In church history, the fear of God plays a very prominent role wherever true experiential relationship with God is magnified because the fear of God is very close to the whole idea of intimacy with God and a real vital relationship with God. Some of the ancient fathers wrote a great deal about the fear of God. Augustine did. He spoke of it often. If you read his confessions, that whole idea of God being everywhere and being in the presence of God is very predominant. Then as you move through the Middle Ages, because grace was no longer the sole operative principle in salvation, that you're saved by grace and works, the fear of God became sort of a mixture. And actually the fear of God became more of a slavish fear than a childlike fear, which is tragic. We do need to retain some of the slavish fear of God as well. God is great and majestic. We need to fear sin just for its own sake and what it could do to us and so on. But a primary motivation even in fearing sin in the gospel is because we love God. It's a childlike fear. But when you teach that salvation is a mixture of grace and works in terms of justification, you've got to be sanctified in order to be justified, as Rome did, and that was a middle-aged predominant, not every single theologian, but predominant approach, then the slavish fear outweighs the childlike fear. Now, when the Reformation came along in the 16th century, Luther went through that struggle. And if you watch his life and you observe his agony, And then his freedom in the gospel, when he really broke through, as he says, into the open gates of paradise through reading Romans 1-16, what really happened there, in terms of the doctrine of the fear of God at least, is that there was a transition where the childlike fear of God now became predominant because he saw that Jesus Christ was all his righteousness. And that's what the Puritans had as well, very, very strongly. And they wrote often on the fear of God. In fact, I just completed a book that we're publishing called The Godly Fear of Jaron Bunyan. The whole book is on the fear of God and Bunyan's perception. Now, Bunyan wrote a whole book called The Fear of God, but it permeates all his writings. And that kind of Puritan emphasis of the fear of God out of childlike gratitude is huge. Jeremiah Burroughs wrote extensively on it, Anthony Burgess, William Perkins. So fear of God was very common. And then when you see the waning of Puritanism between the end of Puritanism around 1700 and the Great Awakening, 1730s, 1740s, that period of time, what was lost was the fear of God. And then after the Great Awakening, the winds of enlightenment blew through Europe and then blew over to America. It's the fear of man that became predominant over the fear of God. And what does man think? And by the time three or four presidents would went by at Harvard, which began so much with the fear of God. You know, John Harvard said, the fear of God is really the beginning of wisdom, really focused on that Solomon concept. And what happened was, I think it was the fourth president of Harvard was leaving in May for the summer, and he said to a sculptor on campus, when I come back, I want you on this brand new building, I want you to put in large letters, taller than a man, and near the top of the building, man the measure of all things. So the sculptor went to work, but he's a man who feared God. He couldn't do it. His conscience bothered him. And so when the president came back, he came around the corner to look at this final work of this man. He goes, what? Because instead of man the measure of all things, it said, what is man that thou art mindful of him? You know, you just turn it completely around. And that's what the fear of God does. And I think whatever you see, true spiritual life, the fear of God swallows up the fear of man. God becomes big. Man becomes small and we worship him at his feet. And our greatest question every day is, Lord, what would you have me to do? I want to do what's pleasing to you today. I want to commune with you today. And everything else that's on the horizontal level is motivated by that vertical relationship, which is marinated in the fear of God. And so when you come to our present day, How can five supreme court justices rule something that's so blatantly contradictory to the whole word of God? It's because there's no fear of God before their eyes. They take it into their own hands to redefine, supposedly, what they think marriage to be for 300 million people. That's the audacity of human nature, stripped, cut away from the fear of God. It's the same thing with abortion. But it's the same thing with every single sin you and I commit. You know, Stephen Charnock said something, the Puritan Stephen Charnock said something amazing. He said, every time when we knowingly sin, be it a sin of omission or be it a sin of commission, At that precise moment, we're being a practical atheist. Because we're acting as if God does not exist. So at that very moment, the fear of God is not operative, it's not conscious. If the fear of God is conscious with us, we just wouldn't dare sin. It would be like Joseph. How can I do this great witness inside of this God? And so when you're a Christian and you've encamped your soul at the cross of Calvary, you've seen the fear of God in the cross like an unconverted person never can. You've got no business sinning.