Living in Awe of Jesus

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Revival of Reverence"

"Fear and Trembling"

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Dannah Gresh: Have you experienced awe of God?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The majesty of God. The power of God. The judgment of God. The wrath of God. What’s going to happen when you see it? When you meet with the Lord, when you hear from Him?

Dannah: That’s my friend, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, with something worth considering. Today we’ll talk about what happens when you really see who God is.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh.

What comes to mind when you hear that word “awe”? Maybe a beautiful sunrise or sunset? Mountains? A walk in a forest? A waterfall? The first snow of winter? For me, it’s the magnificent ocean—especially when I’m in it snorkeling! The most magnificent sight I ever saw was an enormous eagle ray gliding past me!

There are so many wonderful parts of creation that inspire awe in us, and that is good. They point us to the Creator of all of it. As Psalm 19:1–2 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Good truth. Familiar truth. Anyone who is willing to admit it can see that God is wonderful and powerful just by looking at the world He made.

Creation is what we often think of when we talk about standing in awe of God. But there’s more to it than that. Think of the men in the Bible who saw some of God’s glory—Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others. They were terrified . . . in the right way! They recognized God’s unimaginable holiness and worthiness and their own sinfulness—all at the same time.

Have you experienced that? Now, we can’t see God’s glory with our eyes the way the prophets sometimes did, but guess what? We don’t have to in order to be in awe of God, because everything we need to know about Him is revealed in the Bible.

And yet, so often we fall into a pattern of reading our Bibles for ten minutes in the morning and then moving on with life. We don’t pause to meditate on who God is and what He’s done for us.

Mary Kassian says that we need a “revival of reverence.” That word “reverence” is closely related to “awe.” Let’s listen to Mary teaching on Titus 2:3. It reads, “Older women, likewise, are to be reverent in behavior.” I've got to warn you: Mary doesn’t mince words, but I think we need to hear this!

Mary Kassian: I think that Christians in this culture often have a callow attitude towards the Lord. We love Him, but we don’t fear Him. We’re entertained, but we don’t stand in awe. We call Him friend, but we don’t respect Him as Lord.

Fear, awe, and respect are all synonyms for the virtue I want to discuss this session—reverence.

Older women, likewise, are to be reverent in behavior. (Titus 2:3)

Now, the dictionary defines reverence as "a feeling or an attitude of deep respect." Older women are to be deeply respectful.

Are you a deeply respectful woman? Do you go about your day with a profound awareness that every moment is a sacred moment and every task the Lord has given you to do is a sacred duty?

Oh how we need a revival of reverence.

There is a reason Paul cites reverence in conjunction with maturity. It’s not that younger women don’t need to be reverent. They do. It’s just that reverence sometimes takes a while to develop.

Reverence is a mark of maturity. And this is just as true in our spiritual development as it is in a child’s social development.

Have you ever noticed how much energy and effort and repetition it takes to teach a toddler to be respectful and not disrespectful? (laughter.) Those of you who have toddlers are going, “Oh, yeah!”

My sons have toddlers, one a two-year old, one a three-year old, and they’re constantly coaching this two-year old and three-year old girls to be respectful. “You must be respectful. Do not speak to me with a step-sister voice. Speak to me with a princess voice.” (laughter)

My son stepped in and sternly scooped up his daughter when she blatantly disrespected her mama at the dinner table. She didn’t get any cake at the birthday party that day.

A child who’s grown up in a home where respect is modeled and consistently taught has a much better chance of becoming a well-mannered, productive adult than a child who has not.

And the same principle rings true in the spiritual realm. A young woman who is in relationships where respect for the Lord is modeled and taught has a much better chance of maturing into a reverent, older woman who will in turn be equipped to pass that on to the next generation.

I think back over the years to all the older, deeply respectful women who taught me what it means to live 24/7 in the presence of the Holy.

I think of Diane who mentored me through high school and part way into college. She taught me that my studies mattered to God, that the hours I spent with my papers and books were just as holy and important as the hours spent leading a campus Bible study.

I think of Lorna, my professional colleague, who remembered God in each moment, and it was so evident in the kindness and respect and care with which she treated patients at the rehab hospital where we worked. The moment Lorna entered a room, that room became a sacred space.

