Psalm 91: Sheltered

 Okay, friends, if you would grab a seat and find a copy of God's word under your chair or in the chair back in front of you. And turn with me to Psalm 91. Psalm 91. As you find your seat, I especially wanna say a thank you to our deacons. And to so many yesterday who did an amazing job at Trinity's second wedding in this place.

They turned this place around for a beautiful wedding. They turned it around again for a beautiful reception, and last night, late into the night, they turned it around again. For worship this morning. So would you join me in just saying thank you to the deacons and to all the guys who help. Thank you.

Also, uh, just a little housekeeping here for just a second. If you are in, uh, Trinity Community Group, would you raise your hand? You're in a community group in this church. Okay, great. I see all those hands. Thank you. Anybody else? Great. Thank you. Okay. If you did not raise your hand, you are invited to my house.

My wife is outta town so I get to do this on September the seventh. She's in on the gig I promise. September 7th. We're gonna launch at least three new community groups and we have found that the best way to do it is for you just to come and we're gonna potluck at my house so the crazier the meals, the better.

And bring your potluck to our house. And I'm dead serious. If you are not in a community group, yes, you, yes, you please come to our house. And so keep your eyes peeled. We'll, uh, share more about it in the weeks to come, but we want every person in this church to be in a community group. One of the primary means of shepherding in this church, whether you're a member or a guest, is to be shepherded through the life and community of a community group.

And so please plan to join us at our house on September the seventh. Thanks. Now, if you're willing and able, we turn our eyes to Psalm 91. So would you stand with me as we read Psalm 91, together,

he who dwells in the shelter of the most high will abide in the shadow of the almighty. I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God, and whom I trust, for he will deliver you from the snare of the Fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He'll cover you with his opinions and under his wings you will find refuge.

His faithfulness is a shield and a buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness. Nor the destruction that wastes at noon day, a thousand may fall at your side, 10,000 at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the recompance of the wicked because you have made the Lord your dwelling place the most high.

Who is my refuge? No evil shall be allowed to befall you. No plague shall come near your tent. For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways on their hands. They will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent.

You will t trample underfoot because he holds fast to me and love. I will deliver him. I will protect him because he knows my name when he calls to me, I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will rescue him and honor him with long life. I will satisfy him and show him my salvation. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but God's word stands forever.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated, please, and would you use your bulletins on the bottom of the page where God's word is to help pray with me this corporate prayer for illumination. As we listen to the sermon together, would you pray with me, blessed Lord who caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning.

Grant us so to hear them read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. Which you have given us in our savior, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Jim Elliot was a young husband who took his wife, Elizabeth, and there they had a young daughter with four other families to the jungles of Ecuador. To preach the gospel and to serve the Ani people, the Anka Indians, they had learned the language they prepared for many years. They were Wheaton College graduates, and they decided that they were gonna go and give their lives for the sake of the nations in Ecuador.

And on January 8th, 1956, when the four fathers who led this group, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint Pete Fleming. Roger Ian, ed McCauley. They had found a place that they called Palm Beach on the riverbank of the RA River, and they had decided to set up camp there in order to better reach this very remote people.

And on January 8th, 1956, all four men were speared to death by the people that they came to preach the gospel to, and it left Jim's wife, Elizabeth. Reeling painfully aware of every security and every safety net she'd ever had, had just dissipated beneath her feet. And there she stood back at the base camp with her 10 month old daughter, Valerie, wondering why in the world if God is our refuge?

Where were you on that river bank? Where was he in that moment? Elizabeth would later answer her own question when she wrote, God is God because he is God. He is worthy of my trust and obedience, and I will find rest nowhere else, but in his holy will a will that is unspeakably beyond my own understanding.

And they're in the midst of a watching world who had caught wind of these Americans who had died. Years later, Elizabeth and Valerie went back at the invitation of the Ani people. They went back and she lived among the very people who had killed her husband, and she shared the gospel with them, and she gave her life to these people.

And many of the people in the Ani Indian tribe came to Christ, including some of the very killers who were on that riverbank who killed those four men that day.

She later wrote a book that many of you I'm sure have read called Shelter of the Al of the Almighty, because Jim's favorite verse was Psalm 91, verse one.

He who dwells in this shelter of the most high will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. Why would she go back? How could she trust again these people after such an incredible heartbreak? How could she leave her family back in America to go back after such suffering? And that question is what Psalm 91 opens up for us.

It's a question that cracks the door open to ask us the question, where is your refuge? But to understand how to answer that question according to the text as the psalmist gives it to us, you have to understand why the Psalm is found here in Psalm 91. We've learned in the past several weeks that the Psalms are divided into books.

