We have a friend who is unable to keep a secret. A couple weeks ago she was included in a planned surprise anniversary party for her son. She said she kept her “lip zipped” and was so proud of herself. As her family looked back, they recalled how she dropped big hints on the way to the party with them. While they didn’t catch on, she just could not totally keep this great secret to herself.
God has secrets too. He has a secret covenant or agreement that He makes with certain people. Psalm 25:14 describes the people to whom He makes this mystery known, “The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him, and He will show them His covenant.”
Most people would say that the fear of the Lord means an awe and reverence for Him. It does mean that, but in my research, this word can also mean terror, like the healthy terror I should have if a hungry tiger walked into the room or a tornado was bearing down on my house.
Fearing the Lord, in my opinion, means recognizing His unlimited power and what He could do in my life and in this world. It means knowing that He is not to be messed with, and even though He is a loving God who cares for me more than my awareness, like the children of Narnia, I know that “He is not a tame lion.”
The fear of the Lord is important for me. If I focused only on His unconditional love, I might take that for granted and do stupid things. This holy fear keeps my choices in balance. If I focused only on His grace and forgiveness, I might sin without a thought, but fear makes me realize that God can inflict chastening and even bring great calamities to teach me that sin is my enemy; I must not fool around with it. Even the consequences of deliberate sin show me that I need to fear the Lord. While He forgives me, He may not withhold the fruit of foolishness just because He loves me.
This verse from the Psalm 25 brings out another great reason to fear the Lord. He reveals His secrets to those who do. Because I fear Him, He shows me things that I would not otherwise know, things about Him and the spiritual realm, things about myself and others, and the trusts about the covenant or solemn agreement that He has made with me.
C. S. Lewis did a great job in depicting the Lord with the lion, Aslan in his Chronicles of Narnia series. Sometimes I imagine myself with those children curled up in the fur of Aslan, knowing that He could devour me in just one bite, yet knowing that I am safe with him.
I am safe with God too. Because Jesus died for me, I am protected from God’s fury and wrath, and can instead consider this sin-hating God my refuge and hiding place. He still hates sin, but He let me in on His secret—the closer I get to Him, the less apt I am to experience His wrath and the more I know about His grace.
Oprah is promoting a book and a philosophy that is called “the secret” but it is no secret at all. The idea is that whatever a person thinks and focuses on, that will become true in their lives. If you think positive, positive things will happen. If not, you could get sick, become poor, even die.
This supposedly new philosophy is similar to psycho-cybernetics, a notion that my husband used to believe before we got married. It’s something like ‘the power of positive thinking’ promoted by a church leader a few years before that. But it isn’t the change of name or the different twist that makes this notion not a secret; it is the fact that the human heart has always wanted this much control over their own lives.
I normally do not watch Oprah’s show but happened to catch the first one promoting this idea. A Christian woman from the audience expressed her concerns, and was told that all great Bible leaders thought this way. I was so indignant that I wanted to call the show and tell them how wrong they were. If this so-called “power of attraction” was true, then the only Person who never sinned or thought a bad thought would not have “attracted violence” and been killed at the hands of those who hated Him!
The minds of men do not control the world. The Bible makes that totally clear. Yes, we are supposed to think rightly, have pure thoughts, and so on, but even that we cannot do unless empowered by the Holy Spirit. We are full of selfishness, and determined to go our own way and live our own lives without the help of God, and this so-called ‘secret’ is just another way of doing it.
Christians do have a secret though. We have a ‘hidden’ ability to bear spiritual fruit and to be effective in the world, but it is not through the power of our minds. God gives us the power of the Holy Spirit, who lives in us. That power is available, but not at our command, and not when we feel or want to be strong and invincible. It is only there when we are weak and unable, humbly and totally depending on the Lord. Our strength is “perfected in weakness” not in positive thinking. That is an amazing secret, and not at all easy to live out.
2 Corinthians 4 call the Holy Spirit a treasure, and says, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”
The problem is the earthen vessel. Christians fight that tendency to do it ourselves, to live without humble dependence on God, to be our own persons. But 2 Corinthians 4 goes on to tell how that treasure is revealed or demonstrated in us. He says, “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”
There is no mention that we live powerful Christian lives through determination, or focusing on the desired results, or through our own strength. The life of Christ stays hidden when we try that. It only shines through us when we “die” to self-effort and yield to God, just as Jesus did when He was taken to the cross at the hands of sinful men. While His death and resurrection have far larger ramifications, they also picture how we must live—dying to all human wisdom and self-effort. That ‘death’ gets us out of the way so God can manifest the life of His son in our human bodies, our earthen vessels.
Human beings have always wanted power. It goes back to Eden when Satan tempted Eve with the idea that she could be “like God” if she ate the forbidden fruit. “The secret” is the same old line: “You can control your life (be like God) without having to rely on God. Just buy the book, do what it says, and blah, blah, blah.”
The god of this age is mentioned earlier in this passage from 2 Corinthians. It says that he blinds the minds of those who do not believe in Christ, preventing “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” from shining on them so they cannot understand and believe the truth. Other Scripture says that when so blinded, these folks will not only fail to turn to God, they will easily be duped by false teaching, falling for lies and missing the truth.
As far as ‘the secret’ goes, it is a secret only to those who do not know the Word of God. To us who do, it is just another spin on the same old baloney that Satan has been trying to feed us for thousands of years. Phooey!
We have a friend who is unable to keep a secret. A couple weeks ago she was included in a planned surprise anniversary party for her son. She said she kept her “lip zipped” and was so proud of herself. As her family looked back, they recalled how she dropped big hints on the way to the party with them. While they didn’t catch on, she just could not totally keep this great secret to herself.