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When fear turns fierce and foundations feel destroyed, the counsel comes easy: flee like a bird to your mountain. In Psalm 11 David meets that advice head-on, asking how anyone can say it to his soul when he already takes refuge in the Lord.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
David’s friends tell him to flee because “the foundations are destroyed”—yet David refuses. What foundations in your own life have you been tempted to abandon when they felt threatened, and how might that differ from the foundations David chose to stand on?
The sermon identifies several “worldly altars” we turn to when afraid: anger, manipulation, gossip dressed as prayer, and endless scrolling. Which of these do you recognize in yourself, and what do you think you’re actually hoping those altars will provide?
David had the opportunity to kill Saul and secure his own future as king, yet he refused because Saul was “the Lord’s anointed.” How does this apply to situations where you’re tempted to compromise your calling for the sake of control or safety?
The preacher contrasts “young Peter” (drawing the sword to fight) with “old Peter” (resting in God as refuge). What does it take for us to move from trying to muscle our way through fear to actually trusting God’s way—and how do you know when you’re still being “young Peter”?
David’s confidence in God becomes an “umbrella” for those around him. Who has modeled that kind of contagious trust for you, and how might your own refuge in the Lord steady someone else this week?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Tonight we’re beginning a series in Psalm 11. We’ve been in Psalm 10, and we’re just moving along. Dusty’s moving along with us, and so are we, into Psalm 11. You know, the Psalms in general do pick up a lot of tones of desperation. I remember as a little kid I hated when I’d have to read the Psalms. It was like, it’s just so dark. But as we face different things in life, as we face everything in life, isn’t it comforting to know that Scripture doesn’t have some Pollyanna-ish picture that doesn’t actually happen? Everything we face, God says, I know and I understand. And this Psalm comes at it from a little different angle than Psalm 10.
So if you’ve been thinking, okay, we’ve done Psalm 10 for a while, now we’re going to do it all over again, because we need different angles, we need to come at it from different ways, because sometimes it’s where we’re at. And sometimes it’s where we’re at and we don’t even realize it. This Psalm starts with fear.
President Roosevelt famously said, “There’s nothing we have to fear but fear itself.” I was thinking about that this week. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? There’s nothing we really need to fear but fear itself. Okay, so I just won’t fear, right? I won’t fear, I can face everything because I won’t fear and I’ll be fine. But consider the context in which he said that — his inaugural address of 1933. There was a lot to fear. There was a lot of bad stuff, and it wasn’t just, I’m scared of this. It’s really, really bad.
Coming in the aftermath of the great stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, Roosevelt came to power with the promise to fix the country, to find a new deal that would deal with all these problems. And of course, his encouragement there was, we’re gonna do this together. We can do this and we’ll overcome this Great Depression. But there was no immediate fix available. It’s gonna take time.
You can look at what happened in the lead-up to and the actual Great Depression and say, well, really, we’re looking at one historical period when we’re also talking about World War II. And when we do that, there was a lot to fear. Twelve years after Roosevelt said those words, there was still a lot that wasn’t just some emotional fear, but actual life and death that was coming from the situation he was addressing.
Fear is pretty fierce. Now, sometimes we do have irrational fears, right? I can get way too fearful of something and it’s not really a big deal, and that’s possible. But we also know a psalm like Psalm 11 is speaking to the fact that there’s an awful lot of things that we fear that we struggle with. The reason we fear and struggle with them is it’s really, really hard to overcome them. We don’t know if we can.
Fear itself leads us to feel like our situation is hopeless. And on our own, a lot of times it is. But as we can turn to Psalm 11, God says, it’s not really hopeless. So tonight, whatever you’re fearful of, whatever’s burdening you, let’s pray that God would help us as we go through the promises of Psalm 11, that we would hear that He’s with us in them.
Would you pray with me, please? Lord, there is an awful lot that we fear, things we grieve, things we’re pained over, things we’re troubled by, things we don’t know what to do with. So much uncertainty in this world, both personally that we face as a church body here, the different things that our members carry, our family members, and also the big global things that we see going on, that there’s so much to fear.