I think of my own mom—six kids. And then when I had three sons of my own, three energetic boys, one with special needs, and I was overwhelmed by the sleep-deprived grind of changing diapers and sopping up spills and stepping on Legos and breaking up fights, and just trying to survive the day. She reminded me often that my vocation as a mother was a holy one.

Some of these women have gone home to be with Jesus, as I will someday. I hope I’ve done them proud. And I hope I’ve done my part to pay it forward—woman to woman, generation to generation, life to life.

This past summer I did something I hadn’t done for years. When I heard those skies begin to clap and rumble, I grabbed a blanket, boiled a cup of tea, and went outside on my front porch to sit under the overhang to enjoy the show. And it was spectacular!

I watched in awe, overcome with the thought that the Almighty God, Creator of heaven and of earth, who thunders from the heavens and lights up the sky with His power, abides in me and is with me. It was a sacred moment, as is this moment, and is every other moment of our lives.

May we be deeply respectful women who fear Him, who tremble at His Word, who bow in awe of Him, and who revere Him in everything that we say and everything that we do. Ladies, let’s start a revival of reverence.

Dannah: That’s Mary Kassian, reminding you to examine your attitude toward God. Is it too casual? I’ve long had a burden for people to respect God. I know that sounds crazy. But sometimes we approach Him much too casually. I agree with my friend Mary. We need a revival of reverence. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth dived deeper into that topic in her series on Habakkuk. You might remember, he was a prophet in the days before the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem. God tells Habakkuk some of what He is going to do in the coming days—acts of both judgment and mercy. Let’s listen as Nancy describes Habakkuk’s response.

Nancy: God gives this awesome picture to Habakkuk. Habakkuk remembers it as he reflects and reviews. What was God like? What did God do? How did he display His power? How did He display His majesty? How did God go out for the salvation of His people? How has God crushed His enemies? Habakkuk has been, in this prayer, reflecting on all these things.

And Habakkuk, who’s been praying through these—he’s been remembering these—now, in verse 16, he responds to all the awesome things he has seen and experienced and heard. It’s a response that you don’t see a lot of today. He says in verse 16, “I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; rottenness enters into my bones; my legs tremble beneath me.”

Now, what is causing Habakkuk to tremble? I think it’s several things. I think, first of all, it’s the revelation of God’s awesome power and glory, like looking at the sun in its brilliance. It’ll shake up your world. Seeing God will change your perspective on everything. He is so awesome, so holy, so great. I don’t have words to tell you what God is like.

When you’ve been given a glimpse of Him, when you’ve seen His power and His glory, you’re going to tremble! So I think in Habakkuk there’s a sense of awe and fear and weakness. He’s just limp. He’s shaking like a leaf at the power of God.

We’ve seen people do that. You hear about hurricanes and earthquakes and tornados, and people tremble. I want to tell you, they’re nothing next to God. If we ever could see and know God for who He is, we would know what it is to tremble.

Habakkuk trembles at the wrath of God, at the terror of God, at the impending judgment and persecution that God is going to send on the earth. God has told Habakkuk that in his immediate situation, the Babylonians are coming. They’re going to sweep through the earth. They’re going to mow things down. They’re going to conquer Judah.

And sure enough, they did, within fifteen years of Habakkuk’s experience with the Lord. He knows there is impending judgment. He knows there is impending devastation coming. It makes him tremble.

It would make you tremble if you could see what God is going to do in this world to judge the nations. It may be fifteen years; it may be fifteen minutes. You don’t know. It may be 1,500 years. You don’t know. But when you know it’s going to happen and you reflect on it, it makes you tremble.

I think Habakkuk trembles because he knows everyone is going to suffer—including the righteous, including himself, the man of God. He knows there is suffering coming. And Habakkuk experiences physical and psychological effects in his body, his emotions, and his mind from the revelation he has seen of God and of what is to come.

Habakkuk’s encounter with God is transforming. He trembles. Now, that trembling—as we’ll see before we finish this series—ultimately becomes praise. It becomes a proclamation of the greatness and the deeds of God.

But at this moment, it is as if Habakkuk can smell the singed flesh of those who are under God’s judgment. He knows that even the righteous are going to experience some of that wrath. If you’re righteous, and you live in an ungodly nation, and God judges the nation—you’re going to feel the heat. And he trembles.

