Inside Out Living

"Have no fear, have no fear, said the cat in the hat.” I read that line today at lunch in the book I was reading to my daughter. As I was reading it, I thought about our theme this week and the subsequent mess that the cat in the hat made. Fortunately for the children in the story, the cat cleaned up his mess, but life doesn’t always play out like a Dr. Seuss book.

Today we read about more kings over God’s people that made one mess after the other. The idolatry they allowed showed a total lack of fear towards the LORD. What do we see as a result of this lack of fear? We see the consequence of incurring God’s judgment. Both Joash, king of Judah (2 Chr. 24:24), and Jehoahaz, king of Israel (2 Kings 13:2-3), invited God’s judgment on their people because they didn’t fear God and practiced idolatry.

So why should we fear God? We fear God because He is the one who judges our actions (Eccl. 12:13-14). We fear God because of the consequences that result when our actions invite His judgment.

This week’s theme is the fear of the Lord. This is an often puzzling subject and can be difficult to fully comprehend. God loves us and we love Him in return, and yet we are also supposed to fear Him. Sometimes this fear is a sense of awe and respect because of the holiness of God and the fact that He is so vastly different than we are. Sometimes this fear of God is because, as the sovereign Lord, He is the one who judges our actions and thoughts and has the power and authority to save and to condemn at the same time.

Today's Devotional:

At lunch today I had to do a little maintenance on our home computer that my wife uses for work. I suggested to her that she begin to solve these problems without my help. She promptly declared that, as long as I was around, she didn’t need to; she had a ‘learned helplessness’ when it came to our computer.

King Joash took the throne when he was seven years old. I wonder if his early ascension didn’t develop in him a learned helplessness. As a child he surely had been taught, if not just told, what to do by Jehoiada. He never developed an ability to think independently. Joash remained fully dependent upon the input and influence of others around him as is clear from his departure from the Lord following Jehoiada’s death.

Do you suffer from a spiritual learned helplessness? May you fear the Lord and may your faith mature that you will “no longer be like children, forever changing our minds about what we believe because someone has told us something different or because someone has cleverly lied to us and made the lie sound like the truth” (Eph. 4:14).