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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Jesus came to set us free, not enslave us to the law. All of the Protestant Reformers agreed upon this point and spoke of its importance. This is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. If Christian liberty is not the defining characteristic of the Christian life, then the doctrine of justification is not properly understood. 

If anything is worth defending it is Christian freedom.  In the face of the threat to such liberty posed by the Judaizers, Paul issues a stern warning to the Galatians– “for freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).  Anyone who seeks to be justified by obedience to the law of Moses, through receiving circumcision, through the keeping of Jewish dietary laws, or in observing the Jewish religious calendar, will fall from grace and come under God’s curse (Galatians 5:4).[1] 
Paul has already pointed out that those who seek to be justified on the basis of works of law (Galatians 2:16), or who place their confidence in what Paul identifies as the basic principles of the world (stoichiea) will find themselves in eternal danger.  In Galatians 5:1-12, Paul contrasts the Judaizing campaign of enslavement to the law with Christian liberty in Christ.  This is yet another important plank in his case against the Judaizers.
In the first four chapters of Galatians, Paul issues several responses to Judaizing legalism.  In chapter 5, we move into what some identify as the “practical section” of Paul’s Galatian letter, when the apostle takes up the practice of Christian liberty and exhorts the Galatians to defend it.[2]  While Paul does change focus a bit from those redemptive historical events which culminate in the death of Jesus and justification through faith, here he describes the Christian life in light of the gospel revealed to him by Jesus Christ.[3]  The apostle continues to set out sharp contrasts between opposing positions.  Readers of Galatians are now well aware that Paul is fond of antithesis (contrast) as a rhetorical critique and he uses it repeatedly. 
Following up his analogy between Hagar and Sarah in Galatians 4:21-4:31, when Paul turned the Jewish understanding of redemptive history on its head, in Galatians 5:1-12, he contrasts faith and works yet again, proving that they are diametrically opposed to the other when it comes to the justification of sinners.  To seek to be justified by works of law or through observing of dietary laws, feast days, or circumcision, is to return to slavery to sin and bondage to the basic principles which characterize this present evil age.  This is a very serious misstep since Jesus Christ came for the purpose of setting us free from bondage to sin and the law.  The gravity of this misstep is identified in verse 1 of chapter 5, when Paul challenges the Galatians with the uncompromising declaration, “for freedom Christ has set us free.” 
This is where the Christian life begins for the Galatians and the readers of this epistle–with freedom from the guilt of sin and its enslaving power.  Christian freedom is a central concept in terms of our standing before God, as well as a major theme in the Galatian letter.[4]  The agitators in Antioch and Galatia deplore Paul’s stress on Christian freedom and see it as the chief sign of a low bar of entrance for Gentiles and an affront to the traditions of their fathers.
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James calls followers of Christ to be, “gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” Silence might be easier…however, we must take the posture of engaging the issues—not avoiding them—and especially of engaging people with truth and love as Christ did. 

The questions we receive more than all others have to do with how best to respond to friends, family members, and neighbors who struggle with gender dysphoria. The rational case for humans as either male or female is strong, as are arguments from history, biology, law, and theology. However, arguments that would’ve been considered obvious not that long ago often seem to go nowhere with someone desperately reaching for answers or affirmation. 
The number of Americans who report personally knowing someone who struggles with gender dysphoria now approaches 50%. Thus, Christians should be prepared, as best as we can, for these scenarios which we are now more likely to encounter than not. When unprepared, too many Christians simply go quiet, and in the process, go along with transgender ideology—not because they believe it but because rocking the boat seems too risky. Rather than truly loving our neighbors, something admittedly difficult, we instead choose the easier path of not offending and only affirming. We then name that path “love,” but it’s neither loving nor true.  
The story of Holy Scripture, in each of its four chapters, contextualizes what is true about every person, including the created reality of sexual distinction. First, that God created and values our bodies, which are made male and female for His purposes. Second, the Fall, while validating the pain and discomfort that many people feel within their own bodies, dispels the idea that what we feel should be accepted as true. In fact, it may be false, confused, and harmful.  Third, that Christ is making all things new through His life, obedience, death, and resurrection, all of which came by God Himself taking on a human body. Fourth, one day the pain of dysphoria will be fully healed when our faith becomes sight. 
The topic of transgenderism requires, first and foremost, theological clarity. Children must hear, over and over, God’s design for sexuality and the body articulated. If they haven’t heard it, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn how many struggle in silence.   
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