Sunday Sermon: Knowing the Fear of God (2 Corinthians 5:11-16)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the letters to the Corinthians.

This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe.

The Fear of the Lord and the Christian Life

2 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 11 through 15, in honor of the word of the King, would you please stand. The Apostle Paul writing to the church,. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.

But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those things who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart.

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died.

And he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. Let us pray again. Our Lord God, as we come to these scriptures this morning, I pray that your Holy Spirit opens our hearts to receive them and to understand them.

For as Paul also said to the church in Corinth, the naturally minded man can't understand spiritual things, for they are spiritually discerned. So as we come to discern the things that are written here, even deeper truths than what we see with black words on a white page.

So I pray that your Spirit would illuminate these things to us, make these words real to us, that they would be written on our hearts and applied to our lives, that we would understand the significance and the relevance of these instructions even to us as the church today.

So we don't look at Paul the way the Corinthians did, as seeing him as somebody who was mad or crazy, but when somebody sees in us the passion of the Lord God that we have, they see a love and affection for our Creator.

And even when the world would see us as fools, that we continue to stand strong in the truth anyway. For it is the Lord God who searches mind and hearts, and he knows our conscience. And I pray that before God, we would be seen as worthy sons and daughters of the Most High, adopted into your family through Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray, and all God's people said, amen.

Thank you. You may be seated. So we have an interesting contrast here when we get to verse 11. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord. The section that we looked at last week, which started in verse 6, how did we start that?

So we are always of good courage. We're always of good courage, verse 11, but we know the fear of the Lord. Those two things seem to be contradictory. They seem to be opposed to one another. Courage in Christ, but fear of the Lord.

What are we talking about there whenever we talk about the fear of God? Proverbs 1, 7 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. So clearly, it's something that is essential when it comes to our worship before God, to have a healthy and a reverent fear of God.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Yet in 1 John 4, we read that God is love and perfect love casts out fear. In Isaiah 11, 2, it says that in the spirit of the Lord, there is the fear of God.

Yet in 2 Timothy 1, 7, it says that God gave us not a spirit of fear. All right, so maybe the fear of God is just an Old Testament thing. No, because 1 Peter 2, 17 says, fear God, and we've just read it here in 2 Corinthians 5, 11.

And Jesus says it in Luke 12, 5, right before he says fear not in verse 7. So now that we're thoroughly confused, what on earth is the fear of God? Is it just for unbelievers? After all, Hebrews 10, 31 says, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

And indeed, that is a truth that every one of us must hold to heart. But Paul says to the Christians in Philippians 2, 12, work out your own salvation with fear and with trembling. So yes, unbelievers have a certain kind of fear and believers also have a certain kind of fear, which we also read about in Psalm 2, 11, that we are to fear the Lord.

What does it mean to fear God? Well, first of all, let me tell you that this does not mean that we're supposed to be nervous Christians, always filled with anxiety, always concerned that God is not pleased with us.

We've already heard about that this morning as Julie was sharing that with the kids, that when she feels anxious, she needs to take that feeling to the Lord. We're not always supposed to be filled with this constant nervousness, thinking that we haven't pleased God, and so He could be striking us down with a lightning bolt at any moment.

But if we are in Christ, God loves us and receives us to Himself, not because of the righteousness that we have, but because of the righteousness of Christ that has been imparted to us. If you are in Christ, God could not love you any more than He does right now.

He will never love you more or less than He does now as you are in Christ Jesus. And even greater truth than this, my brothers and sisters in the Lord, God loves you with the same love and affection that He loves His own Son, Jesus.

What do you think about that? You can be confident in your salvation because of what Christ has done. If you place confidence in yourself, that's no confidence at all. However, we also need to have a healthy fear of God in the sense that we would be in awe of His majesty and His holiness.

Knowing that He is glorious, we are not. Knowing that He is perfect, we really are not, falling far short of that standard. And if we stood before God in the human natural descendant from Adam state that we are in, we would be destroyed because we cannot do anything good enough to measure up to God's holiness.

Even if you declared today that you are never going to sin again, first of all, I would tell you you've immediately sinned because you've hubristically said something about yourself that is just outright impossible.

So in great pride, you have declared yourself innocent of any future faults you've already sinned. But let's say it were possible and let's say you could, from this moment on, declare that you are no longer going to walk in sin.

