The Fear Of The Lord, part two

Psalm 130:3-4
If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.

For many of us, the weight of sin is heavy. It burdens our walk with undue strain.

We don’t need to walk through our lives under the heavy burden of sin. Not when God is standing by, waiting to forgive. He wants to lift our load, but we hold on to it. We struggle and wonder why life is so hard.

For those of us who have allowed God to take away our sins, it’s like an enormous boulder has been lifted off our backs. I can straighten up. I can walk upright. I can dance in the presence of the Lord who has freed me.

If God took an accounting of our sins by watching us try to manage under the weight of it, no one could walk. We couldn’t even stand. We wouldn’t be able to lift the load from each other because our own load would be too much for us to even move.

But God forgave us. He took the sins of the whole world on himself.

That’s a lot of weight. But he’s God, and he can manage it. He threw the whole package into Hell where it belonged. That’s why God is feared.

He did what no one else could. He is respected for his awesome power to lift our sins and destroy their hold on us. God is feared because of his desire to remove the sins that we committed against him, knowing we would sin again.

When we see that God doesn’t number, categorize, record, and store up our sins, his love is revealed. When we see that his forgiveness is sure, we gain a deep reverential respect for God called, the fear of the Lord.