Before I tell you or ask you to open your Bibles, I'm going to give you a disclaimer. We are not continuing the Psalm series for another week. We are starting the new series, but I decided to add in another passage, particularly for this week. So please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 112. If you're using the black Bibles that are in the pews, you can find this on page 509, page 509, Psalm 112. We're starting a new series on the blessed life. and we are going to kick off by looking at a theme that comes up in all of the three passages we're gonna be looking at for this 10-week period, and looking at particularly in Psalm 112. So hear God's word, Psalm 112, verses one through 10. Praise the Lord. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. His offspring will be mighty in the land. The generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever. Light dawns in the darkness for the upright. He is gracious, merciful, and righteous. It is well with the man who deals generously and lends, who conducts his affairs with justice. For the righteous, will never be moved. He will be remembered forever. He is not afraid of bad news. His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord. His heart is steady. He will not be afraid until he looks in triumph on his adversaries. He is distributed freely. He is given to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. His horn is exalted in honor. The wicked man sees it and is angry. He gnashes his teeth and melts away. The desire of the wicked will perish. May the Lord add his blessing to the reading of his word. We're gonna be looking today at something that all three of the passages we're gonna be sort of surveying, jumping all over the place on, have in common, which is an emphasis on the fear of God. And this is not something that, even in Christian congregations, this is something that I think gets downplayed a little bit, this whole idea of the fear of God. Sometimes you'll have people who will explain it and say, well, it's not sort of a, you know, it's not fear of fear, it's more of a reverence or respect, and there's something to that. And there is a wrong kind of fear of God, and I hopefully will get a little bit of a sense of that in the sermon today. But the fear of God is a major theme of the whole Bible. You'll run into it over and over again in the Psalms and the Proverbs, but also throughout the books of history in the Old Testament, throughout the New Testament, fearing God is a big deal. So we're gonna look at what that means a little bit. But before we get into that, we're gonna talk about, we'll try to answer two questions that have to do with this whole series that we're gonna be looking at. We're going to be looking at three passages of scripture, Job chapter 29, Psalm 112 that I just read, and Proverbs 31, or most of Proverbs 31, the famous passage about the mighty or the excellent wife. The first question I want to bring up is, why ask what a blessed life is like? Why have a sermon series on the blessed life? Why talk about what a blessed life is or what it's like? Well, at a very simple level, I think everybody is motivated by some vision or other of what a good life is. All of us are motivated by one vision, one picture in our minds or another of what a blessed or a good life is. Now that can vary all over the place. And you'll run into people who have a very well put together idea of what they want their life to look like. And then you'll also run into people who are kind of scattered all over the place and very often they'll see something on TV or on social media or something like that and they'll just be really attracted by this. I know what I want to do. I want to move out into the country and be a homesteader. I know what I want to do. I want to be a club promoter in New York City. I know what I want to do. I want to be an astronaut. and they just kind of jump around. But everybody is led by a picture of what they understand to be a blessed or a good life. And this is true, by the way, for totally non-religious people as well as religious people. So if you see, for instance, atheistic computer engineers at Comic-Con dressed up as Chewbacca the Wookiee, This is, in a way, a stand-in for a worship service. Because you have people who are excited by this vision of heroism and warfare and fantasy and science fiction. They're excited by this. They're led to it. They're drawn to it. And they wrap their lives around it. They focus their lives on it. Same thing is true. A few weeks ago, my nine-year-old daughter and I, this is a fantastic bonding moment, watched a bunch of strongman competition videos on YouTube together. If you don't know what strongman competitions are, it's like weightlifting, but even crazier. You have guys picking up huge concrete boulders, and logs, and things like this. And we watched some of the Arnold Classic strongman competition. And these are guys who eat, sleep, and breathe being strongman competitors. They're trying, literally, to be the strongest people in the world. And that, too, is a vision of a blessed life. They think in their hearts, if I have that, everything will be right. If I can get that, if I can achieve that. And so that becomes the focus of their lives. The reality is all of us are motivated by a vision of a blessed life. And it may be a very small and modest one. Maybe just, I just want to raise my kids and survive that, and then I want to retire. and just relax a little bit, right? But all of us are motivated