Psalm 62; A Psalm for the Shaken

Martin Wagner June 7, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

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Transcript

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Our passage this morning is Psalm 62. It'll be on the screen behind me. It's also printed in your bulletin. Their Bible's in the pew back in front of you. It's on page 481. So follow along as we read God's word to us today from Psalm 62. For God alone my soul waits in silence. From him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation,

Psalm 62 Read Aloud

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my fortress. I shall not be greatly shaken. How long will all of you attack a man to batter him like a leaning wall, a tottering fence? They only plan to thrust him down from his high position. They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse. For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I shall not be shaken. On God rest my salvation and my glory, my mighty rock, my refuge is God. Trust in him at all times, O people. Pour out your hearts before him. God is a refuge for us. Those of low estate are but a breath, those of highest state are a delusion. In the balances they go up, and they are together lighter than a breath. Put no trust in extortion, set no vain hope on robbery, riches increase, set not your heart on them. Once God has spoken twice, I have heard this that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love, for you will render to a man according to his work. Let's pray together. Our Father, many of us uh come this morning. Uh, we feel more uh like a leaning wall uh than a fortress. We believe that what you say is true in your word, yet we often find that our hearts and souls rest in other things. And so as we come to your word today, help us to be honest. Uh give us grace to see where we have built our hopes

The Gap Between Belief And Life

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on things that can't hold. Strengthen our faith where it is weak, and most of us show us Christ, the one who is our rock and our salvation, so that we might find rest in him. And we pray this in his name. Amen. The great philosopher and boxer Mike Tyson once quipped everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. There's a theological version of that statement. Everyone has a theology until life punches them in the mouth. We have things that we genuinely believe about God, that God is loving and sovereign and wise and good. We sing those things and teach them to our children, but then life uppercuts us, and what is revealed is that we are actually standing on something else completely. When life starts throwing haymakers our way, what we are really trusting in is revealed. One idea I want you to take home today, even if you forget everything else, is that there is a gap in all of our lives. On the one side of that gap is the theology that we profess. God alone is our rock in salvation and fortress. And on the other side of that gap is where we actually live when the pressure comes. And Psalm 62 is David's honest account of that gap. He tells us what to do with it in three parts. First, David tells us, This is what I believe. That's in verses one and two. Secondly, he says, This is what I experience. That's in verses three and four. And then it turns into a prayer in verses five to eleven, when David prays, Lord, help me to believe what it is that I say I believe. So let's begin where David begins. This is what I believe in verses one and two. David begins, For God alone my soul waits in silence. Notice that David begins not with what is happening to him, not with naming his enemies, but with talking about who God is. The Psalms teach us to look at our troubles through the lens of God's character, not look at God's

