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November 2 - December 5, 2018
they are fairly sure that God loves them, but they also want or need love from other people — or at least they need some-thing from other people. As a result, they are in bondage, controlled by others and feeling empty. They are controlled by whoever or whatever they believe can give them what they think they need.
It is true: what or who you need will control you.
“Fear” in the biblical sense is a much broader word. It includes being afraid of someone, but it extends to holding someone in awe, being controlled or mastered by people, worshipping other people, putting your trust in people, or needing people.
Fear of man is such a part of our human fabric that we should check for a pulse if someone denies it.
The most radical treatment for the fear of man is the fear of the Lord. God must be bigger to you than people are.
Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God). The task God sets for us is to need them less and love them more.
What was once a blessing — knowing and being known — was now a curse. What was once a loving meeting of the eyes now became impolite and intrusive.
there are two ways that we can become naked. The first is the self-imposed nakedness that is due to our sinful nature and our personal sin. The second is other-imposed nakedness that we experience because of the sin of other people.
Low self-esteem is a pop version of biblical shame or nakedness. It is secularized shame.
The self-respect the schools are seeking to bestow comes only as a person develops a growing ability to meet difficult tasks, risk failure, and overcome obstacles. You can’t simply confer self-esteem upon another person.
That’s the paradox of self-esteem: Low self-esteem usually means that I think too highly of myself. I’m too self-involved, I feel I deserve better than what I have. The reason I feel bad about myself is that I aspire to something more. I want just a few minutes of greatness. I am a peasant who wants to be king. When you are in the grips of low self-esteem, it’s painful, and it certainly doesn’t feel like pride. But I believe that this is the dark, quieter side of pride — thwarted pride.
If the gaze of man awakens fear in us, how much more so the gaze of God. If we feel exposed by people, we will feel devastated before God.
Fear of people is often a more conscious version of being afraid of God.
The ultimate problem appears to be the gaze of other people, but in reality the problem is within us and between God and ourselves.
kill me, but don’t keep me from being liked, appreciated, or respected.
We are more concerned about looking stupid (a fear of people) than we are about acting sinfully (fear of the Lord).
Paul was not a people-pleaser. He was a people-lover, and because of that he did not change his message according to what others might think. Only people-lovers are able to confront. Only people-lovers are not controlled by other people.
Fear of man is always part of a triad that includes unbelief and disobedience.
What is it that shame-fear and rejection-fear have in common? To use a biblical image, they both indicate that people are our favorite idol.
We worship them as ones who have God-like exposing gazes (shame-fear) or God-like ability to “fill” us with esteem, love, admiration, acceptance, respect, and other psychological desires (rejection-fear).
The whole strategy backfires. We never expect that using people to meet our desires leaves us enslaved to them.
Dozens of the same warnings and exhortations followed, all repeating the same theme: you are prone to fearing people who seem to be a threat to you; instead, fear God and God alone.
She must believe in the words of Christ more than she believes in anything else. She must follow the principle: For every one look at myself I must take ten looks at Jesus.
The gospel is only available to people who know they are unclean.
Only persistent meditation on the cross of Christ is sufficient to allay this fear. Then she will know that there is no person capable of thwarting God’s good purposes in her life.
It is when desires become demands that we are more concerned about our desires than the glory of God.
To do that would mean that her victimization problem is deeper than her sin problem, and the truth is that there is nothing deeper than our own sinfulness.
man? If we are chronic victims, we are shifting the locus of control from ourselves to others. We are saying that other people made us do it.
Ephesians is about unity in the church. The foothold refers to Satan’s divisive influence in the body of Christ rather than Satan possessing an individual.
The authority of feelings and the language of spirituality without the content — these are the assumptions of our culture.
The only immoral act in such a culture is to say that your version of God is superior to anyone else’s.
Anything that erodes the fear of God will intensify the fear of man.
We are morally good.
Emotions are the way to truth.
All people are spiritual.
ALL experiences of the fear of man share at least one common feature: people are big.
our goal can be self-improvement rather than the glory of the Holy God. We need more sermons that leave us trembling.
The person who fears God will fear nothing else.
We must hate the evil and ungodly assumptions of the world, we must hate our own sinful nature, and we must hate Satan. To accomplish these tasks demands the most powerful resources we have: the Word, the Spirit, and the body of Christ.
Consider the Bible God’s school in the fear of the Lord. Class begins immediately.
In the law, God set a new standard for holiness that the world had not known.
How will the people become holy? How will they love and glorify their God? In reverence they will submit to God’s authority and obey him. This is what the fear of the Lord looks like.
The goal is to establish a daily tradition of growing in the knowledge of God.
Apart from the giving of the law, 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 treatment for almost anything.
For he bore the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (53:12) This is the Old Testament zenith of the holiness of God. If your jaw doesn’t drop when you read it, then read it again. Read and be in awe.
Such awe attracts you to God; it does not repel or leave you feeling shame. It makes you want to come to him and know him. When the fear of the Lord matures in you, Christ becomes irresistible.
The triune God delights in showing us his grandeur and holiness, and we should never be satisfied with our present knowledge of him. So aspire to the fear of the Lord.
Liberation from the fear of man has three components: we must have a biblically informed knowledge of God, other people, and ourselves.
Biological needs.
Spiritual needs.
