Turning Point

David Michael Jeremiah: Have you ever seen someone else's troubled life and said to yourself, "I'm glad it's them and not me"? Fortunately, God never says that. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah offers biblical assurance that no trial is big enough to intimidate God, who is in control of all things at all times. To introduce his encouraging and compelling message, "Triumphant Over Trouble," here is David.

Dr. David Jeremiah: One of the psalms that we talk about in the book *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life* is Psalm 46. We're going to listen to it today. If you get the book, you'll see a bold outline and really good discussion of the psalm in practical terms that you can put into use even now.

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And don't forget we just have a few days left for you to get your copy of the book *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. This 236-page gift book is yours for the asking when you help us during the month of May with an investment in the ministry of Turning Point. Thank you so much for your gift. Be sure to ask for the book when you send your gift. Let's get started with Psalm 46. It's a great psalm, and here is the teaching of it from Turning Point.

If you look down at the psalm, you'll notice immediately that it falls into three sections, each of which is ended with a little phrase called "selah," which is a marking in the Old Testament hymnal. Each of these three stanzas remind us of something particularly important about God that we need to know when we face trouble. Rather than go through the outline in a historical way, let me present it to you by way of three principles to help you overcome the trouble that you have in your life by means of God's resources.

First of all, in the first stanza, we learn that we need to retreat to our refuge. Notice what it says in 46:1-3: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling."

We learn first of all that we have a refuge, and this refuge is awesome. Psalm 71 was sort of my marching orders to tell the world how awesome God is for the rest of my life. My friends, we have an awesome refuge. God is our refuge and our strength. The word for "refuge" really means a quiet place to go for protection.

We see Hezekiah following this principle as he goes into the temple with the problems that are before him and he spreads them out in the presence of the Lord in his quiet refuge before Almighty God. He says, "God, here is my need, and here's what I need You to do for me," and he finds refuge in God. Deuteronomy 33:27 says, "The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms."

Psalm 91:2 says, "I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust.'" Psalm 18:2 says, "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust." Notice secondly, He's an accessible refuge. The text says He is a very present help in trouble.

It reminds me of what I heard a parent ask a little boy what the Bible says about lying, and he said, "The Bible says that lying is a very present help in the time of trouble." That is not what the Bible says. God, our refuge, is a very present help in the time of trouble. The word for "trouble" could be translated "in tight places." How many of you have ever been in a tight place, in between a rock and a hard place? You don't know what to do.

The words "very present" convey the idea that God is easy to be found, and when He is found, He's enough for any situation. God never withdraws Himself from us when we are in trouble. He is more present to us than a friend or a relative can be. Think about this: God is more present to us than the trouble that has driven us to Him in the first place. He is a friend in need and a friend indeed.

As we read in Exodus chapter 33 and verse 14, God's word to Moses was, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." He's very accessible. Notice thirdly, He's ageless. This refuge is not only accessible, but it's an ageless refuge. It says in verses 2 and 3 of the 46th Psalm, "Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling."

The psalmist has tried to figure out all of the calamitous things that could happen: the earth being removed, the mountains being destroyed. He's come up with all of the things that would think of natural and national disasters, and he said if all those things happen, there is still God. Sometimes we wring our hands with the things that happen in our culture and we think, "Look what happened to earth."

Let me ask you to read part of Psalm 102:25-28. Let's read it out loud together: "Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure; yes, they will all grow old like a garment; like a cloak You will change them, and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will have no end. The children of Your servants will continue, and their descendants will be established before You."

When your trouble comes, retreat to your refuge. He's awesome, He's available, and He's ageless. Whenever everything else fails, there's still God. Notice in the second stanza of this psalm, when trouble comes, you need to rediscover your strength. There are two thoughts here in this stanza. First of all, the first part of your strength you need to rediscover is that you have a secret power within.

Whenever an ancient city thought they were going to be surrounded or besieged by another nation, they feared most of all not the enemy, not their embattlements, not their armaments—they feared the supply of food and water inside the walled city. So when Hezekiah realized that the Assyrians were coming toward Jerusalem, he had enough time to do a little preparation.

He took great care to make sure that his city would be protected. In the Kidron Valley outside of Jerusalem, there was a deep spring, an ever-bubbling spring called the Spring of Gihon. This spring was the water supply of Jerusalem, and it had to be protected. Hezekiah redirected the waters of the spring through a conduit that was 1,777 feet long, hewn out of solid rock.

He redirected the waters of the Spring of Gihon under the wall of the city of Jerusalem into a reservoir so that it was right in the middle of the city. Then he went out and he covered up any evidence of the spring, and did it in such a clandestine way that Sennacherib and the Assyrians had no idea where the water supply was or what had happened to it.

If God hadn't taken out the Assyrians that night, Hezekiah had enough water inside the city to keep his people alive for a long time. So we read in verse 4, "There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High." How many of you know that in the midst of the walled city with trouble all around, you have a resource in the person of the Holy Spirit of God?

