Under His Wings

A sermon by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Part of a series from favorite Psalms, “Lift Up Your Eyes!” 

Three years ago, Shirley and I were utterly fascinated by a mama and a papa cardinal who decided to build a nest in a tree outside of a window that we could watch.  Fact of the matter is it was so well camouflaged that if they hadn’t been coming and going, we would have never noticed it.  Mama and papa were about their building of a home, step-by-step, day by day.  Mama laid the eggs, hatched them.  Because the nest was a little bit above our sight level, it was sometime before we could see the little birds.  But then finally there they were.  Usually hungry.  As we watched that whole process, one of the things that was fascinating is the response of the mother bird anytime there was a threat.  A squirrel in an adjoining tree.  Somebody walking by.  Immediately, she would take those little birds and put them under her feathers and she would be as still as a stone.  You could not see the little birds.  But you knew they were completely safe.  It is a wonderful expression and a word painting that we are given in Psalm 91.  And God is likened to, are you ready for this, a mama bird.  Turn to Psalm 91.  Psalm 91:4.  If you have a pew Bible, it’s page nine thirty.  ‘Tis a Psalm of great trust.  The Drama.. the  Drama Team has read it.  Sophia has sung it.  I will not bother to read it again.  But let me point out this verse.  “He will cover you with his feathers, God will, and under his wings you will find refuge.”  And if that is too soft for you, that’s too touchy-feely for you, look at the next phrase.  “His faithfulness will be your shield and your rampart.”  I don’t know who wrote the Psalm;  nobody does because it is not labeled.  I do know this.  He was a wordsmith, par excellence.  And he could draw pictures with words, and not only that, he had experienced the realities of which he spoke.  For example, in the Old Testament you have lots of words for God.  But there are four main ones.  And the four main words for God are in the first two verses of this Psalm.  The first one of which is Most High, that’s the way we translate it in English. Derek Kidner, Old Testament  scholar, defines most high as the title for God which says that God cuts every threat down to its own size.  Isn’t that great? The second one of these is Almighty, which is the Hebrew word for Shaddai.  I mention that simply because there are songs that are sung now with El Shaddai and this is the word for God that was used in the Exodus when they were fleeing the forces of the Egyptians and on their way to the promised land.  This is the God who watches out after details.  This is the on-hands God, not walk-away-and-leave-it God.  This is the God who provided the manna, the cloud in the sky to follow, the instructions on how to build the tabernacle, El Shaddai.  And the third one of these is Yahweh.  It’s really a Hebrew form of a predicate.  You remember when Moses asked God, “Who shall I say sent me?”  And God said, “Tell them I am sent you.”  And later, he says, “I am who I am.”  That is, “I will be who I will be.”  As the book of Hebrews says, I God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The fourth of these words is the generic word God.  It’s the word like we would use it.  Four words and each one of them spells a specific function of God if you want to take time to study it.  Most High – cutting things down to size; Shaddai – caring for the details, living your life along side of you, the on-hands God.  And the third one is identity – I am who I am.  And the fourth one, generic word for God.  Four words.  Isn’t that amazing?  In two verses, you have a complete doctrine of God.  For wasn’t it our Lord Jesus who said, “The Father and I are one.”  Occasionally, there is a translation where I scratch my head.  That is not how I lost my hair.  But I scratch my head and I say, “How did that translator come up with that?”

