Isaiah 8

11 The LORD spoke to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people. He said:
12 "Do not call conspiracy
everything that these people call conspiracy [f] ;
do not fear what they fear,
and do not dread it.
13 The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,
he is the one you are to fear,
he is the one you are to dread,

Fear can be an overwhelming emotion. It can paralyze you from moving forward on any front. It can keep you from enjoying life, friends, family and God. We can struggle with all kinds of personal fears never mind getting caught up in the fears of others.
The media calls us from nearly every major tv channel announcing gloom and doom, death and destruction in every state, and continent around the world. There’s enough bad news on any given day that could cause us to fear walking out our doors.
But instead of fearing all that, a healthy fear of God is what I choose. This past week in the bible study I’m doing we talked about just that. I’d like to post a few paragraphs I found most helpful:
Anointed Transformed Redeemed – Week 3 – Day 5 – “Beth Moore”

“A healthy fear of God draws us toward Him. An unhealthy fear of God draws us away from Him. A healthy fear of God bows to His holiness and obeys His precepts but all the while is compelled like a magnet to the source of its fascination. It seeks Him like hidden treasure. It stretches and strains to peer into His perfections. It yearns to be captivated by His beauty from so near a place that it becomes beautiful too. It longs to approach the One who dwells in unapproachable light. To know the unknowable till faith turns to sight. To be ruined for every other contesting love.
Unhealthy fear runs from God and recoils at the thought of trusting Him. It associated Him more with pain than praise. It sees Him as an angry god to appease rather than a wise and holy Father we need to obey but whom we can also trust. Unhealthy fear associates the glory of God solely with the agony of man. It believes that His gain always means our pain. Oh, if we could only comprehend that His gain cannot fail to also be ours, whether or not pain is involved in the worthy process.
God can never do Himself right and do His children wrong. God’s glory and goodness are inseparable. We’re scared to live fully surrendered to God because we’re afraid It will kill us. If only we understood that any part of us crucified in doing His will becomes a hotbed of resurrection power. Where we die to self, the Spirit of Christ is raised in us. “

A healthy fear of God is one of the things I am discovering as I read through Isaiah, and I feel its one of the things we are missing most. With a proper awe and wonder of Who God is, we will find ourselves less afraid of what this world shouts to us, and safer under His wing that we could have ever imagined.