God As Rock Salvation Fortress

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character through the lens of our sufferings. If you begin with trouble, God shrinks down, your sense of God shrinks down to the size of your sufferings. You can't see anything bigger than what you're facing, but if you begin with God, your trouble finds its proper size. The trouble is still real, it still hurts, it may be unresolved, but it's no longer the biggest thing in your world. That word that David uses for wait and silence, it describes a soul that isn't frantic, a soul that isn't worried. This came home to me when I was preparing to preach this week. Some weeks, when you prepare to preach a sermon, that's smooth sailing. Everything comes in on time, it's easy. And some weeks it's like war. And this week was like a battle for me. Uh and as I'm praying and meditating on verse one, I'm frustrated, I'm anxious. I'm, am I gonna have something to say on Sunday? And it was like God holding a mirror up to me. Here I am, frantically, restlessly, anxiously trying to think about how to talk about not being frantic and restless and anxious in the presence of God. And in a moment of just kindness and grace, I sense the Spirit of God just remind me of what I already knew and ask me, do you trust that I'm going to give you what you need to preach this week? And that's what David is doing in verse one. He doesn't know how, but he believes that God will provide, and so he's not frantically overfunctioning. He believes that God will do what he says he's going to do, and so he doesn't have to fill the silence with frantic activity. He's not anxiously grabbing every lever available to him because he thinks it all falls on him. Waiting in God, waiting on God in silence is not our preferred posture of living. We even feel uncomfortable when we have to start 60 seconds of silence at the beginning of a worship service. We like to fill our silence before God with figuring out worst-case scenarios, with fretting and worry. We waiting on silence means that we try to manage things that God has told us he doesn't need our help managing. Waiting in silence doesn't mean that he is entirely passive either, but it means that David refuses to make anxiety and control his heart's refuge. So, what gives David the confidence to rest in God like this? He gives us three images. He calls God a rock. The rock is what moves when everything around it doesn't move. It is strong and fixed and permanent, the same day yesterday as it will be tomorrow. Next, he calls God his salvation. You don't need salvation if you're merely struggling. You need salvation when you're drowning and you have no hope. Drowning people don't contribute to their own rescue. David is not saying God is his life coach. He's saying God is the one who rescued me when I had nothing else to give. And lastly, he calls God his fortress. A fortress is protection when everything else is exposed, when there's nowhere left to hide, when all the walls around you have failed, you have a fortress. David ends verse 2 with I shall not be greatly shaken. He doesn't say, I shall not be shaken at all. He's not claiming that the life of faith produces something where you're not affected by anything, where nothing hurts, where nothing makes you afraid. He says, I will not be greatly shaken, which means that I may tremble, I may feel the walls around me shake, I may be affected, but I will not be destroyed. That small word greatly is a gift for all of us who might believe that trusting God means not being affected by the things around you, by your circumstances. You begin to think, well, if I just trusted God better, I was just better at this faith thing, then I wouldn't be so worried about what people think. I would be more calm, I wouldn't care so much. David is certainly affected. We'll see that in just a few verses. The storm may shake him, but it doesn't have the final word in his life. Because God alone is his rock and his salvation and his fortress. And so this confession, this is what David believes. And this is underneath all of the rest of the Psalm. So that's point one. This is what David believes. Point two is this is what his experiencing. David is experiencing, and what he is experiencing is a gut punch. Look at verse three. How long will all of you attack a man to batter him? Like a leaning wall, a tottering fence. That phrase, how long? You'll read it over and over in the Psalms. David is not asking God for a date on the calendar when he says how long.

