Do you sometimes find yourself feeling embarrassed or uneasy when the idea of 'fearing God' comes up in the Bible? Would you invite your friends and family to a special guest service at church if you knew that was going to be the message?

Fear is taboo in Western society. Fear curtails freedom; it crushes dreams; it inhibits people. It should be avoided altogether.

But some kinds of fear are healthy - just as some kinds of fearlessness are foolish. There is bad fear and good fear. And, oddly enough, fearing something can mean we are no longer afraid of it.

In this short book, David Mears takes us back to the Bible to look again at the fear of God - and more than that, to take delight in it and discover why the fear of the Lord really is "the beginning of wisdom".