Lord, we know that You are king, You are sovereign, You are in control. And so as we come to Your word, as we read it, as we face the things that we face, would You remind us that You face them with us, that You are with us in every aspect, big and small. And that’s where we find hope. We pray this in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
Well, we’re going to skip over the very beginning of verse one, and if you want to turn there, we are going to pick up towards the end of that verse. Here’s what it says there: “Flee like a bird to your mountain. Behold, the wicked bend the bow. They have fitted their arrows to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
Good question, isn’t it? And so we see here kind of a pairing in these verses. The first is an instruction that David is being told, presumably by his friends: flee, get out of here. The conclusion here is why? Because the foundations are crumbling. What can the righteous even do if everything is falling apart? If it’s all coming apart, best thing to do is get out of Dodge, just get away before it gets worse.
What is it that’s so bad? Well, it’s the various evils, and we’ll see more of that along in the rest of Psalm 11 over the next couple of weeks. But verse two summarizes a lot of it: The wicked are ready to kill. The wicked are ready to destroy. And it doesn’t have to just be physically, right? Most of us, I pray, will never have a reason to fear that someone’s going to physically try to kill us. I hope you never feel that.
And one of the blessings that we have, for the most part in our society, is that we don’t need to feel that, and that’s a good thing. But we all feel that the bow’s firing their arrows at us. Sometimes they’re lesser physical harms. Sometimes it’s emotional.
The evil that we see here dwells in the dark. It doesn’t come out in the light and say, “Hey, I’m team evil, and I’m ready to make your life miserable.” No, what does it do? It hides in the shadows. It hides and it attacks. And oftentimes we don’t know until it pierces us in the back. And when it does, it really does feel like those foundations are crumbling because we couldn’t even see it coming.
And oftentimes it feels like all those in authority, all those in power, both at a global level and just the interpersonal level, feel like they’re going right along with it. Psalm 82:5 first of the same foundations: “And of the powers it says they have neither knowledge nor understanding. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken.” Psalm 85 uses the metaphor of gods, lowercase g gods, not that the Bible’s saying there are a bunch of different gods, but rather those things that we think have power, those things that we trust in, they seem to actually be triumphing.
And it could be something we actually literally worship as many of the neighbors of the ancient Israelites did, and then the Israelites would fall into as well. Or it could be simply the worldly things we trust in. Seems like those triumph in God’s way. The way of the righteous doesn’t. And so it is. David, his friends say to him, “It doesn’t matter, David, that you’re righteous. It doesn’t matter that you want to do it the Lord’s way. You need to just get out of here because you’re just going to die too.”
If you stand for what’s righteous, they’ll get you and they won’t even care. Now, what do they have in mind? What’s going on in David’s life? There’s not a complete statement here in Psalm 11 of what’s going on. We know it’s from David, but he does use language he uses elsewhere in 1 Samuel 26 as he’s fleeing Saul. Notice, take a look here at verse 20. He says, “Now therefore, let not my blood fall to the earth away from the presence of the Lord. For the king of Israel has come out to seek a single flea like one who hunts a partridge in the mountains.”
David thought of himself as that bird fleeing at times. Now, is this reflecting on that time or is he thinking of another time where it was simpler? He was a shepherd boy who had been promised to be king but wasn’t yet, and he could just take off and run, hightail it to the mountains and it’d be okay. And now he’s king and he kind of wants to flee again. Is that it? Could be. It could very much be in that moment that in a sense he’s fleeing, right? He is getting out of the way of Saul. He’s not saying, “Hey Saul, here I am so you can stick your sword through me,” but he’s not abandoning his calling either, right? He could say, “You know, that king thing sounded kind of nice, but living sounds even nicer. I think I’m just going to move to Egypt and live out my days. It’ll be okay.”
