SERMON: Fear Of Man And The Decay Of Worship

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 you would catch a greater vision of who

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

Not too long ago, we finished Proverbs one through nine, which is the expositional chapters of the book, which is verse by verse.

You can go through it and you can preach through it. And we got to the end of that, and we are now in chapters 10 through 31, which is a collection of statements about various topics.

And we decided that the way we're gonna tackle this book is that we're gonna look at it through miniseries on different topics.

And we're right now in a miniseries on worship. So this is, today, the penultimate, which just means the second to the last sermon in that series on worship.

And we're gonna be looking at a very important topic. Now, I wanna begin by just asking the question, when was the last time that you changed what you were going to say because of a person who was in the room?

Maybe it was in a dramatic moment. I mean, I'm sure that there was no cinematic music going on in the background, no escalating drum beats.

But you didn't say what you were wanting to say. You very quietly and very internally adjusted what you were going to say.

You started with one sentence, but yet you finished with another. You left something out because you softened it because of who was in the room.

And you did that because maybe you felt the temperature of the room rising. You felt the flushness of the cheeks.

You saw the anticipation. Is he gonna say what I think he's gonna say? And you calculated the cost, and you revised in order to keep the peace.

In no more than a millisecond, without anyone noticing, all it took, and the whole conversation was changed.

Or how about this? Can you remember a time that you laughed at something that you actually didn't find funny because you didn't want to hurt someone else's feelings?

Or have you thought about maybe a time where you stayed quiet when you knew the right answer because you were afraid of being wrong in public.

You were afraid of what people might think if you said something stupid. Maybe it felt more dangerous to say the thing than to actually make a stand or to say what needed to be said.

Or when was the last time that you held a friend at arm's length? Or did not act with authenticity around someone that you loved?

And it wasn't because of them, it was because of you because you thought to yourself, if they really know who I am, they're not gonna love me.

They're not gonna accept me. They're not gonna want to be near me. Or what about when you discipline your children and you don't because you're afraid of what they'll think or that you'll disappoint them.

All of these sins have a common theme and it's the fear of man.

And there's a litany more that we could go through on this particular topic.

It is the most primal fear that we all have that shapes our behavior and that destroys our worship because it seeps into our worship like sewage and it taints and it poisons everything.

I saw, I probably shouldn't share this. I saw an incredible commercial. There are times when commercials reach genius and this one was one.

And it was a man with a oil rig in his backyard and it struck and the black gold came flowing out.

And he said, honey, we're rich. We can finally go on our vacation. And the neighbor, it panned to the neighbor and he said, honey, close the windows.

They hit the septic tank. That's what the fear of man is, that moment.

Whether you're singing out loud for all to hear, whether you're praying the kind of prayers that seem authentic in family worship, whether it's just that simple, creeping, shameful suspicion that your life with Christ is a sham if people actually knew what it looked like, that it was nothing more than a social performance, that you've been going through the motions, maintaining appearances, put forward a version of yourself that appears more pious and holy.

That's the cause and effect of the fear of man because the soul can only worship what it most fears.

That is a rule. Your soul can only worship what it most fears. And if your deepest and your most base level fear and is a fear that governs your daily decisions, if that's the fear of man, then it's gonna choke out the worship of God.

It's gonna choke out the fear of God. And you'll begin worshiping people and their opinions and their judgments and their happiness.

And you get my point. You and I will inevitably worship what we are most fearful of.

And that will either be God or it will be something else. And one of the biggest something else's that sits on the throne of our hearts is not idols of gold or stone, it's people of flesh and bone that we live in mortal fear of.

And here's the good news. The book of Proverbs has cataloged this very clearly so that we will know what it looks like and how to repent.

So with that, today we're gonna look at two rival fears that compete for your affections and that compete to sit on the throne of every human heart, the fear of the

Lord and the fear of man. One is the beginning of wisdom. It's the ground of worship. It's the true liberation for our souls.

And the other is a snare and a trap baited with approval, tightening around you with every nibble of the bait and it leads to death.

Today we're gonna see how the fear of man and the fear of God are not competing habits.

They're entirely different religions. And this is because the soul was made to tremble before God, not to be hijacked by the fear of man.

