The Perspective that Changes Everything

Good morning! Good morning! Great to have you guys here. Hey, just kind of a quick show of hands. This is kind of an abstract question. How many of you enjoy optical illusions? How many of you enjoy that kind of stuff, right? I love this kind of stuff, so I'm going to show you some of these. I'm going to start with a familiar one. Let me put this on screen. Now, what is this a picture of? Shout what you see here in this picture. What do you see? Old lady, old girl, some of you are saying both. Right, depending on your perspective, this is either a picture of a young girl looking into the distance. You see there's her face. You see the outline of her chin there and her eyelash and her nose looking away from you. Or it's an old lady with a big nose and a big chin. You see that? It just kind of depends on how you look at it. Isn't that kind of cool? I love optical illusions, especially illusions that play with your perspective.

Like, let me show you a video that we found on YouTube this morning. It's all about perspective. Look at this guy's desk. It's got all kinds of stuff on it. Like this Rubik's Cube, also obviously a normal Rubik's Cube. Or is it? It's an optical illusion. It's just a flat piece of paper. In fact, look at the rest of the things on this man's desk. Look at this roll of tape. Clearly, it's a real roll of tape. The camera's even going to zoom in and show you. It's a real roll of tape. It's three-dimensional, just like any other roll of tape. Except for the fact that it, just like the Rubik's Cube, is actually a flat piece of paper. And it depends on your perspective what you see.

In fact, every single thing you see on this person's desk is an optical illusion. Clearly, this old shoe looks very comfortable. The camera's going to zoom in and it's going to show us how three-dimensional this thing is, right? I mean, obviously this thing is an object. Except when the camera zooms back again, you'll see this guy's hand come down and demonstrate the fact that it is all an illusion depending on your perspective. In fact, the guy who lives in this house is only a flat piece of paper. I love this. There's a whole bunch of chalk artists that do this now. Check this out. This looks like the whole sidewalk is disappearing into a ravine, right? There's chunks of ice just falling down. But this too is an illusion. The artist drew it in what is called forced perspective. It's just a flat piece of sidewalk. It is a giant optical illusion that plays with your perspective.

One more. What about this drawing? Shout out. Who do you see here in this photograph? What was it? Of course, it's Albert Einstein. Unless you have a different perspective. This is the weirdest one. Because when you're close to it, you see Einstein. But if you change your perspective, if I asked you to get up and move away from this, which you can't do, so I'm going to move the picture away for you. And as it goes further and further away, I want you to shout out who you actually see. Shout it out. Who is it? It's Marilyn Monroe. Is that not the weirdest thing? Proof in church today that Einstein and Marilyn Monroe were one and the same person. There it is. Very weird. But talk about perspective. How you see something, what you are looking for when you look at something, changes what you see.

And this actually applies to life. Your perspective changes everything. And this morning I want to talk about the most life-changing perspective shift of all. Grab your message notes that look like this. They're in the bulletins to help you follow along. The art of living well is what we've been calling our series through the book of Proverbs. And we're going to wrap this up this morning by talking about the perspective that changes everything. I have really enjoyed this series so much. But today I want to look at a phrase that comes up a lot in the book of Proverbs. In fact, you have seen this phrase practically every week in the verses that I've been pointing out. I'll admit it. I've been kind of dancing around it because it's a tough phrase. It's a weird phrase. It's a phrase that is really hard for us to understand. And it's this. The fear of the Lord.

This is one of the main themes of the book of Proverbs. You need to live in the fear of the Lord. You and I hear that term and most of us go, "That's really weird because it sounds like I'm scared of God." Like it's saying, "Be scared of the Lord." Are you scared of the Lord, sister? Because I'm scared of the Lord. Is that what it means? Don't hit me, Lord. Is that what this is saying? Not at all. That's not what it means. You say, "Well, how do you know, René?" Well, look at how this word is used. Look at these three verses from Proverbs. Proverbs 28:14. Let's read this out loud together. Let me hear you. "Happy is the man that feareth always." What? I don't usually associate fear with happiness.

