Life Coaching: Why We Should Fear The Lord

“You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear Him, and keep His commandments and obey His voice; you shall serve Him and hold fast to Him.” Deuteronomy 13:4

I read this verse this morning in honor of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles). I figured I’d read an Old Testament verse from the Torah, since I was thinking about this Hebrew feast. For those of us who may be uninitiated in the feast days (I am one of the uninitiated, by the way), the Feast of Tabernacles is a harvest feast, and it’s a pilgrimage feast. Since I couldn’t actually go to Jerusalem, I settled for attempting to learn a little bit more about this feast week, and do the best I could to think about what it might mean to me in the upcoming year. The Israelites were actually commanded to go live in a tent for a week. I am not a good camper, so I just tried to focus on what can an American citizen do to honor God during the Feast of Tabernacles. I’m still not sure I know the answer to this, but I do know one thing: Once I got quiet and tried to listen, I believe God was trying to tell me something…and the something was this verse…

I don’t think we fear God enough. I think we’ve Americanized the Lord, homogenized Him into a neat little package we get out on Sunday like a holy Jack-in-the-box. Then, we gently place Him back in that neat little box and don’t think about Him much until the next occasion we have to attend church. This bothers me. The love of God is immeasurable. There is no end nor is there a beginning of His love for us. But, in our zeal for His love, do we fear Him? We have only one legitimate object of fear—God. We shouldn’t fear death, pain, sickness, snakes, spiders, heights, or anything else this world throws at us. Yet, we do fear these things, and don’t fear the Lord. Why is that? I think there are two main reasons (probably more, but for the sake of brevity, here are just two): 1) It’s easier to focus on love, grace and mercy, than it is fear. It’s easier for us humans to see God as a one-dimensional being who waits with open arms like some type of cosmic earth mother, rather than see Him as a loving Father who sometimes disciplines us. And we humans surely resist discipline like my dog, Trixie, resists the leash…We don’t like it. We don’t like it because we have to admit we are in the wrong, and we have to repent. And repentance isn’t fun. It’s changing our direction, changing our hearts, changing our minds. No one wants to do that because there’s pain involved in the process. Please don’t get me wrong—God is the ultimate lover of our souls! He loves us more than we could ever possibly imagine. He moved heaven and earth to make a way for us to be with Him forever. But, this same God also has the power to separate us from Him forever. THAT’S what we should fear…being away from His presence, spending our eternity without Him. That’s why quick repentance is absolutely necessary when we sin. Had enough? Well, wait…there’s one more, and I think you’ll like this one: 2) The devil makes sure to keep things in front of us that scare or make us fearful. Why? Because he knows these things have absolutely zero eternal consequences. Death is only death of the physical body. The soul lives on. Pain only lasts as long as the body lasts. One day the soul will be free. Sickness is the same way. Snakes—well, those things have to die sometime…And my theory for the snake thing is that Satan has tried to make us fearful of them because of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. When the serpent tempted Eve, he became an object of fear for mankind, when mankind should have been fearful of the One who put them out of the Garden! This is no different from what he’s always done—trying to usurp God’s authority and set himself up as an object of worship. I’ll have to admit, he did a pretty good job on that snake thing with me because i’m terrified of them. I run over them with my car when I can because I figure that’s one less snake to crawl in my back door when I’m not looking…

The point to this blog today is to simply ask this question: Do you fear the Lord? I know we have a tendency to view God as we view our earthly fathers, and sometimes that’s not a real good thing. Some of us had fathers that simply weren’t at all Christ-like, and they hurt us in unimaginable ways. So, rather than viewing God like an earthly father, view Him as perfect. What would our fathers have been like if they had been perfect? Their love would never run out. Their patience would always be there. Their mercy would always endure any hardship, and their grace would be abundant when we mess up (as we all do). A perfect father would warn us of calamity. He would give us a list of good, solid instructions on how to conduct ourselves to keep us from harm. He would set in place a set of consequences for willful disobedience. Why? Not because He likes to punish us, but because He knows what will happen if we are left unchecked.

This is simply my view on this wonderful week of the Feast of Tabernacles. I am hoping you will read this is the spirit in which it was intended. It was written to draw you closer to the One who made you—to make you see things from a little different perspective. That’s usually always a good thing…God bless you, and I love you all! Maranatha!