Anxiety – Psalm 46

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Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted amongst the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord Almighty is with us. The God of Jacob is our fortress.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Thank you.

Psalms are curious things. Chris, can we have the next slide?

I always think of this character in the middle. There's Frodo and Gollum and Sam. You know what that's from? Do you recognise those people? Yeah.

Lord of the Rings. That's right. Now, Gollum is a fascinating guy, isn't he? He is this person who is battling good versus evil and you hear him talking to himself, I should be doing this. And then he feels he's been overtaken by his greed and his anger and his desire for power.

And they think, no, I shouldn't be doing that. And when you read the psalms, they are just like that. You are channelling your inner Golem when you read the psalms.

Technology is a wonderful thing. You might not have been able to get to Keswick last week when some of us were up there, but if you go to the Keswick Convention website and look for week three and go to the Bible readings by Vaughan Roberts, he takes in five sessions through the Book of Psalms in a wonderful overview and it will give you a feel for what the book of psalms is all about. It's very easy just to open the book of psalms and read a psalm just by itself, but to learn where it comes in the book of psalms and what it's all about is really, really helpful. And he just opened up psalms in a whole new way to me that I just found encouraging. So if you are an adult or an older child, do go and investigate that because you get great blessing from that.

But anyway, today we are looking at psalm 46 and it picks up next slide from where we were last week. Last week, Claire was taking us through psalm 23 as we were thinking about the emotion of feeling abandoned. And there we discovered that the Lord is my shepherd.

Our psalm picks up on that next slide. Starts off, God is our refuge and strength, our ever present help in trouble. The shepherd who God is, is the shepherd who is a refuge. What is a refuge?

What's a refuge? Any thoughts on what a refuge is? Place of safety. Refugees, they're looking for safety. So God is our place of safety, is what the psalmist is saying.

This is positive psalmist. This is a really great way to get going in the psalm. God is our safe place and he's strong and he's always with us. So why have anxiety? Well, the world makes us anxious.

And that's what he immediately starts thinking about. Next slide. He just looks at the world around him and in poetic language, he brings out things that are going on in the world that he sees going on in the world, and he talks about them in sort of apocalyptic terms. Mountains falling into the sea and the seas roaring and quaking. Does that ring any bells with you, that sort of stuff going on?

When in the Bible can you think of the seas roaring and the mountains tumbling and a little boat bubbling around on the water? Next slide. The ark.

God got to the point of thinking, I just cannot cope with these people any longer. And yet there was Noah, who was a righteous man. He wasn't a perfect man, but he had a heart for God and he had a boat and he survived the mountains falling into the sea and the waters raging. And so the psalmist is saying, look, I look at the natural world and there are things that make me anxious when I go out in the natural world. Have you ever been fell walking the Keswick convention?

It was very unusual. It was beautifully sunny, hot weather. We used to live up in Kendal and we would quite often go out walking and I would say to Nicky, things like, on a clear day you get a fantastic view from here, but the mist was down, you couldn't see anything and we had a few hairy encounters. But anyway, we're here to tell the tale. The natural world can be frightening.

You might have seen video clips of boats in the sea surging and you think, oh, my life, how could they survive that? The natural world is awesome, but it's not just the natural world that fills the psalmist with anxiety. Next slide.

It is what he sees going on in the world. And at the time the psalmist was written, he was writing to a people who were either just about to be taken off into exile or who had been taken into exile. They were supposed to be the people of God who were safe in Jerusalem, and yet armies are marching against them. Everything's going wrong. This life isn't supposed to be like this.

And when life feels it's not supposed to be like that, it makes you anxious because you don't feel in control.

And what was true of them then is true of our world today. Next slide. You might have seen pictures like this on the news where people are homeless. And this picture is taken on the border of Turkey. This is some friends of ours, the Ali family, who we got to know in Wolverhampton.

