Scary God: Introducing the Fear of the Lord to the Postmodern Church

by Mattie Montgomery

Overview

“Scary God brings you face-to-face with our Warrior-King God.”

—John Bevere,

bestselling author of The Bait of Satan

Discover the great wonder and wild freedom the fear of the Lord can bring.

God’s character is like a mighty diamond—a glorious convergence of respect, awe, reverence, adoration, thanksgiving, and yes, fear.

Yet why is it so difficult to reconcile the wrath of God with the love of God?

As Mattie teaches, it is simply a continual awareness of Jesus, our mighty Warrior King.

We should not be afraid to come to God; rather we should be afraid to be against Him.

Fans of Jefferson Bethke, John Bevere, and Brian Head Welch, will love the straight-talk in Scary God.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400208197
Publisher:	HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Publication date:	12/19/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	950,671
File size:	459 KB

About the Author

Mattie Montgomery is the founder and president of Awakening Evangelism, a ministry that provides instruction and support to believers from all around the world who desire to grow in the ability to share the gospel and advance the kingdom more fearlessly in their everyday lives. Mattie was the vocalist of For Today a renowned Spirit-filled hardcore band. He lives in Mobile, Alabama, with his wife and three sons.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

FRIGHTENED TO LIFE

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

— Deuteronomy 10:12

The first time God scared me was in a trailer in Virginia. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that He was unkind or that He assaulted or attacked me. It wasn't like in a horror movie, when someone suddenly appears at the window and everyone jumps out of their skin, hearts pounding.

He wasn't mean. He didn't frighten me for the sake of it. He simply let me experience more of Him than I ever had before. And it was scary!

I think I should say this early and clearly in this book: there is a difference between being scary and being mean. The risk in some teaching on the fear of the Lord is that people may be tempted to regard God as cruel and maniacal, when that couldn't be further from the truth.

Like any good father, He has a tremendous intensity and a capacity for violence — but these are driven not by uncontrollable rage or brutality, but by jealous love. The most frightening thing about God is simply how dramatically, indescribably different He is from any created thing.

When I had that encounter in Virginia, I wasn't unfamiliar with what Christians talk about as "the presence of the Lord." You may have experienced it yourself in a special worship gathering, or even in your own time with God — a sense of His closeness, His sweetness, His kindness. Like a warm blanket, comforting and safe.

Having grown up in church, I'd known many moments like that. I'd stood through countless worship services and prayer times. I'd cried at youth camp altar calls with my friends while the worship band played our favorite song. I'd stood for my faith at See You at the Pole rallies. I'd been grateful for God's gentle presence.

I'm not knocking such experiences at all. But they are nothing like what happened in that mobile home somewhere outside Virginia Beach.

Though I had a church heritage, by this stage of my life, I was spending more time in dingy, sweaty clubs than in bright, clean sanctuaries. With the best intentions, though.

In the fall of 2007, I had left everyone and everything I'd ever known to join For Today. I became the front man for this unheard-of metal band from western Iowa because I thought it would give me the chance to share the gospel with people who needed to hear it. I was right.

We were not very popular in those early days, but every night, during our set in some dark room somewhere, I'd preach the good news about Jesus, and every night the message would transform lives. It was exciting and fulfilling.

At each tour stop, we would hope and pray (and sometimes beg) for one of the few people attending that concert to be generous enough to let us sleep on the floor of their home. Sometimes we'd get no offers and end up parking our van and trailer in a truck-stop parking lot for the night. But often we'd make new friends, or connect with old ones, who would kindly inconvenience themselves to accommodate us.

Slogging our way through another seven-showsa-week tour, we came to Virginia Beach in the summer of 2008. We'd played there a number of times before. After the concert, we met a local pastor who asked if we needed a place to stay for the night. We gladly (desperately) accepted his invitation.

He explained there was a mobile home on his church's property that had been converted into a prayer room. People may come in throughout the night to pray in one small section, he told us, but the rest of the trailer was separate, with couches and carpet on which we were more than welcome to spread out. Yes, thank you!