by some vision of a blessed life. Furthermore, we want to go beyond sort of a cheap understanding of what it means to be blessed, right? So this is really, really common. Somebody will post a picture of themselves draped across the hood of a brand-new, pre-owned Hyundai Sonata, and hashtag blessed, right? We have a term for this, humble bragging, right? What I'm really doing is showing you the cool thing that I got or the cool thing that I did, but I'm going to couch it in terms of blessing from God. And to some extent, it's fine to tag something blessed on social media, that's not a big deal. But we do want to go deeper than that. We don't just want to say, every time a nice thing happens to me, that's what blessing looks like. To be blessed by God means more than just receiving stuff or having stuff or even experiencing good things or happy things. It means a life that is lived before the face of God that brings glory to His name as well as good to us. And not just this worldly good, but a final and ultimate good of eternal life. The final reason why we should ask and try to answer the question, what a blessed life is like? There's an old saying, if you aim at nothing, you are certain to hit it. If you aim at nothing, you are certain to hit it. And if we do not have before us a vision of what a blessed life is like, we are certain to go not there, but everywhere. We're going to go everywhere. We're going to aim at nothing. We're definitely going to hit nothing. Second question, why these passages? These are three pretty different passages in some ways. Psalm 112 that I just read, we're not given an author, we're not given a context, it's just a psalm of praise for God that at the same time paints a picture of what it means to be a blessed person or a blessed man. And the blessed man says, Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. And then you have blessings on his children or blessings through his children on the community. You have wealth and riches are in his house. You have things like he gives freely to the poor. So there's all these sort of features or aspects of being, living a blessed life that are given there. Psalm, excuse me, Job 29 gives a very different picture. Because Job, if you remember the book of Job, Job is a rough book. And a lot of Job is arguments or questions or discussions back and forth between Job who had been at the absolute top of life and was brought to the absolute bottom. And he's having these discussions with his supposed friends about why that is. And they keep insisting, you must have done something to deserve this. You must have done something to sin and make God angry. He keeps insisting, no, it's just not true. I didn't do anything. And in Job 29, it's actually a little bit of a flashback. Job 29, as we're gonna look at over the next few weeks, is a flashback, and he talks about, oh, that I were as in the days of old, in the good old days when everything was good. But it's helpful for us to see that because we see what the Bible means when it talks about a life that is well-lived, a life that is worth living. And finally, Proverbs 31 is a famous passage that paints this picture. Throughout the book of Proverbs, You have two huge things that you need to pay attention to, and each of them has an avatar. And the two huge things are wisdom and foolishness, or folly. And each of them has an avatar. The avatar of folly is the strange woman or the adulteress. The avatar of wisdom is the mighty or the excellent wife. And so she's an embodiment of wisdom. And there are huge lessons throughout that passage, not only for women, but for men and children, for that matter, as well. So we're going to be looking at that. But what these all have in common is that they don't just give us word pictures. They don't just tell us. They actually show. Or they don't just give us words. They give us word pictures. They don't just tell us. They show us. They give us a vision. Because I don't know about you. But I can learn a good bit from words. I learn a lot more from pictures. And I learn a lot more from poems and pictures of words that will give me a full vision of what I'm supposed to be aiming at. What do I want to be like? Now, in all of these passages, there's a common theme. All three of the people who are described as blessed in these three passages are people who fear God and walk with God. So Job describes himself in Job 29. He talks about the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, when the friendship of God was upon my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me. Psalm 112 that we just read. Praise the Lord, blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. Proverbs 31, 30, almost the last verse of the last chapter of the book of Proverbs. Charm is deceitful, beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. So at the heart of being a person who lives a blessed life in all of these passages, and this is throughout the scriptures, but especially in these, is this idea of fearing the Lord. And the reality is that actions speak louder than words. And when we see the way that these people live, we'll see the fear of the Lord is not just something they talk about, It's something they live out and we want to be the same. We want to be the people who are not just baptized good church members who have checked all the boxes and we're not in trouble and you know we're not in trouble with the church authorities or we have a good reputation. We want to be people who inside and out live the