When we meet God…not just our idea of God or a theory or some projection of the self… but when we actually have a brush with “The God Who Is There” (Schaeffer) that 2 is always an encounter with the transcendent. He’s above us and as we’ll see, infinitely above us (“the infinite, eternal and unchangeable Spirit”) and that’s frightening. I know we usually define the “fear of the Lord” or the “fear of God” as being synonymous with awe or wonder or trust… but there is an element of just plain… fear. When we stand before the ocean or a massive rock-formation or a wild animal or the Grand Canyon…or we go into the sky in a jet… there’s a feeling of fear…even terror. And when we come into contact with the Maker of all these things, it only makes sense that we are awe-struck and afraid… even terrified. We also know that this “fear of the Lord” CAN go wrong: it can be absent in those who don’t recognize anything but the natural/phenomenal world (the observable, measurable)…or it can be dismissed as if God were a kind of superman or a heavenly Santa Claus figure (“the man upstairs”, really another form of atheism and worse) OR it can become a kind of phobia… where a person lives a cowering, warped life that’s twisted by anxiety and absent of joy. AND …where our tendency…is to seek a kind of bland balance between those extremes, what we really need is a third-way…a transformation of trembling. Let’s look at this 139th Psalm: 1) Trembling Explored 2) Trembling Transformed and 3) How You Can Know That the Transformation Has Occurred In YOU When you read these prayers and meditations in the Psalms, and in the larger Bible
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Rev. T. J. Campo
Trembling Psalms for the Seasons of Life St Andrews Presbyterian...
