The theme verse of the whole book of Proverbs is: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7). Sadly, many churches in modern times have been so fruitless in establishing this principle, especially as it relates training up children. There will be no success in conquering sin without the fear of the Lord being present in the heart of the individual, and really no solid grasp of the Gospel itself. And God is calling parents to train up their children to have a godly fear as the foundation of their discipleship.

I was assigned Proverbs chapter 1 verse 7. I think that in addition to the title is in the program. And if you've brought a Bible You perhaps have already thought about that verse today or have turned there. There is no more fundamental or basic text in the Word of God than this verse for many reasons. So I, it seemed to me as soon as Scott Brown emailed me that this was my verse, it sounded like I had the verse which really is kind of the core verse of the scriptures on the subject.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction. Here what you have really is the the theme book of the whole book of Proverbs, the theme verse, the theme thought of the whole book of Proverbs. This is the key thought in the author's mind of the book. It's the heart of where he's going in writing this. If you were to ask him what he wrote the book of Proverbs for, this is what he has to say to you.

In fact, the way he ends his first book, I'm sorry, the way he ends his second book, Ecclesiastes chapter 12 verse 13, where he says the end of the matter or the conclusion of the whole matter is to fear God and keep his commandments, that's how he starts this one, his first book. And so sometimes we don't put that together. It's as though he bookends both of the major writings that he's given for us with starting and ending by saying fearing God is really what this is all about. Fear of God is central and essential to knowing God. It's the beginning of knowledge and so he he would agree with King David's desire to start with the young when David wrote for instance in Psalm 34 verse 11, Come O children listen to me and I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

You think about that a moment. Come children listen to me I'll teach you the fear of the Lord. Such appealing words to today's children don't you think. Nothing like a talk about the fear of God to bring the children gleefully scampering into the room and jumping up on your lap and saying tell me more about that you know read it again. Well not so much perhaps.

Fear has never been high on people's list of favorite subjects to talk about not with children and not with anybody else and of all the scary fears that you could possibly talk about I suppose the idea of fearing God pretty much tops the charts of all But then again I like to ask how many parents, how would parents really know in some cases how children might respond to the subject of the fear of the Lord because how many have tried it? How many have really attempted to have a significant conversation with their children about it. How would they know how a child might respond to this? But there is stuff that we know kids like to talk about, particularly boys. Things like, you know, tornadoes and violent storms and waterfalls and bungee jumping and parachuting and things blowing up, right?

I put some thought into that. I live in Oklahoma. Why do people chase tornadoes? My wife thinks I'm a little nutty because when there's a, we haven't seen it very often, but when there's a tornado, all the weather people are saying, you know, go inside, get in a closet, maybe the bathtub if you have a small bathroom hunkered down, you know, just tuck yourself somewhere safely away. We live somewhere where it's, you've got a couple of overlooks and a few places where you can get a good view of things and when I hear this or tornado, I get in the car and I go over there and I'm like, where is it?

You know, I want to see it. Why do people do that? Why do people walk on a thin bridge over a waterfall that would dash them to pieces if they fell in but they entrust themselves to that rickety bridge? Why do people jump off a bridge with a bungee cord tied to their ankle that they would never in a million years think about doing otherwise without that. Why do people watch a movie you know where no one ever wants to be blown to pieces No one wants to experience anything like that, but we've all watched a dozen, a hundred movies where things are blown up and people are killed in this way.

These terrifying thoughts. Why do some people watch horror movies, which in my opinion no one should? I think they're morally unhealthy. Why do people do that? All of these stolmen, all of these are moments when people feel safely afraid.

That's what's going on. People like the feeling to experience sensing that I can be safely afraid. There's something about how God wired human beings and made us that takes joy in being overpowered with a degree of awe that is terrifying and yet at the same time be at peace. This is so awesome it could demolish me, but I'm safe. I'm okay where I am because the cord is tied to my ankle, because I'm on this bridge, Because I see the tornado and it's it's immense and horrifying But I'm far enough in a fast car that I can I can get to where I need to be Safely afraid what I'm seeing on the screen isn't really happening?

It's okay It's it's scary, but but it doesn't bother me because I'm so I'm in my living room. There's really no monster in the house. And I propose to you that the idea of knowing the fear of a God in heaven who we can completely feel ourselves entrusted to is part of why we feel wired that way. I think that at least in part explains why it makes sense that we can fear the God that we also trust and love. So back to that point, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

I propose that the fruit that the evangelical church has been bearing among our children today is precisely because we have strenuously avoided the topic of the fear of God. This is why so many children grow up even in Christian homes and forsake the faith because we ran from the beginning. We left out the beginning and we mustn't do that. It's foundational. Let's start there.

