No one wants to be genuinely scared, yet people will spend time and money to go to haunted houses every year.
In the United States, we spent between 300 and 500 million dollars just for the chance for someone to jump out at us with a chain-less chainsaw. We are strange creatures.
That says something about us: we need fear in our lives. That seems counter intuitive, but it is true. We seek out fear at times- whether it is at a haunted house or a horror movie or jumping out of a moving plane towards the hard ground- we have some sort of need to be fear-full.
Well, we seek out a certain type of fear, anyway. We seek fear we can control. We can walk out of the movie or decide not to test gravity by staying in the plane.
Proverbs 1:7 says something equally as strange as our desire for fear: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
This makes me think that there are different kinds of fear. There is the kind of fear that makes us fight, flight or freeze…the kind that might cripple us from trying to do hard things or the kind that keep us from trying to beat the train across the train tracks. It also seems that there is another kind of fear- fear of God. A kind of fear that makes us tremble and that brings us joy. A fear that is right and good somehow.
As we gather this Sunday evening we will dive deep into the fear of the Lord from the book of Acts. We will encourage each other to seek- together- the kind of fear that comes from experiencing the fullness of the character of our God.
Join us with a holy expectation of what our unexpected God might do among us.