You still would not be perfect before God, for how would you atone for all of your past transgressions and sins? It is only the perfectness of Christ and the holiness of His sacrifice on the cross for us that can cover over the sins that we've committed against God.

So we are in awe of His majesty and we are in awe of His holiness with reverent fear, and this keeps us obedient to His word. It keeps us accountable to the body of Christ, His church, and it keeps us away from the snare of sin.

Look at what we read coming up in 2 Corinthians 7, verse 1. Since we have these promises, beloved, the promise of justification of salvation in our Lord Jesus Christ, since we have these promises, my beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.

So having a fear of the Lord directs us in holiness and righteousness. God doesn't just judge unbelievers. As we read last week, He also judges believers. We make it our aim to please Him, as we read in verse 9, for we must also appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

Then verse 11, therefore, knowing the fear of God. We read in Psalm 103, 13, as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. Hebrews 12, 6, for the Lord disciplines the one He loves and chastises every son whom He receives.

So the discipline of the Lord that we receive as a follower of Jesus Christ is not the same as the judgment or the wrath of God that would be poured out upon those who are not followers of Jesus. We have nothing to fear of the judgment of God.

In fact, going back to a reference that I said earlier in 1 John 4, we read that God is love and perfect love casts out fear. John goes on to say, for fear has to do with judgment. And so fear in that context that he's talking about in 1 John 4 is the judgment of God, which we do not fear if we are in Christ Jesus, for we know that the judgment of God that is coming against all unbelievers has been atoned for by the blood of Christ.

The fear of the Lord is not being scared of God. It is worshiping God with reverence. And if we fear the Lord, there is absolutely nothing else that can be done to us. No one can do anything to you if you fear God.

You have no reason to fear anyone or anything in this world if you have the fear of the Lord. For as we read in Romans 8, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, and not even life and death will separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

We read further about the fear of God, Psalm 2233, you who fear the Lord, praise him, glorify him, stand in awe of him. Psalm 3318, behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love.

Psalm 349, oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack. And Psalm 118 .6, the Lord is on my side, I will have no fear, what can man do to me? So indeed, there's a couple of different ways that we can interpret an understanding of this word, fear.

Christians have a fear of God in one sense, and unbelievers have a fear of God in a completely different sense. As we see that in 1 John 4, the fear that they have, that unbelievers have, is a fear of judgment.

For they know that on the day of judgment, God will destroy all who were not declared innocent by faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther distinguished between what he called a servile fear and a filial fear.

A servile fear, that word is characteristic of a slave. It's where we get the word slave from, and it's the kind of fear that a slave would have of a malevolent master. So indeed, we are all supposed to be slaves of Christ, as we read about in Romans chapter 6.

But when you think about a slave in the earthly sense, such a slave would fear displeasing their master in case their master would punish them. And at the time that Paul was writing this letter, and even in a time of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, at the time that Luther would have been writing about his definition of fear, somebody who was a slave could have been killed by their master had they done something wrong.

Their master would have had the legal right to do so. So this kind of fear is the kind of fear that anyone who is not a follower of God would have of God, this servile fear. But Martin Luther wrote about another fear, a filial fear, and it's from this word filial that we get the word family.

Tell me, don't you have a sense of fear that you would displease a member of your family and what it might do to them if you were to wrong them somehow? That it might break their heart? That it might hurt the feelings of somebody that you love and are close to?

And you do things that are honoring of them and for them, gentle for them, kind toward them, because you don't want to cause unnecessary hurt or pain against those that you love. Putting this more specifically in the context of our relationship with God our Father, what kind of attitude do you have toward your earthly father?

When you were growing up as a child, you had a desire to want to please your father. As we talked about last week, whether you had a good relationship with your father or a bad relationship with your father, there was certainly a time in your life when you desired to please your earthly father.

Maybe by pleasing your earthly father, you would get the attention from your father that you had not been receiving. Or maybe by pleasing your earthly father, you would earn the pride and the admiration of your dad.

And it is that kind of fear that we have against our earthly father. Fear of doing something wrong and it would bring punishment upon us. For maybe your earthly father was indeed a loving man, but in that love, he still must punish you when you do something that would deserve punishment.

And so our heavenly father treats us the same as we've already read. He disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. As we read also in Hebrews 12, that if God did not punish us, he would not love us.

