Louie Giglio - Fear of God
So we have a value at Passion City Church: worship is a lifestyle. I’m steeped in this moment because Brett Ainslie and I have been teaching the theology of worship at the core of our beliefs. We’re all in on this idea. This past week, Brett Ainslie conducted an entire survey of Scripture from beginning to end to trace the thread of worship throughout it. The net of it all is that worship is a lifestyle. For many of us, we come into worship for an hour, but worship is meant for every hour.
That’s what we are trying to convey: worship does not only happen from 11 to 12 on a Sunday. While I know most of us at Passion City Church don’t think that way, many people in churches do; they think worship starts at 11 and ends at 12. If the Spirit’s moving, it might extend to 12:10, but if it goes past that, things have gone wrong, and we’re late for lunch. Throughout the rest of the week, God wants us to see that worship isn’t just for an hour—it’s for every hour. In every hour, we are responding to God in worship. All of this hinges on having a proper view of the gospel, which is predicated on the fear of God.
So today’s message is on the fear of God. Amen. Just look at your neighbor and tell them how pumped you are that today’s message is on the fear of God. You might be thinking, «Man, I told you we should have skipped this one and stayed home to watch it online.» What does that mean? It means that for us to truly live a lifestyle of worship, we must comprehend who we are, where we are, who God is, and where He is. You might say, «Well, God is in us; Christ lives in us; the Spirit has come to take up residence in us to bring to life the very person of Jesus within us.» Exactly—that’s the miracle of the gospel!
Understanding or having a proper view of the gospel is necessary for worship to become more than just an hour a week. The gospel requires that we understand the fear of God—in other words, we cannot simply cruise into a relationship with the Almighty. We have to understand who He is. The psalmist wrote it this way in Psalm 34, and I’d like to read the entire psalm. He says, «I will extol the Lord at all times.» So there’s our not just one hour, but in every hour, «His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice.» He says, «Glorify the Lord with me.» Your translation may say, «Magnify the Lord with me; let us exalt His name together.»
This assembly signifies coming into the moment; that’s why we are at church today. There is an invitation and a call: come magnify the Lord with me, and let’s exalt His name together! There’s something powerful when we do that. Now back to me: «I sought the Lord, and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.» That’s what we all want, but that’s not true of most of our lives right now. But it’s possible, and that’s what we’re reaching for today. How do I get free from all these fears and their cousins: anxiety, panic, depression, and worry? How do I get free from all of that? Well, we’re going to see it in the text: «I sought the Lord, and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.»
«Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered in shame. This poor man called, and the Lord heard him; He saved him out of all his trouble. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and He delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Fear the Lord, you His saints, for those who fear Him lack nothing.» This is an important moment to stop and dig a little deeper into the Hebrew word for «fear,» because this clarification is crucial.
The word for «fear» means to fear. It’s important that you grasp that. Back to the text: «Fear the Lord, you His saints, for those who fear Him lack nothing. The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.» «Come, my children, listen to me; I’ll teach you the fear of the Lord. Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, here’s how you do that: keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies; turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.»
«The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are attentive to their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them from the earth. The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; He delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. A righteous man may have many troubles, amen, but the Lord delivers him from them all. He protects all his bones; not one of them will be broken. Evil will slay the wicked; the foes of the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems His servants; no one will be condemned who takes refuge in Him.»
The way that you and I get free from our fears is by fearing the God who is greater than all, and what it requires in us is a proper view of the gospel. You cannot have a proper view of the gospel without the fear of God. There’s no soft sell; there has to be a revelation of who I am, where I am, who God is, and where He is. Then you begin to see the gap, and when you see the gap, you start to appreciate the gift of Christ, who bridges the gap and allows us to enter into a relationship with God. It’s gospel clarity, and it probably is one of the cornerstone verses on worship in Scripture.
This is what it says in Hebrews 13:15. We’ve shared this a lot: «Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess His name.» We’ve been doing that together today, but that’s not all worship is. «Do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.» In other words, it’s not an hour; it’s every hour. Jesus is the key, and our entire lives are the response. This is what God is looking for.
So it looks a little bit like this: we come into worship, worship together, and then we go out to worship. We come in worshiping, we worship while we’re here, and then we go out to worship, because worship is a lifestyle. Now here’s the thing I noticed yesterday: I was watching a college football game by an unnamed team in the state of Georgia, and as the game approached kickoff, only minutes away, some very nice people set the game up, raised our expectations, and gave us all the details we needed to know. Then, just like that, kickoff happened.
What I want you to understand is that it went off at kickoff! I mean, when the guy makes contact with the ball, it’s going off. No one has scored; no one has won; no one has caught a pass, made a great tackle, or blocked a punt. It’s going off down there! Was anybody there? Was it not going off? I just lost my voice on that one; the excitement blew a vocal cord. Thank you! It was going off! I’m sitting in my house thinking, «Why is everybody losing their minds? Nothing has even happened yet!» Then I realized—oh yes it has—the coming in has happened first!
