From the Mar/Apr, 2026 issue of *Touchstone*

Feature

On Our Faces

A Faithful Church Is a Trembling Church
by Ronald Moore

Scripture speaks plainly: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). What happens, then, when this fear is lost?

The modern Church—especially in the West—has become strikingly casual about holy things. Preaching is often an exercise in motivational speaking. Prayer is flippant, the Name of God taken lightly, and the moral authority of Scripture often subject to the approval of the zeitgeist. The Church still speaks of grace but forgets that grace comes to the humble—and humility, true humility, begins with fear. Not the fear of punishment, but the trembling awe of standing before the Holy One of Israel.

This is not a call for emotionalism or reactionary aestheticism. It is a call to remember what the Church is and whom she serves. It is a call to let the Church tremble again.

Fear as Foundation

At the heart of biblical religion lies a trembling awe before the presence of the Almighty. From Genesis to Revelation, the testimony is consistent: the fear of the Lord is not an archaic relic of an earlier, more superstitious time; it is the foundational posture of the faithful.

Proverbs declares it plainly: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (1:7). In this short axiom, wisdom is not first intellectual, nor is it moral in the purely humanistic sense. It is theological. Wisdom begins when man stands rightly before God—humbled, aware of his own sin, and conscious of God’s majesty and holiness. To fear God is to see things as they truly are.

Consider Isaiah. When he beholds the Lord “high and lifted up,” his response is not applause or affirmation—it is dread: “Woe is me! For I am undone . . . for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Is. 6:5). The prophet’s lips are purified only after his trembling confession of unworthiness. This sequence is not incidental but paradigmatic. Revelation follows reverence. Forgiveness follows fear.

Likewise, the New Testament does not set aside the fear of the Lord as something obsolete. After the terrifying judgment of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, we are told, “So great fear came upon all the church and upon all who heard these things” (5:11). This is not pre-Pentecostal fear; it is fear within the born-again, Spirit-filled Church. And the result? “And through the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were done” (5:12). Fear did not quench the Spirit—it made room for him.

The epistle to the Hebrews reminds its readers that even under the New Covenant, “our God is a consuming fire” (12:29). Far from relaxing the standards of holiness, the new and living way opened by Christ demands a deeper awe. We are not invited to come with informality, but “with reverence and godly fear” (Heb. 12:28). This fear is not servile dread, like a slave before a cruel master, but filial awe—a child before a father whose glory burns brighter than the sun.

This distinction is vital. Christian fear is not the paralyzing terror that flees from God but the purifying awe that draws near on holy ground. The great Reformed theologian John Murray put it succinctly: “The fear of God is the soul of godliness.” The Church must recover this soul or risk losing her very life.

Even Jesus, in his humanity, “offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears . . . and was heard because of his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7). If the Son of God feared rightly, how much more must we?

Ronald Moore is the pastor of St. Luke’s Church in Corinth, Mississippi. He writes on Christian doctrine, church history, and the renewal of reverent worship in the modern Church.

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