My Life, and the Fear of God

Well, thank you very much. It's very exciting to be here today. I'll give a quick little warning, though.

I'm on call at the hospital. And so I told Weston, I told Brother Weston, I messaged him this morning and I said, I said, just be ready to have a sermon in your back pocket, you know, in case I get called in. And with his situation, with his family, we were worried we wouldn't go together.

So you can pray for both of us that we can make through this and everything. So when Brother Mark asked me to speak as he wanted to get off early to spend some time with his family as they drive down to their other family in Florida, you know, I pondered what God had on my, what would he put on my heart for this message. And the theme that kept over and over appearing to me as I pondered this was this theme, my life and the fear of God.

And just the theme of the fear of God, and I was very blessed as Brother Jerry, where was Brother Jerry here? Yeah, your message when the part that you emphasize during your devotion on the aspects of the fear of God and what that does was a very confirmation to the Word of God that he wants us to hear about this this morning. I was also thinking of, wow, what a passage in our Sunday school class, the Acts 4 passage where we see God, you know, coming down and speaking to the congregation and shaking them like it was in Pentecost. And so with those confirmations, with those things, let's look to the scriptures and see what God has to tell us about the fear of God.

You know, I'm at a phase in my life where I am doing a lot of pondering, you know, I'm 58 now, so I start to think back to the past and I start to think to the future. You know, you're at a spot where you start to take inventory of things. And as I ponder some of the things that I've seen, God has given me wonderful experiences, spiritual experiences in my life.

I've been able to be with very godly men and in some very genuine experience, spiritual experiences. But on the other hand, I've also seen some very bad things. And those things can trip you up as you get older.

I have been around some, I've seen people that were very dear to me when I was a young man and zealous for the Lord and seeing people apostatized from the faith. I know people who were just right as committed as anyone in this room who have now completely apostatized from Jesus Christ. I've seen people, just many of my friends and people in my life, just give up the fight.

You know, just stop fighting. I have seen and experienced some things in revivals or outpourings of God in the church and even through people, and this is the hard part, I've seen it through people that now when I hear things in their life and some of the experiences that surrounded that, some of it is bad, very bad. And as I ponder through that, as I ponder through the apostasies, the giving up the fight, the different things, I say, okay God, what is it though, through that smoke, through all those things that have I experienced, I praise God that there are some things that last.

You know, the Bible tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. In other words, what that means is faith, instead of just being some theological ideology, it's something that you can hold on to, that you can see, like this clicker. It's the substance, the evidence.

It's not just an ideology or a theology or something, you know. It's the substance. And so, all that shakes in the smoke and Dean finds himself dizzy and wondering through life and as I ponder those things, I say, I thank the Lord that although there has been many apostasies and many hypocrisies and many, my friends that have given up the faith and things that have offended my family and myself and all my friends and all whatever churches, the fact is I also have seen genuine.

I've seen the real and I've experienced it and it's like substance. And I think if there's anything that the passage then that kind of came to me as I had pondered that, as my life in light of the fear of God, it's this passage. It's a beautiful passage.

Hold on to this passage with everything you have through the years. It's this, in Hebrews chapter 12, 28-29, and this is going to be the guiding passage for this sermon. And it is this.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire. Wow.

The fear of God. Let me read that again. What a passage.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, so all the things that can happen to your life, all the things that can discourage you, all the things that can confuse you, offend you and everything, but we're receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Amen? And so let us have grace through all that shaking by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.

Wow. I think I'm by nature kind of a silly guy. I'm a foolish man.

I'm a foolish guy. I was, you know, the clown in school and all that kind of a thing. And so the fear of God and being serious and that kind of thing doesn't come natural to me.

I tend towards foolishness very easily. And this sermon kind of like wakes me up. As I ponder and I think through those things, I think, okay.

In retrospect, as I look through my past and I look future, I say, okay, God, let me have that that cannot be shaken and so that I can serve you with reverence and godly fear. For you are a God that is a consuming fire. One of the things that kind of confirmed this message is a few weeks ago, a month ago maybe, a friend of mine sent me a video.

It was all those little video clips and it shook me. You know, you get those little, I don't know, your friends send you all these little video clips and a lot of them, if they're not cats or something, you know, but this one was good. It was a preacher.

And the preacher was visiting. It was John Veneer and he was visiting, John Brevere, excuse me, and he was visiting a preacher who got put in prison. He didn't give the name.

I had my guesses but probably better not to guess. He didn't give the name. So he's visiting this guy who was a famous preacher and he had done all these different things and preached all these different places and he was ministering.

John Brevere is famous for writing a book about being offended in church. Excellent book. Excellent for a church to go through it as a Bible study.

It's called the, oh, I forgot right now. Anyway, he's visiting this preacher in jail. The Bait of Satan is the name of the book.

He's visiting this preacher in jail who's now gone through all this and he's in prison and everything and he's listening to a story and he's crying out his heart and he's crying and telling about all the things that happened and he said, okay, I just have one question. When all that bad stuff happened, and he's admitting it now, he's confessing it, when did you fall out of love with Jesus? That's what he says in this little message clip. When in your life as a preacher, because I was there and I saw people responding to you when you preached.

I mean, people responded. They got right with God. They did things in response to your preaching.

When did you fall out of love with God? And he said, John, I have to be honest with you. You need to understand, I never fell out of love with God. I loved Jesus with everything in me.

But you know what happened? I did not have the fear of God. I lost the fear of God. I had the love of God.

I loved Him and I wanted to talk about Him and sing about Him, but I did not have the fear of God. And in that started a cascade of things in my life that ended up in destruction. And that's what happened to me.

Boy, when I heard that, I thought, wow, that's really significant. That's really significant. You know, it's easy for us to get so distracted with so many different things in Christianity.

Easy for me, at least. And I have noticed, I don't know, some of you older brothers and sisters that are here, I have noticed in my preaching and my thinking and my life, just if I go from now to 20 years ago, if you don't mind me, I'm 58 now, I can do that, all right? The preaching has become much more academic. Much more, I don't know, sanitized.

You know, much more friendly than it used to be. It used to be, and I admit that there was a lot of pride in many things that I said at the beginning ended up just being hypocrisy. You know what I mean? And me too.

But there was something that addressed God and came to God in a way that I feel in many ways I want to get back in my life. This academic sort of thing is good, but there's a pendulum somewhere that I'm trying to find the balance in my life. Now, one of the biggest things we do when we look at something that could be emotional or thinking of fear is talking about fakes and hypocrisies.

And I can guarantee that, at least for people that I know and in my own life, one of the things that makes us give up the most in church life is hypocrisy in people. And seeing people, leaders, or people that have let you down and different things, is when you see that, it kills you personally and it can kill the church. When I was doing the study for this sermon, I was really shaken by this passage in 2 Kings.

To give you a quick context, this is towards the end after David, and we're going into the different kings and the northern kings and all that. And now the northern kings are about to be given into captivity. And this is interesting as we talk about the fear of God, because you can fake this stuff.

You sure can. And listen to what it says here in 2 Kings 17. It says, talking about them, it says, However, every nation continued to make gods of its own and put them in shrines on the high places with the Samaritans and made every nation in the cities where they dwelt.

So they feared the Lord. And I looked this up in the Hebrew. There wasn't any getting around this.

It was Yahweh. And from every class they appointed for themselves priests of the high places who sacrificed for them in the shrines of the high places. They feared the Lord, yet served their own gods according to the rituals of the nations from among whom they were carried away.

I looked at this different version. Some different versions said they feared the Lord superficially. They feared the Lord in their mind, but yet it didn't go all the way through to actually changing their life.

They still sacrificed to idols. I think of some things back of that revival period of the more exciting. There was a lot of the talk of the fear of God and some of it was just filled with this type of thing.

Some of it was filled with this thing. And you know what? It's interesting that when people, even when they apostatize, they still give up on, they still have like a superstition kind of faith. I remember my parents once went to China.

I've never been to China. Anybody ever been to China? They went to China and it wasn't on a spiritual tour or anything. They had a tour guide.

And the tour guide very plainly stated that she was an atheist. She said, oh yeah, we're atheists. We were raised atheists and everything.

But yet every time they would go into one of these historical spots, she would get a candle, she would do something, she would mark something and do something sacrificial, touch a belly of some God or whatever in this temple. So my dad, he asked, he said, I'm just curious. So you're an atheist.

You don't believe in God. Why are you doing all the rituals and everything? And she said, I don't know. It's our culture.

It's our, you know, for good luck, for prosperity and everything. And so it's interesting. You'll see this.

When people become atheists, agnostic, lose the faith, whatever, they'll get superstitious. It's a religion of our own. Paul, the Apostle Paul, says in 1 Corinthians 10, 20, talking about the pagans, the Gentiles, it says rather the things that the Gentiles sacrificed, they sacrificed to demons and not to gods.

And I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. This is the kind of thing that's going on with all this temple thing. Here in the northern tribes, they had this fear of Yahweh, but yet they still had these false gods that they were serving.

