Monday Motivational - Fear > Fool

                                                                     Monday Motivational – Fear > Fool
 
      Welcome to another Monday Motivational! I hope that these weekly posts have been able to encourage you and set your week up for success! It doesn’t take a lot to shift your week’s focus to Christ, and once you have, the opportunities to tell others about Him will start to add up. I like to think that focusing on Christ is very similar to how as children we would focus on our parents. Our parents, if they are doing the whole parenting thing right, should be pretty accurate examples of who Christ is for us—they sacrifice just about everything to make sure we get to be where we want to be, have the toys we want, go on vacation to our favorite places, get to do all the things we want to do; they love unconditionally even when we give them plenty of reasons not to; they teach us impacting life-long lessons in riddles or parables, I mean seriously how cryptic was it when you would ask “why” and you’re just told “because” as if that was going to one day click and make everything in the world make sense! To be fair, it does eventually make sense but by eventually I mean like 15 to 20 years down the road.
 
     Those are just a few of the ways that us focusing on our parents parallel to focusing on Christ. For today’s Monday Motivational I want to look at one specific parallel—fear. Now of course I don’t mean fear in the sense of being afraid, or feeling unsafe. This type of fear is more in line with respect and la desire to understand something better. I don’t know what your family structure was growing up, but in the Sturgill household we had Tina (hands down the greatest mother to ever live) and it was her responsibility to balance love and discipline all on her own. To this day I have no clue how she managed to do it, but if I had to take a guess I would say that it came it down to her creating an atmosphere of this healthy and productive fear. For believers we are challenged to have this same fear towards Christ.
 
     Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” How does fear lead to knowledge? Because like I mentioned earlier this isn’t the kind of fear that makes you want to hide or flee the presence of something, but rather the kind that is rooted in respect and a desire to understand. The more we learn about Christ the more we respect His sovereignty and authority. We begin to understand that He is in control and as we continue to surrender parts of our life to Him we gain the knowledge of what He wants us to do with our life. The second half of that verse is equally important for us to understand. It says, “fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Growing up I frequently tried to do what I thought would be best and that often led to me ignoring the instruction and wisdom that Tina was trying to give me. This approach always ended in me making a fool of myself, and I could have easily avoided doing that if I would have listened to Tina from the start. In the same way, Christ lived a wisdom and instruction filled life but yet we still try to do things on our own—like fools!
 
     There is such a thing as healthy and productive fear. It takes respect and desire to understand the person it is for. If we start to live our lives toward Christ this way it will be “the beginning of knowledge” and lead to a fruitful relationship with Him! Take time this week to look at yourself and see if you have this type of fear for Christ. If you don’t, what needs to change so that you will? If you do, what sort of knowledge has He been giving you and how can you use it to help others?
 
Happy Monday!