The Kingdom Perspective

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

Fear is a controlling principle. Its tactical maneuver is to dominate. And the greater the fear, the greater the ability to dominate.

It does this by promising us safety and security. It tells us that if we can just control our lives tightly enough, then we can be assured that we will be safe and sound. We will finally have the life we “need” and “deserve,” with “nothing to fear.” “Control is the path to blessing!”

Now, the problem with such thinking from a Christian perspective is that to obey God’s command to love others, we must relinquish control—we must become vulnerable and open to God and others. Love requires risk. Love requires us to lose our lives for God and others.

C.S. Lewis exposes the fallacy of such fearful thinking in his classic work The Four Loves. Listen to what he writes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

As Jesus put it: If you want to save your life, you must lose it. But if you lose your life—if you risk it, if you lay it down for God and others—you will find it.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you. After a little while, the world no longer is going to see Me, but you are going to see Me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you. The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, what has happened that You are going to reveal Yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him. The one who does not love Me does not follow My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.”

~ John 14:18-24 (NASB)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

Fear is a very powerful and controlling emotion.

It is for this reason that many use fear to control others. For example, if an advertiser can make people fearful, they can drive them to purchase their product. “You don’t want to be rejected by your friends for your bad breath, do you? Then, use our mouth wash and you’ll have nothing to fear.” The mob uses fear to control individuals and communities. “You might want to think about doing what we say; I’d hate to see anything bad happen to you or your family.”

You see, fear can make you do things or keep you from doing things. Fear constrains us.

Thus, if we are controlled by a fear other than the fear of God, that fear becomes our functional god and keeps us from obeying the true God.

So, for example, God commands us to love Him and others. But love requires vulnerability—opening yourself up to possible hurt or misunderstanding—risking your comfort in order to connect with God and others. Such loss of control can be terrifying. And so, it is at that very point that worldly fear steps in and promises an alternate path: “You can keep your life safe and intact if you just put up enough barriers. Keep up your guard. Widen your margins.”

Such fear operates on a lie that says it’s possible to preserve your life by clinging to it. It promises control by controlling you.

Jesus interrupts such foolish thinking by saying, “…whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).

Fearing your life will imprisons your life. Fearing Jesus liberates it.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“And He summoned the crowd together with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it benefit a person to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?”

~ Mark 8:34-36 (NASB)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

The idea of “fearing God” seems not only unpalatable to us as modern people, but also wrong. We object: “We shouldn’t fear anyone! We should be motivated by love, not fear, especially when it comes to God!”

Well, this may sound pious and nice, but it is actually very shallow and misguided.

There is no love without fear. Fear and love are closely linked. When the Bible speaks of fearing God, it is calling us to treasure Him above all else. There is no love without treasuring and there is no treasuring without fear. That’s why those with the greatest earthly treasures expend so much money and effort trying to protect those treasures. They lock them away in vaults and guard them with expensive security systems. They are fearful of anything harming or threatening that which they so treasure—that which they so love.

The same is true in relationships.

You could say that I “fear” for my wife, more than any other human being, precisely because I so love and treasure her. What she thinks and how she feels matters to me. I fear losing relationship with her; I fear harm coming to her, more than any other human being. Because I love and treasure her so much, I fear not pleasing her, not honoring her, not caring for her, more than I do anyone.

In a similar but infinitely greater way, the Bible calls us to fear God above all else. Listen to Deuteronomy: “You must fear the Lord your God and worship him and cling to him…. He alone is your God, the only one who is worthy of your praise.” (Deuteronomy 10:20 NLT). To love God is to fear Him—to treasure Him—above all else.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise. He is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen.”

~ Deuteronomy 10:17-21 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

For us as modern-day thinkers, one of strangest commands in the Bible is the command to “fear the Lord”. Everywhere in Scripture the fear of God is presented as the very foundation of true religion—the very beginning of wisdom and knowledge (Proverbs 9:10 and 1:7).

But what does this mean? How could living in fear of another, especially God, be good and psychologically healthy?

