it's not about you and why that's a very good thing

Psalm 46 is a classic. Even as I write this, my mind is filled with a well-known musical setting of these verses. This Psalm is used for everything under the sun, and you could probably quote most of it. It begins “God is our refuge and strength…” Got it?

 But God only speaks once in this psalm.  One small verse out of eleven. It’s as if He reaches the point where He must interject saying let me apply this for you. Or as a former college professor used to tell us, let me put the cookies on the bottom shelf. And what God chooses to say in the next three lines is as radical as it is wonderful.

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”

He is saying, stop. Stop and consider that what you see my sovereign hand doing in this world and for my people is for my glory. I am God. I protect and strengthen, and preserve and tear down, and build up, and allow…for my name’s sake.

I will be exalted.

It’s not about you.

You see the Psalm is true. We may well find our refuge and strength in God. He will rise up and go to war for us and break our enemies. He will live in our midst. He will make the noise of strife cease. But He does this so that the heathen and the whole of His creation pause to look and see Him high and lifted up either by our strong testimony in life or because there will be no other option at the end of this life.

And maybe God is there in our hurt and hard not so we can wring from Him every last drop of what we need. Maybe He’s there so we can take a good look at a hand that is not shortened and an ear that is not heavy. And what if our response to the rough and tumble of this world is not one of desperate clawing for relief from Him, but one filled with trust and wonder and praise for Him?

The psalmist is telling us that it’s not so much the fact that He is our refuge, as it is the fact that the Lord of hosts and God of Jacob is our refuge. He is mentioned 15+times in this short psalm. He saturates it. He is the song.

It’s not about you.

So stop being afraid. Stop the worry. Stop being faint. Stop falling. Stop panicking. Stop manipulating. Be still, and consider the God who is at work in and around you.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in the time of trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though earth be removed, and though mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, though waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof…

The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge…

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted…