Sermon Tone Analysis
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*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.
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