God-Fearing
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Psalm 34:8-14
| Devotional
In the Bible, there is no single word for worship. When you see the word worship in English, several different Hebrew or Creek words could be behind what you are reading. And some of those words don’t always get translated into English as “worship.”
Even this knowledge should tell us something about worship’s complex and wide-ranging nature. One of the Hebrew and Greek worship words has perhaps more expansive reach than any other in the biblical vocabulary. That word often gets appropriately translated as “fear” in English. It’s present in our passage: “Fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack!” (Ps. 34:9).
Fear, as a worship word, is so central to our faith that it appears across Scripture as a title describing what we as the people of God are called. We are labeled “God-fearers” (Ps. 22:23; Acts 10:22). This worship word presses against any idea that worship can be contained in an hour or two on a Sunday morning. Do a word search on fear and you’re thrust onto a playing field that stretches over all of life. Fear covers attitude and disposition. It covers behavior and action. Fear means that worship isn’t merely the ritual of our gathered experiences. It’s a lifestyle.
Fear as worshiping God means that we take Jesus seriously when he says that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matt. 22:37-38). Our passage here in Psalm 34 fleshes this out for us. “Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD” (Ps. 34:11). And what does this God-fearing, worshipful lifestyle look like? “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it” (vv. 13-14).
All of life, Monday through Saturday, is our sanctuary. Our worship of God includes our wallets, our relationships with our classmates or coworkers, our political engagement, our retirement accounts, and our leisure time. My phone is a house of worship, where I am to fear the Lord. My email inbox and online shopping cart are holy tabernacles where I pour myself out in God’s pres- ence. When the psalmist says that he will “teach you the fear of the LORD,” he is saying, “Come, let me teach you how to worship God 24-7.”
This God-fearing, integrated worship life has a couple of implications: First, we need to fight the urge to be two different kinds of people when we’re “at church” and when we’re “in the world.” To be a God-fearer means that we know no such distinc- tion. We recognize that when we leave the worship space, we don’t stop worshiping. Rather, we carry it forth into the world. We take the sweet-smelling fear of the Lord, replenished and bottled up on Sunday, and we pour it out like an alabaster jar of perfume on Jesus’ feet Monday through Saturday. We recognize the holy moments embedded in the ordinary rhythms of eating, conversing, phone scrolling, and Netflix watching.
Second, we can let gathered worship establish patterns for how we worship scattered out in the world. Part of what a good worship service does is boil life down to its essential elements. It reminds us what being human is fundamentally about. It grounds our iden- tity as God’s creatures, made in his image, redeemed by his Son, filled with his Spirit, and then restored to receive and give love. Worship also teaches us one of our most important skills. We could even call it the pro hack for being the best human this side of eternity. The Bible and the Christian tradition call this skill repentance–the art of being so secure in Jesus’ love that we’re free to own, out loud, our sin and baggage in front of other people, to apologize, and to seek forgiveness and restoration from God and others. If we learn nothing else from worship but how to be good penitents (repenters), we have been equipped with the most important skill for being a 24-7 God-fearer.
The integrated, God-fearing life doesn’t come easy. Everything in our sin nature fights against its joy and peace, and fragments it. So if we hope to have such a holistic lifestyle of worship, we must, ever and always, ask God to give it to us.
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Pray that God would tear down the walls in your people’s lives that separate the worship that takes place on Sunday from the worship of Monday through Saturday.
- Ask God for the gift of an increasingly God-fearing life, and for the Holy Spirit to open your people’s eyes to see their lives in the world as locations for worship.
- Pray that the powerful patterns of worship-particularly the patterns of repentance-would shape the identities of your people, both in the upcoming service and over the years.