Forrest: Good morning.
Forrest: I'm Forrest Leap Pastor here at Multiply.
Forrest: If I've not met you before, welcome.
Forrest: Glad that you are here.
Forrest: And I just want to double down and celebrate not only Tracy Barnes and our kids team, but also the fact that those who just led you in worship, uh, every single person who just led you in worship completely volunteer, comprised of completely volunteers on this team.
Forrest: Can we just thank the worship team and the kids team that are serving everybody who's giving of their gifts because our church is not based on the talents of a few, but the sacrifices of many.
Forrest: And it's been that way for years now.
Forrest: And we're not going to change now.
Forrest: We're going to keep going.
Forrest: So I'm glad that you are here today.
Forrest: Welcome as we're jumping into this new series, Fear of God.
Forrest: That's a two-part series.
Forrest: And spooky season is upon us.
Forrest: And I'm not just talking about Halloween, but also there's also a looming election in a couple of weeks as well that may have us on edge.
Forrest: And uh, I don't know about you, but it feels like that at times fear is just all around us.
Forrest: It's even like in the air that we breathe on the screens, on our phones, in society, in our homes.
Forrest: Sometimes it just feels like fear is all around.
Forrest: Anyone uh got any um intense phobias in the house?
Forrest: Well, uh, I know my wife definitely does.
Forrest: She has an irrational fear of snakes, which it's good.
Forrest: I think it's okay to have a fear of snakes, but hers is to the point where if she even sees a snake on television, she screams at the top of her lungs and covers her odds so fast that she hits herself in the face most of the times, which actually happened this week.
Forrest: We were watching a show, and in the show, uh somebody picked something up and it revealed a snake, and then when we screamed at the top of her lungs, and she's hit herself in the face.
Forrest: And I don't know if uh you have any phobias like that, but what I do know is that uh there are often times where there we are tempted to be afraid, and not only just in regular life, but also I want to say that there are times where the concept of fear has been misused and mishandled in the context of the local church.
Forrest: That fear tactics have been weaponized in order to make people feel guilty, guilty enough to have some behavior modification or short-term change or some kind of mindset.
Forrest: But I know this a guilt trip is a short trip, it doesn't last very long.
Forrest: And we know that as followers of Jesus, that yes, we at times are convicted by the Holy Spirit of things that are going on in our life, and that conviction comes to our mind and our heart about our sin.
Forrest: But for us to just live in a state of guilt or shame is straight from the pit of hell.
Forrest: We're not supposed to be just walking in guilt and shame.
Forrest: Instead, it's a tactic of the enemy.
Forrest: How do I know that?
Forrest: Because the scripture's extremely clear about this.
Forrest: The fact that God's kindness is what leads us to repentance.
Forrest: It's God's kindness that leads us to change.
Forrest: In Romans 2.4 it says, or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
Forrest: Or the fact that it's God's perfect love that drives out all fear in our lives.
Forrest: 1 John 4.18 says, There's no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment.
Forrest: The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
Forrest: This passage was the passage that was the first sermon that I ever preached in college was on this passage.
Forrest: And as it comes to preaching, Oswald Chambers says, When we preach the love of God, there is a danger of forgetting.
Forrest: The Bible reveals not first the love of God, but the intense, blazing holiness of God and his love at the center of that holiness.
Forrest: Now we are well aware that throughout the scripture we see a theme of God's wrath and anger towards sin.
Forrest: From the Old Testament to the New.
Forrest: But the truth is this that because of Jesus sacrificed on the cross to die in your place in my place, the raging wrath and anger of God that burns against that which is unholy was completely satisfied by the blood of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection to walk out of the grave.
Forrest: So that the wrath of God that was intended for you and for me, for the ways that we are unholy, instead of that being poured out on us, it was poured out instead on our Savior Jesus.
Forrest: So that we could walk in love with God.
