A Shelter in the Time of Storm
A few weeks ago our minister read to us from Paul Tripp’s book A Shelter in the Time of Storm – Meditations on God and Trouble, during a connect group leaders' dinner. I have appreciated Paul Tripp in the past, I loved what our minister read out, so I ordered the book. It arrived in the post on Friday, which was timely. I spent most of the weekend home alone, sitting in the wreckage after a storm, reading this book. Lately I have been feeling more and more that, in the human sphere, I am walking this pathway by myself, that there is no-one who’s going to be there, and that nothing at all in my life is how I would have planned it. So I was particularly "uplifted" by this one, on Psalm 27:5.
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No human being enjoys feeling that he is living in the sinking sand of unpredictability, disappointment, and danger with no rock to reach for and stand on. In fact, this quest, this desire for surety which is with us every day, points us again and again to the reality of God’s existence and our identity as his creatures, his image bearers. We aren’t hardwired to live by instinct. Like God, we are in possession of thoughts, desires and emotions. Like God, we are spiritual beings. As people made in his likeness, we long for our hearts to be satisfied and our minds to be at rest. We think, analyse, and wonder. We toss our lives over and over again in our hearts, trying our best to make sense of the mystery of our own story and recognising the scary reality that there’s little that we are actually in charge of.
In our honest moments, we know that we couldn’t have written ourselves into the situations, locations, and relationships that make up our daily lives. We couldn’t have written the story of even one day. Yet we long for our lives to make sense. We long to have meaning and purpose, and we long to have lasting stability.
The problem is that the longer we live, the more we know that there is little around us in this fallen world that’s truly stable ...
So here is the dilemma of your humanity: you are clearly not in control of the details or destiny of your life, yet as a rational, purposeful, emotional being, you cry for a deep and abiding sense of well-being. In your quest, what you are actually discovering is that you were hardwired to be connected to Another. You weren’t hardwired to walk the pathway of life all by yourself. You weren’t hardwired to be independently okay. You weren’t hardwired to produce in yourself a system of experiences, relationships, and conclusions that would give you rest. You were designed to find your “solid rock” only in a dependent, loving, worshipful relationship with Another. In this way, every human being is on a quest for God; the problem is we don’t know that, and in our quest for stability, we attempt to stand on an endless catalog of God-replacements that end up sinking with us.
In fact, our inability to find security for ourselves is so profound that we’d never find on our own the One who is to be our rock; no, he must fid us. The language of Psalm 27 is quite precise here: “He will lift me high upon a rock.” It doesn’t say, “I will find the rock and I will climb up on it”.
Here is hope for every weary traveler whose feet are tired of the slippery instability of mud of a fallen world. Your weariness is a signpost. It’s meant to cause you to cry out for help. It’s meant to cause you to quit looking for your stability horizontally and begin to cry out for it vertically. It’s meant to put an end to your belief that situations, people, locations, possessions, positions, or answers will satisfy the longing of your heart. Your weariness is meant to drive you to God. He is the Rock for which you are longing. He is the one who alone is able to give you the sense that all is well. And as you abandon your hope in the mirage rocks of this fallen world and begin to hunger for the true Rock, he will reach out and place you on solid ground.
There is a Rock to be found. There is an inner rest to be experienced that’s deeper that conceptual understanding, human love, personal success, and the accumulation of possessions. There is a rock that will give you rest even when all of those things have been taken away. That rock is Christ, and you were hardwired to find what you are seeking in him. In his grace, he won’t play hide-and-seek with you. In your weakness and weariness, cry out to him. He will find you, and he will be your Rock.
On Christ the solid rock I stand,
all other ground is sinking sand.