Week 3 June 2026 – REFLECTION ON HEALTHY FEAR

“…giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God.”  Ephesians 5:20-21

Most popular translations substitute the word “reverence” for “fear,” which sounds too forbidding for modern ears. Don’t tell that to the loving, former school principal whose recent birthday card to me read, “You’re the Birthday Queen today. You should be Honored, Worshipped & just a little Feared.”  Lest I put on airs, my poor old fingers are unable to fasten on the golden “Queenager” pin gifted by my fun loving family.

We are most familiar with the quote from Proverbs 9:10, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Pastor Timothy Keller, who wrote “Go Forward in Love,” took me one step further by taking me back into Deuteronomy 10:12, “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

This widely known lecturer and still bestselling author was senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, who died May 19, 2023.  Next to Pastors Lance Allen and Alistair Begg, he was the mentor whose ministry continues to uniquely impact my life. Take his insistence that the word “reverence” cannot convey the biblical “fear” in our mutual relationships, but for days he’s been writing in the context of “The Meaning of Marriage.”  It all makes sense, given that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and everything joyful and liberating is rooted in an intimate connection on the divine and human level. Timothy Keller died at the age of 72 after a three-year battle with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Perhaps it was he who at one time said, “Exemption isn’t necessarily the Christian’s guarantee, but Redemption always is.”

Those who crave “unhealthy fear,” can feast on all the “bombshell” revelations daily served up by a gullible Internet devoid of the ability to discriminate. Most posts have deescalated to the point where no further sensationalized headlines will follow up, but most news on YouTube are separated from the Good News of Scripture as "far as the east is from the west.”

As a ten-year-old I lived a mile or so from the Swiss border with nazified Austria.  On many moonless nights the nearby skies were blood red from the bombs dropped by allies.  When the French marched in, they began shelling my village until a brave soul waved a Swiss flag at them.  Meanwhile, my mother was hospitalized for weeks and expected to die, with my dad being away with the army as a commissioned film maker.  I suffered from PTSD, but was delivered from my recurring panic attacks during one miraculous night decades ago.  That’s when I learned the truest meaning of the “fear of the LORD.”  It filled me with unspeakably holy awe and lasting incomprehensible joy.