The big idea
Jesus told his friends to fear God — and in the same paragraph told them not to be afraid. So the fear of God cannot be the thing love replaces. It is what keeps our love aimed at the God who is actually there, rather than one we assembled out of our own preferences.
Key takeaways
- Obeying Jesus is not a deviation from grace. In Matt’s standing phrase, it is “more grace” — the chance to taste and see that he is good in a new way.
- The fear of God is one of the few things that holds steady when you are being worked on emotionally, socially, or spiritually. Sometimes it is the last line of defense, and that is not a failure.
- The most effective attack on the fear of God is not denial but hollowing out — keep the phrase, remove the meaning.
- Hebrews 12 and Psalm 147 both put fear and love in the same breath. Most of us already do this with our own parents and never think it strange.
- What perfect love drives out is fear of man, fear of condemnation, fear of the enemy. Not reverence for God.
- Wisdom starts with the fear of the Lord — and the pattern in Proverbs is that the fool is precisely the one who thinks he has enough of it already.
- Fearing God is what makes love for God honest. Otherwise you end up loving a figure you imagined and calling it God.
Matt had two introductions and could not pick between them, so the congregation got both — with a cheerful nod to Mark Proeger’s message on forgiveness the previous Sunday in case that was one intro too many. What sat underneath them was short and single-minded: Jesus tells us to fear God, and it is worth working out how a person can fear God and love him at the same time.
Obeying Jesus is not a detour around grace
This is the boilerplate Matt has opened with all series, and he repeated it without apology. “Obeying Jesus is not deviation from grace. It’s more grace.” His shepherding of our lives is plainly better than us winging it, and when we obey him we find liberty rather than lose it. Anything telling you otherwise, he said, is propaganda out of the kingdom of darkness.
First introduction: he is already here
Matt likes to steward his faith — fill his head with scripture, pray scripture, and be careful about how he prays. Not to police himself, but because the wording shapes the assumption. God is omnipresent; the point is that he is present with the church in a particular way. “The way maker is here in this room right now. The miracle worker is among us. The one who battled Egypt’s false gods is present.”
So when he is low, he would rather not begin with “please come be with me.” He would rather begin where Elisha’s servant ended up — eyes opened, and “tons of soldiers from heaven everywhere” that had been there all along; he just had no idea. Like the song the church sang a couple of weeks earlier: you are here, you are moving. Matt would rather start there.
Second introduction: how deception would actually be done
Part of him wants the servant’s experience; the more reasonable part suspects he could not handle it. “I think maybe it’s the Lord’s wisdom that you just don’t see every single little angel, demon, principality, power.” He pushed back on how flat our picture of the unseen world has become. Angel is not a species; it is a job — messenger. A person can be one, a bird can be one, a donkey has been one. Seraphim are burning things, cherubim are winged composites. Scripture is not thin here; we are.
Hearing Mel Gibson talk about how to film spiritual combat sent him down a practical line of thought. Cartoon devils in red jumpsuits are funny, and useless. “If it were me, I would make all the bad angels really attractive looking.” A hairy, foul-smelling creature suggesting you rebel gets thrown out of the room. A soft voice, a pleasant scent, an affirming message pitched exactly at your deepest cravings — that works. And the best tool in the kit is the Bible itself: that was Satan’s own move on the pinnacle of the temple.
Which is where the two introductions converge. “In the midst of the conflicts of our world — conflicts that we can’t see, conflicts that we can see — one thing that anchors us is the fear of God.” Matt does not want his gut-level assumption to be that he can spot deception easily. Even the powers that would deceive us tremble before God.
The phrase kept, the meaning removed
A healthy fear of God is not reinforced by the world and is sometimes actively discouraged — and it gets thinned out inside the church too. Outside, it is “just don’t be evil, you do you.” Inside, it comes as a sincere question: how can I fear God if I love him? Or the phrase survives and is quietly emptied. Matt named that as the smarter attack: “Yeah, we’re going to keep the phrase, but it’s not going to mean anything.”
