When was the last time you faced a real storm in your life? Think back about what you went through, and about how you got through that time of real difficulty.
Today, we’ll give some serious thought to how it is we can weather the bigger trials that come our way. When we face hardship, when we’re unsure; when we’re not sure who we can trust, when the world is caving in around us, what can we do? What can we do? Where can we turn?
Someone has said “Inside every large problem is a series of small problems struggling to get out.” Felling one giant often only unleashes a boatload of other adversity.
Often we wonder why God allows the storms to enter our life but as Erwin Lutzer, pastor of Moody Bible Church in Chicago, has said. “God often puts us in situations that are too much for us so that we will learn that no situation is too much for him.”
Now, the author of the Psalm that was read today by ______ was King David, King David was a complicated man. His choices in life led him to a lot of dark places.
Psalm 62 was a Psalm written by David during a hard time in his life! The background of Psalm 62 is that anguishing time of Absalom’s rebellion. Absalom, his son, had been attempting to take the throne away from David and the conspiracy was growing stronger each day. It was a very disturbing and distressing time for David!
When we face tough times, David’s song that we know as Psalm 62, gives us some good insight and direction.
God our Rest
5 Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.
Hardship leads to stress, stress that we can feel as weariness in our bones. We all know this time of year how we can get so cold that it feels like we’re chilled to the bone. Well, we can be tired to the bone too.
Recently as I recovered from a serious back injury, once the pain was pretty much all gone, there was still about a month when I was very easily fatigued. At first I was tired by 3 in the afternoon, then it became later and later until I was tired at the normal time of night.
The issue is: when we need rest, where do we go? Where do we go? Entertainment is a great opiate. There is now so much leisure entertainment in our world that we could spend, if we wished, most of every day consuming movies and TV shows. It is a real temptation. Netflix is a great and cheap source of entertainment, but it can also provide us endless distraction from really getting the rest we need.
David could never have imagined the kinds of distractions we have today, but in this psalm he spoke to his own soul in his own day and time. And what did he say to his soul? “Find rest in God alone; my hope comes from Him”.
There’s this connection between rest and hope that David knows deeply. I love the Jewish notion of Sabbath. The Sabbath is not thought of as a time to recover from the trials of the previous week. It is understood to be preparation for what lies ahead. It is rest that points to renewal. It is a pause in the week where we put our focus firmly on God, God who is the source of our hope.
By May I’ll have been at the mission for 27 years. That’s a good chunk of time. And I look forward, if God wills it, to continuing to serve here for a long time still. But I’m due for some rest. So at some point in the next year I’ll be taking what’s called a Sabbatical, where I’ll be away for some months to rest, to focus on interests I’ve not pursued for some time, and to grow deeper in my relationship with God.
I will find my rest in God alone. And I’ll have my vision for the future and my hope for things to come restored.
God our Rock and Refuge
6 He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. 7 My salvation and my honor depend on God ; he is my mighty rock, my refuge. 8 Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge. Selah
For King David, everything in his material world was topsy-turvy. The kingdom that had been given to him, the realm of his influence was under serious attack from an interloper who was, you guessed it, a relative.
Anyone here experience stress from those closest to you? Whatever the source of our trial, there is One we can look to, to be our anchor. The past seven years has been rough for Barb and me.
First her father died, then my brother went through a five year process that ended with his passing, then this past year my father died. I was very close to both my brother and my father, and it still hurts a lot to this day. I went from being the youngest in my family, to being the patriarch, the eldest surviving male. Not a happy thing. Not at all.
And the only way I’ve been able to cope emotionally, if I’m being honest, is to keep looking to my Anchor, to set my thoughts on God whose love and commitment to me generates in me a response of love and commitment to Him, no matter what.
It’s said that in order to realize the worth of the anchor, we need to feel the stress of the storm. To appreciate how deep and solid God’s loving presence is in our lives, we need to go through rough – sometimes seriously rough patches.
And we have something to learn from Christians who have experienced much loss, much pain and yet have known God’s presence. We have something to gain from those who have known God’s accompaniment during the worst times,
It’s important to note that David says: “The Lord alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress”. That’s quite a statement. That means that David looked to the right place for his strength.
We often can try to rely on people when things get rough, and to a certain extent people can and do provide us with support and help. But this goes much deeper than support and help. This passage is about God being the singular ROCK of our life. The only place we look to for salvation. The only fortress we head to when storms start a-stirring.
I don’t know if that had always been true for David. He, like many of us, may have sought from people what only God can give us, and then been fiercely disappointed.
I’ve seen family relationships and friends break apart because one person could not be the fortress in the storm for another. One person could not be that anchor due to issues in their own lives.