life of the fear of God that the Lord has put before us. So I'm gonna say a few things about the fear of God. And a lot of these, some of these are gonna connect directly with their passages. Some of them are gonna be jumping all over the scriptures. The first thing is very straightforward, that the fear of God, fearing God is the right response to his power and his goodness. Fearing God is the right response to his power and his goodness. Now, there are risks that you can run, and there are risks that you can't run. So we can work on things, and when the guys are here working, building this stage, there's always a risk of tool malfunction, somebody hits his thumb with a hammer, or maybe even worse, I have a retired pastor friend who cut off two fingers in a miter saw. That's a risk when these guys are working on this. Every day when we go out in our cars, or when we work on things, or when we just get up in the morning and hope that the milk isn't spoiled, we run risks. There are risks that we can run. And some people, for very good reasons, run much bigger risks. Police. Military. First responders of all kinds. People who have to run into dangerous situations to rescue people from danger. People with really dangerous jobs. There are legitimate reasons to run risks. But there are some risks that you don't run. And if you have a clear idea of what we are talking about and who we are talking about when we talk about God, you will recognize that Fighting God is not a risk that you want to run. That if you have declared war on him, which some people do, it is only a matter of time before you lose that war. I remember a number of years ago talking to a man that I had and still have a lot of respect and admiration for, And I found out that when he was a young man, he had professed some kind of faith. I don't think it was ever all that real. It was never all that strong. But at some point, he did a 180-degree turn away from that faith, and he was living his life on his own. Now, he wasn't a flagrant sinner. He didn't turn around and start robbing banks after this. He was still a very hardworking man who loved his family. But I had a chance with him one time to sit down and talk to him and say, why aren't you, it was a long conversation, but I led up to the question, why aren't you a believer anymore? And he said, I just got tired of being worried that I had to do everything God said, and finally one day I said, who the hell do you think you are? And I quaked for him. You do not do that. You cannot run into a tornado and expect to be fine. You cannot climb into a volcano and expect to be fine. And there is one, if God is real, God made the tornadoes and the volcanoes. All of these things, every power in heaven and earth, every power that is physical and spiritual is at His command. Do not defy the Almighty. But you know what actually makes it even worse? Is that he's also perfectly good. Because you and I, we might think for a minute, well, maybe I can fool him. Or maybe I can strike a bargain with him. Right? Maybe I can get away with these things, or sort of keeping these things to myself, or living my life in the way I want to in these different areas, as long as I sort of check these other boxes. Right? And we all have different lists of what those things are that we don't want to give up, and what those things are we think will buy off God. But if God is perfectly good and perfectly holy, part of that is you cannot buy him off. He is not fooled, and He will not be satisfied with anything but a perfect obedience, which is why the gospel of Christ is so central. Because we recognize that our relationship with God can't come down to anything we can do in obedience for Him, but what Christ has done on our behalf. And yet, once you recognize that, there's no going back. You don't turn around and say, well, then I guess I can do what I want. You say, no, I guess I was bought with a price. And I am not my own, but Jesus Christ who loved me and gave himself up for me. And now I know who God is. If there is a God, what is his power like? If there is a God and he is perfectly good, he is not manageable. And by the way, this was one of the big differences between the Christian understanding that there is one God who made all things and who rules over all things. and apart from whom nothing exists, that was a major difference between the Christian understanding of God and what you find among people like the ancient Romans, or like Hindus today, who worship a whole bunch of different gods. Because those gods, they're small. They are manageable. You can buy them off. You say, I really want a good crop, so I'll sacrifice to these various gods that control the crops. and then you hope that you bought them off sufficiently. But you know you can't make all the gods happy, so you just try for some of them. We understand that God is not manageable, and we are not in a position of making him do the things that we want. The only right response to a God like this, who is all powerful and perfectly good, is to fear him. That is the beginning of everything else. And everything else that the scriptures say about the love of God is predicated, is based on our understanding that God is big. and we cannot defeat him if we try. So that's the first thing, big heavy thing. We fear God as a right response to his power and his greatness. Secondly, the fear of God leads us to accept our situation as the gift of God. The fear of God leads us to accept our situation as the gift of God. Now