Forrest: See, the writer of Hebrews mentions and says that God is a consuming fire.
Forrest: And a fire can either destroy or it can purify the precious metal.
Forrest: It can also fire bricks to build.
Forrest: And as we look today to the words of Jesus and how we should be thinking about, understanding, interacting with this concept of the fear of God, the fear of God in our life, and what that should lead us to, and how we should handle it.
Forrest: Jesus speaks very plainly and almost in some ways to read this passage on its face, it can also come off as frightening, these words of Jesus.
Forrest: He's speaking to this group of people who constantly rejected him and tried to tear him down, tried to discredit him, tried to end his ministry, the religious leaders, the Pharisees.
Forrest: And in Luke chapter 12, that we're going to look at, Jesus starts this chapter by roasting these Pharisees for their religious mentality and for their hypocrisy.
Forrest: And then he turns to the disciples.
Forrest: And he begins to speak to them, and he gives some instructions to them that on its face sound contradictory.
Forrest: He tells them to both fear God and also not fear, and Jesus appears to, in this passage, be giving some schizophrenic advice.
Forrest: But we're going to see that it is not.
Forrest: Instead, we're going to see that he is instead revealing the power of the truth of God's word and the reality of the fear of the Lord in our lives.
Forrest: So let's take a look at this passage together, okay?
Forrest: This is Luke chapter 12, starting in verse 4.
Forrest: It's very quick.
Forrest: Jesus is speaking to the disciples.
Forrest: Dear friends, don't be afraid of those who want to kill your body.
Forrest: Jesus is speaking to these Pharisees, the ones that ultimately would play a part in the plot for his own death.
Forrest: They cannot do any more to you after that.
Forrest: But I tell you whom to fear?
Forrest: Fear God.
Forrest: Who has the power to kill you and throw you into hell.
Forrest: Yes, he's the one to fear.
Forrest: And then verse 6 are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?
Forrest: And not one of not and not one of them forgotten before God?
Forrest: Why even the hairs of your head are all numbered?
Forrest: Fear not.
Forrest: You are more valuable than many sparrows.
Forrest: The average person has about a hundred thousand hairs on their head.
Forrest: The average person also loses about a hundred of those hairs a day.
Forrest: Now there's some men in this room that are losing a lot more than that every single day.
Forrest: But can you imagine how much God loves you and values you that every single hair on your head, God knows where it's placed.
Forrest: At any given time, He values you so much.
Forrest: He values you more than the rest of his creation.
Forrest: And Jesus is speaking very plainly right now to the disciples and giving them this concept of the fact that they should both fear God and not fear at the same time.
Forrest: And how in the world do we do that?
Forrest: I, as you all know, I've got young kids.
Forrest: I've got a two-year-old Magnolia.
Forrest: Now, two-year-old Magnolia is now I feel like we're in the time where we're just chasing her around the house all the time.
Forrest: And this last week, Magnolia came into the kitchen.
Forrest: Thank goodness, both my wife were both in the kitchen at the time, and there was a pot on the stove, the hot stove, and Magnolia beelined over to the stove and began to reach her little hand up to touch the hot pot that was on the stove.
Forrest: And both my wife and I both screamed, no, stop! Hot, hot.
Forrest: And Magnolia turned around and burst into tears.
Forrest: She burst into tears, one, because she wanted to touch that pot.
Forrest: And two, because she was afraid of the warning that her mom and I were giving to her.
Forrest: But what she didn't realize was that the warning that we were giving to her, even though it startled her, even though it may have scared her in the moment, it was 100% out of love.
Forrest: Because her mother and I knew what would happen if she'd gotten that little hand onto that red hot eye on the top of the stove.
Forrest: And the pain that she would have suffered had she been able to do that.
Forrest: Jesus gives this word to the disciples and he tells them to fear God and also to fear not.
Forrest: And the word that Jesus uses in this passage is it is a Greek word that we get the word phobia from.