That's a key point in this message, a first key point. It's foundational. He calls it the beginning of knowledge, and by that he means something along the lines of what we mean by talking about something that has a foundation. The beginning. Last time I checked, children started at the beginning.

That's where they were. It's not just therefore one point to teach children, or it's not among the key points to teach children, it's not one optional theme to teach children, it's first base in teaching children. It's the very beginning. By beginning, we don't mean also this, we don't mean that the fear of the Lord is something merely important for the start of the Christian life and then you know as you mature well that was for the start and then we move on to other subjects as we mature. No, it's the beginning as in foundational.

Anything you build on it from that point on, you know, has the right foundation and if you don't start there, if you don't start with the foundation, then anything you build from that point on is skewed, and it's not going to stand well. We hear of how there is milk and meat in the Word. There are passages that talk about that. You call Hebrews 6 saying maybe that we move on from elementary teachings to learn meteor doctrine as we mature. We move on into deeper studies.

But the fear of the Lord is not one of those things that we move on from as we mature. Now as we mature, we probe more deeply into the fear of the Lord. It's both milk and meat you might say. To a little child the youngest child explaining the fear of the Lord might be something like merely explaining the dangers of a of a fire or a great precipice, that there's potential harm and power here, and that you have to respect that. It's simple.

To an older saint, you continue to explain it. He continues to learn about the fear of the Lord, and for him it's more like learning about the vastness and depth of an ocean and he comprehends it in a much bigger way. We had to be made willing to learn about it the first time whenever it was that the Lord first opened our hearts to this and we have to continue to be made willing to learn what to our flesh seems a little bit distasteful. In John chapter 1 you know Nathaniel asked his friend Philip, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And I think there are a lot of believers today, professing believers at least, who would say you know can any good thing really come out of fear is that possible and the answer is not only yes the fact is I think you've seen this this week already from other messages the answer is every good thing proceeds from the fear of the Lord and nothing good in the Christian life can thrive without it.

The fact that the fear of the Lord is central to our faith strikes many people as as odd. It's a contrast. They have a hard time wrapping their minds around and so we we should not be surprised to find our children have some difficulty wrapping their minds around it. To say of the same person, I trust you, I love you, I fear you. It's difficult to package together, isn't it?

It doesn't quite add up for us, But it's a faith that is different than in other things. Fear of God because God is a different thing because God is the most different of all beings. Too many think of faith and love as consisting entirely and only of happy and sweet thoughts but those do and should have an element of fear also because our faith is not a faith in a in just a set of positive ideas our faith is a faith in a God that we have a relationship with and so what we believe is what he tells us of course we're to believe such as that he's omnipotent and that he you know that's possessing all power and knows all and rules all and who could possibly begin to relate to a being like that without some degree of fear and so understand what it is just for a few negatives you know the fear of the Lord is not teaching children to live in terror of God all the time. That's not the point. The fear of the Lord is not causing your children to be obsessed with hell.

Now those things aren't entirely absent. There's an awareness that those exist. There is a sense that he has great power and can harm those who resist him, those who will not humble themselves. There is a hell, these are realities, but the fear of the Lord is not obsessing on either of those things. And you can't just teach children that isn't responsible child raising to merely teach children to obey God's rules and laws We don't want to just make Pharisees do we who presume that they're justified by their works But to know God A first step in teaching children the fear of the Lord therefore is, and I want to highly recommend this to you if you haven't ever started it or tried it, what I'm about to tell you is something that the Puritans of New England in particular regarded as an essential step to a good education.

They did not believe anyone was well educated who had not been through significant studies in the attributes of God. Your children are missing a huge element in their education if you don't do what would virtually amount to a course on the attributes of God with them. You can skip some of the other curriculum that many of the public educators tell us that we ought to have and that our children vitally need. Make sure they get an understanding of the attributes of God And on that, you know, how is one to go about that There are so many good ways, you know, I'm going to recommend some things to you The attributes of God is there's a book by Arthur W. Pink on the subject, there's a well-known book by A.W.

Tozer on the subject, there's a huge volume of over a thousand pages which will choke any animal on your farm, it's enormous, by Stephen Charnock, an old Puritan book, it's huge. Yes, as soon as I recommend these, you know, someone's going to think a family like this sitting here, can my children read, you know, Tozer or Pink or Charnock on the attributes of God? No, that's not necessary. What needs to happen is you, mom and dad, absorb that material. You study those things, you learn from those books, and guess what?

