But the same New Testament says He’s the consuming fire. Okay? So you have to understand something. If you don’t have the love of God and you don’t have the fear of God you’re going to end up in a rut. How many of you know that Jesus said the road to life is a narrow road? Right? How many of you know that every road’s got two ditches on both sides? Right? So the first ditch is called “legalism.” Now the church in the 1960’s was in a legalistic ditch. Now I wasn’t a Christian back in the 60’s, I didn’t saved until “79. But let me tell you something, I saw the remnants of this legalistic move.
Because women would wear their hair up in a bun remember, they didn’t cut their hair and wore it up in a big bun, and they didn’t wear any make-up, and they had dresses down to their ankles. You know you can have a dress down to your ankles, you can have your hair up in a bun, you can have no make-up but still have a seducing spirit up to your eyeballs. Okay? That’s not holiness. Okay? So it was all about an outward form to try to hide a deficiency that was in our hearts and we were in legalism. Right? So what happened in the 60’s? God brings a revelation to the church. You know what the revelation was, he used one man to do it. God is a good God, and something good can happen to you. The man was Oral Roberts, right? And then the Charismatic move began. Right? And we found out our Daddy loved us. What did the love of God do? It delivered us from the ditch of legalism.
But you know what we did? We said I went so far from that ditch I’ll never fall in again and we went to the other side of the road and fell into that other ditch. And the other ditch is called lawlessness or lasciviousness which is an excessive, fleshly, worldly, disobedient lifestyle. And God’s given us a force that keeps us, keeps us out of that ditch. It’s called the fear of the Lord. So you see it takes the love of God and the fear of God to keep us healthy. Okay? It’s like two sides of a coin, you got heads and tails, if you don’t have tails you don’t have a coin, you need ‘emboth. And so when we understand that God is Abba, Daddy, but He’s also the King, He’s also the consuming fire we understand that yes, we can jump in His lap, there are times for that but then there’s other times, let me tell you, I didn’t feel it was the time to jump in His lap when He came into Brazil like He did. You understand what I’m talking about. When I was in Malaysia and those girls, those women were getting baptized in fire. That’s just not a time you’re jumping in his lap. And so there is a right way to understand that God is so much greater and more complex than our simple little, well He’s Daddy and here’s grace and it doesn’t matter how you live you’re going to get to heaven.
That is a complete lack of the fear of the Lord. And you see if you’ve got the fear of the Lord, Paul says, it will perfect holiness. We work out our salvation, in the New Testament it says, with fear and trembling. If you look at the church in the early— in the Book of Acts, you know what? They were all drunk on the Day of Pentecost. I mean they were experiencing Daddy’s love, so they got a little too familiar, they got a little bit loose, and so now this couple who’s in good standing, they’re members of the Church of Jerusalem bring up an offering and it’s a big offering, it’s a big chunk of the land they just sold, and they lay it at Peter’s feet, and the next thing you know they’re dead. And if you read in Acts, chapter 5, verse 11, it says “So great fear came upon the church.” Not upon the city. Yes, it said somewhere else great fear came upon all those who heard these things. Great fear came upon the CHURCH! So what is the fear of the Lord? So first of all it is to be terrified to be away from Him. The person who fears God doesn’t say how close can I get to the line of sin and not fall in.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth