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October 22 - November 10, 2021
The fear of the Lord adds length to life (10:27), it is a secure fortress for the one who fears and for his or her children (14:26). It is a fountain of life (15:16), it brings honor (22:4), and it should be praised when we see it (31:30).
What does the fear of the Lord look like? It looks like loving good and hating evil. “The fear of the LORD is to hate evil” (8:13). It looks like ...
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Job is a near-perfect example of a person who feared the Lord. If you want to know whether or not you fear God, note your reaction when good things are taken from you. How do you react to financial loss, the death of a family member, the loss of love? How many of us, after experiencing such intense suffering, would be persuaded that God is bigger than our suffering? Job certainly was. After losing everything, he said, “The LORD GAVE AND THE LORD HAS TAKEN AWAY; MAY THE NAME OF THE LORD be praised” (Job 1:21). Then,
after his own body was severely afflicted, he said, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10).
God’s longest speech in the entire Bible is in the last four chapters of Job.
It is a speech intended to cause Job to grow even more in knowing God’s greatness.
If you read these chapters every day for a month you will find that they are a treat...
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This is one of the great blessings of the fear of the Lord. We think less often about ourselves. When a heart is being filled with the greatness of God, there is less room for the question, “What are people going to think of me?”
If you have ever walked among giant redwoods, you will never be overwhelmed by the size of a dogwood tree. Or if you have been through a hurricane, a spring rain is nothing to fear. If you have been in the presence of the almighty God, everything that once controlled you suddenly has less power.
Jesus, the one who rescues us from hell, is also the one who speaks the most about it. He is the “scare” preacher, the divine threatener.
Consider Matthew 10:28, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” John Calvin said that this text makes one’s hair stand on end.
WHEN you spend time in the throne room of God, it puts things in perspective. The opinions of others are less important, and even our opinions of ourselves seem less important.
Liberation from the fear of man has three components: we must have a biblically informed knowledge of God, other people, and ourselves.
We tend to see ourselves as people who need something from somebody if we are going to change.
Biological needs. Biological needs are pretty straightforward. We need food, water, and shelter; otherwise, we die.
“your heavenly Father knows that you need them” (Matt. 6:32).
Or consider the popular “I need sex.” When this is elbowed out of the category of desire and lust into the biological, the assumption is that sex is a biological need, nearly identical to food and water. The reasoning is that since it is a biological need, sexual self-control is unnatural, and the only option is to practice “safe” sex. Abstinence, therefore, is both oldfashioned and biologically untenable.
Spiritual needs. A second use of the word “need” is spiritual need. Apart from Jesus, we are desperate, needy people.
According to Scripture, Jesus meets all our needs for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3).
Psychological needs.
significance, acceptance, respect,
admiration, love, belonging, meaning, and so on. Some people collapse this long list into one: the need for love.
First, while we all agree that love is a universal human desire, how do we justify elevating desire to God-given need?
According to the
popular thinking, these needs must be met so that we can reach our potential and have happiness, psychological stability, and self-esteem.
We know that we are created to live in relationship with other people, and in these relationships we are to love, encourage, and comfort each other, but is the purpose of these relationships to bolster our self-esteem?
At first glance the Scripture can support the idea that we have a need to show love to others, but it is more difficult to find Scripture that says we have a God-given need to receive love so that we can feel better about ourselves. Where does the Bible talk about these needs?
The popular idea is that the physical body has physical needs, the soul has psychological needs, and the spirit has spiritual needs. Accordingly, the person with physical needs goes to a physician, the person with psychological needs goes to a psychologist or counselor, and the person with spiritual needs goes to a pastor.
The tripartite view of the person exists because there are different shades of meaning for spirit and soul. Like most words, these two have fuzzy boundaries.
Matthew 10:28 suggests that the person is two substances, material body and immaterial soul: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body [material substance] but cannot kill the soul [immaterial substance].” First Corinthians
7:34 also suggests that we are two substances — material and immaterial — but they are referred to as body and spirit rather than body and soul. James 2:26 is consistent with this duality and refers to it using “body” and “spirit”: “the body without the spirit is dead.”
It is more likely that the passage suggests that God’s Word penetrates the indivisible aspect of the person. It goes to the very depths of the person’s being. It goes within the substance of the person, not between, as if it were slicing us up into neat pieces.
Mark 12:30 indicates that we are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind
The accumulation of terms is used to express completeness.
loving God is a response of the e...
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Neither term suggests that we were created with a distinct category called psychological needs.
Instead, they are overlapping words that refer to the inner person, the immaterial aspect of humanness, or the person who lives before the Holy God.
what is similar is that both God and man have a deep longing for relationship (or love).
How will I deal with my longings? then becomes the fundamental question of human existence. According to the theory, we answer this question in one of two ways. We either act independently of God and look to fill ourselves with
other objects or people, or we look to Christ and find relationship needs met in him
when we realize that he didn’t need to love us.
When psychological needs, rather than sin, are seen as our primary problem, not only is our self-understanding affected, but the gospel itself is changed.
A needs theory suggests that the gospel is, most deeply, intended to meet psychological needs. In other words, the gospel is aimed at our self-esteem problem.
This sounds good to us, but it is not the gospel. The good news of Jesus is not intended to make us feel good about ourselves. Instead, the good news humbles us.
Jesus did not die to increase our self-esteem. Rather, Jesus died to bring glory to the Father by redeeming people from the curse of sin.
Instead of looking for this concept at the time of creation, when we were created in the image of God, perhaps we should look at the time after Adam’s sin. After the fall into sin, people remained imagebearers, but Adam’s disobedience brought fundamental changes to our ability to reflect God’s image. The direction of the human
heart became oriented not toward God but toward self.
loved. It would be inhuman not to delight in love. It would also be inhuman if we didn’t hurt deeply when rejected or sinned against by others. The problem is not that we desire love, the problem is how much we desire it or for what purpose we desire it. Do we desire it so much that it overshadows our desire to be imitators of God? Do we desire it for our own pleasure or for God’s glory?
Longings have much in common with lust. They start out good (a desire to be loved) and end up enslaving us.
This explains why Christ is sometimes not enough for us. If I stand before him as a cup waiting to be filled with psychological satisfaction, I will never feel quite full. Why? First, because my lusts are boundless; by their very nature, they can’t be filled. Second, because Jesus does not intend to satisfy my selfish desires.
