Not All Fear Is the Same
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
4.8 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Scripture's most common command is "Do not be afraid." Yet the Bible also calls us to fear. So, is fear a good thing or a bad thing? Today, Michael Reeves shows how the fear of the Lord puts all other fears in their proper place.
Get Michael Reeves' video teaching series The Fear of the Lord on DVD with your donation. You'll also unlock digital access to all 8 messages and the study guide: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/
Live outside the U.S. and Canada? Request Dr. Reeves' digital teaching series and study guide with your donation: https://www.renewingyourmind.org/global
Meet Today's Teacher:
Michael Reeves is a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow, president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Wales, and host of the podcast Delighting in the Trinity.
Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today, we live more safely than we've ever done before. |
| 0:06.9 | From seatbelts and airbags in our cars to the removal of lead paint and asbestos from our homes, |
| 0:16.9 | our safety is guaranteed more than our shorter-lived ancestors could have imagined. |
| 0:24.1 | Quite simply, our culture has lost God as the proper object of fear. |
| 0:56.4 | As Dr. Michael Reeves just shared, we live in a bit of a paradox, don't we? Despite living in the safest and most advanced time in recorded history, it seems that we've never been more fearful and anxious. This is the Tuesday edition of renewing your mind, and I'm glad you're with us today. |
| 1:01.9 | For the remainder of this week, our featured teacher is Dr. Reeves, one of our teaching fellows here at Ligner Ministries, and you'll be hearing messages from his popular series, The Fear of |
| 1:07.0 | the Lord. |
| 1:08.1 | So how are we to understand the fears that many of us have and also understand |
| 1:13.1 | what it means to fear the Lord? Let's join Dr. Reeves. |
| 1:17.0 | Fear is a complicated emotion. As children, we love to leap out on our friends and shout boo, and yet at the same time we were scared of the dark, scared of the monsters under the bed. |
| 1:38.3 | We were both fascinated and repelled by our fears. |
| 1:47.5 | And not much changes when we grow up. |
| 1:51.5 | Even as adults, adults love scary movies, |
| 1:56.4 | thrills that bring them face to face |
| 1:59.2 | with their darkest fears. So there are thrills, |
| 2:04.7 | but also we agonize over all the dreadful things that could happen to us. We fear |
| 2:12.4 | losing our lives. We fear losing our loved ones, losing our health. We fear that we might fail. We fear that |
| 2:24.0 | we might be rejected. Fear is probably the strongest human emotion. And yet it is one that |
| 2:33.5 | baffles us. And when it comes to the Bible, the picture |
| 2:39.7 | seems equally confusing. Is fear a good thing or a bad thing? For many times in scripture, |
| 2:50.5 | clearly fear is a bad thing from which Christ has come to rescue us. |
| 2:57.6 | So the Apostle John writes in 1 John 418, there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. |
... |
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