And this was a huge problem. The prophets cried out against this. Right after that, it goes on to say, just to repeat itself, it says, but the Lord your God you shall fear, and he will deliver you from the hands of your enemies.

That's what the prophets were crying to him. However, they did not obey. However, they did not obey, but they followed their former rituals.

So these nations feared the Lord, yet served their carved images. Also, their children and their children's children have continued doing as their fathers did even to this day. Isn't that weird? It's strange.

So there's superficial fear. There's different kinds of fear. There's servile fear.

We know about the Bible. The Bible says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but it also says that perfect love casts out fear. There's wrong kinds of fear.

There's hypocritical fear. So what is it about God that he's talking over and over in the Scriptures? As I did my study for this sermon, the Bible is filled with this Old Testament and New Testament. If I could bring it to one thing that I hear repeated in revivals, repeated over and over again in some passages that I'm going to give you, it's the manifest presence of God.

He's there in a way that's real, that's evidence, that's present. Not just theologically, not just ideologically, not just ritually, but there. And when this happens, you don't forget it.

And I want you to experience that kind of thing, because when life gives you then shakes, it can't be shaken. That presence. So let's look at an example here of some things that happen in the Scriptures.

One of the most bizarre things that happen is right in Leviticus, right after God pours out all these instructions on how people are supposed to live, how the temple is to be laid out and all the sacrifices and all this and everything, right after that we have a bizarre scene. So the command is given, the holiness of God, they've seen the holiness of God, and then we get these two, Nadab and Abihu, who heard the instructions on how you are to worship God, and they just kind of did it on their own, they wanted to worship, they feared the Lord, yet they did not obey God, and so they just took this sacrifice and went out and brought against the way God had told them, and it was just BAM, they were consumed. And it's like just right when you start reading it in context, there in Leviticus chapter 10, he starts reading it, and ZAP, they received this judgment of God.

And so you kind of see them stunned, and then Moses intercedes and asks the question, and I'm just, this passage just makes me shake. It says, and Moses said to Aaron, so Aaron's standing there, you know, he says, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, Aaron apparently asking what went on, and get what he says, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, by those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy, and before all the people, I must be glorified. So Aaron held his peace.

I don't blame him. God will not give his glory to another. If there's anything that I have seen in my life is when God gives me a hard spanking is pride.

And you want to lift up, and he will cast you down. He will not give his glory to another. When a movement or a people or a, or whatever it is in our life, when we begin to think that we're something that we're not, if God loves you, he will smite you.

And in that sense, I have seen, if there's something that God purifies, and we can accept that, then I think it's okay to receive that from God. It's okay. And God can bless a church, bless a people, and help us through that, and help us through that.

You know, Satan will gladly trade, will gladly trade your sanctification, and will trade it for sanctimoniousness. He'll trade your righteousness, genuine righteousness, Christ's righteousness, rather, for ritual. He will trade you whatever, the real power of God for pride.

And in this game, you must be careful, and it's things that can get us as we get older. As we get older, we get more sure about ourselves, or whatever those things, and God can, God, if he loves you, will chasten you. But as I've pondered now, and gone through these different things, and different expressions of hypocrisy, I think, wow, but still through it all, God wants to be worshipped in a very serious and powerful way.

So how did Jesus give us this? So in Luke chapter 12, Jesus is giving a sermon where he, this is the passage where he talks about beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. So the Pharisees, of course, as everybody knows, were these big hypocrites. They're going around acting holy with their faces, and their rules, and their laws.

And he talks about how they were making all these extra laws. And this is the context there in Luke chapter 12. But then Jesus says this.

This is what's interesting. This is Jesus' response to religious hypocrisy. Ready for this? So the context is religious hypocrisy.

This is Jesus' response about that. And he says in Luke chapter 12, and I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body. And after that, have no more that they can do.

But I will show you whom you should fear. Fear him who after he has killed has power to cast into hell. Yes, I say to you, fear him.

This passage is amazing. So right after the context of the hypocrisy, he reminds us, fear God. It's the New Testament.

It's Jesus Christ. He's speaking to us. And this is it.

So as I think of, again, the ease it is to lose it because of our past or to lose it because of the different things that's happened to you or whatever, remember, don't get your eyes on them. Get your eyes on God. He's the one.

He's the one. Therefore, remember our passages. Since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.

In our passage for the sermon, do you remember that it's by grace that we receive this? And it really is that way. When it's stirred up fear, when it's pharisaical fear, when it's sanctimonious fear, when it's servile fear, whatever, it's not the right kind of fear. But by grace we shall serve God in righteousness and fear.

