David’s Secret To Being Unshaken

Pastor Don Campbell - June 18, 2020

I’ve been meditating on Psalm 16 in The Passion Translation, where it’s entitled The Golden Secret. The subtitle reads “A precious song, engraved in gold, by King David.”

Keep me safe, O mighty God

I run for dear life to you, my safe place.

So I said to the Lord God,

“You are my Maker, my Mediator, and my Master.

Any good thing you find in me has come from you.”

And he said to me, “My holy lovers are wonderful,

my majestic ones, my glorious ones, fulfilling all my desires.”

Yet there are those who yield to their weakness,

and they will have troubles and sorrows unending.

I never gather with such ones nor give them honor in any way.

Lord, I have chosen you alone as my inheritance.

You are my prize, my pleasure, and my portion.

I leave my destiny and it’s timing in your hands.

Your pleasant path leads me to pleasant places.

I am overwhelmed by the privileges

that come with following you,

for you have given me the best!

The way you counsel and correct me makes me praise you more,

for your whispers in the night give me wisdom,

showing me what to do next.

Because you are close to me and always available,

my confidence will never be shaken,

for I experience your wrap-around presence every moment.

My heart and soul explode with joy — full of glory!

Even my body will rest confident and secure.

For you will not abandon me to the realm of death,

nor will you allow your holy one to experience corruption.

For you bring me a continual revelation of resurrection life,

the path to the bliss that bring me face-to-face with you.

Aren’t those delightful words? This is a wonderful psalm, and I think it becomes more delightful with every reading. I find it richly meaningful in The Passion Translation. We have said throughout this time of pandemic and unrest that God is shaking the whole world. The Bible says that He will shake everything that can be shaken until only the unshakeable remains. David speaks here about being in a place where he is unshaken, where he has such confidence in the Lord that can never be shaken. One of the goals that God has in shaking everything is to reveal what we put our confidence in so that we will come to Him and our hearts will be set on Him alone. God wants to shake everything around us so that we realize the foolishness of trusting in it, and the foolishness of neglecting to come to a place where our confidence is only in God. Long before David gets to this place where he says, “my confidence will never be shaken,” he had already been setting himself apart to the Lord and setting himself apart from the spirit and the ways of those around him. Did you notice in this psalm that David would not allow his spirit to be drawn in by any other spirit around him? We have a lot of strong clamoring spirits all around us. There’s the spirit of this age, there are satanic seducing spirits, so many loud voices demanding our attention. And any spirit that we pause to give time to by turning on Fox or CNN, by spending time on social media — any spirit that is not born of the Spirit of God is not going to draw us into a place where we are more set apart to the Lord and where we are more trusting of Him. David said here that he “would not gather with such ones.”

We will never find confidence in the Lord, we will never gain peace from the Lord, we will never be encouraged by the Lord, our hearts and our spirits will never be strengthened in any place except in Him. David gives us the secret here: it’s coming into a place of greater exclusiveness with Him, a place of greater dependency upon Him. David continuously and relentlessly sought the presence of God. He didn’t dabble in the presence of God. He didn’t know the presence of God theoretically. He didn’t say “amen” to these things because he was familiar with them — they were the procedure and the process of his life! David was continually pressing into a place of exclusiveness with the Lord. David could truly say — and the Lord could truly say of David — that he sought the Lord with all his heart. That involves time. It involves setting a wall around our hearts, our feelings, our eyes, our ears, so that we aren’t taking in the voices of this world. It involves us spending much time in worship, in prayer, in the word of God, in fellowship with God’s people. David speaks about such things in this psalm. And he speaks about the continuous revelation he experiences from the Lord, and how he experiences from the Lord this understanding of how wonderful and extensive is his provision, his inheritance, his blessing in the Lord. How he’s hearing the voice of the Lord continually with clarity because he’s shutting out other voices and he’s spending time in the presence of the Lord. He speaks about a continual revelation of resurrection life that he is walking in, that makes the expectation of seeing the Lord face to face come closer and closer and more real to him. This was the process and procedure of his life, and he’s continually pressing into that place of exclusiveness with the Lord. And because of it, he had come to a place where he could say, “my confidence will never be shaken.”

We find the same expression of confidence in Psalm 46: that the Lord is our refuge, He is our ever present help in time of trouble, and even if the mountains are shaken and slide away from under our feet, falling into the sea, we will not fear. There is a city, God is within her, she will never fall. David had reached that place in the Lord, and we need to reach that same place. God will continue to shake this world. He will continue to shake people. He will continue to shake everything that they put their trust in. He will continue to shake believers. The spirits of this world will get louder, more clamoring. You and I need to press into that place where our hearts are truly detached from everything around us, where we are putting a wall around our thoughts and our emotions, where we are only affected by one presence, one power, one voice: that of the Lord. God wants to shake everything around us; He wants to shake everything in our lives so that there is only one thing that we are looking for, one thing that we have our hearts set on, and that is the eternal hope that we have in Jesus Christ — the promise of being in His presence. He wants to make sure that our hearts are considering this world that we live in and this life that we have here to be so temporary: it’s not our home, our citizenship is in heaven, we are eagerly awaiting the return of Jesus Christ; the sooner the better, I want to see Him face to face. So God continues to shake this world. May you and I continue to press into Him. No matter how much He shakes this world, there is a place in Him where we can be confident and unshaken. That possibility, that hope, and encouragement is held out to everyone who will draw near to Him and set their hearts on Him and Him alone.