5 minute read
Wholehearted Fear
5 Wholehearted Fear
The best biblical word to describe the fruit of faithing fear (eulabeia) is wholeheartedness. Just as felicitous is one description of our faithing fear, so is wholeheartedness. This level of commitment is a very important concept in the Bible. In fact, it is the word that describes the “normal Christian life,” as Watchman Nee expressed it. This level of spiritual living is what Jesus called the “abundant life” (John 10:10). Anything and everything less is abnormal, sub-normal, a spiritual anomaly. But the abnormal has become the new normal. As a result, millions of believers who have experienced eternal life are not enjoying the abundant life that Jesus made available to them through His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and bestowment of the Holy Spirit.
This level of total commitment is often expressed or implied in the Bible in opposition to half-heartedness. Sadly, it is a spiritual wilderness where so many of God’s people eke out their lives in miserable discontent, just like the children of Israel experienced for 40 years. According to the Bible, this kind of half-hearted commitment is an abnormal spiritual existence between the extremes of no commitment and total commitment. It kept a whole generation of Israelites from entering the Promised Land. It still does the same today, which is why most Christians half-heartedly live out their spiritual lives in the wilderness. It is a carnal halfway
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point that always leads to spiritual half-stepping in our obedience to the Lord—one step forward, two steps backward! Not much spiritual progress is ever made toward maturity in Christ.
Sadly, this half-heartedness causes us to live at the slowest pace and lowest place in our Christian lives. As a result, we neither glorify the Lord, satisfy ourselves, nor edify others. We live a halfway Christian life that tries to simultaneously love God and love the world. As I said above, this is what the Bible calls carnal living or living a life dominated by the flesh rather than living a life controlled by the Spirit. We have just enough Christianity and spirituality to be miserable and to make others miserable! Obviously, that kind of half-hearted Christian living is a poor advertisement to the non-Christian world. And the root problem is this matter of the fear of God.
In reality, half-hearted Christians neither fear God nor fear sin. Instead, they try to have a little love for both. But what happens is that they tend to love God less and love the world more.
By contrast, when a person really fears God, then he or she loves what God loves and hates what God hates. That’s true holiness of heart. But as A.W. Tozer rightly said, most of us pray this way: “Lord make me holy—but not entirely!” That means we want to keep a few favorite sins for ourselves that we feel are necessary for our happiness and fulfillment. Sadly, so many of us want to be happy far more than we want to be holy.
However, we need to realize that there is no true happiness apart from holiness. One is a by-product of the other. With
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that spiritual principle in mind, let’s look at some biblical examples that clearly set forth this primary fruit of fear, which increases our love for God and decreases our love of sin.
• “Job . . . feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). • “The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding” (Job. 28:28). • “Let those who love the Lord hate evil” (Psalm 97:10). • “To fear the Lord is to hate evil” (Proverbs 8:13). • “The wise fear the Lord and shun evil” (Proverbs 14:16). • “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, turning a person from the snares of death” (Proverbs 14:27). • “Through the fear of the Lord evil is avoided” (Proverbs 16:6).
If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we have only a half-hearted commitment toward God. That’s why there is so much sin disobedience and discontent in the lives of professing Christians. They really do not fear God. That’s why so many of us need to hear and heed the words of King Jehoshaphat: “You must serve faithfully and wholeheartedly in the fear of the Lord . . . you are to warn them not to sin against the Lord” (2 Chronicles 19:9–10).
Likewise, through the prophet Jeremiah, God said, “I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will
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always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them” (Jeremiah 32:39).
The call is to fear and follow God wholeheartedly or singleheartedly rather than half-heartedly. This is a recurring theme in the Bible (Numbers 14:24; 32:11–12; Joshua 14:8–9; 1 Kings 8:23; 2 Chronicles 15:15; 31:21; Psalm 119:80; Ephesians 6:7). That’s why Paul’s prayer and praise for the saints at Rome is so relevant for each of us: “Thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance” (Romans 6:17).
So, God wants us to fear Him with our whole hearts. Then we will increasingly and wholeheartedly hate sin. In the meantime, it is blatantly obvious that humanity increasingly has no fear of God, since they thumb their noses at His every decree. As the Bible says, they not only break His laws, they “invent ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30).
Even more tragic, too many of us as Christians have only a half-hearted fear of God. As a result, we are half-hearted in our love, obedience, worship, giving, and serving. But God’s Word is clear about evil behavior: “There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil” (Romans 2:9).
When we do not have a proper fear of God, then we soon cease to respect authority, parents, government, life, marriage, sexuality, and nature. Both biblical and secular history painfully demonstrate that a loss of the fear of God always leads to moral indifference at best or moral rebellion at worst. Morality can only be built upon the foundational fear of God!
So, our prayer must be: “Father, give me a loving fear and
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fearful love of You that will cause me to love what You love and hate what You hate. Amen!”
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