What is the proper fear of God?
To some the fear of God appears to be a fear of this terrible threat from a powerful being. It seems indistinguishable from the cowardice to surrender to the threat of a gunman waving a gun around and the sefishness of someone that obeys the gunman at the cost of other just to preserve his own life. I know that this is not the proper fear of God because I know that this is not the character of God. God is the one who loves us better than we love ourselves and we can trust in Him better than we can trust ourselves. Why oh why then should we have any fear of Him?
The proper fear of God is nothing like that, for it has nothing to do with threats and promises. The proper fear of God derives simply from the fact that He is beyond our ability to manipulate in any way. He knows the truth and He knows what is required for us come to eternal life in a relationship with Him and that is a reality that our wishful thinking and deal making attempt at manipulation simply cannot change. There are no magic words or short cuts that will get us there. There are no passwords to let us through. There is no secret knowledge that will show us the way. There are no rituals (whether you call them communion or baptism) that will put God on our side. There are no dogmas that you can agree to that will bind God to you in some kind of contract. There are no political causes you can champion that will bring you into God favor. There are no works, missions or tasks that you can do for Him that will earn you His acceptance. This is what is scary.
The only answer is faith. You must surrender completely and put your head into the mouth of the lion of Judah and He will either save you or dispose of you. Knowing my sins and my unworth that is a fearful thing to do indeed and yet this I will do because is the one thing that I am sure is worth doing, for I understand quite clearly now that His will is more important than my own. This is what salvation by grace alone through faith alone means: that only God can save us and all that we can do is put our faith in Him. When we do that, then it is our love for Him that guides the rest of our life. Do our flaws vanish? No. Do we suddenly have all the right answers? NO! Will we stop doing anything at all because nothing we do is important anymore? No. We will do our best in faith out of our love for Him. But there is ONE thing that should definitely change, for that if nothing else should be the measure of our faith and that is that we cannot think that the answer lies inside of us. How then can we measure others? We should know that we cannot do so.
But it is inevitable that men should remake Christianity into another legalistic religion trying to bind both God and men in their habitual attempt to manipulate and control all the things in their world from the day they are born. And so they will change the scripture from a gospel message of liberation to a textbook of instructions. And in this way the words of Jesus go right over their heads, "you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they which bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life" (John 5:39-40). Unwittingly the Christians that do this have repeated the error of the Pharisees and doing this they "shut the kingdome of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you traverse see and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." As unwitting as all this is, Christians really should know better because in taking it on themselves to speak and act for God in telling others the way they must go, such a result is inevitable.
Jesus came that we would have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10), by bearing witness to the truth (John 18:37), because the truth will set us free (John 8:32). What does this mean? That God would put us in chains to say that we can only do the approved things on a list? Those that think this have made God a small and tiny light in a vast darkness, which is a lie! It is God and His goodness that is infinite and it is evil which small and insignificant. Thus the message of the gospel is not to accept chains of slavery but to leave our dark hole behind and to let God liberate our spirit by letting His inspiration teach us how to make the most of our lives, and that is not a regimented program of cookie cutter lives but one of infinite possibilites.