spiritual consolations in heavenly places.

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We bless you. We praise you. Oh glorious Trinity, three persons, one

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God. What more could have been done for our souls and for our salvation, which you have not freely and mightily accomplished?