Forrest: And he uses it four times in this passage, and it's used throughout the New Testament in a variety of different ways.
Forrest: In the context of fearing God's wrath, of respecting God and reverence of God.
Forrest: It's used in the context of physical danger, fearing social ramifications, having fear of governing authorities, but only for those who do things that are illegal that should fear the authorities.
Forrest: But doesn't this seem to be a contradiction?
Forrest: And I know that there are folks who think at times, how in the world could a loving God ask me to fear him?
Forrest: Even people who have had this concept rock their faith.
Forrest: Even to walk away from God because of not understanding the fact that our God is so holy that we should in reverence to him, acknowledge and respect his preeminence and supremacy, and at the same time how much he loves us and cares for us.
Forrest: And so, what should we do when we think about the concept of fearing God and coming to him and approaching him, even on a Sunday morning like this?
Forrest: What we should do is that we should we should face the fear.
Forrest: We should face the fear.
Forrest: Whether it be Moses or whether it be in the New Testament or Paul who's on the road to Damascus, and Jesus appearing to him in a bright light, brighter than the sun.
Forrest: That people are almost frozen by the fear in the moment of being close to God.
Forrest: But the reality is this the fear of the Lord should lead us to drop down onto a knee and worship, not to run away.
Forrest: This is about us being reverent before the king, before God and before people.
Forrest: That you would think about the fact that no matter who's watching, who's looking, in your life and walk with God, are you willing to fall down on your face and to face the fact that we serve and love a holy God?
Forrest: And to face the fear, because that's ultimately what He wants us to do.
Forrest: When Magnolia reached her hand up to touch that pot and we screamed and yelled, what I in that moment, what I was not wanting her to do is to run away from me in fear.
Forrest: Instead, you know what I did?
Forrest: I scooped her up into my arms.
Forrest: And she was upset and she was crying.
Forrest: And I was comforting her because I wanted her to be close to me.
Forrest: I wanted her to know how much I loved her.
Forrest: When we come before God and we allow His presence and holiness to drive us to our knees rather than drive us away, we're honoring our King.
Forrest: King Jesus, we're honoring our King.
Forrest: I know.
Forrest: For me at times, I I think about how fear has been used in the church.
Forrest: And to give you a pretty poor example of this, my friend Heather, who I've known for a long time, she talks about how she came to faith in Christ.
Forrest: And she is a child was in a country church and they were having some type of VBS type environment or some type of kids' service, and they had a preacher who came in and he was talking in front of all the kids, and in the middle of his message or towards the end, he said, I want all you kids to imagine that in the room right now the floor broke into two, and you could see the flames of hell beneath you, and all of you fall into the flames of hell.
Forrest: Now, naturally, Heather gave her life to Christ that day.
Forrest: But that's not how I would suggest that we do children's ministry and we don't do it that way.
Forrest: Because it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance.
Forrest: And it's as I think about at times the fear that can grip us, like the fear for me and maybe for you of failure, of the unknown.
Forrest: And I know there's probably been times in your life that you like me have found yourself paralyzed by fear.
Forrest: Maybe financially, maybe it's had to do something with your health, maybe it's been about your work, maybe it's been about your future, but it's possible for fear to grip us and control us.
Forrest: That it be the primary thing that we're thinking about as we make decisions.
Forrest: But what we know is true is that Jesus said in these words that we should fear him who has authority, who has the power.
Forrest: And so because of that, we should to align ourselves and our priorities with God, we should fear him first.
Forrest: And as we fear him first, we are freed from fearing anything else.
Forrest: What life will throw at you, what circumstances, the shifting sands of life, if we will put God first and if we will fear him first, all while recognizing that he wants us to uh be in alignment with him and not fearing the circumstances that are around us because we know that we are not alone but in his hand.
Forrest: We're not alone.
Forrest: God loves us.
