What is the difference between a healthy fear of God and an unhealthy fear of God, part
three.
Hi, welcome to today's Little Lesson.
We've been talking here for two previous lessons about the fear of the Lord and trying to help
folks understand that there's a difference between a healthy fear of God and an unhealthy
fear of God.
If you attend a church that the preacher is always preaching about God's judgment and
his wrath and his righteousness and his holiness, there's a good chance that you could develop
an unhealthy fear of God.
On the other hand, if you attend a church where the pastor is always preaching on the
goodness and the love and the mercy and the grace of God, you could develop an unhealthy
lack of fear of God.
So there's this entire spectrum and we want to be right in the middle, biblically balanced.
I can't tell you what church to go to, but again, you want your pastor or your preacher
to be balanced like the Bible is balanced.
The whole Bible is very balanced when you read the whole thing.
But a pastor that only focuses on judgment and righteousness and wrath is unbalanced.
A pastor that focuses just on love and mercy and goodness, unbalanced.
We need a healthy balance.
So the cure for any imbalance is to get balanced.
That comes by reading the entire revelation that God has given us in the Bible.
Now I've talked about this in detail.
If you miss the first two Little Lessons on this, you might want to search for them and
go back because we've covered quite a bit of ground.
Now, one of the indicators of a unhealthy fear of God that we run into quite frequently,
people write to us here at Little Lessons and ask this question, concerns the fear of
having committed the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, or the unpardonable sin.
As a consequence we have really lots of people within the church who develop this unhealthy
fear that they've done something that can't be forgiven, namely that they've somehow blasphemed
the Holy Spirit.
Oftentimes they equate it with something slipped out of their mouth where they said something
negative about the Holy Spirit under pressing circumstances or something.
Then they make reference to what Jesus said.
Now, I just read the scripture before I started filming this Little Lesson.
You can find one example in the gospels in Matthew Chapter 12, where Jesus said, "Anyone
who will speak against the son of man, it will be forgiven him."
Now I might add, if he repents.
If we take the whole of scripture.
God's not just forgiving people carte blanche.
We have to repent.
Then Jesus went on to say, "But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit or blasphemes the
Holy Spirit, this is a sin that will not be forgiven, not in this age or in the age to
come."
Because he's committed this unpardonable sin.
Based on that one scripture, without considering the context of the entire rest of the Bible,
focusing on just that, it's possible to develop an unhealthy fear of God and a fear that one
has committed the unpardonable sin.
But if you just expand your view a little bit out from that one verse and read the context
of when Jesus said that...
Here's the context.
One of the Pharisees had just made a remark after Jesus cast out some demons.
He cast out demons by the Prince of demons.
So they're attributing what Jesus did to the power of the devil.
Of course we know that Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit and all of the miracles
that he did were by the Holy Spirit of God.
So what was just done, an irrefutable miracle, many miracles actually, by Jesus, by the Holy
Spirit through Jesus, here's a hardhearted Pharisee or Pharisees, attributing it to the
devil.
That's when Jesus makes his remarks about blaspheming the Holy Spirit being the unpardonable
sin.
Does that help at all to understand what he might be talking about?
If you need to go to the whole rest of the Bible and see the kind of things that God
forgives people of, horrendous things, horrendous things that God forgives people of.
So why would speaking against the Holy Spirit be so grievous to God that it could never
ever be forgiven in this age or in the age to come?
Well, it would just seem reasonable to think that the context had something to do with
what motivating Jesus to say that right then.
When we have someone whose heart is so hard that they can see a miracle of the Holy Spirit,
like a demon coming out of a demon possessed person, and attributing that to the devil,
that person is beyond redemption.
That person has got a heart that's so hard that they can't be reached.
They'll never be forgiven.
We find other examples of that in the Bible.
You can read it the book of Jeremiah.
Go back Old Testament now.
God never changed from Old to New Testaments.
The covenant changed sure.
But God's character, personality, didn't change.
He's the same.
Three times in the book of Jeremiah, you hear God saying to Jeremiah, "Do not pray for this
people.
Don't pray.
Stop praying.
I will not hear your prayer."
Why?
Because they had sent away their day of grace.
They had repeatedly hardened their hearts under God's attempts to try to get their attention
and get them to repent.
So God just said, "That's it."
When you think about it, all the people who are in hell right now, is there any hope for
them to get out of there?
Not anywhere that I can see in the Bible.
Their day of grace has gone.
They blew their chance.
The grace period is over for them.
God reached his limits of toleration and their fate is sealed.
So that can actually happen before you die.
Now the folks that most of the time, actually I would say all the time, I've had scores
of people come to me over the years asking me that question because they're afraid that
they've blasphemed the Holy Spirit.
I always tell them, just the fact that you're concerned about it shows me you haven't committed
that sin.
Your heart's tender towards God.
You want to serve him.
You love him.
You want to go to heaven.
You fear him with a healthy fear, but now it's become an unhealthy fear because you're
not fearing him rightly, as he's revealed himself in scripture.
You're fearing him like a snake.
A snake is unpredictable.
You could be walking along and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, the snake bites you.
Well that's not God.
God is long suffering.
God is moral.
God is the perfect being.
His anger is only aroused very slowly and only very gradually in most cases.
Because God is love.
So if you're concern that you've committed the unpardonable sin, well that shows you
haven't committed it because you're concerned.
Your heart is soft towards God.
You haven't sent away your day of Christ.
Get into the word.
Quit reading those scriptures that fill you with fear and get balanced again before you
go back and read those scriptures.
get balanced with understanding of the love and the mercy and the grace of God.
Okay.
All right thank you so much for joining me on this Little Lesson.
If you're looking for more biblical content, check out davidservant.com.
We've got years and years of stuff that I've written and videos we've recorded and different
teachings and so forth.
It can be hopefully a real blessing to you.
Until next time.
May the Lord bless you.