Fear.

One occurring theme I've seen in the book of Proverbs is fear. In Proverbs 1:7 it says:  The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge... I know we all want knowledge, but does this mean we need to be scared of God in order to gain knowledge? I'm sure there are many books and scholars that could explain this fear better then I can but I want to share with you how I see this fear. This type of fear isn't always being scared of God striking you down if you sin. To me this fear is a fine balance of fear and respect for God. When it comes to the idea of fear, being scared of God, that's something that we need to remember. What I mean by this is we need to remember who God is and what he's done. Read the Old Testament and find out how God would punish those people who sinned against him. It's pretty intense. We don't read that so we are constantly in fear of being struck down/punished, but we get the understanding of what God is capable of doing to us and also that he's not going to stand back and let sin rule.
The next part of this fear is respect. The best way I could describe this is how we looked at our parents when we were little kids. For me it's like when my dad would punish me. I loved my dad but I didn't walk around in fear thinking he was going to just always punish me. But knowing that he was my dad and that he had the power and authority to do so was enough to keep me from disobeying him. I think it's funny how we can have so much respect for parents and obey them because we are scared to get punished but yet we constanly disobey the ONE who is in charge of all. This is why this fear is so important. I believe we need to have this fear always in our minds because it will help us keep from sinning.
I want to leave with this, after reading Proverbs we see how fear is the beginning of knowledge so that why we should strive for it but it also make God happy. Psalm 147:11 says: the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.
So my prayer for us today is that we learn how to fear the Lord. I pray that we would find out exaclty what this means so we could gain knowledge. I pray for strenght and faith for us to continue for us to let God be God.