Then you take that and you translate it from your meditation. You let the word of Christ dwell richly in you to where you can take what you got from that and you can regurgitate it back to your children in language that they can understand that their various ages You reconstruct it in a way that they can take in at whatever age they are Teach your children about the attributes of God so that they know that he's all wise and all powerful all knowing omnipresent and all of those that you've heard of before. So those are some of the vital things. Far from being a bitter pill that makes life miserable, the fear of the Lord makes life pleasant, peaceful, happy, holy, long, sweet, and free of a lot of needless turmoil. Where would I get that from?

Psalm 34 tells us those exact things. Psalm 34 stresses those very points and then says it this way, starting at verse 11, the verse I quoted a moment ago, Come, O children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good.

Speak peace, seek peace and pursue it." It results in pleasant days and pleasant conversations and people who get along well and who are at peace with one another. Proverbs 14 in verse 26 says, in the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence and his children will have a refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life that one may turn away from the snares of death. And so all of these verses just emphasize that point that I've been saying that it's it is foundational. Consider it foundational to know God, to know Him and His attributes, to thoroughly investigate those things and search those things out so that your children by knowing Him will know who it is they are to esteem and highly regard.

The second point, You'll notice a lot of these points have the letter F with them. I'm not that creative, but it just, I had almost a year to work on the message because Scott Brown asked me last September, so I managed to pull it off. It's part of being faithful. Conveying this to your children is part of being faithful. You know, it got mentioned in my little introductory bio there that I like mountain climbing and hiking, I've been doing that since I was 19, I'm 64 now.

I took a hiking group to the famous goat trail above the Buffalo River in Arkansas a few years ago. The goat trail is a trail that gradually gets thinner and thinner. Any of you ever been there? Okay. And it gets thinner and thinner until finally it reaches a point where the trail is only about three feet wide and on this side there's a cliff that goes straight up that you couldn't possibly climb without ropes and on this side there's a cliff that goes straight down that you wouldn't want to descend except by rappelling.

It's about three feet wide for the last several hundred feet and it dropped 600 feet into the Buffalo River at that point and so we took a number of people there one time and it's a three mile hike until you reach that stage and so when when we got to the point where we were about to Reach that portion of the trail. I asked my friend Terry one of the elders of our church said Terry Let's let's assemble the group and why don't you give them you know sort of the warning talk you tell them what we're about to see and he was quite austere and stern Terry was was very grim about it and he emphasized to them that this is not a place to mess over there were some children there he said I want you all to know it's not somewhere to play around or mess around. You've got to be very careful here. Why was he austere? Because he wanted them to be able to enjoy the place.

Right. He wanted them to have pleasure there and to rejoice in the splendor of the beauty that God had made and not see someone plummet to their death as has happened at that spot. When you think about it in that way does this sound like something, does the fear of the Lord sound like something that we need to have concerns about having too much of? Hardly. Could he have gone overboard on stressing that point with them?

They needed to be aware of the significance of the power and the forces and the danger that they might be facing at that place. And just as it's not possible to relish and value the love of the Lord too much if we correctly grasp what love is likewise we can't emphasize or stress the fear of the Lord too much if we correctly understand what it is. All people demonstrate if they say that the fear of the Lord is an idea or a doctrine that's dangerous to children to talk about is they merely show that they don't grasp it. They don't get it. They don't understand the point.

I like to tell people that almost anything misused or misunderstood can be dangerous. You know, a warm fireplace, a new car, a box of tissues, a water hose, a dollar bill, they're all, every one of them is dangerous if you don't know how to use it right. They can all cause catastrophic harm to your life if you don't know how to use them correctly even haven't you seen people harm themselves greatly with a misunderstanding of the love of God and by twisting it into something it's not they ruin their lives so of course misunderstanding the fear of the Lord could be harmful but that's not to say anything bad whatever about the true fear of God and what it's what it's all about. The writer of the Hebrews wrote, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with godly fear for our God is a consuming fire said Hebrews 12. You see in a passage like that that gratitude, worship, the security of being possessors of a kingdom that cannot be taken away, these, even these, still lead us to respond properly with fear.

That was from Hebrews 12. The author had just finished writing in chapter 11 about about faith and he emphasized that even faith is not to be held without fear. Love for God or resting in the love of God is not to be rested in without fear. Serving God while not best done in a state of servile terrified fear is still not to be done without some fear. The peace of God is not a peace to be enjoyed without fear.