People decided, «I’m going to the game! I got a ticket! We’re making plans! I’m excited! I’m telling people on Wednesday, 'I’m going! You going? '» So, phone calls are happening. «Can you keep our kids because we don’t take babies and toddlers to between the hedges? We need to make sure our dogs are taken care of.» We gather and park and figure out how and where to meet them; are we going to tailgate? As the Friday night anticipation builds, people are excited!
Then Saturday comes, with the pregame tailgate. This is all about family or friends; it’s about lore. All the stories are told; there’s some prognostication and intimidation going on when the other fans walk by in funny hats. I’ve been with visiting teams in Athens before—it’s horrible! When they come out warmed up, the intimidation is real! There’s an opportunity to don face paint, make sure everyone looks appropriate, and then we go to the stadium. Awe fills the air as we realize, «Look around! This is unbelievable; this is the best atmosphere in college football!»
Then the moment finally comes for the real pregame festivities. I don’t know what happens at UGA, but they sing some song or hymn or fight song. Everyone gets into it! It hasn’t even kicked off yet! So, when it’s time, the place goes off! Church, let me find my rhythm again. Church is a little bit more like this: pre-church, with a lot of questions like, «Are we going?» There are even more questions: «When is it? Is it happening?»
There are no box seats—I don’t need a ticket! No, people! Maybe a few are still excited. Then we get here; it’s chill. The worship team comes out, and we begin building a sense of excitement. Someone did arrive with expectation, but maybe about 35 minutes in, we have a semi-kickoff. If it’s an amazing gathering, maybe about 45 minutes in it all goes off.
I think what we need to see—I’m not entirely sure how to get back to where I began, but it doesn’t matter—is that I want to be part of a church with a great gospel perspective, a fear of the Lord coming in to worship where kickoff goes off! I want to be in a church where all the people come in worshiping, and at kickoff, it goes off! I don’t want to wait to hear what songs we’ll sing or who will be leading—no, I want to be part of a church where it all goes off because people refuse to come in and wait for the moment.
I want to be in a church that understands everything we do while we’re here is worship. All of it! The guys who make sure the property looks good are worshiping. The people who clean the building worship. The people who set up Bloom and ensure everything for your babies and toddlers is clean, welcoming, spirit-filled, and love-filled are worshiping. The person holding your baby right now is worshiping. The person in the fifth-grade tent with your fifth grader is worshiping. When we’re preaching, that’s worship! When we’re hosting, that’s worship! When we say hi to each other, that’s the family of God—that’s worship!
When the teaching happens, it’s worship! The preaching is worship! The response is worship! People getting saved is worship! The closing music is worship! Then we go out from all of the worship to worship in everything we do. This is what worship is all about, and it’s all about our approach and making adjustments. Brett Ainslie conducted an incredible survey of scripture, showing the thread of worship from beginning to end, and we have only touched on this story that I want to dive deeper into today, as it’s a bedrock moment in scripture for our house and our movement.
In fact, we have been building for over two decades on this idea: it’s the story of people missing the fear of God, and it’s God wanting people to understand that if you fear Him, you don’t have to fear anyone else. It’s a beautiful paradox; when you think, «Fear God? That doesn’t seem like the kind of relationship I want.»
Listen! We’re talking about a God of mercy and grace! He made a way for you and me to come to know Him, but He wants us to understand who He is. The reason I know we don’t fear God is because of what we’re afraid of in life, and what we fear in life reveals that we don’t fear God. When we’re afraid of things—people, opinions, situations, circumstances, what might happen, what could happen—it shows us we don’t fear God and that we lack a proper perspective of the awe of the Almighty. I believe the church in this moment must pray for a revelation to recapture a sense of the awe of the Almighty.
In this story, there are so many details, so don’t worry about catching it all, but we’re dropping into 2 Samuel 4. At this moment, the people of God are warring against the Philistines because they always fought them. They’re in a battle, camped at different locations, and when they go into battle, the Philistines prevail and kill several thousand of God’s people. They report back what happened: «It didn’t go well; the Philistines wiped out a couple thousand people.» They’re distraught, «Oh man, how did this happen?» They think they need to flex, so they decide they will go to Shiloh and get the Ark of the Covenant, and bring it to battle because they need a victory—they need the Ark to bring them victory.
They approach Eli the priest and say, «We want to bring the Ark of the Covenant—the presence of God—into battle.» Now Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, known as terrible leaders in God’s house, come down with the Ark. As they approach, the enemies tremble in fear due to the reputation and awe of God. We will see soon that the Philistines had more fear of God than God’s people had of God!