After packing all the instruments and gear into our trailer, we piled into our big purple van and followed the pastor's car to the church property. We arrived well after midnight. As we grabbed our sleeping bags and pillows and poured out of the sliding side door of the van, it seemed like just another one of oh-so-many such stops. We'd stumble into our temporary home to sleep for a few hours before waking up to leave and do it all over again.

But as I walked through the door of the trailer, the atmosphere of peace and stillness that seemed to rest in that place immediately struck me. Two lamps set on either side of the room cast a dim light that made the lounge feel sleepy. However, there was enough light for me to be able to tell that the brown carpet was nice and thick — something to which I paid special attention because I knew that's where I'd be sleeping.

We all spread out to claim our spots for the night — a couple on couches, the rest of us on the floor. After laying out my sleeping bag and pillow in one corner, I decided to spend some time in the small prayer room that was just on the other side of a thin wall.

Upon entering the prayer room, I noticed that one of the walls was coated in chalkboard paint, with prayer requests, poems, song lyrics, and testimonies written all over it. Pieces of paper with other notes and messages were pinned to the other walls.

I spent maybe an hour there, simply thanking God — for who He was, for His faithfulness and love, and for the people who had been saved at the show that night. I asked Him with great expectancy for the "more" I sensed would come over the next days. As I knelt and prayed, I felt as though my conversation with God was the only thing happening in the whole world.

Even now, years later, I can still feel the warmth and stillness of that small room.

After I'd prayed, I spent some time reading the short testimonies, prayers, and prophetic declarations scribbled in notebooks and chalked on the wall.

Eventually, though, I padded quietly back into the lounge, gently closing the prayer room door behind me. I tiptoed over the snoring bodies of my bandmates sprawled out across the floor to find my sleeping bag. Then I crawled inside and sank into sleep with a full heart, expectant and excited about what wonderful things might be waiting for me on my great adventure with God.

What my wandering mind never could have imagined was that before morning I would come face-to-face with a reality of God's nature that I had never known before.

FACEDOWN IN TERROR

I was pulled violently from sleep at about 3:00 a.m., jerked awake by screaming. With my heart pounding in my chest, I opened my eyes wide but could see nothing through the darkness. Beneath the cries, I could hear what sounded like a hammer striking a board over and over again.

I balled my fists tightly around the soft fabric of my sleeping bag as I listened intently, trying to make sense of exactly what was going on. As the fog of sleep lifted off me, I realized what was happening.

There was a woman on the "night watch" in the adjoining prayer room, and she had turned on music and was worshiping God loudly and crying out for Him to move in her family and her church. Alone in the early hours, probably unaware — and if not, certainly unconcerned — that five guys were sleeping nearby, she stood shouting, clapping, and weeping in the holy presence of God.

"Yahweh!" she shouted. "You are holy! You are worthy! Send Your Spirit and heal our land!" Pouring her heart and soul into every word, she cried with such passion and desperation that her voice began to crack, but she persisted. "Send Your Spirit and heal our land! Send Your Spirit and heal our land! Holy One! Holy One!"

The other guys had stirred and muttered something, half-awake, when she'd first crashed into our consciousness, but then turned over and burrowed back down into sleep.

But I was wide awake, rooted in place. I could not have moved if I had wanted to. As I sensed the prayer warrior's appeals touching the heart of heaven over and over again, I could feel waves of what I can only describe as God's glory begin to wash over me.

Sometimes, when you stand on a stage as the sound techs check the subwoofers, it feels as if the sound is flowing up into your body from the ground, making every cell vibrate. This was what I was experiencing, though even more intensely. It wasn't just sound; it was spirit too — something so all-encompassing, so intense that I felt I might somehow melt into the floor. This was God in a way I had never known before.

Now that I had some sense of what was happening, the fear that had first gripped me when I jolted awake didn't subside — rather, it intensified. As I listened to this unseen woman's pursuit of God and His presence, the holiness and weight of the moment bore down upon me. I felt unworthy to experience it.