So what we're talking about, you've heard several definitions this week, probably three or four by this point and here is mine which was borrowed from a few sources assembled from a few places together and I've liked some of the other ones that I've heard in the keynote sessions. To fear God is to take him with the utmost seriousness so that we dread the thought and consequences of displeasing him and relish the joy and rewards of trusting and serving him. And as you try to deepen your understanding of the fear of the Lord let me give you another pointer or clue these are mingled into the points that I've got concerning explaining this to children. When your children are particularly young, not that this ever ceases you don't ever turn entirely away from this, but while they're particularly young you convey a great deal about the fear of the Lord through the Bible's stories. You don't need me to tell you I'm probably not the first person to tell you that the scriptures are full of a vast array of stories probably something like 60 percent of the word of God in terms of content is stories.

Well, there are good reasons for that. And communicate it that way to the young. Those things, we all know that lessons and truths are communicated well to the young through stories. They need to discover from his word through the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah and the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah and Korah's rebellion and Israel and King Saul and Ananias and Sapphira and Pharaoh and even Of course the story of our Lord Jesus suffering the wrath of God for us What do all of these convey to us if if nothing else they certainly convey that God meant it when he called his people to holiness and showed that he was very serious about it when they did not obey that call. Right?

We see that constantly in those stories. Convey the fear of the Lord through the truth of those stories and make sure be very careful that you don't end up explaining the element of fear and reverence and even peril away from those stories. How often you know you you may have heard people explain a story like that of King Saul or Ananias and Sapphira and say well you know the Lord really didn't take him to hell, he just killed him before he got worse you know just kind of stopped him in his path before things got any worse. Well you know You may or may not have your own theology of the outcome of those stories and where those persons are, but to me that's just an example of how people deflate the power of some of those stories and take away some of the thrust. We need to understand they are emphatic about how when God called people to holiness and they did not follow these were the consequences in many cases so convey that to children.

And a third point now about the fear of the Lord I said the fear of the Lord is foundational teaching the fear of the Lord is part of faithfulness the fear of the Lord is learned from Father that's a third one not to exclude mother not without mother by any means but it has a lot to do with how we relate to our Father if you pulled evangelicals today and I tried to choose a word that would sum up the idea of those who profess to know Christ and who we have question marks about when we're not really sure if they do or not and I think evangelicals seems to have become the recent term that the press uses and everyone uses to talk about well those who profess the gospel and who go to churches that say they teach that Jesus died for sinners, conservative theology in general. Whether those persons are actually saved or not evangelicals are sort of of that category. If you pulled evangelicals today I think there's little doubt in my mind that you would find that most of them think of our relationship with God the Father pretty much only in terms of sweet and tender love and not a relationship of discipline and impartial judgment and not as a relationship in which we are called upon to conduct ourselves with godly fear but if you know the scriptures well you may have already thought of 1st Peter 1 and that I was going to read that when I stated this 1st Peter 1 and verse 17 when Peter writing a congregation unquestionably believers when he says if you call on him as father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, then conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile.

And by exile, he means their time in this world in which they are separated from the world by the Spirit of God. So we are foreigners in this world. He says there to conduct ourselves with an awareness that we serve a God who is an impartial judge, who we are to revere, who we are to fear, who judges impartially according to our works. Too many evangelicals tend to think that all thoughts about the fear of the Lord should end when they turn to the Lord. And that fear only has to do with unbelievers.

Too many of them think that concerning themselves with works should have no place in their lives. I've often said that good works seems to have a bad rap to many Christians. We learn right at the outset of the Christian life that we can't be justified by our works, we can't be saved by our works, and to some extent the whole concept of works gets skewed into something that, well, that's not even necessary. And that's very poor thinking. It's an embrace of cheap grace obviously.

And the idea of serving a God who judges is completely out of the picture. Peter speaking to believers says all of those discipline, fear, good works, God as judge are factors in the mind of a child of God walking with our Heavenly Father. This brings up another point in terms of then the education of your children. Do convey and teach your children that all of life is lived under the eye of God. Constantly lived under the Eye of God.

This relational element of the Eye of God, this has so much to do with how you teach a child to resist temptation. It can't be merely a just say no to temptation proposition. I remember telling believers I knew who are teachers in the public education system and when I don't think it's still popular but there was the real big just say no campaign some time ago when it came to drugs and to strongly discourage teens from experimenting with illegal drugs and all of that, that was powerless. There was no possibility that would ever make much progress at all because it contains no potency. There's no strength to fight temptation in telling people just to say no.

One of the Puritans, I think it was Thomas Chalmers, said that you've got to teach people resistance to temptation through what he called the subduing power of a superior affection. The subduing power of a superior affection. An example of that. There's nothing that will safeguard a man from immorality with other women more than a superior controlling immense love for his own wife. If he has such a vast love for his own wife that anything of that sort would be incomprehensible to him, then that temptation loses all of its power.