So Hophni and Phineas come down with the Ark into battle, and you can kind of flip back if you want to 1 Samuel 4:5 and 6. They bring the Ark into battle, and when they do, they experience a crushing defeat. It says around verse 19, «So the Philistines fought, and the Israelites were defeated, and every man fled to his tent. The slaughter was very great, and Israel lost thirty thousand foot soldiers. The Ark of God was captured, and Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, died.» A man runs back to Shiloh to report what has happened, and Eli, sitting by the road staring down the road where the Ark went, says that Eli is sitting in his chair because his heart feared for the Ark of God—he still had that sense of awe and wonder for the Almighty.
Eli’s heart was still in it! Although his sons were involved, his heart primarily feared for the Ark of God. The messenger arrives and explains the battle was a wipeout: «We lost thirty thousand people, your sons are dead, and the Philistines captured the Ark!» Upon hearing this, Eli falls over backward, breaks his neck, and dies right there. The text tells us a few verses down that Phineas’s wife was pregnant and, upon hearing of the wipeout in battle, goes into labor, giving birth and dying. But before she dies, she names the child Ichabod, which means «the glory of God has departed from Israel.»
Now we have a child named Ichabod because God’s glory is gone! The awe is gone. The fear of God is gone; what we saw go down the road is gone. They went out with the Ark like it was a good luck charm, but now it’s taken from them. These men, trying to use God’s glory to instill fear in others, didn’t recognize that God had given them Himself so they would know that in fearing Him, they wouldn’t need to fear anything else.
What happens next? The Philistines celebrate, declaring, «We’ve captured the Ark!» They throw a victory parade, but everywhere they go, plagues break out because God isn’t happy. While they encounter these plagues and tumors, they realize quickly the necessity of the fear of God; so they decide to send the Ark back. They build a cart, harness some oxen, and put the Ark on it along with parting gifts—little gold rats and gold tumors—to say, «We’re sorry,» and send it back up the road. They just said, «Go!» and the Ark comes back into the territory of God’s people.
As it approaches Beth Shemesh, the people are out in the fields and notice this cart separately coming up the road. They investigate and realize, «It’s the Ark of the Covenant of God; it’s coming back!» The people gather around, astonished by the miracle—but then they think maybe it’s a trick. So they open the Ark to check and ensure everything is in place. When they pry it open, God isn’t happy, and Scripture tells us in verse 19 that God strikes down some of the men of Beth Shemesh, putting seventy of them to death for looking into the Ark of the Lord.
The people mourn over this heavy blow, and the men of Beth Shemesh ask, «Who can stand in the presence of the Lord, this holy God? To whom will the Ark go from here?» They send messengers to the people of Kiriath Jearim, saying, «The Philistines have returned the Ark of the Lord! Come and take it up to your place.» The men of Kiriath Jearim arrive, take the Ark of the Lord, and bring it to the house of Abinadab. You can imagine his reaction: «Oh great, you want to put this in my house?» After thousands have died, he must be thrilled! So they install Eleazar, his son, to guard the Ark. It’s a long time—twenty years—before the Ark remains in Kiriath Jearim, during which all the people of Israel mourn and seek the Lord.
If you read ahead, Samuel steps into the story, calling the people to repentance: tear down your idols, your Asherah and Baals; return to God. They do, and God blesses them. They stand strong against the Philistines for the following 20 years. God raises up David, who has a heart after God. He knows the Ark is in Kiriath Jearim, longing for the fear of God and the glory of God, so he goes to get it. There are many details, but they say, «We’re bringing the Ark back to Jerusalem.»
They rebuild a cart because that’s how it arrived, then put it on the cart. The procession is exuberant; everyone is dancing and singing, celebrating because they’re bringing the Ark to Jerusalem! But in transit, the cart jostles over the threshing floor, and Uzzah reaches out just to steady it, and as he touches it, he dies. David is perplexed; we’re in 2 Samuel 6 now. He’s confused and cries out—his heart is trying to move forward, but he doesn’t quite understand.
The text continues, saying, «David was very angry because the Lord’s wrath had broken out against Uzzah.» Verse 9 says, «David was afraid of the Lord that day.» He cried out, «How can the Ark of the Lord ever come to me?» This is gospel recognition and the fear of God. «How can God and His glory come to someone like me? If I even tried to touch it, I would die!»
They set the Ark aside at another man’s house, Obed-Edom, saying, «You keep it.» David returns to Jerusalem; I don’t want to be too detailed. But in the last decade, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of worship music from the church, like fire hydrants bursting forth—a torrent of new worship music. Simultaneously, a dearth of holiness among God’s people has emerged. When we bifurcate worship into music or an hour we do each week, missing the gospel perspective—totally informed by the fear of God—our adjustments are nonexistent.