Not fleeing from his calling. And so whether it’s later on as the king in power that is facing opposition and it seems like it’d be nice to get out of the way, or as the much younger David who isn’t yet in power but has a very powerful king who wants to kill him, either way the temptation is to say, enough with my calling, let’s just get out of here. I think that’s what David’s friends are telling him. David, we love you, we want you to live. It’d be better if you set aside this calling and you live, that you hold onto this for some kind of insane holy quest from the Lord and allow the enemies, the ones that don’t play by the rules, to get you.
The question is, what are you going to do? What are you going to trust? Last week I saw a famous picture from September 11th. It’s a picture of Ladder 118. I put it up, I don’t think I can get copyright permission to show it. But you probably have seen this picture, probably seen it multiple times. The towers are still standing but are on fire; you can see the smoke billowing out. The traffic has stopped; people aren’t driving into the city because they don’t want to go in there. And you see a bridge going towards the Twin Towers with Ladder 118 in bright red paint driving straight towards it.
I was wondering what was going on in the minds of those six firefighters as they drove in. I don’t know what they were trusting in that moment. They may have trusted their ability. “Oh, we’re great firefighters, we can take on this giant building on fire, we’ll be okay.” But you know, I think what they were really trusting in was their calling. They had a calling to go save people. And so did they look at that and think this was going to be just another day at work? I don’t think so. In fact, it wasn’t.
They went into the Marriott Global Hotel that ended up collapsing as part of the towers falling. And by all reports, they saved about 900 people and got them out before the building collapsed on them. Not a single man in Ladder 118 survived that day. Like so many other firefighters, they perished in it. But they trust in their calling. And they were used to rescue people.
Here’s an uncomfortable reality for us. I think when we’re trying to decide what to do in the face of opposition, in the face of problems, in the face of brokenness in this world, we’re going to be confronted with, am I going to trust my calling from the Lord, or am I going to trust in my ability? We trust in our ability at some point. If we have any sanity at all, we realize it’s not going to work, and we get that sense, maybe we really should get out of here.
You see, the people advising David said, “David, the towers are on fire. You’re not going to survive this. You need to get out of here. It’s going to collapse on you.” But David in this psalm says, something’s different. It’s not about my ability. It’s about my calling.
I don’t know what was going on in those firefighters’ minds, but I think that’s what they said, too. I think they probably knew this was not going to be an easy case, and that they were at great personal risk in going in. Are they going to trust in their ability and say, “I’ve maxed out my ability, I’m getting out of here,” or are they going to say, “No, this is what I was made to do. And so I’m going to do it. What matters is I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, what’s righteous to do.”
We trust in our ability, we’re going to fail. We think we can do it. We will fail. We will encounter that tower that’s too tall, as covered in too many flames for us to overcome. And we can either run, or be devoured by it. But if we trust in our calling, even if we don’t survive that circumstance in the way we’d like, we’re used by God to actually do what we were made to do. And it’s not a failure.
A lot of worldly altars beckon for us to trust in them and see them as the strength that will right the foundations. The foundations are falling, are shaken, they’re destroyed, what should we do? I’ll go to the worldly altar, and I’ll offer sacrifices. And this is our inflection point. This is our place where we have to decide what is it that we’re meant to do? Am I going to trust in my ability? My ability is figuring out a way, so if I have to sacrifice righteousness for the sake of accomplishing something, so be it. Am I going to say no? God doesn’t play that game. I don’t want to either.
Sometimes we sacrifice at the worldly altar of anger. We go to it, and we take all of our suffering, our pain, and we put it on that altar, and we light it on fire, and it gives us back the gift of blasting out that anger to people. It feels like it’s going to solve things, but it actually breaks things — sometimes more than we were even dealing with to begin with, sometimes even for ourselves. Sometimes it consumes us in it.
The world says you need to do, you need to stick up for yourself, and you need to make sure that people understand that might makes right. Sometimes it’s a little more subtle. Sometimes we see how we think things should be, and they’re not, and so we do it the Christian route. We gossip. What do we do there? Well, oftentimes we pray for each other. You know those prayer requests that go on and on about what’s going on for someone else, and our concern for that someone else, and it’s not the kind of information that needs to be said to actually pray for a genuine concern, but we’re trying to figure out how to get our way, and we’re not going to go the anger route because that’s bad, so we couch it in righteousness. And we do the same thing that the world does, but with pretty Christian imagery around it.