Proverbs 19:23. Let's read this out loud too. The fear of the Lord leads to life. Then one rests content untouched by trouble. Well, wait a minute. Here it says that when I got fear of the Lord, I'm going to rest. I'm going to be content. I'm going to be untouched by trouble. That doesn't mean you won't go through trouble. Everybody goes through trouble, but it means you'll be less phased by the storms of life. If you have this thing, it calls the fear of the Lord. In fact, Proverbs 14:27. Read this out loud like you made it here. Here we go. The fear of the Lord is a life-giving fountain. Life-giving fountain? We really need to figure this out because all these verses say that there's a cause and effect between your concept of God and your life. And if you fear the Lord, whatever that means, you'll apparently be unafraid of anything else.

You could say it is the fear that drives out all other fears. If you fear the Lord, you'll be happy. You'll be contented. You'll be at rest. Okay, so what in the world does it mean? I have no idea. Let's dismiss some prayer. No, of course not. Let's look at the riddle of the fear of the Lord. Here's one thing. On one hand, we are told to fear God about 100 times in the Bible, depending on your translation. About 100 times. It's not just in Proverbs. The fear of God phrase is all over the place in the Bible. You need to fear the Lord. You need to fear the Lord. And yet, God keeps telling people to fear not whenever He appears to them. And I've given you just a few of the many references there.

See, in the Bible, every single time people encounter God, they see a vision of God like in Revelation 1 or in Isaiah 6 or even they just encounter angels, which are the closest thing most of us will, you know, most people in the Bible see to God. Whether it's God or an angel, they fall down like it says, like they're dead men and they're scared almost literally to death because they're in the presence of God. And every single time that happens in the Bible, what does God say? Fear not. Don't be afraid. You're not going to die. Get up. Fear not. And so what does it mean to fear the Lord? If we're told to fear the Lord and yet God says, fear not. Well really, it's all about having the right perspective.

The right perspective on your life, the right perspective on how important you are, the right perspective on how important the other things that the world tells you is important are and not having this skewed angle on life. Seeing reality is what it's all about. Proverbs talks about four things that relate to getting this accurate perspective and I'm going to spend by far my most time on the first point here. So jot these things down. Number one, it's about living in awe. Living in awe and wonder when it says in Proverbs 28:14, blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity. The word fear can't mean mere terror or anguish because it's mixed here with the word blessed, which means happy, literally blissed out.

So what kind of fear makes you blissed out? Well a woman came up after the service last night and she had a great illustration of this. She said, you know René, what this reminds me of, she said, I used to live in upstate New York and I lived just around the corner from Niagara Falls. She said, I got to go to it almost every day because it was literally just a few blocks away from my house. And she said, as you approached Niagara, you could hear the rumble before you ever saw it, just sort of. It got louder and louder and louder. Then she said, when you came around the corner, suddenly there it was. Niagara Falls, this huge horseshoe of just thundering water. And she said, as you stood at the edge of the cliff looking at it, she said you were filled with fear and awe and wonder and with a feeling like I am so glad I live here and in this moment I wouldn't want to be anyplace else.

That's kind of what it is to live like in fear of the Lord. There is a fear there, but there's a feeling like this is also so beautiful. I don't want to be anyplace else right now. And I'll tell you what else, how many of you have ever seen Niagara Falls? Anybody here? A lot of people. How many of you have ever been to the Grand Canyon? Anybody here? Kind of the same sort of thing, right? You know when you're seeing a natural wonder like Niagara, like the Grand Canyon, you do have that sense of fear and awe. And you know what else? You respect the guardrails, right? You go right up there and you're like, I'm kind of respecting the safety railing right now. And that's a little bit of what the fear of the Lord does to you too.

