Sunday's Sermon

Theme: “God, Our Refuge”

January 25^th, 2015

Worship Resources

Psalm 62:5-12New International Version (NIV)

⁵ Yes, my soul, find rest in God;
    my hope comes from him.
⁶ Truly he 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, you people;
    pour out your hearts to him,
    for God is our refuge.

Exploring the Scriptures

This psalm has been called the “Song of Faith.” It establishes without a doubt that the writer believed it is God alone whom we must trust on our journey of faith and trust. Words are powerful reminders in this psalm of our need for God and how important the presence of God is in our lives. 

As we hear this psalm read, we notice the images created through words like, my hope, my rock, my fortress, my refuge, and my deliverance. They point to God as a strong foundation and one that is reliable and trustworthy. God wants us to experience through our trust this deep and abiding sense of connection and support.

The type of trust described by the psalmist has a particular perspective of life: It illustrates confidence that is unshakeable in God and God’s presence. The question of faith is not “What do we believe?” but “In whom do we trust?” As articulated in this psalm, no other human effort, cause, or relationship is suitable for this type of absolute trust.

God is generous, always offering each day to be “our refuge.” This psalm encourages us to keep our attention and focus on God rather than ourselves. We should put no faith or trust in the things of this world. They can be distractions to our relationship with God. This can be difficult since our world seems to be dominated by our wants and what we consider our “Just Needs”. 

As receivers of God’s love and people who have acknowledged God’s power of this love in our lives, we are asked to be generous and share our stories and testimonies. No matter where we find ourselves—in need or in abundance, in loss or in joy—God is there, blessing and supplying the foundation for our lives.

So this is my experience.

When Bob died so suddenly almost five years ago, and after the shock of that week’s experience wore off, I realized I had a choice to make. I could grieve for days, months or years or I could do what Bob always told me to do when life got rough “and pull myself up by my bootstraps.”  I had choices.  I could choose to be miserable or I could choose to go on with life.  I knew any choice I made would take some time. 

 I could choose to be sad, angry or upset about the turn of events or I could make a conscious decision to be happy. I chose to be happy. As I made that decision, I trusted that God is always with me and would be my source of comfort in those bad times.  I didn’t lose faith in God or find it difficult to have complete trust in God because I did not expect God to do anything or be anything that is outside God’s domain.  I believed (and still do) that God is our constant source of strength and I trusted God to be right there with me as I worked through all that.  I also knew God worked to give me strength and comfort through my friends, who were very supportive. 

Although my concept of God’s power has changed over the years, my concept of God has not.  God’s presence is the very foundation of my life. In every difficult situation I have found myself in over the years, even if my poor decisions had brought bad consequences on myself, I learned that if I were able to withdraw from myself and from the stress of that particular difficult situation to find God’s presence, then God could and would give me the guidance I needed and the peace I sought.  Most of the time, I can do that now because I am even more aware of God’s presence everywhere in our world. Sometimes, I rebel though and try to “fix things” on my own. That’s usually always a mistake.  But that’s not God’s fault.  It’s mine.  

You see, I don’t expect God to be something that my experience with God denies. My experience with God has to make sense to me. Changing my concept of God was not easy. It required me to rethink the nature of both God and the world. 

To this day, I conceive of a God that is conscious and that loves, and acts …but mostly, is just with me. And God, to me, is relational and is ethical.  Since God is love, I find the ethics of the traditional concept of God appalling. 

In the Bible and in much of traditional Christian thought, God has been described as causing great evils: war, slavery, plague, famine, and even the hardness of human hearts.  At the very best, God has been described as standing by and allowing needless suffering that God could have easily prevented… such as the holocaust and terrible wars.  That is not my concept of a loving God. I believe God does everything within God’s power to work for the good. But I believe God’s power is limited by free agency. God can persuade us but cannot coerce us into doing the right thing. 

And dominion, another popular Christian concept, has proven to be a poor theological model for my understanding an ethical relationship to the world. Instead, I have found that we must come to see ourselves as participants in a complex and fragile web of relationships in which each person and even each creature has some value. That’s something Bill touched on in our church school class several weeks ago and something Bob Miller seemed to believe. He never wanted me to kill a bug or a spider. He always wanted me to pick it up in a Kleenex and put it outside.   Where bugs and other creatures were concerned, dominion just didn’t fit that model. 

Cooperation with our world seems more logical….not domination over it.   

Thus this God of love is our refuge. 

I believe God awaits our free response to God’s urgings and that God always urges us toward the best decisions for humankind’s best well-being.  

I believe God is omniscient; and knows everything there is to know, perfectly.  But to me this means knowing the future as “open”,….. as a range of possibilities, not as something fixed or already settled.  

The reality is that life is hard. Nowhere in scripture are we promised that it will be easy. Life is hard. The history of the Israelite people, God’s chosen, is ample proof of that. Bad things happen to good people, to bad people, and everyone in between.  We live in a real world, and we should want a religion that deals with that reality.  This psalm was written while the children of God were in captivity in Babylon.  They had to face that real world.  It gave them hope and trust in God. They were advised by the prophet to marry and make Babylon their home and even raise their children there. …to make the best of a bad situation.  God was to be their refuge. 

When Corrie Ten Boon was in her late teens, she witnessed Nazi soldiers arrest and torture an older person. She said to her dad, “I couldn’t stand that. I would wilt under persecution. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be faithful.” Her father said, “Corrie, God will give you the strength you need.” But she kept insisting, “I don’t have that kind of courage and faith.” Finally her dad said, “Do you remember when you were a little girl and we took rides on the train? I kept your ticket in my pocket. Do you remember when I gave you your ticket?” “She said, “Yeah, right before we got on the train.” “Right,” he said, “I kept it until you needed it so you wouldn’t lose it. God is like that and will give you the faith and strength you need. He will empower you by His Holy Spirit according to your need. Trust Him for that.”

Later when Corrie Ten Boom was arrested and persecuted by the Nazis, her faithfulness and strength became an inspiration to all.

God will be our refuge, but the refuge does not protect us from experiencing the storm, but rather it strengthens us during the storm. In this life we will experience trouble, but if we can put aside “ourselves”, and trust in God, God will see us through it. 

In the storm, one thing a refuge will do is provide us with strength we do not possess on our own. I have experienced that in my own life and heard testimony upon testimony from others who have gone through some awful situations, situations they thought they could never handle, but somehow, with God’s help, they had the strength to get through them.  That is God as refuge.