I'm going to read from God's word for us.
Psalm 91, the passage that Corey is going to come and preach for us in a little moment.
This is Psalm 91.
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 will cover you with his pinions 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 noonday.
A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand,
but I will not come near you, but it will not come near you.
You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked.
Because you've made the Lord your dwelling place, the Most High who is my refuge.
No evil shall be allowed to befall you.
No plague 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 trample underfoot.
Because he holds fast to me in 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.
All right, well, with the busy summer travel and the balcony slightly quieter for a few weeks,
I'm going to stay down here if it's okay with the folks in the balcony.
Not that you get too much of a choice, but we are working our way through some of the psalms
across the summer and the mornings, and today we come to Psalm 91.
Psalm 91, psalms are sung prayers.
So they're songs written so that we may pray them, and they're there to give us a felt experience
of the Christian life.
So they're more than intellectual.
They're meant to get down to the bottom of the soul and give you a felt experience of the
Christian life.
They grip us emotionally, even more than intellectually.
There's a very famous church father by the name of Athanasius.
He was very important at the Council of Nicaea, and he wrote a letter in 357, a long time
ago, and this is what he said about the psalms.
He said, most scripture speaks to us, the psalms speak for us.
And so what he meant by that was that the psalms give you a tool to pray when you don't have
words to pray anymore.
They're there for that.
They're there to give you a way to pray.
So you can take the psalms and you can return them, the words of the psalm, in prayer to God,
and they give you something.
God provides something for you to be able to wrestle with your emotions before God.
And so that's very true today because today Psalm 91 is about danger.
It's about the dark forests of life.
It's about the protection that God promises to give us.
It's about how this world is very unsafe and very dangerous.
And you'll have seen that all throughout.
We've sang it.
We've read it all throughout the psalm as we've looked at it so far.
Dante, in Dante's Inferno and the Divine Comedy and just the opening line, he says,
midway upon the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, unexpected.
What he meant by that was that like everybody else, we are walking along through the path
of life and we find ourselves in dark forests that we don't expect.
We find ourselves in situations of danger and being very unsafe in so many different ways.
And it just seems to hit us.
It just seems to come to us.
And in the same way, this psalm is about all the different ways that you can be unsafe in
this life.
You can feel danger.
And so if you just cast your eyes over the psalm, I'll just highlight a few of those ways.
In verse 3, he mentions deadly pestilence, the problem of disease.
And then just after that, in verse 5, he talks about the terrors of the night, psychological
danger, psychological distress.
The middle of the night is the place where we terrorize ourselves the most with thoughts
of all that's going to go wrong the next day and with our lives and with this world.
And then after that, in verse 5, he mentions the arrow by day, violence.
And if you go down to verse 6 and verse 7, he talks about 10,000 people falling at your
right and left hand, war, disease, all the problems of the world that we know.
And then all the way down to verse 12, the angels will keep your foot from even striking
a stone, stubbed toes.
A couple of nights ago, I got up in the middle of the night and I caught my baby toe, my pinky
toe on the bathroom door, 3 a.m.
And that is a dark forest.
You know, it's a danger, but it's mentioned here.
There's all sorts of ways to be unsafe, to feel danger in this life.
And though our technology in so many ways, our craft, our ability to craft as modern humans
enables us to flee some of these dangers far more than the ancient person, we still face
all the same problems that ancient people faced and they like us.
And so we, of course, can speak today of physical disasters, natural disasters, the fires raging
across Canada this week, of accidents and tragedies of health and disease and pestilence and addiction
and aging and injury and the financial problems and dangers we face, job loss and material poverty, debt.
Some of us are crushed by debt.
Markets crashing and scams like never before.
The ancient person didn't have to face a scam like we do today.
Work and vocation issues.
Some of us are coming from toxic work cultures, poor management systems, career stagnation, burnout, failure,
lack of achievement in our lives.
But far more than that.
It's the relational and existential dangers that hurt the most.
So if you are here today and have experienced family breakdown, breakup, betrayal, loneliness, being bullied, bereavement,
that leads you towards existential and spiritual dangers like the loss of meaning, the loss of purpose,
the loss of a sense of what you exist for.
And that can cause you to wrestle with guilt and with shame and with despair like nothing else in life.
These are the dark forests.
These are the dangers.
And we could list seven or eight different categories just listed in the Psalm of different ways to struggle.
One of the great Scottish theologians and ministers, Thomas Boston, he wrote a book called Human Nature and Its Fourfold State
and talking about the state of corruption and sin that we live in.