I'm convinced that a healthy fear of God in the healthy sense, it's what's kept me from crawling over the guardrails too often in my life. Now I've done it, but the fear of the Lord is what's kept me from going too far down kind of the sin cliff because I'm like, I'm a little bit afraid of that drop, you know? And there's a healthy sense of wonder and awe that leads to that. A man named Sinclair Ferguson defines the fear of God this way. Look at it. I love this definition. It's an indefinable mixture of reverence, fear, pleasure, joy, and awe, which fills our hearts when we realize who God is and what he has done for us.

So you know what I want to do this morning? I want to get some awe going. And I want you to think about the parts of creation that maybe, maybe you've never thought about before. The detailed intricacies of creation and what they might reveal about the character, the personality, the power, the creativity of God. For example, Francis Chan talks about this one in his book Crazy Love. Did you know that a caterpillar has 228 separate and distinct muscles in its head? Isn't that interesting? Did you know that an elm tree has approximately 6 million leaves on it, on average 6 million? Did you know that your own heart generates enough pressure as it pumps blood throughout your body that if it was a fountain it would be powerful enough to squirt blood 30 feet high? Now I don't recommend this. I've never done it myself, but just take my word for it.

All right, let's go to another picture because some of you are being grossed out. Did you know that God didn't have to make hundreds of different kinds of bananas? But he did. He didn't have to put 3,000 different species of trees within one square mile of the typical Amazon jungle, but he did. God didn't have to create so many different kinds of laughter, but he did. Or did you know that spiders produce 3 different kinds of silk and in fact when they build their webs they create 60 feet of silk in one hour? Now most of us are kind of freaked out by spiders, but 60 feet of silk in one hour, that deserves some respect, right? And if all this is giving you goosebumps, did you know that when you get goosebumps the hair in your follicles is actually helping you stay warmer by trapping body heat? And all of this reflects the creativity and the power of God.

Like the Bible says, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. He is glorious. There is none like him. He's the king of kings, the beginning and the end, the one who was and is and is to come. And so we stand in awe of him. That's why we do worship. You know like the 3 worship songs or whatever that we do before the message and announcements, that's not just like warm up time, you know? What that is is perspective shift time for you to remind yourself of some of this stuff. It's kind of like there's an exercise we do sometimes around here. Take your pointer finger like this, go ahead and hold it up like this. Now point up to heaven and say God. Now point to yourself and say not. Try that again with me. Ready? God. Not. One more time. God. Not. Repeat as necessary, right? And you can do whatever you tend to idolize, right? You can go out to the parking lot and go God and point to your nice new car. Not, you know? You can go to work. God and then point to the sign that's in front of your workspace. Not, you know? What do you tend to idolize? There's only one true God and it so helps to keep this in perspective.

That's what it means in part to live in fear of God. When I live in fear of God, I'm not as afraid of rejection anymore. I'm not as afraid of failure anymore. I'm not even as afraid of death anymore because God is God and he is great and he is good. All right, so what's the opposite of this? What's the opposite of standing in awe and reverent fear of God? Well, that verse says it's when somebody hardens their heart. Now this is kind of a hardening of the spiritual arteries, right? Where you walk around, you're not able to feel wonder from life anymore. You don't see the caterpillars and you don't see the leaves on the trees and you don't feel the goosebumps anymore. Why? Because it's all about you. It's all about you. And your concerns and your worries, me, me, me, right?

Now is this a danger for us today? Last week's Time Magazine cover story, the me, me, me generation. It says, "This may be the most narcissistic self-centered generation ever. We are so self-focused." Some of the stats in this story, narcissistic personality disorder is three times as high now as it was 40 years ago. Check this one out. A survey that asked, "What is your guiding morality?" What is your guiding morality? 60% of people under 40 believe it's their feelings. Believe that in any situation they'll just be able to feel what's right. Man, that's tough because our feelings are unreliable. The me, me, me generation, our disease is ingrown eyeballs. We're worried about ourselves. We fear our own lives and our own selves. We're obsessed with ourselves. And to fear the Lord is to kind of feel the relief that comes from not thinking about yourself all the time.