The Gut Punch Of Slander

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He's not saying, God, would you would you wrap this little situation up by next Thursday so I can get on with life? He's saying, God, this is too much. This has gone gone on too long, and I'm not sure that I can endure what is ahead. This is honest prayer. The same guy who waits alone for God in silence is the same guy who, a verse later, says, How long, Lord? The same one whose God is his salvation and his strength later describes himself as a leaning wall and a tottering fence. This uh both of these things are true. David has not abandoned what it is that he believes in verse one, but he's also not pretending as though verses three and four don't exist. And this is what the series that we're calling Honest with God is all about. Being honest with God doesn't mean presenting him the version that sounds really faithful, the version of yourself that sounds like something that God might want to hear, but it means bringing both what you believe and what you experience into the presence of God. David calls himself a leaning wall. He says, I'm like a tottering fence. A leaning wall is not a wall that is at full strength when it is tested. It is a wall that is already compromised and already weakened. This assault that's going on in verses three and four is not finding David when he's at 100%. It's finding him in a condition of existing vulnerability, and it's just pressing on the bruise a little more. But isn't that how it happens in our lives as well? That punch of life doesn't come when you were at your strongest. It comes when you're already exhausted, when you're already carrying more than you thought you could carry. And the criticism piles on top of the grief. The betrayal comes on top of the diagnosis. The wall is already leaning, and then someone comes and they just press a little harder. But notice who it is that is doing the pressing in Psalm 62. There are no swords or armies in the psalm. If you've read through the Psalms, you know that David is no stranger to danger. He he hides in caves while people are trying to kill him. He knows what that is like, but there are no armies in this psalm. The insult here is entirely different because you can flee an army with a sword. You cannot flee a story that's being told about you and rooms that you're not in. And that's what's happening to David. Verse 4, they only plan to thrust him down from his high position. They take pleasure in falsehood, they bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse. This is not a physical assault against David. It's something more insidious and in some ways more destabilizing than just an outright fight. Notice what's going on. The attack against David is coordinated. All of you. He uses the plural in verse 3. This is not just a one-on-one, it's not one person that is against him. This is everyone, a group of people, coordinated effort against him. And secondly, it's targeted. They want to thrust him down from his high position. This is not just uh indiscriminate random hostility from people who may not like his leadership style. They have identified what they want to do, what they want to destroy. They want to bring him down from his high place, from his calling and vocation. And lastly, it comes wearing a smile. They bless with their mouth, but inwardly they curse. That's what makes this so hard. These people are not visibly hostile to David. They'll walk up to him with a smile and a handshake. They say all the right things, they express support, but behind his back and conversations that he's not a part of, they are plotting against him. And then the psalm just kind of turns the knife a little bit and adds one more detail. They take pleasure in falsehood. This is not reluctant slander. They're not doing this because they feel they have no other options. They enjoy it. These folks have an appetite for destruction. They delight in the pain that they are causing. Can you feel what it's like to be David in this Psalm? Because here's what that kind of pressure does to us. The assault of verses three and four don't just threaten David's position. It actually tempts him with weapons to fight back with. Think about if someone is spreading lies about you, if someone is building a case against you, what do you do? You circle the wagons and figure out who's on your side. You look for leverage, you look for who has influence, and you start managing those relationships. How can I make myself less vulnerable in this situation? And none of that feels wrong. It seems like what any of us would do in the same situation. But here's what this psalm is going to show us the weapons that David's enemies are using are the exact weapons that will destroy him if he decides to pick them up. God is asking David to wait in silence. Can you feel what it's like to be David right now? Part of him knows that verse one is true, that God alone is his rock and salvation and fortress. But there's another part of him that is watching this campaign unfold against him. There's a part of him that feels the weight of a leaning wall, and the weight is just getting heavier against him. And he looks at the weapons around him and he says, I could do something about this. I could fight back. I could end this. And God says to him, Wait in silence. That tension you feel between belief and experience, that is the gap that you and I live in. And that is the gap that David describes. And so that leads to our third point, the prayer that emerges out of that gap. David prays, Lord, help me believe. Help me believe what it is that I say I believe. Now I want to pause and I want to acknowledge and show appreciation for all of the grammar nerds who are in our midst. They get a bad rap. It's easy to ridicule grammar nerds with their semicolons

Preaching To Your Own Soul

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and ellipses. But in their defense, a single letter, a single comma can make the entire difference in the meaning of a sentence. You remember Hamilton. Angelica reads the letter from Alexander. But she notices that he puts a comma after dearest. With the comma, she is his dearest. Without the comma, she's merely the recipient of a letter. Think about it this way, simpler. Let's eat, comma, grandma is vastly different from let's eat grandma with no comma. It's the difference between family dinner and a felony. Now compare verses one and five. Verse one, for God alone my soul waits in silence. Verse five, for God alone, comma, oh my soul, wait in silence. They're nearly identical. But two letters and two commas have changed everything. In verse one, David is stating, This is what I believe. In verse five, he is pleading, oh my soul, wait for God alone. He's not describing what he believes, he is telling his soul what he needs to believe again. Those small grammatical changes tell you everything. They say that somewhere between verse 1 and verse 5, that in the midst of what he's enduring in verses 3 and 4, the pressure against a leaning wall, that somewhere in that his soul has drifted. That his soul has started hoping and trusting and other things. And David catches it. He catches his soul drifting, and he says to his soul, My soul, wait for God alone. This is the most honest moment in the psalm. This is not the polished theology of verse one, but this is the actual situation. This is the gap between what I say I believe on Sunday morning, and then where I find myself on a Tuesday afternoon. David is praying, Lord, help me believe. Help me believe what it is that I say I believe. Verse 7 shows us where that prayer lands. On God, on God rests my salvation and my glory. David is saying, My glory and my salvation. What really matters in life, it doesn't actually depend upon what happens in the situation. It doesn't matter. My significance and my reputation don't hinge on me actually coming out victorious in what's going on. He leaves this in God's hands rather than trying to fight it himself. And then verse 8 lands with the invitation that this entire psalm has been building toward. Trust in him at all times, O people. Pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. Pour out your heart. The invitation is not to bring the cleaned up version of yourself, but to pour out what's really going on in the presence of God. The comedian Chris Rock observed that when you first meet someone, you're not really meeting them,