So with that, I'm gonna read a few passages this morning and then we will explore them together and I pray that it will crucify that part of us that is afraid of man so that we may fear

God. First one I will read is Proverbs 22, four. The reward of humility and the fear of the

Lord are riches, honor, and life. Proverbs 24, verse 21 through 22.

My son, fear the Lord and the King. Do not associate with those who are given to change for their calamity will rise suddenly.

And who knows the ruin that will come from both of them? Proverbs 29, verse nine.

When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, the foolish man either rages or laughs and there is no rest.

Verse 13, the poor man and the oppressor have this in common. The Lord gives light to the eyes of both.

Verse 18, where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law.

And then verses 25 through 27. The fear of man brings a snare, but he who trusts in the

Lord will be exalted. Many seek the ruler's favor, but justice for man comes from the

Lord. An unjust man is abominable to the righteous and he who is upright in the way is abominable to the wicked.

Let's pray. Lord, there's much in your word about the fear of man.

There's much in your word that connects the fear of man to idolatry. There's much of our behavior that is informed by fear of man.

And Lord, I pray that today we would see how utterly incompatible a heart that is filled with the fear of man is when we have been called to fear

God and God alone. Lord, I pray that you would cause us to grow in our affections for you and our fear of you and our love for you.

And Lord, also I pray that we would not grow in the opposite way of pugnacity and capriciousness.

I'm saying things like, well, I'm not afraid of man, and then just use that as an excuse to steamroll people. Lord, help our hope to come from you and not people.

Help our identity to come from you and not people, and let that identity shape the way that we treat people.

Lord, it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. What we've been establishing in this series on true worship is that true worship is the fear of the

Lord. The fear of the Lord is true worship. That's why Proverbs 22, four says, the reward for humility and fear of the

Lord is riches and honor and life. So before we can examine what has gone wrong with worship, we need to be reminded of what we've been learning in this mini series on true worship, and that's the fear of the

Lord is the foundation for everything, and that certainly includes our worship. And by contrast, the fear of man is not simply a bad habit, but it's a substitution and a counterfeit of the original.

And in that way, the thing that was supposed to occupy the throne of our heart, which is the fear of the

Lord, and would order our entire life around a center that actually has the power to stabilize us and bless us, has oftentimes become supplanted by the fear of man, who comes in and sets down in the thrones of our hearts and poisons everything.

Now, here's what we need to know about the fear of man. Whether you fear your spouse and her opinion, whether you fear your boss, whether you fear your children's opinion of you, do they like you?

Are they angry at you? Fearing governors or kings, fearing people who are gonna leave you and forsake you?

Whatever manifestation the fear of man shows up, and there are legioness examples of this, you can know for sure that the fear of man did not come into an empty heart.

It came into a heart that was created by God for the worship of God, and it took up residency in a heart that was fully furnished for the worship of God, designed with a

God -shaped throne, and it sat down as an imposter on that place. And when the fear of man came in, it didn't just simply put a different occupant on the throne that God established in your heart for only him to sit.

It became an actual deicide in your heart.

Now, the phrase used in Proverbs 22 .4 is Yerat Yahweh, which simply means the fear of the

Lord. And while that sounds very simple, nothing in this sermon is gonna make sense if we don't understand and get that right.

As we've described, the fear of the Lord is not a kind of fear like a criminal before a judge, or the trembling of someone standing on the edge of a cliff wondering if they're going to slip and fall.

It's not that kind of fear. It's not the flinching dread of a man who knows that the verdict is coming, nor the naked and exposed, the hiding, the ducking, the diving, the dodging that happens in the quagmire of a guilty soul.

It's not a dammock post -fall fear like on the day that he heard God coming like a hurricane, coming after him in his sin.

That kind of fear drives you away from God. It drives you into hiding in shame. I'm talking about the kind of fear that drives us to God, into his arms, which is something closer than terror.

It's more close to awe and wonder. Like when you're standing on the rocky shoreline as the storm rolls over the ocean and you see the massive waves reaching its height and you think to yourself,

I'm so small in comparison to this, and you look at it with awe and you look at it with wonder.

You see both the ocean in front of you that's fearsome and churning and yet magnificent and beautiful.

