Show Notes
Proverbs 14:26
Pastor Stephen Lauer
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Let's pray.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Your word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. It shines the way forward for us.
How it is that you call us to live before you. But we thank you that it doesn't just shine forward.
As it shines, we are drawn to Jesus, who is our light.
So, O God, we ask that by your spirit you would lead our hearts not just in the specifics of the ethical decisions that you call us to, but that you would most especially lead our hearts to Jesus, our Savior, our rock.
That our hearts, souls, all of our being might take its refuge in him, and that in him we might find peace, we might find your love.
We might know for certain and sure that we have nothing to fear, for you are with us.
Help us by your spirit, for Jesus sake. Amen.
Our sermon text is Proverbs, chapter 14, verse 26. Proverbs 14:26.
Hear God's word in the fear of the Lord.
One has strong confidence and his children will have a refuge.
Please be seated.
Confidence is kind of a funny thing, isn't it? It's a tricky business when someone has too little.
Maybe it's a problem if you have too much confidence, maybe a bigger problem, problem.
Sometimes it's just downright humorous, isn't it?
Your two or three year old child runs out of his room and he says, mommy, Daddy, look, I did it all by myself.
And his pants are on backward and the right shoe is on the left foot and the left shoe is on the right foot.
Sometimes it's humorous, other times it's.
It's a problem, isn't it? If we lack confidence, it can be difficult getting a job.
And if we struggle with confidence in the jobs that we have, we may not be able to progress and get more responsibilities and move up. Right? And of course, on the other hand, if we show too much confidence, you've worked with people like this, maybe it's been you.
Problems happen. Mistakes are made when people are overconfident, right? Confidence is a tricky business. We want our children to grow up confident in good things, but we don't want them to have too much.
Well, we could go on giving examples about confidence in natural things, in our human abilities, but here in this proverb, Jesus tells us that those who fear the Lord can have a strong confidence.
We might call this the Christian's confidence.
For those who fear God, Jesus says, you should have, you ought to have, because I give to you. We'll see that Jesus gives us a strong confidence. So we want to look at the Christian's confidence this evening.
First we'll consider a false or deceitful confidence.
Then the strong confidence that Christ offers us. And finally, a refuge of confidence.
First, the false confidence.
In this proverb, the fear of the Lord. The fear of God and confidence are tied together. The one who walks in the fear of the Lord, the one who truly fears God, we're told, has a strong confidence.
Now, very briefly thinking about this fear of God, it belongs to those whom Jesus has saved. Jesus is king. He saved a people for himself. And he calls them to fear God, to fear God and keep his commands. You see this in the Exodus. God brought Israel out of Egypt. He saved a people for himself. He made his covenant with them, and he spoke his ten Commandments to them from Mount Sinai. And the people were terrified of God's voice. It frightened them.
And Moses came to them and said, God wants you to learn to fear Him. Not to be terrified of him, but to fear him so that you would learn to keep his commands.
A couple weeks ago, when we looked at another proverb about the fear of God, we drew out the idea that the fear of God consists in in an awe of God, an awe of who he is, a wonder at who he is and at what he does for us.
The result of that living in awe of God, living in fear of him, is that our lives are changed, transformed, so that we want to obey him and to please him and keep his commands. The fear of God is an awe of God that changes everything about us.
Here in this proverb, King Jesus comes alongside of us and he says, you who I've saved and brought into the fear of the Lord, I'm going to give you two additional reasons, important reasons for why you ought to fear God. Because the fear of God brings confidence and refuge.
Now, I've explained this very briefly because I want to set up, you might say, a foil here. Here there is an opposite to this strong confidence that King Jesus offers us.
And that is what we might call a false confidence or a confidence that the world outside of Christ may seem to have.
Maybe before you came to know the Lord Jesus, you experienced this kind of confidence. You yourself depended on it.
Maybe even now, as someone who knows Jesus, you look at people outside the church who don't know Jesus and you see them living in a kind of confidence.
But it's a deceptive confidence.
What might their confidence of the non Christian be in? It might be rooted in himself.
Maybe he thinks he's a competent person. He finds himself to be popular, successful, good at what he does.
Maybe he's confident in himself, maybe he's confident in his wealth or possessions. This will keep me safe.
Or maybe people have a confidence in earthly powers.
Just listen to the news.
You hear this all the time.
People are confident in their government, or maybe not confident in it right now, and they want a different government. Maybe in the next election cycle they'll get the government that they think that they're confident in because it's got a strong governing power or it gives us a good economy or it gives us a strong military. These are earthly powers that people put their hope and confidence in.
