Fear God

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“Lord, I have heard the report about You and I fear. O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy." Hab. 3:2

I had the thought this week that we (as people, a nation, and sometimes even the Church) have lost our fear of God. That might sound like a good thing because we think of fear as a negative term, but Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary helps clarify the type of fear I mean:
In good men, the fear of God is a holy awe or reverence of God and his laws, which springs from a just view and real love of the divine character, leading the subjects of it to hate and shun every thing that can offend such a holy being, and inclining them to aim at perfect obedience.
We reverence very few things, and we lack a holy awe for God because we have so little understanding of His character. Simply put, my awe of Him increases proportionately with my knowledge of who He is. If I understand who He is, then I will learn to hate what He hates and love what He loves, and my aim will be to “be perfect” [complete, mature] as my Father in heaven is perfect as Jesus commands His followers in Matt. 5:48.
This fear I speak of leads me to be more like Him as I understand His character. This fear does not lead me to snivel without hope in a corner—no! It is a bold fear; it is a fear that draws me to Him. When I truly understand His nature, I awefully respect it. God longs for us to fear Him in this way, and He rewards us for our awe and reverence of Him. In Deuteronomy 5:29, this longing shows when He says to Moses, “Oh, that they [the children of Israel] had such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever” (NASB). God longs for us to fear Him, but we ignorantly stew in our lack of reverence for Him that stems from our lack of knowledge of Him.
I pray that He would revive His work in the midst of these years that we have stupidly set Him aside while we’ve pursued the gods of this world. It is my prayer that He will make His work known (for His fame) that others might be drawn to Him. It is my prayer that we will not have to know His wrath and need the mercy in the midst of it—rather, that we would truly fear Him.

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