And if you will turn over and look at verse 3, it says, “He will save you from the fowler’s snare.  My soul, what in the world is a fowler’s snare?  Well, let me tell you – I had to look it up.  See, in English, we have a lot of names that used to be professions that are now family names, like Baker, Farmer, Carpenter, and we have a family name, Fowler.  But have you ever met anybody that you asked them what they did and they said, “I am a fowler.”  No, we don’t use that anymore.  What would be a fowler’s snare?  The  today’s English version has a very clear translation when they say secret trap.  A fowler was one who trapped animals by putting the traps in secret.  That’s a wonderful description of the devil.  For the devil is about the job of putting secret traps in our way.  And one of those traps we value very highly.  You know what it is?  Competence.  We love competence and should.  And we just really have trouble with incompetence and should.  Like the incompetence of the Government and the way they have handled the destruction alongside the Gulf.  But competence has a strange way of doing things.  For you see, the more competent we are, the more we believe we can handle.  And the more we think we can handle, the less we need God. And the more we think we can manage our lives, we don’t need his management.  The trap is that God begins to be pushed to the margins of our lives and finally off the page altogether and let me ask you, “How long has it been since you really had a good prayer time with God?”  And when you don’t have a prayer time with God, you’ve pushed Him to the margins. Our whole society is based upon a competent view of things; that we can handle things.  Any area of life – put your finger on it.  We can handle things.  And the very great trouble with that is there’s just an awful lot that goes on in life we can’t handle.  The fowler’s snare is the secret traps that the devil lays for us.  And sometimes that happens in a ministry.  I’m thinking of a minister who was called and had a vision and put it in place.  He was insecure, afraid, launched out into the deep, and it all worked.  It wasn’t too many years until he had a worldwide ministry.  And then came the day when everything shut down – his emotions, his mind, his enthusiasm, his energy shut down.  His spirit was gone, his faith was gone, his trust was gone, his confidence in God was gone, and he really thought God had abandoned him.  It wasn’t God abandoning him; it was that a long time ago he abandoned God because he knew he could handle it by himself.  What about us?

You see competence can become a trap and the way to keep it from becoming a trap is to keep our eye on that other side of life.  And what it’s symbolized in the Psalm is arrow.  Look at verse 5.  You will not fear the terror of night nor the arrow that flies by the day.  Hmm.  In their book, “The Sacred Romance,” Brent Curtis and John Eldredge used this word arrow to talk about the penetration of the pains and hurts of life at the deepest level.  Brent Curtis writes, “One of the first arrows I remember was the morning when I happened upon my mother who was standing at the stove.  She was stirring the oatmeal.  She had been crying and the tears were not the tears of even upset at the father.  No, they were the tears looking back now as an adult of a frightened child in her mid-twenties who could find no meeting place between the life she found herself living as a wife and the mother and needs of her own life and heart.

She had never been given the gift by her parents to live with courage and hope and faith.”  Now Brent was just a little boy and he felt he need to do something.  After all, when you’re a little boy and your mother is shaky, you realize the world out there may not be as secure as you thought it was.  And you are going to do something about it.  So he walked over to his mother and put his hand on her arm and said, “Awe, it’s going to be alright.”  And his mother turned on him with anger and said, “It’s not alright.  You kids just don’t know what it’s like.”  The arrows that penetrate the soul.  Brent mentions that in the school he went to, he was smaller than many, and one day one of the big guys pinned him down and beat him up.  And he remembers thinking while all of that was happening, “I wonder if I will spend the rest of my life being pinned down and beat up.”  The arrows – the secret arrows that penetrate us and our level and listen to me please, your competence can’t handle them.  Hmm.  There is a guy who teaches in a private school in Nashville.  Christian school.  The first class they take in high school is bible.  And the last class they take before they graduate is bible.  He teaches it.  He is an incredibly scholarly but creative guy and it is legendary how he starts his first class.  He takes a glass, finely made, clear as it can be, and he shows it to the class and he says, “This is the world you live in as it sees itself.”  And then with great vigor, he takes that  glass and throws it against the wall.  And it breaks into many, many pieces.  And he said, “The world you live in is a lie.  Life is broken. And the reason Jesus came was to try to help us put it back together.”  My question to you this day is, “Would you be willing to settle under the care and shadow of the wings of the Heavenly Father?  Jesus.  On a day, the only two times that it says Jesus wept, one was at the grave of Lazarus.  You know what the other one was?  It was on a hill overlooking Jerusalem and he said, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you as chicks under the wing of a mother hen, but you wouldn’t let me.”  The question of course is “Will we?”

Pray with me, will you?

Lord Jesus, we have such a false sense of confidence about so many things.  We need you so badly and we treat you shabbily.  We need you at the center of the page, and we put you in a footnote.  Just now, help us to be like a little chick, willing to be gathered, cared for, protected, and loved.  Oh, Lord God, forgive us but just now we want to re-commit ourselves to be part of you, to be like little chicks that you love so much.  And in the nest of your love, help us to find your grace and salvation.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray.  AMEN