What does it truly mean to take shelter in God?

With this recurring theme in the Psalms, I found myself asking whether I really understood what this meant or if “shelter in God” were just a familiar Christian phrase. Psalm 77 is one of the clearest examples of the writer not only expressing his crisis and asking tough questions of God but also demonstrating his own arrival at the answer. I am only providing a brief part of the conclusion of the study below, but you can read the entire thing here.

Part of the conclusion is that one’s act of taking shelter in God must be plainly and clearly an act of knowing God, of reminding  oneself of God’s goodness and all that he or she knows to be true about God. These truths must come from Scripture. This recitation of truth is seen in Psalm 77:13-20.

Another aspect of the conclusion is that, for the Christian, remembering and meditating on the goodness of God and the truth of who he is must always center in the cross of Jesus. The truth of what has taken place in God’s act of dealing with sin sets the stage for everything else we should be learning about God. God forbid that it should ever sound like an exaggeration or even a cliché, but plainly there is nothing else that compares to the display of God’s love in Jesus Christ. (Romans 8:31-39 and Ephesians 1:3-14 are merely two of the passages that draw our attention to this truth.) Hence, any time that we are prone to question God’s goodness or God’s ability to “fix” our situation, our ultimate answer is to preach the gospel to ourselves (to borrow the wording of author Jerry Bridges among others.) When one is reminded that God has purchased us through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, that Jesus has died as our substitute, taking our sin upon himself, and that, though we possessed nothing good or worthy of ourselves, his perfect righteousness has been given to us—when we remind ourselves of these things we should not continue to be overcome by any temporary and fleeting trials or afflictions.

[You can read the rather rough draft of a Bible study here.]