Everywhere you look in the New Testament you see that. The Lord Jesus, teaching in a powerful reminder to His people in John chapter 4, said, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; but the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life."

In the seventh chapter of John, on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water." When you have the Holy Spirit of God within you, you have a secret resource that nobody knows about. It's down deep inside of who you are. It's the Holy God Himself incarnate in you through the Holy Spirit.

When trouble comes, don't look out there. You're not ever going to find anything out there even close to the resource of the Holy Spirit who lives within you. He is the Almighty God. He's the stream that never ceases to supply. Not only do you have a secret power within you, but if you keep reading in the psalm, you discover you have a secret person within you.

Notice verses 5 through 7: "God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved; God shall help her, just at the break of dawn. The nations raged, the kingdoms were moved; He uttered His voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." Do you see how this psalm reflects what God did before dawn when all the people were killed by the angel and the rejoicing in the great victory of the Lord?

Like the fourth person in the fire in the book of Daniel, they looked in and there were more than Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. There was a fourth person, like unto the Son of God. God was in the fire with His children. Like the disciples out on the Sea of Galilee fishing at night and the storm blows up and they're panic-stricken and they don't know what to do and the Lord God's asleep in the back of the boat.

The one who created the waves and the wind spoke, "Peace, be still," and everything was over. How many of you know so often when we go through trouble we look everywhere but the right place? I'd rather be in the storm with God in the boat than on the shore without Him. I'd rather be in the fire with the Lord God there protecting me than standing outside the furnace without His provision.

The Bible says when we go through trouble, what we need to do is reexamine and restore and remember we have two secret resources: the Holy Spirit and God Himself in the midst of us. When we come to the third stanza, we're reminded that we need to redirect our thoughts. Here is a wonderful reminder to us whenever we face trouble. This is psychological, it's therapeutic, but it's theological in every sense of the word.

It is God's word to us. What do you need to do when you go through trouble? First of all, redirect your thoughts by reviewing the works of the Lord. Notice what it says in the eighth verse: "Come, behold the works of the Lord, who has made desolations in the earth, and makes wars cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow, cuts the spear in two; He burns the chariot in fire."

Whenever you go through a difficult place in your life, one of the greatest things you can do is look back over your shoulder and review what God has done for you. Remember that the God of today is the God of yesterday. The God who has sustained you to where you are right now, who's brought you victoriously through every trouble you've ever experienced, that God stands with you in the midst of this trial.

I love what it says in the story of Sennacherib, that the next morning they got up and there were all dead corpses. How do you ever forget a victorious intervention like that? How do you ever forget the interventions that God has exhibited in your life? One of the things that I love to tell people about and try to encourage them to do—and I keep trying to be faithful at it every day myself—is to record what God is doing in your life in a journal.

Because we have a tremendous capacity for forgetting the works of the Lord. I've been doing this now since 1994. Now it's fun for me to go back when I'm writing in my journal on a particular day and say, "I wonder what was going on in my life on this day in 1994?" I go back into that pile of papers and pull out those two pages and read, "I'd forgotten all about that. I forgot what God did."

Sometimes you can just almost get high on what God did for you years ago, just getting excited by thinking back through those circumstances. Behold the works of the Lord. Satan isolates us to our present calamity out of context of the greater work of God. He makes us think that this thing we're going through right now is everything and that nothing else is involved.

This is a little blip on the chart, and we need to see how God has helped us in the past. Behold the works of the Lord. The second part of that last stanza reminds us in Psalm 46 that we need not only to review the works of the Lord, we need to reclaim the words of the Lord. Notice what He says as He closes out this hymn: "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."

Hardest part of all of that is the first two words: be still. Be still. That's what we tell our children: be still. Sometimes I think God leans over the banisters of heaven and sees us running around in our frenzied activities, and He just leans over like we're His little kids, saying, "Be still." When you're frenzied and you're doing everything, you can't find God in the midst of the frenzy.

You need to retreat to your refuge, rediscover your strengths, and then be still and know that He is God. These verses call us to be quiet long enough to hear the Lord and to know that the Lord is with us, that He has a plan for our future. God's plan is that He be exalted among the nations and exalted in the earth. He will be exalted in our circumstances as well if we will be still and know that He is God.

Trust Him to do it. For the second time, the psalmist says, "The Lord of hosts is with us." Don't let that slip through your fingers. Don't just read that as if that was something you want to forget twice in the psalm. Who is the Lord of hosts? In the Hebrew, it's the Lord of Sabaoth, the Lord of the angels, the Lord of the hosts of heaven.

In the story we read in Second Kings, one night God Almighty sent the angel of the Lord down, and he destroyed 185,000 Assyrians who were bent on the destruction of God's people. The text says we don't just have the one angel, we have the Lord of all the angels with us. Every once in a while people get off on this angel thing. Everybody's got an angel, angels helping them find parking places and all kinds of weird things.

