This morning I want to share with you a key to having a good life. It's also a key to having a dynamic, very real relationship with God. That key is having a fear of the Lord! Life is best and we have the best relationship with God when we fear the Lord.

Last week we talked about fear and addressed the issue of how life is spoiled when we live with fear and worry. We also said that it reflects badly on God and shows that we don't trust Him if we live in fear. Today is the second part of our two-part series on fear. We’ll see that fear can be good — especially a fear of the Lord.

I have some concern about preaching this message. Part of my job as a pastor is to try to understand the people God has called me to pastor. One of the things I've come to know about a significant number of you is that you come to Mayfair-Plymouth church wounded by being raised with a belief that God is out to get you and that you have to live in fear of Him. I understand your discomfort, but trust me: you're actually going to experience more healing by the end of the message!

HOW TO VIEW GOD
When I wrote the final draft of this message I was sitting on my patio, typing on my laptop. The view was gorgeous. I heard a cricket chirping, and a rooster in the coop was crowing. The rising sun was backlighting the trees with a green glow, and a breeze blew the tops of the trees at the end of our property. It was a wondrous creation, and it made me think about how awesome God is. That's exactly the reflection of the psalmist when he composed Psalm 147.

“Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him!” (Psalm 147:1) Then the psalmist listed all the ways that God inspires. He stated that God heals people, He created and named all the stars, He has mighty power, His understanding has no limit, He creates the weather, and He makes things grow. Then the psalmist wrote that it isn’t what we do that delights God most of all. He’s most delighted when we’re in awe of Him: awe that could be described as fear but which is under-girded by confidence in His unconditional love. The psalmist concluded the first part of his psalm, which was a description of God, by stating, “The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.” (Psalm 147:11)

Did you notice that the psalmist talked about fearing God and enjoying a confidence in His unconditional love all in one breath? The psalmist had experienced fear of the Lord and the love of the Lord. It’s recorded here because we’re also meant to experience both of those things.

This fear of the Lord isn’t the same kind of fear we have for someone or something that may hurt us. It’s reverential awe, deep respect, taking seriously the holiness of God — realizing that we in and of ourselves are not holy and that God insists on what’s right, but we aren’t always right. This is something of what's involved in having a fear of the Lord.

GOD'S PLAN IS FOR US TO FEAR HIM
God must think that the concept of fearing Him is important because He repeated Himself on the subject. I did a word search for the words “fear God,” and I found 130 references in the Bible. The specific phrase “fear the Lord” appears 27 times and the phrase “fear of the Lord” appears 22 times.

Let's look at one example: “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,” (Deuteronomy 10:12). The first thing God mentions here is fearing the Lord.

Part of God's plan for a relationship with us is that we have a proper fear of Him. Why is that? How does this work to please God and for our good?

BEYOND A “BUDDY” GOD
Any healthy relationship has a place for fear: for instance, the fear of displeasing a person we love. This is also true in marriage.

Before people get married, or when they first fall in love, it's not difficult to imagine the relationship being all sweetness and positive experiences. The couple picture themselves taking walks together, laughing, and listening and talking to each other at a deep level. Each person pictures his needs being met in wonderful ways by his mate. This romanticized, idealized view of marriage isn’t really all there is to it!

You haven't experienced marriage until you've experienced the anger of the other person and feared the other person's response. A couple of years ago we got new carpet in our living room and hallways. Then we invited a group of people from the church to come over. What happened next is all Jim and Andie Shackle's fault! They brought meatballs — the kind that have a high dosage of red sauce that stains carpeting.

I was walking along the hallway on my way to the kitchen with nothing but some leftover sauce on my plate, and the plate flipped out of my hand. Guess which way it landed — right side up or wrong side down. You guessed it! The odds are 100% that a plate with food will land upside-down. Have you ever seen it happen the other way?

There it was: a bright red glob on the carpet. My first thought was, “Diann's going to kill me! There’s going to be another bright red stain on the carpet: my blood!” Did I fear her? I’m stronger and taller than she is. Did any of this matter? No! I was afraid of her! (Come on, men, admit it! You've all said it when you did something stupid: you mumbled, “She's going to kill me!”)

Folks, you haven't experienced the complexities of a full-fledged marriage — the mysteries of this wondrous union — until you've been in fear of your mate. This is marriage at its glorious fullness!

Similarly, we don't have a deepening, maturing relationship with the Lord unless there’s a place in it for the fear of the Lord. This means having a sense of awe over how great and holy He is and knowing that He can’t be part of anything that’s not holy, pure, and perfect.

If all we focus on in a relationship with the Lord is His love, we don't have a fully-dimensional relationship with Him. God is supposed to be more than our buddy! He's not just some sidekick who wants to play the lead role in our lives.

We live in a time when people talk a great deal about being spiritual. They believe in a higher power and desire to be “one” in perfect harmony with this supreme being. Rarely does such a view of God prompt a person to feel challenged by Him. God becomes a creation of one's imagination and almost always ends up reinforcing the way we want to be and accepting what we want to do. What a cozy arrangement — and what a total fabrication of an overactive imagination!

Let me illustrate this. I like to target practice with my 22-caliber rifle. I take a piece of cardboard that I'm going to use as a target, prop it up, take a bunch of steps backward, aim, and fire. Then I look at the piece of cardboard, see where the shot hit, take out a magic marker, and draw ever-increasing circles around the hole. It’s a bull’s-eye! However, it's not fair to fire first and then draw the target around the spot your bullet hit!

This is the way some people view God. They determine what they’re like and what they like to do, even if it includes some questionable material. Then they create an image of God who — surprise! — is pretty much like they are! It’s comfy and comforting, and it gives them the license to be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do in the first place, but it's not reality! God is real, and it’s definite what He’s like — and that’s often far from the way we are!

Of course, God isn’t only holy and perfect; He’s also completely loving! Remember that amazing last verse of this morning’s text? “The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.” Note the last part of that statement: “Who put their hope in his unfailing love.”

God has unfailing love for us. When we fail Him He never fails to keep loving us!

The prophet Jeremiah passed on to us what God has to say about a relationship with us: “I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.” (Jeremiah 32:40) If we never fear what another person might think, say, or do, we don’t really care about that person! Any healthy relationship has a healthy aspect of fear. Our relationship with God should be like that, too! People who have a proper fear of the Lord can experience His love. A psalmist declared, “Let those who fear the Lord say: 'His love endures forever.’” (Psalm 118:4) God can be close to such a person: “The Lord confides in those who fear him; . . .” (Psalm 25:14)

A fear of the Lord, which includes the awareness that we can displease Him, is part of what makes a relationship with Him dynamic and real. A healthy fear of the Lord also helps us to live better!

A BETTER LIFE
Which child will grow up to be a properly functioning, productive adult? A child who’s never disciplined and who treats his parents like one of his friends? Or a child who’s disciplined and has a fear of displeasing his parents? It's almost a rhetorical question. Our relationship with the Heavenly Father is no different. A healthy fear of His anger, displeasure, and discipline can help us to be healthy, productive people, living well.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Psalm 111:10) God's ways are the best. When we’re willing to fear that we aren’t living His way, we're taking the first step to acting wisely. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!

The best motivation for pleasing the Lord and living His way is sheer love for Him. However, sometimes that doesn't work. I have an inclination to be a law-abiding citizen, even with traffic laws. Sometimes I’d like to drive faster than the law allows or disobey a traffic law because it's convenient, but most of the time I don't — for fear I'll be caught by the police and have to pay a fine.

Children sometimes do the right thing because they’re good kids, but sometimes they do the right thing out of fear that they might get caught! It's good to remember that we have a relationship with a God who’s sinless and who will go to great lengths to move us toward being more like Him.

God has ways of keeping us more in His will. It's all right to fear the actions He may have to take to bring us back to Him, in line with His will! There's a verse in the Old Testament where God's people are told, “You may be sure that your sin will find you out.” (Numbers 32:23) God keeps people who have a relationship with Him on a rather short leash. We should always watch for the prompting of the Holy Spirit with a stab of guilt or of remorse. We should be aware that something someone says or someone else’s failure can prompt us to change our own direction before disaster overtakes us.

Several years ago, one of our elderly members was found dead in her chair. They hadn’t moved her yet when I arrived. There she sat, and in her lap was the past Sunday's bulletin: she had been reading it when she died. If you or I were to die suddenly, what would someone find us reading or viewing on the Internet or find in our DVD player playing in a continuous loop? If Christ had returned at any one of the 10,080 minutes of this last week, during which minute would you definitely not have wanted Him to return? What thought, subject you were viewing, or act you were in the middle of would you have not wanted Him to interrupt?

That may sound harsh, but sometimes we need harshness! Besides, though He didn't come visibly, as He will at His second coming, Christ was there with us all the time! That’s why I depend on His unfailing love to forgive me and for Him to still love me!

We have a God who loves us so deeply that He came as one of us to die for us, so that we might live forever as His — in spite of our falling far short of His glory and His glorious ideal for us. Because we have such a personal, everlasting relationship with Him, we should fear disappointing Him! Let's reaffirm that amazing statement by the psalmist: “The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.”