Let me give you an example. I use it a lot in sermons, but I think it's very important. It's one of my favorite scenes in the Bible.

It's in Isaiah chapter 6. If you have your Bibles handy, just turn to there. Why I think this passage is important, let me ask you, when you pray, what do you imagine? What is your Christian mental imagination, if you would, of what's in your mind when you pray? For me, this guides me. I don't like to come up with different false gods or some image of Jesus Christ that's really some actor somewhere or some icon that could be some pagan god or something.

No, this is the image of what we have. So I try to use these images that were given in the Scripture to be what comes to my mind as I pray. And this one's important because Isaiah is coming and he's having a hard life.

Isaiah from here lived a harder life. And he's coming before God and he gets an image of God. And he says, and here it says, as he looks at him, and above he's looking at God and he sees how his robe filled the temple and all that.

And he says, and above it stood seraphim, each one had six wings, and two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. So these angels don't have sin in their life. They're not sinners.

They're not ashamed because they sin. But the Scriptures are revealed to us that God is so holy and so righteous that even the heavens are unclean to Him. And so these angels there who are pure, they're not having sin, in the holiness of God are covering their face and covering their feet and flying and crying out these attributes and saying these attributes of God.

They're wonderful. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.

You know, that's the only attribute of God that's mentioned three times. You don't hear the angels saying, love, love, love, or judgment, judgment, judgment, or justice, justice, justice. Those are all true attributes of God.

But holy, holy, holy is the only attribute we get repeated by the angels like this. And here's that. Imagine this.

And the post of the door was shaken by the voice of Him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. Can you even imagine? I mean, have you ever been to these big places where these temples are? I don't know what it's going to be like in heaven. But have you ever seen a building shake? As close as I've ever been.

Have you ever been in a song fest and the singing is so lusty and zealous and singing out to the Lord that the hymnal literally vibrates? Anybody ever experience that? It's intoxicating. We need more of that again. I've been there.

You feel it in your hands. You're singing and the hymnal is vibrating. As close as I've ever got.

Here, the pillars in heaven are shaking from the cry of the angels, Holy. That's the image that we get when we go to prayer. I'll tell you, years ago, when I first actually, this is around 2001, when we first moved to Pennsylvania, I was going through a very hard time, again.

And I was really just pondering the righteousness of Christ in our sanctification. How it is Christ that sanctifies us and not ourselves. And I was really struggling with works righteousness and some of these themes.

And I was going through a devotional. I think it was by Andrew Murray. I think it was.

And it was particularly about the sacrifice that Jesus Christ is our sacrifice before heaven. And I was in devotion. And I don't... Nothing ever happened like this.

And I'm not a guy that has all these things happening to me all the time. But in that moment, I got somewhere in prayer that I've never been before. I don't know if I've ever been since.

It was like a presence, a manifest presence of God focusing on the righteousness of Christ and His sacrifice for my sanctification, not just my salvation, but for my sanctification. I remember literally saying the words, at least in my mind, I've never been here before. Now, I kind of wrecked it.

Because then I remember thinking, I wanted to bask in it, but then I started being nervous I'm going to be late for work or something. And I just sort of sobered up and said, okay, it's time to go to work now. So I got up and went to work.

Nothing big. But I don't know, as I pondered that moment, it's real. And one of the things I want to bring to you today is do you have these times with God that are real? They're little.

They're just you. They're personal. They're ramahs, as sometimes we use the term.

That God gives personally to you and it becomes not just ideological, it becomes not just theological, it becomes something where you are approaching. And I tell you, when things get bad or you find yourself in a mess or your ministers have let you down or whatever, those things can't be shaken. And don't let anyone shake them.

They're powerful. So, let's go. Oh, and then he says, woe is me for I am done.

Because I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in a people of unclean lips. My eyes have seen the King, the Lord of the host. Isaiah 11 goes on to say about something about this fear of God actually in the attribute of Jesus.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, and the delight, his delight is in the fear of the Lord. That the fear of the Lord is actually part of the constitutional attribute of Jesus Christ and the Father's delight is in this fear of the Lord in Jesus. And here's the secret that comes out.

And I'll give you something that's very precious. I love this passage. Don't you just love having a little secret? You know, if you know someone and they say, hey, I'll tell you a secret.

Or you're involved with something, a trade or whatever, and if somebody gives you a little secret, it's precious to you, right? Look at this one. The secret of the Lord is with those who fear him, and he will show them his covenant. Wow.

So in this worship, in this praise of God, in this place, he gives us, if you would, secrets of his covenant. That's a precious place. That's the place we want to be.

All right, just real quick as we look and I go towards the ending here. In the Acts 2 passage, when salvation is given and presented to the people of God, you see something that happens to them that, again, I've seen in my lifetime a pendulum. In the past, we were, I don't know, maybe rebaptizing everybody who did not have this super-duper crisis conversion type of thing.

Nowadays, I see the pendulum swinging over here and it's almost like into this kind of old order sort of salvation. I don't know. What I see in the testimony of what we see in the book of Acts is this good place in the middle that I would try to stay in, and it's powerful.

When he began to preach and he preached Jesus Christ to them, he goes on to say, And Peter said, Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. And they were cut to the heart. Then they said to Peter and brethren, what shall we do? It was interesting that in the preaching, this is the preaching of salvation to them, they were convicted.

They feared God inside them. And then they cried out, what shall we do? And then they were called on to repent. And then they were baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

And they began their life of faith. And it goes on to say, And with many other words testified and exhorted them, saying, Be saved from this perverse generation. Then those who gladly received the word were baptized, and that day about 3,000 souls were added to them.

And this continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in prayers. And then the fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. Is this a servile fear? No.

Is it some sort of guilty fear? Absolutely not. It's a manifest presence of God that gave them a carefulness to be with the Lord. Paul goes on to say, Therefore, having these promises, those promises that come out from the world and be unto Him, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, the inside and the outside, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

And then in Acts 9, I love this one. It combines this comfort and fear. Then the churches throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and were edified.

And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied. Isn't that beautiful? Walking in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. That's the place that we want to be.

All right, I'm just going to end with one little story, and then I'll be done. Probably the most, what's the most famous hymn in the world? Amazing Grace. And the story of John Newton who wrote Amazing Grace is amazing.

So you know John Newton was raised in a religious home, but he ended up being a slave trader and was a really nasty guy. And as he was a slave trader, he lived for years, grew up with his father's merchant marines type of thing, and then took over that, took over a ship. And then one day while he was out at sea, and he was called the great blasphemer.

Apparently he would cuss and curse and all these types of things. But one day they were going through a hurricane and they got thrown off course and they were lost for days. I think 10 days if I recall.

Lost in there. Eventually at one point he had himself tied to the helm so that he could continue to steer the ship and make it through this. And he cried out to God, but he only heard these scriptures of the judgment of the accuser of the brother and accusing him who gave him this passage.

This is what he actually wrote in this journal that he heard. In Proverbs it says, Because I have called you and you refused, I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded. Because you disdained all my counsel and would have none of my rebuke, I will laugh at your calamity.

I will mock when your terror comes. When your terror comes like a storm and your destruction comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. And this is all that he was hearing.

But in this moment, in all the days of the storm, he then found a scripture and he found in where Luke said, You being evil, know how to give good gifts to men. Will the Holy Father, I had the verse coming up. Will the Holy Father not also give to anyone who asks? And in that he writes this idea that becomes the song.

T'was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fear relieved. That passage is powerful. Do you have that experience in your life, both at the beginning of your Christian life and continually in your Christian life, that God gives us a holy fear? It's by grace, remember, that he taught my heart to fear and grace my fear to relieve.

And here's a Luke passage. So, as I come and I ponder this, my journey, experiences that I've had, and where I want to spend the rest of my life serving him, let's anchor in on this passage. And if you're here today, if you're here today and you're struggling, if you're here today and you find yourself more like maybe John Newton, the great blasphemer, or if you're here today and you're just discouraged, I encourage you to let grace do these things in your life and stand in this place.

Hebrews chapter 12, 28 through 29. Therefore, since we are receiving, not just receive, but receiving, hallelujah, a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire, and he's a Father.

And you can have the fear of God and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. I pray for that for all of us as we walk through our journeys of faith. Let's pray.

Then I'll hand it back over to Wes, and let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you, Lord, for your mercy in my life and your perseverance with me, your mercy. And dear God, I pray over Crosspoint Church today, and I do pray, oh Lord, that your very presence would be with us as we go, as in our homes, in our church, as a community.

And dear God, I pray that in each and every one of us, that we would not walk in this hypocrisy as the northern tribes did, but we would have a genuine faith that's real, Lord. Not in pride, not in pompous, sanctimonious life, Lord, but I pray, God, make this be real in our life and be true to us that we can hold on when all the shaking comes and have a faith and a kingdom that cannot be shaken. We thank you, Lord, and we praise you.

It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.