Series Introduction

Shelter. As you’ve travelled with the psalmists either in meditation or prayer has it struck you, like me, how often they’re on about shelter? I’m not. I tend to presume my basic need for safety. But notice, when push comes to shove—to threatening, or suffering, or deadly shove— ‘shelter’ is then on our praying lips! It’s desperate people who long for, hope for and plead for shelter. And a desperate person is what God wants us to be—desperate to find our needs met in him. From the gallery of psalms this one paints a picture of that honest and radical reliance. It’s a sort of Mona Lisa psalm in that it’s well known. But I wonder how well-lived.

Reflection: My safe-hiding

“You who sequester in Almighty God, rest assured that…you’ll be safe….  You’ll witness sinners receiving their just punishment—yes, you’ll just see. But you won’t experience it because your identity and mine is safe housed in the Lord.  We are abiding in Christ and not one thing can sever us from his love.”

(Author’s paraphrase of Psalm 91:1,8-10, through New Testament eyes)

A hiding place, for you, might trigger naïve childhood fun and games. Or perhaps you think of The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom’s testimony of an altogether-other sobering world of false cupboards and concealed rooms for German Jews-in-hiding. I was reminded too, of Moses in a rock crevice, concealed under God’s hand. But with his first brush strokes this psalmist (who may well have been Moses) immediately clarifies that we’re not on about a place. This shelter is a person.

This is the person from whom Adam and Eve hid. The one multitude still hide from in shame and uncertainty.

But not Corrie Ten Boom. She joined the psalmist with reliance and safe hiding in God:

“If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God, you’ll be at rest…. You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.” (Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook)

Prayer:

“[Oh] what joy for those whose record the LORD has cleared of guilt, whose lives are lived in complete honesty! … For you are my hiding place; you protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of victory.” (Psalm 32:2,7 NLT).

Clarify my safe-hiding in you, Heavenly Father. I retrace your rescue in Christ that lifts me from cowering in sin and shame.  In Corrie’s words, “No places are safer than other places. The centre of [Your] will is my only safety.” So, settle me today with humility and confidence in your love and your good plans; accomplish your will in my life, in the lives of your faithful people and on earth, as you do in heaven.