Fear for Life R1587

God has an encouraging word for you and me today through the Bible-based preaching of Dr. Don Wilton and a message on fear.

Sometimes it seems that fear binds us, it holds us back, but there is a certain respectful fear, a fear of God that will actually empower us and give us strength to move through our day. In just a few moments, Dr. Don Wilton will take us to Psalm 115 with this unique message on fear for life. As we open God's Word together, know that we're here for you opening the phone lines at 866-899-WORD. We'd love to pray with you and for you. And we'd also love to meet you online at tewonline.org. That's the place you can sign up for the daily encouraging word devotional from Dr. Don as well.

Online at tewonline.org. We'd love to connect with you. And now let's open our hearts and God's Word together to Psalm 115 with Dr. Don Wilton. I'm going to ask you to open your Bibles with me to Psalm 115. Psalm 115. I want to speak to you for just a moment about the one thing that no graduate can possibly afford to be without. My subject is entitled fear for life.

Fear for life. I'm going to read to you in Psalm 115 and just a few verses beginning at verse 12. This is what God says. The Lord remembers us and He will bless us. He will bless the house of Israel. He will bless the house of Aaron. He will bless those who fear the Lord, both small and great alike. May the Lord make you increase both you and your children. And may you be blessed by the Lord, the maker of the heavens and the earth. So here it is.

Are you ready for this? What can we say to people in today's world about the blessings of God? I'm going to say to our graduates today because we are so proud of you.

And that's been very evident even today as we've celebrated together. There are many things that you are going to be given advice about. You're going to be told to get a good education.

Check that off. Absolutely. You're going to be told to walk properly, to talk properly. You're going to be told to live right. You're going to be told to be careful what you put into your body.

You're going to be told so many different things, all of which are incredible. Those who understand finances are going to tell you to take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. They're going to say to you from the earliest age, save money, even if it's one dollar a month. Your mothers are going to tell you don't lie in the sun too long while you're young because the time's going to come that you're going to be sorry that you did. One or two of you that smoke cigarettes, they're going to tell you don't do it because you run the real possibility that in the coming years you might suddenly find yourself with the consequence of smoking. They're going to tell you don't drink.

That's almost like a joke today, isn't it? But some people are going to say to you as they go through recovery programs and divorces, those who are sitting in prisons because of DUIs and all kinds of problems created by alcohol, they're going to say to you don't do it. But what God is going to say to you is so dramatic that it's hard to put into words because the reality of life today tells us that we are going to be confronted with every kind of circumstance one can imagine. I pray that we will never ever face another killing like we've just seen in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I pray that there will never be another riot in America. I pray that we will never again face a virus. I pray that none of us will ever hurt. I pray that no one will ever lose a child in childbirth again. I pray that there will never be another marriage that will ever experience difficulties.

I pray that nobody here will ever again be laid off from their job, but we know that that's not true. And God tells us in his word that the key to all of this is that we fear the Lord. This is a condition when God told us in his word that if we want to hear him from heaven and we want God to forgive us for our sin and we want God to heal our land, he told us what the condition is. Humble yourself, seek my face, pray and turn from your wicked way.

And if we do that, God will do this. God tells us if we want the hand of God's blessing upon our lives, the one requirement is that we fear God. Oswald Chambers made this statement. I put it on my Twitter account yesterday.

It just grabbed my heart. This is what he said. And I quote, the remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else. Whereas if you fear not God, you fear everything else.

Let me just run that by again. Oswald Chambers said this. The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else. Whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.

Somebody else put it like this, and I love this quote if you want to remember one. We fear men so much because we fear God so little. We fear mankind. We fear our lives. We fear our circumstances. We fear death. We fear the breakup, the breakdown. We fear the violence. We fear the unknown. We fear everything that our humanity will give to us.

And we fear it so much because we fear God so little. You know, those Sadducees and Pharisees came to the Lord Jesus Christ. And boy, they tried to pigeonhole Jesus. They came to him with all their legalism, with all their religiosity. They came to them with all their culture. They came to Jesus with all their education. They came to Jesus with all their spaceships, their rocket ships and all their brilliance.

And they tried to confront him. And Jesus looked into the heart of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And he said in Matthew chapter 15 and verse 8, You people honor me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me. You're listening to Dr. Don Wiltum here on The Encouraging Word and that challenge from Matthew. Oh, goodness, Lord, help us not to just confess with our lips, but yet our heart grow cold. Perhaps you'd like to have someone praying with you about your life, about situations and circumstances, perhaps you feel like have chilled your heart to God.

Let us pray for God to renew a fresh wind and a fresh fire in each of us. Our phone number is 866-899-WORD. That's 866-899-9673. And we'd love to connect with you. As a matter of fact, we'd be thrilled to connect with you in a number of ways. You can do that on our website as well, www.tewonline.org. Here's Liz with all the ways to connect.

Do you know someone that could use some encouragement? We're here to help. Visit our online web store at tewonline.org. It's like having a Christian bookstore at your fingertips 24 hours a day. You will find sermon messages, books, and outreach cards. Let us take care of the shipping and help you send a word of hope today. The Encouraging Word is a viewer and listener supported ministry that trusts in God to supply our needs through people.

Thank you for listening today. And now back to today's message, Fear for Life with Dr. Don Wilton on the Encouraging Word. What does it mean to fear God? What does that mean? It really means four things.

I'm just going to give them to you very quickly. It means, number one, to reverence God. That little word reverence there means that you respect, you admire, you adore our God, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When you adore him, you are going to place yourself in a position to do anything for him. To fear God carries with it the idea of reverence. It means, second, that you will worship him. It means that everything that you do in your life, I fear God, therefore I worship him with all my heart and my soul and my mind. But it also means if I fear God, I'm going to obey God. I'm going to do what God tells me to do. It also means I'm going to submit to him. This is what God said here.

I didn't say this. God said, if you want me to bless you, fear me. That means reverence me. That means worship me. That means obey me. That means submit to me.

So here's the bottom line. What is the Bible tells us that the fear of the Lord produces in us? What do you get for this?

What can I be very personal? Lord, when I fear you, when I reverence you, when I worship you, when I obey you, when I submit to you, what is it that you do in turn for me? Do you know that as I did my study on this particular aspect of God's blessing, there are over 500 references to fearing the Lord in the Scriptures.

Can you imagine that? I don't want to give anybody the fear of the Lord here, but I thought to myself, you know, I need to preach this morning on all 500 of these blessings that God will give to us. So let me give you three of them. Here's what this produces. Number one, the fear of the Lord produces wisdom. Graduates, look at me.

Spiritual wisdom is the capacity to use knowledge God's way. You cannot do without that. So can I be a little bit negative here?

Just for a tad bit. Is it possible there's a graduate sitting here right here today, and you're going to go on, you're going to get Ph.D. after Ph.D., you're going to become world renowned. Who knows, you might get the next Nobel Prize for mathematics or geophysics. God's word tells us if you want to be blessed of the Lord, you will never receive his blessings unless you understand the product of that blessing. And that when you fear God, when you reverence him and you worship him and you obey him and you submit to him, God in his great majesty is going to give to you wisdom.

Proverbs 1 verse 7 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You can have a lot of degrees. I love talking about degrees. I love talking about studies because I've been there like so many of us.

My favorite saying is you can have so many degrees behind your name that you begin to look like a thermometer. Some of you young people are so brilliant, you're so intelligent, you're so capable, but God's not going to bless you unless you fear him. And I'm going to tell you, my friend, you cannot live without the wisdom of God. And the wisdom of God is the capacity to use knowledge.

That's what happened to Solomon. The wisdom of God is the spiritual gift that God gives to you to translate life's data in a spiritual manner. God will give to you an inner insight. He will take your intelligence and your understanding and he will translate it into a spiritual dynamic and in that realm he will bless you beyond anything you can possibly imagine.

