Psalm 46

So today we're going to take a little break from our study of 2 Samuel, just given all that's happened here in the city and all that's happening around the world and in our nation and the background noise of the raging river of rancor as well as all the stuff from uh this week locally here.

And take a look at a very old song, Psalm 46, that you've already read this morning because it was our call to worship.

You've sung a song that was inspired by Psalm 46 when Martin Luther wrote Mighty Fortress is Our God.

So we're going to take a look there.

The Psalms are 150 songs, roughly 3,000 years old.

They stood the test of time.

Part of that's because they serve us in so many ways.

And there's five up on the screen at least.

They stir the emotions, inform the mind, direct the will, stimulate the imagination, and inspire worship.

The psalms speak to every human emotion.

They give voice to the things that we're feeling.

And sometimes we're feeling them but don't know exactly what it is we're feeling.

And here comes a psalm and says exactly what we're feeling.

So Athanasius, it was, it said, a lot of the scripture speaks to us.

The Psalms speak for us.

And they give us words that we can use.

And sometimes they're words expressing to God our honest pain and suffering, not denying it at all, which I so appreciate about our Bible.

It doesn't just ask us to sweep our pain and our suffering under the rug.

It even gives us language and words to be able to come before God and to share with Him exactly what's going on.

Well, since you've already read it, I'm going to give you the outline in advance.

Okay, well, some of you are going, oh, good, this is great, all right?

So power of God, presence of God, purposes of God, and the peace of God.

You know how I love my alliteration.

And we see this in this, the short song of 11 verses, that there is a power greater than any other.

There is a power that dwarfs all of the raging storms and completely obliterates all of the fierce raging giants that we face in life.

There is a presence that's attached to that power.

And some of you know that presence, and you've had moments, almost numinous experiences, where you've actually sensed the presence of God in a very real and almost visceral, tangible kind of a way.

And you know what that's all about.

But there is an abiding, ongoing presence.

And Jesus described this as when he said that we're the branches and he's the vine.

That is, we find our life in him.

And so it's good to be reminded of that over and over again.

The purposes of God remind us that this universe, this world, and even our tiny little planet, dust ball-sized planet that we are, is actually a part of a plan that God set in motion when he created everything out of nothing.

So this life that we're living is not intended at all to be meaningless and insignificant because I'm one of seven billion people on that dust ball-sized planet in a you know tiny little galaxy among millions of galaxies.

No, God's got his eye on us.

And he has a plan and a purpose for our lives.

And he wants to pour his glory through our lives and for us to see his glory and experience it, all of which will lead us to the peace of God.

So let's take a look first at verses one through three where we'll see the power of God.

I'm gonna put it back up on the screen since you read it.

Uh, this is the, I believe, the ESV translation I've got up on the screen.

God's our refuge and strength, ever-present, help and trouble, therefore we will not fear.

And then there's these four those that illustrate it.

And what's cool about the those is that I've never really seen those kinds of things happen myself.

But what he's saying is, use your imagination.

I said the psalm stir the imagination.

Well, here he's doing it.

Use your imagination and imagine the worst that could possibly happen.

The thing that you think could never give way, the entire earth.

The things that you think are so grand and majestic that they would never fall, the mountains.

The, and we've all had this experience, I know you have, because I know there's a bunch of ocean people here versus mountain people.

But if you're an ocean person and you like to stand next to the ocean because it's so big and it reminds you of how small you are, and there's something really comforting in all of that, isn't there?

That's great.

But even though the waters roar and foam, the ancient Jews were actually, they they had a lot of fear of the ocean.

Um, it was, it was, it was the uncontrollable thing out there.

That power of that ocean, that vast, huge ocean, uh, was for them a little bit uh nerve-wracking.

Though the mountains quake with their surging.

And so he described, he illustrates this, these kinds of things that are the worst that you could imagine that might happen.

Most of it probably won't happen, but whatever you can imagine, how many of you have vivid imaginations when it comes to worry?

And how many of you are sitting next to someone that has that?

You recognize that in them.

Okay, that's right, yeah.

That's very true.

And we write narratives all the time about how this might happen or that might happen, and we're borrowing trouble, we're we're constantly sort of churning ourselves up because we have wonderful imaginations, but sometimes they go a little too crazy.

And I love it that he takes it to the to the you know, in this psalm that he takes it to this degree.

Um, because everything else less is you can kind of see how these kinds of things that he's talking about are beyond even my imagination.

So everything else is less.

And if I need a refuge and if I need strength, and God's going to be all of that in the face of the thing that I can't even imagine would happen.

So he says, God is our refuge in strength, not money.

