Fearing Go[o]d

The spiritual necessity of fearing God; and why doesn't our culture like this?

Adapted from this article:https://beliefsoftheheart.com/2021/04/21/fearing-good/  by Sam Williamson. 

And very special thanks to Keith Medley for his FANTASTIC 27 string guitar background song, Ancestors. You can find more of Keith's music at: http://www.keithmedleymusic.com/

Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:05

Welcome to beliefs of the heart, weekly reflection. I'm Sam Williamson. And today we're discussing: Fearing good.

0:15

During my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, I heard of a summer job repairing the U of M stadium, the Big House. I showed up the Monday after term ended to apply for the job. The foreman snarled that the jobs were reserved for student athletes. He grudgingly admitted I could return and try the next day since a few star athletes hadn’t yet shown up. I returned the next morning and the foreman growled, “Tomorrow!” I kept showing up, and he kept chasing me off with one-word rebukes. On the eighth day, the foreman handed me a note with “Don” written on the outside and pointed me toward the Athletic Office. Someone led me to the office of Don Canham, the Michigan Athletic Director. He had been a star athlete at Michigan. As its AD, Canham was famous for hiring Bo Schembechler, for single-handedly increasing revenues an order of magnitude, and for his shrewd business tactics. I knocked on his door and handed him the note. As he read it, his face reddened. Finally he exploded: “Those jobs are reserved for star athletes we can’t scholarship. And you aren’t one of them! Who the [expletive deleted] do you think you are?” And that was just the warmup; his team hadn’t yet taken the field. I stood mute and stunned horror as he quote woven tapestry of obscenity. That as far as I know is still hanging in space over Michigan stadium, it would have filled the a hundred thousand person big house to capacity with a poetic profanity, never before witnessed their end . I grew up in the city of Detroit. I was mugged more than a dozen times with fists knives once even with a gun, but I was never more scared than in the middle of that season. Eruption. I imagined him kicking me out of university, retracting all my credits and blacklisting me forever. I would be ostracized and shunned and academic pariah. As the volume of Canham’s roar diminished, I tuned back in to hear the closing phrases of his poetic, profane rant. His red complexion lessened. He even smiled. Then he stuck out his hand: Sam, I love to see a man who faces obstacles with dogged determination. I’d pick you to be on my team any day of the week. The job is yours. Congratulations. Fearing God. We associate fear with something bad, maybe evil. Young kids fear the boogeyman and thunderstorms. High schoolers fear rejection, shame, or failure. Parents fear loss of children, ill-health, diminished capacities, and mortality. We all face a spectrum of fears, from embarrassment, to loss, to death. And anxieties paralyze us: as our lungs are squeezed, our hearts race; as we toss about in bed, nightmares rage; as our thoughts run in frenzied fever, we can’t choose what to eat for lunch. Yet Scripture praises fear. In one of the few places Scripture reveals the longing of His heart, God sighs: “Oh that my people’s hearts were always inclined to fear me.” The Psalms pray, “Let all the earth fear the Lord.” Proverbs claims that wisdom begins with fear, fear of God. Fearing good. We don’t fear kittens, we fear lions; because fear isn’t so much about the bad as fear is about the powerful. But we aren’t frightened of the caged lion in the zoo, we’re scared of the escaped lion in the street; because fear isn’t just about power, it’s about uncontrolled power. And the nature of God is uncontrolled power. Our world has dwelt in paralyzing fear this last year: fear of COVID, fear of passing it to others, fear of politics, fear of vaccination arguments, fear of the economy, and fear of the future. The only cure for fearing the uncontrollable bad is to fear the uncontrollable good. Because when we see the Ultimate Good in the Uncontrollable God, we will never fear the world again. We know His plans are for our good, even when we cannot understand them. Or control them. Elizabeth Elliot wrote, "God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to." In fact,

Speaker 1 5:28

As I look back, it was probably my fearsome heavenly father that softened that his heart longer, the more I run into different Christian circles,