I love this quote from Tim Keller. "To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and His love." It means that because of His bride holiness and magnificent love, you find Him fearfully beautiful. Means bowing before Him out of amazement at His glory and His beauty. That's awesome. But you know what I've noticed in my life anyway? I tend to fear people almost more than I fear God. Very often I tend to be overawed at people I meet. I mean, I do this kind of blunder all the time, but just this last weekend at Elizabeth's graduation we were at the baccalaureate Friday night and I was just kind of meeting people who were there chatting with people and somebody introduced me to a guy. "René, I'd like you to meet Pat Gelsinger." "Pat, nice to meet you." And I walked away and I thought, "Pat Gelsinger, that name's super familiar to me."

And then I did something that's kind of stupid but I'll just, it's true confessions in front of the church. I whipped out my iPhone and I Googled his name. "Pat Gelsinger, who is that guy? That guy's like somebody I should know." Well, until recently he was the chief technology officer at Intel and he's now the CEO and president of another big company, VMware over in the Santa Clara Valley and venture capitalist, all kinds of stuff. So I'm like, "Whoa." And he's the chairman of the board of the college that my daughter attends. And I'm like, "Pat Gelsinger, I should have been nicer to him. I should have talked more to him. I should have said, "Thank you, Pat Gelsinger, for the wonderful education." And Elizabeth said, "Thank you, Pat Gelsinger, for all that's so honored to meet you." And he probably, "I was too dismissive." And so now I'm super self-conscious and going, "Must say more to Pat Gelsinger." And I walk over there and I thought, "Walk naturally. Don't be over odd at Pat Gelsinger." And what happens when you're thinking about how you walk, right? It's like you're too conscious of it. Now you can't walk normally. You're walking like this. Because you're thinking, "Walk casual. Walk casual." Wave, wave, walk by and kind of wave, wave casually at Pat Gelsinger. And you overdo it, "Hey," you know. Go talk to Pat Gelsinger. And so I went over and talked to him and I'm like, "Show him that you know who he is." And so I'm blurting out, "Pat Gelsinger! Pat Gelsinger! I was surprised to meet you earlier. I was surprised because later I found out that you were the chief at Intel because you probably have to really smart to be at Intel. And so when I met you, I was surprised. No, that's not what I meant. You just walk away wanting to go, "Stupid, stupid." Why? Because you're over odd at who just a normal human being is, right? Do you ever do that with anybody? That fear of man thing? That's what the Bible says, "Have fear of God instead." Because if you don't kind of have that perspective that God is the one I should be in awe of, then what happens is you end up putting other people in that place or something else in that place. Usually it's someone and you end up living your life kind of twisting in the wind if that person doesn't approve of you. They become almost an idol to you, right? So it means that kind of awe and wonder and respect.

Now some of you might be going, "Well, then why use the word fear? Why use the word fear at all if it's about awe and wonder and respect?" Well, there's a couple of good reasons. First, fear is humbling. There's a kind of awe and joy that is humbling, right? Gives you perspective. Now, on the other hand, there is a kind of joy that you can experience that puffs you up, that tempts you to look down on other people. Maybe when you get promoted or something because you can tend to think, "I'm so awesome," right? But when you live in awe of God, it humbles you. It brings you to a point where you actually understand weaker people better. You have respect for them because you see all of us in the same boat in that perspective that God's the greatest one.

And you know what else being in awe of God does? It's humbling because, listen, it brings me to a point of sobriety about my own life where I realize I'm not the center of the universe. God is. And so the word fear connotes a humbling. But there's a second reason the word fear is used. Fear is revealing. Fear is revealing. And stay on that first page for just a second because I sort of want to explain this. Follow me. Psychologists have said for years that if you really want to understand yourself, follow your fears. Follow your nightmares. Because your fears reveal what you value the most. For example, if your greatest fear is rejection, getting laughed at, put down, then obviously what you value more than anything in life is people pleasing, right? Wanting to look good in the eyes of other people.