Or you hear maybe less of this in our society, but it's coming back and eventually will come full circle. People will be doing this again openly.
People put their confidence in idols, false gods. They do it all around the world. They trust in their God to care for them, to provide for their needs, to save them from some problem.
You could probably find other things that people put their confidence and hope in, but this confidence is empty.
The confidence of the world is empty.
It's going to fail them.
It's a futile attempt at dealing with their fear and terror.
Confidence in self is deceitful because the heart is desperately wicked.
It's deceitful. Who can know it?
Wealth and possessions are deceitful.
Moth and rust destroy. Thieves break in and steal.
Stock markets crash.
Earthly powers are deceitful.
You can't trust the government, not because of some political reason, but because the government is made up of men.
Psalm 146 says, Put not your your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day, his plans perish.
Don't trust governments. Don't trust their military power. What's the most powerful might that the United States military has? The atom bomb. Scary thing, right?
Not for God.
What does Psalm 46 say that we just sang?
God breaks when the nations rage. God breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two. He burns the chariots with fire.
Man's most powerful military instruments are nothing against God. We think the atom bomb is something God has made.
Billions upon billions of stars, each of them far more powerful than the atom bomb.
Man's greatest earthly might is nothing.
And false gods, idols. They can seem impressive, but the psalmist tells us their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. We made them.
They have ears, but they don't hear. They have eyes, but they can't see.
They have hands, but they can do nothing.
Those who made them Become like them. So do all who trust in them.
The confidence that this world has, whatever it is, is deceitful. It's going to backfire.
It's merely an attempt to soothe their fears.
In the end, all human confidences will fail.
Psalm 37:35 is very helpful for us in illustrating this.
The psalmist who's talking about the righteous man, the godly who fear God, he says, I have seen a wicked, ruthless man spreading himself like a green laurel tree.
In the context of the psalm, this is the picture of the wicked, violent man who seems to have everything he wants. And he spreads himself out confidently like a tree standing up tall and spreading out its branches and leaves, seems to be doing wonderful and fruitful.
But he passed away, and behold, he was no more. Though I sought him, he could not be found.
The confidence of the wicked is vanity.
No.
The godless, those who are without the fear of God, the godless only have terror.
When their confidence is stripped away, all they're left with is terror.
All outside of King Jesus, those who don't know him, who haven't been delivered and brought into his kingdom, all they have to look forward to is the day when God will come to judge the world. And that's a terrifying thing.
If you're outside of King Jesus, if you're not under his reign, you don't fear him, you don't fear His Father.
Where is your confidence?
Come to King Jesus, repent of your vanity.
Turn to him for salvation, turn to him to learn the fear of God, and he will give you a strong confidence. And that's our second point, strong confidence.
Now, this proverb says, in the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence.
And that might strike your ear a little odd, a little funny.
What do fear and confidence have to do with each other? Why do these two go together?
In fact, aren't they usually opposites? In fact, preacher, isn't that the point you were just making, that those who should have a terror and fear of God ought not to have confidence?
The fear of the Lord is different than the fear that the world lives under.
The fear of the Lord.
The fear that King Jesus brings us into in his kingdom is not a thing of terror.
In the true fear of God that we have as God's children in his kingdom, there is no terror.
That's very important for us to begin grasping here. In order to understand this strong confidence that those who fear God may have, we need to understand that the fear of the Lord is. Has no terror in it.
In fact, it's the Opposite of terror.
We are God's children. Jesus has delivered us out of our sins, out of the kingdom of darkness, brought us into his kingdom, into the family of God.
He brings us before the feet of his heavenly Father. And he says, father, these are my children.
Children, this is your father, and he loves you.
God loves his children, and he does not want them to be terrified of him.
There's no place for terror in the family of God, only love.
In fact, first John tells us we love him because he first loved us.
God started loving us before we loved him. Before Jesus brought us into his kingdom, God loved us, and that's why he brought us into his kingdom.
And how did God show that love to us? First John tells us he showed that love to us by sending his son to die on the cross so that he could reconcile us to the Father.
And then what does God do? God puts his love in our hearts. It's not just out there, it's in here. He wants us to know his love.
You don't just want your children to hear the words, I love you. You don't just want your children to think, well, God, Daddy and Mommy, they think that they love me. We want our children to truly know that as parents, we love them and so we hug them so they can feel it physically. We give them good things, right? So they can learn to trust us and know that there's a true warmth of love in our hearts for them. The same is true with our Heavenly Father.