I had prayed before, but I'd never prayed like that. I had known significant experiences with God, led hundreds to Christ, and seen some astonishing miracles, but I had never experienced anything like what I felt in those moments. For the first time in my life, I had been touched by real terror — holy fear.

One thought haunted me as it replayed in my mind over the next hour: God is in the room. Not that "presence of God" so often casually talked about in church, or the theological idea that an omnipresent God is always everywhere. I mean, the tangible weight and glory of Yahweh Elohim — the One Elijah called "the God who answers by fire" (1 Kings 18:24) — had filled the room and pinned me to the floor.

I lay there on the brown carpet, drenched in sweat, trembling, while tears rolled down my cheeks. This was holy. There was a power and gravity in the room beyond anything I could ever hope to fully describe.

I was unnerved, overwhelmed, undone. While I knew the presence was holy, its utter purity was beyond anything I had ever even imagined — brighter than the brightest light, hotter than the hottest flame. It felt as though it might be too much for me to bear.

It was like one of those moments in an action movie when the hero runs for cover as something explodes into a giant ball of flame behind him. Then he ducks behind a wall or slips into a doorway as the sheet of flame roars over and past him, consuming everything in its path. All he can do is keep down, stay still, and hold his breath.

Perhaps that was what Moses felt like when God's presence passed behind him as he hid in the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33).

All I knew was that I could not speak or stand. Only by keeping still and lying facedown did I feel I might be safe; I feared that if I moved, I may die. This was not a presence that coddles or excites; it was a presence that rips, ravages, and burns. I felt, not wonder or awe, but plain fear.

I didn't know why God had let me experience this. I was unworthy, but He had allowed it anyway. Unconcerned about my capacity to endure or process it, He'd simply come in His glory and left me ruined on the floor.

Despite my familiarity with the stories and concepts of Scripture, the sheer intensity of His holiness was more than I could have possibly imagined or anticipated. I lay unmoving, confronted by the fearful truth that though I thought I had known a lot about God, actually I was still only at the beginning — of the beginning.

Somewhere before dawn I finally fell into an exhausted sleep. When I woke again, it was quiet. As we broke camp and readied to head out on the road, some of the other guys grumbled about how that wild woman had woken them up in the middle of the night with all her noise.

I kept quiet. I felt too raw, too stunned, too vulnerable to speak, as if in doing so I might somehow trivialize or taint what had happened. It was too pure, too powerful, too precious, too everything to begin to try to put into words. So I kept it all to myself.

I never saw the woman who had worshiped so loudly on the other side of the wall, never learned her name, but her pursuit of God had opened a door for me to encounter Him as I never had before. I didn't understand all that had happened, but I sensed I would never be the same again.

That night in the trailer marked me. It haunted my thoughts in the weeks and months that followed, always hanging in the back of my mind as I sat through happy, casual worship services. I wondered often about the power, the weight, and the glory that had pressed down on me as I lay next to that little prayer room. I listened to many great messages in many great churches, but I never really heard God described the way I had encountered Him back there.

I have had some similar moments since then, though they are not common. Powerful as those occasions have been, I have not sought them out just for the sake of having them. I have been more interested in what it means to express the reality of those experiences and in how I should live differently as a result of this greater sense of the fear of the Lord.

Over the next few years, as I continued to grow in my walk with Him, I began to gain some understanding. I discovered that this fierce, wild, weighty presence I'd met in that mobile home was not merely a profoundly personal experience; it was also a deeply biblical one.

As I studied Scripture, the Spirit of God showed me that fear was not only something God evoked in me; it was something He demanded of me. I learned that God attaches the condition of holy fear to blessing, mercy, long life, protection, glory, and even power.

There are promises made specifically — sometimes exclusively — to those who "fear the Lord." And He relates in a different way to those who fear Him than He does to those who simply believe, those who pray, or even those who love Him.

I came to realize that God had not come to scare me to death, that night in the trailer. Rather, He had come to scare me to life — the life spoken of in John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." It's the abundant, wild life Jesus died for me to have.

