Our Refuge and Strength

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. PSALM 46:1

Tozer rarely preached about current events. He said so himself, in one of the sermons now in the Ochorus library, before making an exception. He had watched, he told his congregation, a mounting fear take hold of the country around him — fear of war, fear of the bomb, fear of the future — and he had watched politicians and even evangelists use that fear to move people where they wanted them. He had nothing to say to the world but that it must repent and believe the gospel. But he had something to say to God’s people, and he took as his text the forty-sixth Psalm. The sermon, God Is Our Refuge and Strength, is a fine example of what happened whenever Tozer brought his doctrine of God to bear on ordinary human anxiety. He began with the first word of the verse, and stayed on it: God.

The sovereign God

Everything in Tozer’s theology of comfort rested on the sovereignty of God. He meant by it that God is the one absolute ruler of all things, answerable to no one, dependent on no one, and able to accomplish whatever He purposes. Nothing takes Him by surprise. Nothing escapes His notice. Nothing can finally frustrate His will.

Our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. PSALM 115:3

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? DANIEL 4:35

In The Knowledge of the Holy Tozer treated this attribute with care. He was not a Calvinist; he belonged to a movement whose theology leaned the other way, and he believed that men make real choices for which they are truly responsible. He held the two truths together by insisting that God in His sovereignty has freely chosen to give men a real measure of freedom, and that even their rebellion takes place within limits He has set and cannot overturn His purposes in the end. Christians have argued about how best to state this relationship for many centuries, and will go on doing so. Tozer’s pastoral point did not depend on settling the argument. It was that the world is not out of control, because God has never let go of it.

Therefore will not we fear

That is where the forty-sixth Psalm goes, and where Tozer followed it. The Psalm pictures the worst that can happen — the earth removed, the mountains carried into the sea, the waters roaring, the nations raging, kingdoms tottering — and then declares that God’s people will not be afraid. Not because the catastrophe will not come, but because God is in the midst of them.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. PSALM 46:2

The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. PSALM 46:7

Tozer believed that a great deal of Christian fear arises from a low view of God. The believer who thinks of God as well-meaning but somewhat overstretched will naturally be anxious, because there is always the chance that something will slip past Him. The believer who has seen God as the Scriptures show Him — sovereign, infinite, holy and good — can face the news with the calm of a child whose father holds the reins. He does not pretend that the danger is unreal. He simply knows who is greater.

The love of God

Sovereignty alone would not comfort. An almighty God who did not love us would be more terrible than a weak one. The reason the sovereignty of God is good news is that the Sovereign is love. Tozer insisted that love is not merely something God does from time to time, or a mood into which He can be persuaded. It belongs to His nature. He loves because He is love, and He loves without any cause in the one loved.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 1 JOHN 4:8

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:10

Because God is infinite, His love is infinite. Because He is immutable, His love does not change. Because He is self-existent, His love owes nothing to our deserving and cannot be withdrawn because of our failures. And because He is holy, His love is not indulgence. It will not leave us as we are. It wills our highest good, which is to be made like Christ, and it will spare no pain that is necessary to accomplish it.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ROMANS 8:28

Put together, the sovereignty and the love of God are the believer’s whole security. The God who loves me rules everything, and the God who rules everything loves me. There is no power in heaven or on earth that can come between.

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ROMANS 8:39

Weighing it

There is little here to set aside. Tozer’s handling of the sovereignty of God was balanced and pastoral, and his handling of the love of God was sober and deep. One caution is worth adding for the reader who goes on to the sermon. Tozer’s contempt for what he regarded as fear-mongering in the politics and evangelism of his day was sharp, and in places he speaks of his fellow preachers with more scorn than charity. The truth he was defending — that the child of God need not be driven by fear — is right. The temper in which he sometimes defended it need not be copied.

Being still

The Psalm ends with a command that sums it all up.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. PSALM 46:10

Stillness, for Tozer, was not passivity. It was the posture of trust. It meant ceasing to strive, ceasing to calculate, ceasing to lie awake rehearsing disasters, and resting the whole weight of the heart on the character of God.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Psalm 46 each morning this week. Before you read the news or check your phone, read the Psalm.

2. Name the fear that has most occupied your mind this month. Write beside it one attribute of God that answers it.

3. Consider whether your anxiety rests on a low view of God. Ask Him to enlarge your sight of Him.

4. Memorise Romans 8:38–39 and say it to yourself when fear returns.

5. Spend five minutes in silence each day this week, doing nothing but being still before God.

A PRAYER

God, You are my refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. You rule all things, and none can stay Your hand.

I have been afraid of many things, and I have forgotten who You are. Forgive me for fearing the storm more than I trust the One who commands it.

Thank You that the One who rules everything loves me, and that nothing in all creation can separate me from Your love in Christ.

Make me still. Let me know that You are God, and let that be enough. Amen.