When we have expectations of others that are simply not realistic, if we insist that others should be something in our lives that they cannot be, we will force a rupture in that relationship. May it never be for us in this room. May we always go to God for the things that only God can provide us.
I recently read the story of a man who had just brought a boat and kept it in the harbor on the coast of Florida. A hurricane warning went into effect, the storm was brewing just off the coast and was about to hit land.
He didn’t know what to do. He have made a sizable investment in this boat and he didn’t want to loose it so he asked for advice. A friend, who had experience with both boats and hurricanes gave him this advice.
“Don’t attempt to tie the boat to the dock or anything on land. It will be torn to pieces. Here’s what you need to do. Your only hope is to anchor deep. Take four anchors, and drop them deep and the boat will ride out the storm.”
That’s good advice spiritually as well. If you don’t want to drift away, if you want your life to mean something, if you want to leave your children an example of what it means to be a Christian, anchor deep in your fellowship with Christ.
It’s also true that how we choose to walk with Christ when times are good, or things are flowing smoothly, will inform our response to hardship when it comes. If I practice journeying closely with Jesus when the waves are calm, it will be second nature to go to Jesus when the seas get rough.
9 Lowborn men are but a breath, the highborn are but a lie; if weighed on a balance, they are nothing; together they are only a breath. 10 Do not trust in extortion or take pride in stolen goods; though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them.
This speaks not of the value of human life, which is not possible to overvalue. Pause. It speaks of how vulnerable we are. Many of us have known real suffering and hardship. But have we known the total breakdown of our society, the systems we rely upon for what we consider ‘normal’ life?
Few of us know the severe poverty that is a desperate problem throughout the world. Among the 4.4 billion people who live in developing countries, three-fifths have no access to basic sanitation.
Almost one-third are without safe drinking water; one-quarter lack adequate housing; one-fifth live beyond reach of modern health services; one-fifth of the children do not get as far as grade five in school and one-fifth are undernourished. It is a desperate situation for many, and it gives me some relief to know that Christians are on the forefront of caring efforts to alleviate suffering around the world.
We are vulnerable. Those who are poor are perhaps considered more vulnerable, but the seeming ‘strength’ of those who are wealthy is an illusion.
Steve Jobs had nearly unlimited wealth as the head of Apple Computers, but he was just as vulnerable and helpless as anyone on the planet once his terminal cancer took root.
All our wealth does is try to insulate us from the vagaries, the real downs of life. I think King David, as one who had great privilege and power, wrote this from the wisdom of seeing all that privilege shrivel. “Though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them”. Amen? Amen.
11 One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: that you, O God, are strong, 12 and that you, O Lord, are loving. Surely you will reward each person according to what he has done.
Strong and loving. Loving and strong. What does God do with His strength? What does the One who has the most power, the greatest wealth, the highest glory – what does He do with all that extraordinary power?
He uses it to love. And He uses it to lift us up from the miry clay. He uses it to woo us, to guide us, to point us to the powerful truth that life is a gift not intended to be lived selfishly. It is intended to be lived generously.
And so the reward we receive from God in glory will be directly linked to what we have done here on this planet in the short time we’re given. This is not about going to heaven or going to hell.
It’s not about finding peace with God. Salvation is not something that can be earned by good works. That’s Christianity 101. We’re saved by grace and grace alone through faith in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. I hope you know that you know that that is true.
Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.
So the reward we receive according to what we have done is not about salvation. It is though perhaps connected to how we choose to live. What that reward is is unclear. But it will be the Saviour’s great joy to dispense that reward, that blessing.
Perhaps, if we consider Matthew 25, the reward will be knowing that when we fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited those in prison, we were meeting up with Jesus Christ long before we might have if we had not responded to the needy.
Perhaps it will be that when we actually arrive in heaven and see Jesus, we will recognize Him, because we’ve already looked upon Him in those we have reached out to and loved who others simply walked by. We’ve already seen His face in the thirsty, the stranger, the sick.
When we face hardship, when we’re unsure; when we’re not sure who we can trust, when the world is caving in around us, what can we do? What can we do? Where can we turn?
Let us decide to turn to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. Let us begin now, when things are perhaps not so bad.
Let us get in the habit of going to Jesus with everything, trusting Him in what we might call smaller things, so that once bad times come – and they will come, of that we can sadly be assured –
Let’s learn to trust Him in smaller things so that so that when hard times come, we will not turn our backs on Him, but instead we will choose then to run to Him, to run into His arms and cleave to Him.
And may none other take the place in our hearts that belongs to God alone. May the living God be the One we turn to when we need an anchor.
May Jesus be the One we turn to when we need a refuge. May we testify that He alone is the Rock of our salvation. Amen.
