Faith — The Challenge

You’re listening to a podcast by Lance Lambert Ministries. For more information on this ministry, visit www.lancelambert.org and follow us on social media to receive all of our updates. In this episode, Lance preaches from Psalm 46 about how our faith is centred on God Himself being constant in the midst of circumstances. Let’s listen. Now shall we turn to a very well known psalm, Psalm 46. I haven't been here except for last Thursday, to these times when everyone's been contributing. And I haven't really heard so much of what folks have been saying about this psalm. But I am told that strangely enough, nearly all the contributions have been on Psalm 1. Although we've read this psalm rather a lot in recent weeks, we'll read it again, shall we? God is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change, And though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, Though the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof. There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God, The holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God will help her, and that right early or at the dawn of the morn. 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. Come, behold the works of the Lord, What desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; He burneth the chariots in the fire. 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. Now, we have in fact, not very much time, but this Psalm 46 falls quite naturally into three. And although I know there are many messages, many themes, almost you could say, or aspects that can be taken from this psalm as many parts of the word of God, there is one particular matter that the Lord has spoken to me about through this particular psalm, the 46th Psalm. One of the wonderful things about the Bible, I find, is that it's like a diamond. When you turn it, it has so many facets, it flashes with different lights when you look at it from different angles. There's no other book like that. It's quite remarkable and it's one of the reasons why I've always so firmly believed in the authority and inspiration of the Word of God that you can get so much out of one passage. Now, it seems to me that there are this psalm falls into three. There is verses one to three, verses four to seven, and verses eight to eleven. And in verses the first three verses, we have what I have entitled the challenge of faith. The challenge of faith. Now, when you become a Christian, all the time you are receiving a challenge. Why? Because you believe certain things and your circumstances, the problems you face, the difficulties that come into your life all these things become a challenge to the position you've taken. And here we have, I think, the challenge of faith. I think you know very well there is plenty of trouble in this psalm. In verse one, a very present help in trouble. Verse two, there is change. We will not fear though the earth do change. And the same verse mountains shaken into the heart of the sea. Verse three, waters roaring and being troubled. The same verse, mountains trembling with the swelling thereof. Verse six, nations raging. And the word in Hebrew is a wonderful word just meaning uproar, in uproar. The kingdoms were moved. They were tottering, as it were, tottering as if having received a punch to the jaw, staggering around almost in a drunken state. Then in verse nine, war. The whole psalm is a psalm of much trouble. The psalmist was not living in exactly peaceful life, outwardly. Everything appeared to be going wrong as far as circumstances were concerned. Trouble, change, shaking, uproar, war. Everything was there. But the fact in the midst of it all is simply found in verse one: God is. Not God was, nor God will be. But God is. And when you finally come to it, the Christian life is simply that: God is. When God, in one of the greatest meetings with any human being in the whole of history, met with Moses in the desert. And when Moses asked, God, what is thy name? God said to him, tell them, I Am hath sent you. Not I have been, nor I will be, but I Am. God is. Now, when we are in the midst of trouble, it is very easy to only think of two things, God has been and God might be. The fact is, God is. The storm makes no difference to God. The storm may roar but God is still. You've got it again and again. Right through this psalm. Verse one God is our refuge and strength. Verse five God is in the midst of her, right in the midst of all the trouble, of all the shaking, of all the earthquake, of all the change, of the war, of the uproar of kingdoms. God is in the midst of her. Not God will be in the midst of her, but God is in the midst of her. Or again, you've got it in verse seven. The Lord of hosts shall be with us? No, the Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. And again, in verse eleven the Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Now that is the fact. And that fact becomes the challenge of faith. Why does God allow so much to go wrong in our circumstance? Surely it is that we might be delivered from what is superficial and shallow and that we might really come into a deep, deep experience of the fact that God is. God is my salvation. Or again, as John the Apostle put it, God is love. God is light. And in putting it in a slightly different way, he said God is life. He that hath the Son hath the life. God is. That is the fact. Now, most of us, when we're in the storm, the challenge comes to us. What is the challenge? The challenge is to take our position, come wind, come weather on the fact that God is or to go under and to disbelieve. We're all the same. I suppose there's not