What Would Change in Your Life?
What are God’s requirements for riches and honor? The answer to that question is found in Proverbs 22:4, “By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches and honor and life.” Just what is the fear of the Lord?
It is the continual awareness that I am in the presence of a holy, just, and almighty God, and that every thought, motive, attitude, word and action is open before Him and is being judged by Him. If you knew that all of your secret thoughts, words, and actions would be displayed publicly so that everyone could watch them and evaluate them, it would make a profound difference in the way you live. Each one of us has an instinctive concern about what others think of us and how they will judge the things we do. That concern is the fear of man. If we have this much concern regarding what man thinks, how much more should we be concerned about God’s evaluation of our thoughts, motives, attitudes, words and actions? The problem is: most Christians have little or no understanding of the “fear of the Lord.” It is usually interpreted as a reverence for the Lord. However, a simple reverence doesn’t produce the results and rewards revealed often in Scripture (particularly in Psalms and Proverbs). For example, Proverbs 16:6 states that “by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil.” The view gets much clearer in the words of Psalm 33:18-19, which speaks of God’s protection—“Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him, on those who hope in His mercy, to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.” Again, the key element regarding the fear of the Lord is the awareness that God is watching and judging everything! If you were to live in the daily reality that God is evaluating everything you do, and that He is going to expose and judge every secret sin, what would change in your life?
Sin cera, Erik
Erik O. Garthe is Associate Pastor at Canton Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
