Jeremiah Knight, April 30, 2026
There is a category of spiritual experience that the New Testament treats as foundational to the Christian life and that the contemporary church has almost entirely lost. It is not joy or peace or love, though those are foundational too. It is the fear of God. The trembling reverence before the holy and almighty God who made us and saved us and will judge us. The deep settled awe that produces caution about sin and seriousness about obedience and a kind of spiritual sobriety that runs all the way down through the personality of the person who has been formed by it. That fear has gone missing from most of what calls itself Christianity in this generation and the loss of it explains far more about the present condition of the church than most of us are willing to acknowledge.
The fear of God is not optional in the biblical framework. It is treated as the foundation of every other spiritual reality in the believer’s life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” Proverbs 9:10. The beginning. Not an advanced spiritual achievement reserved for mature believers. The starting point. The ground floor on which everything else gets built. Without it, the wisdom that Scripture promises does not develop because the soil it grows in has not been prepared. “The fear of the Lord prolongs life but the years of the wicked will be shortened” Proverbs 10:27. “By the fear of the Lord one keeps away from evil” Proverbs 16:6. “The fear of the Lord leads to life so that one may sleep satisfied untouched by evil” Proverbs 19:23. The fear of God in Scripture is not an unfortunate emotion that mature spirituality eventually moves beyond. It is the protective grace that keeps a believer’s life from collapsing under the weight of the temptations that surround it.
What does it actually look like when this fear is genuinely operating in a believer’s life? It looks like Joseph in Potiphar’s house, refusing to lie with his master’s wife and saying, “How then could I do this great evil and sin against God?” Genesis 39:9. The fear that produced that refusal was not primarily fear of being caught. It was fear of God Himself, the recognition that the act would be a sin against the holy God who saw it whether or not Potiphar ever found out. It looks like Job, described in the very first chapter of his book as a man who feared God and turned away from evil. Job 1:1. The fear and the turning away were connected. The first produced the second. It looks like David in Psalm 119:120 saying, “My flesh trembles for fear of You and I am afraid of Your judgments.” That is a man who has been brought into genuine awareness of who God actually is and whose physical body responds to that awareness because the soul cannot encounter that reality without the body feeling it.
The contemporary church has produced something different. Believers who pray casually, sin casually, repent casually, attend casually, and treat the holy God as though He were a manageable acquaintance rather than the consuming fire Hebrews 12:29 describes Him as. The casualness is everywhere. Worship songs that address God as though He were a romantic partner. Sermons that feature Him as a supportive friend who wants what we want. Prayer that operates more as wish fulfilment than as the trembling approach of a creature into the presence of the Creator. None of this is biblical and all of it has been normalised to the point where any preacher who tries to recover the fear of God from Scripture is accused of preaching legalism or salvation by works or of dragging believers back under the law. But the fear of God is not the law. It is the right response of any creature to the actual character of the God who made them.
Hebrews 12 carries one of the most direct corrections to this casualness in the entire New Testament and most readers move past it without slowing down enough to feel it. After describing the believer’s privileged access to the heavenly Jerusalem and the church of the firstborn and Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, the writer says, “See to it that you do not refuse Him who is speaking. For if those did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth much less will we escape who turn away from Him who warns from heaven… Therefore since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken let us show gratitude by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire” Hebrews 12:25 to 29. Reverence and awe. A consuming fire. The God of the new covenant is not a softer version of the God of Sinai. He is the same God whose holiness has not diminished and whose fire has not been extinguished by the cross. The cross made it possible for sinners to approach Him without being destroyed. It did not change what He is.
This is where the contemporary loss of the fear of God becomes most damaging. Believers who have been told that grace means they no longer need to fear God have been told something the New Testament does not actually teach. Paul tells the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” Philippians 2:12. Peter tells believers to “conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth” 1 Peter 1:17. Paul tells the Corinthians that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ and that “knowing the fear of the Lord we persuade men” 2 Corinthians 5:10 and 11. The fear of God is not the burden the gospel removes. It is the foundation the gospel restores. The unbeliever has the wrong kind of fear, the fear of impending judgment without any covering. The believer has the right kind of fear, the trembling reverence of a creature who has been brought into proximity to a holiness so vast that the only appropriate response is genuine awe.
The fear of God produces a particular kind of life and the absence of it produces the opposite. Where the fear of God is present, sin becomes serious. Not because of consequences in this life but because every sin is committed against the God who sees and whose holiness cannot overlook what His justice must address. Where the fear of God is absent, sin becomes negotiable. The believer manages it rather than mortifying it. The categories of acceptable and unacceptable shift based on what feels reasonable rather than on what Scripture says. The conscience grows progressively quieter because the voice that should be speaking through it has been muted by the assumption that grace covers it all anyway. “Do not be deceived God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows this he will also reap” Galatians 6:7. The God who is not mocked is the God who is rightly feared. A believer who has lost the second has begun to mock the first whether they intend to or not.
The recovery of the fear of God begins with the recovery of an honest reading of Scripture. The Bible does not present a domesticated God who exists to make us comfortable. It presents the God who shook Sinai with His presence, who consumed Nadab and Abihu for offering strange fire, who struck Uzzah dead for casually touching what represented His holiness, who killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5, and who reserved a final judgment in which every careless word will be brought into account. Matthew 12:36. This is the God whose Word we hold, whose Son we worship, whose Spirit we claim to have received. Reading the Bible without sanitising what it actually says about Him is the first step toward recovering the fear that has gone missing. “I will warn you whom to fear: fear the One who after He has killed has authority to cast into hell; yes I tell you fear Him!” Luke 12:5. Jesus said that. Not Moses. Not an Old Testament prophet operating in a different dispensation. Jesus, the same Jesus who is gentle and lowly in heart, the same Jesus who said come to Me all who are weary, the same Jesus who calls us friends. He told His disciples to fear the One who has authority over hell, and the contemporary church has filtered that command out of its functional theology so completely that hearing it now sounds almost foreign.
The fear of God is also what makes joy in God real. The believer who genuinely fears God experiences mercy as something staggering rather than as something assumed. They experience grace as something costly rather than as something automatic. They experience the cross as the necessary intervention of an infinitely holy God on behalf of creatures who deserved nothing but judgment. The joy that flows from that recognition is the deepest joy available to any human being and it cannot be produced by a casual relationship with a domesticated god. “Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling” Psalm 2:11. Both. Fear and rejoicing. Trembling and joy. The contemporary church has tried to keep the joy while removing the fear and what it has produced is neither real fear nor real joy but a thin substitute for both that satisfies no one and saves no one.
What we need is not a new programme or a new movement or a new strategy for cultural relevance. We need to fall again under the weight of who God actually is. To open our Bibles and let the throne room descriptions land with the force they were given to carry. To read the warnings without softening them and the promises without inflating them and the descriptions of Christ without reducing Him to the manageable size that the contemporary religious imagination prefers. The recovery of the fear of God is not the recovery of legalism or moralism or dead religion. It is the recovery of the only ground on which genuine worship and genuine obedience and genuine joy in Christ have ever stood. “How blessed is everyone who fears the Lord who walks in His ways” Psalm 128:1. May we be that kind of blessed people again. May the fear that has gone missing be found. And may the church that has forgotten the trembling rediscover the One whose presence has always made trembling the only appropriate response.
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.