And Mohammed was a writer, a journalist, an academic in Syria, in Aleppo. And the syrian president didn't like things he was saying about the government and what was going on. And so he had to flee and he came to this country. His story of how he got here is heartbreaking, exciting, amazing. And then after he sought asylum here, he called for his family, but they still had to travel and they camped on the border for ten days, waiting to get permission to cross into Turkey.

And they made a tent out of bits of scrap metal and carpet. And the kids were very anxious. Not surprisingly, Freya, the mum, said, let's go camping. She made it fun for them, trying to calm their anxieties. There's lots in our world to be anxious about when we see what people do to one another.

One thing the psalmists do is they're not afraid of talking about life as it really is. And sometimes it gives you the chills and we get the chills in the next verse, verse eight. Come see what the Lord has done, the desolation he has brought.

We like to think of God as a peacemaker, but here the psalmist is recognising, the Lord is king of all. He is in control of everything. And so if he is in control of everything in some way or other, all the trouble that is going on in the world has something to do with God. And that is deeply disturbing. It's something that fills you with anxiety.

This isn't the God I thought I knew what is going on here.

But he has a purpose and immediately he sees that next slide. He sees that actually, in the midst of all the warring that we human beings do, it's God who makes war cease to the ends of the earth.

And of course, the biggest war that has ever taken place took place on the cross. Next slide. When Jesus was battling not just human beings, but spiritual forces beyond our comprehension. And in dying on the cross and being resurrected again, Jesus was fundamentally changing the outcome of all things in the world. He was in the business of breaking the bow and shattering the spear and burning the shields of war.

God is ultimately a peacemaker and we achieved that. He achieves that through Jesus Christ.

What's going on in this next slide?

What do you think is going on in this next slide? Any ideas? Do you do this? My boys used to do this, actually. They're in their forties and they still do it.

Fighting. Yeah, they're wrestling.

Who do you think those might be? Who is it? Who's wrestling? Any thoughts?

Our minds? Yeah. Okay. It's something to do with this psalm. If we have the next slide, the Lord Almighty is with us.

The God of Jacob is our fortress. This is a picture of prayer. It's Jacob wrestling with a man who turns out to be God in Genesis. And Jacob was full of anxiety because he was actually a pretty horrible sort of guy. He was a cheat and he knew it and he'd done a lot of harm and hurt to people over the years.

He cheated his brother out of an inheritance and he was fearful of his brother, who had become a very powerful man. And yet he realised he need to go and make peace with him and he was full of anxiety. And on the way, on this journey of anxiety, he meets with God and has this wrestling with him. And in the outcome of the fight, God renames Jacob. So Jacob means deceitful one.

And he renames Jacob Israel, which means the one who wrestled with God. It's an image of a story about somebody who's encountering God in a very powerful way in the midst of all their anxieties and worries.

And here in the psalm, he's saying, this is the God who wrestled Jacob, who is our fortress.

Jacob wrestled with God and was ultimately protected by him. God is our fortress. The God of Jacob is our fortress.

Next slide. When we feel anxious, we can find ourselves doing things like this. You might have been in a supermarket where a little person doesn't want to do what mum or dad or the adult with them is wanting them to do. And there's a bit of a showdown. And if you're a parent, I'm sure you've experienced that.

You just want the floor to swallow you up in the midst of all this. And when we get anxious, we can behave like that, we can. Self preservation kicks in and we fight for what we think is right and what God is saying to us in this psalm. And what the psalmist recognises is that is not the way to deal with anxiety. If you just let anxiety rule your life, it will ruin you.

But he says in the next slide, be still and know that I am goddesse.

We begin to come to terms with anxiety, can live with anxiety. When in the midst of our anxiety, we can come to God and pray to him, because he is the one who is our fortress and our stronghold. He is the one who we can wrestle with and pour out our hearts. He is the one who can lead us forward with our anxious hearts so we're not frozen and we can still show kindness and love and care for other people.

We're going to sing to Jesus, who is a wonderful person to pray to, and then we're going to be still before God as we pray. So let's stand and sing now.