Awe

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, if you receive my words and treasure upon my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, Yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand that the fear of the Lord and find knowledge of God. I, wisdom, dwell with prejudice, and I find knowledge in discretion. The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil, pride and arrogance, and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate. I have counsel and sound wisdom. I have insight. I have strength. Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you. Reprove a wise man, and he will love you. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser. Teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is in sight. For by me your days will be multiplied, and years will be added to your life. If you are wise, you are wise for yourself. If you scoff, you alone will bear it. The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short. In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death. The ear that listens to life giving Reproof will dwell among the wise. Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reprove gains intelligence. The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom, and humility comes before honor. We're in the book of Proverbs today, and I think this is a good time to be in it, because we are looking at this phrase that I think we have to stay in, kind of stay in, which is a great way to live. And it is what this whole series is really about in another way. You find wonder from the beginning of the Bible all the way through the end, from the book of Genesis with the whole Genesis 1 in creating the world. That is a masterpiece. It is an artist, God, who is creating all of this and creating an art studio in which he places us to basically say, go for it, cultivate the garden, grow, behold, beautify, Keep working at it with me. We're going to have a great time together at the beginning, and you could see all the way through Revelation at the end where God dwells with humanity forever in this most glorious new heaven and earth coming together position. And it's all about wonder. And I think we can be in awe of that. So today we're looking at this phrase. It's Yiratah Yahweh, from the Hebrew, that's what it says there, or we translate it the fear of the Lord. And from that, in these, I basically just took every passage in Proverbs that has that phrase in Hebrew and strung them together this morning. That's what Kelen read at the beginning. And from this, we're going to look at these three points, what awe is, why we need it, and how we recover it, because I think we're missing it. You might go, wait, wait a minute, awe, I thought the passages say fear of the Lord. Yeah. Well, that's an English translation. That is a choice that translators had to make. How do you take that word year-ra and put it into English simply? But as you know, for a lot of words that we have this morning, just the word back we talked about this morning, you know? And the back is this area of the body, or I'm back, or my back, or whatever, you know, you have my back, you name it, right? There's more than one way to use that word. The same with this Hebrew word yereh. Actually, It has a range of meanings. The best word ones, I think, are fear, potentially, but reverence and awe. Is that? Yes. Okay, I thought I had this slide. So, in this context, I think the best understanding for us in English, because that word fear has turned into this be scared, afraid, and anxious. That is not the best, but it's the idea of reverence and awe and just beholding what God is doing. who God is, what he's about. Do you know the last song we sang? You know, basically it says, you know, Show me who you are and fill me with your love, right? And just, May I be in wonder at the beauty of our God. I think Abraham Heschel, in his books, captures this beautifully. He says, The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe. So, what is awe? What is awe? Awe is not curiosity. I know, the university right now, we just came up with three C's for our values, curiosity, commitment, and collaboration. great, you know, for a university, especially in an empirical society, curiosity is about knowledge. Curiosity wants information. Awe receives a revelation. It is open to what God has to say. Curiosity observes, awe worships. Awe is a lens, a posture through which we...