Be Still, and Know That I Am God — Carter Conlon

Psalm 46, be still and know that I am God. Father, I thank you with all my heart, Lord Jesus Christ, for the anointing of your Holy Spirit. I thank you for your mercy. I thank you for your presence. I thank you, God, for your word and the assurance that it brings into our hearts.

I thank you for divine change, Lord, for your willingness to endure us in our frailty and our failings, yet still love us and call us your own. Thank you, Lord, for inviting us into the incredible victory that you won for us on the cross.

Lord Jesus Christ, would you open our understanding? Would you cause your word to live? Would you cause us to grow in the grace and knowledge of who you are? I thank you for this. I thank you for covering this frail body and frail mind.

I thank you, Lord, for giving me thoughts that are deeper than my own. Thank you, Lord, for taking this offering that I bring to you and to your people and multiplying it a thousand ways and speaking to every heart in a way that only you can.

Build your church, Jesus, for you said you'd build your church upon this foundation. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. Build a strong church in this generation, oh God. Father, I thank you for this and I praise you in Jesus' name.

Psalm 46, beginning at verse one. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, even though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

Though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling, there is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle and the most high.

God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God shall help her just at the break of dawn. The nations raged, the kingdoms were moved. He uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord, that means past and future, who has made desolations in the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two.

He burns the chariot in the fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Be still and know that I am God.

A phenomenal verse, a verse about which songs have been written, poems have been made. Countless numbers of sermons have been preached. You know, when people hear a verse like that, they wonder, what does it mean to be still?

Does it mean just I don't do anything? What's the context of this particular word? When you look in the original text, it's a phenomenal context. It means admit defeat. It means let down your hands. It means give up trying to figure out and to work out everything in your own strength.

Come to the end of yourself is really what it means. And let down your hands. Let go of the efforts. Let go of all the striving, the struggling, the trying, to even that which seems to be godly, but it's got its fuel source in human effort.

Give up trying to be godly in your own strength. There's a lot of noise today in the house of God. And I have found over the years, wherever you have a lot of noise, nothing is going on in the supernatural.

And in order to compensate for the lack of God really working in the midst of the people, they have to create noise. That's what the prophets of Baal did. You have to jump and dance. You have to leap.

You have to shout. You have to create things in the atmosphere. You have to create everything that you can in the sensory realm to try to create an illusion that God is actually there doing something.

But the deepest work of God is actually that which goes on in the hidden inner man of the heart. It's not something that really makes a lot of noise. But listen to what Psalm 74 is, and think of it in the context of at least what I have seen in the last 30 or more years in much of the testimony of God.

The psalmist says, lift up your feet to the perpetual desolations. The enemy has damaged everything in the sanctuary. Your enemies roar in the midst of your meeting place. They set up their banners for signs.

They seem like men who lift up axes upon the thick trees. In other words, they appear to be people who are here for our benefit. But now they break down its carved work all at once with axes and hammers.

Keep that verse in mind. There's a carving going on inside the temple, and they come in with their noise. They come in with their fleshly ideas. They come in with their human effort, and they break down that which was designed by God.

And they've set fire to your sanctuary and defiled the dwelling place of your name to the ground. I don't want to be in a place that's just noisy. I don't know about you. I want to be in a place where God is.

I want to be in a place where my heart just stands in awe of him every moment. I want to be in a place where I sing that song. I can only imagine, and I can imagine it in a sense because I've experienced some of it, a foretaste of glory divine, as the scripture says.

I've been touched by the presence of God. It's created this insatiable hunger in my heart for more. But how do I learn to be still when all around me is noise and flurry, and even in that which claims to be representing God in the world?

Listen to what the prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah chapter 30 in verse 15. He was calling out to his own people. They were about to go into a horrific moment in history when their very existence would be challenged.

And he says, for thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, in returning and rest you shall be saved. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. In coming back to that which is clearly revealed is the source of your life, your strength.

In letting go of human effort, trying to create the presence of God in your own strength, and coming back and having confidence in the work that only God can do, this would have been your strength. But then he goes on to say, but you wouldn't come.