I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put, I want to balance two huge things here as I say this, because there's a way to take this the wrong way. Think about your situation. There's something in your life or your situation you don't like. I'm willing to bet on anybody here who's over about the age of five. There's probably something about your situation you don't like that much. Maybe you don't like your body. Nobody 100% likes their body, okay? Maybe you don't like your body, and maybe you have really good reasons to. Maybe you have all kinds of illnesses and difficulties with your body. Maybe you look back on your background or your upbringing, and you're like, oh, man, that was a train wreck. I mean, that was just terrible. Or you say, yeah, it was okay, but man, I just feel like I didn't learn very much. Here I am, a grownup, and I just don't feel equipped for grownup life. Maybe you look at your time in history. That's a temptation for us students of history as we go, oh, this awful age we live in. Although, for real students of history, we can also look back on every other age and realize they were all pretty awful. Maybe you don't like your financial situation, your work situation. Maybe you don't like your family situation. Maybe you don't like that you're single. Maybe you don't like you're married. Maybe you don't like that you don't have kids. Maybe you don't like that you do have kids. There's all kinds of things not to like. But here's the reality. Wherever we are, if God is God, he put us where we are. He put us here. And that means that the real drama in our lives is not the situation we're in. The real drama is how we're gonna respond to it. Are we going to rage and fight God over this and say, how dare you do this to me? Why is it that I don't have what he has or what she has or what they have? Why is it that I don't have the blessed life that I would like to have? Are we going to rage against God and fight against God? Or are we going to recognize that he is in charge and he does what he pleases? There is a wonderful passage that sometimes gets quoted too early to people when they're dealing with great tragedy. Romans chapter eight, verse 28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. If you love God, all things are working together for good. But you know, we must read that through the lens of the cross of Christ. All things work together for good for Jesus Christ. He rose from the dead on the third day. He ascended to triumph and rule, and he is King of kings and Lord of lords, and nothing will ever take that away from him. And the only thing that is ahead for him is more glory, more blessing, more joy, and a greater kingdom than he's ever had yet, because there are more people being added to it all the time. But the way to that, the all things that had to work together for good to get to that point was a cross. And the same thing on some level is true for every one of us. God doesn't call us to just delights and delights until we finally hit heaven. He calls us to take up our crosses and bear them. and to willingly suffer whatever He has sent us. And that may have everything to do with what our bodies are like, what our background or upbringing was like, our time in history, whether it's a good time or a bad time for Christians and the different temptations that those things bring with them our financial situation, our work situation, our family situation, our marriage situation. God has put us where we are and he has a plan that takes where we are right now and will make it into something good. So how can we rage against him? Now, here's the thing you need to not take from that. Sometimes you're in a bad situation, and the thing to do is try hard to get out of that situation. So there can be a kind of fatalism where people say, well, if God put me here, I guess I just need to continue, you know, fill in the blank, continue to have a terrible job, or continue to be abused by somebody in my life, or continue in this or that situation. That's not what I'm saying, and that's not what the scriptures call us to. In fact, there's a really interesting passage, 1 Corinthians chapter 7, where Paul is writing to a bunch of Christians. This is a wild bunch. I'll preach on 1 Corinthians sometime. It's a pretty fun book. But the Corinthian church, they're wrestling with a lot of things. And one of the things they're wrestling with is, maybe I can't serve God in my situation. Maybe I can't serve God as a single person, or maybe I can't serve God as a married person, or maybe I can't serve God as a rich person, or as a poor person, or maybe I can't serve God as a slave. In the ancient world, they had slaves. And some of the people in the Christian church that Paul is writing to were slaves. And what's really interesting, because Paul actually says to this church, hey listen, Wherever you are, you can serve God. Whatever situation you're in, you can serve God. And this is one thing he says. He says to the slaves, were you a slave when you were called? In other words, were you a slave when you became a believer? Don't sweat it. That's the Greek. Don't sweat it. Don't worry about it. Don't let it bother you. But then he says, but if you can get your freedom, do. because if you can get your freedom, you'll have more freedom with which to serve the Lord. I think that's an excellent way to look at almost anything we're going through. You may be in a bad financial situation. Guys, sometimes bad financial situations last the rest