It can't get anywhere with him. And you've got to teach children this way, a respectful love of God, An awesome love of God, a heightened love of God that is greater than the love of any sin. That's teaching the fear of the Lord. And back to this point about father. Dad, you have more to do with how your children relate to God than any other relationship in their life.

This is why you've seen it. Why is it that children who grow up to dislike or even eventually despise their father generally and almost universally will despise their father's God as well? Because in their minds the two authorities are very much wrapped up together and how I respond to one is going to largely be how I respond to the other. And so while a father must you know be sure that he's imposing consequences upon his children for their sins and discipline and all of that, yet he cannot, if he wants to teach his children the fear of the Lord, he cannot merely relate to his children as judge and think that that is the only way in which to convey Himself being as though the image of God to them. Because Psalm 103 says that just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.

We need to be compassionate fathers if we want our children to honor God Just as we need to be compassionate fathers if we want them to to honor us And if you're seeking wisdom, you know If you want to yearns to learn more about how to walk with God in a pleasing way and if you want your children to pick up on wisdom that verse from Proverbs, our opening verse from Proverbs 1-7 said that it's the beginning of knowledge, the fount of wisdom. There are three or four places in the Proverbs that say that it's the beginning of knowledge and the fount of wisdom. Well you know that he promises in James chapter 1 that if anyone lacks wisdom what does he do? He says to ask of God. Ask God and to know that it will be given to him.

He grants it. He's always willing. He's constantly willing. Teach your children to take all of their concerns for wisdom, all of their every need for situations in which they sense a lack of ability to know what to do, to go immediately to God, to develop a prayerful habit of requesting wisdom from God. Has your family ever even merely looked up, talk about you know a simple guideline.

I merely looked up all the verses in the scriptures about the fear of the Lord. There are approximately 30 verses that explicitly mention it and when I say explicitly I mean verses that just actually say something to the just directly to the point, fear the Lord, you know, in some way or other. And there are obviously, there are easily a couple, I think someone asserted yesterday that there are somewhere around a couple of hundred passages in the scriptures that in some way or other convey something about the topic, the necessity of the fear of God, that would include many of those that don't use the word fear and just come out right and state it in that way. But they're about, just start here. What if you were just, you know, we used to have something, when I was a young Christian, we had a big fat book called The Concordance, you know.

I don't think anybody uses those anymore, you know, and it's got real little print and it needed good reading glasses or a magnifying glass to look it up and you'd turn the pages and it would tell you, you know, how many times is the word unto used in scripture? And then you'd find like five pages of unto, unto, unto, you know, and all the other... Well, you'd look for more important words than that, like fear, you know, and if you've learned to use a good computer concordance, which the big books have largely been replaced by, then you can get two words. You can type in, well show me the verses that include the words fear and God or fear and Lord or fearing and him and you can do that and you can gather those together. Have you ever, dad, even considered the idea of sitting down with your children and saying one at a time we're going to take those passages and look them up I'm going to start collecting them and collating them and saying what do they say, what do they tell us.

Do that in conjunction with your study of the attributes of God. Do we need a fear of the Lord class kind of like math, English, history, you know, fear of God, attributes of God class. Is that what we need? Not necessarily in that way, but I will tell you that if you are including all of those other subjects in your daily teaching of children, regardless of that, you do need to include some biblical time on a regular basis with your family and some time just around open Bibles to investigate and dig into the Word together. Obviously there has not been any specific teaching this week here at the conference on family worship.

Maybe one year they'll make a conference subject on family worship, but I hope you're doing that. That would be part of this. But now for my fourth F. I said the fear of the Lord's foundational, that it's part of faithfulness in teaching our children, that it's wrapped up in in fatherhood, conveying it is something that father has a key role in teaching. But back to Proverbs 1.7, our key verse again.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction. And there's where I got my fourth F. It's forsaken or despised by fools. It's despised by fools, it says. And so there's my chance to transition into the second phrase.

Just as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge was a comprehensive sweeping statement that summarizes the whole book of Proverbs. So now in the second phrase, fools despise wisdom and instruction, This scholarly author of Proverbs takes and reduces a vast volume of thought to a few words to the core. A fool despises this, he says. He's got no use for it at all. There's an expanded version.

I wanna take a few minutes with this. This passage came to mind and I thought this would be a good place to go. Again, if you've got Bibles with you, look at Psalm 36. You could call Psalm 36 a little bit of an expanded version of what fools despise wisdom and instruction in Proverbs 1.7 says. The first four verses.

