Ok, so I fell prey to an "urban legend". On May 5th, I blogged that Be not afraid appeared 365 times in the bible. I posed the question to the forums at Catholic.com to see if it was true, and got a couple of responses--all of them charitably chiding me for being gullible. One of the posters (a non-catholic Christian) said he found the following in the King James Version:
The phrase "fear not" appears 63 times (48 times in the Old Testament)
The phrase "(do) not be afraid" appears 13 times (12 times in the OT)
The phrase "be not afraid" appears 28 times (19 times in the OT)
That's a total of 104 times, 261 short of 365
On a side note, the word "fear" by itself appears 400 times in the bible (316 times in the OT) , the word "afraid" appears 193 times (158 times in the OT)
Oh, well at least I got a couple of people to STUDY the bible for a little bit.
Getting back to the original thought, though. What is a "God-fearing" Christian? I think most people think that God is to feared, so they walk on egg-shells, thinking that He is just looking for an excuse to "send me to hell". They make God out to be a vindictive being, rather than the loving Father He truly is. This, in my opinion, is exactly the wrong attitude to have. We certainly should follow the precepts and laws He has set down for us from the beginning. But we should do it out of RESPECT and THANKS for the gift of life He has given us. The only fear that we should have is the fear of disappointing our loving Father in Heaven and causing Him sadness. I am going to try in the next couple of weeks to explain what I know to be gifts from God and how I can best thank Him for these blessings.
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