Well, we need to understand what we mean by fear. In the Bible, fearing God means to treasure Him above all else—to value and cherish His character, reputation and holiness above everything, even our own lives. The fear of God is not, at its core, a mere dread of divine punishment. Indeed, it is true that God is our ultimate judge and that one day each of us will give an account of our lives to Him. However, obeying Him merely out of a fear of punishment is not to treasure God at all. Rather, it is treasuring ourselves. In such a case, we are merely looking out for our own well-being.

Rather, God calls us to a different kind of relationship with Him—a different kind of fear. Listen to Deuteronomy 10:

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul….

Indeed, if God is our Maker (the very Source of all reality!), then He must also be the source of all pleasure and goodness. And so, not to treasure Him above all else, would be the very height of foolishness.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good? Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.”

~ Deuteronomy 10:12-16 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

What do you fear? What are you afraid of?

Fear is a very controlling emotion. But the goodness or badness of any given fear is not so much the fear itself but the object of that fear. It all depends on what is driving your fear.

In one sense fear cannot be avoided. Life is a trade-off of fears. This is why two of the most common commands of Scripture seem so contradictory. On the one hand, we are commanded “Fear not!” But on the other hand, we are commanded to “Fear God!”

Well, which is it? Both! God commands us to not fear some things, so that we might fear the one thing that matters the most—Him! Again, fear can either be good or bad, depending on its object.

This means that having the right kind of fear (good fear; fearing God) drives out the wrong kind of fear. The Bible tells us “Fearing people is a snare”—it’s a dangerous trap (Proverbs 29:25). When we fear others, we become slaves of what they think of us. However, to the degree that we “fear God” to that degree we are liberated from what others think. Thus, Proverbs tell us that “Fear of the Lord is a life-giving fountain; it offers escape from the snares of death” (Proverbs 14:27)

You see, the fear of the Lord liberates us to fulfill our destiny of being divine image bearers, reflecting God and what pleases Him. It puts our lives in the proper perspective, by reorienting the fears of our hearts to the proper object—God Himself.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“The fear of man lays a snare,
but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”

~ Proverbs 29:25 (ESV)

“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.”

~ Proverbs 14:26-27 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

The Old Testament book of Judges has some of the ugliest stories in all the Bible. Why is this the case? Well, the book of Judges chronicles the cycle of sin, enslavement and salvation that the children of Israel went through, over and over again, as they first entered the Promised Land.

God had promised them freedom and prosperity, if only they would obey Him. However, they did not take God up on this promise, but turned instead to idolatry, obeying the pagan gods of the Canaanites and suffering the consequence of chaos.

Listen to Judges 2:12-15:

… they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the LORD to anger…and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them… And they were in terrible distress.

This shows us something very profound about us as human beings. The only place we can find true freedom is under the authority of God. God’s authority brings freedom.

This is the very opposite to our common assumption. Foolishly, we think the choice is between God’s authority and our own freedom. Nothing is further from the truth. When we stop serving God, we do not become our own person. Rather, we become slaves of someone or something else. We were made for worship. When we do not worship the true God, we will substitute something in His place.

This is the essence of sin. And to the degree that we reject the true God to that degree other “gods” will rule over us. Since we were not made for other gods, chaos ensues in both our soul and society. Sadly, the book of Judges tells the story of our lives.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress.

Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so. Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them. They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he said, “Because this people have transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died, in order to test Israel by them, whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did, or not.” So the Lord left those nations, not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua.”

~ Judges 2:11-23 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

Representative John Lewis was a legend in his own time and one of the most important civil rights leaders of ours. As a young man, he led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group responsible for organizing the numerous student-led sit-ins against racially segregation. At just 23 years-of-age he joined Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as one of the youngest organizers and speakers at the 1963 Civil Rights March. Later in 1965 he helped lead the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Sadly, this event became known as Bloody Sunday, because John Lewis and his followers were attacked and brutally beaten. Lewis himself suffered a cracked skull.

You do not need to agree with every aspect of John Lewis’s politics in order to appreciate his towering presence over the past 60 years.

What strikes me most about John Lewis is his optimistic courage and gentle patience, even with those that hated him. Lewis refused to be sucked in by that hate; rather he sought to overcome that hate with truth and love.

He famously said: “You never ever hate. You must never ever become bitter or hostile. You must be hopeful. You must be optimistic. Never, never give up.”

