God will Remain

We are in the 4th week of our series, God of the Hills and Valleys. We have been doing a study on the book of Psalms. How has that been going reading the Psalms? Getting some good stuff? We have based the title of each sermon from a line in the song.

God of the hills and valleys And I am not alone!

Father, you give and take away Every joy and every pain Through it all you will remain Over it all!

In the joys, in the pains. God is there, God will Remain.

The psalmist rests assured that God’s people are safe and secure under God’s mighty protection.

I. GOD IS OUR REFUGE, WE NEED NOT FEAR

Dictionary of Bible Themes 5490 refuge

refuge

A safe retreat; a place of healing and renewal; also a stronghold from which to launch a counter-attack.

Psalm 46:1–3 NIV

1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 3 though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.

Psalm 46:1–3 NIV

1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 3 though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.

I. The Protection from God (46:1–3): The psalmist finds security and peace in knowing that God watches over his people.

A. Its availability (46:1) : God is always ready to be our refuge.

B. Its dependability (46:2–3): We should not fear, since God is with us through all circumstances.

1. Though the earth gives away, the world is destroyed (46:2)

2. Though the oceans roar and we fall into the heart of the sea. (46:2–3)

3. In all these things, God Remains, he is our strength he is our refuge.

C. He is our strength and refuge, but what do we do when our world is falling apart either in reality or emotionally. It gets a lot hard when the storms of life are crashing down upon you. When life is beating you up! It’s one thing to trust in God when things are going well, but God says, I will remain, I’m not going anywhere. Hide in me, let me protect you.

EX: went goose hunting with my Dad, for a few days. We were in Arkansas for the polar vortex, they were predicting to have the coldest temperature on record while we were there. We did miss it by a few degrees, but it was cold! We were set up near the this wildlife refuge. We watched these geese in this refuge a safe retreat, a place of renewal. they estimated there were over 40,000 geese in this area. So many it kept the ice from forming on the reservoir. These geese would get up and fly around they would circle and then land right back where they were protected from us trying to shoot them. The went to the place they were safe from trouble. What’s interesting is these wise old birds, would get up and fly out of the refuge, they would have enough strength from resting to go straight up and fly high enough they were about the troubles, about the assault, above roar of our 12 gauges.

D. God wants to be the help for you. God wants to be your strength and your refuge so you can go above the assaults and troubles of this world. I. GOD IS OUR REFUGE, WE NEED NOT FEAR

II. GOD IS OUR STRENGTH, WE NEED NOT FALL

Psalm 46:7–8 NIV

7 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. 8 Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth.

Psalm 46:4–7 NIV

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. 5 God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. 6 Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts. 7 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.

PS

A. God is our strength. God is within the city of God and as Baptized believers in Jesus Christ, as those covered in that living water, he isn't just with us, He is within us! Not just in the same city, but living inside you. The power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power that overcome, death, hell and the grave is available to you and is in you.

A. God is our strength. God is within the city of God and as Baptized believers in Jesus Christ, as those covered in that living water, he isnt’ just with us, He is within us! Not just in the same city, but living inside you. The power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power that overcome, death, hell and the grave is available to you and is in you.

Therefore, we Need not fall or falter. There are times in life, however, when we are weak or perhaps we feel weak, helpless and inadequate.

But we must remember that God is our strength and the more we lean on Him the less we will fear or fall. But He alone is our strength. WE ARE NOT STRONG IN OURSELVES.

I want to read you a quote from Michael Sechler.

My son, Micah died in 2012 from kidney disease and complications.

My son, Micah died in 2012 from kidney disease and complications.

As he lay dying I wrote this in my journal:

"Sitting at the bedside of my dying son at 3:48 in the morning. Weeping like crazy. Bertrand Russell once said that 'no one can sit at the bedside of dying child and believe in God.' Well I beg to differ. My faith is the thing that strengthens me. How else can I make it through? We cannot do anything else. This fire drains away everything else. Nothing else satisfies my soul. I would love to save my son. I would easily give my life for his, but God has not chosen that path for us. He has chosen a vale of tears, but He will walk through it with me."

Micah now walks with Jesus, and Jesus still walks with me. Michael Sechler

That kind of faith, that kind of trust, that kind of strength comes from God. Do you have the kind of relationship with God to get connected to his strength, to his power? I know for me it comes from daily walking with God. It comes from time in the word, time in prayer. People ask me how much time do I need to spend in prayer and reading? What’s the minimum? Is there a rule? You need to spend enough time that when the waters rage, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, and the earth gives way, that you can find refuge and strength in God.

A good question is, how do you react to stress and difficulties in your life? Do you freak out when things don’t go your way or do you draw strength from God. Maybe you fell lost and broken, and full of fear. I want you know that there is hope. There is help.

