Well, we have been in the series about hope and talking about
what does it mean to have biblical hope.
Well, how is that different than worldly hope?
And we looked at why we need hope.
And I unpacked that over the the first three weeks.
And then we had the wonderful Clare Mulroney, who spoke last
week. Yeah, we can give her a whoop.
Just so blessed by looking at hope in his provision.
And just love the way that Claire spoke into that and that
place of surrender as we surrendered to him to be our
provider. And if you missed that, you can
catch up on our YouTube channel. Do watch that.
If you missed it, I'd really encourage you to to watch that.
And as Claire said, over the next number of weeks, we're
going to be looking each week on those promises of God that we
can put our hope in. And I have a subject here and it
is entitled Hope in his protection, Hope in his
protection. And the way we're going to do
this is by looking at a very famous Psalm and it's probably
one of the most quoted Psalms. You will, you will have heard
it, I'm sure. And and it's typically used in a
form of a prayer. Many people will pray this Psalm
because it provides language for us to express a desire that we
have to be protected by God. And you know, one of the things
I spoke about a few weeks ago was the need for us to be real
with God, about our situation. To I think I use a phrase to
walk through the pain, don't let the pain walk you.
In other words, we need to not just be an optimist by ignoring
reality, but saying to God, this is what I'm feeling, this is the
reality that I'm walking through, and then give that to
God. And this Psalm allows us to do
that. It's also a Psalm that I'm sure
you've heard or maybe you've read to someone who is in need
of comfort, someone who is in need to feel that the Lord is
looking after them. And I know that as a parent,
Steph and I have often times quoted this Psalm.
If that hasn't whetted your appetite, I don't know what
will. Are you ready for the Psalm?
It's Psalm 91, I heard. Yeah, there you go.
I knew it was that Mark knew you're going to talk about Psalm
91. Well done.
So I'm going to read that it's going to be on the screen if
you're in the room, and if you're online, it'll be on your
device. However, you may want to close
your eyes as I read this. Maybe for you you need that
comfort this morning. Maybe for you you need to hear
the promise of protection. And so, rather than read it, why
don't you just listen to it as I read it?
To us, 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, in 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
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. 1000 may fall at your side, 10,000 at your right hand,
but it will not come near you. You will only look with your
eyes and see the recompense of the wicked, because you have
made the Lord your dwelling place the Most High.
So 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 the stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and
the serpent you will trample under foot, 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.
It will be with him in trouble. I will rescue him and honour him
with long life. I will satisfy him and show him
my salvation. Amen.
That is the word of the Lord. There is so much to unpack in
this Psalm, so rich in its meaning and so diverse in its
application. And I would be lying to you if I
didn't say that I struggled much with this Psalm this week as I
prepared. And I have wrestled with the
word as I have sought to try and convey the truth that is in this
word. Because there is much in here
that I believe the Lord wants to speak to us this morning.
And what I want to do is maybe just track through the Psalm
with you and and maybe point out some thoughts that the Lord has
given me. And the first thing that struck
me as I read this was simply verse one and two.
Let's let's read that again. It says this.
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, in whom I trust.
Now, I don't know about you, but when you think of protection,
what do you think about? Maybe you think about your seat
belt when you put on. I hope you put your seat belts
under the car. Maybe you've got an alarm system
with back to base monitoring. Maybe that's your protection
while you're at home. You know, when we had COVID,
everyone was wearing masks thinking that that would, you
know, protect us from germs. There are certain things to give
us protection from certain things and the way we use those
things, How many times can I use the word things?
Probably a few. When we have those times where
we need those things, we grab them and we use them.
But I want to say this, When we talk about and we think about
the protection of God, it's an altogether type of different
thing. It's not something you call upon
and put on. It's not something that you use
just in the moment. Yes, there are places and there
are times for arrow prayers. I love a good arrow prayer.
Help. And there's a place for that.
But you see, what the psalmist is suggesting here is that there
is a different approach to protection when we think about
God, rather than it being a one off thing, it's about
cultivating a lifestyle. And he says it here so well, he
says this. He who dwells in the shelter
dwells. What does it mean to dwell?
I think it means practising the presence of God, you know,
recognising that he is with us, you know, this week Ellie, our
middle child, she was struggling with some night terrors and as
as recently as last night she came into into our room and she
was, she was scared. And I said let me come with you
darling. And and I came with her to her
bedroom and she got into bed, and I just curled up on the end
of her bed and I dwelled with her, and she dwelled with me.
And the fact that she was dwelling with me, I didn't do
anything. I didn't have to do anything.
But the fact that she was dwelling with me, she was, she
felt protected and she was able to go to sleep.
