Psalm 11 - Open

Shawn Clarke

Stand Alone • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

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On Monday afternoon, I sat down to start working on this message. It was a crazy 24 hours for sure…in reality it was really more like 36 hours. Last Sunday was just an incredible day all around. Showing up early turning on the baptismal waters an hour before anyone was in the building and just hearing the water starting to fill up the tank brought a smile to my face. The tank was filling with water and my heart was filling with anticipation to have a gathering of saints assembled in just a few short hours to hear 8 people preach the reality of the Gospel in their lives as they share their stories of how God had saved them from their most horrific sins and how they have been united with Christ and identify with Him in His sacrificial death, cold dark burial and joy filled resurrection. I am not sure if there is a much greater anticipation for a pastor to experience than to sit in the sanctuary alone knowing what will take place before anyone else gets there…it’s like Christmas morning.

Anyway, show up early, work with worship teams, teach equipping hour, help lead in the worship gathering, co lead a “new membership class” alongside Pastor Mike, then head home for a late lunch. I even attempted to care about the Seahawks game. I couldn’t even though they were playing the Packers, so we decide to go out exploring a little bit, but before we did we noticed how the creek behind our house looks like this it might start to over flow a bit. We went out exploring and then came back an hour or so later and it had filled up our front yard! At this point we decided to move the cars to higher ground and move our inflatable raft to the porch just in case things got crazy. Well things got crazy when the water started rapidly flowing on all four sides of our house. The actual creek just north of us and then the makeshift creeks to the south, east and west of us.

We decide to wait it out and monitor it through the night. From around 11pm until 4:30am I was rehearsing what we will do when we need to get out of here. Have you ever had that? Where you just can’t get a scenario out of your mind no matter how hard you try. You are riddle with anxiousness. It’s hard to breath normally and have a normal pulse. You are both obsessive and compulsive.

Every time I gathered even a little bit of ground on my worry, a blast of rain would pelt the window and send me shooting up and looking outside once again to see how far the water had risen and then my mind is on the treadmill again working the escape plan over and over again. Around 4:15am when the water at finally gone under the porch and was up covering the bottom step, I decided, enough rehearsing…let’s go literally “test the waters.” I got my old shoes on, the head lamp that iIgot from tractor supply last Christmas from by boys and I headed out with my back pack to see if i could make it across the torrent of water that was rushing. It was up past mid thigh and I had decent traction still with my feet and knew at this point if it goes any higher I won’t be able to walk my family and belongings out in a raft. So I made my way back and started getting stuff up off the ground level and up on the countertops and I told suz… “I think we need to get out of here now.” We started to get all of our stuff in order and wake the boys up who were sleeping sound and let them know we were getting ready to go on an adventure…(They were excited). and their excitement remained throughout the duration of the escape…(Oh to have childlike faith in the abilities of your Father!) So by the time it took to get ourselves and the rest of our stuff ready to take to the car, the levels rose to my waist and the grip was still there, but I was a lot more buoyant. I took a load to the car, and came back. Grabbed the boys…and started the trek while the current was pushing me south and the wind was demanding that I go north. It literally laugh out loud at how miserable this was and so I started singing. Do you know what song came to the old worship pastors mind?

I looked at my kids face and they were having a blast. I drop them off in the running car and said do not push any buttons or shift any knobs and I let them watch me head back into the dark to rescue the queen on the other side of the moat. I grab suz and brought her over and we made it into the car with hearts beating fast and we got out of dodge and we headed to church. By that time it was a little after 6am. We hang out for a bit trying to just get a grip on what had happened and what was happening while trying to not imagine what still my be coming if the bank gives way and the current hits the double wide.

We hang out for a bit and then Selena, asks us if we would like to come over for a late breakfast. Ummm...YES…we need to be with people and tell our story a bit.

Throughout our time there, we had multiple reports come to us from neighbors or friends that had stopped by our house to let us know what they were seeing in real time on the ground. The waters were still going up and the rain was still coming down. One of the videos that came back our way showed us that the raft that I had used to get my family out to safety and that I had tied to two posts out by the driveway, that raft must have caught a gust of wind…ripped the poles out of the ground and was now resting up against the trees that were lining the “creek” on the other side of the water. Scott…thought to himself…that’s an interesting place to keep it. (pointless).

We ended up staying at Judy’s…which let me tell is…it is very far from roughing it!

Anyway…all this to say…I sit down to start working on this sermon 36 hours in to a marathon and I am looking at the text and thinking…about trying to come up with an opening story that would capture the ideas of feeling overwhelmed, or devastated and anxious and worried. I wanted to come up with a story that would captures your hearts cry when it feels like your worlds falling apart of potentially floating away.

haha…the Lord is good isn’t He? All the time.

Our experience this last week wasn’t nearly as bad as some and certainly not even close to most of those who were directly effected by the water levels. Difficulty and adversity is a universal human experience. And it is not just actual flood waters that rise when the tempest blows, what we experienced last week could also be seen as a metaphor for a thousand different scenarios that can play out in a thousand different ways in a thousand different lives.

What we are going to see today in the text is what we are to do when the foundations of our lives or our society feel like they are being shaken. We have all experienced that the over the last decade or so. The moral moorings of our society have been untied and let loose. What was once considered anchored and tethered to at least some of God’s revealed truth is floating away down steam never to be seen again. What are the righteous to do? That is what David will wrestle with today.