The Fear of the Lord and the Fear of Man
A few weeks ago we looked at the fear of the Lord and the fear of man. The fear of the Lord is when the Lord is the biggest thing in your life. The fear of man is when we replace God with people. The fear of the Lord is the “fountain of life” (Pro. 14:27), while the fear of man is a “snare” (29:25).
The classic text contrasting these two fears is Jeremiah 17:5-8. These verses say there are two options concerning the way we’ll live our lives: will we trust in man or will we trust in the Lord? We all stand at a crossroads between the fear of people and the fear of God. One road leads to life, one to death.
The trouble is that it’s hard to know where we are with the fear of the Lord and the fear of man. It’s difficult to discern which one we’re growing in.
To help you think through where you are on the spectrum of the fear of the Lord versus the fear of man, let’s take a moment to self-asses to see which one is bearing more fruit in your life.
Some fruit of the fear of the Lord is when you begin to consistently look at things from an eternal perspective. So, for example, when you’re going to hang out with friends or family, you’re praying, “Lord, help me show them your love, let me be an example of Christ for them.” You’re looking for ways you can bless and serve and encourage, rather than ways to impress or manipulate.
Another fruit of the fear of the Lord is that you’re open to correction and you want to grow. As David says, “Let a righteous man strike me – it is a kindness; let him rebuke me – it is oil for my head; let my head not refuse it” (Ps. 141:5).
The fear of the Lord produces the fruit of humility. “The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom, and humility comes before honor” (Pro. 15:33). When God is the biggest thing in our lives, we learn to not exaggerate our importance.
The fear of the Lord leads you to walk in calmness and peace when things seem to be falling apart because you have an eternal perspective. Your hope is in the Lord, not in the strength of your nation or money or savings or connections or what people think of you. The fear of the Lord creates a contentment in you that isn’t based on how much or how little you have. “Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble with it” (Pro. 15:16).
Some fruit of the fear of man could be when the praise of others carries a high priority in your life, or when you think you have to get a certain job or compliment or possession or title or promotion so you can hear the praises of others in order to feel valuable.
The fruit of the fear of man is when you find yourself being insincere or like a chameleon. When you’re with Christian friends, you’re spiritual and act a certain way, but when you’re with other people you’re different and you may not even bring up the Lord.
Other fruit of the fear of man is when someone says something negative about you or criticizes you and it ruins your week or you set out to prove them wrong or you may gossip about them to make them look worse and you look better.
When your sense of well-being is based on what others think of you and not what the Lord thinks of you, you won’t have a sturdiness or poise and you’ll be fretful and prone to interpret everything in the most negative way possible. “The fear of man lays a snare; but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe” (Pro. 29:25).
What Does the Fear of the Lord Produce?
This morning, I want us to think about this question about what the fear of the Lord produces in our lives so that we can discern its fruits and pray for them to grow. It’ll also give us a target to aim at.
I want us to look at a few verses Psalm 34 (vv. 4-14). Here we see at least three things the fear of the Lord produces: a satisfaction in the Lord, a desire to turn away from evil, and blessing for God’s people. Let’s take these one at a time.
A Satisfaction in the Lord
First, in Psalm 34:9-10, David says that the fear of the Lord produces a satisfaction in the Lord. One of the results of the fear of the Lord is a fundamental belief that God is all you need.
David says that the while the wicked, or the “lions,” languish, those who fear the Lord “lack no good thing” (v. 10). This isn’t a naïve statement that fearing the Lord will get you what you want, or that God’s people will always prosper. The next section of the psalm talks about the righteous crying out to God in desperate need and having “troubles” (v. 17) and being “crushed in spirit” (v. 18). God’s people will and do suffer in many ways.
David’s point in verse 10 isn’t that fearing the Lord will make your life easy, but that it’ll make your life complete. With the fear of the Lord you’ll have everything you need even if you lose everything you have. Those who fear God understand that their relationship with God will satisfy them completely.