And you said, no, we'll continue to try to do this in our own strength. We'll strategize it. We'll push it. We'll develop an agenda. We'll cultivate it. We'll make things happen on our own in society and even in the house of God.

And then he said, no, you said, no, we'll flee on horses. Therefore, you will flee. And you will ride on swift horses. He said, therefore, those who pursue you will be swift. A thousand shall flee at the threat of one and the threat of five you shall flee.

Till you are left as a pole on top of a mountain and as a banner on a hill. Therefore, the Lord will wait that he may be gracious to you. And therefore, he will be exalted that they may have mercy on you.

God says, I'll let you run the course if you choose to do so. I'll let you run so hard, so fast, so far until you've exhausted all your strength until there's nowhere to go but where I am. And when you finally get there, I'll be there and I'll be waiting for you.

I'll be at the top of the mountain when there's nowhere else to go, I'll be there and I'll be waiting for you. And I will be merciful to you in that place. Don't you just love the graciousness of our God?

The mercy of God. To even partner himself with me staggers my mind. It's truly amazing. And so the question comes into your heart today in mind, how do I learn to let down my hands and give up trying to figure everything out and work out everything in my own strength when that's all I have ever done?

Especially New York. It's almost like an oxymoron speeching to a New York audience and saying, be still. You go out on the street, everybody's running at a furious pace. Everybody moves at 100 miles an hour.

Get out of my space, get out of my space, get out of my space. Gotta go to work, gotta make money. Gotta get ahead, gotta do this, gotta do that. And suddenly the word of God comes and says, be still.

Let your hands down. Give up trying to figure it all out and work it all out, especially the things that pertain to godliness. Well, figure out your work environment if you have to do that. But you can't figure out the supernatural inner working of the spirit of God.

You and I can't even, apart from faith, there's nothing we can do to even help God in that vicinity. Psalm 47 verse seven tells us, sing praises with understanding. In other words, if you're gonna come into a place where you worship God, it helps to know what you're singing about and who you are worshiping.

When you look at the rest of the Psalm, it speaks of the absolute sovereignty and faithfulness of God. God is sovereign. What he says he will do, he will do. What he says is gonna happen, is gonna happen.

Who he says he is, is who he is. There's no fine line. There's no bottom line. There's no small print. He says it clearly. He says it straight out. He said it straight. Every purpose and promise of God will be performed in the earth and will be performed in my life if I choose to trust him.

Everything he said in this book is mine. Every word that comes to life as I read it belongs to me and it will happen. It will happen by the spirit of God making it happen inside of my life. And so we come back to the original question.

So what do I do? Be still and know that I'm God. Give up, let down your hands. Give up trying to figure it all out and work it all out in your own strength. Let me give you an example of what this looks like.

I'm just gonna share it with you. I'll just paraphrase a lot of it here, but it's the very first temple that God designed and built on the earth for himself. He never really had had a temple up to this point.

And this temple that he built, he gave the pattern of it to King David in writing. And he said, this is what the temple's gonna look like. This is how it's gonna be built. This is every, and he was so detail oriented.

Everything was all, there was nothing left to chance. Nobody had to figure anything out. The whole design was given right down to the color of the doorknobs. If they had such a thing, it was all designed by the hand of God, given to David by the spirit.

And David gave it to his son Solomon when he passed on all of the workings of this temple that God was going to build for himself on the earth. And when I read about it, it foreshadowed something. God had never had a physical place to dwell on the earth until the building of what we called Solomon's temple.

And in a similar way, he now has another temple. Solomon's temple is gone. The Dome of the Rock sits in that place, essentially in the vicinity of it. Solomon's temple is long gone, but God moved to a new temple.

You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are the dwelling place of God. You and I have to understand, and I've said it many times here, I'll say it again. You and I are not, we're not recipients of just ideas about God, a theory about God, or somebody else's testimony about God.

When you opened your heart to forgiveness of your sins, when you believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross in your place, admitted you couldn't save yourself, you opened your heart to his offer of forgiveness, he came in the form of the third person of God, the Holy Spirit of Almighty God, who is God, and he took up residence inside of your physical body.