He wants us to know his love, not terror.
And so God puts His love in our hearts.
And the way one John reads, it's as though it takes some time and some work of God on our hearts for this love to come to its fullness.
He talks about love being perfected in our hearts.
As the love of God becomes completed or comes to its perfection and fullness in our hearts, our terror goes away.
First. John 4:18 says this. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. What kind of fear is he talking about?
Fear has to do with punishment. He says the kind of fear he's talking about there. The terror that as sinners, we had of Almighty God, our judge.
God, by perfecting his love in our hearts, casts out that terror so that we only know and feel his love for us and no longer experience terror.
Perfect love casts out fear. Read terror of punishment.
How did that happen?
How could it be that no more there is punishment for us?
Because the Father sent his son and your king, King Jesus went to the cross and took your punishment. On himself because he loved you and because the Father loved you. And that punishment is gone.
There's not an ounce, not a drop of it left.
And with it God wants to take away the terror.
What does this mean? This means that your conscience can be washed clean.
It felt guilt because of sin. Jesus took that guilt so that you could be free, so that your conscience, which was tortured and terrorized because of sin and the guilt of sin, he wants it to be at peace.
He wants you to know now only the Father's love.
There is to be no terror in the true fear of the Lord.
Those who fear God know only his love for them in Christ Jesus.
In Psalm 112 we got a glimpse of this.
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.
Terror and being scared, gone.
For those who fear God, in its place, love and a heart that's steady, a heart that's not moved. A heart that has a strong confidence in the Lord.
King Jesus takes away our terror. And in its place he puts the fear of God and with it a confidence that flows forth from it.
Taragon Jesus wants confidence in its place.
We talk about the Proverbs as words of wisdom. King Jesus is advising us. He's counseling us with wise words.
And to you who fear the Lord, he would advise you. His counsel to you is fear God and see the confidence that comes with it.
There is a truly strong, unmovable, unshakable confidence that comes from your king.
What does it consist? In at least three things.
There is a confidence in God's presence that you as his children can have a confidence before your father.
Romans 8:15 says, you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry. Abba.
Father Jesus has put his spirit on your hearts so that you would be able to enter the presence of God in prayer with confidence and with joy and be able to cry out, my Father.
Not just my Judge and my God and my King and my Creator, but my dear Father who loves me.
He puts his spirit in your heart so that you would know and experience that presence and that out of that you would be able to cry out to God in confidence.
Not just the work of the Spirit in your heart that should bring that confidence, but the work of Jesus, your high priest.
It's because Jesus is your high priest who's passed through the heavens that we Read.
Let us then with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Are there problems in your heart, in circumstances, in your family, sin troubles, problems in the circumstances of life that put you in need of grace and of mercy?
With boldness, have confidence to enter God's presence, the very throne of grace itself, because Jesus stands before the Father pleading for you.
Jesus wants you to have boldness and confidence, strong confidence before the Father.
Secondly, this strong confidence is a confidence that you can have in God's love for you.
Not just that you can draw near to him, but that he loves you, that he delights over you.
No matter what happens, no matter what's going on, no matter what you do.
God loves you in Christ Jesus. And he wants you to be confident in that firm, sure, unmoved, knowing God loves me.
I did this, I did that. God loves me.
Something happened, I didn't respond well, God loves me for Jesus sake.
Anything you can think of.
And the answer is God loves you and he wants you to be confident in that.
For I'm sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.
The confidence that King Jesus wants you to have is a confidence in God's love for you for his sake.
It's a confidence in God's presence. It's a confidence in his love for you.
It is a confidence before the judgment seat of God.
What Christian doesn't tremble when he thinks of the great white throne, with all the nations gathered before the books being opened and every sinner being led before the throne of God and being judged upon his own deeds. Everything that he's done.
We know what we've done.
We know that our best things that we've done still fall short of God's glory.
And we know that the worst things we've done are horrifying.
We struggle to admit them to ourselves.
Yeah, we tremble when we think about God's judgment seat.
But Jesus wants us to have a confidence before God in God's love for us in Christ.
That we can stand before the throne of God with our heads held up, looking not to our judge who condemns us, but to our Father who loves us and to our Judge who has acquitted us, who has declared us righteous. For Jesus sake.
We talk about justification. That means that the judgment that would have happened on the final day has Happened now when you were united to Christ and God's delivered the verdict.