Your greatest nightmare, your greatest fear is a sign of what your heart most desperately wants. If you're living for your money, then your greatest fear that you literally have nightmares about is losing your money. If you're living for your work or living for your house, then your fears will be about losing those things. If you're living in mortal fear of something, the loss of which will render your life meaningless, you have just discovered what you are idolizing. So when the Bible says to fear God, what it's really saying is make him the love of your life, right? Make God the thing you want desperately to get a hold of. Make God the core of your identity because that perspective rearranges your heart. And that gets us to point two. It's about choosing a world view.

It's about choosing a world view. Proverbs 9:10 says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The knowledge of the Holy One is insight." So the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now couple that with this. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. But fools despise wisdom and instruction in Proverbs 1:7. So it's the beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom. What this means is the fear of the Lord is the foundation, not only of your values, but it's the foundation even of your thinking. Your fear of God completely determines how you see the world. It's your perspective.

The tough part is in our world we have all kinds of competing world views. There's a brilliant Jewish writer and columnist David Klinghoffer and he wrote in an op-ed piece in the LA Times, "What we have today is not a struggle of religion versus no religion. What we have today is a struggle between competing religious world views." Now if you object that secular humanism has no deity and is therefore not religion, you forget that there are other religions such as Zen Buddhism which also have no deity. A religion is simply a set of beliefs explaining where life comes from, what it means, and what we're supposed to be doing with our lives. Answers to these questions are not provable but must be taken on faith.

What he's saying is everybody has a world view that they take on faith from which they build all their other assumptions and values in life. This is so important because a lot of people are clinging to the illusion that, "Well, I'm not a person of faith. I'm neutral. I don't really have a religion or a religious viewpoint." But if you think about it, that's actually not true. Everybody has to base their lives on some world view that they take by faith. I believe that somehow karma makes it all work out in the end. How do you know? You're taking that on faith and building your assumptions on that foundation. Well I believe that there's no purpose, there's no God, there's no designer, there's no reason behind it all. How do you know that? That's an assumption you're making and then you're building the rest of your views on that foundation.

And these verses are saying if you fear the Lord, if you're operating assumption, even though it can't be conclusively proved, is that God exists and he's great and he's good, then that is going to determine how you perceive your reality. It's the foundation for all your wisdom and knowledge. But you need to very consciously choose your world view. How are you going to see the world? What's your filter? What's your lens? I'll tell you a story. Sheldon Van Aken, this guy, Sheldon Van Aken. He was a professor on the east coast of America. He was a leader in progressive politics. An interesting character to examine from a Santa Cruz perspective because he was actually a leader in the early feminist movement. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with coining the word sexist in fact. And then he went to Oxford to get a second doctorate and while he was there he met C.S. Lewis as one of his teachers and they began a relationship.

The guy who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia was a genius himself and taught at Oxford. And so Sheldon and C.S. Lewis start this relationship. C.S. Lewis used to be an atheist, became a Christian. Sheldon Van Aken is like, "Well, I don't really believe in this." But Sheldon became a Christian after several years and he says how he became a believer in a letter that he wrote to C.S. Lewis. This is just part of the letter. He says, "I saw a gap between myself and Christ. How was I to cross it? If I was going to stake my life on the resurrected Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted certainty. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these." And then I realized, "My God, there's not only a gap before me. There's a gap behind me as well. There's going to have to be a faith step either way. There might be no certainty that Christ is God, but there's no certainty that he's not either. I suddenly realized I couldn't reject Christ without faith. And so there was only one thing to do. I turned and flung myself over the gap toward Christ."