You didn't come here to meet with God. I know many people think you did, but you didn't. You brought God with you. You came here to meet with each other and to worship God. I remember as a young Christian, I always found it so humorous when I'd go into a service and somebody would suddenly say, he's here.

I'd feel like saying, I know, I brought him with me. He lives inside of me. Christ in you is the hope of glory, Paul said. We come here to meet with each other. We come here to worship God. We come here to thank him collectively and to encourage each other and say, thank you for strength.

Thank you for our redemption. Thank you for our hope. Thank you for our future. Now, in 1 Kings chapter six, when they began to build this temple, verse seven, it says, and the temple, when it was being built, was built with stone finished at the quarry, so that no hammer or chisel or any iron tool was heard in the temple while it was being built.

This is a phenomenal illustration. In other words, all the hammering was going on in the mountain. But from the mountain were brought foundation stones and stones to build this temple. And when they were designed in the mountain, all the hammering took place in the mountain.

And I think about Calvary, the hammer coming down on the nails and the hands and the feet of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. All the hammering was done in the mountain. All the work was done there. And out of that mountain, when you came to Christ, came wonderful stones of a new foundation for your life.

I thank God for that. The Bible says that if you're on Christ, you become a new creation. That means the old foundation slowly and quietly slides out, and the new foundation slowly and quietly slides in.

A new foundation built on the truth of God, built on the cornerstone of Christ, the testimony of the apostles and prophets of God, those that have walked before. I thank God for this with all my heart.

There doesn't need to be noise inside the temple for God to work. Old things are carried out. Sometimes you don't even know until they're already gone. If you walk with God for any amount of time, you've obviously had those surprising moments.

I've had those when you look back and say, wow, where did that go in my life? That was part of my life since I was a child. And then suddenly you realize it's gone. It left months ago. I didn't pray about it.

I wasn't even thinking about it. But somehow that old stone just slid out and a brand new one came in. And I was placed on a new foundation. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God. And it says in verse nine, so he built the temple and finished it and paneled the temple with beams and boards of cedar.

Oh, thank God. That speaks to my heart about the cross. In other words, inside this temple, the cross covers it all. The cross covers my flaws, my failings, my frailties. Assuming that you are a genuine believer in Christ, my friend, you are growing in grace and in knowledge.

And while you are growing and while the building is going on, there's a cedar wood inside of you. The cross of Jesus Christ that covers all the flaws in your life, covers your mistakes if you're a genuine believer.

Think of it this way. If sin was imputed to you, in other words, sin was marked against you as a believer, you would be lost. At two o 'clock, saved at three, lost at four, saved at five, and you just hope you die at the right time on the clock.

It's not a license to sin, but we can't run from the understanding that when you came to Christ, you and I make mistakes. We do things that the Bible will call sin. We are not doing it deliberately. Somebody cuts you off and suddenly a word comes out of your mouth and don't tell me it's holy.

You make a gesture that you shouldn't have made and you put that on heaven's screen, it falls far short of the glory of God. But yet you're covered if you're a genuine believer in Christ, you're covered.

The cross covers the inside of the temple. You can't be condemned. You have a righteousness given to you from God. The devil can't get through that to condemn you unless you let him. That's why the scripture says every tongue that rises against you in judgment, you shall condemn.

This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their rightness, their righteousness, their cleanness in the sight of God is given to us by Christ. It's not earned, it's not deserved, it's a gift of God, lest any one of us should begin to boast.

Thank God for the covering of the cross. It pushes the devil's voice way beyond the utter court. He can't even get close to the temple because I know in my heart I'm a genuine child of God. I know in my heart God has put that inside of me to cry out, Abba, Father.

I know it inside. Therefore, as a son or a daughter of God in your case, the devil can't condemn you when you've had a bad day. You clap like you almost believe that. Thank you, Jesus. Then it says in verse 18, it says the inside of the temple was cedar carved with ornamental buds and open flowers.

All was cedar, there was no stone to be seen. In other words, suddenly these skilled craftsmen start coming in. God knows how to take the barren places of our lives and create something beautiful. You know, we sing that song, something beautiful, something good.