And I think that's a rather beautiful picture of what the
Psalmist is talking about here. He's saying he who dwells with
God, He who walks with him, He who recognizes that God is with
him, that communes with God. You see, the protection that
we're talking about here is a result of communion with God,
relationship with him. It's about being in prayer.
It's about being in his word. It's about recognizing that he
sees all things and that he is wanting to be with us.
That's what it means to dwell. And I rather think in our
present modern day it is so difficult to dwell.
We skip from one thing to the next.
We snack on this, that and the other.
But have we lost the art of dwelling?
I think I'd rather have. But what's very interesting
about this Psalm you see, is that it moves from he to I.
Let me show you what I mean. Verse one is a general statement
of trusting God. He who dwells in the shelter of
the Most High will abide in this shadow of the Almighty.
And then verse two says this. I I will say to the Lord my
refuge and my fortress. You see, verse 2 is a personal
testimony. It's easy for us to declare God
is a protector. God is almighty, but the
question is, is it personal to us?
We can know about God, We can declare his character.
We can even tell ourselves. We can tell other people.
But actually the challenge in this Psalm is not do you know
that God protects? The challenge in this Psalm is
this. Do you know that he wants to
protect you? The challenge in this Psalm is
not to declare that those that abide with God are protected.
The challenge is this. Are you abiding with God?
You see, as Claire mentioned last week in her talk, when we
talk about surrendering to God, it's ultimately about trust.
Who do we put our trust in? And I've said it before, I said
that which you put your trust in is ultimately that which you
have hope in. You trust in your money, in your
bank balance. You have hope that your money
will solve your issues. And so fundamentally the
question here is, do you trust God enough that you can
surrender to him and dwell with him?
And I couldn't even get past one and past verse one and two in
preparing this word before I got unstuck, because I've seen
commentaries on this verse and I've heard sermons about this
verse and it's all about declaring who God is.
And let me just say we should do that.
But where in that is the personal challenge of saying
have you made it personal to you and said that he is, are you
dwelling with God? I think that's the first thing I
wanted to highlight. And then let's look on as we
read further. We get to verse 5, and there's
this wonderful 2 verses that says this.
You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that
flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor
the destruction that wastes at new Day, noonday.
I mean this is quite a comprehensive protection list.
Think about it. You know when you if you ever
meet these these people that sell you alarm systems with back
to the base stuff, we don't personally have one.
But you know like package one, you've got this.
Package 2:00 is way more comprehensive.
Package three will come round in a van with the dogs.
Package four will have a helicopter for you hovering
above. You know, package 5 we can set
some armed guard around your perimeter, you know package 6
and on and on. This is like package 10.
This is like the gold package of protection.
I mean, what do we see? First thing we see that it is
all the time. What do we see?
Terror of night by day. And just so we're not confused.
And noon in the middle. I love that.
Why is that the case? Well, we read in Psalm 121.
I'm going to read this because this is a very similar Psalm in
many ways. It says this.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come
from? My help comes from the Lord who
made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be
moved. Listen to this.
He who keeps you will not plumber.
You see, that story I told you about Ellie is a good analogy,
but it slightly falls short because I did doze off. 2 hours
later I woke up and thought, oh she's asleep.
I better come back to bed a little bit cold.
But you see, that's not our God. He dwells with us, but he
doesn't fall asleep like talk about monitoring.
Our God does not slumber. He is actively protecting you.
He's actively looking at you. He delights in you.
He wants to be with you. Some of you may feel like that.
No one wants to be with me. I want to tell you right now,
this morning, God wants to be with you.
Maybe you only came this morning to hear that one thing.
God wants to be with you. He wants to lie on the on the
bottom of the bed with you, so to speak, To use that analogy,
because it's a very comprehensive protection plan.
What else we see? Second things.
It covers all things. We've got fear there, emotion,
protection of our emotions. Then we've got physical,
personal attack. The arrow that speaks very much
of A of a targeting to you, doesn't it?
So we got, we got emotion, we got a personal physical attack,
then we've got what else? Physical, General danger,
pestilence. I mean, that covers it.
That's quite broad. And then it goes on.
What does it say? Destruction that that wastes as
a result of what's around you? I feel like this is a very
impact. In two verses, we can see a lot
about the heart of God towards us, for his protection for us.
It's a very comprehensive plan. And then let's read on a bit
verse 11. 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 the stone. Now, interestingly enough, I'm
sure some of you know this Psalm 91.
This point here is actually quoted or probably misquoted by
the devil. The only bitter scripture that
the Devil quotes. When?
When does he do that? Well, Jesus is in the in the
desert being tempted and we read about it in Matthew 4 verses 5
to 6 and Satan quotes his verse and essentially tempts Jesus.
Say, listen, if you're good, climb up to the top of this
temple and jump down and the angels you know will will come
to protect you. Now how does Jesus respond?