And if you look at the top of Psalm 90, we skip Psalm 90 because Mike Ford back in 2017 preached on Psalm 90 when he was the RUF Campus minister at the University of Arkansas. So we go from 89 to 91, and if you look at the top of verse 90 in your Bible, as you see what it says up there, it says book four.

What does that mean? Book four of the Psalms goes from chapter 90 through 106, and it was compiled for people who were reeling after watching their kingdom destroyed. They had been people who had tasted the beauty of Solomon's temple. They had been a people who had lived through the Babylonian exile, taken away from Jerusalem.

Imagine if people came in with armed weapons and they came and they took us out of Oklahoma. They took us out of the United States and they made us go and live in a foreign country. That was the scene for what it was like for these people to live in exile. And so at the book of 93, uh, uh, book three, it just goes downhill all the way.

They move you into despair. And you heard Nathan Duke preached several weeks ago, the saddest psalm, Psalm 88, where they are just left in despair. And then Psalm 89 says, you've broken your covenant, it seems, where are you? And leaves them just with a little bit of hope pointing us. To the Savior. And then book four bursts out with this prayer of Moses in Psalm 90.

And then Psalm 91 just piles on to give people in exile hope that they are indeed covered by the Lord's protection and sovereign care over each of our life. And if there's ever a book of the Psalms that we should know as God's people in a world where the church is living in exile, it is book four. And so as you look at Psalm 91, you see this tapestry of the Old Testament covenants in Genesis 15.

We find that God's sworn protection is over Abraham's offspring, and you see vestiges of that language here. In Exodus 19, you see God's care and defense of his people at Cyan. You see aspects of those metaphors here in Deuteronomy 32. He says, he covers us and bears us up as though on wings of eagles.

You see that also when he covers us by his opinions, his wings as veiled reference to the Holy of Holies that you heard. Bill and Melanie read from earlier, and of course the refuge here is. The covenant redeemer, the Lord Jesus himself. He is the true Israel, perfectly indwelling in God's shelter without sin in the wilderness.

Jesus was the one who endured what scholars called the Messianic testing, where Satan, of all the passages of scripture that Satan could have quoted, he quotes from Psalm 91 because this psalm was Jesus' Psalm before it was ours. He knew. Jesus knew this Psalm as our covenant head. Jesus was the one who absorbed the arrows and the pestilence and the judgment that we deserve so that we could find rest, rest, and safety under the refuge of his wings.

Jesus is our eschatological. There's the 50 cent word of the day. He is the in times refuge. Jesus is the one who is coming to make everything new. He is securing a final salvation for us beyond death. In his kingdom. And so as you read Psalm 91, would you hear the psalmists call to you through the corridors of history to say, listen, and would you hear your tender?

Father in heavens call to you to say, run to the refuge of my son and to help us get there. The first thing he does is he shows us point number one, our need for a true. Refuge. Look what he says in verses one and two. He says, he who dwells in the shelter of the most high will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.

And I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God, and whom I trust, this Psalm does not say, if danger comes to you, it assumes it will. And frankly, of course we know this. You know this from your own experience. Every one of us constructs a shelter, a place where we hide and we shield ourself from the chaos, the disappointment, the pain in our life.

What are the some, uh, a young man came to me this week about the joys of ministry. What is it like to be a minister? How can I begin to think about ministry? And as I've reflected on that conversation, I thought one of the privileges of ministry is being invited in to your inner symptoms. And being able to share with you the burdens of so many of my and of your false shelters that we've built, and walking you through the pain of recognizing that all those false shelters are actually what are keeping you safe.

But it is the Lord's finished work ultimately, that delivers us and protects us. Listen, we have, it seems everything at our fingertips. We have safety in relationships. We think that if we're loved enough, we'll finally be secure. Some of us put it in planning and control. If we can just get our schedules, if we can outmaneuver things, we can be able to address what's going wrong.

Some of us in this room are numbing ourselves. Some of you're addicted to drugs. Don't look like you are, but I know some of you are and you gotta fight to get help. Through Narcotics Anonymous, through the help of counseling in the church. Some of you men looked at pornography last night and you're addicted by it.

And as I mentioned that your heart starts to beat and you feel I wasn't there. I'm not looking over your shoulder, but I know enough of your stories to know that you have numbed yourself. That is, you're numbing yourself from the pain. These are the false shelters that we build for ourselves, thinking that somehow, some way we'll be secure.

Psalm 91 is not about self-made fortresses. The psalmist's language is personal. In Psalm 32, he says, you are a hiding place in Psalm 1 21. The Lord is your keeper. He's your shade at your right hand, and when you read, you are the shelter of the Almighty. Oh. It is like our soul's ache for home to be truly safe.

