understanding fear on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

Recently, I invited a cross-section of leaders in the biblical counseling world to attend our

bi-annual ACBC Leadership Colloquium. That is an invitation-only event where leaders from across

the biblical counseling world gather together to talk about topics

that are of great importance to biblical counselors. And the theme for this year's ACBC leadership

colloquium was on post-traumatic stress disorder. And what that meant is that you had about

40 biblical counseling leaders together for a couple of days talking about the issue of fear. And because we get a lot

of questions about fear for the podcast, I wanted to talk about it on Truth and Love this week.

If we're going to understand and help with fear, we need to understand some categories of fear in the

Bible. It's important to realize that in the Bible, not all fear

is created equal. And what I want to do is talk about three different kinds of fear. We could talk

about, to start with, godly fear. Godly fear is discussed in places like Proverbs chapter 9,

verse 10, where the Bible says the fear of the

Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It's important that we notice that in this context, fear is a really

good thing. When you have a reverential fear, when you have an awe of the presence and the power

of God, that is the very beginning of wisdom, the Proverbs say. You cannot be a wise person without

being the kind of person who stands agape at the glory and the wonder of God

and reverences and has awe over him for who he is and what he has done.

And so there are some places in the Bible with godly fear where fear is a really good thing.

...