All my confusion he understood. All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife, but he made something beautiful of my life. When you walk with God, people come in and they're angry and suddenly they find themselves with patience.

That beautiful flower of God's carving comes inside the temple. There's a skilled work going on inside the temple all the time. You don't necessarily hear it. You don't necessarily see it, but it is going on.

Paul the apostle said, as we simply behold him, as we look at his victory, as we start to understand who he is, why he died, what he wants for us, that as we simply behold this graciousness of our God, we are changed from image to image and glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord.

It doesn't require noise for this to happen. We read, we believe, and things supernaturally begin to happen inside. And before you know it, where there was barrenness, there's a flower garden. Remember the psalmist said, they've come into the house of God and they appeared to be with us and they appeared to be craftsmen, but what they've done is they've destroyed this inner work of God with their noise and with their roaring and with their shouting of fire and all the rest that they do, they've taken away this still quiet confidence in God that is the real essence of Christian growth.

You see, this is a supernatural life. This is not a natural life. I can't make myself holy and neither can you. I can only yield my life to the one who does it within me. I can only read the promises and say, God, I believe you.

That's what Jesus said. You know, there was a religious system of worship going on, probably the most God-defined in the world at that time. But Jesus made this profound statement and said, it's not this kind of worship, neither at Jerusalem or wherever you've chosen, but God the Father is looking for people in spirit and in truth.

In other words, people who see the truth of the promises of God and are trusting in the Holy Spirit to make these promises real. Spirit and truth. I love to worship that way. I simply, there's truths I've seen all my life.

There's truths I've seen that, as Paul said, I've not attained, I'm not there yet. I haven't reached the mark of the high calling of God, but I'm gonna leave behind what needs to be left behind. I'm gonna move forward to where God is calling me.

And I'm gonna trust the Holy Spirit to be that master craftsman inside and carve a flower in this barren area of my temple. To carve the flower of patience and carve the flower of love and carve the flower of the willingness to be what God's called me to be.

Carve the flower of truth in every area of my life. Carve the flower of humility if I've become proud. I'm trusting the master carpenter to do this. And all of these carvings, they're silent. That's why, for those that are listening online, beware of a place of too much noise.

I'm not saying we don't clap our hands, but clap our hands for the right reason. If we're clapping our hands to try to prove that God is with us, then really not much is going on inside of the temple.

But when something's going on in the temple, all you wanna do, I felt like dancing this morning all over the platform. Eventually, I'm gonna break out of this white skin and I'm gonna be able to dance on this platform.

Then verse 19 says, and he prepared the inner sanctuary inside the temple to set the ark of the covenant of the Lord there. And that means Christ wants to come to the center core of his temple. There's a moment in your life where Jesus becomes everything.

He is really all in all. It's not just a song. He really is everything. You get to the end of your days, or at least to the point where you can see it from where you are. And there's nothing but joy in your heart.

There's nothing but life ahead. There's nothing but God's desire becoming intermingled with yours. Jesus comes to the center. And in verse 21, it says, and Solomon overlaid the inside of the temple with pure gold.

He stretched the gold chains across the front of the inner sanctuary and overlaid it with gold. In other words, if you and I will let Jesus do the work, we'll let the Holy Spirit inside of us do the work.

On our part, we read the word of God and we believe what we read. And we put one foot in front of the other by faith believing that what I was yesterday, I will not be tomorrow. And what I am tomorrow, I will not be the next day.

And what I will be the next day, I will not be the day after that. We put one foot in front of the other and we say in our heart, I am done trying to change my own life. I am done trying to chart my own course.

I'm done trying to change my own destiny. I'm done. I'm letting down my hands. I'm giving up trying to figure out and work everything out in my own strength. Let all hell and everything in this world shake around me.

It's not gonna touch me anymore because God is my strength. He's become everything to me. And I know who he is. And I know, as Paul said, that he can keep in his hand everything I've entrusted to him.

I know he will not fail me. I know he will not forsake me. I know he's not ashamed of me in the midst of my struggles. I know it as much as I am known by him. In 1 Kings 10, the Queen of Sheba came. Now you have to understand she had a kingdom as well as Solomon did.