But you see what he was doing. He realized that no matter what he chose to believe, he was betting the farm on one particular worldview that was going to change the way he perceived the world. And once he realized that, he found it was a lot easier to consider Christianity. And I pray that that'll be the case for somebody listening today. But the point of these two proverbs is this. The way you see the ultimate questions of life, including what you think about God, determines the rest of your life. In fact, the Bible says you'll be out of touch with reality if you're out of touch with the truth about God. And that brings us to the final two points.

Number three, it's about learning to trust. Learning to trust. The Bible says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to him and he'll make your paths straight." Proverbs 3:5–6. Now trust is what the fear of the Lord actually looks like externally in your actual practice. See, almost all of us start our relationship with God conditionally, right? We say, "All right, I'm going to start going to church. I'm going to start reading my Bible. I'm going to start praying. And if I feel better, and if my marriage goes better, and if the things I pray for start coming true, then I'll keep involving God in my life. And if those things don't happen, then probably it's not working." Well trusting means moving beyond all the ifs because the ifs mean some other goal is actually driving you and you're just using God as a tool to get to what you want. And you still haven't had that perspective shift.

So let me give you another perspective shift here to help you. Think of God's creation again. And this time, instead of thinking the intricate details like a caterpillar's facial muscles, instead let's think of the bigness of creation and what it reveals about God. Check this out. If the distance between the earth and the sun, which is 93 million miles, was only the thickness of this sheet of paper, all right? If the distance between the earth and the sun was only the thickness of this sheet of paper, then the distance between the earth and the next nearest star would be the thickness of a 70-foot high stack of paper that's more than twice the height of this ceiling right here. And the diameter of just our little galaxy would be a stack of paper 310 miles high. And our little galaxy is just a speck of dust in the part of the universe that we can see.

Now if the Lord is the one who upholds all of that, as the Bible tells us with his finger, with his pinky, then is that the kind of person that you invite into your life to be your assistant? Is that the kind of person you invite into your life to be, you know, your consultant? You know what consultants are? You know the definition of a consultant? They're people that you pay and then you ignore what they tell you. That's a consultant. Unless they're saying something that you agree with that you perceive will help you reach your goals. So is that who God is to you? Then you don't have fear of the Lord. Is God your consultant or is he your Lord? That's the difference between belief and trust. A lot of us want God as an advisor or consultant to get what I want, but that's not trust. Trust is what the fear of the Lord looks like in real life when you just go, "God, whatever you want."

Now some of you are going, "All right, how do I get there? Because I'm not there. How do I get this healthy fear of the Lord, right? Do I just go home tonight and go, "Okay, God, hit me." You know, "Give me that awe." You know, "How do I get there? What does it mean to get yourself to the place where you can trust God like that because this is seeming so abstract?" Well, I believe it's the last point that's the key to all of this. It's about being astonished at his grace. And here in the heart of the book of Proverbs is the foundation of the New Testament Christian Gospel. It says Proverbs 20:9, "Who can say, 'I have kept my heart pure? I'm clean. I'm without sin.' Who can say that? No one, right? Nobody can say that." And so what can be done? Well, Proverbs 16:6, "By steadfast love and faithfulness, iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil."

Now what you don't see here is there's two things that are almost opposites in this verse. Steadfast love means absolutely total unconditional love. But faithfulness means total holiness, total commitment to remaining pure. So how can one person love unconditionally, yet also remain totally holy and pure and atoned for your iniquity that way? How can that be done? Well, God did it on the cross. And that makes me so amazed, so amazed that the fear of the Lord, which is my awe at what He did for me, that makes me want to turn away from evil. In fact, to the degree that I am astonished at this, to that degree I want to turn away from evil. And that's a very quote from Keller, "The more we experience God's grace and forgiveness, the more we experience a trembling awe and wonder before the greatness of all that He is and has done for us."

