Transcript
Refuge and Strength
First Baptist Richmond, July 26, 2026
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 46
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear…
For years I’ve turned to Psalm 46 in times of trouble, usually when someone has died suddenly or unexpectedly and I’m asked to do the funeral. I step up to the pulpit and say, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,” because for those family members sitting in the front pew the earth has changed. “Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,” I continue, “though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult,” and I see them nodding their heads, because that’s how it feels. For that family the mountains have fallen into the sea, its waters have roared and foamed. And that’s why I come back around to verse 1 and remind them, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
But it’s not only at funerals that we need to be reminded of that truth. Anyone here feel like the world is falling apart? The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created order out of chaos, but these days, in so many ways, it feels like chaos is making a comeback. Here are some recent headlines:
BREAKING: Nearly 270,000 evacuated as record wildfires rage across France and Spain—the worst wildfire season in French history.
WEATHER ALERT: Smoke blankets much of the eastern United States while floods inundate Texas and dozens of major wildfires burn across the West.
EXTREME WEATHER: Europe reels from record heat, drought, hailstorms, and rapidly spreading wildfires as climate extremes continue across the continent.
But it’s not just chaos in nature; there is also chaos among the nations.
MIDDLE EAST: Fragile ceasefires remain under strain as conflict continues to destabilize the region and humanitarian crises deepen.
UKRAINE: Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on, with no clear end in sight after years of fighting.
GLOBAL TRADE: New tariffs and economic tensions raise fears of another round of international trade conflict.
SUDAN & GAZA: Humanitarian agencies continue to warn of worsening conditions for civilians caught in war.
Open your news app any morning. In one column you’ll find creation groaning—fires, floods, storms, earthquakes. In the next you’ll find humanity raging—wars, political upheaval, economic conflict, nations threatening nations.
It’s almost as if the front page of today’s newspaper is divided into the two halves of Psalm 46: the first half, where the psalmist describes chaos in nature, and the second half, where he describes chaos among the nations. But it’s also a good reminder that it’s not just us, and it’s not just now; this kind of thing has been going on forever. In 1919—just a few months after the end of World War I, the Spanish Flu, the Russian Revolution, and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence—poet W. B. Yeats described his everyday experience by writing: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” But the author of Psalm 46 insists, “Oh, yes it can, as long as you remember that God is the centre.”
Take a look at the way this psalm is structured: It opens with the affirmation that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. “Therefore,” it insists,
“we will not fear though the earth should change.” And then it invites us to imagine the worst possible calamities that could come upon the earth before reminding us, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” And then it gets into chaos among the nations, with kingdoms tottering, and civilizations crumbling, until God himself has to intervene, breaking bows and shattering spears and burning shields with fire until, in the silence that follows, we are reminded once again, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” The psalm moves back and forth, from chaos to calm, almost as if to show us how it’s done.
Often when I read Psalm 46 at a funeral I follow it with a prayer and say something like, “Thank you, God, for being a safe place to hide while the storms of grief are raging all around us. Thank you for being a refuge. And when the storms are over give us the strength we need to come out again and live in a world where things have changed so dramatically that we hardly recognize it, where nothing feels the same.” My hope is that my prayer will be answered, and that the family will know, “We don’t have to be afraid. Not even in a time like this. God is our refuge and strength.”
But in this psalm it’s not just fear, is it? It’s panic. The kind where you can’t think clearly, where you’re simply running for your life. And honestly, when mountains are falling that seems like the appropriate response. I had a conversation with a friend last week who reminded me that fear can be a good thing. When you’re out for a hike in the woods and see a snake on the path in front of you, you jump back instinctively. Your heart rate goes up. “Fear,” my friend said, “is information. Panic is what happens when fear takes over the control room.”
I looked it up. The word itself comes from the Greek god Pan, who, according to legend, “would suddenly terrify travelers with inexplicable fear in lonely places.” The
Greeks called those irrational waves of terror “panic.” Even today we speak of “panic attacks”—fear that seems to come out of nowhere and overwhelms reason.
And this may be more than you needed to know but, neurologically, panic is fascinating. When the brain perceives a threat, the amygdala can effectively bypass the slower, more rational parts of the prefrontal cortex [in other words, we stop thinking]. Adrenaline floods the bloodstream. Heart rate increases. Breathing becomes shallow. Vision narrows. Blood moves away from digestion and toward large muscles. As one commentator said, “It’s an extraordinary system if you’re facing a charging bear. It’s not nearly so helpful if you’re lying awake at 3:00 in the morning, imagining the future.” The remarkable thing is that the body doesn’t distinguish very well between an actual bear and an imagined catastrophe. Your body can begin preparing to run from something that exists only in your imagination.
That may explain why panic feels so convincing. Your body says, “Something terrible is happening!” even when the only evidence is a thought. One psychologist put it this way: the body is answering a question the mind has not yet carefully asked. So, when our hearts start to beat faster, maybe we need to ask the question. “Why am I feeling threatened? Is it a real threat or only a perceived threat? Is it a physical threat, a financial threat, a relational threat, or is it only a threat to my carefully constructed way of looking at the world, or my carefully curated way of thinking about myself? Those are all good questions, and if you had the presence of mind to ask them it could make a huge difference. But as I said earlier, panic robs you of your ability to reason. It’s when fear takes over the control room. It’s one of the main reasons that someone will tell you, in a fearful situation, “Don’t panic!”
