Rob Morgan - What To Do With Problems You Cannot Solve And Fears You Cannot Shake

What To Do With Problems You Cannot Solve And Fears You Cannot Shake

A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________

Robert J. Morgan
November 1, 1998

In our Sunday mornings together this fall we’ve been looking at the subject of stress—how to bear up to it, how to handle it. I read this week in the New York Times that Harvard University has begun new programs for helping graduate students suffering from stress. The programs were started because 27-year-old Jason Altom, a fifth-year graduate student in chemistry, became the third Harvard graduate student to commit suicide in recent months due to stress.

Meanwhile in Norway, the Prime Minister of the country, Kjell Magne Bondevik, has just returned from 3 1/2 weeks of sick leave. He bluntly told his nation that his sickness was a depression triggered by the stress of running the country and by his inability to find any private space in his life.

Most people today are living under undue pressure. Where do you turn when you are so stressed you can imagine yourself becoming either suicidal or sick? Well, we turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, to our Savior. We follow his example. What did he do when he was stressed? Where did he turn during his greatest moments of anguish and affliction. Look at what Luke says about it:

/It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last. The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, "Surely this was a righteous man" (Luke 24:44-46).

/}}}

In the last, stress-filled, anguished, painful moments of his life, the Lord Jesus quoted Scripture that he had previously memorized. When he said, "Into your hands I commit my spirit," he was taking an Old Testament prayer of the Psalmist David and making it his own. The passage that came to our Lord’s mind at that profound moment was Psalm 31:

In you, O Lord, I have taken refuge;

let me never be put to shame;

deliver me in your righteousness.

Turn your ear to me,

come quickly to my rescue;

be my rock of refuge,

a strong fortress to save me.

Since you are my rock and my fortress,

for the sake of your name lead and guide me.

Free me from the trap that is set for me,

for you are my refuge.

Into your hands I commit my spirit;

redeem me, O Lord, the God of truth.

For our purposes today, we can say that the whole of Psalm 31, all 24 verses, are summarized and summed up in verses 4 and 5; for here in verses 4 and 5, the Psalmist deals with the three themes that pervade the whole Psalm. The first is the idea of a trap.

The Trap

"Free me from the trap that is set for me," he prays in verse 4. He is feeling trapped. We use this same kind of terminology today. People talk to me about feeling trapped in a bad marriage, or trapped by circumstances. Some people feel like they’re trapped in a job they don’t like, or caught in the trap of financial stress. Ecclesiastes 9:12 says, "As birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times and fall unexpectedly upon them." The devil is setting traps for us all over the place. 2 Timothy 2:26 warns us to beware falling into "the trap of the devil."

The Psalmist here, the Israeli King David, had fallen into a trap of some sort, and he was in a terrible state of mind. Look at the words he uses to describe his condition.

Verse 7 - Affliction

Verse 7 - Anguish

Verse 9 - Distress

Verse 9 - Sorrow

Verse 9 - Grief

Verse 10 - Groaning

Verse 10 - Weakness

Verse 12 - Broken like pottery

I wonder if anyone here feels trapped by life, broken like pottery, afflicted and anguished and distressed. Well, the next word I’d like to use is Truth.

The Truth

The passage continues, Free me from the trap that is set for me, for you are my refuge (vs. 4). This is the main theme of the whole Psalm. You see how it begins in verse 1? In you, O Lord, I have taken refuge.... And verse 2: ...be my rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save me. And verse 3: ...you are my rock and my fortress.... Verse 4 says, for you are my refuge.

The writer puts it even more beautifully in verse 19: How great is your goodness which you have stored up for those who fear you. God is very, very good; but what does he do with all his goodness? He stores it up for those who fear him, ...on those who take refuge in you. In the shelter of your presence you hide them... in your dwelling you keep them safe.