He says, God is our refuge and strength, not worldly pleasures.

God is our refuge and strength, not social or political power or popularity.

God is our refuge and strength, declare the sons of Korah, who are attributed with this song, the ancient Israeli boy band.

You know, I love I love that they got together and decided to put this thing together for us, right?

This song.

And to remind us of these really important truths.

That is God who is not only our strength, that means he's an offensive force for us.

He replenishes our need for strength to move to go on.

But he's our refuge as well.

He's our defensive.

Um, he's our shelter.

Um, he's the place where we can hide if we need to hide once in a while.

And we do.

Uh yeah, you you hear we've heard stories of some of the folks uh around the city that literally hid in a bathtub or in a garage or under a staircase or something like that when this tornado was coming through.

And we need sometimes, we definitely need God as our defense, our shelter, our hiding place, our resting place.

But we need him as our strength as well if we're gonna make it through all the struggling and all the things that we struggle with and all the things that we will suffer through in this life.

Um, more than money, more than pleasure, more than power.

We need Almighty God to be our refuge and our strength.

The one who made the mountains that shake once in a while, the one who made the ocean and drew its borders, the one who set the waves in motion that relentlessly approach the shore to remind us that God has a rhythm and a design in this great, amazing creation that He's made.

These hypotheticals are really powerful.

They're good for us.

They are great news.

The Bible never asks you to deny the reality of your suffering, the realities of your fears.

He just says, do not fear.

He doesn't ask you to deny all of that.

He doesn't shame you and to say, just think positive thoughts.

And he definitely doesn't say, just believe in yourself, like the world around us would say.

Man, I have failed myself so many times.

I can't believe in myself.

If I've learned one thing, you know, I mean I'm thick and I'm slow to learn, but if I have learned one thing, is it I can't trust me.

You know?

Jeremiah said it this way the heart of man is deceitful.

It lies to me all the time.

Nobody lies to me more than I do all the time.

Sometimes I lie saying, oh, you're okay, you're really great, and I'm not.

Sometimes I lie to myself and I say, you are, it's over, dude, and it's not.

But I'm lying to myself all the time.

And often I'm reminding myself not to trust the one person that could actually be my refuge and my strength.

The Bible acknowledges that even though these things do happen, even when we do suffer in this broken, sinful world, we will most certainly all suffer at some point.

But even in our weakest moment, no matter how dark the storm gets or how tall the giant is that we face, God is trustworthy as our refuge and our strength.

Dallas Willard said this, thank God I'm weak because when I'm weak, I get to know the power of God working in me.

Some of you know this in real seriously tangible kind of ways over the last couple weeks.

Um, whether it's the stuff going on in the world, in the nation, or whether it's the stuff that just happened here locally this week.

But to get to know the power of God is to depend upon God as refuge and strength.

Because when we are weak, his power begins to surface and it becomes visible in our lives and experiential in our lives.

Deeply connected to this realization of the power of God is the presence of God, to which the psalmist turns to in verse 4.

Look, there's a river whose streams make glad the city of God.

What's the city of God?

I love that.

That's an amazing title, title of one of Augustine's writings as well.

You're the city of God.

And there's a stream that makes glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.

He dwells among his people.

We just sang that uh in the song.

He wants to inhabit the praises of his people.

So we gather on Sunday and we sing together.

Um he lives within us, he will not um, she will not fall because God is our help at the break of day.

You see that up on the screen.

And while all the chaos around us is happening, nations are in an uproar.

And even though nations and kingdoms might fall, that does happen, God lifts his voice and the entire creation melts.

Why?

Because he spoke it into being, he can also speak it into unbeing.

He has that power in his word.

One of the reasons why we give attention to the reading of scripture and the study of scripture.

But the idea with this psalm is to take our eyes off of the fearfulness of the storm around us or the giant we're facing, and turn our eyes into a much greater, much more powerful force than any of that.

The one at whose beckon call, literally, nations fall or rise.

The Lord Almighty is within us, the God of Jacob.

This one specifically, not just any God, not just God as you imagine God to be, but Yahweh.

The one who's revealed himself to us so long ago.

Wherever you see that capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, the translation is from the name, the personal name of God.

So here he is, God Almighty.

Um El Yan, uh, this one who is above all.

He's the most high.

You know, which is really, again, he's the contrast is to be, you thought that was great, that thing that happened was powerful.

That thing you saw, that thing you experienced, whatever.

You thought that was powerful.

But compared to God, it's nothing.

And I think that's important for us to remember.

We sing this psalm, Luther said, the one who wrote Mighty Fortresses are God, based on Psalm 46.