This is an inner look. Psalm 36 one through four could be called an inner look to the thought the psychology if you will of the man Who does not fear the Lord and for that reason I find it such a fascinating passage I've preached whole series on this at my church And we'll sum it up in a few minutes here. Psalm 36 1-4. Transgression speaks to the wicked deep within his heart. There is no fear of God before his eyes.

For he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated. The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit. He has ceased to act wisely and do good. He plots trouble while on his bed. He sets himself in a way that is not good.

He does not reject evil." The way that starts and I know that I don't know what Bible translations you have with you, some of you may have ESV like I've got, some have King James, the first phrase, verse 1, must be one of those that's very difficult to bring from Hebrew into English because it gets translated a lot of ways and so what I read may not have matched very closely what you've got but something along the lines of transgressions speaking to the wicked deep in his heart, there is no fear of God before his eyes is there. What that's saying is this, and how vital this is for you to know pertaining to your children. All of us struggle with sin at times, right? Every one of us knows what it is to have sin in the heart and to succumb, at times, to temptation, because it's powerful and we're weak. Jesus told us that.

The Spirit, your spirit is willing, but your flesh is weak. So all of us struggle with sin and succumb at times, but it's an entirely different thing. It's another thing completely to have transgression in such comfortable residence in your heart that it communes with you all day long as a familiar friend, where it's your favorite thing to meditate about. And that's what he means here by transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. For you and I, who are believers, sin is a foe that sometimes fights its way to a victory over us and knocks us down and other times gets beaten away at the door and driven off, get out of here.

But In this case, the man he's describing in verse 1 here, sin is a welcome houseguest. And in the Proverbs, the fool is exactly what the author here means by the wicked man and how other biblical books parallel the wicked and the fool a different place. Look through the Proverbs and you'll see the parallels. So while a godly man can sin frequently and terribly, the ungodly man actually never stops. You might say to borrow an old phrase that we used to use about those who would, you know, shack up that they were living in sin.

The ungodly man is always living in sin. He's never off the campus of sin. He's constantly there. It's where his life is most comfortable. And rather, the fear of the Lord is what will put us in dread of temptation.

Look at the reason that this man has transgression communing or speaking to him deeply in his heart. Well the second phrase of verse 2 explains the first. There is no fear of God before his eyes. That's why he's so comfortable pondering sin all the time because there's no fear of God before his eyes. This is the reason for it and that grief of displeasing God and that cherishing of the warm sense of his presence that we can only know when we're walking with him, that's what we have.

But this man's got none of that. This characteristic of this one who has no fear of God before his eyes. No, he's got none of that in the cabinet to restrain him. That's the prescription he needs and there's none there. And so he communes with sin.

He fellowships comfortably with sin. We're told to let the word of Christ richly dwell within us. We're told that your word I've treasured in my heart that I might not sin against you. But this man finds that the thoughts of his heart are not treasuring the word of God. What his mind is deliciously enjoying and constantly turning over and meditating on and living in happy fellowship with his thoughts of his sin.

There's no war with sin. He's at peace with it. You and I know that all of our children are born with that war with the Spirit of God in our hearts and not a war with sin. We're at peace with sin when we're born. It's our natural habitat.

Your child, just as you, we're all born with no fear of God before our eyes. We were not born with the beginning of knowledge imparted to us we have to obtain it from the Word. And so how could something make more you know vitally important the stress the necessity of you keeping the Word of God before your children. This man it's the passion of his heart to be wrapped up in sin. Further, he flatters himself about his sin.

Look at verse 2, where it says, he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated. How many children would love to live satisfied with the thought that I can do this and get away with it? No. This will not be found out. There is no one living who hates this about me because they don't know it.

They don't know that that's how I am. Or as the another Bible version puts it, it flatters him in his own eyes concerning the discovery of his iniquity and the hatred of it. The man who does not fear the Lord, in other words, is quite sure that he's going to continue getting away with it. He feels convinced of that. He does not believe in a God who knows his sins and will hold him to account.

The flattery that verse 2 speaks of is not the kind that means that he boasts of himself. Oh, he might do that. You know, there are people who do that. But in this context, what is David saying in this context of this psalm? He's saying that this person thinks himself pretty bright, unlike those who fear God, who are so dreadfully wrapped up in these outdated beliefs of the fear of God, and unlike them he can enjoy the pleasures of sin and not let anything interfere with that.

He chooses to enjoy the freedom of sinning without the remorse of guilt or letting brokenness of heart get a hook in his soul, those bothersome traits that he sees in religious people that he knows. No, he's too worldly wise for that. He feels that his sin will never be held to account by any God. There's no reason to hate it. He enjoys it.

He may feel that, well, other people enjoy it. Can they all be wrong? We should enjoy it. He is sure that there's no accountability for it. And where does this attitude come from but an inadequate view of sin?

