Mostly – we think of fear as being a bad thing.  And often it is.  But it’s also a protection mechanism.  And “good fear” if I can call it that – helps us to make good choices. So – exactly how does that work?

Fear is a funny thing, mostly we think of it as a negative thing. None of us wants to be afraid, I mean who wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "Gee, I hope I get to be afraid today?" No, fear is something we don't look forward to but fear is one of those funny emotions that also helps to protect us.

We've all seen a little child who will chase a football out onto the street without any sense of the fear about what might happen if a car or a truck or a bus happened to want to occupy that very same piece of real estate just at the time that they're there.

An adult on the other hand has learned a healthy fear of that and so we hopefully would have a good look before we ran out onto the street. Well that makes sense, the same is true when, of most things that are dangerous, an adult has a healthy sense of fear. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be a respect for the consequences and so that acts, in effect, as a protection mechanism. So as it turns out there is a right and good sense of fear in life, so how does that apply to our relationship with God?

This week on the program we're taking a bit of a look at the dark times we travel through in life sometimes and we've all had them. Sadness, loss, pain, you can look back and say, "Yep! That was one of those dark times." Maybe you're even in one of those times at the moment and we've spent some time with a man, King David of Israel that had more than his fair share of those dark times and I guess because he was a man with a close relationship to God, he learns some things about God and about that relationship in those dark times.

He shares a bit of that in Psalm 34 which we're having a bit of a poke around this week. Psalm 34 is written with the benefit of hindsight, looking back at some dark times, the fearful times and rejoicing because what David discovers is that God was faithful to him in those difficult times, hopefully that sets a bit of the scene. Now let me read to you the first bit of the psalm right now, Psalm 34 beginning at verse 1:

I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me, lets exalt His name together because I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered in shame.

This poor man called and the Lord heard him; He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.

Today I want to take a bit of a look at this fear element. It's a word that David uses twice in that short passage. Now I hate being afraid, I'm sure you're the same. I remember when I was in the army and we would be repelling out of helicopters or going over high things on obstacle courses. I have a fear of heights, I just don't like them, I had the opportunity to go parachuting once, I said, "you've got to be kidding me! I am not jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane." And as I said the other day, fear is what happens in those dark times too.

In a broken marriage there’s a fear of the future, there's a financial fear. In retrenchment there’s a fear, will I ever get another job and we can lose hope? Fear is a big part of that, it kind of, well it immobilises us and obviously the times that David had been through he'd experienced that same fear that you and I do. Psalm 34, verse 4:

I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears.

In a sense that fear is a bad fear, that's the fear that God wants to deliver us from. We talked about that yesterday on the program and I can't tell you the number of times that, that I've been immobilised by that sort of fear and I've gone to God and just cried out to Him and He fills me with a peace that defies any human comprehension.

Now I'm not someone who naturally gets afraid, I'm a fairly positive person 99.9% of the time but we all need God in those dark places with us to deliver us from that sort of fear but it's the other mention of fear in this little passage that I'd like to spend a few moments focusing on.

You see this is one of the good fears that I was talking about at the beginning of our time together today. It's in verse 7 of Psalm 34, it says:

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.

You see, this is talking about the fear of God. Now it's easy to see this as one of those bad fears, "oh God is just this old grumpy old man with a big stick and a bunch of rules and old fashioned rule based religion. They start talking to me about the fear of God, see I knew I didn't need that sort of religion in my life," but that's not what it means. The fear of God or the fear of the Lord is quite different. Proverbs chapter 1, verse 7 says:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

See the word fear means two things, the first is the obvious meaning, 'to be petrified; to be afraid' it's the meaning we know well, terror. The second, the second is respect and reverence. You see my Dad when I was growing up, I had both of those fears for him. I knew that if I did something really bad, when he came home from work I'd get a belting. There were consequences.

Now that's just the way it was but at the same time I respected him and he's passed away now but as I look back my greatest emotion is that one of respect and yes he did punish me sometimes and that's what happened but I didn't wander around all day in terror, it was a sense, a healthy sense of respect and knowing that if I crossed him, there were consequences and it's the same with God.

That's what the fear of the Lord means. You know something; if you and I reject God, if we spend the rest of our lives walking against him, one day there will be a day of judgement and one day there will be hell to pay for that. That's that kind of fear but the other part of that fear is to have respect and a reverence, a right view of God. Yes He is my friend and He is my saviour but He's also a God who's powerful and mighty and awesome and sovereign.

Love and respect go together and when we have that right relationship with Him, when we get Him in His rightful place in our lives something starts to happen. This is what David says in Psalm 34:

God delivers us from our fears; He protects us.

And Solomon in Proverbs chapter 1 that I just read before, He gives us wisdom:

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.

God protects us when we honour Him, when we respect Him and I want to encourage you to do something. In the dark times we travel through sometimes we just get tempted to behave badly. Sometimes we just say, "well God's not in that place and I'm just going to walk my other way", I want to encourage you in your dark time to fear God for "the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him."

And you know something; He delivers them.