What Is It to Have the Fear of the Lord?

I can speak a little from personal experience. I had a personal encounter with the Lord where no one else was present when I first met Him.

But what stirred me up to seek the Lord was I had met some unusual people, unusual by my standards. I was a Cambridge don at the time. I’d never met people like that. They went to strange churches, they sang hymns from red hymn books, and they clapped their hands, and they did all sorts of unconventional things by my standards. And I couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell me. Actually, if they’d spoken in Greek, I would have understood them better.

But one thing impressed me was they knew God. And it didn’t seem fair to me because I discovered later that neither of them had ever been beyond elementary school. And here was I, just fresh from 7 years at Cambridge. I thought, “It isn’t, it isn’t fair.” They talked about the Bible as if it was the morning’s newspaper, as if everything in it had just happened and the ink was still fresh.

But what really impressed me was that the little lady said, she said her husband had been sick with tuberculosis of one lung, been exempted from military service in World War I. And then she said, “But I prayed every day for 10 years for God to heal my husband.” And when I heard that statement, I thought to myself, “That is in a different world.” I mean, I couldn’t conceive of praying every day for 10 years about anything.

And then she said, “And at the end of 10 years, I was praying by myself in the living room. My husband was sitting in bed in the bedroom, propped up on the pillows, coughing up blood when he’s, when, spitting up blood when he coughed.” She said, “I heard an audible voice say to me, ‘Claim it.’” And I answered out loud, “Lord, I claim it now.” And she said, “When I said that, my husband was healed instantly and completely in the bed.” And the healing was later confirmed.

Well, I said to myself, “This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.” And that’s why I was motivated to seek God, and I met Him. And I began to understand all the strange phrases that they’d been using.

But I tell that story because there’s a rather sad end to it. After World War II, I went back to visit them. The man, the father of the house, had had one leg amputated because of gangrene. And was in danger of having the other amputated. And it was hard for me to speak to him because he, in a sense, if I had a father in the faith, it would be he. But he said, “I don’t fear anyone. I don’t fear anything. I’m not afraid. God has delivered me from all fear.”

And very respectfully, I said to him, “That attitude is not from the Lord.” Because God never delivers us from the fear of the Lord. And I think he had a rather unhappy ending. Because he’s with the Lord now, and I thank God for him. But it was a real lesson to me. We cannot afford ever to have an attitude which doesn’t leave room for the fear of the Lord in our lives. And as I go on, I think you’ll see that there are many who are in danger of that attitude today.

If you look now in Hebrews chapter 5, you have a remarkable revelation of why God the Father always heard the prayers of Jesus.

“In the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save him from death, and was heard because of his godly fear.”

Why did God always listen to the prayers of Jesus? Because He always prayed out of a godly fear. That’s the fear of the Lord.