Now, what would give one such courage and patience? I think that answer is simple. Lewis, like his mentor Dr. King was a Baptist minister. He grew up in a Christian home. From his earliest days his imagination was animated with the optimism of the gospel of Jesus Christ, even preaching that gospel to the chickens on his family farm when he was just five.

Here’s the point: Those whose imaginations have been captivated by a God who loved us when we hated Him, died for us when we were enemies and yet rose victorious over our sin and guilt, have a resilience that this world cannot easily shake. It does not conform to this world; it overcomes it.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

” Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

~ 1 Corinthians 15:58 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

At our cultural moment we are in desperate need of optimism, and there is no better place to turn for that than Christianity. Christianity is an optimistic religion.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Classical Christianity addresses evil head on. It does not tip toe around the ugliness of sin, the seriousness of hell and the judgment to come. As a matter of fact, it tells us that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be. Our world is fallen and corrupted by sin—every inch of it. The Apostle Paul calls it “this present evil age” (Galatians 1:3). You see, the Bible doesn’t naively assume that what is, ought to be. And that’s precisely the point; it tells us that there’s a new world coming, in which all sin will be judged and all evil banished. Justice will roll down like a mighty river (Amos 5:24).

In large part, it is this optimistic vision that drove the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. Remember, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. He was not merely a civil rights leader. He was first and foremost a Baptist minister.

The night before he was assassinated, King preached his now famous “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” sermon at a church in Memphis. In it he calls for unity, economic and social reforms, etc. calling the American society of that time to live up to its stated Christian ideals.

Now, good people perhaps can debate about the best policies for implementing Dr. King’s vision for our world. However, the Christian optimism that drove him to live and die for this hope, must not be a matter of debate. Rather, it must drive us all at the very core of our being.

The Bible gives us a view from “the mountain top”—a vision of a world yet to come, but a vision that also should inform how we live in the here and now.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“”And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.””

~ Revelation 21:5-8 (ESV)

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective.

In the midst of the Nazi crisis, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “A pessimist sees calamity in every opportunity, but an optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity.”

Though Churchill was the leader of a country that overtly proclaimed itself “Christian”, Churchill himself was not much of a churchman. One time he quipped: “I could hardly be called a pillar of the Church. I am more in the nature of a [flying] buttress, for I support it from the outside” (Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (London: Plume, 2002), 49 n.)

Although he was not personally a Christian, nonetheless, it seems that his tenacious and optimistic spirit owes itself in no small part to the Christian context in which he was raised. The Christian religion at its heart is a religion of optimism. It believes that the best is yet to come. It believes that our labors in this life will be rewarded, and that evil will not ultimately triumph.

This gives us buoyancy in our troubles and the gumption to overcome them.

Again, listen to Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”

As Apostle Paul puts it:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-17 ESV)

My friends, this is good news when we face the troubles and trials of our days.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

~ 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (ESV)

* https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-163/churchill-proceedings-winston-churchill-and-religion-a-comfortable-relationship-with-the-almighty/

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

We were made by God and for God. Therefore, our souls are slaves to the degree that we live for anything other than Him. To the degree that our souls are centered around and driven by anything other than our Maker, to that degree we are imprisoned—barred from fulfilling our destiny and delight.

But this is exactly what’s wrong with us. The Bible says that our souls have been sold into bondage to sin (Romans 7). Because of the universal power of sin in our world, our desires are out of order. You could say this is the very definition of sin. Our hearts are driven by anything other than God. Thus, our desires have become tyrannical prison guards confining our souls deep in the dungeon of “self”, far from the sunshine of God’s goodness and beauty. And so, our souls become prison cells of misery and ultimate loneliness.

John Milton in his famous Paradise Lost put it this way:

“thou art become, O worst imprisonment, the dungeon of thyself.”

This raises the question, who can possibly set us free from a dungeon of our own making? Who could ever set us free from our own self-obsession? Who could possibly set us free from the twin tyrannical prison guards of both self-love and self-loathing? The Bible gives us but one answer. Only the Love of God can break our love of sin, and this is exactly what God has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

” For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”

~ Romans 7:18-25 (ESV)