Righteous for Jesus sake. Your sins put on Christ. Christ's righteousness put on you.
And the Father says, I accept this sinner as righteous in my Son.
And the apostle John says, that means we can be confident. We ought to be confident before the throne of God again. That love being perfected in us from 1st John 4:17 by this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment.
King Jesus would counsel you to embrace the confidence that he gives you through his blood, through his righteousness, and through uniting you to Himself and reconciling you to to His Father, so that all is well for you.
You meet confident people in this world, but nothing, nothing compares to the confidence, the confidence that your King would have you have you hold in your heart.
Your King Jesus would have you walk up with head held high before your Father, knowing that he loves you, knowing that he accepts you and that he always will, and that nothing will take you from him.
And knowing that you can walk up to that judgment day one day with confidence that the Father will receive you.
No sinner in the world has that confidence.
There is a refuge, a refuge of confidence.
If there's confidence, you might say, what's the reason? What's the source? We've been pointing to Christ. This verse says that our children will have a refuge. Those who come to fear the Lord, their children will also have a refuge.
No, it's parallelism. This is how the Hebrew mind works. The children will also have the confidence. And their parents who fear the Lord will also have the refuge. It's for both of us.
Jesus is your Savior, dear children, not just your parents.
The confidence that Jesus offers your parents, he offers you if you come and receive Him.
What is the refuge of our confidence?
The refuge is God Himself. We sang Psalm 146. God is our refuge and strength, our very present help in trouble.
God is the refuge that those who fear the Lord possess. He is our place of refuge.
And you know now that you can have a confidence to go to that place.
He loves you and will receive you.
He is the Rock of our salvation.
Dear children, little ones and old ones, all of you are God's children. Dear children, the world flees in terror when they see God.
When they come to know who he truly is, they flee from his presence.
As you come to fear the Lord your God, and to know him and all of that he is for you and for you. In Christ you learn in the fear of The Lord to flee to God.
Not to flee from him, as the world was, but to run to Him.
He is your refuge.
You run straight into what Moses calls the everlasting world.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Arms.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: God is the reason for your confidence.
You see how the fear of the Lord and our confidence are connected because he is our refuge. As we fear him, we are drawn to him. The more of him we know, the more we want to be with him and to flee to him.
God is your refuge.
He's your refuge in this life.
Do people scare you?
Do you have trouble with people?
God is your refuge.
Is your boss difficult?
Is he disappointing?
Is he hostile to you?
Do you live in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile to Christians, to those who fear God?
You know Jesus. Answer King Jesus. Counsel is, flee to your father.
Run to your refuge, that place of refuge. He's your hope in the midst of those troubles with men.
Again. Psalm 37, verse 32.
The wicked watches for the righteous and seeks to put him to death.
You think having a difficult boss is trouble?
Someday they may seek to put you to death.
The Lord will not abandon the righteous to the power of the wicked or let him be condemned when he is brought to trial.
Wait for the Lord and keep his way and he will exalt you to inherit the land you will look on when the wicked are cut off.
Do you have problems with people?
God is your refuge.
Do you have troubles in this life?
God is your refuge. He is on your side.
Go back and read the end of Romans 8.
There is nothing that can come between you and God.
Nakedness, sword, famine, peril, sickness.
The circumstances of this life that seem to be coming after us. Is God displeased with me? Is that why I'm sick? Is that why we're having trouble? Why we can't pay the bills? Is God unhappy with us?
Nothing can separate you from God's love in Christ Jesus. Nothing.
All of those things happen.
And God still loves you.
Think of Job.
He lost everything and nearly everyone he cared about.
And his wife, who was left, told him to curse God and die.
He pretty much lost everything.
And then his friends came and to comfort him. And they tormented him.
They were messing with his conscience. It was pretty miserable.
And yet in the midst of all of that, what. What does Job, who fears God and turns away from evil, what does he say?
Though he slay me, I will hope in him the worst things you can experience in this life.
God is your refuge and he loves you. And nothing can separate you from him or him from you.
Trust in the Lord forever. For in God the Lord we have an everlasting rock.
Or if you need another verse. I've read Romans 8 too many times. I need another verse.
That's okay.
Isaiah 25, verse 4.
For you have been a stronghold to the poor, A stronghold to the needy in his distress.
A shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat.
For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall.
Men in their wickedness come at us and torment us like storms.
And God is a stronghold protecting the world itself. May seem to be collapsing in on you at times and all around you.