How many of you grew up gonna summer camp anybody? Grew up gonna summer camp here. I see some of those hands. I, I went to a camp called Camp Longhorn in South Texas, not far from the Guadalupe River when I was growing up and at Camp Longhorn when I was eight years old, my parents dropped me off for three weeks.

I was that kind of kid, I guess.

And I remember for three weeks I was crazy homesick. And my parents would send me packages. There'd be letters and I could see my mom's handwriting and I would just cry in my book reading my mom's handwriting 'cause I wanted her to be there. I hated being at camp my first year. I was so homesick and three weeks was a long time for an 8-year-old.

And I remember they sent me one time, um, one of those old bottle rockets that you pump up with water, you know, and you put the pressure and it, the old timey bottle rockets, like, where are those today? Those are awesome. And I remember in my free time, I'd go shoot that bottle rocket off, hoping it would go, it would go so high to go get my parents and tell them to come pick me up.

I ached for home. And when you read the psalmist, you can hear, you can hear the psalmist aching for a home, Lord, I long to dwell in your shadow, which means I'm near you. I'm in your presence. I want you to be home. Notice the kind of language that he uses. He uses these intimate covenant names most high, which is El Elon in Hebrew, it speaks to his kingship and his sovereignty over all of creation.

He says, almighty Al Shada. That is his omnipotence and is all sufficient in all powerful nature. He says, Yahweh the Lord. That's his covenant loyalty as our covenant redeemer. And finally he says, my God, Elohim, that's his nearness. And here's the tension. Many of us, many of us struggle to place our shelter in the gospel.

Where are you seeking your shelter? That's what the Psalm gently asks, what are you trusting in to keep you safe? Are you willing to step out from that small paper, thin, fragile shelter of your own making and abide in the shelter in the shadow of the almighty? And this is where the gospel breaks in as you read the Psalms, not just in Psalm 91, but in all of them.

The good news is that the most high, the Almighty is the God who offers himself as a shelter. Amen. Remember when you read these psalms, you read them through the lens of Jesus. They all point to him,

he the Lord Jesus Christ, stepped into our storm tossed world. Jesus. Lived out Psalm 91. He's the perfect Israelite. This is why Satan quoted Psalm 91 at Jesus, because Jesus perfectly embodies the Psalm as he does every one of them. Certainly this one. And on the cross, Jesus is the only one who perfectly dwelt in the shadow of the Almighty.

But it wasn't a shadow of comfort, was it? It was a shadow of utter abandonment at high noon when Jesus died at high noon. Why high noon? So that you would see the contrast. The world goes dark. And it wasn't the shadow of the father's presence, it was the shadow of the father's wrath. He dwelt, oh, he dwelt in the shadow of the Almighty so that you might be able to dwell in the shadow of the Almighty, not in the shadow of his wrath, but in the shadow of his embrace and of his love.

And would some of you lower. Your deeply held sacred cows, would you slit their throats? Metaphorically speaking, would you lay them down at Jesus's feet and trust in him and him alone gloriously complete? Listen, your image, your social media feed, your, your bank account, all that stuff, of course, is important for life and thing.

Well, some of it is for life. But would you lay down those things that have stolen your identity? You can have your identity stolen by thieves. Like I had one time in my early twenties. Or you can have your identity stolen slowly by the way that you just prostitute yourself to a thousand shelters that never protect you.

Jesus is the living shelter. He's the true fortress that cannot be shaken. And so the question for us is how do we build our lives underneath this shelter? How do we run to Jesus? And would you actually run to him because the gospel doesn't promise us a storm free life. I can mention so many names in this room.

Doesn't promise a storm free life through the travails of divorce, through the travails of keeping our grandchildren safe from treatment like Bill and Kathy Ladder doing right now, is they fight for their granddaughter in prayer through the life of so many of us who are struggling. He doesn't promise a storm free life, but what he does promise us is he promises us a storm proof shelter.

In Christ himself, which takes us to the second part of the Psalm in verse three, down through verse 13, the promise of protection in a very perilous world. He continues. He will deliver you from the snare of the Fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his opinions, and under his wings you will find refuge, and later you will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrows that fly by day.

In this poetic sweep, he covers all of the threats of the ancient. World, and we do so many things to protect ourselves and of our families. We have more ways to protect ourself now than in the history of the world. We have alarm systems, we have insurance policies. We have health apps, we have security cameras.

We have neighborhood watch groups. We have cell phones. Listen, we can do everything we possibly can to eliminate the threat, but still your anxieties rain. Why? Because those are false shelters, and ultimately you have to place your faith again and again and again in the gospel. Why do we always talk about the gospel in this church?

Because why do you always forget it, and why do I?

We get, we see the headlines, we get a call.

We think about that. You know, if you're a Wendell Berry fan like I am, you think about his most famous poem, the Piece of Wild Things, which begins when despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound of what my life or my children's lives might be. I go and lie down. Where the wood Drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds, I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax themselves with the forethought of grief.

