From Fearing Man To Fearing God Series

From Fearing Man to Fearing God

Series: Moving Forward: The Choices that Free Us

Brad Bailey – January 21, 2018

Note: In the process of preparing to address this topic I found that what developed was an extent that would be better served as the basis for a 2 to 4 message series. Therefore, what follows is more material than I was able to share well in a single message…but should serve others with plenty to draw from for either a message or expanding towards series.

Intro - Throughout my teenage years I had a Golden Retriever dog named Genny. Golden Retrievers are known for their particular love for one thing… the tennis ball.

The tennis ball was her life focus… actually it was retrieving it and bringing it back to her master. When she retrieved it… gave her clear direction.

One year… threw a birthday party… friends came…and one had collected aa mass of tennis balls…we saved it for her last gift. At that point he poured out across the lawn the mass of tennis balls…and we watched. We looked the mass…and picked up a ball… but then stopped…as her every instinct couldn’t just pass over the others…so she stopped…eventually had to drop the one to get another…and this continued….and continued.

It was a world of equal expectations…equal focus…with no central focus.

• Focus (Another picture of Golden Retriever with single ball)

• No focus (Another picture of Golden Retriever with MASS OF BALLS)

When every tennis ball is calling you…your stuck…not by too little calling you…but too much.

In the same way…

? Can’t move forward when internally when we are surrounded by equally significant expectations from every life around us.

This first month of the new year… focusing on Moving Forward: the choices that can free us.

When Israel was brought to the edge of the Promised Land…

Deuteronomy 1:6-8 (NLT)

“The LORD our God said to us, ‘You have stayed at this mountain long enough. It is time to break camp and move on. … Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and occupy it...”

Many of us may sense a similar word to us…

You have stayed at this mountain long enough.

It is time to break camp and move on.

Most of us want to move forward. We sense there is more potential than we have reached yet…more that God wants us to become. We may have moments of quietly declaring it’s time to change… but we often find that we are stuck…and we just don’t move forward as we had felt so determined to do.

One of powers that we face…is the fear of others.

When Israel reached the edge of the Promised Land…

• Moses sends 12 spies into Canaan. All 12 tell how good the land is, but then 10 go on to state their fear of those who lived there…and that fear spread through all the people.

• Tragically… they will now spend 40 years in the wilderness, until the generation bound in fear has passed. (Numbers 11, 12, 13 and 14:38)

A whole generation never entered the Promised Land because they feared men more than trusted God.

This is a power at work that hold any of us back more than we know. It’s

The Fear of Man

I am using the term “man” only in literary way…the fear we have of others…includes our fear of both fellow men and women.

While it can speak of fearing the physical harm that others could bring upon us…the fear is more broadly all the ways in which we fear others.

It speaks of who we believe we should most deeply honor and serve…what we NEED to please to appease.

It speaks to whose approval we need most and whose disapproval we fear most.

It as a dangerous trap

Proverbs 29:25 (NLT)

Fearing people is a dangerous trap, but trusting the LORD means safety. [1]

It’s a dangerous trap. Many translations use the word “snare”

The Hebrew word used for “trap” or “snare” refers to traps hunters used to catch animals or birds. These traps bind us. Snares are dangerous. If we get caught, we must do whatever it takes to free ourselves.

“The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.”

In truth…I believe we are all bound by the fear of man…the fear of what others may think.

We were created to live in the adventure of life in relationship to the Creator… but we have created a world in which we tend to perform to fellow actors… from a script that has been handed to us.

When the world within us becomes a world of people to perform to…we become nothing more actors.

Life becomes a stage…we must enter over and over…to perform to fellow actors …and then retreat from … because we find it’s an audience of expectations we can never meet. [1b]