Pour Out Your Heart To God

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that you're meeting their representative. You're meeting the person that they send ahead of themselves to make them look good. And we do the same thing with God. We bring prayer to God that are that sounds different, sounds more faithful than what we actually feel. It's already polished, it's already processed. But the Psalm says, Pour out your heart before the Lord. Charles Spurgeon says it this way: turn the vessel of your soul upside down in the secret presence, not as milk, whose color remains, not as wine whose savor remains, but as of water, of which when poured out, nothing remains. That's the invitation to come to God and hold nothing back. We can do that because He is the one who can, He is the refuge who could hold what's really going on in our hearts. And I have to admit that when I was studying this uh for this sermon, verses nine and ten seemed really out of place. It seems like it was a we were sort of uh walking around in David's soul in the earlier verses, and then all of a sudden he starts talking about scales and breath and extortion and riches, and it feels like another, a different psalm shows up uninvited at the end. But I don't think they're out of place

The False Refuge Of Legacy

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at all because remember what was going on in verses three and four. They're running a coordinated campaign to bring him down. In verses nine and ten, these describe the weapons that David is tempted to pick up. These verses are David looking at these weapons that are on the ground, and he's saying to himself, don't go there. The weapons your enemies are using against you, they will not save you. They will just bring you into, drag you into the web that's trying to destroy you. What are these weapons? Verse 9 talks about trying to secure a status or a legacy of high estate. His enemies want to remove him from the place where God has put him and want to make sure that he doesn't recover. This assault on his position. This awakens a deep human fear that we all have, that our life won't count, that we're going to be forgotten, that you're going to be removed, and that no one is going to remember that you ever existed. There's something in all of us. There's this temptation in all of us that wants to be remembered beyond our days, that wants people to still be talking about us hundreds of years later, to leave a mark and a legacy, to be remembered of a high estate. And David says that is delusional. All of this legacy stuff, David says, all this stuff about legacy, he says it floats. Put it on a scale, it rises. It floats, it means nothing, it's a vapor. I read an article this week about a church that had a statue in its courtyard of one of its former pastors. And the story was that the pastor himself actually commissioned the statue in his own honor because he hoped that his legacy would live beyond his ministry there. And the interesting thing was that. No one at the church actually remembered anything about him. The only thing that he was remembered for were these mutton chop sideburns that appeared on his statue. This man wanted a glorious legacy. And all he was left with, he was a nameless laughing stock. The sobering truth is that within a generation or two, almost all of us will be forgotten. Your great-grandchildren probably won't know your name. No one at your job is going to remember that you even worked there a few years after you leave. The show will go on without you. That sounds bleak, but actually David means it as relief. Because the burden of making yourself unforgettable is one of the heaviest burdens that a human being can carry. And this psalm says you don't have to carry that burden. Because the logic is if God remembers you, then being forgotten is okay. David is saying, if God remembers me, then being taken down from a high place is that's not a big deal. If God sees you, then you can survive being overlooked. You can survive not making the team. If your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life, then the final meaning of your life does not depend upon whether someone is still talking about you 100 years from now. The legacies that we try to create are lighter than breath, like a vapor. Money and control, they are the two other weapons that David is tempted to pick up, and they fare no better on the scale. Take money first. Money is a temptation for us because when the assault comes, financial security feels like the thing that we can hold on to. If we just had enough cushion between us and the worst possible outcome we could breathe. We all know that there's never enough. And control,

