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We’ve come to the end of our series on Spiritual Practices for Exhausted People. We’ve looked at sabbath, solitude and silence, prayer, Bible-reading, fasting, friendship, discernment. And I thought it best to end by considering once again the purpose for engaging in any of these things. What are we hoping to accomplish? How are we being healed and transformed? Well, the Psalmist will help us this morning peak behind these disciplines to understand what they are for and what they do. Their purpose and work is to help us see that . . .
We are beloved.
As
a father has compassion on his children,
so
the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; (vs. 13)
Our text is truly about an expansive, jaw-dropping, persistent, love. Earlier in the Psalm we find verbs describing the actions of God like: forgives, heals, redeems, crowns, satisfies, and renews. This love works righteousness and justice for the oppressed. God’s love, it says, is as “high as the heavens are above the earth.” The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of what the highest heavesn looks like - a galaxy 13 billion light-years from Earth. A light-year is 6,000,000,000,000 (6 trillion) miles. That would put this galaxy at 78 sextillion miles from earth (78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)!
Now, I can drive for a good 8 hours without needing a break. If we were traveling 500 miles per hour nonstop, 24 hours every day, without a moment’s pause—it would take twenty quadrillion years (20,000,000,000,000,000) years to reach the farthest heavens. That’s how much God loves us – “everlasting to everlasting,” the Psalmist says.
But it’s not just mind-boggling expansive love. It’s also familiar and intimate. In vs. 13 it’s the relationship between parent and child and the beauty of flowers.
And yet I imagine that a few of you hear something different in our passage. Perhaps you hear favoritism or something even worse – the sinking suspicion that God only loves some and not others, the good and not the bad, the right and not the wrong, the ones who fear and not the ones who don’t. I get it. I want to sit with it for just a moment and ask the question, “Does God really love us – all of us?”
Some might have us not believe so but sometimes reading the Bible means prayerfully and carefully discerning the right problem. And we must be careful for we are talking about God and we are talking about us. I just watched a video of homecomings. One of the interesting elements is always surprise, even disguises, in which loved ones, who’ve been away, unexpectedly show up, and for dramatic effect hide behind walls, come in after everyone else, or even sidle up during a picture, waiting for the person to see them, recognize them. I want to tell you this morning that God is present, compassionate, and loves you deeply, fiercely, always, but this God also loves surprises and we need to learn how to see him and experience that love. That’s why it mentions the need for keeping covenant and its parallel “fearing the LORD.”
Let me switch analogies for a minute. The love of God, expressed throughout Scripture and displayed through the life and teachings of Jesus, is a lot like radio waves – ever present, continually being transmitted – but it’s only when one is attuned to the frequency that one can hear it, dance to the music, and receive the gift. That’s what spiritual practices do. They don’t make God love you. They simply allow you to hear the music – it’s a love song by the way, I’m thinking Frank Sinatra but I’ll let you decide. We’ve been learning about practices for exhausted people not because they make the music but because they “tune our hearts to hear and sing God’s grace.”
But we are more than beloved.
We are fragile.
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he
remembers that we are dust.
15 The life of mortals is like grass,
they
flourish like a flower of the field;
16 the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and
its place remembers it no more.
The spiritual practices also help us by reminding us how we are formed, helping us remember how breakable we are, how delicate our mind and bodies are. We’ve been talking about spiritual practices but for a moment I want to talk about “exhausted.” For the most part, I imagine that we’ve understood that word negatively, achingly, as a kind of life that’s, well, tiring, and I’m not suggesting that’s wrong. But I also want to suggest that the spiritual practices remind us that we are fragile beings made of dust. They help us remember that the originating sin of Adam and Eve was there refusal to be human, their loathing of fragility, their desire to know everything. Spiritual practices, thus help us remember that we hunger, feel lonely, misunderstood, experience hurt and pain. They help us practice that it’s okay not to be God. This is the “we” of the text. This is who we are and this is a universal condition – not the condition of a select few.
The good news is that we can feel exhausted as a reminder that we don’t have to save ourselves, transform our lives, become righteous. We can engage these spiritual practices in order to help be totally, guiltlessly, human. And that once again brings us back to our experience of beloved and vs. 17.
Vs. 17 is a weird verse. It doesn’t say what you would expect, perhaps that’s why we should fear God. You would expect the logic to work as follows: We are finite, mortal, like grass but God is infinite, divine and eternal. But that’s not what it says. It says we are finite and God is everlastingly loving. That’s what spiritual practices aim to do – they aim to help us fully reflect on who and what we are and who God is. We can feel shattered and yet fully loved.
We are fearlessly fearful.
17 But from everlasting to everlasting
the
Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and
his righteousness with their children’s children—
18 with those who keep his covenant
and
remember to obey his precepts.
What is this “fear” that we are to have? And how does it help us experience the love of God? It feels counter-intuitive, if not a little bonkers.
The fact that fear-of-the-Lord cannot be precisely defined is one of its glories--we are dealing with a God that we cannot pin down, who inhabits mystery, we can't be glib. In that spirit, presumption recedes, attentiveness increases, expectancy heightens. So on one hand, “Fear of the LORD” is the deeply sane recognition that we are not God.
A quick Biblical tour of the concept can help:
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” ~ Proverbs 1:7
“So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul” ~ Deut. 10:12).
But this is not merely an OT idea.
“Meanwhile the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up. Living in the fear of the LORD and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in number.” ~ Acts 9:31
“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” ~ Philippians 2:12b
"Fear-of-the-Lord," as we notice the way our biblical writers use it, turns out to be a term that is plain without being reductive, clear without being over-simplified, and accurate without dissolving the mystery inherent in all dealings with God and His world. It also has the considerable advantage of evading the “control” that we could use to locate ourselves along a spectrum of goodness that would feed our instincts for coziness with God.
So there appear to be two aspects to the “fear of God”: 1) One is our response to God’s awesomeness and otherness; 2) The other is about the experience and expression of our fragility, a dependency on God.
The writer Brian Russell reminds us that the Biblical writers are thoughtful practitioners of the human condition. The need for the fear of the LORD finds its roots in human nature. Modern psychology defines human drives by two primary motivators: fear and love. Fear plays a crucial role in helping us to avoid pain and harm. Fear keeps us alive in moments when we face life-threatening scenarios. But the problem lies in the objects of our fear. If we fear the wrong things, we can harm ourselves and harm each other. So it’s not a matter of eliminating our fears but rather aligning fear with its only legitimate object - God. To fear any part of creation hurts me and the only way forward is to properly fear the LORD. The irony is, if I want to live freely without fear, I must only fear the LORD. This is not because God is scary or vindictive or cruel or unhinged. Fear of the LORD, keeping God’s covenant, engaging in spiritual practices, help keep us from the two things that destroy us: idolatry and injustice.
Always remember this – the only Being that Scripture commands us to fear is the One who loves us everlasting to everlasting. When the only object of our fear is that God who loves us, we are free. Free from cruel taskmasters. Free from the manipulation of ideology. Free from the cultural pressures that suffocate and promote a false conformity or an indifference to expedient cruelty.
So what should do we do? Launch into this life of following Jesus. Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God as a beloved, fragile human being. Fear-of-the-Lord is a way of living authentically nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, and turns everything into an encounter with the living God. So let us commit to tuning our radio to hear the love song of God and remember that though we are breakable, we need fear nothing on this earth, not our failures, nor our inadequacies – not those things that seem to shatter us, not even our own death.
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