And there beneath the Dave line Stars waiting with their light. I'm free. Lauren and I read a, a article to our children this week that was. Uh, in the Atlantic Magazine and the article was titled What Kids Told Us About How to Get Off Their Phones. And, um, I think we partially read it to them so that Lauren and I would, or I would get off my phone, but.

Uh, one of the articles, uh, the article talks about how much we've, like, you've tried to over parent our kids. We don't ever let them go out and play. And it has this funny, there are real threats in the world, so don't hear me say that there aren't, but it has this interesting line that caught my attention.

It said, according to Warwick Cards, the author of How to Live Dangerously Kidnapping in the US is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised, on average for 750,000 years. Before being snatched by a stranger. And, and I thought about the fact that, that even the way that we protect our kids and don't, it's, it's a form of us trying to provide a shelter for them, a, a false shelter.

Sometimes our shelters aren't even necessary. Some of them are weak and some of them aren't quite necessary. And we spend a lot of our energy in ways protecting our children that actually might in fact be harming them. But the images here in Psalm 91 are so rich under his wings, like a hen gathering his chicks.

This points us, of course, to Jesus. Every metaphor in Psalm 91, you can go home and study every metaphor in Psalm 91, Jesus uses or is used by the apostles of the ministry of Jesus. Jesus said, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen, gathers her brood under her wings and you are not willing.

Or the language of a shield and a buckler shield is a big shield. A buckler is a little shield. In John 10, Jesus says, no one will snatch them outta my hand. No one is able to snatch them outta my father's hand. Why? Because you are protected behind the shield of his covenant presence. A thousand falling, but it will not come to you.

This is God's covenant picture of protecting his people during the plagues of Egypt. And Jesus says in John 17, in his high priestly prayer, prayer, while I was with them, I kept them in your name and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction.

Treading on the line in the serpent. You know, this is the image of Jesus's, uh, ultimate. Trampling down upon the serpent's head that you see in Genesis 15. In Colossians two, Paul writes that Jesus disarmed the rulers and the authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. Nothing can touch you.

That doesn't first pass through the hands of Jesus, who bears the scars of your salvation. Nothing can touch you. That hasn't passed through the hands of Jesus.

That's our promise of protection. Not about protecting you from all pain, but about keeping you through it. We have a deep need for a true refuge. We have a promise of protection in a very perilous world. In the final movement in verses 14 and 16, in love's assurance to our anxious hearts, suddenly it's God's voice that we hear.

Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him. This is God's voice through the psalmist. I will protect him because he knows my name. The true Israelite knows the name of Yahweh. When he calls to me, I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will rescue him and honor him with long life.

I will satisfy him and show him my salvation again. God doesn't say I will keep you from all trouble, but he says, I will be with you. In the trouble that is the deepest security because God is making everything new. We are saved already, but not yet fixed in the heavens, justified in his sight being sanctified in this life, and one day when he comes again, we will be fully glorified and we will be just like Christ without sin because of his finished work for us.

Forever a creature in the presence of the triune creator and the new heavens and new earth, singing and shouting with joy, that would stagger your imagination.

And this is the kind of hope that Elizabeth Elliot had when she could write that God is God and he is holy. Even when my husband gets killed on that riverbank, she could hold her 10 month old daughter, Valerie, and she could say, Valerie, we're going back. We're gonna live with those people. We're gonna give two years of our life to invest into them, and the trajectory of this Psalm extends beyond the experience that you've had in the past and invites you to have a new one with Jesus as your shelter.

He says, I will satisfy. Yeah, I will show you my salvation. If you're here and you're back to church for the first time, man, I just want you to imagine a thousand people giving you a standing ovation because of the courage it takes to come back to church. And I want you to know that it is not about perfection.

It is not about even performance. It is about trust and what Jesus has performed on your behalf. It's about resting in his finished work for you. And this is the invitation we have of Psalm 91. Elizabeth had hope and she went back because she knew that she dwelt in the shadow of the Almighty. And Psalm 91 reminds us that he is the fortress when every wall falls.

Jesus is the shadow under which the people of God will dwell forever. He is the refuge that no arrow can pierce because the Roman soldier has already done that through his side for us. So where's your shelter? If you know the story of Elizabeth and Jim, you know that Jim's most famous quotable line is?

He is no fool to give what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose. It's worth it. Lay down your false shelters and come to this table today confessing that only in Christ can you find your true shelter of every enemy, the enemy, even of sin and death that most attacks you. And you can hear Jesus say to you, I will be with you in trouble.

I will rescue you. I will satisfy you, and I will show you my salvation. Amen. 

Sermon transcript is computer generated.