Word of Salvation – Vol. 46 No.27 – July 2001

 

The Convicted Conversation

 

Sermon by Rev S Bajema

on Psalm 91

Scripture Reading: Psalm 91

 

Beloved in the Lord,

Our age is a time of different voices.  Perhaps more than any other time we hear more voices clamouring to be heard than ever before – whether they are competing political ideologies, from feminism right across to male chauvinism; or attitudes to the environment, where you can go from extreme conservationist to the most blatant opulent waste; or religion, which can take you, in your own neighbourhood, from the most rigid Islamic faith to the Eastern New Age.

We can get very sick of them – those who are destroying so quickly the values Christianity has blessed our country with, just keep bleating away, on the TV screen, magazines, billboards – whether mild or obscene!  And when we try to block out those distracting voices of the world, sometimes the voice we should hear is muffled.  Listen – it’s this voice you need to hear right here in Psalm 91!

You may have noticed that the Psalm was like a conversation.  There was more than one voice, but there’s only one person.  It begins with the voice of reason in verse 1.  There is a personal response to that in verse 2.  Then we hear reason’s voice again until verse 9, where again he personally responds.  And to cap it all off, the Psalm ends with the third voice, which we hear as God’s voice.

The first verse is quite factual.  It tells us there is a battle out there.  And just as in our society today you will see physical security around you everywhere, from the signs telling you these premises are alarmed, right through to those black uniformed security personnel, so the psalmist declares the spiritual protection around believers everywhere.

The psalmist actually draws the physical-spiritual metaphors quite a way as he develops this protection in the verses 3 to 6.  The fowler’s snare could well be the plots which trip us up, or compromise us with others.  There may be reference to the illnesses that attack the mind, in the first part of verse 5, or the body in the next line.

As for God’s care, it’s pictured as the warm protectiveness of a parent bird, combined with the hard, unyielding strength of armour.  How much don’t we need that!  It can only be the LORD God who keeps us from the terrifying monsters in our lives.

Perhaps your life has been a depressing affair.  You can’t wait to get over some of the things that were a real problem.  There are times that are filled with devils threatening to undo us – the prince of darkness made things very grim.  Like Luther, maybe you even saw Satan’s presence clear enough to throw something at him!

Listen to the first voice, it’s saying, “no fear, no harm, no disaster”.  It describes precisely how God is making it all happen this way.  There are even angels guarding you and what’s more – they’re lifting you up!  Right when you’re at your weakest, He’s being the strongest!  Though you step on the biggest lion and the deadliest snake He’s got you safe!

It’s about how you are kept secure, through the most dangerous physical description he can give of his time; that the first voice speaks.  And it’s no different for today!  Take all those things which have haunted you these past twelve months.  Think of any one of them.  Go on – identify it!

Now make it a lot worse.  Was it something taken from you?  Then imagine everything is taken from you!  Do a Job – write off the whole lot.  Was it bad health in some way?  Take away your health altogether – put yourself in the most debilitating and depressing situation ever!  Was it what someone else did to you?  How didn’t that hurt you, and probably because they never said it to you, but you heard about it alright!

Anything bad which you’ve gone through; multiply it to its biggest possible equation.  What have you then got?  Not a lot!  Yet – you’ve still got God – haven’t you?  Come on – haven’t you!  Or do you feel He’s gone on you too!  You haven’t fallen with the thousands on the side, have you?

I tell you now that if you’re feeling even that low, God has done it for a purpose.  The apostle Paul, when he was spiritually flying on the mountain top, also had to take a tumble into the valley’s bottom.  Something was sent from Satan to especially torment him, and despite his pleas with the Lord to take it away, the only answer he got, was, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

That made Paul truly see!  He knew what Job showed.  In complete contrast to what matters in this world – the power and prestige – he found his true worth in weakness and poverty.  It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, exactly because if you depend on what you have that’s your sole worth.  The reason why Jesus said that the poor shall always have to be with us is because that’s what we have to be spiritually!