I remember I was at Holden Beach, North Carolina when a category three hurricane came in and I remember watching the wind and the power and the waves.

I don't know why we were there when a hurricane came, to be honest with you. I was a kid. My parents made a bad decision.

But I remember thinking to myself, I could not peel away from the window. I had to watch because it was so big and so powerful,

I couldn't grasp it. How much more infinitely big and magnificent and glorious and powerful is

God? Some of you know this from other places. Maybe the first time you held a newborn child, the sudden beautiful hush as time stood still and you realize that the moment was bigger and more awesome than you.

Pressing in on you so that you will not forget a single second of that moment in that hospital room when you held that baby for the first time and you smelled that baby's fresh breath as you held him or her close to you, you realize that that moment was bigger than you.

It was greater than you and it's kind of glory that's pressing on you. Glory means weight and that moment was weighty.

Perhaps you've experienced it with a song or an orchestra. I've listened to a song before that moved me from my head to my toes.

Or I've listened to symphonies that swelled around me with all of the different instruments from the winds and the flutes and all of the different things and I've thought to myself, dear

Lord, how beautiful is this moment? That pressing, weighty beauty is an example, a human, creaturely example of the fear of the

Lord who is infinitely more beautiful than Bach and Beethoven. And while these are paper -thin examples, really we're grasping in the human experience to try to illustrate what it means to have an awe and wonder of this infinite

God, I do hope that they serve as a shadow of what we're talking about, that they help us understand, at least in a finite way, what an infinite thing might feel like if we had true knowledge of what it is and understood and felt like we should towards it.

Extreme admiration and reverence as if we were standing on holy ground because in God we are, in Christ we are.

You multiply the storm or the orchestra or the moment holding a child and you multiply it by infinity and you might have a concept of what it means to adore

God rightly for his power, glory, and beauty. This God who spoke universes into existence with a single breath.

The prophet Isaiah in the classic throne room vision in the year that King Uzziah died was taken into the throne room of God with the seraphim.

Now, we don't have time to get into this but I wanna paint a picture. Seraphim comes from the Hebrew word seraph which means fiery serpent.

So we're talking about God sitting on his throne with fire -breathing dragons. This is what the throne room looks like.

There's lots of Hebrew evidence underneath that, just don't have time to go there, but imagine the scene. Isaiah sees it and these fire -breathing dragons that are menacing to Isaiah are covering their faces before the awesome glory of Yahweh.

And Isaiah cries out, woe is me, for I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Every bone in his body shook with the beauty and the splendor of God like he would snap as a tiny twig if the

Lord's grace had not protected him. The seraphim again covered their faces and he said, woe is me,

I'm ruined. He was not terrified into fleeing from the presence of God, he was undone by how pressing the worship was, by how beautiful and glorious God was.

And out of that holiness and out of that experience, Isaiah became the greatest prophet of the entire

Old Testament. That's the pattern, it's always the pattern.

The soul that has truly encountered the beauty and the glory of God is not gently undone, it is fully undone, captivated by God.

Not in despair, but not in terror, but in worship. Maybe you've had an experience like this. God often does this to the ones that he calls where he will give them a glimpse of his glory and beauty.

I remember riding in a car with a friend of mine and we were talking about how good God is and I remember my breath coming out of my lungs and I remember saying to myself,

I can't even describe with my own lips and then I just stopped talking and just sat there because nothing I could say was good enough to describe this holy

God. And I just sat there in a kind of holy silence for 30, 40 minutes, which is not really common for me.

But it was a beautiful experience where God gave me a glimpse of his glory.

God does this by a kind of reverent trembling, a kind of tear -soaked and joy -producing worship that's not just natural to us, it is a kind of showing us who he is.

That is what Yerat Yahweh means and that's why Proverbs 24 compares the fear of the

Lord with the humility of man because you cannot fear the Lord rightly and not walk away from it understanding adeptly who you are and who you are is finite.

Fear and humility do not even occur sequentially, they occur simultaneously because as you understand the magnitude of God, you understand the finitude of you.

And the coalescing of those two realities leads to the most ardent and beautiful worship.