Deuteronomy 616 Jesus replies, do not put the Lord your God to
the test. He's quoting Deuteronomy.
Do not put the Lord God to your test.
And I think this is a very important point, a lesson for us
when we talk about the protection of God.
You see, the protection we're talking about is a trusted
obedience in what God is calling us to.
But what it's not is a sinful presumption that God will
protect us no matter what we do. And I think this is important.
God has given us ways in which we live our lives not to limit
our freedom, but to protect us, whatever that might be.
And so often times I meet with Christians and they've come out
of God's will. Maybe they've had relations
outside of marriage and they've they've had issues resulting to
that. Maybe they're in a habit of
getting drunk. Maybe it's whatever it might be,
these things that God says this and don't do that.
And yet they find themselves out of God's will.
And they say, why didn't God protect me in that?
Now hear my heart here. I'm not saying that the by the
grace and the love of the Lord, He doesn't come in and save us
in spite of ourselves. And I've seen that.
But what is Jesus telling us in this?
Don't put your Lord God to the test.
I don't say. Well, God will protect me no
matter what. I'll just do it anyway.
It's fine. God loves me.
We call this hyper grace. And it doesn't matter what I do,
God will always. But I think there's a bit of a
stark warning from Jesus here that we can learn from.
And so I want to. I want to encourage you to say,
Lord, would you help me? Would you show me by your spirit
those things that I'm doing in my life that are outside of your
will, that are not dwelling with you?
But I'm going contrary to what it means to surrender my will
and my obedience to you. And I realize that that comes
comes across as a little bit hard, doesn't it?
But if we want to walk in the truth of the word and to walk in
the protection of our Lord, I think this is a really important
message for all of us this morning.
But at this juncture, we've covered a lot here.
This is where I got to struggling and wrestling with
the word, because we've talked about this very comprehensive
protection plan. We've talked about how if we
dwell with God, of which many here do, we'll be protected.
But here is why don't we address the elephants in the room?
Why doesn't that always happen? I could have just preached this
and got you excited and energized and and ignored this
fact. But I think we need to ask the
question because I suspect that just like me, where I've done
all this in spite of and I have had pestilence or my child has
had a disease or whatever it might be.
You say, Lord, help me understand.
What does it mean that I, I I've done all you've asked me to.
I I I've sought you in prayer. I've worshipped you.
I've lived my life in obedience to you as much as I'm able.
And yet why does this happen? I'm sure I'm not the only one
that's cried out to God and said that same thing.
And so I want to look at why that could be the case, and I
want to give you some possible reasons.
The first one is, this is what you may hear.
You don't have enough faith or you're not dwelling enough.
There are certain streams that would suggest that if you're not
walking in the promises of God to its entirety, it's down to
your lack of faith. I have been part of churches
where that was the message. And someone would say why am I
still sick? I pray to God.
I believe that God can can heal me and the and the and the
person said, well it's because you lacked faith and that's just
been a body blow. Now I don't want to undermine
the importance of faith. We know that in Jesus hometown
he wasn't able to do anything because they lacked faith.
I'm not talking about the fact that faith isn't important.
Absolutely is. What I'm telling you here is
that is not always the reason why we don't see this fulfilled
in our lives. So it's not necessarily that.
And some of you probably in some of these pestilences or some of
these issues and you've had faith and you haven't been
outside the Lord's will #2. This is another way in which
some people will help manage that tension by saying this, it
isn't a real promise of God, that the Psalm is just a poetic
desire, and it's poetry, and you need to read it with that lens.
So you can't claim this as a promise of God.
I disagree. Yes, it's poetry and it's
beautiful, isn't it? Yes, it gives us language to
express our desire. But here's the thing of it.
Does it express the character of God that you know and love?
Yes. And so this is a promise of God.
So OK, Mark, if it's not because I don't have enough faith,
although faith is important, and if it's not because these aren't
real promises, something else must be going on here.
Absolutely. And in order to understand this,
we need to understand it through the lens of His Kingdom breaking
in and the tension of the here and the not Yet.
What do I mean by that? The Lord's prayer?
Lord, would your Kingdom come here on earth as it is in
heaven? Now Jesus, when he came, he he
proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is at hand.
It is near, right? And when he died on the cross,
and if you've been here for any length of time, you would have
heard me speak about this before.
When he died on the cross, he inaugurated his Kingdom.
OK, that was the define decisive blow to the enemy.
And I've used the analogy before.
It's like D-Day and V day. That was the D-Day.
That was it. There was the the the battle had
been won. But there's the the battle had
to play out until we got to V Day, Victory Day.
And that is when Jesus comes again, and that is when his rule
and his reign is established here.
But until that time, we pray, Lord, with your will be done on
earth, in heaven. There are other wills at stake
here in play here. There's the devil's will.