Speaker 2 5:43

You know, different groups that have different emphases

Speaker 3 5:45

That when I come into it, I'm just because I've lived outside that when I come into it. And I'm just a bit shocked. And I would say that I'm seeing a trend throughout Christianity, not just in individual circles, but the trend is to disparage the idea of fearing God. You know, I think when I was growing up, my parents generation fear , and God just made natural sense. You could both fear God and love God. And there was just no conflict, but nowadays it feels like you either love God and you called GoDaddy, or you called him Lord and master and you speak in king James English and you fear him and there's distance. But, but in scripture there was never an issue with combining the seeming opposites of fear and love of this God. And so that's what really prompted this article was to say, God is uncontrollable and God is unlimited in power, which is the reason we're fearful of him, but he's good. This is the CS Lewis, you know , saying, yes, he's Elian , but he's good. Uh , and the problem with having a God that we don't fear, he turns into a Casper milk toast, Santa Claus, kind of nothing. There's, there's like niceness, but there's no roar. And I want it to be a lit express, how we need the roar in our life from God that that does make us our knees shake because that roar is on our side. We can't pick and choose the parts of God that we want. That is what idol making is. I don't make it when we say I like this part of God, but I don't like that. Part of God. We're we're idle making means we're recreating a God. We're creating a God in a certain sense in our own image, but at least in the, in the desires that we want, Francis Shaffer once wrote a book, I think it was a book. It might've been a pamphlet called the God who is there. And his point is to say the really is a God there. Uh, you know, my daughter, can't say, I like to think of my dad as a six foot six center for an professional basketball team. She can say that, but I'm a five foot nine kind of chubby 64 year old grandfather. I am not what she might say. She would like me to be Francis. Shaffer is saying we have to come and know the God who was there. And that God has is great, big, powerful, uncontrollable, and good all at the same time. And God has asked us to wrap our hearts around the God who was there. And he , he does delight when we fear him. Now I had a comment from a reader and I don't know if I want to call this a comment of the week because it ended up becoming an email interchange. So I'm just gonna have to explain it to you, but it's , it's from a woman that I've known for a few decades now, and a good friend. She wrote me and said, she couldn't get past my opening story where this very famous. If you live in Michigan, very famous athletic director, chewed me out, scared me to death, cussed me, you know, with poetic profanity. And she says, I couldn't just get past his abuse of you. And I said, well, you know, I don't , I actually think there was a way in his rough and gruff way that I think he was caring for me. Yeah . Literally during the summer, he came to where I was working, just checked up on, he walked up and say , Hey, Sam and I was, I was amazing . Knew me. I mean, this is the guy who, who who's over all the , um , sports programs at the universe Versiti of Michigan. He knows all the first string of football players, but he doesn't know the second, third string names yet. He knew my name. He came up and he said, Sam, I just want to know how you're doing. I think he knew that I was 140 pound, never did college sports. You know, I did skiing, but I didn't do basketball or football. I was going to be working with nine first string, U of M football players. These guys joked hard, partied hard, played hard, worked hard. I think his rant for me was to see if I had the stones to be able to stand up in this environment. And he did come by. I felt like he was caring for me. But when I said this to my friend , she said, I am not having it. You were abused. Now, maybe you were resilient, but maybe you also haven't dealt with the trauma of this abuse. Now, as I said, I've known this woman I've respected her for decades, but I think she's, she's not only wrong, but she's dangerously wrong, dangerous, because, because we have become a therapize culture and Christianity has been infected with this idea where we, where we're more therapeutic than we are about worshiping the God who was there the way he is partly. This is because we've been so free of real physical dangers. Like the people in Israel's day that we create dangers. I don't mean to say that emotional dangers aren't painful. I really don't, but I would much rather have my feelings hurt than have my arm cut off with a sword. You know, Cami crazy. Joseph, his brothers despised him publicly, berating him time and time again. Then he was , they beat him. They threw him into a pit. And the word for throwing into a pit in Genesis is the same word that you use for throwing a corpse into the grave. They stripped his clothes. It's the same word in Hebrew. That's used to strip the skin from an animal. So they really abused him. They sold him into slavery in slavery. He was abused by his master's wife. Then he was put into prison and he helped two guys. And then they forgot him and then got promoted. Him and Joseph doesn't cry. I need my feelings comforted. I've been betrayed. I've been hurt. Of course he wasn't some senses. But when his brothers show up, Joseph says, you meant it for evil and God meant it for good. Now we know that the only way Joseph could have done that is somewhere in his heart. He had to recognize that his vision of his, you know, he had had all these dreams about his brothers bowing down to him. His vision of his stuff was, was, was only going to be accomplished God's ways. In some ways he had to say, God is Lord. In some ways he had to say, God, you're not a Santa Claus . You're not okay . Or the friendly ghost, you are an uncontrollable awesome power. And you are Lord. And then he could say, brothers, you meant it for evil. You are theirs . You're not getting off the hook. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And in that way, just saying that is a worship from Joseph, much more important than our therapy, which I know we need. We need to worship God and say, God, you brought good out of something bad. David is the same thing. The story of David. Remember when there's a big party, all the brothers are coming to see, let Samuel anoint one of them king. He goes through all of them. God keeps saying not this one, not this one, not this one, not this. So David finally goes , uh , Samuel find , it goes to Jesse David's father and says , uh , do you have any more sons? And Jesse says, oh, you mean hot Katon . This is the Hebrew haka Baton . That means the dinky one, but the it's a metaphor in Hebrew for the runt. So, so David has, you could say he's been emotional , actually abused when his own father calls him the runner , right? And then David's life. He , he , he escapes death by hacking just by, by inches, by the skin of his teeth, as it says in job. But then later in life, you know what he says, he doesn't say poor me. My feelings were hurt. Although his feelings were hurt, of course, but what he said in Psalm 1 44 is he said, God, you, my Lord trained my hands for war. And my fingers for battle. David saw that God's greater purpose. God was behind quote, this abuse. God did not do the abuse. You know, just like Joseph's brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. God is greater as purposes. David was able to say, my brother, I just didn't mean for Eva. My , my dad was not doing a good job, but my biggest problem was when I held it again against God. And now I recognize that God meant it for good God. As I was being just a dumb shepherd , the runs of the family got the runt job. He was training my hands and he was trained. He was training my hands for war and my fingers for battle so that I could fight Goliath so that I could run eyes up to be a general installs army so that I could learn how to be a king. David said I had to let go of my anger towards my brothers. I had to let go of my anger towards my father. I had to let go of my anger towards God, God, and worship God. That's what he needed. More than therapy. He needed to worship. We are terrified today. We are terrified of hurt feelings. We are terrified of experiences. We call PTSD and God is saying, he turns these evils into something good. So that in some way, some house someday, we will say someone in the world, our parents, our friends, our betrayers, our athletic coach. I don't know, meant it for evil, but God meant it for God because I know this is hard to say. I know peop EV everybody listening has had some form of betrayal. Some people have had some form of trauma. I don't mean to minimize that. I really, really don't. What I mean to say is what we do, how we deal with our trauma is the key to our healing. And the way we deal with our trauma is worship of God. Remember MAs on road to a mass , to depress despairing, despondent. Men are walking together. Jesus shows up and they don't recognize him. He says, what are you going on? What are you talking about? And they say our chief priests and rulers deliver Jesus up to be condemned to death. And they crucified him. But we hoped he was the one to redeem Israel. That Jesus has to come and say, yes, you hoped he was to be the one that would redeem Israel. But you had to let go of your idea of what that meant because you had, you had a God in your own imagination. But the truth is the only way I could redeem Israel was to be condemned to death and crucified. So there's a , there's actually a little irony. Our chief priests condemned him to death and crucified, but we hoped he would redeem Israel. But the only way he redeemed Israel was to be condemned to death and crucified. And of course, what came out of that condemnation and death was that we are adopted as children into the kingdom. We are made the bride for the bride groom , unbelievably intimate. Jesus says you are my bride. This came about only through this horrible evil that happened. The best things in our life comes about when God brings a resurrection in our life that we cannot imagine. And so when we hold onto our beliefs and say, I don't want to fear God, we rejecting the very God who was there. Now, this woman who emailed me , she gave a story about her husband got healing. Her, her husband's father had done something. Uh, it had at the very least given her , her , her dad's, her husband's father had given him , her husband a hard lesson that she called abuse. I don't know. I , I don't know what I would've done with him if I had been his father, because I know that he was a very rebel , but rebellious son and her husband says, you know, I joked about that experience for a while . But finally I crap . I w I wept once when he, when I remembered that incident and her husband said, I finally forgave him, but you know what? I don't think that as healing, I don't think it is healing until we repent. I think her husband will only repeat healing when he says, I repent for harboring ill judgment of my earthly father and ill judgment of my heavenly father who let this happen. I need to see that God brings good out of all things. And it need to look to the God who is in fear and trembling and in great love and gratitude for the goodness he brings out of even death. That's what we need is a kind of worship that says you are good in all your ways, even the way is maybe especially in

Speaker 1 18:26

The ways I don't understand. Thanks for listening. Please join us by following this podcast or liking it, visit our website, beliefs of the heart.com for more articles, books, videos, podcasts courses, all designed to foster, intimate theology, deepening a real relationship with the real God who is there. See you next week.