When you really see God rightly and you really understand you rightly and in the crag that God cuts out for you in that middle space, that is where worship is most glorious.

And from that posture, worship flows. But today we're gonna look at something that absolutely kills that.

Today we're gonna look at something that starves your worship, suffocates your worship, withers your worship, and it could be the reason why you have no joy in worship.

And it's because the fear of God that produces the humility of man has been replaced by the fear of man which leads to pride and it withers us.

Proverbs 29, 25 through 26 says, the fear of man brings a snare, but he who trusts in the

Lord will be exalted. Many seek the ruler's favor, but justice for man comes from the Lord. Notice what the fear of man brings on us, it's a snare.

The Hebrew word there is makesh, it's not a prison with visible bars, it's a trap that is hidden in order to snare you.

It's baited with something that you want. That will inevitably destroy you.

That is what the fear of man is. It's the lure hiding in the hook that if you bite it will drag you away to death.

You want what it's offering. And what is it offering? Belonging, community, to be known, to be loved and accepted.

Even secular sociologists and anthropologists will say that the most base human desires that everyone wants, even like more central than food, is we want to be known.

We want to be able to disclose who we are to the persons around us, and then at the end of that disclosure, we want not to be rejected.

But because we live in a world full of rejection where people hear our story and then look down upon us, we become closed off, isolated, calcified, and we begin to spend our entire life self -protecting from the hurt.

That's the fear of man. That's the snare. The fear of man also dethrones

God in your heart. Perhaps you don't need to think very hard about the specific person in your life who matters more to you than anyone else, and their opinion matters more to you than anyone else.

You know exactly who it is. You thought about him the moment that I said it. And a significant portion of your daily decisions have been quietly organized around the premise, what will they think?

And this is subtle, because it's not wrong to be considerate. It's not wrong to think about other people. It's not wrong to be kind.

It's not wrong to try to be a delight to the people around you, but it is wrong to try to please man over and above pleasing

God. And that not only becomes toxic, it's God dethroning in your heart. And you will know that you've done this.

You will know that you've handed over the throne of your heart to man instead of God when the pleasure of someone else becomes intrinsic to yours, when you are not happy unless they're happy with you.

That's how you know that you've dethroned God in your heart and put the fear of man on the throne. That's what the fear of man does.

It also puts your soul on permanent trial. Think about this. The fear of man will cause you to rehearse conversations over and over and over again.

How many of you stayed awake at night thinking about the fight, thinking about the argument, thinking about what was said, what could have been said?

Why I didn't say this? Why I should have said that? And when the moment's over, the trial begins.

You replay the scene over and over and over again. The word you shouldn't have said, the tone you shouldn't have taken, and the court never adjourns.

Because the fear of man, the fear of what they think has turned your soul into a courtroom that has been unleashed against you.

The fear of man will cause you to accuse yourself, defend yourself, and retry yourself for the same crimes over and over and over again.

Because if you cannot bow before God, you're gonna perpetually stand in front of men, and you're going to be in a place of permanent accusation.

Because man is not God, and you cannot satisfy man. There's a great principle, whatever you idolize, you will demonize.

That's what the fear of man does. It also dissolves your identity. Think about who you are at work.

Is it different than who you are at home? Think about who you are with your oldest friends or with those friends that maybe don't pull the best qualities out of you, or who are you with your parents, and who are you when you're alone?

If there is a difference between those things, then you are performing at some level in front of different groups.

And why are you performing? Because you fear them more than you fear God. If you've created a version of yourself that's calibrated to a particular scenario and scene in order for you to function well there, and it's not truly who you are, all you've done is make a costume that pacifies the

God called man. And the costume soul doesn't worship because worship requires you being naked and unashamed before God with no pretenses.

The fear of man makes that impossible. Fear of man also fractures our mind. You know what you believe.

You could articulate it clearly. There's no such thing as transgenderism.

There's man and woman. You know that, and then yet, in a social setting, maybe the cost is too high.

And you play it a different way. There's moments where we stop asking whether something is true, and we start asking whether it's safe.

And when we do that, the internal man -calibrated moral compass will shift towards whatever voice is the loudest or most costly, and we will pacify that which we fear most.