Listen to how he describes this.
He says,
Who sees not a flood of miseries overflowing in the world?
Where can a person go where they shall not dip their foot or even their head or their ears all the way down into the bog of misery?
Everyone at home and abroad in city and country in palace and cottage is groaning under some one thing or another.
Now, it doesn't matter if you live in a palace or the worst little cottage in the city.
You face the same issues.
You can't escape it.
If you're a first century person, a fifth, sixth, seventh century person or a modern person, we all face the dark forest of danger.
Now, Psalm 91 verse 1 says that it is possible to dwell in the shelter of the Most High.
And that means that this psalm is saying to you that you as a believer can have an experience of peace in the midst of such an unsafe world, such a dangerous world, by resting in God.
So he's saying that he wants, the psalmist here wants every one of you to know that it is possible for every believer in God and Christ to have a life that has such an inner peace that you can face every danger in this world and still be at rest.
Do you have that?
Have you grown into that space yet as a believer, as a Christian?
Let's think about it.
Let's see first the reality of rest and peace.
Secondly, what this rest is and what it isn't.
And then finally, how you can get it.
Okay, so first, the real promise of inner peace and rest in a dangerous world.
Now, Psalm 91 is laid out in such a way that the psalmist wants you to find this, wants you to find inner peace and inner rest.
And so in verse 1 and 2, if you look at it, you'll see that it is in the first person.
So he says, I will say to the Lord, he who dwells or I who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, I will say to the Lord.
So the psalmist is saying in just the first two verses, this is really the bedrock of the psalm.
I have found this peace in my life.
I've grown into it.
And it's very similar to how Paul in the New Testament will say in Philippians 4, I learned the secret of contentment.
So there's a way of learning something over time to say, I've learned what it's like.
And then if you look at verse 3 to 13, he turns to you.
So in verse 3, he will deliver you.
Verse 4, he will cover you.
Verse 5, you.
And there are 11 second person pronouns in verse 3 to 13.
So he turns and says, I found this, this inner peace.
Now I want you to have it.
Verse 3 to 13.
And then finally in verse, at the very bottom, verse 4 to 16, you can see that it turns back to the first person.
And so in verse 14 to 16, he says, I will deliver him.
I will protect him.
I will be with him in trouble.
So at the very end, it goes from the psalmist saying, I have found this.
You can find this.
And then at the very end, God's voice comes in.
And you've got to get to the end to God's voice if you're ever going to know how to get this type of peace that the psalmist found.
And so it lays it out in such a way that he's trying to persuade you and trying to say, you can grow into this as well.
You can grow into inner rest and peace no matter the danger as a believer.
So what is it?
What is this rest?
What is this peace he's talking about?
So verse 1, he says,
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide, or the word can be translated, rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
The verb he picks, I dwell in the shadow of the Most High, it's a verb of residence.
I take my residence up in the shadow of God, in the shadow of God.
So it's got this connotation of sitting for a long time.
So the verb to dwell can also be translated to sit in the shadow, a residential term.
And so he's saying that I've discovered this peace by sitting in God's presence for a long time.
And what he really means by that is that being in God's presence is my home address.
It's where I go out from and return to at the end of the day.
It's the place I long to be the most.
So I think one of the ways to picture it, the way that the verbs are used in the Hebrew text here,
is something like a child sitting in the U.S., we would say crisscross applesauce.
Here I think we just say crisscross legs.
Every little school child comes home, they sit crisscross legs on a rug in the living room,
and they're nearby their parent there in the living room home, and they're in their parent's shadow.
And because that's where they feel the most safe.
And you never have to argue a child into thinking,
sitting on my living room rug, crisscross legs, in the shadow of my parent is a safe place.
It just is.
And in the same way, that's the connotation, that's the idea here,
is that sitting inside the residence of God's near presence is my home address,
and it is where I feel most safe.
Now, to the psalmist, God is invisible just like God is invisible to us.
So he's not saying here that he goes through some physical front door
and sits in the physical presence of God, and you say,
if only I had that, I would feel this way too.
But no, God is invisible to the psalmist as well.
And what he's saying, what is he saying?
How is he saying that this works for him?
You say, I want this inner peace.
What does it mean even to sit and dwell in the presence of God's safety?
Like this?
And the answer is found in verse 2 when he says,
I will say, my God in whom I trust.
And so there's the word for faith, trust.
So he's telling us that this is by trust, this is by faith,
that I sit like this in God's presence.