People say, and I rather believe this, that we have guardian angels. I probably have a guardian angel, or I wouldn't be standing up here before you today. I wouldn't have survived. But I want to ask you a question. Would you rather have your own angel, or would you rather have the Lord of Sabaoth as your God? My friends, we've got Almighty God in our heart.

He hasn't revealed a lot of things about angels that people are talking about today, but He has revealed this clearly: the Lord of the angels lives within our hearts. When we're in the midst of our troubles, we need to pray to Lord Sabaoth, Lord of hosts, and say, "Oh Lord God of hosts, You are with me." The word "with me" is Emmanuel, from which we get the word Emmanuel. He is Emmanuel. The Lord of Sabaoth is with us.

If you've read much of the literature of what we might call the deeper life, you've read some writings of Hannah Whitall Smith. She wrote a book some years ago called *The God of All Comfort*. In this book, she told of this experience. She had been going through a time of great trouble in her life and questioning and she didn't know what to do.

Like most of us, she thought that no one had ever had any trouble like her trouble, and it was all peculiar to her, and that there was no one who could understand it. She writes about it: "There happened to be staying near me just then for a few weeks a lady who was considered to be a deeply spiritual Christian and to whom I had been told I should go for additional help to get through my trouble."

"So I summoned up my courage, and one afternoon I went to see her and I poured out my troubles before her. I expected, of course, that she would take a deep interest in me and would be at great pains to do all she could to help me. She listened patiently and did not interrupt me, but when I finished my story and I paused expecting her to respond in sympathy and consideration, she simply said, 'Yes, all you say may be very true, but then in spite of it all, there is God.'"

"I waited a few minutes for her to say something else, but nothing came. My friend and teacher had the air of having said all that was necessary. I knew she was done. But I continued, 'You didn't understand how very serious and perplexing my difficulties are.' 'Oh yes, I did,' replied my friend, 'but then as I tell you, there is God.' And I could not induce her to make one other answer. It seemed to me most disappointing and unsatisfactory."

"I felt that my peculiar and really harrowing experiences could not be met by anything so simple and so mere as the statement, 'Yes, but there is God.' I knew God was there, of course, but I felt I needed something more than just God. I came to the conclusion that my friend, for all her great reputation as a spiritual teacher, was at any rate not able to grapple with the peculiarity of my particular case."

"However, my need was so great I did not give up with my first try, but I went to her again and again, always with the hope that she would sometime begin to understand the importance and peculiarity of my difficulties and that she would give me some adequate help. But it was of no avail. I was never able to draw forth any other answer. At last, because she said it so often and seemed so sure, I began to dimly wonder whether, after all, God might not be enough even for my need, overwhelming and peculiar as I felt it to be."

"From wondering, I came gradually to believe that being my Creator and Redeemer, He must be enough. At last, a conviction burst upon me that He really was enough. My eyes were opened to the fact of the absolute utter all-sufficiency of Almighty God." She wrote, "My troubles disappeared like magic, and I did nothing but wonder how I could ever have been such an idiot as to be troubled by them when all the while there was God."

The Almighty, the all-seeing God, the God who had created me and was therefore on my side and eager to care for me and help me. I found out that God was enough, and at last my soul was at rest. How simple but how profound. What do you mean God is enough? That sounds like pious language that somebody rehearses to answer questions with.

It is not. Let me just ask you this: you better hope He's enough, because if He isn't enough, where do you go for plan B? If you have exhausted all of the sufficiency of Almighty God, where do you go then? I'm telling you He's your Creator, He's your Redeemer, He's your Sustainer. He's the one who loved you enough to give His life for you.

When you come to Him, the all-powerful one of the universe, with whatever problems you may have, I'm telling you He's enough. God's enough. Oh, I know you need the comfort and encouragement of God's people, and I'm not disdaining the personal ministries we have to another. But when all of that is pushed aside and you're alone at 3:00 in a hospital room and you look up into the ceiling and there's nobody there but just you and the darkness, I'm telling you God's enough. And He's enough for you. Try to think about your problem in relationship to Almighty God. He's enough. He surely is.

That's a very special phrase to me. I discovered that phrase personally, individually, passionately during the time I had cancer several years ago. People asked me what I learned, and I just told them I learned one thing: God is enough for every situation that you face. Psalm 46.

Tomorrow, as we conclude this series, we're going to talk about Psalm 16 and the title of the psalm for this series is "The Best Is Yet to Come." A great end to the series. The best is yet to come. There's more to come, and it's all good, and we'll talk about it tomorrow.

You can get this beautiful book on psalms from Turning Point. It's brand new, it's never been offered before. It's called *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*, and it's yours for the asking when you send your May gift to Turning Point. Simply ask for it when you send your gift. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you tomorrow right here on this station.

David Michael Jeremiah: For more information on today's special message from Dr. Jeremiah, please visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at DavidJeremiah.org/radio or call us at 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of David's new book, *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It'll help you abide with God, and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James Versions, available in your choice of attractive cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow for another special message from Dr. David Jeremiah here on Turning Point.