I. “Preserve me, O God, for in You I take refuge” (v.1).
II. “Making God our Refuge” means that we have (vv.2-8)…
A. A new way to define our “good” and determine our “heroes” (vv.2-4).
B. A new way to evaluate the “boundary lines” that have been set for us (vv.5-6).
C. A different place to look for wisdom and security (vv.7-8).
III. The reward of making God our refuge (vv.9-11): Gladness, security, eternal life, fullness of joy, and pleasures forevermore (in His very presence)!
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Four Calls to Every Man and Boy Here Today:
1. Godly men found their lives on the goodness of God (vv.2,5-6).
2. Godly men fashion their life goals and pursuits after God’s heroes, not the world’s (vv.3-4).
3. Godly men find constant strength and direction in the Word of God (vv.7-8).
4. Godly men fix their hope on the pleasures found in being in the presence of God forever (vv.9-11).
“We need to understand that however long we have been walking with the Lord, whether we have never read the whole Bible or have a PhD in it, we have a perverse resistance to [believing that God is truly good].”
“The Christian Life is a lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God.”—Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, 166, 172
“Every moment of every day something in our soul is being fed and something is being starved. Because we live in a fallen world, the natural course of events feeds the world’s values into our soul and starves the Spirit’s values. Fed largely by the presence, power and corruption of modern media, Christians are in danger of being swept out to sea by the riptide of modern culture. We must devise a way to offset this barrage by power-feeding our soul, each day, large doses of the things of the Spirit, sufficient to offset the power of the culture.”—Max Anders (blog post)
“By the way, it’s very important to recognize that these two authors back in 1989 targeted conservative religious organizations, in particular, conservative theology. Any kind of biblical evangelicalism, for example, any kind of Christian biblical theological orthodoxy on marriage as being something that had to be subverted. They argued, advising the gay rights movement, as it was known at the time, “This entails publicizing support by moderate churches and raising serious theological objections to conservative biblical teachings.” That’s exactly what’s been taking place, book after book saying you don’t have to take the Bible at its word when it defines marriage or talks about gender or sexuality. The arguments coming that any kind of conservative biblical theology is just historically backward and oppressive. You see the argument, the liberal churches are on the right side of history and the other denominations, if they will not join the revolution, simply must be marginalized, cast to the side, castigated as no longer publicly acceptable.”—Al Mohler, “The Briefing” 6/7/2021
“Christians are not asked to treat pain as though it were pleasure, or grief as though it were joy, but to bring all earthly adversity into comparison with heavenly glory and thereby be strengthened to endure…
If you insist on taking the short view of things you will be forever frustrated, confused, and angry…
The happiness of heaven is not like the steady, placid state of a mountain lake where barely a ripple disturbs the tranquility of its water. Heaven is more akin to the surging, swelling waves of the Mississippi at flood stage. With each passing day there is an increase in the level of water. And as the rain of revelation and insight and discovery continues to fall throughout the endless ages of eternity, so the water level of love and joy and happiness rises higher and higher, never to abate or to any degree diminish.”—Sam Storms, One Thing, 166,170
“Throughout the ages to come, forever and ever, we will be the recipients each instant of an ever-increasing and more stunning, more fascinating, and thus inescapably more enjoyable display of God’s grace than before…
“We will constantly be more amazed with God, more in love with God, and thus ever more relishing his presence and our relationship with him. Our experience of God will never reach its consummation. We will never finally arrive, as if upon reaching a peak we discover there is nothing beyond. Our experience of God will never become stale. It will deepen and develop, intensify and amplify, unfold and increase, broaden and balloon. Our relishing and rejoicing in God will sharpen and spread and extend and progress and mature and flower and blossom and swell and snowball and inflate and lengthen and augment and advance and proliferate and accumulate and accelerate and multiply and heighten and reach a crescendo that will even then be only the beginning of an eternity of new and fresh insights into the majesty of who God is!”—Sam Storms, One Thing, 172-73