If there is one witness that should convict us in the church it is that some of the very people who are dismissed by those in the ‘know’, the ‘poor’ so to speak, are the very ones who put us to shame.  You can write them off materially; you can write them off mentally; you can write them off in terms of all the social graces, you can write them off in all kinds of ways; but they’ve got angels looking after them.

Whenever God has moved in a most powerful way in church history it has so often been the poor who were set free.  If anything, those who had become so entrenched in the institutions of the church, those who seemed so ‘right’ had to be converted before they saw that, too.

It has to be said, but, in this church right now, we’re not seeing much struggle – there’s little of that desperate fighting for our very souls in the Lord’s strength alone!  Could it be that the most passion we feel – we who have sat in this church for years now – is if someone shifts our cushion?

Congregation, this first voice is simply the voice of reason.  It’s really no one’s particular voice at all – it simply states what’s here.  Ah, but the second voice, that’s us.  The voice which we hear in the verses 2 and 9 is right in here!  Listen: “I will say of the LORD, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust’.”  This is what we should be saying.  But when we become so wrapped up in looking after ourselves, and feeling good about ourselves, are these our words?

Do we really believe God is our owner – the centre of our whole being?  You might wonder how I get this from these words.  To you it seems nothing more than a type of spiritual insurance policy.  Isn’t it only the type of safeguard you took out when you joined this church?  “Of course I trust in God – you should see where I pay for my kids go to school, the support our family gives to our Senior Citizen’s Home, and I’ve kept this church going too!  We live the right kind of life, mix in the right kind of company and, besides, I am always here – when I’m not in Bali or holidaying elsewhere!”

“And I have to say, with verse 9, the Lord’s looked after us pretty well.  We’re blessed, I know that.  Look I know about God looking after me.  Besides, isn’t that what the third voice in the Psalm tells me.  When it’s God’s voice, I can see He’s looked after me!  It’s plain to see!”

Dear friend, I wonder if that is God’s voice you’re hearing.  I mean, how can you really distinguish it from all those other voices in this world that we heard about earlier on?  Have you really been hurt so that you know the difference?

In verse 14 we hear the words of the LORD Himself.  Those words are for us.  And what the LORD responds to from that second voice is not someone who’s comfortable but someone who’s actually in a lot of pain.  In fact, we can never be at peace while we’re on this earth.  The words of the LORD are for someone who’s not comfortable but actually in a lot of pain.

Congregation, we shouldn’t think that what we have on this earth is meant to prove we have God on our side.  Health and wealth are not a pat on the back from God.  The psalmist spoke often enough about how rich the wicked were to disprove that.

The voice of the Lord, though, is exactly that, it’s the voice of the Lord.  It’s His voice which we must hear.  But do we?  Are our lives the most intense sensitivity to what God tells us in His Word?  Or are we too busy talking of ourselves?

Perhaps we don’t openly brag about ourselves, but deep down that’s our agenda.  And we’re wealthy enough to quickly cover over that ugliness with a bit more money or practical help.  But inside we’re not happy at all!  For all the outside appearance the inside is really quite a mess.

Mind you, you could be honest about that.  You could agree with the second voice and say that God’s the only one who’s got it together.  You could even look at the person who showed us perfectly what the second voice sounds like.  You could say the same as Him – He who said to those who wanted to be Christians that they had to give up everything just like He gave up His very life!

I could only be speaking about Jesus Christ.  No one can ever sound so much like the second voice as He did.  His cry from the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” is the second voice down to a tee!  It is by faith in Him, the only Saviour, that we can say the same thing!  It is when the Lord Jesus is our King that we have that voice – the voice so different than any other voice, and the only voice that has to be heard today.

Dear friend, the hardest thing isn’t saying that Jesus is your own Saviour, it’s actually that He is your Lord every day and in every possible way!  Then, however long our lives are, we are proving that the third voice is right – He is showing you His salvation.  Whatever will come to pass can only help draw you closer to Him.

Amen.

PRAYER:

Let’s pray… 

O Most Loving Saviour God, as this human period of time ticks away we look to you who controls the divine time line, and realise again how much we have in you alone.  O Lord, please keep us and guide us.  In Your precious Name we pray.

Amen.