I'll tell you one final story. In his book, "The Joy of Fearing God," Jerry Bridges tells the story of a Marine recruit named Bruce McGregor. Now, Bruce was a young man, 19 years old, he was in Marine boot camp, and he was very intimidated when he heard that the commander of the whole base was coming to inspect his barracks one night. He was a general, General Collins. And so the drill sergeant was all amped and everything got totally clean and pure and spotless, and the general walks in and he stops right in front of Butch McGregor and he inspects his uniform and Butch is just quaking in fear and awe and excitement that this general, the commander of the base, is actually standing right there in front of him.

Well, Butch gets out of boot camp and it turns out that he's assigned to a motor pool in Iraq as a driver. And then General Collins also gets promoted to major general and he ended up commanding Butch's division in Iraq and Butch McGregor became General Collins' driver. And as he would listen to the general commanding troops and giving orders on the radio as he drove him around, Butch's initial awe and intimidation turned to respect and admiration at the general's intelligence and skill. Then one day, the jeep that they were both in hit an IED, an improvised explosive device, a mine on the streets of Baghdad, and the jeep was exploded. The general was thrown clear of the vehicle, but when he landed he sustained severe injuries.

Butch McGregor was trapped upside down in this burning jeep and he was immobilized. He couldn't escape and he was going to die. Well, the general, in spite of his two broken legs, crawls commando style over to Butch and somehow is able to laboriously drag him out of the burning vehicle and saves Butch McGregor's life. And so now Butch's intimidation and awe and respect and admiration is turning to gratitude that this guy rescued him that way. Then, in the following months as Butch is recovering in the burn unit, he's asked himself a hundred times, "Why would a two star general risk his life for a sergeant who's a replaceable driver in the motor pool?" And he realized there's really only one reason that general had love for his troops.

And Butch's intimidation and awe and respect and admiration and gratitude turned into love for the general to the point where Butch would have done anything for him. Well, guess what? That is exactly how your fear of God matures into love for God. It starts with this Niagara Falls Grand Canyon intimidation and awe and then you realize that he personally gave his life to rescue you, then it blossoms into gratitude and love. That is the kind of fear of the Lord the Bible talks about. Now this is not some experience you have once, some emotion that you feel one time and it changes everything from then on. In fact, it's not primarily an emotion and Christians can get trapped by this. They can think, "I need to walk around feeling God buzzed all the time." Like, "Whoa, God's just amazing and if I'm not just feeling that dude thing all the time, then there's something wrong with me, right?"

Well, you can't walk around God buzzed all the time. You can't walk around with any emotion all the time. It's not primarily emotion, it's perspective. Notice this last verse from Proverbs, Proverbs 23:17 says, "Don't envy sinners but always continue to fear the Lord." Continue to fear the Lord. It's a conscious choice. This is key. I continue to remind myself of this perspective. I continue in it because it's the perspective that changes everything. It makes your fears go into perspective and seem smaller. It makes your failures go into perspective and you see that they're redeemable. It makes all the other people who intimidate you be put into perspective and you see who they are in light of God's greatness.

The perspective that you remind yourself is this, God, not. Let's focus on that perspective right now. In fact, would you stand with me in the presence of our awesome God and let's have a word of prayer together. Thank you, Todd. Praise God in the presence of our awesome God. As we stand, let's pray. Help us this morning not to have hardened hearts, soften our hearts. We're standing, so help us to stand in awe, in reverent fear and wonder right now. Lord, we've been in the book of Proverbs. It's filled with wise sayings, but they're all connected. They're all connected back to this perspective that you rule, you know best and you love us. And so I just pray that right here, right now, there might be some here today who say, God, I want to make that leap of faith that Sheldon Van Aken made. I want to commit myself to you. Help me to frame my reality around you because I have to choose a worldview. So help me to be humble and keep life in the perspective that you are God and I'm not God. And thank you for that reminder that puts everything else in its proper place. In Jesus' name we pray.