Road to Sanity [Peter Herbeck]

[Music] Hello friends this is Peter Herbeck hope  you're at peace in Christ and having a happy Lent making our way through this very very important  season in the Church year you know a penitential season a season where we get serious as I  mentioned in an earlier video about our battle against sin in our lives we're resisting sin  we're you know through fasting through almsgiving through increasing our prayer time reading you  know spending more time in Scripture frequenting the sacraments more

often whatever it is that  you're doing all of these things are helping dispose us to the work of the Holy Spirit in and  of themselves the things like almsgiving or even extra prayer whatever we're doing almsgiving it  doesn't automatically change us what it does is it disposes us more with greater intention  with humility to the present action of the Holy Spirit in our lives the Holy Spirit is the  one who produces change he's the one who makes us holy he's the one who gives us the grace we n

eed  to slowly put to death affections we have for sin in what we're resisting and at the same time  awakening in us a deeper love a deeper passion a deeper zeal for the Lord and deeper conformity  to the person of Christ and so it's just such an important time and I think one of the spiritual  gifts that is you know all the spiritual gifts that the Lord wants to give us are significant  but I think one in particular that I've been thinking a lot about I just want to share with  you and I think

it's often misunderstood the gift of the fear of the Lord I want to begin by just  looking at Isaiah 11 verse 1-3 and these are he's describing really characteristics of the endowment  of the Lord himself the Messiah what he's like and the gifts that he carries and of course that he  wants to give to us there shall come forth from a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a branch shall  grow out of his roots and the spirit of the Lord shall be upon him remember Jesus said the spirit  of the Lord is u

pon me the spirit of wisdom and understanding the spirit of counsel and might the  spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord and this is the verse that caught my attention and  his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord Jesus the Anointed One delights even to this day  the writers tell spiritual writers tell us in the fear of the Lord so I thought it would be helpful  to just take a look at what St Thomas Aquinas and some of the other spiritual writers say about  the fear of the Lord so we

understand what it is and what it isn't because a misunderstanding  of it I think often leads us folks to not think about it very seriously or to hunger for it and  to thirst for it and to pray for it as to grow in us it's a foundational foundational gift so  St Thomas Aquinas talks about the fear of the Lord as a kind of wonder and awe you know we stand  in awe of the majesty and the sheer magnitude and the greatness of God with the gift of the fear of  the Lord we're aware of the glory and maj

esty of God a person with wonder and awe knows that God is  the perfection of all we desire perfect knowledge perfect goodness perfect power perfect love  this gift is described by Aquinas as a fear of separating oneself from God he describes the gift  as a filial fear like a child's fear of offending his father rather than a servile fear that is the  fear of punishment also known as knowing God is all powerful right so this servile fear is a fear  of he says of being punished and that's not a b

ad fear but it's not where the Holy Spirit wants to  take us because it's still valuable and you could say salutary because it helps us be wise enough to  not want to offend God and even if it's at the low level of just I just don't want to be punished  I don't want to suffer the consequences of that decision that's a good thing but it's not enough  right it's not enough that's why filial fear is the distinction of it is very important okay fear  of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because it

puts our mindset in its correct location with  respect to God that is critically important fear of the Lord brothers and sisters gives us  sanity we're rightly ordered to God when that when we're not rightly ordered to God we're living  in disorder we've entered unreality we've entered into we've really entered into the darkness  we've entered into our own finite mind the enemy is the one who leads us away from God in  this kind of way and we see it in the culture so much we see the apostasy th

at's happening I  mean so many people you know are just kind of boldly saying nah I just don't believe in God  anymore no it's just not in not on my game my screen I'm just not I don't care about it  don't believe in it don't need it and so I'm going to live I'm going to define reality  apart from God it all sounds nice and free and wonderful and aren’t we autonomous but it is  really dangerous and really foolish the fear of the Lord is wisdom because God is real he's  the ground of being and in

him we live and we move and we have our being so when we decide  in our bold freedom we pound our chest and say no to God right we're saying no to the very  ground of our being we become a disordered contradiction in us we get disconnected from  reality and truth itself even though people end up talking a lot about their own truth a  lot in the midst of it all but this is really really important right we're finite creatures  dependent creatures he's the infinite all powerful Creator the spiritu

al gifts are different than the  virtues you know the virtues that are the virtues that we’re given like prudence and justice  and things like that by our human will and decision and God helps us but we can exercise and  build those habits of responding in the right way toward these those fundamental goods right  but spiritual gifts are different spiritual gifts are really they grow from the impetus and  the initiative and the power of the Holy Spirit within us so understanding that it's importa

nt  in your prayer during the season we wake up in the morning go to bed at night ask the Lord Lord  please bring me into a deeper understanding and experience of the fear of the Lord because I  want to be rightly ordered to reality here's Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange one of the great  spiritual writers of the 20th century he described it this way he said the gift of fear is the first  manifestation of the influence of the Holy Spirit in a soul that leaves off sin and is converted to  God i

t's the first manifestation he said the holy fear of God is the inverse of the worldly fear  often called human respect the fear of men or the fear of God honestly I think it's going to be one  or the other for human beings really you’re going to fear men powerful men influential men my you  know future depends on certain people that I'm rightly related to them and they hold my ticket  and I don't want to be rejected or forgotten dismissed by people powerful people right in  our life or whoever

we give power to and that's a slavery it's kind of idolatry really and it's a  slavery as all idolatry is he goes on to say it is superior also to servile fear which we mentioned  earlier and he said servile fear which trembles at God's punishments it diminishes with charity  which makes us consider God rather as a loving father rather than a judge to be feared so as love  increases we move from servile fear into filial fear God is my Father so that profound respect  and awe of God begins to go

