Latest / The Daily Word / September 29 – Who Do You Fear?
Transcript
- Cory: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good wee hours of the night. Whenever you're joining us, welcome to the Daily Word podcast from Lakeshore Christian Fellowship. My name is Corey Barnes, and it's my privilege to serve as our Kotaba Campus pastor. I'm excited to be sitting down with you for another Daily Word episode where we're going to be doing a devotion out of the New Testament portion of our life journal Bible reading plan. Today is September, the 29th, already almost into October, pretty wild, pretty crazy, years flown by. Luke chapter 12. That's what we're reading today. And I noticed something for the first time when I was reading through this chapter, and that's that all these stories, all these teachings from Jesus, I think they have a similar overarching theme. And I think that theme is highlighted in verse chapter five. But I will show you whom you should fear, fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell. Yes, I say to you, fear him. Here we have a lot of different teachings coming from Jesus, and I honestly think that there's a common thread between all of them tying back to the Fear of the Lord. Now this isn't a super duper common teaching in the contemporary church, the Church of twenty twenty six. We don't talk about the fear of the Lord a whole whole lot because people in the past have kind of gone too far with it, and we don't go far enough with it sometimes in in the church at large. So so let's make sure we're all on the same page about what the fear of the Lord. Is the fear of the Lord is a holy reverential awe and respect for God. Now, when you hear fear of the Lord, the word fear there makes it sound like we're supposed to be afraid of God. That's not really what the fear of the Lord means, though. think about like like I had both of my parents were loving people, my dad. I was very was very loving to me, and he never gave me any reason to be scared of him, to be afraid of him, but I feared him in the sense that I feared the consequences of displeasing him, feared the consequences of disobeying him and the punishments, the discipline. That he would bring to bear. I respected him because I knew that if I crossed a line with him, he would be just and faithful to bring on some punishment with that belt. So I feared my father in that regard. I was never afraid or scared of him, just like we're never supposed to be afraid or scared of our heavenly father, but we are called to fear him. To fear the God who, at a word, created all that we see. He spoke everything we see into existence. Hebrews tells us that the very power of his words is what's holding all of existence together. It is the glue that holds atoms together, that brings life into existence, that gives breath to us to be able to breathe. This is the God that we serve, and we should accord him the proper respect and awe that he deserves based on who he is. And this theme, we can see how that plays into every story that Jesus shared here. from the beginning with verses one through three, the yeast of the Pharisees, hypocrisy, saying one thing publicly, doing or saying something else in private. Well, all that's gonna come to light one day. We should fear the Lord and we should fear that consequence happening. verses four through twelve, that's explicitly where Jesus says, fear God, because he has the power to send to hell. Don't fear men who can kill the body and do nothing after that. Don't fear man, fear God. Verses thirteen through twenty one say that we should fear God. Well they don't say that, but we can deduce that. We can see this theme writing in it, that we can we should fear God, and the fear of God keeps our eyes on the Lord for providing for us not on riches, not on a worldly good. goods, it is the Lord who provides for us. Kind of a similar thought there that we can extract from verses 22 to 34, that if God provides clothing for flowers, food for the sparrow, if he is just that good and that powerful, we should fear the Lord enough not to worry about our own provision. We should respect Respect him, that he is a God of his word, that when he said, I will provide for all of your needs, that he meant it. And instead of worrying about what we have or don't have, we should fear him enough to bypass all that and have faith in him. And of course, verses 35 through 48, where it talks about the servant who is abusive to other servants while their master is away. I think that one's really obvious. That the Lord is coming back and we don't want to be caught unawares. We want to get this thing right. We want to make sure we don't live like the Lord doesn't see what we're doing. That way, our lives don't end when we are not walking in righteousness. So we can see this theme kind of pulled through. it's not that Jesus identified it, this is just Corey's. Reading of it, but I think it bears witness, and I think it's got some value there that we should fear the Lord and we see these different areas of fearing him. Fearing him in the way we live and not living as hypocrites, fearing him instead of fearing men, fearing him instead of worldly goods, fearing him instead of worry, fearing him and living right and treating others. Well, as he has commanded us to do. So all that we could bring application out of each and every one of those, right? Like we could go down the list and we could have a very practical conversation with Jesus. Lord, Lord, is there something in my life that I am living in hypocrisy? Am I living in the yeast of the Pharisees instead of fearing you? Am I fearing men? instead of fearing you, am I worried about what they will do to me, what they will say of me or think of me instead of fearing what you think of me. We could go through that. Am I fearing you instead of riches? Am I fearing you or am I fearing lack of provision? All those things. And we can have beautiful conversations. So this is kind of a very multifaceted application on today's devotion. And I trust that if you have a conversation with the Lord and if you'd go down those different trails with him, I trust that if there is anything we can trust together that he will be good and he will be faithful to open our eyes to be able to see what it is that he wants to communicate to us today. So go about it, go have a conversation with the Lord, allow him to search your heart, allow these scriptures to search your heart. Let's pray. Father, I just thank you. I thank you that you are so good. I thank you that you are so powerful, that there is no need that we should fear you in the sense of being afraid of you, but that we should always have holy, reverential, awe-filled respect for who you are, for your station, for your position and all of existence as the guy, the Lord. the master. So Lord, I pray that in all of our lives you would show us any areas where we are not walking in fear of you the way that we should, whether it be in our living, our worrying, our our provision, our thought process, Lord, I pray that you would keep our eyes on you, your promises, and all that you have told us to do and be. And I thank you, Jesus, for working us to in us to will and to do for your good pleasure today. In the name of Jesus, amen.