So he's describing this experience of a maturing believer,
where eventually you start to think that faith is not just something where I say,
I believe God exists, intellectually I'm there,
but faith eventually becomes trust, where you say,
believing in God and being near unto God at all times is just my normal life.
It's just who I am.
I've started to not think of faith as a leap of faith,
but think of faith as a position of life where I can't imagine any other way to be.
This is exactly what it means for me to just live.
I'm near him because I know he's near me.
I'm standing in his shelter.
I might go out from him, but I always come back.
He's my home address.
And so that's what I think he means here in verse 1 and 2.
It's really the bedrock and the foundation of the experience of a living faith
that offers real inner peace in your life.
And so all these metaphors that he's picked throughout the passage,
you can see just how strong they really are, how significant.
I'll just mention a couple of them.
He says shelter.
He says, he used the metaphor of refuge and fortress in verse 2.
Some of the metaphors are translated in such a way to make sure
that modern people aren't going to grasp what they mean
because he uses words like shield and buckler.
I'm sure all of you know what a buckler is.
I had to look it up.
What's a buckler?
In verse 4, he says, he is my shield and my buckler.
It's more precisely translated, he is my long shield, my body shield,
and my arm shield.
A buckler is an arm shield.
And so it's saying that he's such my protector, and I'm so near to him,
that he is a full-size shield that covers my whole body,
and he is my arm shield attached to my arm.
You know, that's all the shields you need.
If you have a long shield and an arm shield, you don't need any more shields.
And he's saying his faithfulness and constancy is that important to me.
He's that much of a shield to me.
Even the word refuge and fortress, a more connecting translation for us might be,
he is my mountaintop castle.
So if you want to know refuge, it's a fortress, a castle built on top of a mountain.
It's castle rock.
And he's saying, so I come back to him,
and I come into the gates of the mountaintop fortress,
and that's what God ultimately is to me.
And the metaphors are that thick, that big, that strong all throughout the passage.
Now, everyone here has the same story as the psalmist to some degree.
All of us, every human has the story.
It's the story of our souls.
And we all have a there, a dwelling place, a residence, a shelter, a mountaintop fortress,
where we say, if I could only get there, inside that residence, inside that circumstance,
inside that home, then I would be okay.
And that's the story of the human soul.
To find a space of inner peace that's arrived at by way of saying,
if only I could get this, then I'd be safe.
I'd be in the shelter of my most high.
And the natural, the problem, of course, is that the natural instinct,
and this is why the psalm exists,
because all of our natural instincts are to say that
the way I'm actually going to achieve inner peace is by way of circumstances.
And so the outside level of security or insecurity
is going to be the determination of my inside security or insecurity.
And so we look, of course, this is a tale as old as time, but it's true.
And it's here in this psalm because it's so true.
And so we look to circumstances and to other people and what they think of us
and to what our parents think and to our reputation and our achievements for security
before we have the bedrock of dwelling in the residence of God
as our security at the base of our hearts.
And so you might today in a room this size,
some of us today will be looking for security and safety and rest in our lives
from a relationship.
And maybe that's a relationship where a person was supposed to have been safe for you,
but they weren't.
And if that's happened to you,
then you will live life with remoteness, with a lack of fullness.
If that person was the one that you thought,
they are my bedrock, they are my dwelling place, they are my safety,
they are my residence and security.
Or it may be another kind of relationship that you've lost
because they've sinned against you in some great way.
And it may be that if they are your bedrock security,
then you'll never be able to forgive
and you'll struggle with bitterness all your days
and it'll really zap your life away from you.
For some of us today, it's going to certainly be achievements
that our dwelling place, our residence, we want to abide the most
and to be thought of by others as a person who has done well
and who is doing well.
And a couple of things are going to happen if that's true.
One is that it could be that if you find your security
and your achievements,
that it's actually very difficult for you to repent.
The calling of the Bible to repent and return to God
because you'll say,
my identity is so wrapped up in what I've done by way of performance
that if I say to God or anybody else that I'm not good enough,
then that's like pulling the rug out from my foundation.
My achievements are my everything,
but if my achievements are sinful and lacking,
then who am I?
And if you come today and say,
it's about what other people think about me,
and some of us will definitely be there
where that's where our security is and struggle.
So if we live our life in the fear of what everybody else thinks
as bedrock security and dwelling place,
what's going to happen to us is that you'll only be as secure
as the last idea you had of what somebody thought about you.
You'll only be as secure as the last decent sermon you preached.