We’ll manipulate to get our way. But that doesn’t work either. It’s actually in some ways even worse, because we blaspheme God as we do it, because we say, “I’m going to couch this in holy language, and make it sound really good,” and we’re still doing the worldly manipulative thing, but we’re doing it in a way that we’re putting God on top of it. Doesn’t work. It destroys. It destroys.
Sometimes we just internalize it. We go to the altar of doom scrolling. If you’re not familiar with the term doom scrolling, it’s the phenomenon nowadays that when we’re just worn out, or depressed, or whatever, what do we do? We go onto our computer, or our phone, and we go onto social media, and you just start scrolling. What do you know? Social media companies, go figure, are willing to supply us with an endless amount of content that we’re probably not interested in, that actually only makes us feel worse, but we can keep scrolling. We’ll never get to the end. You will never scroll to the end of Facebook, or Instagram, or X, or what have you. There will always be something else, even if it has no relevance to anything. You think, why in the world is it showing it to me? It will find something.
Maybe not on social media, but we still find the same kinds of things. We find something we do that just sort of feeds our depressed state, our powerless feeling state, our defeated state, and we just feed it. And if we can’t actually somehow, in our own power, triumph over the things of the world, we say, well, at least I’ll just enjoy wallowing in the defeat of it.
David doesn’t want to flee. Is that what he’s going to do? He has those choices. Because the interesting thing, where David makes that remark, he’s talking to Saul from a distance, but he’s talking to Saul from a distance because he actually has Saul under his thumb at the moment, in 1 Samuel. He has the opportunity to kill Saul.
And David’s advisors in that moment say, “David, God has just richly blessed you. You can do this. You can take Saul out.” And what’s saying future king would refuse that? Well, David would.
1 Samuel 26, we go back just a little bit to verse nine. And David said to Abishai, “Do not destroy him. For who can put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” You see, there’s actually two different occasions in David’s life where Saul is unaware, but he is in a compromise position and David could potentially kill him. Then it’d all be over. David wouldn’t have to run anymore. David wouldn’t have to fear someone trying to kill him. He could just go and be king, which is what God told him to do after all.
So why not help God out here and just make it happen already? David says, but God gave Saul a calling. And my calling isn’t to take it away. God can take it away if he wishes. That’s not the role He gave me. He didn’t assign me the role of taking down Saul and coming to power by the same means that the world has always come to power by taking down whomever came before me.
He gave me a divine calling. He gave me a divine calling, a righteous calling, and I am willing to hold onto that. I’m not going to take someone that God has called previously and kill him just because I have him in a compromise position, just because I have that sword there and he doesn’t even realize it and I could take him out, or my warriors could take him out.
Now, you might say, “Oh, well, this is a special circumstance. This is special because Saul was the anointed one, right?” And if you know that term from the Old Testament, you know it’s a term that we use as Christians sometimes because it’s the Hebrew term that we’ve turned into the English word Messiah. And each of the kings was the anointed one, the Messiah. And yes, there was the ultimate Messiah in Jesus, but he’s still a Messiah. That’s what David’s saying here. It says he’s the Lord’s Messiah. I can’t kill him. So this must be special pleading, right? If Saul had been anyone else.
No, because as that ultimate Messiah was teaching his disciples, as he was about to be betrayed, as he was being betrayed, the soldiers were surrounding him. Remember that Peter tried to do what David’s advisors wanted to do for David. Peter tried to take out the soldiers, right? “I’ll pull out my sword, brave Peter here. I will take out the enemy.” He slices off a man’s ear before Jesus stops him and says, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Tells Peter, that’s not the way we’re gonna do this. Other kings rise to power that way, but we don’t. That’s not how God’s kingdom works.
God says, let’s do it a different way. I don’t need to do it the worldly way. I don’t need to do it the outright worldly way. And I don’t want you to baptize the worldly way into something that sounds kind of Christian, but it’s just as wicked. I want you to do it my way.