Forrest: He doesn't want us to be caught in fear, instead, he wants us to be free of the fears that want to control our lives and our spiritual lives.
Forrest: I'll put it to you like this.
Forrest: When I I first came to Christ as a kid, and then my teenage years are kind of up and down, one foot in with God, and one foot not with God, and that led to my junior year when I really got serious about the Lord, and I stopped pursuing the party lifestyle and popularity and all the things that can trap you as a young person.
Forrest: And what began to happen is kind of one by one, I started to lose my friends, the guys that have been most close to me over the years because I stopped doing some of the things that we used to do, stopped talking in ways that we used to talk, and that really began to distance me from them in our friendship.
Forrest: And it led to a night that I think about at times when I think about myself in high school, and so any students who are in the room thinking about this, it was my senior year.
Forrest: I was it was New Year's Eve, and I was supposed to be with a bunch of friends, and I had been disinvited to this party.
Forrest: And I was sitting by myself in my truck in the McDonald's parking lot, my senior year on New Year's Eve with no friends, and I remember thinking to myself, what is this Jesus thing all about?
Forrest: Is this worth it?
Forrest: Well, you know what what's what's great about this is obviously I'm glad that I made the choice that I did to walk with the Lord.
Forrest: And as years have gone on, many of those uh friends of mine have remained friends of mine as different times and circumstances in their life have come about and they've remembered who I am, and I've been to be able to step in to encourage, to walk with, to minister, to pray with many of those friends, uh even still today.
Forrest: And I'm grateful for that.
Forrest: And when we're not controlled by our fear of people's opinions and the circumstances around us, it frees us.
Forrest: It frees us.
Forrest: And the only way that we're able to be free from that fear is by knowing what the fear of the Lord is all about.
Forrest: And to truly know the fear of the Lord so that you can have no fear.
Forrest: Know the fear of the Lord.
Forrest: So that as you're walking out your relationship with God, you are recognizing the fact that even though God is so powerful, he wants to be close to you.
Forrest: The scripture says that if you draw near to him, he will draw near to you.
Forrest: And as Satan and the enemy and the powers of hell want to separate you from God and put a wedge between you and God, when you recognize the power and the holiness of God and how much he is above all things and an almighty and all knowing, that if then you couple that and understand the fact that God's so Powerful wants to be so close to you.
Forrest: You can walk in a life that is not afraid of every single circumstance that comes up.
Forrest: And every little word that somebody says.
Forrest: And when somebody tries to discourage you, and when somebody tries to tell you that you shouldn't be doing this or shouldn't you be doing that?
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Forrest: Francis de Sale said it this way we must fear God out of love.
Forrest: Not love him out of fear.
Forrest: The irony of the words of Jesus to his disciples to not fear those who can kill their body.
Forrest: The irony is that most of those disciples met that in the end.
Forrest: Most of those disciples, as they were ministering, many of them were martyred.
Forrest: History tells us Peter was crucified upside down.
Forrest: And not just the disciples, but first century Christians in Rome who were fed to lions in the Colosseum and uses candles on fire at parties in front of the Caesar.
Forrest: Jesus speaks to them, knowing what was awaiting them.
Forrest: So hey, don't fear those.
Forrest: Who can kill your body?
Forrest: But fear the Lord.
Forrest: Who can allow you to live forever?
Forrest: This life and into the next.
Forrest: From this life into eternity.
Forrest: So how in the world do we do that?
Forrest: Starting very small.
Forrest: Imagine your life.
Forrest: Not being controlled by fear.
Forrest: But instead in step with God, recognizing his supremacy.
Forrest: You should serve him.
Forrest: Got this card in your seat.
Forrest: We have a team around here, multiply, made up of a lot of people who want to serve God and walk with him.
Forrest: None of us being able to do it perfectly.
Forrest: But just wanting to serve.
Forrest: We should seek him.
Forrest: Psalm says, Come let us worship and bow.
