The Fear of Man

The fear of man is a Bible term for what most people today call peer pressure or sometimes codependency. It's basically fearing man more than you fear God. It can (as I learned the hard way) lead to many issues and problems. I am reading a book by Edward T. Welch called When People Are Big and God Is Small. It has been a very convicting and insightful book, and I would highly recommend reading it. I will do several posts on it over the next couple months, and I hope that they will help you as much as they have helped me. I will do a list of points that I have taken from the book. I know that it will take me a really long time to fully put what I have learned into practice (and even then, I will still fail at it sometimes), but I feel that if this concept were fully embraced by everyone, our world would be so much better.
I am about halfway done with the book, and I have already learned so much. In one place, the author was talking about what would happen if everyone feared God and not man. He said, "Just imagine what it would be like to truly hate sin, first our own, then the sins of others (Matt. 7:3-5). What would happen to marital fights? They would be almost impossible. Spouses would be too busy listening and asking forgiveness for their own selfishness. What about the little cliques in the school yard? They would be telling good stories about somebody else. What about when someone sins against us? We would no longer have to murder the person in our own heart. Instead, we could cover the sin in humility and love, or we could confront the other person in the same spirit." [Page 114, When People Are Big And God Is Small]
That passage really affected me, because it showed me what the positive effects of this mindset are. It showed me how I can accurately show God to others, and how I can build others up rather than tearing them down. I have done this whole post with only one quote from the book. I think that shows how big this concept is. That quote came from the middle of the book, but I thought it might be a good place to start. The first several chapters of the book talked about how and why we fear people more than God; then, the book transitioned into how we find freedom from this and fear God instead. I will do a couple more posts on this later on, but I hope this helps you!