But all the bad ones, you'll think,
who am I?
Am I worth anything?
See, if we find our dwelling place in the shelter,
mountaintop fortresses in the shelter of anything in this life,
as bedrock, but the most high,
then it'll leave us insecure.
And here's why God is better than all those things.
And we're told here because of the four names of God.
So in just the first two verses,
the four of the great names of God are listed.
So this is how he finds his rest in God.
He calls God most high, El Elyon, the most high God.
Because in the ancient Near East, there's tribal deities all around.
And so people are looking for security in the God of grain
and the God of fertility and the God of the storm and the God of war.
And we do the same thing, but by different names.
And he's saying that the real God is most high, supreme cosmic sovereign,
not just part of some hierarchy.
So this is accenting the Lord as incomparably other.
So if you're the most high, you have the vantage point and the power
and the authority to see everything and do anything to actually protect people.
And then after that, he calls them in verse, he calls them in verse one, almighty,
that famous Hebrew phrase, El Shaddai, which comes from verbs related to mountains.
And this has a connotation of God's ultimate power, absolute power.
And then just after that, he calls them in verse two, Lord, Yahweh, the divine name, Exodus three.
And the divine name Yahweh means I am who I am.
It's the language of God's self-existence.
He's utterly independent.
He doesn't need anything.
He is who he is.
He doesn't derive his being from anything else.
And then lastly, he takes after those three names,
God who is holy other, unlike these little tribal deities or the little gods we worship in our life.
The God who is most powerful, almighty, unlike the things we chase after.
And then the God who is of himself, he is who he is.
And then at the last in verse two, did you catch what he says?
He says, Elohim, my God.
And that means he's saying that the God who is most high, all powerful,
omniscient, omnipotent, all knowing, who is of himself, self-existence,
is also my personal Lord and has allowed me to come all the way into his presence
and sit underneath his shelter.
And let me say this to you in New Testament language.
Because this promise shows up again after Christ has come.
And this is how Paul says that in 2 Corinthians 6, 18.
He says, I will be a father to you.
You will be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord God almighty.
That's all four names.
Lord, covenant name, God, Elohim, almighty, El Shaddai in the New Testament.
And he says, and he will be a father to you.
You will be his sons and daughters.
And it's taking all four of those names listed here and saying, this is your God.
And you can dwell in the shelter of the most high in the exact same way that the psalmist here can.
And when you realize, when you will take a minute to let your heart and your mind rest on the reality that you have a God like that,
if you will make him your home address, you will be able to say,
there is a person in this cosmos, the sovereign, in whom I can find inner peace no matter what danger comes.
Now, some of us like me will respond to that and say, but I do not feel that peace.
It is not something I've come to in my life.
I've not learned it yet.
So, secondly, briefly, what is this promise and what is it not?
That's very important to address, and especially in verse 3 to 13.
So, in verse 3 to 13, he says, you can have this too, 11 times, second person plural.
This is for you.
He goes out of his way to say it over and over again.
And just listen.
If you cast your eyes across 3 to 13, I'll highlight just a couple of things.
Listen to how he says it.
He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler, a person who catches birds and nets,
and from pestilence, that's diseases that birds catch.
So, he's calling you a baby bird.
That's how he starts.
That's the metaphor.
And then, right after that verse 4, he says, God will cover you in his pinions.
There's another word that I certainly didn't know.
So, maybe you knew, but pinions are the long feathers of a bird.
And then, right after that, when it uses the word wings, that's the short feathers or the
tail feathers.
So, he's saying he will, in this metaphor of a mother bird, a hen, take all the wings
the bird has and cover you.
But then, as it goes on, you start to get this sense.
You know, verse 7, a thousand people may fall at your side by disease, by war, by violence,
but when you dwell in the house of God, when you make God your home address, you won't
fall.
No evil will ever come to you, only to the wicked, not to you.
And then, verse 9 and 10, because you've made the Lord your dwelling place, the Most High,
who, by the way, is my refuge.
He says, I have made the Lord my dwelling place, the psalmist says.
No evil will befall you.
Now, there is a way of reading this text.
It sure sounds like this, doesn't it, as you work through verse 3 to 13, where it sounds
like the text of saying, if I believe in God and make Him my dwelling place enough, if
I find my residence in the shelter of the Most High enough, then I will be protected in this
life from every type of danger there is.
No evil would ever happen to me.
I'll be safe in Him.