We must come back together with congruency, and I believe it begins with the fear of the Lord. You don’t need to worry about being afraid of God; they placed the Ark at Obed-Edom’s house, and he felt the fear of God. He feared this presence! Now we don’t hold the same presence, but in that moment, that was God on earth. Obed honored the Lord, and he was blessed! His family flourished; his crops and herds thrived and were blessed! He flourished abundantly; he did not die!
On the contrary, he was blessed! Word got back to David: «Hey, Obed is doing great! Everything around him is flourishing!» The problem isn’t with the Ark; it’s in the heart! Obed has a good heart, so David goes back and retrieves the Ark. It says in 2 Samuel, right in the middle of the chapter, that David brought the Ark from Obed-Edom’s house to the City of David with rejoicing. What it doesn’t say is how.
You’ll need to flip to Chronicles to see the «how,» whereas they made a significant adjustment by consulting the Levites and priests, reviewing what went wrong. They discovered, «You are trying to do this man’s way.» The Philistines sent the cart with the Ark, and now you’re trying to bring it in the same manner. The Ark wasn’t meant to ride on carts; it was meant to be carried on poles.
The Ark of the Covenant has big rings on each side so that you can slide the poles through, and the Levites lift the poles to carry the Ark. This is God’s plan from the start, so He’s asking today, amidst all these names and places, «What did I show you in the beginning that you’re no longer doing? What did I tell you is my way but you changed it?» Maybe collectively, we’ve looked at the carts of the world and said, «Those are amazing! Let’s build one like that!»
They returned to Obed-Edom’s house, taking the poles and sliding them through the rings. The followers of this procession took their places, lifting the Ark of the Covenant. Can you imagine that moment?
How did it get to this point? A couple thousand people died, then thirty thousand, then seventy, then Eli died, Hophni, Phineas, then the wife of Phineas died, then Uzzah…it’s been a train wreck! But you’re going to get to carry the poles? I doubt many people signed up for that job! I doubt anyone was excited to volunteer for that task.
There likely were no selfies or Instagram stories taken, «Hey everyone, I’m picking up one of the poles!» I think the people were trembling. But they picked up the Ark, and this is how the text unfolds. Back in Chronicles, when they took six steps, they stopped!
Six is the sign of man; seven is perfect, representing God. When they took six steps—six glorious, mercy-filled steps—they paused. «We’re still alive! We’ve got the Ark of the Covenant—God’s presence on earth—man and God together, moving toward the City of God!»
They took those six steps, set down the Ark, built an altar, and sacrificed an animal, praising God they were still living in His presence. Eleven and a half miles to Jerusalem, some scholars believe they set down the Ark every six steps to worship God! Worship is a lifestyle; it’s every six steps; it’s every turn of the page.
It’s an awareness of God; an awareness of who He is! It is the fear of the Lord! We come from people who, when copying the Old Testament scriptures, would stop at the word for God, Yahweh, setting the pen down, cleansing it, cleansing themselves and returning to write what’s known as the Tetragrammaton—Y-H-W-H. They wouldn’t dare write the name Yahweh because they feared the awe and the wonder of the Lord.
Can you imagine looking back along those eleven and a half miles? Every ten feet, there’s an altar. When they arrive at the walls of the city, David lost his mind! The king, in his undergarments, danced with all his might before the Lord. His wife Michal saw him from the window and criticized him when he returned home. He said, «I wasn’t dancing for you or anyone else; I was worshiping before God! I am delighted that we’re alive with God’s presence in Jerusalem. I am so overjoyed I couldn’t contain myself, and I don’t care if I look undignified; I’ll be more undignified than this!»
Some say Psalm 24 is a response to this moment, and I believe it echoes everything we’re saying: coming into worship, worshiping in every way while we’re here, and then going out to worship! The psalmist wrote, «The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it, for He founded it on the seas and established it on the waters. Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place?»
«Oh, anyone can come!» someone may declare. «This is a grace explosion!» «Who may ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place?» He who has clean hands and a pure heart—that’s how you get that—through Jesus!
«Who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false?» The fear of God! «He or she will receive a blessing from the Lord and vindication from God their Savior. Such is the generation of those who seek Him, who seek your face, O God of Jacob.»
Now we have this antiphonal worship! Many believe this is what happened as the Ark entered the city—this was a procession approaching Jerusalem. There was a choir and a chorus singing! «Lift up your heads, O gates! Be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in!» From the walls echoed the response, «Who is this King of Glory?»
Echoed from the roadway came the reply: «The Lord strong and mighty! The Lord mighty in battle!» So lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in! Again, they asked, «Who is this King of Glory?»
The answer resounded, «The Lord Almighty! He is the King of Glory!» The Lord Almighty wants to come in, and He can—but He comes in when He finds the fear of the Lord.