At our house, we have a cat named Spider and a dog named Duke. Sometimes, Duke will take a notion to chase Spider. He will leap to his feet, a conniving smile on his face, and dart after her in a flash. But he’s never been able to catch her, because she heads to the nearest tree and darts up it as quick as a wink. From her secure perch on a limb, she looks down and laughs at Duke. She feels utterly safe and secure, knowing that despite his barks he can’t touch her, he can’t get near her.

Just as a pursued kitten runs to a tree, just as a frightened child runs to his father, so we can come to the Lord in our stresses and distresses and find in him a hiding place, a place of security.

I read the other day about a football player named Eric Moore, a senior who plays for the University of Oklahoma Sooners. He came to the Sooners as a freshman starting quarterback, but was rejected by the fans. He received thunderous booing whenever he walked onto the field. Now he is a senior, finishing his college football career, and he recently gave an interview with the Dallas Morning News, talking about those days. He received hate mail and death threats; and from sports radio hosts he was pounded with insults, sarcasm, and criticism. "I was 18, 19 years old. I thought about quitting... I thought people were my friends, but they weren’t. I just didn’t know who I could go to."

But he found that his once source of comfort and strength was the Lord. "I knew about God and I really felt like I had a relationship with God. But going through this showed me I was not really as close to God as I should have been." His pastor advised him to burrow himself into his Bible, to pray, and to submit himself to the authority of his coaches, and that’s what he decided to do. He said, "If it weren’t for (the Lord Jesus), I couldn’t have made it through this." He found his refuge in God.

This week we had a member of our church, Lofty Castle, pass away. His sister told me that after he had contracted terminal cancer it affected his thinking. But he could still pray, and one evening she overheard him praying in his bedroom. He was saying, "Lord, I don’t understand why, but you know why." He was finding his refuge in God.

The Trust

And that leads us to the third theme in this passage—Trust. Free me from the trap that is set for me, for you are my refuge. Into your hands I commit my spirit.... The word "commit" means to entrust; specifically, to entrust into another’s safekeeping, to turn over something to someone for their watchful care.

The wonderful thing about this verse is its versatility. You can end it with a blank, and fill in that blank however you need to. For example, we who are parents can say, "Into your hands I commit my children." I first realized this when I started sending my kids off to college and feeling very insecure and uneasy about it. But while worrying one day I happened upon Psalm 31, and I realized I could say, "Lord, into your hands I commit (I entrust) my children." He can be where I cannot be. He can love them as I cannot. He can do for them and within them things that I cannot do.

This is exactly what Paul did with his children—that is, with the churches that he established here and there. For example, after spending a great deal of time launching the church at Ephesus, he eventually had to leave it and he felt very insecure about doing so. Yet he had no choice, so he knelt in the sand and prayed for them, saying to them, "Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified" (Acts 20:32).

We can also say, "Into thy hands I commit my talents. Perhaps God has given you some special gifts or talents or opportunities. Give them back to him, in full surrender. Proverbs 16:3 says, "Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed."

We can also say, "Into thy hands I commit this problem—this problem I cannot solve, this fear I cannot overcome. This has been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn, but sometimes I’ve faced bad situations which, despite my best efforts, only got worse. But what a joy and peace comes to our hearts when we learn to give those situations to the Lord, to commit them to him, to entrust them to the one who can do the impossible.

We can also say, "Into thy hands I commit this disappointment. A friend told me the other day of going by to see lady who had just received bad news. She was disappointed and vexed. But when my friend visited her the next day, the lady was as cheerful as ever. "What about your problem?" asked my friend. "Oh," she said, "I’ve already given that to the Lord."

Isn’t that a wonderful phrase and a wonderful practice? When we’re faced with a disappointment we can’t do anything about, we can give it to the Lord.

When missionary Robert Moffat prepared to leave for South Africa, he badly wanted to take a young lady named Mary Smith along as his bride. But when her parents objected, the young couple abandoned their plans, and Robert prepared to go to the mission field alone. He was bitterly disappointed, but he gave it to the Lord and found strength in a verse of Scripture from 1 Samuel 3: "It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to him." In other words, he was committing the disappointment to the Lord, saying, "Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done." As it happened, it all turned out for the best; and within three years the two young people were together, and they walked hand-in-hand through South Africa in remarkable ministry for the next fifty years.