of your life. Sometimes difficult family situations go on for decades. Sometimes your body, right? We went camping a few nights ago, and Niall was in the tent with me, and I woke up and I thought, it's going to take me like 20 minutes to unbend, to get up. And I said, if I'm not out in an hour, send a forklift. Your body, you're like, I may never be back to as springy and spry as I was when I was 25. That's OK. That's OK. But if you're in a position to make your situation better, not at all costs, but at some cost, do make your situation better. So don't misunderstand that. And there are situations you should get out of, and you should get out of as fast as you can. Remember that God is good, and remember that there is always something we can do, starting with we can pray. We do things wrong, but God does not. Thirdly, the fear of God leads us to take the long way around. The fear of God leads us to take the long way around. One of the things we're gonna see about the various people in these three passages is that they don't take the easy way. Now, we read in Psalm 112 a little while ago, wealth and riches are in his house and his righteousness endures forever. Well, what's the fastest way to riches being in your house? Make a lot of money and hang on to it. Don't be stupid, right? Certainly don't give it away. And yet a few verses later, we read that it is well with the man who deals generously and lends, who conducts his affairs with justice. He is distributed freely. He is given to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. His horn is exalted in honor. In other words, this guy, whoever he is, that's probably not a particular person, anybody who wants to become a wealthy person, the most straightforward way is not necessarily the right way. The most straightforward way is not necessarily the way that God calls us to go. Now the same thing is gonna happen in Proverbs 31 in a different way. In Job 29, we're gonna see Job taking responsibility as a public person who is willing to carry the burdens of the community that he lives in. That is not the most straightforward way to become wealthy and blessed in that way. And yet, that is what God calls us to. There are many good things in the world And they can either become occasions for worship and obedience to God, like the way that we use our money is a classic one, or they become idols that we worship instead of God. So the questions then are, I see this good thing in front of me. Maybe it's a family, maybe it's wealth, maybe it's health, maybe it's respect in the church or respect in the wider community. How will I seek them? directly charging ahead at all costs, or somehow indirectly. In my time, I must have this now, or I'll die. Or in God's time. You are sitting in one of God's blessings that he brought in his time, not in our time, certainly not in my time as the planting pastor of this church. I thought about six months in, we're probably ready for a building now, right? We could have a building. And the Lord said, no, that's not gonna happen until I get the glory. If we are fearing God, we will not be afraid to go the long way around. We will not be afraid to work hard instead of taking the shortcuts of cheating or stealing. We will not be afraid to wait, even multiple generations, for the fruit of our labors when we could take shortcuts like living for this life or foolishly borrowing money. We will not be afraid to be celibate. instead of taking the obvious shortcut that could save us from that. We will not be afraid to deal with the consequences of our decisions. And there are many people who are exactly afraid of that. They've made bad decisions, they've done foolish, maybe even criminal things, and they cannot They cannot endure facing the consequences for what they've done. We will not even be afraid to live when a shortcut would be dying. The fear of God calls us to place obedience first and results later. In fact, it calls us to place obedience first and entrust God with the results, even though we may be called to wait for a long time. Next, the fear of God is the foundation of wisdom and of friendship with God. And I'll keep this brief. But you cannot love someone until you know them. And so in God, there is no contradiction between fearing God and loving God. Now, I'm not sure that's true about another human being. about a human being, excuse me, about any human being. You think about your relationship with your parents. When you're little, you both fear them and love them. As you grow older, you fear them less, right? You could still be kind of afraid of them, but you don't fear them in the same way that you do when you're little. Your relationship with them changes. There's a little bit of a push and pull between the fear and the love. But in our relationship with God, fear is the right foundation of wisdom and of friendship with God. You can't love someone until you know them, you know their character, and you know what they're capable of. In fact, the best kinds of friendship always require respect. Respecting somebody knows that you know, on some level, what they are capable of. Fear of the Lord is portrayed throughout the scriptures as the beginning of wisdom. Psalm 111, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. All those who practice it have a good understanding. Proverbs 1, verse 7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. But it's also, the fear of God is also the beginning of a friendship with God. Where we delight in Him. It's not just we know