Discipleship

Pastor Martin expounds the third essential ingredient of the fear of God: a constraining awareness of one's obligations to God. The essence of that obligation is threefold — to love God supremely, obey Him implicitly, and trust Him completely. He illustrates this powerfully through Abraham's offering of Isaac (where God singled out fear as the virtue tested) and through Christ in Gethsemane and at Calvary, showing how the fear of God operates in supreme love, implicit obedience, and complete trust even unto death.

Continuing the biblical case for Christ's deity, Pastor Martin brings four more witnesses (Philippians 2:6, Titus 2:13, Hebrews 1:8, and 1 John 5:20) in which Jesus Christ is explicitly called God in contexts that admit no lesser meaning. He summarizes the sevenfold witness in Colossians 2:9 — in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily — and applies the doctrine: the one who invites sinners is God able to fulfill every promise and every threat, He demands supreme religious affection, and He is the object of faith, worship, and a jealous guarding of the heart.

After nineteen Lord's Day mornings contemplating the person of Christ, Pastor Martin presses one searching question on every conscience: do you love him? Working through 1 Peter 1:8 and 1 Corinthians 16:22, he shows that love to Christ is an indispensable mark of Christian character and that its absence is the infallible indication of coming judgment. He defines the essence of that love (with help from Bishop Leighton) as goodwill toward Christ, delight in Christ, and desire for Christ, traces its roots to a saving revelation of his glory and a believing reception of him, and identifies its infallible fruit as keeping his commandments.