Text: Psalm 62:5-8
Date: July 17, 2022
Event: Proper 10, Year C (Non-Lectionary Text)
Psalm 62:5-8 (EHV)
My soul, rest quietly in God alone,
for my hope comes from him.
6He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress.
I will not be disturbed.
7My salvation and my honor depend on God, my strong rock.
My refuge is in God.
8Trust in him at all times, you people.
Pour out your hearts before him.
God is a refuge for us.
My Soul, Rest Quietly in God Alone
This past week was only my second time being able to be at Tree of Life Bible Camp with the awesome kids and wonderful staff to spend a week in nature, having fun with the kids but mostly centering our day around God’s Word. We spent the whole week reviewing the different pieces of armor that Paul lists off in Ephesians 6 like the helmet of faith, or the belt of truth, or the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.
So our theme was to be warriors for Christ—not fighting physical battles here with people, but fighting the battle of faith as we struggle toward this life and look forward to eternity. We recognized over and over again just how many things Satan tries to use against us, how mightily he strives to pull us away from our God and Savior.
We each have our own weaknesses in this regard. If we went around the room this morning and asked each person what it is that they feel pulls them away from their trust in God and looking forward to heaven, we’d probably get a lot of different answers, but we’d probably find things gravitating to a common themes. Maybe we’d find some people who find the promises of God too intensely good to be believed like Sarah in our First Reading. Maybe we’d find people who mean well but get things just a touch out of order like Martha did in our Gospel. Maybe we’d find people for whom the riches of life are too enticing and they become focused on those to the determent of all else—including their faith in God. Maybe we’d find people for whom the troubles of this life scream and stomp around so wildly in their minds that they just can’t think about anything else.
It’s that last distraction—the troubles of this life—that I’d like to focus on for a few minutes this morning. If I’m being honest, this is one of the real places that I struggle and places where I continually need God’s direction, reprimand, and refocus. And to zero us in on this, I want to read just a few verses from one of the psalms that King David wrote, Psalm 62: My soul, rest quietly in God alone, for my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I will not be disturbed. My salvation and my honor depend on God, my strong rock. My refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, you people. Pour out your hearts before him. God is a refuge for us.
Psalm 62 gives us direction for when trouble overwhelms us, when sorrow or loss or unfulfilled desires or despair weigh us down. David knew something of these struggles. From things that happened to him (like Saul trying to kill him or his son trying to steal the kingdom from him) or things that he caused (like all the horrible ramifications of his sin with Bathsheba and his attempted cover-up), we know about a lot about the hardships he faced and the trouble that would have tried to pull him away from God.
So David talks to himself in this psalm. Or, more accurately, he talks to his soul. He says, My soul, rest quietly in God alone, for my hope comes from him. That word quietly jumps off the page to me. When worries are crashing in, for me, it feels like they’re screaming in my head morning, noon, and night. I can’t escape them. It’s so loud and so painful and so distracting that I can hardly think about anything else. They occupy all the airspace I have, all the ability I have to think, and my emotions quickly follow suit. I am quickly sorrowful at the first hint of a problem. And then I am quickly frustrated by my inability to fix these problems.
Amid the cacophony of these worries yelling and screaming in our hearts and minds, what does David say? Rest quietly in God alone. Where is there peace from this horrid noise? Where is their calm amid this never-ending tumult? In God, yes, but also in God alone. Notice how David didn’t say, “My soul, rest quietly in your own strength.” Nor did he say, “My soul, rest quietly in your ability to rise above the fray.” No, he said, “Rest quietly in God alone.”
David calls God our refuge and fortress. If an enemy is attacking, where do you want to be? Behind the safety of thick walls, right? You want some protector between you and the adversary. You want protection that is sound. You want a fortress and refuge.
But the very presence of a fortress implies danger, doesn’t it? I always find the signs from fallout shelters from the Cold War-era to be very disconcerting. Here is a thing that exists solely because there is a chance that we should need it to be protected from something horrible.
When God describes himself as our fortress, it means that there will be things to hound us, things to attack us, things to make us sad, and hurt, and distressed. God does not promise that nothing bad will every happen to you. In fact, he promises just the opposite. But when those things do come, he promises to deal with it, to work good from it, to love us during it.
But that’s often not what we want to hear. We want to think that because we’re Christians, because we’re devoted to our God, that we should be immune from all of that bad and troubling stuff. Maybe I don’t want a fortress—maybe I want a rolling green field and a cool breeze or and warm beach with cresting waves. I want to live an idyllic life that has no troubles or worries or anything else of the sort. And when life isn’t that, it is easy to start to turn on God. Isn’t it easy to accuse him of making mistakes? Isn’t it easy to to ask him why he lets this trouble in my life but not this other person’s? Anger, jealousy, hurt, and frustration can seep out of us when life doesn’t go the way we plan, envision, or desire.
Which leads us to the next realization. God is called our salvation. Surely, God saving us is a good thing, but there’s also something else implicit in that, right? If God being our fortress implies danger and hardship, then God being our salvation implies that we need to be saved from something. And this is not being saved from trouble or hardship. This is being saved from sin. Because, whether it’s from our dissatisfaction with what God allows into our lives or a myriad of other things, we have sinned against God. He demands perfection and we have been far from it. We need to be saved because we have rebelled against him and have brought hell on ourselves as the punishment for that sin.
And if we combine those things, it can start to feel like we’re putting God to the test and perhaps trying our luck with him. Is he still going to protect us from those bad things if we continue to complain about how he’s let those troubles come to us in the first place? Is he he still going to forgive us, to be our salvation, if we continue to heap sin upon sin? And that’s where David’s third point as he describes God is so important: he says God is our rock, even our strong rock. God doesn’t have emotions in the same way that you and I do. Hi feelings aren’t fickle like ours can be. He doesn’t feel good about you one day and then feel frustrated with you the next day. He isn’t kind to you one day and then mean to you the next day. God is stable and solid, like a gigantic rock that cannot be moved no matter how hard we might push on it.
So you will not get up one day and find that God has decided to be done with you. God continues to stably and perfectly love you. He forgives every rebellion and sin because he died to take those sins away. You will not find God disposed against you. You will not find a day where your troubles are too much for him to handle or too irritating for him to care about. Every day we awake to a new day of his love and patience for us.
Which is why David encourages us on the path of true resolution to these heartaches and worries: Trust in him at all times, you people. Pour out your hearts before him. God is a refuge for us. It’s a theme that keeps coming up in sermons probably I personally feel so poor at this task, but how is your prayer life? Is it your first go-to when troubles arise or is it your last line of defense, if you use it at all? Knowing what we know about God’s protection, forgiveness, and stability for us, why wouldn’t we bring every problem to him in prayer? From the small pain to the gigantic personal problem, he wants us to bring all of it to him, and in faith to trust that he will work these things for our eternal good. He is, after all, a refuge for us.
So rest quietly in God, not because he’s going to make life perfectly serene this side of eternity. He won’t. But rest quietly in God because no matter how loud the problems of this life or the guilt of our sin shout—he is greater than all of them. May he focus us on himself, and may we find our quiet rest in him now, until he brings us to that perfect home in heaven when things truly will be quiet and peaceful with him forever. Amen.