He remembered a novel from high school in the early 2000s — not recommending it — in which God and the devil sit on a park bench watching people. The devil is calm and worldly-wise. God is a bumbling grandfather who cannot make correct change for a hot dog and drops Assyrian shekels out of his pockets. That caricature is in the air constantly: it is just grandpa running his mouth, and “he’s just going to wink and smile at you no matter what.”
The break room
There is a fight for your soul every day, and the competing voices are outside you and inside you. Which means there will be moments where loyalty to God and the desire not to disappoint the person standing in front of you cannot both be satisfied — and the person in front of you is the hard part. A lunch conversation takes a sharp turn. An invitation you do not want. You say “not for me, not today,” and get indignation back: so you’re judging me.
Or the classic: would you say that to my face? Matt’s first thought is always that he does not ordinarily address people’s elbows. Whether the subject is the only name under heaven by which a man may be saved, or marriage, or plain honesty — “my proximity to somebody’s face doesn’t change what I think. And the biggest concern for me is what does God think.” He will stand before God the way he is standing before this person, and one of those two opinions carries more weight.
Sometimes what is right feels right and refusing is easy. Sometimes it is not like that at all. “For some of us, you’ve been so deep into that temptation that the only thing you have, the last line of defense, is the fear of God. That’s okay. In fact, that’s good.” When anger, or crocodile tears, or false accusation comes at you, the gut is a poor instrument. He would rather be anchored than be a child tossed about by every wind of doctrine and human cunning.
How I would argue you out of it
Then Matt made the case against himself, apologizing for nearly slipping into the whispery voice he uses for the new age section of his fall discipleship class. The argument runs: there is no fear in love, God is love, you are commanded to love God, and perfect love drives out fear — so be rid of all of it, because fear prevents love. He admitted it is compelling. It uses the Bible, it sounds sweet, and at gut level it tracks. If forced to choose, most people will take love as the higher thing.
Except that if he actually sat with the conclusion — I fear neither God nor man — he would notice he had begun to sound like the unjust judge in Luke 18, who is described in exactly those words. Somewhere back there was a wrong turn. What the argument fudges is simple: you can do both at once, and they work well together.
Two places where fear and love sit together
“It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?”
Hebrews 12:7–9The analogy works because we have all lived it. You want the cookie, nobody is looking, but your sibling will report you to dad — and you respect your dad anyway. “You just are aware that spankings are all part of the deal.” Matt allowed for the room’s 2026 sensibilities: substitute whatever discipline you consider appropriate. The command to honor father and mother stands beside it, unembarrassed. Most people in the room have a healthy fear of what their parents would do and love them enormously, simultaneously, and have never once found it impossible.
“His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man, but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.”
Psalm 147:10–11Matt read verse 10 first on purpose, to show how Hebrew poetry works. English cannot stop rhyming — roses are red, violets are blue, then you say something probably true. Hebrew puts two lines side by side saying the same thing differently. Horse legs and man legs are the same idea: God is not impressed by muscle. Verse 11 is built identically, which means the two groups are one group. Those who fear him and those who hope in his steadfast love are the same people. “I can fear God and have a strong hope in his steadfast love.” What his love drives out is fear of man, fear of condemnation, fear of the enemy — not reverence. “I still fear him, but I don’t fear him being bad because of who he is.”
The command itself
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Matthew 10:28 (NIV)“Hell” there is Gehenna, which Matt flagged as a real place out of Isaiah and Jeremiah where God brings final judgment on his enemies. The logic of the verse is deliberately gruesome: a body can be killed, it decays, it needs burying, and that is frightening enough to make you fear the person who could do it to you. Jesus takes that same intensity and turns it toward God. And no, this was not aimed at some crowd he disliked. He said it to his disciples.
“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Luke 12:4–7Same word for hell — Gehenna — carried over from Matthew, and Matt kept the whole passage together on purpose, because it is not a paradox and Jesus has not lost the thread three sentences in. “You can fear God and live fearlessly at the same time.” I can fear God and not fear people who could murder me. I can fear God and not fear condemnation, since in Christ I am not under it. I can fear God and not fear the devil, or my clothes, or my food, or a demon behind every rock. Jesus said all of it to his friends. “Fear God, friends. Fear him.”
