If this verse is true…then we need to think a lot more deeply about it.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
Yesterday we began to work on increasing our fear/awe of God. Not by trying to be more afraid of God because we are all still struggling with sin, and He is angry with us. But beginning to be in awe of Him because there is no one who is greater and more glorious than God who has, by the way, chosen us to be members of His family and He is not only God…He is our Father.
Many children grow up not knowing their dad. That could be due to many factors. Perhaps he died when you were young, and you have no memories of him. Perhaps he left for any number of reasons, or your parents divorced when you were a child. Or, like many fathers, he was either too wrapped up in his work or too emotionally afraid of connecting with anyone probably because his father never connected with him.
Now when it comes to knowing God our Father there is a kind of blindness that is deadly.
Paul Tripp writes this…in AWE
“It is the worst kind of blindness. It’s the physical ability to see without the spiritual ability to really see what you’ve seen. It’s the capacity to look at wonders, things specifically designed to move you and produce in you, breathless amazement, and not be moved by them anymore. It’s the sad state of yawning in the face of glory.”
Unfortunately, many of us have become bored with God. This happens because He has become a theological idea too difficult to grasp. Or because He seems so silent almost all the time we stop looking for Him and talking with Him. Jesus is in our hearts. He is our ticket to heaven so He can just leave me alone so I can do whatever I want to do in this world. Or we want a life of diminishing returns putting our desires ahead of His desires for our life.
Remember when Jesus said these words…
“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
Believing that your life here is simply that…YOUR life here…is a grave mistake. Because it is yours to live as you please but there is check-in at the end when we get to heaven. Because the next words Jesus says are these…
“For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.”
The solution to this costly error of living your life…or should I say the life that He has given you…for yourself is to grow in our AWE of God. To take the blinders off that keep stop focusing on your will, your desires, your challenges and instead see God with fresh eyes that are open and see how glorious, magnificent, and wonderful your father really is.
I suggested yesterday that we start increasing our AWE of God by working at becoming a person of thanksgiving. We begin to see all the great things God has done for us and how incredible He is and begin to give thanks in all things. That we do what Paul writes for us to do in Philippians 4:8…
“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
The second thing I believe we need to do is to do what we are told in Psalm 19:1-2.
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.They have no speech; they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”
We can be growing in our AWE of God every day by simply looking at the creation He has made for us. Instead of looking for the next awesome show on Netflix why not step outside and see the awesomeness of the creation in which we live every day?
Maybe you live in the city and see no majestic mountains or in the Midwest and cannot watch the ocean or in a [lace with so much smog and cannot see the stars. Well, guess what…just as you have used the internet to see porn…you can see almost anything in the universe online. In a matter of seconds, you can see the Alps, the view from Mt. Everest, or be riding the Colorado River down the Grand Canyon.
We can be astonished at the infinite creativity of our God in the display of color from the sky to the feathers of a parrot, to the beauty of the rainbow. His genius is revealed in everything He has created, and we are right in the middle of it every day and are being distracted and dismayed by the conflict in our world or wars and politics. Fearing disease, lawlessness, racism, or another day with someone gunning down students in their school.
Yes, there is a lot of garbage in our world…and things seem to be going from bad to worse but perhaps we should do this simple thing we are reminded of in Psalm 121.
“I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.”