In the book of Proverbs, that the father who spares the rod against his son hates his son. And so as our Lord God loves us and desires to grow us more and more in holiness and in the image of his perfect son Christ, he does so with discipline but in a loving way.

And it's knowing that God is loving toward us, compassionate toward us. Knowing what he gave for us, the sacrifice of his son on the cross. Knowing that he could judge us to heaven or to hell. It is in the knowledge of all of these things that we develop a healthy and a reverent fear of God.

In fact, it was that fear or it should have been that fear of God that brought you into reconciliation with God in the first place. For you knew that apart from Christ, when you heard the gospel proclaimed that Jesus died for sins so that all who believed in him would not perish but would have eternal life.

And when you heard that gospel proclaimed, you came to a realization of your sin. And that before God, if you were judged in the state that you were in, you would be cast from his presence forever. You would not survive the holy righteous judgment of God.

And so upon seeing the law described to you your sin and hearing the gospel of Christ proclaimed, the fear of God overtook your heart and you were convicted. And you sought God for forgiveness. And after a period of conviction and grief over your sinfulness, there came shortly thereafter, or maybe perhaps it was a long period of time for you.

This sanctification is different for everyone. But after a time you came to know the loving grace and forgiveness of our Lord God. And relief filled your heart. And confidence overtook your life. And courage filled your spirit.

And so we may understand both statements that Paul makes here in 2 Corinthians 5, 6, and 11. So we are always of good courage, therefore knowing the fear of the Lord. We have nothing to fear of death for our confidence is in Christ.

And Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, 11, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. Because we know the judgment of God that comes against every man for his sinfulness. Again, as we read last week, it is not just unbelievers who are going to be judged.

Believers are going to be as well. The difference will be at that final judgment, we who are in Christ will be judged for what Christ has done for us. Whereas those who are not in Christ will be judged because they did not have their sins atoned for and forgiven.

They did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so they were not saved. And so we know the fear of the Lord as he is the great and awesome high king and judge over all of the universe. And we persuade others that they would turn from their sin and they likewise would know the fear of God.

The healthy, reverent, awesome, worshipful fear of the Lord. All authority that has been handed to Jesus Christ. And they would turn from sin and they would worship him. Paul goes on here in verse 11 to say, but what we are is known to God and I hope it is known also to your conscience.

As Paul wrote to Timothy in both letters, 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy, he says multiple times in those letters that he has confidence in Christ and that he preaches with a clear conscience. And so he likewise would encourage Timothy to have a clear conscience.

Meaning what? That Timothy would not deviate from the sound words of the Lord Christ and try to teach anything that was speculative or myth or something that he just made up on the fly, but he would know the word of Christ and he would teach the word of Christ so that he would be able to teach it with a clear conscience knowing that he had not gone astray from the words that were delivered by the Lord himself.

Paul says furthermore that he has a clear conscience because he has not walked in any sinful way since his conversion. Ever since coming to Christ, he no longer walked in sinfulness, but he pursued the righteousness of Christ.

Doesn't mean that Paul was a perfect man. Because in that same letter to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1, he says that Christ came to save sinners of whom I am the foremost. Doesn't say of whom I was the foremost.

Paul making the illustration that he doesn't know any man's sins more acutely than he knows his own. And so that is the same for each and every one of us. We know by the conviction of the Holy Spirit how we have sinned against God and our need for forgiveness and our need for a Savior.

The only person that can know with confidence that you are saved is you. No one can know that. And no one can declare that for you. It is very common, particularly in the evangelical church today, even in America, that an evangelical Christian would leave the Protestant church and they might go either to the Roman Catholic church or the Greek Orthodox church.

Dr. Albert Moeller was asked about this recently. Dr. Moeller is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And he was asked, this was a little over a year ago, after it was revealed that Hank Hanegraaff, the Bible Answer Man, had left a Protestant church and had become Greek Orthodox.

And on a Q &A program that Albert Moeller was doing, a live video feed through Facebook, one of the viewers asked him this question. What makes a Christian leave the Protestant church and go toward Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy?

And Albert Moeller says one of the primary reasons he believes that Christians will do this is because they want somebody who will authoritatively or popishly declare forgiveness for them because they don't think that they have forgiveness.

They are not confident in the words of Christ themselves. So they need somebody on earth to be able to declare their forgiveness for them. This is what some will refer to as going after the smells and bells of the church.