You know, a lot of times, in fact all the time, when we see the foundations crumbling, you know what we can say about those foundations? Those foundations aren’t of the Lord. They’re the worldly things we trust in. And they’re not always necessarily even bad. They might be our careers. They might be our dreams that we’re thinking we’re pulling together. They might be our health or our families or our friends. Those aren’t bad things. Those are things that are gifts from God. But if those are the things that we’re trusting, at some point, they’re gonna be shaken, right?
Even when it’s a perfectly holy thing. It’s a holy thing to enjoy the friendship and fellowship that we have as believers here, but it gets shaken. And suddenly there’s an empty chair. Because someone who we thought should be here isn’t. And we grieve. And the fact that we grieve over Betty not being here, we grieve as someone else that we hoped was here. I can think of a few others I hoped would someday join and are no longer living either.
And you think about those situations, and does that mean that those are bad foundations? No, it doesn’t mean those are bad foundations, but it means that there’s a frailty to everything that we hold on to in this world. And if that’s what we’re holding on to, that’s what’s gonna give us confidence. We’re gonna be shaken.
We were saying earlier, we will not be shaken. So how do we do that? Well, we need to reorient ourselves to how we understand those foundations. Here’s the first truth that we see in Psalm 11. The first truth is that if my foundations are crumbling, I’ll fail if I try to repair it.
See, David realizes this. Whatever crisis he’s in at the moment, if he spends all this time trying to fix that rather than trusting in the Lord, you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to find that he fails to patch it enough. There’s lots of things that we try to repair in life and kind of repair it, but then it falls right apart again. David realizes that too often I don’t. Too often we don’t. We need to do what David did instead.
We need to say, I’m not gonna try to repair that broken, faulty foundation that’s falling apart. I need to do what David did and understand that I’m not going to face fear alone.
Beginning of verse one that we skipped over, the highlighted part there: “In the Lord I take refuge.” How can you say to my soul? See, David’s actually quoting his advisors with that quote, “Flee like a bird to your mountain.” And he’s asking a question as he quotes it: How can you say this to my soul? Why? Because the Lord is my refuge. I’m not facing this alone. I’m not facing this by myself. I’m not facing this even with some really wise advisors that can tell me to get out of the way because it’s never going to work. I’m not facing it with my own abilities. I’m facing it with God.
And if I’m facing it with God, it changes everything. David’s incredulous here. He’s saying, how can you? Guys, don’t you know anything about me? Don’t you realize the reason I’m here? Don’t you realize I’m the shepherd boy? The only reason I’m king is because of the Lord? How can you say that?
Why is he incredulous? Because God is here. He says, not just in the Lord I take refuge. Someday the Lord’s going to be a refuge to me. He says, right now in this moment, my refuge is in the Lord. I’m taking that refuge right now. I don’t need escape, I need asylum.
I liked one commentator made the observation that’s very much what’s being described here as asylum. Because sometimes people say, “Well, you’re just escaping to God.” No, we’re not escaping to God. We’re going into whatever places he’s called us to with him.
Notice Peter later in his life, 1 Peter chapter five: “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.”
You see, Peter, when he sliced off that man’s ear, hadn’t yet faced anything. You may have thought he did. That’s how a lot of times it goes for all of us, I think. We think we face things and then later in life we say, “Whoa, I hadn’t faced anything yet. Boy, I had no idea and I’m kind of glad I didn’t because if I knew I was gonna face that way back when, I would’ve just crumbled.”
That’s the case for Peter. The time he’s following Jesus around, generally speaking, his big thing that he has to fear is, are people going to realize that I’m a really important disciple or not? Maybe even the best. Right, I need to make sure that Jesus says that I’m the best and everyone knows it because I know Jesus really loves me. That’s the kind of thing that Peter had to face in that moment.
There’s a transition here and he’s having to grapple during that time as Jesus is being betrayed. What am I really trusting in here? And what does it really look like to face everything?