And that means that the logic is, if you're not safe today, if you have had danger come
into your life in any of the forms, relational danger, mental health danger, physical danger,
and boy, have we, then that means that you have not dwelt in the Most High enough, and
you have not had enough faith.
And if you read the text that way, then what's going to happen to you is this horrible consequence,
and the consequence is going to be that because harm and danger is coming to you and has come
to you, has befall, evil has befallen you, you will be forced to say either, I didn't believe
enough and I didn't dwell in His shelter enough, or this promise isn't true, one of the two.
And you will say, this God is not the God that I read about here, and you will start to withdraw
and pull away from God, and you will start to walk away from the faith.
And how many can tell that story, how many have had that story in their lives, because
they've read passages like this in that way.
And here's why we have to see today that this is not the point.
We could think of a place like Job, where Job is blameless, a lover of God who sat in
the shelter of the Most High all the days of his life, and his friends told him, the reason
all this terrible stuff has happened to you is because you didn't dwell in the shelter
of the God Most High enough.
And at the end of that story, remember, God says, you tell those friends they were wrong.
That's not the right way to read Psalm 91.
It's not the right way to read Job or life or history.
But even more than that, this is most important.
I think Satan only directly quotes one full verse, one full section of the Bible from the
Old Testament in his work we read about in the Gospels.
Only one.
Satan quotes Psalm 91 verse 11.
And you remember when he goes to Jesus, when Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, and he takes
him on top of the temple, and he says, now Jesus, throw yourself off, and the angels will
catch you.
Verse 11.
For he, your Lord, will command his angels concerning you, and not even your toe will get
stubbed on the way down.
He will protect you.
And Jesus says, do not test the Lord your God from the book of Deuteronomy.
In other words, what does Satan want you to do?
He wants you to read this Psalm that way.
He wants you to think that this Psalm teaches that if you would only trust enough, God would
protect you from every danger in life, and he will not even let your toe be stubbed.
And that means I'm in trouble.
And the reason that you know not to read it like that is because this is exactly how Satan
reads it when he goes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness in the New Testament.
He's trying to get you to think of it that way.
And so instead, how should we think about this promise, this prayer of rest and deliverance
for you?
And it says, here's the question.
Does God protect us from all sorts of problems and deliver us in this life from all types
of disasters?
The answer is yes.
Of course he does.
Boy, we don't even know all the ways God has delivered us from worse circumstances that
could have come.
And so, of course, God delivers us from all sorts of problems.
But what this Psalm is actually saying, to use the words of another preacher, this Psalm
is saying to you, he sometimes chooses to deliver you in this life, but he will always cover you.
He will always spread his wings over you.
He sometimes chooses to deliver you, but he will always cover you until the day he finally
delivers you.
That's the promise that's being conveyed here in the text.
And here's the key.
It's in verse 15.
And it's when God says this, when he calls to me, I will answer.
I will be with him in the trouble.
So this is how you know, because he says at the end, here's the big conclusion.
I will be with you in every danger, in every trouble that you face.
The promise is not, I will prevent every evil from your life.
It's when you walk through that dark forest, I will cover you.
If not, deliver you.
And one day I will deliver you.
And that means that what we're being told here is God uses your trouble to deepen your
rest.
He uses your trouble.
He uses the dangerous.
He uses the dark forest.
As difficult as this is for us to enter more deeply into the peace and rest of dwelling in the shelter of the Messiah, to learn how to abide in the residence of God and how to sit crisscross-legged in his shadow.
He uses the suffering to teach us that.
Simone Weil, famous philosopher of the 20th century.
I was brought to this quote this week by a writer.
She was a Marxist, a Parisian Marxist, a Bolshevik.
But later in life, she became an arch critic of communism.
And toward the very end of her very short life, she started to really connect with Christianity.
We don't know if she came to faith or anything like that, but she was very interested in Christianity.
And this is what she says.
I want to quibble with the first half of the quote, but I won't do that now, but I want you to hear the last half of the quote.
This is what she says.
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for suffering.
And you see, the first part's a little bit wrong, but the second part, the extreme greatness of Christianity is that it seeks a supernatural use for suffering.
So while everybody else, every other philosophy is trying to escape suffering, and boy, will God deliver us from it?
Yes.
What the brilliance of Christianity is, is that it tells you that there is a supernatural use for the dark forests.
And the Christian message doesn't promise escape from fearful circumstances in this life now, but that he will cover you until one day he delivers you.
And sometimes he does deliver you.
That's the promise of the psalm.
I have to finish.
How do you get it?
How do you get this in a rest?