We can also say, "Into thy hands I commit hurt, anger, and desire for vengeance." Psalm 37:5 say, "Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun."

This week there was a story on the internet about a couple named Dwane and Bonnie Wheat. Dwane is a Baptist pastor in Big Spring, Texas. One day several years ago, they talked to their 19-year-old daughter, Charla, about 11 p.m. then went to bed. About 5 am, there was a knock on the door. It was a police officer, coming to tell them that during the night Charla had been sexually assaulted and murdered. The perpetrator of this horrendous crime was soon arrested, tried, and convicted.

The couple was full of anger, bitterness, and a desire for revenge. They wanted somehow to get even with this cruel man. But they later said that as they prayed and worked their way through the crisis, they developed in their own hearts a new definition of forgiveness. What is forgiveness? To them it came to be this: "Forgiveness is giving up to God my desire to be angry and to get even."

Bonnie said, "Several places in the Bible we are told that ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ but I always thought that meant God was going to get even for me. What it came to mean was that God was going to carry the problem that I couldn’t handle. I had to let God carry the load of anger and bitterness and vengeance because it was too big for me."

Perhaps someone has hurt you in some way, and there’s nothing you can to rectify the situation. You’ve carried around a lot of anger over the years. How wonderful to bring it to the Lord and say, "Into thy hands I commit this situation... into thy hands I commit this anger."

Finally, we can commit our souls into his keeping, as this verse implies: Into thy hands I commit my spirit. We can trust him as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death; we can trust him as we pass through the tunnel of light to the gloryland of heaven. 2 Timothy 1:12 says, "For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day."

This was a favorite verse of the famous English scientist Michael Faraday, who pioneered research in electrolysis and the magnetic field. He was a dedicated Christian who lost no opportunity of testifying of the one in whom he believed. People were so impressed with his knowledge, so engrossed in his theories, that even on his deathbed, he was asked, "What are your speculations?"

"Speculations?" he replied. "Speculation! I have none! I am resting on certainties. I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day!"

Several years before the sinking of the Titanic, passengers on another oceanliner faced terror in the night. It was the Empire State, and a Methodist worker named Phoebe Palmer was aboard. The evening was very quiet, the waters placid. Suddenly a blast shuddered through the ship as a boiler burst, jolting the passengers from their beds in alarm. They might have panicked but for Phoebe Palmer, who began singing hymns on deck. Others joined, and soon calm was restored. After the danger passed and all the passengers were safe, someone asked Phoebe, "Weren’t you afraid?"

She replied, "No, thank God," explaining that from the very moment of the explosion, 2 Timothy 1:12 had come to her with such force that she could only sing of the one who was able to keep what was committed to him.

The devotional writer Samuel D. Gordon knew a woman who had memorized much of the Bible, but age took from her memory all the verses but this one: ...I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day. In time, she could only remember: ...what I have committed to Him. When she came to her deathbed, her loved ones noticed her lips moving. Bending low, they heard her repeating one solitary word over and over: Him, Him, Him.

Dr. Gordon noted that she had lost the whole Bible but one word. But in that one word, she had the whole Bible.

There are trials and traps all around us, but the truth is this: Jesus is our Refuge. And so we trust in Him, saying,

• Into thy hands I commit my children.
• Into thy hands I commit my talents and opportunities.
• Into thy hands I commit my problems and heartaches.
• Into thy hands I commit my disappointment.
• Into thy hands I commit my hurts and injuries in life.
• Into thy hands I commit my spirit, for...

I know not why God’s wondrous grace

To me He hath made known,

Nor why, unworthy, Christ in love,

Redeemed me for His own.

But I know whom I have believed

And am persuaded that He is able

To keep that which I’ve committed

Unto Him against That Day.