Not Too Much Fear of God in Your Life? How to Get it Back
One can’t imagine what is going on in the life of a fallen preacher. The public exposure, the heaped-up guilt, the prosecution of a condemning conscience, great opportunities taken away, past messages scrubbed from websites, reputation gone. The pain must seem unbearable!
To have God’s love is to be deeply touched by that tragedy. To have God’s wisdom is to see some parallels in our own life needing Holy Spirit attention.
It is significant that the Bible doesn’t address God, saying “love, love, love”—or “mighty, mighty, mighty”—or “merciful, merciful, merciful” ... But it does praise him as “holy, holy, holy”. That one quality is more defining of God than all others; and as we track what Scripture says about holiness, we see it very much related to the fear of God.
Take Isaiah, for example. He had been a preacher for many years. In fact, he was the most respected preacher in the land. But then one day Isaiah had an encounter with God in the temple. This man who had not disgraced himself as others have, saw the Lord high and lifted up. And having seen the whiter white of God’s holiness, Isaiah instantly unraveled!
One glimpse at God’s holiness struck him down—and kept him down! He lay there, convicted by sin—too unworthy to stand!
It was the holiness of God that triggered the fear of God, which is as it should be. “Woe is me, he cried, for I am undone!”
Take your eyes off the fallen preachers for a moment and ask yourself: If you saw what Isaiah saw, might you be convicted, too?
J.B. Stoney, the nineteenth-century Irish writer, spoke truly when he said:
The moment you are in the presence of the Lord, you are dismantled. Self can have no place there. It is one of the most significant things we find all through the Old Testament—that the Lord, when he comes to speak to anyone, comes with such a glare of glory that they are dismantled.
The glory isn’t one of a strong illumination only; for had that been the case, the effects on Isaiah would have been mostly physical (blinded by the light), or perhaps psychological (stunned by the supernatural). Instead, we see something much deeper: the spiritual transformation that comes to those rare few who have been overwhelmed by holiness.
With considerable understanding, Andrew Murray addressed this issue:
The connection between the fear of the Lord and holiness is most intimate. There are some who seek most earnestly for holiness and yet never exhibit it in a light that will attract the world, or even believers, because this element is wanting. It is the fear of the Lord that works that meekness and gentleness, that deliverance from self-confidence and self-consciousness which form the true groundwork of a saintly character.
To see holiness in the abstract—without seeing God and without seeing yourself—is insufficient.
The only sacred sequence that works involves the circular dynamics, whereby the holiness of God revealed produces the fear of God installed, and the fear of God activated produces the holiness of God manifested.
Live life in that circle and you will experience the fear that draws near and the holiness that draws others.
Live your life outside that circle and the only thing others will draw is a false conclusion about Christianity.
It was said of John Calvin that he feared God so much he didn’t fear anything else.
Charles Spurgeon set forth this example as a principle for all of our lives when he wrote, “He who fears God has nothing else to fear.”
Life does indeed become both simpler and easier once the fear of the Lord has a rightful place in our lives.
Solomon was much esteemed for his wisdom. Employing this wisdom in the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon surveyed all the roads people take to find a life of meaning and purpose: the road of knowledge, the road of pleasure, the road of hard work, the road of improved beauty, the road of increased power—even the road of morality.
As it turned out, these were all dead-end roads! For at the end of each one Solomon said, “Vanity and vexation of spirit”—in other words, something empty and void, something desolate and disappointing, something that can only frustrate but never fulfill!
But then, exercising the consummate wisdom God had given him, Solomon concluded the book of Ecclesiastes with this very profound (what some would call) life verse: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter,” he said. “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all.”
That’s it! The most basic, bottom-line truth, succinctly and summarily stated! The commandments are simply God’s way of fencing off the territory within which you and I need to be so he can be good to us! These are the boundaries that bless!
The fire of God’s holy presence, once revealed, will make obedience easy for the believer; at which time, formal worship will become fervent, and a passive relationship will become passionate.
Offering a summary observation, G.D. Watson wrote this about the fear of God:
There is nothing more beautiful in the interior life than that sacred awe, that sweet and sacred dread which the soul feels in the presence of its Lord. When we gaze at his beautiful and blazing majesty, when our whole soul feels a gentle trembling before him, there is something in that holy dread that draws us to a deeper and more tender love.
This is the fear that draws us near God—and repels the evil that would cause us to fall.