It will either be God or it will be man. See, a soul that replaces what is true for what is safe can't worship because worship at its core is not safe, but it is good.

It also rewires your conscience. This should frighten us the most.

Because of the fear of man, do you ever feel more guilty when you disappoint certain people or when you displease them?

Do you feel more guilty when you displease them than you do when you displease God? When you've told a half -truth to protect your reputation, what do you feel?

Do you feel the sting of sinning against a thrice -holy God? Or do you feel relief that you managed the relationship?

Which one is most pressing on you will tell you which one is controlling you. That internal alarm that is designed to flare up and ring when we have violated the statutes of God, quietly is suppressed to comfort the thing and the person that you fear most.

And that doesn't end in worship. It ends in rebellion to God. Fear of man also makes your obedience negotiable.

Take, for example, a man in Scripture, Pilate. Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent.

He said it three times, out loud and on the record. And then he handed him over anyway.

Why? Because Pilate knew that if he didn't, the crowds would riot, and he would not only lose his job, he'd probably lose his head.

So to save himself, he killed Christ because he was more concerned with the fear of man than truth.

Now, don't condemn Pilate too quickly because you and I have done the same thing in much less stressful situations.

We've betrayed Christ for a whole lot less than the threat of death. The fear of man doesn't always make you do wrong things.

Sometimes it makes obedience so inconvenient that you won't do it at all. It makes every act of devotion a kind of transaction so that we get to the point to where we give

God what costs us very little, and we call that surrender. We offer him the parts of ourselves that people we fear approve of, and then we keep the rest hidden because their opinion matters more to us than God.

That's the fear of man. It's idolatry with a human face. Listen to how

Paul describes this in Galatians 1 .10. For I am now, for am

I now seeking the favor of men or God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men,

I would not be a bondservant of Christ. You see what Paul's saying? If I'm trying to please man,

I'm not even a bondservant of Jesus. He says that trying to live my life in such a way that I'm pleasing someone else is akin to not even being a

Christian. Not even acting like I've been bought and paid for by Christ. He's saying you cannot pursue the approval of man and the lordship of Christ simultaneously because they are competing virtues.

They are mutually exclusive from one another. They are different gods, lords, and saviors.

One will set you free, one will leave you in chains. And perhaps most sinister is that the fear of man is the only idol that is sophisticated enough to try to convince you that your false worship is actually a virtue.

I'm just being kind. I'm just trying to be caring. I'm just trying to be loving.

But at the root of it, you're a coward in your heart and you're caving to man instead of God.

We've all done it. This is why God exposes it in Isaiah 51.

Who are you that you're afraid of mortal man? That you have forgotten the Lord your Maker? He's saying that when we fear man, we are not just doing a whoopsie.

He's saying that we've forgotten him. That we've not considered him. That we have put

God as far away from the center of our brains as possibly imaginable.

He's saying that the fear of man is the consideration of humans over God.

It is a forgetting of God. It is a kind of practical atheism. And it is a catastrophic worship, destroying soul, enslaving, forgetting that will leave us in permanent bonds.

If you are trying today to please anyone over and above pleasing

God, it is a noose around your neck. It is a guillotine that will drop.

You cannot please both God and man. It is from the pleasure of God that we serve man.

It is not from serving man that we will end up at the pleasures of God. There are two different paths.

One leads to utter slavery. One leads to freedom. The fear of man also doesn't just affect us personally, it affects us in culture.

My son, fear the Lord and King, Solomon says. And the order of those two is absolutely meaningful.

Fear the Lord, then fear the King, and always in that order. The King's authority is legitimate, biblically speaking.

God says that he installs government, he raises them up. They're his sword of justice, but do not fear them over God.

Do not fear their power over God. Do not fear what they have to say over and above God. This is why when our government tells us to do things that violate

God's word or to stop doing things that are expressly commanded in God's word, we say no.

Because there are limits to a government's authority. It is God -given and defined, and the fear of them, which is rightly deserved, is subservient and bows the knee to the fear of God.

It also affects the church, the fear of man. Proverbs 29, 18 says, where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law.

