THE 'FEAR OF THE LORD'

Eugene Peterson in his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pp. 40 ff.) says a key to understanding the spiritual life and our relationship with God is embedded in a biblical phrase 'the fear of the Lord'. The Old Testament is especially strong on this concept, with upwards of 138 occurrences of the term in a wide variety of contexts.

There's no available synonymous expression in English, though a combination of awe, reverence, worshipful respect might come close. One of the greatest modern writers in this area, Rudolf Otto, says nothing in his German language has an equivalent meaning either, so he resorted to Latin phrases (numen and mysterium tremendum).

If the 'fear of the Lord' is the key to relating to the living God, how's it done? Only in prayer and worship. Eugene Peterson: "Only by placing ourselves intentionally in sacred space, in sacred time, in the holy presence - and waiting... The moment we find ourselves unexpectedly in the presence of the sacred, our first response is to stop in silence. We do nothing. We say nothing. We fear to trespass inadvertently; we are afraid of saying something inappropriate. Plunged into mystery we become still, we fall silent, our senses alert. This is the fear-of-the-Lord."

Of course humans are tempted in these situations to "domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. 'Blasphemy' is the term we use for these verbal transgressions of the sacred"... Another response is to trivialize the experience. Peterson quotes a fragment of a poem attributed to W. H. Auden:

I love to sin; God loves to forgive;
The world is admirably arranged.

(More to come: watch this space)

Rowland Croucher

For more on the essentials of Christianity visit these articles.

HE AIN'T HEAVY... HE'S MY BROTHER

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

Medieval people were far more horrified by their sins than we are. Sin meant breaking the rules: God's rules, with God being both Lawgiver and Judge. Today's God is more benign, so the seven deadly sins are basically 'seven habits of highly destructive people'. Augustine's idea of 'original sin' - an inbuilt bias towards sin - doesn't sit well with modern notions of freedom. The 'seven deadly sins' emerged in the middle of the first millennium after Christ as a useful check-list to measure goodness or virtue.

PRIDE is the worst sin, according to most traditional Christian thinkers (from Augustine and Aquinas to G.K. Chesterton and C.S.Lewis). It's the 'primal' sin, our wanting to be independent of God's rules: expressed brilliantly by Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost: 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' Pride looks after 'number one': it is competitive, not wanting to give first place to anyone else. The opposite of pride is humility: the virtue that helps us become more like our humble, self-giving God. How? Through confession, whereby God and another hears our sins and faults and offers grace; and through service to others: 'thinking less about yourself, rather than thinking less of yourself.'

ENVY is the one sin which is not fun at all. It is 'sadness at the happiness of another' (Aquinas). Although no one wants to be renowned for their envy, in our meritocratic culture it is the bait in every advertisement. 'We are caught in a culture that hates envy, yet incites it mercilessly.' Mark Twain was wise: 'We will do many things to get ourselves loved; we will do anything to get ourselves envied.' Ancient wisdom teaches us that happiness consists not in getting what we want, but in wanting what we get. The first murder in the Bible (of Abel by Cain) was driven by envy. How shall we deal with it? First, change the price-tags: things may not what be what they seem. Second, learn to admire what others have without wanting it (Salieri both adored and detested Mozart's genius). Life and your talents are gifts: to be given back to the community. If you have God, you have everything.

ANGER can be an appropriate response to cruelty or injustice, but, as Seneca said, is is 'an acid which can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.' God gets angry at evil, and therefore, as William Willimon says, paradoxically, because he does, we don't have to. Solving problems via anger almost always does more harm than good - often creating an escalating cycle of bitterness. Righteous anger - our anger against evil - can quickly turn into a desire for vengeance. Like most sins anger takes something good - a proper hatred of evil and injustice - and twists it into something destructive. The heart of the Christian approach: it's God's prerogative to exercise wrath. Although our anger might do some good, God alone can sustain righteous anger that will truly sort things out. Part of 'anger management' is to practise silence, so that we do not say things we might later regret.

GLUTTONY headed the list of 7 deadly sins in the 4th century. Gluttony is an inordinate obsession with food, drink, or plain consumption. It's to food what lust is to sex: getting something good out of proportion. Being fat is Very Bad in a celebrity-obsessed culture, so obsessive dieting can be as gluttonous as over-eating. (Half the world lives on less than a dollar a day: each year 1.7 million children die from hunger-related diseases). How are we healed from eating disorders? The crucial first step, as AA teaches, is to hand over control. Traditionally Christians have emphasized not dieting, but the age-old rhythm of fasting and feasting: Easter and Christmas are preceded by the fasts of Lent and Advent - ensuring that we retain control of our appetites rather than being controlled by them.

LUST is not simply sexual desire: it's disordered desire - when sex is the dominating force in a relationship. Sex isn't simply physical: what we do with our bodies affects our souls/hearts/minds. 'It's not so much picking an apple off a tree as disturbing the roots'. Lust is 'the craving for salt of someone dying of thirst' (Buechner). The difference between looking and looking lustfully is about five seconds! We might pretend that we are serious about wanting someone else when we only really want part of them. Extra-marital sex is 'Lying in bed'! How is lust overcome? Not, as the Catholic Church has sometimes taught, by eliminating sexual desire altogether, but, with God's help, relating to others as whole persons.