And this produces a humbling joy. When you realize that God is big enough to meet all your needs and good enough to satisfy all your longings, and you realize that his greatness and goodness is completely unmerited, and even unlooked for, but is freely given to those who trust him, it humbles you. It releases you from the burden of self-importance and having to prove yourself. This is what Proverbs 14:26 means, “In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence.” And Proverbs 19:23, “The fear of the Lord leads to life, and whoever has it rests satisfied” (19:23). And Proverbs 22:4, “The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life.” Or, as David says in Psalm 34, “Those who fear God have no lack!” (v. 9)
A Desire to Turn Away from Evil
Then in Psalm 34:11-14, we see that the fear of the Lord produces a desire to turn away from evil. David says that the good we want to enjoy (v. 12) goes hand in hand with the good we do (v. 14). He’s saying that the fear of the Lord literally changes our lives. It teaches us to watch our words and turn away from evil and seek peace. In other words, David is saying that “life” is found inside the will of God, not outside of it.
The lie that the good life is outside of God’s will was first promoted in the Garden of Eden and still circulates the world today. But David says here that a life lined up with God’s standards, a life lived in the fear of the Lord, is the truly good life.
Obeying God’s commands isn’t something we naturally love to do. In many ways, we love to downgrade obedience to God.
We often downgrade obedience and upgrade appearances, focusing more on our actions than our attitudes, on externals more than internals. Of course we should obey God externally, as Psalm 34:13-14 make clear. But focusing solely on external behaviors can give us a sense that we’re okay as long as we haven’t killed anyone or committed adultery or stolen anything. As long as we’re decent human beings, we think we’re good with God. We know we make mistakes, but on the whole we’re pretty good so God accepts us.
But if we think we’re usually good, then God will be usually irrelevant to us. As long as we think we’re basically good people who occasionally make mistakes, we’ll ignore the depths of sin in our hearts and elevate ourselves before God as someone who’s mildly flawed rather than someone who’s deeply rebellious. Because of this, we put God on a shelf, there when we need him, while we live most of our lives completely independent of him.
Ed Welch points out that sin in our hearts is hard to see because it often rides on the back of good things. For example, work is a good thing, but sin takes work and exalts it to the point where it rules us. Welch says, “We become workaholics who say we’re doing it for the kids, but we are really doing it for ourselves.”[1] What about financial planning? It’s certainly wise to plan for the future if you’re able, but it’s a good desire that can grow to rule your life so that you forsake generosity and find your safety in your accounts.
So as we think about turning away from evil, we need to think about external evils and internal evils, idols or functional lords we set up in our hearts that rule our lives. The way to reorder our desires and grow in the fear of the Lord is to identify the functional lords in our hearts and replace them with the Lord.
What’s the center, organizing principle of your life? A hobby? Your family? Your career? Your reputation? Your appearance? It’s easy to project an appearance of godliness while other things sit on the throne of our hearts. Only the fear of the Lord can dethrone us and make Jesus the main passion of our lives.
Blessing for God’s People
The third thing the fear of the Lord produces is corporate in nature, or for God’s people. Notice some of the corporate, or congregational, language in Psalm 34. Verse 3, “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!” Verse 9, “Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints.”
David is saying that the fear of the Lord is for all of God’s people, that the Lord will deliver his people as they fear him. The fear of the Lord shapes the people of God, multiplying the revelation of his glory and goodness.
This is what was happening in the early church. Acts 9:31, “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.”
In the earliest churches there was peace and comfort and edification and multiplication. Why? Because the churches were “walking in the fear of the Lord.” Following the lead of the apostles, the churches cared more about what God thought than what people thought, even if it cost them something. After being arrested and interrogated by the Sanhedrin because they healed a lame man, and after being told to stop preaching Jesus, Peter and John said, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20). And then after they were arrested again for preaching Jesus and again ordered to stop preaching, Peter and the apostles said, “We must obey God rather than men” (5:29).
The apostles would not be intimidated into silence. They would not let the government tell them what they could or couldn’t preach. They would not stop proclaiming Jesus. They would take their marching orders from God, not from men. Why? Because they were “walking in the fear of the Lord.”