As you go through the Scripture, you see that people who met God, people who really saw God’s purposes and plans, they trembled. It confounds me how we can be so flippant, so trite, so casual in the presence of a holy God today.

Years ago, my pastor preached through the book of Habakkuk. I remember he preached a powerful message on chapter 2, verse 20: “The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.”

As I meditated on that passage during that sermon, God was weighing heavily on me with the truth of how powerful He is, how holy He is, and how majestic He is. By the end of that message, I could hardly breathe. I felt a righteous fear of the Lord—not an inappropriate dread, but an awesome fear of God’s presence.

And then do you know how quickly we snapped out of that moment as soon as the final amen was said? The music starts playing, and we’re talking about everything on the planet other than God. I mean, people are talking and chatting. I’m not being critical; I’m just staying we don’t know God. We’re not really seeing God.

Now, I’m not saying that every time we come to church it should be in hushed tones, and nobody should talk about anything like the weather or sports or whatever. But there is something when you are really in the presence of God that is awesome. It makes you tremble.

You see that in the Scripture as people saw God. You see it in the book of Daniel as he was given a vision of the pre-incarnate Christ. Theologians call it a “Christophany.” He actually saw Christ. He was left alone, and he saw this great vision. And he said, “No strength was left in me. My radiant appearance was fearfully changed” (10:8). The original language there says, “My splendor was changed to ruin.”

There’s something devastating about really seeing Christ as He is. Daniel said, “I retained no strength.” He said no strength remained in him and no breath was left in him. There was this sense of being breathless, just having your breath taken away, no strength left in you.

That’s what Habakkuk experienced. It’s what Daniel experienced. It’s what Peter experienced when he saw the power of God—when Christ did that miracle, and there was that great catch of fish. Peter saw this was no ordinary man who made this happen. He knew he was looking at majesty and divinity.

And the Scripture says in Luke 5, “When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord’” (v. 8). He was trembling in the presence of the holy God, a powerful God.

Habakkuk saw it. Daniel saw it. Peter saw it. The apostle John saw it in Revelation chapter 1. We have that beautiful, powerful, amazing description of Christ—the glorified Christ of Revelation chapter 1, whose feet and head and hair shine. They’re glorious. What happened when John saw that vision? He was not running off to play, not running off to chatter with his friends about something inconsequential. He said, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead” (v. 17).

The majesty of God. The power of God. The judgment of God. The wrath of God. What’s going to happen when you see it? When you meet with the Lord, when you hear from Him, how can you just run off to your own routine? To your own day? To business as usual?

It’s said of the revivals of the past that one of the consistent marks was that people were overtaken with a sense of the awesome presence of God, and with the sense of eternity. It’s as if they couldn’t think or talk about anything else. It was said that in some of those great revivals, you could walk down any street—in what had been previously very secular environments—and you would find that people everywhere were talking about God and the condition of their souls.

When’s the last time you trembled at the presence of God? Has the knowledge of God and His ways ever made you stop dead in your tracks? How often when I have my quiet time, do I open the Word, read the Bible, see what it has to say, and then quickly just close my Bible and go on to the next thing? On to my computer, on to my laptop, on to my meeting, on to a phone call. Did I just meet with God?

Now, I don’t want to say that we shouldn’t have regular, normal moments of living life, or that God never has fun, or that we can never enjoy anything. That’s a whole dimension to living the Christian life that is also very true. But why are we so missing this dimension of trembling at the presence of God? I think it’s because we’re not seeing God for who He really is.

So as you get into God’s Word, as you go to church, as you’re with the people of God, ask God to help you to see Himself, to tremble at the reality of who He is.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth with some heart-searching questions.

I hope this overview of how wonderful God is has inspired awe in your heart like it has in mine.

I want to turn now to something practical. I mean, you might be sitting there going, "I want to revive the reverence in my heart . . . but how?" Glad you asked. I have two specific things that may help you stir up some reverence.

To find it, let’s read something in Acts 2. I’ve always loved this little section of Scripture. It describes the sweet, intimate fellowship the early church experienced. It was so winsome that the “Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved!” (v. 47). Imagine being a part of that magnificent growth and friendship. Oh, I do . . . often. In my lifetime, I want a taste of it.

