Fear Of God // Stand In AweSample

The Fear of God = Hope

The American author David Foster Wallace once gave a famous commencement speech at Kenyon College, in which he said that “everyone worships something”. The point he was making was that everyone gives their lives to something; the only choice we get to make is what we give our lives to. 

As a non-Christian author, this was a bold claim from Foster Wallace, but what he said is entirely true. Some people worship money and fame, some worship family or friends, and others worship God. Often, this decision of what we worship is rooted in our understanding of who, or what, is in control of the world we live in; whether God is in charge or not.

For a lot of people, they believe the world is a product of chance; where humans are the power players, responsible for their own lives. This can seem quite an appealing way of thinking, until you follow it to its root and realise that this rules out any hope for the future! If you take God out of the equation, we have no hope for God’s kingdom being established on earth, and no assurance of eternal life.

However, as soon as you add God into the equation of who is in charge of the world, you begin to see the world through a lens of hope, in which all the wrongs will be righted and all the suffering that we see in the world around us will be made up for. In today’s Scripture, we read an amazing passage in which we have this hope of what life will be like in eternity set out in clear language. It’s one of my favourite passages in the Bible, because it reminds me that there is a purpose for my life and a great future ahead!

This amazing hope for the future can only be produced through a fear of God. It is only by understanding who God is and how powerful he is that we realise the eternal hope we have. Our God holds the planets, the stars, your life and mine in his hands, and because of that we can trust that our best is yet to come.