Plan Three: Nurturing a Fear of GodSample

## THE TREASURE To what lengths would you go to find a treasure chest filled with $1 million in gold coins? In 2010, an eccentric millionaire, Forrest Fenn, hid such a treasure chest in the Rocky Mountains and wrote a 24-line poem containing clues to the treasure. Tens of thousands of people sought the treasure. Sasha Dent spent over 10,000 hours researching and looking for the treasure and made 300 trips in search of it. Tragically, five individuals, including Pastor Paris Wallace, lost their lives while hunting for this treasure in the rugged and treacherous Rocky Mountain terrain. Finally, on June 6, 2020, the madness ended when Forrest Fenn announced that his treasure had been found in the Wyoming mountains. Just like the quest to find Fenn’s treasure, understanding the fear of the Lord takes considerable effort on our part. Proverbs 2:4 compares this pursuit to searching for hidden treasure. Upon discovering this treasure, the rewards are not perishable gold coins. Instead, they are the imperishable knowledge of God, his protection, discretion, understanding, and godly wisdom. These riches are for anyone who chooses to pursue the fear of God, not just the one lucky person who happens to stumble upon this treasure. As you read Proverbs 2:1-5, notice all of the action verbs in the passage—accept, store, turning, applying, call out, cry aloud, look, and search—all culminating in understanding and finding. There is nothing passive about this quest. The very nature of faith means that God doesn’t just zap us with the fear of Him, like animals that have an instinctive fear of human beings. No, the proper fear of the Lord must be actively pursued and searched for, like the hidden treasure that it is, using the treasure map that is God’s Word.