I believe that’s what Psalm 46 is trying to tell us: that because God is our refuge and strength, we don’t have to be afraid. Maybe that’s why, in verse 10, after the
psalmist has talked about mountains falling, kingdoms tottering, oceans roaring, nations destroying, he writes: “Be still and know that I am God.” It’s the perfect antidote to panic.
I’m thinking about that story from 2 Kings 6, where the prophet Elisha has been telling the King of Israel what his enemies, the Arameans, are up to. The King of Aram thinks that some of his own soldiers are ratting him out, but they say, “No! It’s the man of God, the prophet Elisha. He seems to know what we’re going to do even before we do.” And so, when the King of Aram hears that Elisha is in Dothan, he sends an army to surround the city, to capture and kill the prophet. And so they go, take their positions, get themselves ready, and early the next morning, when Elisha’s servant goes out to fetch water, he sees that army all around the city, their armor gleaming in the morning sun.
He runs back to the house and tells his master what he’s seen and Elisha says, “Don’t be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them.” But the servant doesn’t believe him; he’s in a state of full-blown panic. So Elisha prays, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” And the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and when he looked up he saw that the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
What Elisha knew that his servant didn’t is that those horses and chariots of fire had been there all along. Elisha could see them, apparently, but his servant couldn’t. His problem was a problem of perception, and often that’s how it is for us. We panic because we look through the eyes of fear rather than the eyes of faith.
“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist says. The Hebrew verb doesn’t primarily mean “be quiet.” It means something like: let go, release your grip, stop striving, loosen your clenched hands. It’s almost the opposite of panic. Panic clenches.
Faith unclenches. One of the commentaries I read referred to panic as “a failure of memory.” In panic we forget what we knew yesterday. Yesterday we believed God was faithful. Today the diagnosis arrives, or the child doesn’t answer the phone, or the job disappears, and suddenly the whole universe seems governed by catastrophe. Psalm 46 doesn’t introduce a new truth; it reminds us of an old one: God is our refuge and strength; a very present help in trouble.
I’m thinking of that story from Mark 4, when Jesus calmed the storm. Do you remember it? He was in a boat with his disciples, asleep on a cushion in the back, but one of those sudden storms came up on the Sea of Galilee, as they sometimes do, and before the disciples knew what had hit them they were nearly swamped, bailing water as fast as they could. But the waves kept coming, filling up the boat, and they got to the point where they realized if something didn’t change soon they were going down. So, someone—maybe it was Peter—woke Jesus up and said, “Master, don’t you care that we’re perishing!?” And what did Jesus do? He woke up, sat up, saw what was happening, rebuked the wind and the waves, and then—when everything was so still you could hear the water dripping from the gunwales—asked his disciples, “Where is your faith?” Afterward they wondered, “Who is this, that even the wind and the waves obey him?”
In time the Lord would open their eyes to see that it was God! Right there in the boat with them. The One who made the wind and the waves. The One who had complete control over them. If we could only be still for a moment we might recognize who it is with us: God! A very present help in trouble. “Therefore we will not fear,” the psalmist says, “though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult…the Lord of hosts is with
us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.” At the end of the psalm he repeats that refrain, as if he wanted to be sure we would never forget it, even when things were at their worst.
I was thinking about that pre-flight briefing you get on an airplane, when you hear the voice on the intercom saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. Please direct your attention to the flight attendants as we review the safety features of this aircraft.” One of the things they always tell you (along with how to buckle your seat belt, how to use the oxygen mask, and how to inflate your life vest) is to “locate the exit nearest to you, keeping in mind that it may be behind you.” I learned that one of the reasons for that is that in several of the worst theatre fires in American history, people tried to get out the same way they had come in, even though there were other available exits. And so now, in theatres, on airplanes, and in other places where people don’t have a lot of options, someone will say, “Please take note of the exits.”
But on the airplane I don’t often see people doing it. They’re getting settled in their seats or looking at their phones. The flight attendants seem almost embarrassed to be putting on a performance that no one is watching. But you know why they do it, right? And why they keep doing it on every flight, even if most people have heard it before? It’s because one day there may be an actual emergency, and that’s not the time to start looking for an emergency exit. We rehearse these things so we will be ready for them when they come, and Psalm 46 may have been written for just that reason—a kind of primitive pre-flight briefing. If you heard it today it might sound like this:
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. Just a reminder that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Should we experience any turbulence along the way, be still and know that God is God. He is greater than any difficulty we might encounter. He is stronger than any enemy we might confront. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Let me repeat that: The Lord of hosts is with us.”
And that may be the most important thing.
Because peace is not merely the opposite of panic, and it doesn’t come to us simply because we have prepared ourselves. It comes to us because God is with us—like Jesus in the boat—and because he is we have nothing to fear.
The secret of peace is presence—God’s presence.
Remember that the next time the earth begins to change and the mountains shake in the heart of the sea. Be still and know that the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Therefore, we will not fear.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