Money And Control Will Not Hold

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that's that's the other weapon that he's tempted to pick up. And he uses strong words. He says, extortion and robbery. But extortion and robbery are just our attempts to try to control outcomes that are not ours to control, trying to secure an outcome by force, to take what you think you need because you don't trust that it's going to come any other way. And that's exactly what a controlling soul does. You try to manage every possible outcome. You try to have everything you can just wrapped up so you can't be surprised. And then David says to us, put no trust in that. What he says is put it on a scale. Put your legacy and your wealth and your control and put it on the scale. And what you see is that it all floats. It's lighter than air. But then in verse 11, David gives us something that won't float away. Once God has spoken, twice I have heard this, that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love. Both power and steadfast love belong to God. A God that has power, but not steadfast love, is not a refuge for us. If God were only powerful, you would hide from him.

Power And Steadfast Love Together

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He would send your best representative to him in prayer. But steadfast love without power is not a refuge for you either. He could sympathize with us, but he could not save us. He could stand beside the leaning wall, but he could do nothing about it. God is both strong enough to save you, and he is loving enough that his strength is for you and not against you. So that means that you can pour your heart out to God. That means that you can bring the heart that wants control and approval, the heart that is terrified of being forgotten. You can pour that out before God because he will not be overwhelmed by the truth about you. And the Psalm ends with these words, for you will render to a man according to his work David's enemies. They think that they're going to control the outcome here. This verse says that they don't. The outcome of the situation in this Psalm, it is not in the hands of David's enemies. It's actually not in David's hands either. It's in the Lord's hands. The Lord will render the verdict. Your future, your reputation, your legacy is not in your hands either. Those things are not in the hands of your enemy. God is the one who weighs, God is the one who judges, God is the one who remembers, and he is the one who renders. And because power and steadfast love both belong to him, you can trust the verdict that he renders. And the good news is that for those of us who were in Christ, the final verdict on your life does not depend upon the work of your enemies. The final verdict in your life does not depend upon the strength of your own faith. The final verdict in your life rests upon the finished work of Jesus for you. The God who is our rock

Jesus Shaken In Our Place

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and our salvation and our fortress, he did not just stand at a distance. He didn't stand in heaven and tell leaning walls to stand up taller, but he became the leaning wall. Jesus entered the assaults of verses three and four. He endured coordinated opposition, false witnesses against him, public shame. He knows what it is to have friends who bless him to their faith, to his face, and then curse him behind his back. Enemies who wanted to thrust him down from a high position. And at the cross, Jesus was not merely attacked as though he were a leading wall, but he was cast all the way down. There, the Son of God bore the full weight, the judgment of our sin, so that you and I might be made sons and daughters of God. And so the hope of Psalm 62 is not that if you try harder, somehow you'll be less shakeable. The hope is that Christ was shaken in your place, and so that you could have a future that can be held by someone and something that cannot be moved. Remember, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. This psalm gives you something better than just an improved plan for life. This psalm gives you the rock that the punch cannot move. And so your soul came in today. You arrived this morning, and your soul was resting in something. And Psalm 62 has been asking the question all the way through: how is that resting place for your soul? How is that working out for you? The approval and the wealth that you long for, is it doing for you what you thought it would do? That legacy that you're longing to leave, is it holding? Put it on a scale. Does it stay down or does it float away? There is only one weight that doesn't rise. God alone is our salvation. God alone is our rock and our fortress. We began the sermon by talking about the gap between what we declare and what we experience. And so here's what this psalm invites us to do about it. Not to close the gap by trying harder, not to perform our way back to verse one, but the psalm invites us to bring, bring the actual gap that exists in our lives, bring the real contents of your heart and pour it out before the only one who can hold it. And this psalm gives us words, precious words that have held many for thousands of years. For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from Him. Let's pray. Our Father, we come to you today as people who have been reaching for things that cannot hold us and cannot keep us. And so we pray that you would give us honesty to pour out what is actually in our hearts, not the cleaned up version that we keep. And by your Spirit, we pray that you would meet us, that you assure us of the love that you have for us in Christ, and that you would remind us that both steadfast love and power belong to you, that you are strong enough to act, and that you are good enough that we can trust you. And so, Lord, settle our souls, help us to believe what it is that we say we believe. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.