Maybe you've had those moments where it seemed like everything was ending.
We sang about that too this evening.
Therefore we will not fear. Though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea. Mount Lemmon, the Ringcons. I don't remember all the names of the other mountains. I haven't learned them all yet. Were surrounded by mountains. Though all of those mountains were to be hit with an earthquake and they all slid into the midst of the sea. And guess what? They're taking with us?
We're trapped in the middle of them.
That's terrifying.
And yet God teaches us to sing in that psalm.
Though all of that happens, we will not fear because God is our refuge.
He's your refuge in this life.
But God is your refuge from the greatest storm of all.
The storm of his own wrath.
Read the descriptions of it. You can read it in the Old Testament Proverbs. God's fury poured out on the nations, poured out on Israel, his own nation. He sends Assyria and then Babylon against them.
Their siege engines to tear down the walls. And then the soldiers pour into Jerusalem and their arrows pierce the hearts of Israelites.
And then they set fire to the city and they burn it in a raging inferno.
Archaeologists have dug up the char layer, the burn layer from the destruction of Jerusalem.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: All of that pales in comparison to the storm of God's wrath that one day he will unleash when he comes.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: In the person of his son, the Lamb.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: When the lamb comes riding on that horse to judge the nations.
You've read the description. There's a sword coming out of his.
[00:35:31] Speaker B: Mouth and he's going to tread the.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Winepress of God's wrath.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: That's a horrific, horrific picture, isn't it?
[00:35:44] Speaker A: People's bodies being thrown into a winepress and then being tread down and the blood being squeezed out of them.
All of this is just pictures to terrify us at the thought of the storm.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Of God's wrath against mankind for our sin.
And God is your refuge and the.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Rock of your salvation against that storm.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: If you fear him, and if in repentance and faith you have turned to his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, our King that he is now your refuge against that storm.
The nations will face the storm clouds of wrath that Jesus comes riding on, but you won't.
You are united to the rock, Jesus, and you will weather that storm.
In fact, we're told that we're going to judge the nations with Jesus.
Jesus is your refuge against the greatest storm of all.
You have passed through death and into life, eternal life. If you know Jesus.
Jesus gives us two very good reasons to learn to fear the Lord God.
That he gives us a strong confidence before the Father and that he is our refuge.
So your last question this evening.
Do you know the fear of the Lord?
Sounds like it's pretty important, isn't it, to know the fear of the Lord, to fear God, if such a confidence belongs to those who fear him. And such a refuge.
If you don't fear God yet you may be wondering, where does that fear come from? How does one come to experience and be a part of such a fear, to live in that?
And the answer is that it comes from the king.
Do you want to learn to fear God?
[00:37:55] Speaker A: You need to come to King Jesus.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Jeremiah 32:39.
Here God speaks prophetically about what he's going to do in and through Jesus. For his people, I will give them one heart and one way that they may fear me forever.
For their own good and for the good of their children after them.
I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them.
And I.
I will put the fear of me in their hearts that they may not turn from me.
Do you want to come to know, to fear God?
Come to Jesus and he will put literally the fear of God, the good kind of fear.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: Not the way we use that expression.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: But the good kind of fear of the Lord in your heart. So let's pray.
O Lord our God, you are gracious.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Merciful, patient with us.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: We thank you.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: We ask that you would help us, those of us who know the Lord Jesus and his fear, help us to grow in this confidence.
Our hearts, we confess, are often shaken, usually because we're putting our trust in worldly things or ourselves.
Or our hearts are focused on our.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: Sin and our problems.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: And our hearts are shaken and we live in anxiousness. And we doubt and we fear and we worry and we turn back to other things.
Turn our hearts back to youo. Lord Jesus, help us to see that yout are merciful, gracious and loving and nothing can take us away from youm.
And we ask that you would strengthen our faith that with a firm confidence we would be able to march forward, not trusting in ourselves, but trusting wholly in you.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: O Lord our God.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: We ask that you would grant this confidence to our children, that our children whom you have given us, but who belong to you, that each of them may come to know the Lord Jesus, and that their hearts would cling to him, and that they would not be shaken, but they too would know the sweetness of your grace and the firmness of your grip upon us.
We pray too for those who do not yet know you for the lost.
We ask you, Lord Jesus, that you.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: Would call them to Yourself, that you would deliver them from the terror of.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: God's wrath and bring them into the godly fear and that they might know your love and peace.
Hear us. And we thank you for these things too.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: In Jesus name, amen.