But old Peter, decades later as he writes 1 Peter, he doesn’t have to wonder that anymore. He’s faced it. He knows that there are people who actively want to kill him on a regular basis. And even if he maybe didn’t fully understand it, but maybe quite possibly he did, Jesus had told him before sending him to heaven that he would actually be taken and crucified.
And I think Peter had absorbed that. He knew he had faced an awful lot and he’d face even worse. Because he knew that, he knew that what he could do, what he could muscle his way out of, what he could try to use his wit and wisdom and connections and whatever else to get through, it wasn’t what was going to secure the foundations.
And so while young, rambunctious Peter takes out a sword and starts trying to hack away at the people he thinks might be hurting him, Peter years later reflects and says, no, what I know is that God provides refuge. Very same thing that David said.
And here’s an important reason for us to spend time reflecting on that. Especially those of us who’ve been Christians for a while. We fall into those same traps. And too often I’m still young Peter hacking away at things and I’m not even Peter, right? So I mean, I’m young Peter without being Peter. That’s even worse.
Too often we are. It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 or 30 or 60 or 90. We can all be young Peter at times. Maybe even Peter, old Peter had still some of those times where it bubbled up in his life. And we start hacking away. And when we hack away, what do we do? We spread a lack of confidence. It’s a contagion that comes in.
When we trust in those altars of the world, when we’re trusting in anger and manipulation and just absorbing depression and whatever else we can come up with, when we absorb the ways of the world and we live in the ways of the world, it’s a contagion that brings itself into our Christian walk, into our Christian testimony. And it’s a lack of confidence. And it infects those around.
But here’s the good news. When we trust in the foundation that actually lasts, and we realize that we’re not facing fear alone, but we’re facing fear with the Lord, that’s a good contagion. And it spreads too. That’s what we see in Psalm 11.
The beginning of it is, “In the Lord I take refuge. How can I say to my soul?” But there on out, he’s talking as a group. That tells us something. As David lives as the Lord has called, he provides an umbrella of confidence in God’s faithfulness to those around him. And that’s an invitation for us too.
But it starts with this truth: my foundations are crumbling. I need a better foundation. We’re gonna be those who provide confidence to people. If we’re gonna be those who minister to people and help people and get people to know Jesus and to live in the comfort of Jesus, what we need to do is actually replace whatever places our life is on those broken, crumbling foundations and say, God, take that away from me. I don’t want that. I don’t want to fix it. I want your foundation instead.
And if you haven’t yet believed in Jesus, you can say, God, all my foundations are crumbling. I don’t have anything that’s firm right now. Take it all out. Just give me you. And He will.
That doesn’t mean He’s gonna take away all our friends and family. It doesn’t mean He’s gonna take away our church or maybe our career or whatever else that we had as foundations. But it means He’s gonna take those things that we were using as foundational. He’s gonna set them on His foundation.
There’s lots of things that you could say, build a house out of that would be a really bad idea, right? If you built your foundation out of wood, for example, does anyone think that’d be a good idea? That’d be a terrible idea, right? Unless you’re a termite. Then you say, “Wow, yeah, that’s great.” But that doesn’t mean wood isn’t a good thing. It needs to be in its right place.
The things that we trust in, they’re often from God, they’re often good things, but they need to be in the right place, situated on the foundation that doesn’t crumble rather than being the foundation themselves. And when we start to do that, we start to find those altars of the world that we keep going to less inviting. They don’t call to us as much. They still call to us because we’re fallen human beings, but they don’t call to us as much because why? Because we realize that those are the things that we need to be in the right place. Those things are trying to fix the broken, crumbling foundations, and we need that better foundation.
And when we say, God, give me that better foundation, the other key thing, and it starts to allow us to share something better too. We have to have that right foundation. And probably I’d say, I don’t know, maybe there’s someone I’ve met that truly 100% in his or her heart had nothing but the Lord as a foundation. I don’t think that’s the case in this side of glory. I think all of us are going to have parts of our lives that we have those shaky foundations. But we keep saying, God, just keep hauling it out. Just keep removing it and keep putting me on your foundation instead.