This is one of the most misquoted verses in the English Bible. Right along with Philippians 4, 13,

I can do all things through a verse taken out of context. We used to pray that prayer when we would play against the

Catholics. I was at a Presbyterian high school, and when we played the Catholics, we'd pray that prayer imprecatorily even.

Lord, may we destroy them. They beat us every time. It was a good exegesis class for me.

I've heard this verse mentioned in church as my whole Christian life, where Christian churchmen will tell you that without vision, the people fail.

This passage is about communicating strategy, communicating vision. If we don't communicate what it is that the church exists for, what the vision is, what the mission, vision, all that, our values, if we don't do that, then the people will be led astray.

It's about leadership pipelines. It's about casting vision. It's about a plan. It's about this and that. But that interpretation's wrong.

That's not what this verse means. That's importing the fear of man in a church clothes into this profound prophetic text and reimagining it as if it's some kind of positive attestation for leadership.

The word for vision in this passage is not pep talks and TED Talks and not leadership conference, jab, you know, pumps and the shots in the arm.

It's not that. It is prophetic revelation. The word is chazan, which means divinely inspired words from God.

Without divinely inspired words from God, the people perish. Not my vision, not your vision, not some leadership guru's vision.

God's words. Without those words, we perish. It's the living voice of God that sustains us, keeps us, strengthens us, nourishes us.

It is not a churchman's vision that is what captivates

God's people. Again, this verse is not about strategic planning.

It's about God's word, his voice in the assembly of God. And I know why churches do this.

I know why they misquote this verse. Because they're afraid. Because they're afraid if they don't have a compelling strategy, that people will stop coming.

That people will stop giving. That people will stop being excited. And when they're not excited, they'll go to the next church that has the bigger show.

And what that does, very subtly, that attitude from pastors, and I've seen it and I hate it.

What it does is it says in his heart, if I preach this message and I offend this person, then we're going to lose our funding in this particular ministry because that person gives.

I've seen it. If I talk about this, people will get upset. If I say this, people will leave. If I make this decision, although it's right, although it's what the

Bible says, the people aren't ready for it. And because they're not ready for it, we're gonna hold off.

I've seen cowards in the pulpit my entire Christian life and I'm sick of it.

How can you be a coward and a pastor? How can you say that you stand up to declare to God's people,

God's word, and you are a coward? Cowards are the first persons on the list of those who are thrown in hell and revelation.

Yeah. The word cuts, doesn't it? How many times have you been to church where the word cut you?

And you bled. That's its job. If we blunt the knife in order to pacify people, this church will fail, this church will fold, and God will be displeased.

And we will all stand before the Almighty and we'll have to explain to him why we thought his word was not sufficient, that we had to coddle our consciences.

The fear of man affects us, our relationships, it affects our society, it affects churches, it affects everything.

And we have to crucify it if we want to have right worship with God. And the glorious news is that you have a standard by which you can know that you are fearing

God over man. Because fearing God makes enemies, fearing man makes pseudo and fake friends, doesn't it?

An unjust man, Proverbs 29, 27, is abominable to the righteous. And he who is upright is abominable to the wicked.

He's saying a sort of universal rule here that if you are obeying the law of God, you will be happy, but you will be hated.

The entire operating logic underneath the fear of man, it depends upon a single lie that if I can just be inoffensive enough, benign enough, banal enough, then maybe people will not find me intolerable.

Maybe people will like me. Maybe they will find me winsome. If your life, though, is genuinely ordered around the fear of the

Lord, you will be an abomination to certain people. Not because you're trying to be offensive.

It's because the word of God's offensive, not you. I'm not saying that we should all be blowhards and try to offend people, because that's a different problem.

I'm saying that if we really take this word seriously, it will do the cutting, and it will do the offending, and it will do the scalping.

You often don't even need to say a word. Your presence is a strong argument enough.

When Jesus says it plainly to us, that if the world hates you, you know that it hated me first.

It hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but because you're not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.

This is what will happen if you follow Scripture with all your heart.

Your life will be a testimony to someone else's shortcomings, and instead of repenting and turning to God, they'll hate you for it, and they'll call you things like self -righteous, and they'll call you things like smug, and they'll call you things that are truly hurtful, and you will live with knives in your back.