Let me finish with this.
Verse 15, the very last section.
He tells us, he tells you, I will be with you in trouble.
He will cover you with his wings in every danger believer that you walk through.
But if you go back through the passage and say, verse 9, because you made the Lord your dwelling place, no evil will be allowed to befall you.
Verse 14, because you hold fast to him in love, he will deliver you.
Because you know his name, verse 14b, he will protect you.
When you call to him, because you have, he will answer you in that trouble.
Now, if you go through that and you say, if he will deliver me because I have always dwelt in the shadow of the almighty, boy, are we in trouble today.
Because we can all look at those conditions and say, that is not what I have done.
I don't even remember him on Sunday afternoon.
I have not dwelt in the shelter of the most high.
I've been far more anxious about everything in this life and chased after every little God more than him.
And that's why in verse 14 to 16, you got to look one more time and notice the language.
Because, notice the pronouns, he holds fast to me, God speaking.
I will deliver him.
I will protect him because he knows my name.
I will be with him in trouble because he calls to me.
Who is this talking about?
See, this is, at the very end of the psalm, God the Father starts to speak.
And if you think about it, who is the only one who has ever held fast to God the Father in love and dwelt in his almighty shadow at all times without remainder?
Who is the only one who, verse 14, knows the name of God?
Therefore, God the Father will protect him at all costs.
Who's the only one who calls out to God with perfection so that God the Father answers him and says, I will be with him in trouble.
And the answer, of course, is that this is language between God the Father and God the Son.
Jesus Christ himself that was to come.
And you say, if those are the conditions of safety in this life, dwelling in the shadow of the almighty at all times, I'm not safe.
I am unsafe.
And that is why it is so important to believe in the substitutionary atonement.
Because here, the Father is speaking of the Son, and it's saying that only Jesus is the one who could ever say, because I loved him, my God, Elohim, Yahweh, all my days in his shelter.
Where God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit sent the Son of God, Jesus Christ, to the cross so that when he spread out his wings at the cross, you were included underneath them.
So that now, when God the Father says, because you have called out, he will come to you in your trouble.
Because you have dwelt with him in the shelter of the Most High, he will come near to you.
He will protect you.
How? How? You didn't.
But Jesus did.
He spread his wings, and you're underneath him.
He's like a mother hen to you.
All of his wings are underneath you when he goes to the cross.
And that means by way of his representation of you, you are included in him.
And you get every single promise that's included right here.
He will deliver you one day because Jesus Christ was delivered.
But he will cover you now because of the cross.
And so what do you got to do this morning?
Let me give you a few very brief sentences, and I'll pray.
Here they are.
First, you've got to identify where you are trying to locate your ultimate rest in peace.
You know, you've got to say honestly to yourself, this is what I actually rest in far more.
And this is why I struggle with such insecurity in my life.
And then you've got to look at that thing and say to yourself, like the psalmist does, it will not work.
It has not worked.
I've got to give it away.
And then after that, you've got to say, there must be thirdly a great exchange that takes place.
I give away the false security I've been chasing in one of the little tribal deities that I love in this life.
And instead, I lastly turn and behold the Christ who spread out his wings over me.
I contemplate him.
And I look at the only one who perfectly trusted on my behalf.
I have to see that he faced the trouble for me.
And so he will cover me until one day when he delivers me.
Look, here's the promise.
He has already given you safety and deliverance.
And so what this psalmist is saying is you've got to learn to take hold of it in your inner life more today because you do have it.
He's already covered you in his wings.
He's already kept you safe.
And so that means the rest of our life is cruciform in his pattern.
In Luke 21, Jesus says to the apostles, the disciples, you are going to go out for me and you're going to go to the sword and you're going to die.
And then he says, and yet not a hair on your head will perish.
How could it be?
He will go and die, yet not a hair on your head will perish.
Because he's saying, I will cover you until one day when I deliver you.
Not a head on your head will perish.
That's the place of rest.
That as you go and you face the dark forest and you trust him more, the promise here is that your inner peace will grow.
It's real.
You can truly have this.
Let us pray.
Father, we ask that you would teach us now as we sing by your spirit that our hope rests firm in you and that we can only find safety in the shelter of the Most High.
In El Elyon and El Shaddai and Yahweh, our God, we pray to you now and ask that you would come and meet with us now and rip away the things that we're searching for,
for false securities in life and rediscover the bedrock of true peace, which is your, your residence, your dwelling place.
And so we ask for that in Christ's name.
Amen.