Fear God Bible Quotes

“When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity.”

— Valerie Tarico

“Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it's not meant to be, isn't a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It's actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all.”

— Peter Enns

“In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust. Branch out. Not only do our beliefs define us, but so does the community of like-minded people who share those beliefs. Christian traditions, denominations, and congregations provide a group identity. We are social animals, so we should not judge our spiritual groups, or those of others, as necessarily a problem. Only when our communities become the defining element of our spiritual lives, packs that protect those boundaries at all costs, do problems begin. That leads to isolation, "us versus them" thinking, and the illusion that "we" are basically right about the Bible and God and "they" aren't-the kind of wall-building that Jesus and Paul criticized. So much can be learned from”

— Peter Enns

“Fear is a scheme that the devil uses to great effect. From my personal study, the words "do not be afraid" or "fear thee not" (depending on the Bible translation) appear over one hundred times in the Bible! The message from God is quite clear: we need not be afraid!”

— Pedro Okoro

“In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”

— Jonathan Sacks

“You might be wondering why the Bible instructs us to speak against darkness, rather than think against it, if the real power is in what we think. While it's true that there can be great power in the words that we speak, this is only true when our words reflect our inner-most thoughts, and our inner-most thoughts are the things we believe in our spirit. Our spirit is where faith resides. And it is faith that God and the rest of the spiritual world recognize and respond to. If our words tell a demon to leave, while our spirit is transmitting thoughts of fear, the demon will perceive that we are afraid, and it will not leave. It is only when our words match the thoughts of our spirit-and we are single-minded-that the spirit world responds to what we say.”

— Praying Medic

“When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack onto it.”

— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

“The only antidote to fear is love. When you fill your life with love, your fears naturally disappear. I'm talking about a love for God, a love for others, a love for yourself, and a love for life itself. The Bible says, "Perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18)." Once your fears are gone, happiness will flood your soul.”

— Eugenio Isabelo Tomas Reyes Sanchez Jr.

“What is missing in our time is not the willingness of God to
act in biblical ways, but the willingness of his people to believe
he is still the God of the Bible-and to act on that faith. To throw
away fear, to stride against common wisdom, to risk all that we
have and all that we are so we may follow only our simple belief
that the God of the Scriptures is still alive and that he will still
do what he says in his Word.”

— Wes Moore

“I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness. When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack onto it. I think that as parents we would be more effective in our parenting if we leveled with our children, if we told them that some of our dearly held rules are not morally grounded but are made for our convenience. I know that many times when I insist that my children turn off the video, my "rules" are the result of my own noise-sensitivity, not some moral abhorrence about Pixar or Disney. I never know how to respond to the women who tell me that they need to be in a church made of people with whom they can identify, people who are like them.”

— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

“Clearly, it is not simply exegesis that determines how we read the Bible; rather, it is our vested interests, our hopes, and our fears that largely determine our reading. And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction. Palestinians' and Israelis' fear of the other, said to be grounded in the Bible, has been transposed into a military apparatus that is aimed at the elimination of the other. It is wholly illusionary to imagine that such an agenda is congruent with the God of the Bible who is commonly confessed by Jews and Christians.”

— Walter Brueggemann

“We must care about unbelievers because God does. Love leaves no choice. The Bible says, "There is no fear in love; perfect love drives out all fear."18 A parent will run into a burning building to save a child because their love for that child is greater than their fear.”

— Rick Warren

“There are more than 150 references to the fear of God in the Bible.6 While the majority of these occur in the Old Testament, there are a sufficient number in the New Testament to convince us that fearing God is indeed an attitude of heart we should cultivate today.”

— Jerry Bridges

“Obviously, to be in the fear of the Lord is not to be scared of the Lord, even though the Hebrew word has overtones of respect and awe. "Fear" in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love. It means that, because of his bright holiness and magnificent love, you find him "fearfully beautiful." That is why the more we experience God's grace and forgiveness, the more we experience a trembling awe and wonder before the greatness of all that he is and has done for us. Fearing him means bowing before him out of amazement at his glory and beauty.”

— Timothy Keller

“Religion operates on the principle: I obey; therefore I am accepted (by God). The gospel operates on the principle: I am accepted through the costly grace of God; therefore I obey. Two people operating on these two principles can sit beside each other in church on Sunday trying to do many of the same things
read the Bible, obey the Ten Commandments, be active in church, and pray
but out of two entirely different motivations. Religion moves you to do what you do out of fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness, but the gospel moves you to do what you do more and more out of grateful joy in who God is in himself. Times”

— John Piper

“Our coin bears the inscription: In God We Trust. And our Bible reassures us: The Lord is just and merciful. With the Lord thence our protector, whom or what shall we fear?”

— Jeremiah Denton

“God brought me to Himself at about the age of 4. My parents were devout believers and my Dad was in Bible College at the time. I remember hearing the gospel in Sunday School and I talked to my Mom about it one night before bed. It was clear to me that I was a sinner and I was not going to heaven if I died without accepting Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross for me. I was brought to Christ out of fear of going to hell. I didn't want to go there if I died and there was only one other choice in my mind as a 4 year old. I wanted to go to heaven. It was and is that simple.”

— Ben Zobrist

“The only time I really get afraid is when something is affecting my family. But even then, I start to think about the Bible and the passage that says "you should fear no one, fear no man, but only God," and I feel better.”

— Vernon Davis

“You will fear something or someone. The Bible says the wisest way to go about your life is to fear God.”

— Kevin DeYoung

“Let us not lose the Bible, but with diligence, in fear and invocation of God, read and preach it. While that remains and flourishes, all prospers with the state; 'tis head and empress of all arts and faculties. Let but divinity fall, and I would not give a straw for the rest.”

— Martin Luther

“I'm an atheist. I suppose you can call me a sort of libertarian anarchist. I regard religion with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing: I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible and the Qur'an and I refute them.”

— Emma Thompson

“Over and over in the Bible, it is fear that threatens to keep people from trusting and obeying God.”

— John Ortberg

“This book [the Bible] speaks both the voice of God and the voice of humanity, for there is told in it the most convincing of human experience that has ever been written ... and those who heed that story will know their strength and happiness and success are all summed up in the exhortation, "Fear God and keep His commandments."”

— Woodrow Wilson

“There's a lot of talk in some of the other versions of the Bible, the Hebrew versions, and things about the end of the world not being a punishment from God, but being an invitation from mankind. That mankind has to invite its own destruction. And I think that's very true, and it's almost very American. I think that's the type of society we're in and it's people's very fear of the Antichrist that has created it”

— Marilyn Manson