What does it produce? It produces wisdom, but it also provides us with nourishment, fearing the Lord, provides us with nourishment. Proverbs 14, 27 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the fountain of life.

By the way, that was a beautiful Hebraic expression. The fear of the Lord is the fountain of life. It carries with it the idea of the nourishment of life. That's what a fountain is. A fountain is a spring of fresh water that just keeps coming up from within the heart and soul of God's earth and replenishes you and refreshes you and strengthens you by the might and power of the Spirit of the living God. And God says that's the means by which you and I will become blessed in him.

You're not going to make it. Without the nourishment that only God can give to you from the fountain of life and the means by which you gain that is to fear the Lord. But there's a third point here concerning the fear of the Lord. It not only gives us wisdom and provides us with essential spiritual nourishment, but it leads us to life. Probably my favorite reference to the fear of the Lord is Proverbs 19 and verse 23. The fear of the Lord leads to life.

Why does it lead to life? Because only the Lord Jesus Christ is the one who loves you enough to give you life. He's the only one who went to the cross for you.

He's the only one who can forgive you. He's the only one who can change your whole perspective. He's the only one who can give you essential meaning. You know it's what Christ has done in me that makes the difference even in the tumult and the turmoil of the life that we lead and live in the world in which we find ourselves. You and I cannot cope in a world like this without Jesus. A world without Christ is a world without life, real life. Jesus said, I've come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. So here's the question.

How do you fear the Lord for life? I'm going to leave you with four things today. Here they are. This is what you and I have to do. Number one, determine who you belong to. Determine who you belong to. If I had my way today, I would ask Seth and say to him, Seth, could we just get all the graduates up here and one by one come through and let me be very cheeky and look at every graduate in the eye and say, who do you belong to? Do you belong to God or do you belong to this world?

Have you settled that issue? I wonder if there's anyone here today or within the sound of my voice and the thousands who are worshipping with us by television and live streaming and Facebook and YouTube all around the world. I wonder if there's anyone, would we be given the opportunity that would readily come up and say, Pastor, I'll stand there and say this. Nobody else does. I wish when I graduated that I had settled the issue of who I belong to. Do you know how many people, young people, I meet?

I'm just one person who look at me and say, you know what? I'm now 50 years of age. I wish I could get those 30 years back again. I wish I hadn't done this. I wish I hadn't gone there.

I wish I hadn't drank this, smoked that. I wish I hadn't messed around. I wish I hadn't been unfaithful. I wish I hadn't sold my soul. I wish I hadn't been such a party animal. I wish I hadn't thought life was just one big never ending joke. I wish I hadn't been so disobedient to my parents and the people that I love and trust.

I wish I'd said yes more often and I wish I'd said no more often. You might say to me today, well, pastor, how can I fear the Lord for life? It starts right there at the beginning. You've got to settle the issue of who you belong to. Give your life to Jesus.

You know, guys, can I be honest with you? I went to boarding school in Africa. I remember making a decision for Christ when I was just eight or nine years of age. I don't know what got into me. I didn't have a rotten life or anything, but gradually over the years and especially in my teen years, man, did I let it rip. I got stories like everybody. I was never overtly a bad person.

I certainly committed no crimes. Okay, well, I spent one night in the brig when I was in the army. I'm just getting that out of my system. But that paratrooper deserved what he got coming from me.

And no decent person who's in the army deals with paratroopers who think they more than they ought to be. So there it is. I've confessed that. But by the way, he was there too. We were all there. But you know, it was only after I met a beautiful young lady who loved Jesus.

Shortly after I married her that I came to my senses and realized that unless I feared God, I would never receive his blessings. Determine who you belong to, then choose whom you will serve. Choose whom you will serve. Watch me, guys.

I'm going to make the most outrageous statement ever. You can belong to Jesus, but not serve Him. You can become a Sunday morning Christian.

I'll guarantee you there's at least one person here today who can identify with what I'm talking about. It's not about whether or not you know the Lord. It's whether or not you serve Him. Number three, submit to whom you will follow.

You know, if you've said yes to Jesus and you've chosen to serve Him, the third thing that follows is you've got to submit to Him. And the final thing, celebrate who you are. Can I tell you something? I want you to know that I'm a Christian man.

You got a problem with that? I want you to know that. I'm a Christian man. I've got a ton of friends sitting out here.

Some of you are going to say, well, pastor, you're setting yourself up for something fantastic. I can get down with the best of them. I love doing it all. I love vacations and fishing and good surf and travelling overseas.

Love going to ball games, yelling my head off, getting alongside with the best, going totally crazy at the best times. But there's one thing I want you to know. I'm not laying down, not for you, not for you, not for the President of the United States, not for the Prime Minister, not for the Queen of England, not for Spartanburg, not for a city official, not to get a scholarship, not to be invited to the party, not to be in the popular group. I am not going to lay down my fear of the Lord. I am going to continue to revere Him, to worship Him, to submit to Him, to follow Him, because He's my Saviour and my Lord. And as soon as you bring to me something that violates my relationship with Jesus Christ, only by God's grace, I am not going to do that.

Do you understand me? I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. If it means you're going to turn around, walk off, tell me I'm the worst thing since peanut butter, if it means you're not going to invite me over to your house, you're not going to invite me to the local dance, you're not going to have me in that sorority or that fraternity, I'm not going to be in the inside club or the outside club, or you tell me I'm not welcome, or you're going to cross the street. Read my lips.

Too bad. I'm a Christian man. I belong to Jesus Christ. And what Jesus Christ tells me is to serve Him with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind. Please, young people, I know we're celebrating our graduates, but it's not just about you. It's about all of us. Can I just say to you today, fear the Lord, man.

Fear God. Would you bow your heads with me today? As Dr. Don begins to pray in our sanctuary, know that we'd love to pray specifically and personally with you. Our phone number is 866-899-WORD. That's 866-899-9673. And as Dr. Don has been teaching the Word today, perhaps the Lord has stirred in you some questions that need answers. We're here.

866-899-9673. We'd love to pray with you and pray for you. That powerful phrase of understanding that if we just fear God, we need fear nothing else. There is strength in that truth, and I pray that you would understand that God loves you and is using this broadcast to let you know how much He loves you. Before we get away, would you take a moment and hear these, perhaps the most important words from our pastor, Dr. Don Wilson.

They're next. Are you ready to give your heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ? I'm so happy to hear that. Why don't you pray this prayer with me today? Dear God, I know that you love me very, very much, and I know that the Lord Jesus Christ came and died on a cross so that I might be forgiven of my sin. Today, I repent of my sin. I confess my sin to you, and I invite you to come into my heart and into my life by faith. In Jesus' name I pray. If you've prayed that prayer, let me be the first one to welcome you to the family of God.

This is wonderful. I hope that you know how much I'm going to be praying for you and how very important this is for me. Call us so that we can talk to you and connect you in the right place so you can begin this wonderful journey. If you've just given your heart to Christ, perhaps praying with Dr. Don or maybe throughout the entire day, this broadcast has drawn you to a commitment to rededicate your life to Jesus Christ.

Welcome home, and welcome to the family of God. We have wonderful resources that Dr. Don Wilton has prepared for you that would help you take the next steps into becoming more of a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, of helping you plug into a local church. We have church partnerships literally around the globe with hopefully somebody that's probably within a zip code or two of where you are right now that would love to welcome you to their church.

Maybe you already know the church you need to plug into. It's a church maybe you've been watching and connecting with during this coronavirus separation, and now you realize it's time to get more connected personally with that church, not just as an observer, a spectator, but a participant. God calls us to participate in the work of God, to get together. We are not called to a solo ministry, but instead to the body of Christ. We want to be a part of that community. We'd love to pray with you right now at 866-899-WORD. That's 866-899-9673. Or if you'd like to, we'll connect online keyboard to keyboard at www.tewonline.org. That's www.tewonline.org.