Prayer Meeting 23/8/2022
Lord I Know What's Wrong With Me, I Do Not Fear You
Well back in the middle of June we spoke at our prayer meeting, and the subheading was
‘God I Know What’s Wrong With Me, I’m Missing You’, where we addressed the reason we are not able to capture thoughts etc. was due to our lack of intimacy. What makes us miss people? - Love does, but we asked the question: do we miss God?
The teaching was in two parts, and we drew much from the puritan Thomas Brooks, from his work entitled ‘The Privy Key To Heaven’, or in other words our private prayer life; our devotional life - it’s what builds this intimacy and awareness. When we don’t know that a lack of God is what’s going on in us, we can be sure our devotional life has slipped. All our struggles can mostly be answered by our devotion, the greater the devotion the more we can spot things and cope and manage things.
Brooks writes:
How can you say you love me when you never acquaint me with your secrets? How can you say you love me, when you never bestow any private visits upon me?
Tonight I’m not going to be talking of this, but over the next two weeks we are going to have the same subheading: ‘Lord I Know What’s Wrong With Me, I Do Not Fear You’.
Proverbs 9:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Tonight we will draw from the Dutch puritan, whom you may not have heard of, his name is
Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635-1711). He preached and pastored in mostly Rotterdam. He wrote a wonderful work called ‘The Fear Of The Lord’, and we will be drawing from much of it tonight. Before we go into it, as always at our prayer nights, we read a puritan prayer, mostly from the Banner’s wonderful book ‘The Valley Of Vision’. This one is in pages 124-125, entitled ‘Yet I Sin’:
Eternal Father, Thou art good beyond all thought, But I am vile, wretched, miserable, blind; My lips are ready to confess, but my heart is slow to feel, and my ways reluctant to amend. I bring my soul to thee; break it, wound it, bend it, mould it. Unmask to me sin's deformity, that I may hate it, abhor it, flee from it. My faculties have been a weapon of revolt against thee; as a rebel I have misused my strength, and served the foul adversary of thy kingdom. Give me grace to bewail my insensate folly, Grant me to know that the way of transgressors is hard, that evil paths are wretched paths, that to depart from thee is to lose all good. I have seen the purity and beauty of thy perfect law, the happiness of those in whose heart it reigns, the calm dignity of the walk to which it calls, yet I daily violate and contemn its precepts. Thy loving Spirit strives within me, brings me Scripture warnings, speaks in startling providences, allures by secret whispers, yet I choose devices and desires to my own hurt, impiously resent, grieve, and provoke him to abandon me. All these sins I mourn, lament, and for them cry pardon. Work in me more profound and abiding repentance; Give me the fullness of a godly grief that trembles and fears, yet ever trusts and loves, which is ever powerful, and ever confident; Grant that through the tears of repentance I may see more clearly the brightness and glories of the saving cross.
I heard someone say if you don’t fear the Lord in this life, He will bring terror to your life at your death. To fear God is to know the state of your own heart. It is only God who can reveal that heart, and therefore He is the one we ought to fear. To not fear God, to only fear man, and what man can and can’t do to you or give you. Is to ignore the condition of our heart; it is to have a heart of stone.
Without the fear of the Lord, we can never be convicted of our sin, or maybe I should say this: we will never be continually convicted of our sin. The fear of the Lord is not the same as the fear of anything else. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of what brings balance and peace to our lives. What keeps us close to God? Is it just love alone? No!
Jeremiah 32:38-40
38 They shall be My people, and I will be their God; 39 then I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their children after them. 40 And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from doing them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts so that they will not depart from Me.
When are we least fearful of God? When we are at our most carnal. Ask yourself: would you really be doing what you do at times if you were in the presence of God? Yet you are.
You simply just don’t fear Him because your heart is far from Him. There is no greater deficiency in the life of a believer than that of having no fear, or little fear of the Lord.
Brakel writes:
Would you not have committed many more sins and neglected many more Holy things, if the fear of the Lord had not prevented you?
He adds:
Does not the fear of God nip many sins in the bud, and does this motivate you to perform your duty?
What will therefore cause us to live a Holy life? What will cause us to be ambassadors of Christ? Is it just love? No! I say again, it will also take the fear of God. I hear people say all the time, believers and unbelievers, atheists: ‘what kind of God desires you to fear Him and makes you fear Him?’. The answer is a loving, Holy, all-powerful God - that’s who. The same people who think it wrong to fear God, think nothing of fearing a boss, or losing money, or fearing spiders, or whatever - but to fear God is not.
What stopped Nehemiah from doing harm to others, and not abusing his position the way others did?
Nehemiah 5:14-15
14 Moreover, from the time that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year until the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes, twelve years, neither I nor my brothers ate the governor’s provisions. 15 But the former governors who were before me laid burdens on the people, and took from them bread and wine, besides forty shekels of silver. Yes, even their servants bore rule over the people, but I did not do so, because of the fear of God.
Was it his love of the people? No, it was his fear of the Lord. Yes, he had love of the people, but it was born from his obedience to God. Show me people who truly love people in a Christlike way, and I will show you a person who fears God more than man, who is obedient to God more than man. What is the root of dependency to man, to a lack of freedom from man? Does it not stem from not having enough fear of the Lord? Who teaches and lives the most Christlike love? Is it not those who fear the Lord more, those that are more devoted?