but I'm not living in a kind of terror like God stomping around in  heaven he's really mad at me and because of the relationship many people have had with their  fallen fathers every human being is broken but some are very broken and their experience of  their father is terrible and so it kind of stays there and then they take that image in a father  an earthly father is meant to be an image of God the Father when that image is broken it's very  hard to see God the Father in any other way and fi

lial fear is really rooted in profound charity  here Lagrange talks about he says filial fear and the gift of fear dreads sin especially more than  punishment due to it why does it dread sin because we don't want to offend the one we love and the  holy God the great God boy that's so healthy when that's in us it's part of the road to freedom  friends and it says it makes us tremble with a holy respect before the majesty of God sometimes  the experience is so vivid that no meditation no reading c

ould produce a like sentiment it is the  Holy Spirit who touches the soul this holy fear of sin is the beginning of wisdom for it leads us to  obey the divine law in everything fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom friends the culture  is psychologically broken because it's walking in foolishness and not wisdom and the foolishness  is what my own wisdom my own truth my own reality we need this is the road back the fear of the Lord  is a key element of coming back to sanity and the Lord wil

l have to bring us back to it because  when human beings get far enough away from it in their own will and the darkness we're walking  into becomes their light and the resistance to God becomes very strong God has to act God has to act  in a way that people experience the consequences of their decisions of their radical autonomy and  all that that means and what it leads to I can't go into that here now but very significant thing  I mean and he mentions here that the Holy Spirit touches the soul

and I love his wording here  it can be an experience that's so vivid that no meditation or reading will get you there I've  had a couple of those experiences in my life as a young man when I was like 20 21 I just experienced  tremendous in the context of prayer with a few other guys college guys I was in the seminary with  the college seminary we were praying and the Holy Spirit came down and began to touch us and I just  had an overwhelming experience of the holiness of God the Father and I'll

never forget it like in  my heart I felt like God the Father was saying no longer will they make a fool or take lightly my  Son and his sacrifice and his precious offering of this act of love to the Father you know it's hard  to put words on but it gripped me and I did shake a little bit and it wasn't like that servile  fear it was deep filial fear and I'm just so grateful to God for it St Augustine said this  while he was teaching you might say catechist people were teaching new believers or p

eople who  were coming closer and are inquiring about who God is and he says starting first with he said it's  important for people to come into understanding of the love of God of faith hope and love and  then he says and starting precisely from that very sternness of God like as a starting point  he's saying which makes the hearts of mortals quake with fear that is greatly to their benefit  we must build up love from there as people rejoice in the experience of being loved by the one  whom the

y fear let them have the courage to love him in return and let them be afraid to prove  unworthy of his love for them even if they could do this without retribution in fact he says it  very rarely happens and I can safely say never that anyone comes wishing to become a Christian  who is not in some way or other been struck by the fear of God this is normal a normal part of  the Christian life because it's a spiritual gift and it's something that we need and St Augustine  is saying of all the con

verts he's ever met and he met a lot he said every single one of them  in some way was struck by the fear of the Lord it seems like in the Church today even people  are afraid leaders and teachers are afraid to talk about the fear of the Lord other than in a  kind of a soft way I don't mean that's universal but I've seen it happen and that even using the  phrase fear of the Lord they want to change the whole phrase because they think it scares people  too much I don't think we should do that bec

ause it's biblical and God's word is living and active  and we should really be faithful to that recently I was thinking I was reading some stuff from  the life of St Francis as a kind of meditation and there was a section in what I was reading it  talked about his very last words to his brothers and there he is dying in the dirt naked and his  body is just so you know he still has the stigma he's all this and the last words he says to his  brothers are these he said I have done my part may Chri

st teach you to do yours farewell my children  abide in the fear of the Lord and ever persevere therein so persevere always brothers he's saying  in the fear of the Lord and now this is a saint everybody knows is just such a profound imitation  of Christ and so full of the love of God and the humility of God and the fear of the Lord was so  precious to him that he exhorted the brothers at his last breath to say persevere in the fear of  the Lord walk in the fear of the Lord seek the fear of the

Lord and the grace of the Holy Spirit  right working in us to be able to understand it and walk in it here's just a few passages from  the Scripture that talk about how precious the fear of the Lord is Psalm 33:8 let all the earth  fear the Lord let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him that's a great prayer for  us to pray every day again why because that's the road to sanity Proverbs 14:27 the fear of the  Lord is a fountain of life Psalm 19:9 the fear of the Lord is clean endur

ing forever the judgments  of the Lord are true they are righteous altogether Proverbs 8:13 the fear of the Lord is to hate evil  right so that’s what the writers here are talking about it increases in us hatred for sin and  that's kind of how we our love for God increases our hatred for sin increases and it leads us into  living in greater and greater freedom of the sons and daughters of God there's many there's over a  hundred verses in the psalms alone I think that talk about the fear of the

Lord so I just want  to encourage you friends to pray into that and to ask the Lord for it and I want to mention to you  as well I wrote a little booklet a few years ago for this very reason because I've been chewing on  it a lot I know how precious it's been in my own life you can get it at renewalministries.net but  let's end with a little prayer Lord we thank you for the wisdom of your word Holy Spirit we welcome  you and together we pray and I pray for my friends who are here Holy Spirit awa

ken in us and grant  to us an experience of the fear of the Lord come and rightly order our desires and renew our minds  and connect us to this fountain of life which is a healthy fear of the Lord for your glory and we  pray for our friends and family members who are walking away from the faith and who are sort of  boldly striding away and they're misunderstanding reality and their own being Lord have mercy and  we pray that you do whatever it takes Lord to awaken them come Holy Spirit in Jesus’

name  we pray amen God bless you friends [Music]