a single Christian in this place this morning who hasn't had an experience of the negative side of this. You've all known what it is to have the challenge come and go under. The storm has become so colossal, the sky has become so dark, the earth under our feet appears to tremble so greatly. Everything around us, all the things that we trust on, even people, seems to change and shrink and be carried away. It seems as if it's the day of the enemy, the day of darkness, the hour of darkness. Have you had an experience like that ever when it seems as if the whole of hell has combined to snuff you out as a believer? You will notice that this psalmist is not speaking of some sort of the kind of idea anyway that many of us have got, that in this thing here was the psalmist and everything was going round and round, but he was absolutely calm but not at all. He expressly says the earth's changing, the mountains are shaken into the heart of the sea, that you can't have mountains shaken and you, if you took Richmond Hill and shook it into the sea, it would cause some commotion, the waters roaring and being troubled, the mountains trembling with the swelling thereof. All this was happening above, on every side and underneath. So the psalmist, the apparent facts were that everything was breaking up, that everything was coming to an end, that everything was changing. Those were the apparent facts. Now here comes the challenge of faith. Do I believe what is apparent or do I look through to what is fact? Do I see through what is apparent to the one who is behind and above it all. God is our refuge and strength. Right in the midst of it then, he is a high tower. He is a stronghold right in it. Not he will be but he is. And we can run into him. We can be saved. He is our strength. When everything appears to be breaking up God is. And so the challenge of faith. Verse two. Therefore will we not fear and then come four though's. Now mark it. Therefore will we not fear though such and such. Though such and such. Though such and such. Though such and such. Have you ever noticed that? We will not fear though the earth do change, one. Though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas, two. Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, three. Though the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof, four. What a position. What a position. The challenge of faith. Can you say that? We will not fear. Habakkuk I think it was said quite the same. He said I will praise the Lord though there be nothing in the store, though the vine and the fig tree don't yield any produce I will praise the Lord though. Why can I praise the Lord though? Because he is. God is. Have you discovered that yet? It's the simplest, greatest discovery that any believer can make. God is. In the beginning, God. In the beginning the Word — was the Word, and the Word was God. That's the first thing. The second thing. We come in the next verses from verses four to seven. And it's the secret of faith. Here is the secret of faith. First, it's the challenge. You met the challenge and you're not going to go under an unbelief or disbelief, but you believe that God is. Now, here is the secret of faith. There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God. Now, just because we have such deceitful hearts and minds, will you please note that this city is made glad in the midst of all this changing and shaking and storm and war and uproar right in the midst of it, this city is made glad. It's not that God delivers and then there's a tremendous service of worship, praise and thanksgiving. But that's the way most people think of it. They think, now, this psalm means God came in in a mighty way, changed the whole circumstances, and they had a wonderful service of thanksgiving. No, the psalmist found this right in the middle. In the last stanza, it actually says he maketh wars to cease. The wars were still on when these people were discovering the river that made them glad. This is the secret of faith. Have you discovered the secret yet? Some people haven't. They found the Saviour. But they haven't discovered the secret of faith. They're always having to run off to this meeting, run off to that meeting, run off to this convention, run off to that convention, run off to this speaker, run off to that speaker. They haven't got the supply inside. Years ago, when I was a boy, we went to a place where they had no tap water. I remember it well. I won't tell you where it was. It was in Cornwall, right in the very tip of Cornwall. There we stayed. They used to go and pump up the water. This was in the war. They used to pump up the water. Years afterwards, I went back there and they'd all got taps in the houses. Now, of course we're all used to taps, of course. But the old lady we knew there said that when the tap was first put in, she turned it on and sat not under it, but sat beside it for a full quarter of an hour and just looked at it. She said, you can't understand what it was to have the supply in your own home instead of all the time having to run out and down to fetch the water and bring it back. Many Christians are all the time having to go and fetch water. Oh it's a laborious business. You go off to the meeting and you fill your buckets up and you go loaded with your buckets back home where you store it all, and then you have to spoon it out, ladle it out as you need it, and gradually it goes down and down. Off you go again with all your containers to get them full and bring them back up. But many Christians live lives just like that. It's not a spring of a well of water springing up unto eternal life. Something within, something