He's there, we don't want to make Him mad. It's that we know Him. He is our friend. We walk with Him, we delight in Him, we talk to Him. He speaks to us. And by the way, the Bible is God speaking to us. Right? It's not number one and first and foremost, a book for me to open up and feel, you know, happy feelings when I read something or else you're gonna have a hard time when you read a lot of the prophets. But it is God speaking to us. It is God encouraging us. It is God teaching us. It is God directing us. It is God comforting us. And when God opens his mouth, we believe him. This is a great little verse in James chapter 2. Abraham, from the Old Testament, believed God and it was counted to him as a righteousness and he was called a friend of God. Unless you know who God is, You can't be friends with God. Unless you have a clear understanding from the scriptures of who God is, then the God that you're friends with is kind of your imaginary friend. It's not the real God. You could think it's God, but you need to know him. And part of knowing him is fearing him. When we take him seriously, we're in a place where we can actually be his friend. Again, Job talks about the time when God was with him as when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, when the friendship of God was upon my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me. The psalmist talks about blessed is the man who fears the Lord. Another psalm says, the friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him. And perhaps we could even say that wisdom is friendship with God, and friendship with God is wisdom. where rather than going to war with the Almighty, raging against His plans for us, we walk with Him in friendship, loving to do what He pleases, knowing that even if we're like Abraham, taken out of every comfort of home, dragged out into the desert, told, you just leave and I'll tell you some years later where I'm going to take you. Even if we're like Abraham out in the desert, we walk under the stars and we see them as a symbol of the love of God and the presence of God with us. We walk as friends with God. There's one more thing, and this is gonna be in some ways a little preview of next week's sermon. The fear of God means that we don't have to be afraid of anything else. The fear of God means that we don't have to be afraid of anything else. Psalm 118. Out of my distress, I called on the Lord. The Lord answered me and set me free. The Lord is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me? The Lord is on my side as my helper. I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. If we have the friendship of God, if we walk in the fear of the Lord, we don't need to be afraid of what anybody or anything else can do to us. Again, consider this as a taste of next week's sermon. But we do not have to fear what other people can do to us. We do not have to fear the future. We do not have to fear the end of the world, or the end of the world as we know it. We do not have to fear being forgotten. We do not have to fear death or what's on the other side of death. Romans chapter eight, Paul says, what then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? This is the kind of life we're called to. We're called to a life of fearing God. We meet God as he presents himself in the world around us, right, because the world is stamped with the fingerprints of God. He reveals himself in all kinds of different ways, but most clearly and most specially as he reveals himself in the scriptures, and we walk with God. in fear, in friendship. We know that if we do, we have nothing to be afraid from anyone or anything else. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the blessing of the fear of God. We tremble for those around us who don't seem to have any. We pray that you would gently teach them, not teach them injustice and judgment, but you would gently teach them and call them to reconcile with you through Jesus Christ. At the same time, Lord, in ourselves, we see a lot of parts of our own hearts that don't fear you and don't walk with you as we should. We see parts of our own hearts that just want what we want, and we want it now. We see parts of our hearts that are terrified of all sorts of things that we ought not to be. We're terrified of what people think of us. We're terrified of what will happen to us in the future. We're terrified of not getting the life that we want. And so Lord, we thank you at a fundamental level that we do not need to reach out and grab a blessed life. but that if we know you, fear you, call on you as our Lord and our God, trust in you, believe in you by faith, then you will give us everything that we need and that one day we will look back on the life that we have lived and we will see your hand and we will say that your plan for us was even better than what we had planned for ourselves. Lord, we pray that you would give us a biblical vision of a blessed life but we pray that first and foremost, and also last, we would place the fear of God. Lord, thank you that in Jesus Christ, that fear is not a fear that destroys us, but a fear that gives us joy, because we know who you are, and you have revealed your face to us through him. Your face is not turned toward us full of anger and condemnation, but full of love. We pray that that would lead us not to take you lightly, but to understand you all the more as someone to be feared. With you there is forgiveness that you may be feared. In Jesus' name we thank you and we praise you, amen.