True reverence for God is a weighty, serious, profound response to God that is more than a feeling you feel. It instead becomes a sense of God’s importance, greatness, beauty, loveliness that affects every part of the Christian life. The fear of the Lord is what we experience the clearer our view becomes of who God is.

If I told you that there would be a worship service for the God of Scripture, to seek His blessing on us, led by a well known preacher, with many churches working together, at great expense and organisational effort, and the music and the preaching is going to stir us up to intense zeal and passion, wouldn’t you be interested? This was the scene when Israel worshipped with the golden calf.
But God’s verdict on this? Here we have in black-and-white, God’s opinion of their worship service:
Then the Lord spoke to Moses, “Go down at once, for your people, whom you brought up from the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. “They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’ ” (Exodus 32:7–8)
God called it corrupt, and said Israel was not worshipping Him, but instead worshipping a thing they had made. Can you imagine their reaction, to be told, “You weren’t worshipping God. The symbol you made of God, you had actually worshipped it, and it warped your idea of God, and you worshipped your own feelings.”?
Apparently, the essential ingredients of revival are not sincerity, passion, zeal, emotion, organisation, expense, unity, sacrifice, effort. Apparently, you can have all that, and yet not have revival.
So why was it not revival? We get part of the answer by looking at how they acted in this event, and what was the character of this worship-response. What was the dominant affection, the mood, or the tone of this event? C. S. Lewis once said the thing we think we are loving is seen in the kind of love. He wrote this, “The form of the desired is in the desire. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, ‘high’ or ‘low.’ It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful”.
So, what kind of desires, and affections were present in this event? We can tell be looking a little closer.
First, we read, they ate and drank, and got up to play.
What does that mean? Well, likely not church volleyball, or hide and seek. The Hebrew word translated play is tsahaq, and it often means laugh, mock, joke.
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People often tell me not to let the death of my brother define me. While I would not have his death be the only thing someone knows about me, it is inevitable that it had changed me. That cold night was one where I experienced something I would not wish on my worst enemy. But there was something else that night.

As Michaela finished up her high school courses, she had to write an essay on an especially significant time in her life. She chose to write about the night her brother died. I asked if I could share it here and she was willing to have me to do so. I hope it will encourage you as it encouraged me.
The night my brother died was a cold one. So cold it was that I refused to go out with my mother for our nightly walk. Instead, we stayed inside with my father. He was sitting on the floor with a bucket of smelly beige paint, while my mom and I were chattering excitedly about my brother’s upcoming trip home with his fiancée.
Then Mom got that text.
I remember her face paling as she stood up, her phone clutched in her hands. My brother had collapsed unexpectedly and inexplicably while he and his friends were playing a game of kickball at college. I remember the panic rising inside me as I watched her pace, calling my dad to come sit on the couch. Hours seemed to pass as we waited. Then my dad’s phone rang. We all stared at my dad’s phone for a moment, the rhythmic ringtone crashing through the silence in a wave of noise. My dad picked up the phone and answered in a trembling voice.
Nick’s heart had stopped, and both the students present and the paramedics had been unable to resuscitate him.
He was dead.
I remember screaming as my dad spat out the words, his shocked voice breaking. I flung myself from the chair I’d been sitting in, my feet carrying me from the living room and into the kitchen before I collapsed on the cold floorboards, begging someone to tell me it wasn’t true. My mother’s equally anguished screams echoed through the hallways as she too ran from the room. Soon after, I crawled back to my father—who sat unmoving on the couch—my entire body shaking. Why, why I wondered as I sobbed, horror buzzing through the air of my small home like an electric current.
“How could God have done this?” I cried. “How could this have been His will?”
When I heard my pastor would be driving to our house, I stood outside in the freezing night air and waited, my shaking arms wrapped around myself to conserve what little warmth I had left. My mother tried to get me to come inside—but I didn’t. The night air was fresh, the sky appearing pitch black and remarkably clear from our home in the city. Our pastor eventually arrived, alarmed to find me standing out in the cold, my breath billowing around me.
“My parents need you.” I croaked when he hugged me tight.
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We fight for holiness, for this leads to real peace and joy. We fight for holiness, “for without holiness no one will see the LORD” (Hebrews 12:14). We fight for holiness, because our Father, whom we love, is holy and he wants us to be like him. “Be holy, because I the LORD your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15-16).  

The apostle John stood on Golgotha and watched Jesus die in agony. He heard him utter, “It is finished,” and he saw his head drop at the moment of his death. He saw the soldier take his spear and plunge it into Jesus’ side, right into his heart. And he saw something remarkable: an immediate flow of blood and water (John 19:34). This distressing and surprising sight gripped John’s mind and soul. We know that because of the very weighty testimony he gives to it:

The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe.(John 19:35; see also 1 John 5:6-8; all Scripture quotations from NIV)

This makes us think of the temple. The temple was God’s house, and a person could only go into God’s house via the altar and the sea (1 Kings 7:23-26 and 2 Chron. 4:2-5). At the altar sin was atoned for by the blood of a substitutionary sacrifice. At the sea—which held some seventeen tons of water—sin was washed away.
Reconciliation to God means blood atonement, and washing. Jesus’ death, releasing water and blood, accomplished both for his people.
Jesus’ death has washed us.
My impression is that we focus very much on the blood. I believe in Jesus, he died for me and his blood atoned for my sins, and so I have been saved from the punishment of hell. This is glorious, but he did not die just to free us from punishment. He died also to wash us and make us clean. He died to save us from the punishment of sin, and he died to wash away the corruption of sin: the guilt of our sin, and its power over our lives.
A believer therefore not only has a new ultimate destiny, but a new life right now. The old sinful nature has been crucified (Rom. 6:6). We have been freed from its slavery (Rom. 6:18). We were once wedded to the sinful nature; but that cruel old husband is now dead, and now we belong to a good husband (Rom. 7:4).  Our sinful hearts of stone are transformed into tender hearts of flesh (Ezek. 36:26). There is rebirth (John 3:7) and a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).
Sanctification is the process of growing in holiness.
Jesus’ death has washed us. We are free to walk in this new life, we will want to walk in this new life, and we must walk in this new life. This is sanctification.
The word is built from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy.” In the Latin Bible the angels around the throne in Isaiah 6 call out Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus! Sanctification is the process of growing in holiness.
At this point we must distinguish between definitive and progressive sanctification. Definitive sanctification is really the same as justification; it is an act of God whereby he declares us right and holy in his sight on the ground of Jesus’ death:

…But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.1 Corinthians 6:11

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