You know, those things that would be appeasing to our senses and to our flesh. And when we lack confidence in the word of Christ, which, praise God, we live in an era where we have so many different Bibles in our homes, probably in multiple translations and different cover styles that you have on your shelf, the word of God is so readily available to us.

And yet, even though we have so many Bibles in our homes and we might apply so much of our time to Bible study, yet we would find ourselves so grieved and unconfident in the words that we read and not knowing that the forgiveness of Christ is upon us for all who believe.

And so lacking confidence in his words, not that we lack confidence in our flesh, we should always lack confidence in our flesh, but we lack confidence in the word of Christ itself that would drive us to go from a place that is preaching the word of Christ to instead a place where there is a hierarchical authority in that particular church to declare upon you whether you are forgiven of your sins or not.

No earthly man can forgive you of your sins. No earthly man can declare of you that you've been declared or that you've been made righteous before God. No one can do that for you. The only person who can know with confidence that you are saved in the presence of God and if you stood before him in judgment, you would be received as his child.

The only person who knows that is you. And I tell you that as a pastor, even I struggle in my flesh when a member of my congregation comes to me and says, Pastor Gabe, I don't know if I'm saved. And I would love to labor with you through the scriptures so that I can help you come to an understanding of whether you are or are not.

And maybe by the revealing of the law, you see the sinfulness that is inside of you and that you have not really actually asked God forgiveness for your sins. You might find where that lack of confidence is as we go through the gospel and some of the New Testament instructions that have been given to his church.

But what I cannot do for you is declare you forgiven of your sins. I can't do that. And there is that desire in my flesh as we're kind of going through things together and you say to me, well, yeah, I'm convicted of this.

I've asked God's forgiveness for this. I walk in this. I obey this. And as all the things that you say to me fall into place, and it appears to me as though you really are walking a Christian life, there begins to arise in me that temptation of wanting to be able to say to you, well, you know, brother, sister, I think you're a Christian.

But I can't make that declaration. I can help you come to a knowledge and an understanding of your salvation or your need for salvation. But I can't declare your salvation. And indeed, God as a loving father does want us to know with confidence the love that he has given to us in Jesus Christ.

As John wrote in 1 John 5, I've written these things to you that you may know that you are saved. Talking specifically to the church, the word of God that has been given to us that we may know that we are saved.

And in Romans 15, 4, Paul says that what was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through the training and the instruction of the scriptures, we may have hope. God indeed wants you to know these things.

God as our loving father does not want to leave you in question or in mystery about his love for you. Has your earthly father ever wanted you to stay in mystery as to whether or not he loved you? How loving a father would I be if when I was leaving for work in the morning, I'm walking out the door and I'm going,.

Bye, Annie. Bye, Zej. Bye, Aria. Bye, Mariah. Daddy will be home later. Maybe. Maybe it's the last time you're going to see me. I'll never be home again. Bye, kids. Would that be loving? To leave my kids in mystery like that?

To not know if I am a faithful husband and father to my family? It is a loving thing for a father to assure his love to his children. I love you. I love your mom. And I am committed to this family. And so the promises that we have from our heavenly father likewise are meant to stir in us a confidence and an understanding of the love that he has for his children.

We're not meant to be in mystery. We're meant to have courage and our confidence, not in ourselves, but in the Lord Christ. We would know the fear of the Lord. We would persuade others. But what we are is known to God.

And I hope also it is known to your conscience. Even though I can't declare of you that you are saved or you are not saved, I can certainly examine and see an evidence in your life of the fruitfulness of Christ, the fruitful walk of the Lord that all Christians should display.

Are you showing an increasing love for others and love for God? Are you growing in holiness? Are you growing in the knowledge of God? Even expanding your understanding of deep doctrine in theology, desiring to know God all the more according to what his word says.

These kinds of things would be the fruit of spiritual growth in your life that we can examine one another by. So it's not our place as brothers and sisters in the Lord to point fingers at one another and say, I don't think you're a Christian.

You look like a pretty good Christian to me. But that we would be welcoming of anyone who proclaims the name of the Lord Christ and we would encourage and admonish one another, Colossians 3 .16, according to what the word says.

We treat one another as brothers and sisters in the Lord. Which is why Paul says, I hope it is known also to your conscience. You know that we're not just speaking for ourselves, we're talking off the top of our heads, nor are we acting like some of these other false teachers who have led you astray.

Paul is going to get to a rebuke of them later on in 2 Corinthians. But that they would be able to examine the lives of these apostles and their missionary brethren and know in their conscience that they are known to God just as any follower of Christ would be known to the Lord.

Outward Appearance and the Heart

Verse 12, we are not commending ourselves to you again, as Paul had said in chapter 4, qualifying himself and his ministry to the Corinthians. But we are giving you cause to boast about us so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart.

And again, that's going to be related to false teachers whom Paul is going to rebuke a little bit later on in the letter. These who boast in their outward appearance, the seeming righteousness that they display on the outside, but their heart is actually far from God.

The fancy clothes that they wear as they proclaim themselves to be apostles, even though they're false apostles, but some of the Corinthians have been won over by this demonstration. They have been coaxed by fabulous speech and melodious speaking voices.

And these guys that dress to the nines as they stand before Corinth and proclaim themselves to be apostles of Christ, but also students of other philosophies as well, there was a sense of syncretism in the kinds of religions that they would proclaim even to the church in Corinth.

But Paul says they boast in themselves. They boast in their outward appearance. Their confidence is what is on the outside, but our confidence is what is in the heart. It is the transformation that has happened by Christ in the heart of the Christian.

The Love of Christ Controls His Church

Verse 14, for the love of Christ controls us. Some of you may have a translation that says, for the love of Christ compels us. And you might say to me, Pastor Gabe, I'm a little more comfortable with that.

Love of Christ compels me, not controls me, but indeed we are controlled by the love of Christ. And there is no difference between those two words, compels or controls. I'll come back to that here in just a moment.

The love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that one has died for all. If you have the new King James, or you have, I believe, the NASB as well. Tom, you'll be able to correct me on this.

But the word one is capitalized. O-N-E. Capital O-N-E. Tom, you're nodding your head. No, it's not. Okay. So in the new King James, the one is capitalized because who we're referring to there in one is Jesus Christ.

That one Christ has died for all, therefore all have died, and he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. Have you ever heard the expression used?

All means all, and that's all all means. You ever heard that expression? It's very popular in Southern Baptist circles as well. It's meaning that expression is used to say that if it says Christ has died for all, then he has died for all, every single person.

But I tell you that all does not always mean every single person. All, like any other word in the Bible, has a context. And here we have a context just as we would have a context anywhere else. In this particular instance, the all that is being used, not saying this is the way all always appears in the scriptures, but in this context, all is referring to everyone who is in Christ Jesus, who is a member of his church.

That is who is being referred to in these two verses. The love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that one, Christ, has died for all his church, therefore all those who are in Christ have died.

We are dead to sin, okay? And then verse 15, he died for all his church, that those who live his church might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. Now, there are occasions in which that word all does mean every single person.

Romans 3 .23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. How do we know that the context there is every single person and not just a select few? Because Paul has spent Romans 1 .18 through Romans 3 .22 bringing all men into condemnation, Jew or Gentile.

No one gets out of this thing. All have sinned against God and fallen short of the glory of God. But even I would say to you there is a particular context. All means every single person but Christ. So it cannot be every single person who has ever walked this earth, because then you would put Christ under that as well, since he is the God-man, God who took on human flesh, God incarnate, who lived a perfect life and was indeed without sin.

So even in Romans 3 .23, there's a particular context. It's every single person but Christ. As Paul will go on from there to say, we are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

So Jesus is not included in the all who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So there's always a context. Every word has a context. In the English language, every word has a context. The word bat doesn't always mean the same thing.

Sometimes it can be an instrument that you take to a plate, hit a baseball. Sometimes it can be swatting something out of the air. Sometimes it can be an animal that decides to take a dip in our baptismal, like what happened a couple of months ago.

So bat has a context. Any word has a context. You always need to look at the context to understand the meaning of the word. And here in particular, in 2 Corinthians 5 verses 14 and 15, we are explicitly talking about the church.

The love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that he died for all, every single person who is a member of his church. There is no one for whom he has not died. Therefore, all who are in Christ Jesus have died.

Romans 6, we are dead to sin. We have been baptized with him in his death so that we would be raised to new life. Verse 15, and he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Let's go to Titus chapter 2. We'll see this further in Titus chapter 2. Titus 2, beginning in verse 11. Titus 2 verse 11. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.