It's a view of sin that has not understood what it is before God, a view of sin that simply has put God out of mind. And a person who is content to only bother with how men might view his sin and not to think about what regard God has for it. Every English Bible translation uses the word flattery or flatters in verse 2. What's interesting, it's actually a word that means smooth or slippery, and how that captures the point. You know, He's a slippery character.

This is someone who feels, well, I can sin and then like I'm a pig you can grab, but you can't hold on. You can't capture me over this. He slips out of your grasp. Can't pin anything on me. That's how seriously he takes anything that you might bring him from from the word of living God.

And for us, you know, it makes you fear the Lord all the more how fearful this really is that there are even people that think that way. This is the polar opposite of the fear of God which despises evil to let yourself believe that there is no giving account for evil at all that's going to come. The fear of the Lord Proverbs 8 says is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance the way of evil and perverted speech, I hate." Help your children learn to hate their own sins. Help your children learn to despise the danger of sin and the power of sin in their lives.

You've got no more effective way. You know, you've probably detected already in this message that this is not this is not a typical message about education in the in the sense in which we normally communicate the points of education. Well that's because I'm kind of a modern Puritan at heart. You've heard me refer to them a couple times already. And the Puritans believed that education had everything to do with character and not classes, not certain subjects.

It was all about transformation of character. No one was really educated who wasn't strong in godly character. And coming back to that point, how are your children gonna learn to hate evil? They're only going to pick that up, dad and mom, from you. They've got to pick that up from you.

I don't mean that they can't pick it up from others as well, other godly companions, people at your church, godly relatives and so on, but you be one that shows them as King David did in Psalm 32, how blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven and whose sin is covered. How blessed is the one to whom the Lord does not impart iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. And he goes on and talks about, hey, there was a time I kept silent about my sin and it grieved me and it made me mourn and I was broken in my heart, but I was trying to keep it to myself I was trying to hide it. You show your children by your confession of your own sins before them. Husbands and wives when you wrong each other you quickly confess that so that it's over and that your children see there's a blessedness to being forgiven and to being transparent, to being open about admitting and forsaking my sins and they'll pick up on that and they'll realize this is not a miserable thing to do.

This is a joyful thing to do. You want them to capture that spirit because otherwise without that they end up the way verses 3 & 4 talk about how the words of his mouth are trouble and deceit. He ceases to act wisely and do good. He plots trouble while on his bed. He sets himself in a way that is not good.

He does not reject evil all those are summaries of How far afield this life can go? So to quote the Apostle Paul, you know alongside King David brothers across the ages if you will. If the man of Psalm 36 perfects the arts of sin because he does not fear God, well then as you heard from Jeff Pollard yesterday, we are able to cleanse ourselves from all the foulment of flesh and spirit as we perfect holiness in the fear of God. We do not know how to be holy because holiness requires wisdom and wisdom is a fruit of the fear of the Lord. A lot of us know this, we don't pursue what we ought to, we don't pursue doing right as a habit until we have to, until something forces our hand and makes us do that.

And the fear of the Lord supplies that have to, where I sense that I need to gain wisdom and so I desperately need to cry out to God to to know how to walk as I should. And wisdom and the fear of the Lord are so conjoined, so wrapped up together in scripture, and the fear of the Lord is defined as the beginning of wisdom because there is no such thing as even ability or power to apply what we know about walking with God if we don't start with God himself being lofty in our thoughts. That's why the fear of the Lord is first base in wisdom because you can't get wise about anything morally unless God is elevated. And if that's not the beginning of it, God at the center. It's not just about learning to do his morality.

It's not just about performing the obedience that the parents say. It's about doing whatever we do to the honor of God, loving to please God, dreading to displease God. It's all very personal. I rarely think, sometimes I think of that phrase being personal. Some of you have probably seen them the old movie Taken years ago and there's a Liam Neeson, the actor finds himself near the end of the movie face-to-face in an elevator with his daughter's kidnapper who is on the floor bleeding at this point and he's in a greatly disadvantaged position and as a last resort this one that was going to kidnap his daughter and sell her into sexual slavery says to him looking up from the floor, you know, that we didn't mean anything personal to you again about it.

It was just business. And the father just before he puts a bullet in him, he says it was all personal to me and then shoots him. And that's made me think thinking about that line so many times it's all personal to God you know it's all very personal we've got to think about that way and that's the beginning of wisdom it's righteousness is gotten it's never just morality it's never just obedience It's about a personal relationship with him. A few points just to touch on because I'm almost out of time and I don't want to miss these as we as we wrap this up. Try to convey these things to your children.

I know that some of these points are a big deal to try to wrap up and comprehend or to take notes on in a few minutes, so maybe you'll get to hear this and play it again on an MP3 or CD or something like that. Or something like that, but if you find your children fearing the knowledge of God's wrathful severity, remember Romans 11 where Paul said that we need to be impacted by the goodness and severity of God and he packaged that together in one sentence. Behold the goodness and severity of God. Make sure your children always see both of those together at the same time. Don't talk about one in the absence of the other.

That's why the very gospel itself shows the wrath of God on his son to bestow love and goodness on the world that needed it, right? A world of sinners that needed it. And so if they fear God's wrathful spirit, If you do find them starting to unfortunately define the fear of the Lord as just hell I'm wrapped. I'm worried about hell Point them to keep fleeing constantly to flee to his kind grace ask him again and again to forgive you be like Robert Mary McShane the old English pastor who said he made it a daily prayer because he was so uncertain of himself, Lord if you haven't saved me before today please save me now. Get your children doing that you know until they're sure and don't feel like they have to ask it every day.

A second point, make sure you understand that if you have joy in the Lord, if you're a person who either is natively prone to joy in the Lord or you have joy in the Lord, make sure that you display before the kids that fear of God keeps your joy deep and not shallow. What do I mean by that? Well, joy is good, but you need serious joy and not superficial giddy joy. We all need that, and we all don't really tend to respect someone who says they're joyful and we pick up on something shallow and giddy and light about it, right? We look at that and think, I don't want any of that.

And we hear of a joy in the Christian media that often is shallow and has no place for gravity and tears and it's a white silly brand. It's not the kind of joy that says, well you know I'm still gonna have joy even if I have to suffer with Jesus. And this sort of joy, John Newton defined it this way, the author of Amazing Grace, he said the joy that Christians need is like the ballast in the bottom of a sailboat, all right? It's like a heavy ballast in the bottom of a sailboat that keeps it from tipping over when the wind blows. That heavy weight, because you know we meet people who they like to sail like this and you've seen it you've met people who they think well man when the wind of the Spirit blows it's just it's just fantastic what a ride you know what a joyful happy ride I'm on and we see them skip across the waves in their Christian life with glee and and it's just so light-hearted and frothy and you and you get this feeling you watch them and you think there's gonna be a wreck here somewhere this is gonna crash this is just goofy it looks too giddy it's reckless it's too fast Everybody on board looks like they're having a good time and that's all they ever have.

And a wise observer knows that that is headed for a capsize because it's careless. There's no, There's nothing heavy at the bottom holding that joy into a place that has a good foundation. That's the kind of joy some professing Christians have. If you're secure in a way that means that you haven't got a care in the world, you need to be secure as someone who takes God dead seriously. Secure in that.

And that's why fear that's mingled with appropriate joy has a somber seriousness to it. And this is why, to come back to that point, this is why people like to behold, as I talked about at the very beginning of the message, massive, intimidating, overpowering, grandeur and greatness, and to feel safe in doing so. Why do I like to climb massive mountain ranges and walk miles into hostile weather around menacing cliffs and strong winds and perilous conditions and I go there and I like it and I enjoy it. Well, it's because for one, I took precautions and I'm prepared and I've got the stuff I need with me to be out there. It's downright fatal out there, But it's okay.

I'm experiencing it and I'm safe. And that's what makes it pleasant. And so that the element of genuine powerful danger is real, it's visible, it's evident, but you're still safe. We need to live the Christian life aware that I'm in the midst of awesome power that could swallow me up, but it won't because I've embraced him and instead of running from him and hiding, I've gone right to him and said, I'm aware of your power. Please keep me there.

Tuck me under the arm of your wing. That's what it is to walk and live in the fear of God, to linger in the presence of a holy God, knowing that dreadful, eternal power is there, but there's no condemnation, no punishment as I experience it, but mercy for me because I've run right into its arms. And when the element of condemnation is removed, everything about that awesome power for the believer is sweet. I hope you can rear your children in the awareness of these realities. And thanks for coming today, let's bow in prayer.

Father, we have spoken of subjects that are truly indeed beyond us and vast, incomprehensible, and we thank you for the richness of your word on this subject. Help each and every one here to convey these things to lead their children and their families, their households into a deeper understanding of these very truths. Be with us throughout this day. There are many more teaching sessions to come and we pray that you'll continue to nourish your people and build them up on the word of your truth, increase our faith and draw us nearer to You, the God whom we are to know and to fear, to reverence and love. Thank you that we can draw near to you in that way through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in whom we pray.

Of the Church and the Family to the Word of God. And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website, ncfic.org.