I’ve seen and battled with many a believer who fears so many things, yet seem to think they are this loving, caring, accepting person. And I’ve said you can’t fear man and things as much as you do, and think what you’re distributing is true love. True love is born from a fear of God, that trumps the fear of man, and makes us love people the right way. When we fear man, it does not just cause us to sin, but it causes us to go from one sin to the next.
Brakel writes five things that are ‘a dreadful sin’ about fearing man and not God. First of all ‘God has forbidden it’.
Matthew 10:28
28 And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Isaiah 51:12b
12…Who are you that you should be afraid of a man who will die…
Secondly:
It is the greatest act of contempt toward God—if He must yield to man for you. It is idolatry and a sin of the heathen. “who…worshiped and served the creature more than the creator” (Rom 1:25).
Thirdly:
It is a denial of the providence of God—as if God did not reign; as if the creature could function independently.
Fourthly:
It affects and troubles you continually.
Fifthly:
It causes you to fall from one sin into the next, and you ought therefore to be ashamed of your previous fear of man. Be warned and give heed to the exhortation of the Lord:
Isaiah 2:22
22Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?
Follow David in his noble courage.
Psalm 118:6
6The Lord is on my side; I will not fear—what can man do unto me?
Nehemiah’s love for his people whom he led was rooted in his obedience i.e. his fear of the Lord. Without the fear of God you won’t mourn at your sins. God chastises those whom He loves means that he brings fear back into the heart of the believer. Chastisement brings fear, it brings reverence. Lord I know what’s wrong with me, I don’t fear you at the moment. Meaning You’re not on my mind, You’re not in my thoughts. If God was on your mind, you would be way more weary of what you were doing, does that just come from love? No, it comes from awe and a knowing of His majesty. To sin we need to remove the majesty.
Brakel writes:
First, we are to be severely reprimanded, if, knowing that God is majestic, having experienced how good it is to humbly walk with the majestic one, and knowing how invigorating it is to walk in the way of uprightness, we nevertheless neglect to thus focus upon the Lord and fear him continually. This makes us vulnerable to all kinds of sin.
Brakel goes deeper here and brings an ever more scary, sobering thought when he says:
Secondly, this is followed by a disposition which is yet more evil, namely, when we even proceed to satisfy this lust, doing so not only when our conscience points out its evil, and counsels us not to begin; and upon having begun, counselled us to desist from and subdue the lust, to be silent in the midst of an evil discourse, and to refrain from the sin which we are currently committing; but also when our conscience causes us to reflect upon God and his majesty. Indeed, this is especially true (which is most abominable) when God manifests himself to the soul, sensibly discourages the soul from sin, and, so to speak, shakes his finger and says, “behold! I am here, and I certainly see what you are doing! Cease sinning—or else I shall cause you to feel my displeasure!” It is a setting aside of the fear of God, a grieving of the Holy spirit, and the inflicting of a deadly wound upon the soul when, due to the agitation of sin, we are driven onward and seek to hide ourselves from the presence of God in order to be able to proceed, and then actually prevail in carrying out the sin which is at hand. If God were not infinitely longsuffering and immutable, he would cast away such impudent souls!
How hard are our hearts when we do all to set aside God’s warnings, and finger pointing as Brakel says? The agitation we feel from the conviction, yet we find ways to push the agitation to a place of justification. When the Holy Spirit gives us an agitation in regard to indwelling sin, it is truly wounding to our soul to move that agitation to a place of justification. The fear of the Lord, is as Brakel says: ‘to be in the presence of the Lord’.
We will never be able to tame and control our thoughts, our deeds, our emotions, our desires without, as Brakel says: ‘tenderly committing ourselves to the fear of the Lord’. Your renewed man, your new man, has an inbuilt fear of God, you no longer have a heart of stone, but a heart of flesh, and that supple heart fears God, its awoken, its alive to God’s majesty and glory. But if we slumber and sleep, and fold our hands, our heart will harden, it will start to seek healing of the flesh, rather than healing of the soul.
Brakel again writes:
The fear of God is the fountain of all the holiness which delights you. Sinful lusts will lose their potency, corruptions which surface will readily be subdued, you will be stopped in the middle of sinning, and you will find yourself inclined toward the practice of all manner of virtues.
Proverbs 9:10
10The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Proverbs 15:33
33The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom.
Proverbs 19:23
23The fear of the Lord tends to life
The fear of the Lord equals intimacy with the Lord. Yes, in that intimacy is love and grace and mercy. But in that intimacy and time, is an awe of who He is, that we truly have a Godly fear that keeps us on the narrow path as much as His grace does.
Therefore we must pray: Lord teach me to fear you, as David did:
Psalm 86:11
11Teach me your way, O Lord; I will walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.
What caused David to sin? A lack of fear. What brought him back? The fear of the Lord. Let us pray this week to grow in the fear of the Lord. To be, when temptation comes, that our awe and fear is louder.
Amen.
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