Chan's Personal Blog

Today my pastor gave a very good message on, "The Fear of The Lord." I'm just going to go over the most interesting point. He did an interesting overview of different religions and the types of fear they have for their gods. Some fear their gods, as in I'm scared. We should have reverant fear for God. Reverence is defined as, "a feeling of profound awe and respect and often love." This kind of fear is synonymous to children fearing your parents, as in respecting them.

The other interesting point he covered was that we now fear man more than we fear God. We fear the laws of man more than we fear the laws of God. The pastor pointed to history of many instances where man had tried to erase God by passing laws to contain God, and they failed. Hitler had tried, Stalin had tried, the Chinese communists had tried, but they were unable to eradicate God's influence. Instead, the opposite has happened; for example, China now has one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the world. One of our missionaries in Estonia (ex-soviet Republic) provided a very interesting statistic. Fifteen years ago, Estonia was still a communist nation where all religion was barred. There were zero pentecostal churches in Estonia. Once the iron curtain fell, there has been explosive growth. Now the country has 80 pentecostal churches (that's only counting churches in this particular denomination, there are WAY more churches there overall). Building 80 churches in 15 years is quite amazing.

We fear man more than we fear God, that really resonated with me. Quite, ironic in the grand scheme of things. I'm reminded by two Lord of The Rings quotes that I like a lot, "And nine, nine rings were gifted to the race of Men, who above all else, desire power." There's also, "the hearts of men are easily corrupted."

In either case, I'm not saying that we shouldn't fear (as in respect) our fellow man. Good message though.