Forrest: Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
Forrest: And Proverbs 14 says, Those who follow the right path fear the Lord.
Forrest: Those who take the wrong path despise him.
Forrest: And we should submit ourselves to God.
Forrest: Y'all know this passage well, Proverbs 3, 5 and 6.
Forrest: Trust the Lord with all your heart.
Forrest: Do not depend on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge him, and he'll make your path straight.
Forrest: And he shares his covenant with him.
Forrest: What does that mean?
Forrest: Shares his covenant.
Forrest: Jesus frames the way that he loves us in the form of a covenant like a marriage.
Forrest: It's the bride and the bridegroom.
Forrest: And those that fear him get to be in a relationship with the God of the universe who loves you so much that he says, The church, my followers, you're my bride.
Forrest: And I'm going to carry you from this life into eternity.
Forrest: Not being able to do that on our own, by our own strength, by our own power, but instead through the mighty name of Jesus.
Forrest: For the fact that he's the one who died on the cross for our sins 2,000 years ago, and his blood is what satisfies the burning, holy wrath of God, so that we can look from this life into eternity and salvation and free.
Forrest: Because our fear is in the right place.
Forrest: That he's asking you and inviting you to give your life to him so that he can give his eternal life to you.
Forrest: And that's his kindness and his love for you.
Forrest: And the fact that we have a holy God, that we can't live up to it, the wages of sin or death, we've all fallen short of the glory of God, but it's through Christ and his resurrection power that we can be made clean, we can be made holy, we can be cleansed by the blood of Jesus.
Forrest: And maybe there's somebody in the room today that this is your time and your day to receive the free gift of salvation purchased for you on the cross in your place.
Forrest: That's it's free, but it comes with a high price.
Forrest: Have you given your life to Him?
Forrest: Put in your faith in Him and your trust in Him because you can.
Forrest: So I'm gonna invite everybody to stand right now as I pray over you.
Forrest: Father, I pray all across this room right now, God, every household that's represented, every man, woman, and child, Father, that's represented in this place, God, that we would be a people who would recognize, who would respect your holiness, your power and your might, that God, we would also receive your love that was delivered to us on the cross 2,000 years ago and every day since.
Forrest: And so, Father, I pray all across this room, Father, that we would not be a people controlled by fear, but instead following you in faith.
Forrest: And so, God, I pray right now, all across the room, if there's anybody in this place who's not received you as Savior, that they would right now pray in their mind and heart to receive you as their savior, to be forgiven and free, they would pray, Jesus, save me.
Forrest: In their mind and heart, Jesus, save me.
Forrest: I believe that you are the Son of God, that you are alive.
Forrest: Forgive me, cleanse me.
Forrest: Forgive me of my sin.
Forrest: So that I can be in heaven one day with you.
Forrest: I give you my life as you gave yours for mine.
Forrest: Nobody looking around right now, heads bowed.
Forrest: You're in the room today and you prayed to receive Jesus as your Savior.
Forrest: I want you to take a tangible step before God in heaven, and so I can pray for you in a moment.
Forrest: I'm gonna count to three.
Forrest: And if you made that decision today, I want you to quickly shoot your hand up so I can see you and pray for you.
Forrest: So if that's you today, the count of three, raise your hand up.
Forrest: Ready, one, two, three.
Forrest: Anyone in this place to receive Christ as Savior?
Forrest: Father, we give our lives to you.
Forrest: And Lord, for hands raised, Father, I pray right now, God, that you would in this moment, God, that decision would be sealed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Forrest: God, thank you, Lord, that we as followers of you, that God, as we rest in you, that God, we will go from now into eternity in heaven because of your power.
Forrest: So, Father, we thank you, Lord, for the transformation of lives and God, your encouragement to us today as we walk with you and love you.
Forrest: We thank you, God, in the strong name of Jesus.
Forrest: Everybody said, Amen.
Forrest: Church, let's all sing and worship together.