within, all the time bubbling up as it were. The river of life. The streams whereof make glad the city of God. Right in the midst of the trouble, right in the midst of the change, right in the midst of the shaking, right in the midst of the earthquake, of the uproar of the war, a stream. A river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God. And will you notice an even deeper secret? It's all part of the secret of faith. But there's even more. This river is not just to make us worshipers. Some people think that is the end of everything. Well, now, then I'm satisfied. I've got fullness now. I had a real experience of the Lord. That's it. There's something more wonderful here. It goes on. It says, makes glad the city of God. Now, the most interesting thing in the Bible is if you compare Genesis 2 with Revelation 21 and 22 you find there's a river of life and a river of life. The river of life at the beginning, the river of life at the end. And you find certain materials which you are expressly told in Genesis 2 are only found as you follow the course of the river. It's so strange, the little way it's put and there is gold there if you follow the course of the river. And there's this bdellium if you follow the course of the river. And there's this onyx stone if you follow the course of, it's all hidden, but it's there. But it's connected with the river. When you come to the end of the Bible, you find that these materials have produced a city. Now, here in Psalm 46 it appears to me that you've got the heart of the matter. There is a river the streams whereof make glad the city of God. Out of this river come the materials this river of life. By the Spirit of God come the materials out of which the city is produced. The gold of Christ, the precious stone of Christ, the pearl of Christ. It all comes, we find it in the river of life. You don't find it anywhere else, you don't find it in theology full stop, you don't find it in methods full stop, you don't find it in meetings full stop. You find it in living, spiritual living. You find it in experiencing Christ in your everyday life. You find it in experiencing Christ together. This matter of the city explains the whole Bible. There are only two cities as far as the Bible is concerned. The one is Jerusalem and the other is Babylon. And right at the very beginning of the Bible, in Revelation 11, you have Babylon and in Revelation 12 you have Jerusalem, right at the beginning of the Bible almost, you have these two cities introduced: Babylon, Babel, Babil in Aramaic, Bavel in Hebrew. Gate of God. Gate of God. And that's what this whole world is. They think it's the gate to paradise. All the way through they've been building the human city because they think it's the gate to paradise, a gate to Utopia, a gate to the golden age, a gate to a life that's going to be prosperous and peaceful and harmonious. And the whole of world history is a contradiction to it. Tells us just what this Babylon is like with all its glory and all its art and all its culture and all its philosophy, it cannot reach heaven. They tried to build a tower to heaven. They called it Babel. Babel, Gateway to God. God blew the thing up. And God has been blowing the thing up ever since. Why? Because it hasn't got the foundations. But in Hebrews chapter eleven it says Abraham went out and sought for the city which has the foundations, whose architect and maker is God, whose builder and maker is God. The city which has the foundations. Where does that city come from? Babylon is built from earth. It was clay bricks baked together on earth. But this other city comes out of the river. This other city is from the river of the life of God. Now this all sounds very, very sort of mystical, but in actual fact when you look right through the whole Bible, you find it is the explanation to it. This is the secret. Why is there all this storm? Why Satan's antagonism? Do you really think that Satan is so bothered about you a few feet, or in these days of metric, a meter or two, of flesh and blood? You think the devil's so bothered about you? I don't think he would even care to visit me if it were not that I've been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ. And if it were not that I am material by the grace of God and through the work of the Holy Spirit for the city. He knows that city is the end. I wish we had hours to spend on the matter because it all goes back to his own function. He was the anointed cherub that covereth. It appears from certain inferences that this this enemy of God in the very beginning there was some some connection with this. But he wanted it for himself. I, he said, will be like the Most High. We have the whole story of the fall. Why is there all this changing? Why all this earthquake? Why all this uproar? Why do the nations rage and imagine vain, empty things? What is it all about? It's all to do with this city, this dwelling place, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High, the dwelling place of God. God is in the midst of her. Now will you notice that then it says God will help her. So evidently, although God is in the midst of her, the storm goes on for just as long as God allows it to. And that is the challenge of faith. Because when the storm gets to its height, we surely believe that God is not in the midst of us. There is not a single evidence that God is in the midst of us apparently. It would only seem that everything is storm, everything is shaking, everything is darkness, everything is war. But it says God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God will help her at the dawn of the morning. Your old version says right early, the Hebrew just says at the dawn of the morning, the beginning, the first rays of the dawn. Have you found the secret of faith? First, the river of the life of God through the Spirit. And secondly, what that river is for that is the building of the dwelling place of God. Have you found that secret of faith? And thirdly in the last stanza, the vindication of faith. The vindication of faith. Verses eight to nine you have the power of an enthroned Christ. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth. He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder. How does he do that? We find it in Psalm 110. The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord will send forth the rod of thy strength out of Zion, rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. The vindication of faith. It says in the word of God those that put their trust in him shall never be ashamed. I have seen many Christians ashamed. I have seen many Christians ashamed and sometimes well known Christians in my travels as well here as elsewhere. I have met so many who have been ashamed. And I have found that in every instance it goes back to a heart of unbelief. Somewhere they could not trust God. Some issue came up. Sometimes it's even to do with our spiritual life and we cannot believe that God can get the better of our own temperament. We cannot believe that if we give our life over to God he will really do the right thing for us. Sometimes it's in the matter even of marriage. Oh how many I've seen who cannot believe that God will do the right thing for them. They've got to do everything. They've got to do all the pushing and choosing and everything else. And then later comes the shame, unhappiness and misery. I've seen it in many, many ways on every level. But God says those that put their trust in him shall never be ashamed or the old English, beautifully put, shall never be confounded. I have yet to meet a believer who has really trusted the Lord in some issue, large or small, who has been put to shame. Everyone I know who has really trusted the Lord has finally been vindicated. And in many cases the greatest vindication lies ahead. They have died in faith. The greatest vindication is still ahead ahead. The immutable purpose of God. Listen to it in verse ten. Verse ten be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. God has never changed from that. Satan has said I will exalt my throne above the throne of God. God says, I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. If our will is his will and our purpose is his purpose and our work is his work, then we shall know a vindication in it. We don't have to bother about protecting our reputation or our work or anything else. There will be the vindication of faith. That's why it says in verse ten, be still. Or as it puts it in the New American Standard, cease striving. Or as it says it very simply in Hebrew, just let be, just let be. Be still and know that I am God. I am God. Cease striving. In verse, I think I may have pointed this out on Thursday, in verse seven and in verse eleven, we have the little Hebrew word the Lord of hosts is with us, in both cases and that little word is the little word Imannu. But here, instead of what we all know well, Emmanuel, God with us, here he says, the Lord of hosts Adonai Tzevaot the hosts. Immanu with us. With us. It's got all that wonderful thought. God is with us if we want to know a final glory, a glorious vindication, we must not only know the salvation of God but we must be identified with the Lord Jesus Christ. And that may sometimes mean that we go down into the grave with Him. Many times it does. We lose ourselves, as it were, in the grave. We know what it is to die with Christ that we may also be raised with Him and know something of a reigning position with Him in the throne. It says, we shall also be glorified with Him if we suffer with Him. If we suffer with Him, we shall also be glorified with Him. So the storm may roar. Much may change. Much may come against us. But we can be absolutely clear if we've found the secret of faith. It's not that I am the center that the rivers come to me. This is what most people talk about. Oh, they talk as if they're the center and the rivers come to them and that the Lord has filled them and that they've got an experience of the Lord. Well, that's wonderful. But that means you are the center of it all. It says there is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God. Got it the other way round. You've been caught in a tremendous flow of divine life that's carrying you into the building. Think of it like that. Your little contribution, your little part in the home will never be forgotten. There will be the vindication of true faith, the challenge of faith, the secret of faith and the vindication of faith. Shall we pray? Dear Lord we do pray that Thou wilt write something of this into our hearts because only Thou canst do it. The psalm is so well known, Lord. We can easily overlook anything that Thou art seeking to say to us. But we pray that Thou wilt, by Thy spirit, really write something into our being. We pray, Lord, that we may be those who discover the secret of faith, may discover, Lord, something of Thy fullness and of Thy power in a new way. And Lord, above all, that we may not become something in ourselves, but may become that material for the building of that city which is eternal, that habitation of Thine in the spirit. Lord, do this, we pray, as we commit ourselves now to Thee in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. May you trust in God and not be ashamed. May you know the deep deep love of Jesus.