This is a promise from God, and it's often not mentioned enough, that the most intense pressure that you will likely face as a

Christian is not from atheists. It's from people inside the church, from people whose own accommodations and compromises are threatened by your obedience, and because of this, your courage makes their cowardice all the more visible, and because of your faithfulness, it makes their compromise legible, and the fear of man in them will label you arrogant, illegalist, faithless, and they'll reframe your refusal as compromise in the category of love.

You're just not loving. I want you to remember that the absence of friction is not a sign of success, but it may be a sign of surrender, and we know that because Jesus even said it.

Woe to you when all men speak well of you. Like curses be on you when all men speak well of you.

If that's your goal in life is for everyone to love you, that's a cursed life, Jesus says.

It's a woe -driven life, because for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way, and they killed them.

If everyone in the room always receives you warmly, you should ask yourself why that is.

Jesus also said, do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul, but rather fear him who is able to destroy both the body and the soul in hell.

Jesus is saying, don't fear man, fear God. He's saying, mortify it, cut it, hack it out of you.

It's destroying you. It is the cancer in you. Cut it out and fear God, because that's the only way to life.

Yeah, the world will hate you, but you will be blessed. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

And how could Jesus be so clear on these things? Because Jesus did these things. We've tried to be braver in our life.

We've come to conclusions that we've been cowards, and we've tried to do better, and we've failed, and we've failed, and we've failed, and we've failed.

We've tried to not care about what that person thinks about us, and yet every time they're displeased, it ruins our total happiness.

We've tried for more accountability. We've tried for more effort, and we've failed over and over.

So why is Jesus asking us to do something that we so clearly cannot? I think first and foremost, it's to expose us that we cannot save ourselves.

And I think more importantly, it's to shine the spotlight on Christ, who is the only one who never feared man.

It says, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame.

Jesus did not fear man. Matthew 21, he walks into the city, and he tells the entire city of Jerusalem, the entire leadership structure, hey,

God's gonna take the kingdom away from you. He's speaking truth to them. And then immediately, they get into a huddle, and they start planning to kill him.

Matthew 23, he calls seven covenant curses down upon Jerusalem. They're ready to murder him.

Jesus never cowered in the face of fear, but he always pressed forward in obedience. And what did it get him?

It got him death. But God honored Christ and his righteousness with resurrection, and there's a very important reason for that, because all of us who are cowards, and all of us who are afraid, and all of us who have prioritized man over God, if we are in Christ, then his obedience will cover us and be our righteousness for us.

That is the hope of the gospel, that not only have our sins been forgiven, but Christ has deposited within us his righteousness.

So that now, brothers and sisters, you don't have to be afraid anymore. You don't have to live in fear anymore, because the only identity that matters is yours.

I used to think to myself that if people really knew who I was, then

I would be abandoned. How can that be if you're a Christian? You can't be abandoned, you can't be forsaken.

If everyone in the world turns on you and hates you, you cannot be alone, because God has you and he loves you.

If everybody hates you, so what? You're loved by God. If people speak all manner of evil against you, so what?

God knows the truth. We have to become so aware of the fact that we are known, loved, accepted, and bought and paid for and held securely by God that the opinion of everyone else fades, so that it no longer has power over us, but it's his power at work in our weakness.

That's what makes us joyful. That is the secret to a joyful life. That is the secret to a worshipful life, is learning how to care less about the opinions of man and learning how to care more about what

God has said about you, and if you're his, you're his. You're free. Let's pray.

Lord God, the fear of man brings shackles. It brings discouragement, it brings hopelessness.

It brings an endless litany of striving to make that person happy, to make that person love you, to make that person accept you, and yet in Christ we have those things.

We have acceptance before God. We have the love of God. We have your kindness poured out on us.

We have your righteousness so that we can stand even in the presence of God without stumbling. Everything that our heart longs for we have in you, so God, I pray that you would do a surgical work in us to make us care more about what you say than what someone else says.

Help us to care more about how you feel about us than how someone else feels about us, and help that to kill our loneliness and to kill our insecurities and to kill our depressions and to kill our anxieties and to kill all of the things that are downstream from the fear of man.

Lord, I pray you'd heal us through the fear of God. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.