He says, we sing this psalm to the praise of God.

Because God is with us and powerfully and miraculously preserves and defends his church and his word against all fanatical spirits, against the gates of hell, against the implacable hatred of the devil, and against all the assaults of the world, the flesh, and sin.

Do you see what Martin Luther was trying to point out there?

That is, there is no power in the entire reality that exists, the entire universe greater than God's power.

There's nothing greater than this God we worship.

And so we trust him.

We run to him.

He is our refuge, he is our strength, and he will accomplish his purpose.

We see this in verses 8 and 9 as well.

Come see the works of the Lord, the desolations he has brought on the earth.

Your mind probably went, oh, that's not good.

What's God doing that for?

The idea here is Hebrew poetry is written in such a way that we will begin to see, catch a greater glimpse of who God is, how powerful He is.

So I'm the blockhead that takes everything literally all the time.

I'm the guy that needs to be reminded to think poetically once in a while, and to allow these images to actually be images as well, and to point to something greater than just themselves.

But yes, the Lord could speak and the entire world could melt.

And that's how powerful he is.

He makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth.

Bring peace, Lord, we pray.

We want to join him in his love for justice, his love for peace.

He breaks the bow and shatters the spears, another way of, and that burns the shields with fire.

Another way of saying his ultimate desire is peace.

Not just warfare.

His ultimate desire is to bring the purposes of God then, just like as you know, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good.

He sends the rain on the just and the unjust.

There's some stuff that goes on globally and in a world-wide kind of a way.

And we who call ourselves the people of God who trust and hope in God sometimes wonder, why did this happen to us?

Why did this we belong to Him?

How did come He let that happen?

And yet, as we get through some of these things, we start to see the glory of God emerging or blooming or blossoming on the horizon.

As the common grace, just as visible as the common grace of God has been this last week throughout our entire community, believer and unbeliever alike, grabbing a shovel, filling a truck with, you know, trash bags and stuff like that, the common grace of God on display in all people, right?

And how much more so, the people of God who turn to God and say, even in our suffering, even in our loss, we will yet praise Him, we will yet give Him glory.

And those of us that didn't suffer in any way from this, run to the rescue.

Make sure we're continually propping up and encouraging those who have suffered, propping up their arms, holding their arms up, if you will.

Allow me to use that metaphor to serve them, to love them, and to continue to encourage them or pour courage into them.

David Atkinson says, as we not see the glories and tragedies of national and global events and the joys and the pains of day-to-day family life as finding their meaning only within human history or personal biography.

It's not about my story.

Their true meaning lies within the purposes of a God who has made himself known as loving and holy, as personal and infinite, as creator and redeemer, as sustainer and ruler.

And what David's trying to say and get us all to think here is just change our perspective.

We constantly think it's all about us.

You know?

Everybody understands that this happens.

We're all sort of aware of this.

That's why books like He's Just Not That Into You, you know, sell so well is because we can see narcissism in other people.

We just rarely see it in ourselves.

You know, it's it's really glaring, you know, as the speck in someone else's eye.

But it's invisible as the board in my eye, isn't it?

And so I need to be reminded that every little thing that's happening to me is in the hands of an Almighty God who is my refuge and strength.

He hasn't promised that there's just, you know, in this world, until he comes, uh he hasn't promised there won't be a storm or a giant to face.

He's just promised to be with me.

He's promised to be my refuge and my strength.

And to be, it says, an ever-present help.

What that means is ready access to the help I need.

The God of the universe.

Ready access?

I don't have to cajole, I don't have to scream and yell and wail.

He actually hears my first cry before I even utter it.

Because he knows what's going on in my heart, my life, and he knows what's going on in your heart and your life as well.

God knows that his presence becoming central in our lives is what will lead us to know his unrelenting love, his unquenchable joy, and his unshakable peace.

Fourthly, and finally, the peace of God we see here in Psalm 46.

Be still and know that I am God.

We could camp out right there for easy for an hour.

I don't know how to be still.

My grandmother used to call me itchy because I'm always in motion, you know.

And I was like, I was the kid at the table, just drumming on the table the whole time, you know.

There we are at the Shione's with the fam, and you know, and I have no sense of rhythm.

I'm the worst guy in the world with any kind of rhythm at all.

But I'm like, you know, and I'm like six.

My my Grammy, my my grandma doll, her name was her Pearl Dole was her name.

Anyway, she was like always like, stop that, Jimmy.

You know, and and she'd call me itchy because I couldn't never stop, you know, moving.

But sometimes I don't I don't know what it takes for me to do that, to stop and be still.

