A Missing Ingredient?

“If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” 1 Peter 1:17-21

The great preacher Jonathan Edwards is well known for his convicting message “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Under his preaching, many came to repentance and salvation from sin and eternal separation from God. We don’t hear much from pulpits these days about “the fear of God.” But God’s Word has much to say about this issue of “fearing God.”
   
God’s word to Jeremiah (32:39-40) is as applicable to Christians today as it was to the nation Israel when He said, “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good....I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”
                   
Do you see evidence in today’s Christian world of a pervasive “fear of the Lord” among God’s people? Maybe, just maybe, that’s the missing ingredient in many lives. Where is the holy reverence and awe in today’s church, the kind we clearly see in Old Testament worship and in the early church? Without the fear of the Lord, we are left with only a form of godliness!

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge...” Proverbs 1:7