That’s why I wanted to copy my confidence from. Because the world says, you do this or you do that, and you’re going to have confidence. And we start copying that down and jotting it down into our lives. And you know what? We feel confident for a time until it breaks.
When I used to teach over at Lindenwood, I wanted to make sure that my students weren’t cheating. And I’d do essay exams. I’d also do multiple choice exams, depending on the class. If you’ve been a teacher, maybe you’ve wrestled with, how am I going to avoid cheating? And I came up with a solution, of course. You know, I’m a geek, so what did I do? I decided to use a tech solution.
I found a tool that I could download that was open source that would create optically scanned tests so I could create my own multiple choice tests and randomize both which questions showed up, in which order, which questions were included, actually not just both, three different things, and which order the answers were for each question. And I actually told the students I was going to do this. Don’t even bother.
But you know there’s always someone who ignored that. And I’d be walking around during the exam, and I’d see that person who’s doing these nervous sideways looks over at the student next to him that he knows is a better student. Putting down. And of course, once the exams were handed in, my suspicions were confirmed. I’d find that the circles were in the exact same spot on those two tests.
I’m not going to ask for a show of hands if you’ve ever been tempted to do such a thing. But I did find that in my classes, the students only did it once. Because when they got their tests back, they got a big old ugly F because they put in what they thought were sure, confident circles in the wrong spots because their exam wasn’t the same as anyone else’s exam around them. And so whatever they put down was wrong.
Maybe some would be right by sheer random chance, but not enough to get anywhere close to a passing grade. When we get to the final exam, when we copy the world, it feels confident. We start filling in those circles. And we know the person next to us seems to be succeeding in the world and getting ahead. And so we say, I can face everything by just copying that.
And we go and we take our sheet and we place it in the test return pile of life and say, I’ve got this all under control until we realize we don’t have anything at all under control.
Where am I copying my confidence from? Am I copying it from the world and the ways of the world, the manipulation and the anger and the malice and the brokenness of the world? Is that where I’m copying from? Or am I copying from Jesus?
Because all those things that we’re tempted to do, all those things that people get away with in the world, even if they get away with it in this time, they won’t get away with it ultimately. And here’s the thing we need to know: It doesn’t actually work.
David realizes that. That’s why he looks at his friends and says, why am I going to flee from what God’s called me to do? Why would I flee? What refuge am I going to find in the mountain that’s better than the Lord Himself? He is the refuge. There’s nothing that I’m going to face that He’s not the perfect refuge for. And there’s nothing that I’m going to face where His way isn’t the perfect way to do it.
And I’d like to say, and of course it’ll work out great for us in the moment. Sometimes we’re Ladder 118. And facing it, we are going to face the very things we fear. And I’d like to say, we’re not going to face the very things that we fear. We are going to face the very things we fear.
But here’s what we know. Here’s what David’s living in. I don’t think he knows that he absolutely won’t die. But he knows that he won’t be without the Lord.
We’re going to face fear. And we’re going to face fear that is tangible and real. And we can feel it because the thing behind the fear is real. But our Savior, our Savior defeats everything fearful. That’s why David can say, I take refuge in the Lord. Our Savior defeats everything that is fearful.
Will you pray with me, please? Lord, we all come with our burdens, our struggles. We come with those things where it’s the case that we’re the ones failing. We’ve come to the altars of the world. Well, why do we do it? Because we fear that if we don’t, somehow it won’t work. It won’t come. Everything won’t come together the way we want. The things that we want to accomplish, maybe even things that we say we want to accomplish for You, they won’t happen. And so we compromise.
You say that You are our refuge. And yet that fear, no matter if it’s only fearing fear itself, that’s pretty mighty fear. And we don’t want to face it. Lord, would You remind us that we have a God who’s faced it for us?
But the reason that Peter can come later in life and reflect is because of what he saw in the miracle of our God overcoming death. It wasn’t that the threat was less real. It was, in fact, more real. It was more tangible. It was more present. And it was more eminent. But he knew his God was his refuge. Lord, may we all rest in that same promise today. Pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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