GREED. The consumer culture is driven by a 'greed-is-good' mentality. Donald Trump put it candidly: 'The point is that you can't be too greedy.' It's not quite the same as self-interest, which, wrote Adam Smith, is the responsibility to look after ourselves and those who depend on us. And healthy ambition spurs us on to greater achievements. The problem is when self-interest impinges on the interests of others. An economy driven by consumption, with governments promised greater growth and prosperity, will inevitably lead to a depletion of the world's resources. 'Over the past 550 million years there have been five major extinctions of species. Who is to say that we might not be next?' We have probably passed the point of no return on global warming. God has provided good things for our enjoyment, but greed is destructive - both of ourselves and of society. A sabbath is a good antidote to greed: it is a regular reminder that the ultimate purpose of life is not to accumulate 'stuff'. But the best counterpart to greed is not poverty (the poor can be avaricious), but generosity. Ultimately we do not own anything: everything is a gift. So let us live simply, so that others can simply live.

SLOTH is the hardest of the 7 sins to define. It's not simply laziness. The old Latin idea of accidia is sometimes translated 'spiritual weariness' or 'despair': essentially 'giving up on life'. Aquinas described sloth as 'spiritual boredom'. Augustine says of the human race, 'They choose to look for happiness not in you, but in what you have created'. So sloth is losing our appetite for God, failing to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. It is substituting something else for God - even religious things like liturgies, church music or theological ideas. Simply enjoying/loving God is an acquired taste. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

Written by Rowland Croucher, with a little - no, considerable - help, from Graham Tomlin's excellent 2007 book 'The Seven Deadly Sins: and How to Overcome Them'.

LET'S START WITH GOD

LIVING WATER

During the 1980s I was privileged to work with World Vision. Part of my role was to take leaders to various places to meet ‘the poorest of the poor’.

I vividly remember Pedro, a day-labourer who with his wife Isabella lived in one of the 400 favellas/slums around Fortaleza, in north-east Brazil. They had five children (of nine live births) – all malnourished. Pedro could only get work about every third day; Isabella made clothes on a basic sewing-machine lent by World Vision. But sometimes they had no food at night, and to stop their starving kids crying from hunger Isabella would feed them little balls of rolled-up moistened newspaper, sprinkled with sugar. These had almost no nutritional value, but at least they wouldn’t cry so much and Pedro could get some sleep.

They’d owned a black bean farm, inherited from Pedro’s father and grandfather, and one day the police, bribed by a wealthy neighbouring landowner, drove them off their farm. They had no legal redress – the authorities were in the pockets of the rich.

We asked this couple, through an interpreter: ‘What do you need?’ Isabella replied, ‘We have only one blanket for the children, and when the roof leaks they get wet and cold and sick, and many children here have died. I would like a blanket for each child.’ And Pedro: ‘I need a job every day to feed my family.’ What else? Pedro said ‘I want my farm back, and for justice to be done in my country.’ Anything else? ‘Yes, where is God? Why are we treated like "the scum of the earth"'?


WHAT DO YOU NEED?

If your 'needs' were to be met by someone, first you must name them. Do you need someone to love and accept you - just as you are? Do you need to feel forgiven for something bad you've done? Do you need peace of mind? More self-worth? A goal for your life? Pass the end-of-year exams? A steady and interesting job? Why not stop now and make a list?

The four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - tell stories about Jesus meeting people with various 'needs'. Sometimes he asks someone 'What do you want?' Sometimes he gives them what they want, sometimes he doesn't: it wouldn't be good for them.

In John 4 we have the longest story about Jesus before he is killed by crucifixion. He's tired, and sits by a well. It's midday, and a woman comes at that unlikely time to draw water (the others from her village would carry water early in the morning or late afternoon, when it's not so hot). But she comes alone, and Jesus asks for a drink. She was surprised that he would speak to her (their cultures discouraged public conversation between men and women who were not married to each other).

As they talked she realized she'd met a very unusual man. He offered her 'living water' which would cure her deep thirst for love and acceptance. Because she'd had five husbands, and was in a de facto relationship with a sixth man, she was almost certainly shunned by respectable people. They told jokes about her. She was marginalized in her town. And she certainly had such low self-esteem that when she met someone like Jesus who accepted and loved her in the purest sense in spite of knowing her past, she was transformed...

I'm a counsellor, and I see this sort of transformation in people every week. A counsellor doesn't so much solve people's problems, but offers kindness and acceptance, partly by holding up a 'reality mirror' so that they can see themselves for who they really are. We are not simply the sum-total of all the good and bad things that have happened to us. Each person is loved by God unconditionally. That means that you have special eternal worth, in spite of all the negative feelings you might have about yourself.

Think about this today: 'God does not share his love between all of his creatures; he gives all of his love to each of his creatures' (Hugh of St. Victor).

See you next chapter!

Rowland Croucher

1Month to Become a Committed Christian

Dear friends,

Watch this space: this blog is part of a series attempting to answer the most important 300 questions I've been asked in 18,000-plus hours of counseling/talking to people - and learnings from 70 years of a fulfilling life.

Other Blogs in this series:

1 Month of Books you should Read

1 Month to Learn About the Internet

1 Month to Understand your Local Church

1 Month of Answers to Tough Questions

1 Month of Devotions

1 Month to Change Your Life

1 Month to Meet Some Interesting People

1 Month to Meet the Baptists

1 Month To Meet Jesus

Basic idea: you read one of the 30 posts each day and complete a 'mini-course' in a month. (I might even organize a certificate for those who complete the 300 units!)

Some of the material will be adapted from the 20,000 articles on the John Mark Ministries website. It's a big site, (although many of the 100,000+ unique visitors a month tell me it's easy to navigate).

I look forward to journeying with you!

Shalom/salaam!

Rowland Croucher