Teach me Your way, O LORD;

I will walk in Your truth;

Unite my heart to fear Your name.

—Psalm 86:11

This morning’s post is going to be a little different. I started this blog with the idea that I would actively seek out what the Lord wanted to teach me that week and write about it. This lesson has been a little longer in the learning and comes with some accountability on my part, so today’s post is going to start with a confession.

For quite a while, the Holy Spirit has been opening my eyes to how I’ve resisted His influence in areas of my life when those potential changes scare me. 

An example happened just last night. I was doing a Bible study on faith and fear and the lesson I was working on was about the fear of the Lord. I was a little annoyed because the first question it asked was, “What is the fear of the Lord?” That’s a question I’ve never felt like I’d understood how to answer. I knew that for a Christian I didn’t believe that fear references abject mortal terror, but I didn’t have a clear understanding before I read the lesson and I didn’t feel like I was any better off after reading it.

All of the reference passages the lesson sent me to used the term in a positive way. In other words, if the verse was in a psalm, the whole psalm would be about how wonderful God is and then a verse would be thrown in there with this idea of fearing the Lord. This matches with the idea I’ve always had that the fear of the Lord is a positive experience for the believer, but I didn’t feel like I understood what that feeling was, and I was pretty convinced I’d never felt it, at least in the way Scripture was describing it.

My initial reaction to this was to think, or really half pray, that I would like to experience that feeling as described in Scripture. I didn’t even make it through the whole thought before I corrected myself. In my mind, I immediately turned away from that idea and erected a mental walk between myself and that desire. All because by starting to think that thought, I began to think about what trials God might put me through to teach me that lesson.

I let my fear of hypothetical difficulties cut my heart and mind off from the work the Holy Spirit was doing in me. And if I’m not mistaken, I’ve probably been doing this for years.

To keep myself from focusing too much on the mini-rebellion taking place in my mind, I continued to look up passages about the fear of the Lord…and thus I found Psalm 86:11. A verse in which David asks God to teach him and keep his heart united in the fear of the Lord rather than divided by fear of circumstances.

So I’m going to step forward in trying to understand the fear of the Lord more this morning. Here’s what my very academically wired brain noticed.

I’ve always heard that when we talk about the fear of the Lord, what we’re really talking about isn’t fear, but awe and reverence. That felt a bit like a cop-out to me because the word in all the English versions I’ve looked at is clearly fear, so I looked deeper. The original word can be interpreted as to stand in awe and to revere, but the fact that translators never seem to use those meanings was still suspicious to me.

So I looked back at other passages that reference the fear of the Lord and I noticed something—in every passage I looked at, the fear of the Lord was thrown in with praise, worship, and thanksgiving.

Psalm 89 starts with rejoicing over the lovingkindness and faithfulness of the Lord. Just before the mention of the fear of the Lord in verse 7, David declares that the heavens will praise God for His faithfulness and then praises the Lord himself for His strength. Even verse 7 praises God for being both great and awesome before he returns to God’s faithfulness and strength in the next few verses.

Jeremiah 10 starts by mocking idolatry, especially the worship of handmade idols before shifting in verse 6 where Jeremiah praises God for His greatness and might. In the next verse, where the mention of the fear of God appears, he continues to praise God’s wisdom and uniqueness. 

Psalm 111 is a psalm entitled “The Lord Praised for His Goodness.” The writer gives thanks to the Lord for the great things He has done. He praises God’s works as being splendid and majestic, saying they are words of truth and justice. Then he ends verse 10, which references the fear of the Lord with the phrase His praise endures forever.

And Psalm 86 is no different. Verses 12-13 give thanks to God and worship Him for His lovingkindness and His deliverance.

I’m sure there’s plenty more for me to investigate, and I’d love your thoughts on the fear of the Lord in the Facebook comments. I didn’t get to all the passages about the fear of the Lor—just these few that He led me to last night, but for now, God has shown me that there’s nothing to fear in fearing the Lord and submitting to what He is teaching me. 

If you’re in a similar place, I pray you’ll join me in stepping into what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives. Whether it be about the fear of the Lord or not, I believe surrendering to His work and giving Him free reign will be more freeing than fearful in the long run.