Okay, let me read one characteristic of the early church. This is Acts 2:43. It reads, “And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.”

Awe. Some versions say "fear" came upon every soul. This isn’t like an “I’m afraid of dark alleys or spiders” kind of fear. It’s the idea of the souls of each individual bowing and submitting completely—reverentially—in word and deed and spirit to the presence of God. Awe!

And the original Greek language for "came" ("Awe came upon every soul”) was a form of the word that carried the idea of an ongoing awe—not a passing moment, not a worship night or great gathering, but every day there was awe and respect for God.

How’d they get there?

Well, of course, only God can do that to a heart, but we can participate. Let’s back up a verse and read, Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul.”

Do you see what I see there? Two ways to enter into the awe:

• Devote yourself to the teaching of the Word.
• Devote yourself to fellowship with believers at the table.

My friend, pat yourself on the back because you’re devoting yourself to the Word by listening to Mary, Nancy, and me teach today. Atta girl, you're on the right track!

But I also want to ask if there’s any room for conviction here. Did you gather with the Body of Christ in a local congregation to feast on the Word of God this week? Have you had some one-on-one fellowship with believers—maybe in a small group or just over coffee? If not, I want to ask you to take inventory. What’s keeping you from that? This is not a condemnation but an invitation. I’m deeply convicted. As imperfect as the Church may be, it’s God’s Plan A for ushering us into His presence. There is no Plan B.

When we enter into community together and feast on His Word, we begin to stand in awe of the great food at the fellowship dinner? No. The fantastic preacher? No. For those early believers it was about one thing, one person: Jesus. They stood in awe of our Savior. 

That reminds me of a song I haven’t sung in a while. (It was back in college for me.) Maybe you remember it. These words are directed to Jesus.

Song: “I Stand in Awe”

You are beautiful beyond description,
Yet God crushed You for my sin.
In agony and deep affliction,
Cut off that I might enter in.
Who can grasp such tender compassion?
Who can fathom this mercy so free?
You are beautiful beyond description,
Lamb of God who died for me!

And I stand, I stand in awe of You!
I stand, I stand in awe of You!
Holy God, to Whom all praise is due,
I stand in awe of You!¹

That brings back memories of sweet moments with Jesus. That was part of the song “I Stand in Awe,” by Mark Altrogge. Is that true of you? Do you stand in awe of Jesus? If I'm honest, it’s not true of me as often as I wish it were!

Would you take some time today to meditate on what you’ve heard? Maybe listen to the rest of the song we just heard. Soak in Scripture. Marvel at what God has done. And don’t forget to thank Him for it.

Hey, speaking of getting into the Word, if you need a tangible reminder to do that, I think you will enjoy getting the new Scripture cards that our team has designed. They’re based on Nancy’s new book Incomparable: 50 Days with Jesus. Each card has a verse about Jesus on one side and a quote from Nancy’s book on the other. They’ll remind you of who Jesus is so that your wonder can be renewed, and they’ll encourage you to dig deeper into the context of the verses.

When you give to Revive Our Hearts right now, we’ll send you a copy of those Scripture cards. To learn more or give, go to ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. When you get in touch, tell us you want the Incomparable Scripture cards!

Would you pray about donating on a regular basis? By giving at least $30 a month, you join our Revive Partner team. Revive Partners are what keep this ministry going. Without you, we couldn’t produce programs, publish books, or develop our other resources. When you commit to giving monthly, you’re making it possible for us to reach women around the world with the hope of the gospel.

When you sign up to be a Revive Partner, we’ll send you a welcome packet. It contains Nancy’s new Incomparable book and the Incomparable Scripture cards, along with other great resources to help you in your spiritual journey.

Again, the website where you can sign up is ReviveOurHearts.com, or call 1-800-569-5959. 

Jesus is the most humble man who ever lived. How can you and I imitate His example and live in humility? Join us next week to hear about that.

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

¹ “I Stand in Awe” by Mark Altrogge, Sovereign Grace Music, 30: Three Decades of Songs for the Church, ℗ 2014 Sovereign Grace Music, under exclusive license to DCCI Services.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.