Have you ever had a time in your life that you would call a crisis?

In a room of this size, there are a few, if not many, who would be in such a time right

now.

And I suspect that most of us, if we've lived long enough, we can look back at some moment

in our life, some time, some season, if not many seasons, that we would call a

crisis moment.

We might say that it felt like the earth beneath our feet was shaking.

Or we may say that our world was being turned upside down.

We reach for catastrophic language in crisis moments, like Psalm 46 does in verses 2 and 3,

put into words, put into concrete images, the kind of tumult that we're feeling within

our own souls in those moments, with the earth shaking, with our world turned upside down.

It could be a national crisis.

Maybe you've felt the tremors of those, it could be an international crisis.

Those can indeed whip up our anxieties.

And it might have been a kind of national crisis, or at least a civic crisis, that is behind

Psalm 46, we'll look at that.

But a national crisis in our modern world, playing out far away in the news on our screens,

is a far cry from the way that a personal crisis rocks our own soul.

Psalm 46 was composed in a time of crisis, and it is preserved for us today by the hand

of God for our crises.

The particular crisis that gave rise to these verses is left unidentified.

So that may not satisfy our curiosities, but it does show us the timelessness of our

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