So the reconciliation is not a compromise where each side gives up half. It is all of it, held together: “Yes, perfect love drives out fear. Yes, have no fear. Yes, fear God. He’s uniquely to be feared, and we can love him at the same time.” The only alternative on offer is to accuse Jesus of not making sense.
He also took the trouble to note that the people saying vicious things about us said worse about him — that he was a Samaritan with a demon, that he cast out devils by the prince of devils — and then harmed him, and harmed his friends. Those are not people we need to be afraid of.
The fear of the Lord is pure
“The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward. But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.”
Psalm 19:9–12 (NIV)“Don’t fear the fear of God,” Matt said. “Embrace it.” It is pure, wholesome, and fitting for who God is and who we are. The same psalm names the reason this matters for the whole series: the things Jesus tells us to do are not bad things. He made us; he knows what we need and exactly what it would take to shepherd us — and the shepherd of our souls is the one saying “Fear God. Don’t be anxious, but fear God.” And the last line is the one Matt kept returning to — “if I’m deceived, I probably never know.” He cannot audit his own hidden faults. He needs to care what God says.
Maturity, then, does not move away from scripture or from the fear of God. It moves further in. In Proverbs and the Psalms it is the fool who has no appetite for wisdom and the wise who are already hunting for it — so the instruction Matt gives himself is to pursue it actively “instead of just thinking like, yeah, I’ve got it. Because that’s what the fool does about wisdom.” He compared it to the signs posted around every workplace: “those signs are directed at the people who don’t read signs anyway.” Which is the uncomfortable part. “Who knows what my default position is on anything? Maybe I don’t even know how wrong I am.”
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” — if you want wisdom, that is where you start. But beginning is not graduating, and Matt named the two ways people quietly treat it as a stage they have cleared. “That doesn’t mean, oh, I got a little nugget of wisdom, I’m done with the fear of God now.” Or the churchier version: “Oh, I love Jesus, so I can put away the fear of God.” Neither one makes any sense. And here the sermon turns on its hinge — the fear of God is not only what keeps us from being deceived. It is also what makes it possible to love him.
Loving the God who is actually there
Then the pen. Suppose Matt holds up a pen, declares it to be God, and announces that he loves it. Someone in the room supplied the word before he could: idolatry. “I can’t just say whatever I want and make my words make that thing the thing that it is.” Obviously silly — and, he insisted, the same silliness as imagining God the way you would prefer him and then loving that. “It’s the same dumb, but just on a different part of the spectrum.” “I don’t want to love the God of my own imagination.” Only God knows what God is like, so he tells us, in his words and his actions. Which is why Matt reads scripture, asks for wisdom, and wants to fear him: so that the God he loves is the real one.
Which is where the first introduction comes back around. The being he is trying to love is not a construct he maintains in his head — “he’s really real,” and he is also here, present in this room. Fear him, love him: “that’s what it means to belong to him.”
So who is he, in reality? The creator of everything. We exist by his good pleasure, brought out of nothing, which was our natural state. It is his power that made a universe and a planet we can live on, his work that there is air to breathe and food that grows out of the ground, his providence that put people near us who can help. It is his universe and his rules, and we all stand before him.
And that, Matt said, is exactly what makes the love possible rather than impossible. The being who could flick him across the room like a soccer ball does not do it. The God who will judge him and who called him out of nothing had the humility, as God the Son, to take flesh, breathe our stench, befriend sinners and die for us. Under the bumbling-grandpa version, forgiveness costs nothing and means nothing — of course he tousles your hair and says “oh, squirt, it’s fine.” But the wages of sin is death, and he came anyway. “The fear of who that God is and the fact of what he’s done for us helps me appreciate all the more how gentle and humble he really is.” Awe, respect, and then love — answering the God who loved us first, and rooted in what he is actually like.
“I leave you with that, friends. Fear him. Don’t be anxious, but fear him.” Then he laughed at the clock — 11:17, early enough that he passed along the children’s ministry’s standing permission to sit tight until 11:30 rather than go collect your kids. He prayed one thing: that the Holy Spirit would speak clearly to each person, as a mercy, about what step to take in response to what Jesus had said. The heart ministry teams would be up front in name tags, ready to pray, celebrate or weep with anyone, and nobody would be bothering them. “Otherwise, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”