How can something that seems so negative — sheer terror — ever result in something so positive — everlasting life? Fair question. The answer requires an openness to being stretched and challenged, and a willingness to look at some familiar Bible passages from unfamiliar perspectives and give God permission to blow away the cobwebs of dead religion that may be obscuring your view of who He really is. Because if we cannot see Him as He really is, we cannot know Him as He really is; and if we cannot really know Him, we will inevitably settle for less than the life He intended for us.

SAFE FROM THE FIRESTORM

One night, in the midst of a long season of study and intense prayer while preparing to write this book, the Lord gave me a dream that left me shaken deeply and astonished at His power. When I awoke, I did so with a clearer understanding of the "scary" nature of God and a firmer grasp of the beauty of my position in Him than I'd ever had before.

In the dream, I was standing in wide-open land with my family. The horizon seemed to stretch away forever all around us. I knew this vast area had been given to me, to us. It was ours to live in, to live from, to live off of. We should have been overjoyed, but instead we were overwhelmed.

That's because the whole area looked as though the life had been choked out of it. Where there should have been acres of crops, there was instead an endless lattice of thick, thorny vines. They ran over the ground like tangled, brittle Christmas lights. In the gaps between them, weeds poked up from the dry, thirsty ground. The rocky earth was dusty and lifeless. It was expansive, but it was useless.

It all seemed hopeless. What to do? Where to start? Even with a fleet of heavy equipment, it would take forever to clear this land so we could begin to sow and tend and harvest. But I had nothing — not even a pair of gloves to put on to start pecking away at the mess by hand. We were standing in the middle of a lost cause.

I became aware of a faint tremor under my feet. It grew in intensity, and the earth began to hum and then vibrate and then shake violently. It felt like standing on a railway line with a freight train roaring toward me, the shaking running up through my entire body.

Looking up to the east, I saw a wall of thick, black smoke moving quickly toward me. It stretched from the ground way up into the sky, with flashes of a fierce orange-red occasionally coming through the black shroud.

As the wall of smoke surged closer, I could see in its midst a burning cyclone of fire. Spinning and rotating, it was as wide as a city block and higher into the sky than my eyes could see — and it was coming directly at us. We were going to die.

I grabbed my wife, Candice, and our kids by the hands, and we turned and fled from the otherworldly force that was coming for us. The earth was shaking harder beneath us, and the dark clouds hung heavy and swirled around us as we ran for a nearby storm shelter, the intensity and heat of the pillar of fire bearing down on us from behind.

We reached the shelter just in time. I flung open the doors and helped everyone down into the underground bunker, pulling the doors closed behind me not a moment too soon. The old wooden shelter creaked and rattled and threatened to break apart as the roaring tornado of fire ripped across the ground above us. We hugged one another excitedly, scarcely believing we had escaped.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Scary God"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mattie Montgomery.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: BROCK THE BULLY, XI,
Chapter 1: FRIGHTENED TO LIFE, 1,
Chapter 2: THE TWO SIDES OF FEAR, 13,
Chapter 3: THE FRUITS OF GODLY FEAR, 27,
Chapter 4: FEAR IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD, 44,
Chapter 5: MOSES: A MAN WHO FEARED GOD, 57,
Chapter 6: PENTECOST: THE CHURCH BIRTHED IN FIRE, FEAR, FELLOWSHIP, 76,
Chapter 7: THE BIBLE IS FULL OF FEAR, 87,
Chapter 8: THEN AND NOW: THE FEAR OF THE LORD ENDURES, 103,
Chapter 9: THE THRONE ROOM, 117,
Chapter 10: GOD'S KINDNESS AND SEVERITY, 130,
Chapter 11: FEAR AND DELIGHT, 140,
Chapter 12: THE WARRIOR KING, 152,
Chapter 13: THE STRONG MAN, 166,
Chapter 14: HOW TO LIVE IN FEAR, 178,
Chapter 15: JESUS WINS, 197,
Afterword, 207,
Acknowledgments, 209,
Notes, 211,
About the Author, 215,