Rejoice and Tremble • Mike Reeves
10ofthose.com/uk/products/26639/rejoice-and-tremble
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"The gospel both frees us from fear and gives us fear. It frees us from our crippling fears, giving us instead a most delightful, happy, and wonderful fear."
"Our moral confusion today and our general state of heightened anxiety are both the fallout of a cultural loss of God as the proper object of human fear."
"Without a kind and fatherly God’s providential care, we are left utterly uncertain about the shifting sands of both morality and reality."
"We fear because we love: we love ourselves and so fear bad things happening to us; we love our families, our friends, our things and so fear losing them."
"Sinful fear drives you away from God. This is the fear of the unbeliever who hates God, who remains a rebel at heart, who fears being exposed as a sinner and so runs from God."
"When people, through misunderstanding, become simply afraid of God, they will never entrust themselves to him but must turn elsewhere for their security."
"It is the devil’s work to promote a fear of God that makes people afraid of God such that they want to flee from God. The Spirit’s work is the exact opposite: to produce in us a wonderful fear that wins and draws us to God."
"The Spirit can cause a fear in those he is convicting of sin, a fear that drives them to Christ for refuge… that fear is then relieved by grace: it is no longer appropriate for a believer once he or she has trusted in Christ."
"True fear of God is true love for God defined: it is the right response to God’s full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory."
"The fruit of the Spirit is precisely that character which grows out of a God-fearing heart."
“The knowledge of God set forth for us in Scripture… invites us first to fear God, then to trust in him. The order is inescapable, for only a God-fearing heart will ever be a God-trusting heart.”
"It is right that trembling fear should be the right reaction to the Creator."
"Our wonder at the Creator’s magnificence - and our enjoyment of it - increases when we know it as the perfect magnificence of the kindest Saviour."
"Safe in the knowledge that the awesome Creator is our tender Redeemer, Christians can delight themselves in the overwhelming majesty of the Creator."
"Without that knowledge of the Son as our Redeemer and the Father as our Father in Christ, we simply do not properly know God."
"If there is any fear of separation from God in believers, it is not the fear of being ultimately separated; it is the fear that our sins might part us from the warmth of enjoyed communion with God."
"The cross, by the forgiveness it brings, liberates us from sinful fear. But, far more than that, it also cultivates the most exquisitely fearful adoration of the Redeemer."
"The fear of God should be a key goal of all our teaching. And that must shape both the content and the intent of our teaching."
"As for content, the people need the word of God if they are to grow in this fear... Through the Scriptures they need to be given the knowledge of God the Creator, but also brought beyond that to a cross-centred knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ."
"As for the intent of our ministry, we must, like Moses, teach with the specific aim that the people might fear the Lord."
"God shares knowledge of himself in order that we might be affected. Just as all theology should be doxological, so all preaching should foster sincere worship."
"In the fear of the Lord is found a true knowledge of God, as Creator and Redeemer, as majestic and as merciful."
"We who love theology need to remember that there is no true knowledge of God where there is no right fear of him."
"The fear of the Lord makes believers both knowledgeable and wise... in essential matters - in knowing God, ourselves, and the nature and story of the universe - the fear of the Lord makes believers more knowledgeable than the greatest geniuses, and wiser than the wisest sages."
"Where the final appearing of the Lord in glory fills believers with an unprecedented joyful fear of the Redeemer, it fills unbelievers with a new level of dread at their Judge."
"All fears are a foretaste. The sinful fears and dreads of unbelievers are the firstfruits of hell; the filial fears of Christians are the firstfruits of heaven."