And it's hard for me to, and maybe you relate to that, I don't know.

But this is the call, this is the summons.

See?

And what what I've done is I sadly is I've become really busy trying to figure it out myself or trying to take care of it myself, or trying to be my own sovereign.

And what he wants me to do is be still, so that I can hear his still small voice and know that he is God.

The psalmist is speaking prophetically here in these last couple of verses.

He's he's speaking in oracular fashion, that is an oracle, as if it's God speaking.

And he says, Be still and know that I am God, not you, not the storm, not the tornado, not the rubble.

You know?

Not the threatening virus, not the fear of who might be in political power.

None of that is God.

See?

We have to set our eyes higher than all of that.

And he's calling us to do that.

Be still and know that he is God, and that ultimately his purposes are that he will be exalted.

Among the nations, yeah?

Um in all the earth.

That means right here in this heart, right here in this mind, right here in this, and this is important in times like this, right here in this imagination.

Uh, because we can write these narratives so often.

The Lord Almighty is with us, he reminds us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge.

In other words, this specific one is the one.

The God who is there, as Francis Schaefer called Yahweh.

Not the God that we imagine God to be, not the God that some people somewhere have created in their own minds, but the God who is really there.

Um, that's really amazing and awesome.

Rebecca McLaughlin has a book that we're reading in the Greenhouse Leadership Training Program here at the Village Chapel.

It's an amazing book.

Even if you're not in the greenhouse program, I highly recommend this book to you: Confronting Christianity.

She says she writes because she believes in a greater truth than my small mind can fathom, a deeper desire than my weak heart can muster, and a closer relationship than the best human marriage can attain.

She's talking about her relationship with God.

And she's saying that God sees and knows so much more than any of us could possibly see and know.

That God's delighting in his people, especially when they delight in him.

So as we gather together to worship him and to praise him, what we're wanting to do is to train ourselves up in finding our hope in Jesus Christ.

In life and in death, no matter when, whether where everything is going smooth and it's smooth sailing, or whether the chaos of storms or the storm's on the horizon and looming and we see it coming, it doesn't matter.

That we fix our sails in the direction of the Lord Himself.

We set our sails to be with Christ and to be have him at the center.

Have you felt the mountains tremble this week?

Has your world been shaken or turned upside down?

Are you longing for enduring peace when everything you thought could you could count on has been shaken or slid into the sea?

By now, most of you have figured out that turning within doesn't really satisfy us.

I mean, we hear this all the time.

Look inside yourself, all that sort of thing.

It's just nonsense.

I can't save myself.

We need outside help.

And you see it even in the world in which we live right now, even in our own city.

Look at all the outside help that's coming.

People's houses have been reduced to rubble and a pile of bricks.

And look at the outside, look at the outside help as people flow in.

It's so beautiful.

And on a much larger scale, much grander scale.

Here comes the God who will be our refuge and strength with salvation in his hand.

To put hope and courage in our hearts, to also put compassion in our hearts, that we might rise up and bear the family resemblance.

Run to the rescue and be our Father's hands, be our Father's feet as we run to help others.

When we come to the end of our rope and our resources, we need outside help.

I'm here to remind you that God is your refuge, that God is your strength, and He has an ever-present, ready access to Him.

You have that ever-present help in time of need.

We'll close with this John Stott quote.

The nature of salvation is peace or reconciliation, peace with God, peace with man, peace within.

The source of salvation is grace.

God's free favor, irrespective of any human merit or works, his loving kindness to the undeserving.

And this grace and peace flow from the Father and the Son together.

I loved it when Punk when Punkchar said, Hey, there's a hundred people in my front yard.

Don't send anymore.

And you've probably seen hands on Nashville, their little tweets are going like, Yeah, I think we got enough.

Y'all can tamp it down a little bit now.

I love the overflowing piles and you know, as big as the pile of bricks are, man, the pile of hope and help is bigger.

Just in the common grace of God at work in our city.

How much more could he do through people who are willing and eager to join him in the work he wants to do in the world?

And would allow, open our hearts, open our minds, open our relationships up to God to put them all under his care, to find in him our refuge and strength and the ever-present help that we need in time of trouble.

Let's pray, Lord, thank you.

We turn to you because of who you are, Almighty God, most high.

That you would even notice us, it blows my mind because we're just starting to learn how big your universe is.

And that you would even notice this small city on this small planet in this small solar system.

And that you would love us so much that you would come on the run with rescue for us in the person and work of Jesus.

We fall to our knees.

We say, You are worthy.

We turn to you.

We place our hope and confidence in you.

Whether it is in life or in death, we trust you.

Amen and amen.