Beautiful fear

Basing his sermon on 1 Peter 3 on suffering for doing good, Phil Kniss, senior pastor at the Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA, said that when Christians fear what their detractors fear, they (Christians) do terrible things to each other. When empires function out of fear, they do ugly things, but when our fear is of the God we serve, it centers us, grounds us and aligns us with the purposes of God. This fear of what God purports for the world is a "beautiful fear," one that enables us to speak to the power of our culture.