There's our will. There's the world's will.
We're we're not in that place yet of the fully consummated
Kingdom. But you see, we live in this
tension that we see His Kingdom breaking in.
We have those those moments where we see miracles of
healing. We see those miracles that come
through, and sometimes we don't. And as painful it is as it is,
we live in that tension point. You hear me?
And that's why and we see and we grapple with this struggle.
So what does that mean, Mark, because you're talking about
hope here and all of a sudden I feel like, well, what's the
point? That's a fair question.
I get you What I would say to this is this, we're called to
live in the here, not the not yet bit.
Sorry, I'll say that no way around.
Shall we? Thank you.
What I'm pointing out, we're here to live in the not yet bit,
not the here bit. In other words, we're here to
declare the Kingdom, to embrace the Kingdom and to seek His
Kingdom. Because what's there for the
point of praying the Lord's Prayer?
And I bet you pray the Lord's Prayer.
Sometimes our desire is to see His Kingdom come.
And I would propose that a lot of the issue is, is that we camp
in the here bit and we don't embrace the not yet bit I've
seen in my life. It normally goes like this.
Well, what's the point? What's the point?
You know, Wimber when people used to come to him and say John
Wimber, the founder of Vineyard, say, listen, I pray for people.
I'm not seeing them healing healed, he said.
Listen, go pray for 5000, then come back and tell me.
Could have been a number higher or lower.
But the point here is that we give up so quickly, but we can
place our hope that he loves us and that that are his promises
and we've got to stand on those promises.
We declare those promises, we seek those promises.
And I suspect that in my life I will see more breakthrough if I
push into the not yet and embrace His Kingdom coming that
if I just give up and say, well, what's the point Because that's
the option we've got. But you see, there is hope in
God, and I want to encourage you this morning to fix your eyes on
God and say, listen, #1 I recognize that my protection
from the Lord comes out of a place of dwelling with him.
And for me that is where it starts, a personal challenge to
put my trust in him, to surrender in him, and to dwell
with him. And maybe for your question this
week is Lord God, can you just show me what does it mean to
dwell with you? Simple.
What does it mean to dwell with you?
#2 It's about then taking that as a personal testimony and
saying I'm not just declare who God is, I'm going to declare
that he is my God and I'm going to walk in that.
Number three, it's about saying and recognising that God's heart
towards us is to protect us from all things and #4 do a bit of an
audit in your life. How do you do this?
You say, Holy Spirit, would you come and convict me of all those
things in my life that are not right with you, that are
contrary to your will? You see, if you're praying the
Lord's prayer, Lord your Kingdom come, your earth be, your will
be done on earth as it is in heaven.
It has to start with you first. That prayer has to start with
praying it for yourself. You're not just saying, oh man,
that world's crazy. I wish they would do your will.
And yet we go on sinning in different areas.
That doesn't make any sense. The challenge here is to pray
the Lord's Prayer in our life and say, Lord, would you show me
that those areas that I'm not in your will?
And lastly, I want to say this as Kingdom people, we have been
called to extend God's Kingdom in faith and so we need to push
in and I often will pray this as a prayer.
As I said, Steph and I before have prayed this over our
children. That's a challenge for us to do
it more. But why don't you take this
Psalm and use it as your daily prayer and claim it for
yourself? Lord, thank you that your word
says that you will protect me during the day.
Thank you, Lord God, that your promise towards me is that
you'll protect me from pestilence.
Thank you, God. So turn that promise into a
prayer for your life and I and I guarantee you'll see, I
guarantee you will start seeing God move in ways you have yet to
see. And lastly, I would say this, I
know there'd been many times where God's protected me, which
I won't even know about until I get to heaven.
I mean, I remember this one occasion.
I do remember this time, it was about 25 years ago and I was in
London with some friends after work having a drink at a bar and
I had to go to the cash machine to get some more cash.
For whatever reason. I came out there was a part,
part van here, and I just stepped out and I went to do
this and literally as if someone held me back.
And in that moment, this bus went right by.
And I was like, oh, my word. I think an Angel just protected
me from that. I suspect there are many, many,
many occasions in your life where you look back and God has
saved you in that moment. So I've just been encouraged to
say, you know what, Thank you, Lord, that you protect me.
Thank you that you've protected me from myself.
Thank you for protecting me from the world.
Thank you Lord, for for the for the way in which you protected
me from other. Like God is there actively
working, but either A we don't give credit to it because we're
still disappointed about other stuff, or B we don't take the
time to recognize it. Thank you, Lord, that you're my
protector. And as we thank him out of that
lifestyle of thankfulness, our hope builds.
Our hope builds in God to be our protector.
I'd like us all to stand, if that's OK.