In Motion sharing from Martin.

II. GOD IS OUR STRENGTH, WE NEED NOT FALL

Psalm 46:4–7 NIV

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. 5 God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. 6 Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts. 7 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.

III. GOD IS OUR GOD, WE NEED NO OTHER

Psalm 46:8–11 NIV

8 Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth. 9 He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. 10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” 11 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Come and see all that God has created, some right there stop and say wait a minute God didn’t create this! It just happened. I believe in science.

Come and see all that God has created, some right there stop and say wait a minute God didn’t create this! It just happened. I believe in science.

SCIENCE PROVES CREATIONISM (Source: Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004)

Allen Rex Sandage, the greatest observational cosmologist in the world--who has deciphered the secrets of the stars, plumbed the mysteries of quasars, revealed the age of globular clusters, pinpointed the distances of remote galaxies, and quantified the universe’s expansion through his work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories--prepared to step onto the platform at a conference in Dallas.

Few scientists are as widely respected as this one-time protégé to legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble. Sandage has been showered with prestigious honors from the American Astronomical Society, the Swiss Physical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, receiving astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times dubbed him the "Grand Old Man of Cosmology."

As he approached the stage at this 1985 conference on science and religion, there seemed to be little doubt where he would sit. The discussion would be about the origin of the universe, and the panel would be divided among those scientists who believed in God and those who didn’t, with each viewpoint having it’s own side of the stage.

Many of the attendees probably knew that the ethnically Jewish Sandage had been a virtual theist even as a child. Many others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, "The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you’d expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds." So Sandage’s seat among the doubters was a given.

Then the unexpected happened. Sandage set the room abuzz by turning and taking a chair among the theists. Even more shocking, during his talk he revealed that he had become a Christian at age 50.

He would later tell a reporter, "It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence." Allen Rex Sandage

Psalm 46:8-

Come and see what God has done. Look into these things, people look and say I can’t believe in God because I believe in science, nothing could be further from the truth, the more you dig into science, the more you will see the hand of God. The 2 work together, don’t be afraid of science or feel like you have to believe one or the other.

Then psalmist says, “He makes wars to cease” in verse 9, and of course this is true.

i. Yet wars continue to arise.

Yet wars continue to arise.

As disciples of Jesus, we must realize true peace can come only when people have peace in their hearts, and this comes only through Jesus, the Prince of Peace. We can focus on the physical war and ignore the spiritual peace that people around us are longing for.

Are you at war with someone in your heart? God can make wars cease. He wants to break those bows that you we can use to shoot arrows at each other and attack each other. He can burn the shields we can hide behind in our defensiveness. We don’t have to stay waring with each other. And he tells us how in verse 10

vs 10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;

This may be the toughest thing in scripture for me. Be still, slow down. quiet yourself. How do you do with silence?

Our world is almost void of silence. There is noise everywhere and if there isn’t we have noise generators that make noise to help us sleep. We have head phones that can blare music so we don’t have to sit in silence.

We have a hard time with silence.

Author Kathleen Norris used to play a game with elementary-school children in which she would make a deal with them. "First you get to make noise," she would bargain, "and then you’ll make silence."

The time of noise was always predictably chaotic -- shouting, pounding and stomping, like a football team exploding out of a locker room. But the period of silence that followed was unexpectedly passionate and creative. When the children were asked to write about it, reflects Norris, "their images often had a depth and maturity that was unlike anything else they wrote."

One boy discovered that "Silence is a tree spreading its branches to the sun."

One third-grader’s poem turned into a prayer: "Silence is spiders spinning their webs; it’s like a silkworm making its silk. Lord, help me to know when to be silent."

And a little girl offered a gem of spiritual wisdom that Norris finds herself returning to when her life becomes too noisy and distracting: "Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go."

(Source: Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith [New York: Riverhead Books, 1998], 16-17. From a sermon by Carl Greene, "Two Point Conversion" 2/16/2009)

II. The Paradise of God (46:4–5): The psalmist describes the perfect tranquility of the city of God.

Be still, and then know that I am God.

A. Its river brings joy (46:4) .

he will be exalted, in every nation and all over the earth.

Do you know that he is God? Well that starts with knowing him. We can’t know that he is God, we can’t be still before him unless we truly know him. I want to invite you to sit down with the person that invited you and look at a few scriptures together. Come and see this God who created the heaven and the earth and who knows you, and wants to be know by you.

B. It is God’s home (46:4–5).

Let’s pray.

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C. It is eternal (46:5) : The city cannot be destroyed.

III. The Power of God (46:6–8): God brings destruction on the world.

IV. The Peace of God (46:9) : He will someday end wars throughout the earth.

V. The Praise to God (46:10–11): We are to be silent and honor the Lord Almighty.