What does this look like today? It looks like a church that refuses to water down or stop preaching the good news of Jesus. Like a church that refuses to call evil good or good evil. Like a church that says killing unborn babies in the womb is murder, that says that marriage is between one man and one woman. A church walking in the fear of the Lord believes that faithfulness to the Lord is more important than numerical growth. But it’s also a church that boldly shares the gospel and prays for conversions because it desperately wants people to be saved because it understands that dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person. As Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt. 10:28).
Churches who walk in the fear of the Lord receive God’s blessings of peace and comfort and seeing people built up and growing in the faith of the gospel. Pray for this for our church.
How Do We Grow in the Fear of the Lord?
It should be clear by now how important the fear of the Lord is in our lives. But how do we grow in it, or it in us?
Psalm 86:11 gives us a clue, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.” Fear of the Lord begins in the heart. It’s something that happens at the heart-level, not the behavior level. Our hearts are scattered and pulled in a thousand directions, so our great need is for the Lord to pull our hearts together into a singular orbit around him as the organizing principle of our lives.
This means that growing in the fear of the Lord is a miracle. How do you perform surgery on your own heart? We prefer to be the center of our worlds so a heart united around God is work God must do.
And it’s a work he promises to do for his people. Jeremiah 32:39-40, “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.”
Growing in the fear of the Lord requires a new heart. And God promises this kind of heart to his people in the new covenant. How does it happen? It happens when we’re born again or converted to Christ. And this happens through the power of the gospel.
The Fear of the Lord Grows by the Gospel
In the gospel, we see the greatness and goodness of the Lord. We learn that he’s so holy that he must punish sin and that he’s so good that he wants to forgive sin.
The gospel is the story of God covering his naked enemies and bringing them into a wedding feast and marrying them rather than crushing them.
As I said a few weeks ago, we long to be covered so we hide behind fear of man. Shame sends us into hiding because we’re afraid of our nakedness being exposed. But Jesus came and died in the most shameful way possible, naked on a cross. He was innocent but he suffered under the mocking shame of others. As Welch says, “Jesus both experienced shame and took our shame on himself, so shame no longer defines us.”[2]
This is amazing – it means we can come out of hiding! It means we’re free to let people see us, the true us, to be vulnerable, to confess our sins and the sins done against us. We’re free to finally be honest with ourselves and others because Jesus covers us, and if he covers us, then anything we confess is already under the covering of Jesus Christ.
But it gets better. The gospel also says that God goes one step further. He covers us in Christ and then he marries us and exalts us and makes us his prized possession. The prophet Isaiah says it like this, “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer” (54:4-5). And, like a good husband, the Lord takes pleasure in his bride. Psalm 147:11, “The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.”
The gospel says that we can be united in marriage to Christ. Through faith, he gives us his name, love, presence, faithfulness, protection, provision, even his kingdom.
When we understand who Jesus is and what he’s done for us, our hearts fear the Lord. And the gospel starts to unravel the fear of man in our hearts. Because of Jesus, it doesn’t matter if people see me because God sees everything and still loves me and covers my shame.
The gospel teaches us to stop worrying about what people think because the only Person in the universe who truly matters loves us and says we belong to him. Living in the fear of the Lord means we have nothing else to fear because God delights in us. Psalm 34:4, “I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.”
“Continue in the Fear of the Lord”
It’s true that you go from not believing in Christ to believing in him instantly. But moving from God as a concept to God as your fear, or God as the biggest thing in your life, is usually not instant. This is why Proverbs says to “continue in the fear of the Lord all the day” (23:17).
So you have to take the gospel and work it into your life. You need daily stops in the throne room of God through his word and prayer. You need a church to shepherd you. You need help identifying the fear of man in your life. So don’t beat yourself up if you’re not where you want to be. None of us are.
But take the gospel, hold onto it, and grow in the fear of the Lord. It’s the fear that will cast out every other fear. It’s the way we were meant to live.
[1]Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1997), 100.
[2]Ibid., 67.