She had servants, craftsmen, cupbearers, a treasury. She had all of these things. But when she saw what God could do in comparison to the best efforts that men could perform, there was no more breath, which means there was no more resistance in her to what she was seeing.

You see, there's a marked difference between well-intentioned people and spirit-led people. And you and I are called to be a testimony in our generation of what only God can do. Only God can do this.

The church began that way with 120 people bursting out of an upper room and all of the religion of the 3 ,000 that came to Christ that day and witnessed it, all of the religion, the accumulation of all that it offered them could not produce what they were seeing.

They were seeing something divine. They were seeing something that only God could do. And that's what your life is to be. We are the Bible now that this generation is going to read. There won't be any Bibles in the hotels.

If there still are in New York, there won't be shortly. All of these things are gonna be eradicated. We're not gonna be able to pray at public events. All of these rules and regulations will be in place.

But there's one thing that this society can't do. They can't take the testimony of the living God outside of his temple. And I believe as Psalm 46 tells us that we are coming into a season in this world that the earth will be removed and all that means.

Mountains will shake. Seas will roar. Societies will be troubled. Difficulty will be no doubt on every side. As nations rage, kingdoms are moved. That's why the scripture tells us, sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you.

Oh yes, they're coming. Oh yes, they're coming. They're coming by the hundreds, if not by the thousands. And when fear begins to break out, now there's a time of collective fear that may be coming our way, but there's times of individual fear that are here now.

People who are afraid they're not gonna make it till tomorrow, who are afraid that their families are not gonna survive, who are afraid because maybe they got a diagnosis from a doctor that's not very good.

There's a lot of fear all around us. But in the child of God, if we have been brought to the place that God wants us to go to, there is a confidence in the heart. Though we have to go through the same storms, we have to travel through the same waters.

We have to live in the same society. We have to endure the same as those around us are having to endure. But if we have chosen to set God apart in our hearts and let him be the Lord of our lives, people will come and say, tell me the reason why you have such hope in your speech, why you have such bounce in your step and why there's such light in your eye and such kindness in your voice in the midst of the calamity, the social, physical, financial, moral calamity that we're living in today.

Could you give me a reason for the hope that is in you? See, this is the testimony that's going to give hope to the people around us in the days ahead of us. But in order for that testimony to happen, we have to be still and know that he is God.

I have a quiet confidence in my heart now that makes me wanna dance. I have just quiet confidence that just doesn't go away. I hope you have it too with all my heart. Hope you've come to the place of just saying, I'm done.

I'm even done trying to be godly in my own strength. I'm going to let God be God now. I'm gonna invite you, Lord, to come into the center of your temple and bring in the craftsmen, bring in everything that needs to be inside of this temple and let your name be glorified there.

Remember, when that temple was complete, the glory came so powerfully that nobody could stand in its presence. All arguments failed. All human effort died. Everything had to be laid out before a holy God because he had come into his temple.

When you look at the dedication of Solomon's temple, it was really all just about prayer. When you pray, I will answer you. I will be God to you. Thank you, Lord. We're gonna come to the communion table now together.

And if you haven't done so, would you, as we receive communion together, would you dedicate your life to God? Not in human effort, but just in faith. So, Lord, I just give you my struggles, my trials, my past, my future, my present.

I put it all in your hands. And I thank you, Lord, that you won't fail me, you won't forsake me. But I'm asking you to make my life a testimony that can't be debated. Let it be an irrefutable testimony of the reality of God.

Your blood shed on the cross covers my failure and my struggle. And your body given the bread represents your promises to me that by these promises, the Apostle Peter said, we become partakers of the divine life of God in Christ.

By promises, not human effort, by the promises of God. I thank God today, and I hope you do. You don't have to promise God anything because you can't keep it. You live by his promises to you now. That's how we live.

That's how we move forward, by God's promises to us. Thank you, Jesus. And Father, just thank you, Lord, for this communion service together. Thank you, God, for what this really means. We are inviting you to cover us.

We are inviting you to cleanse us. We are inviting you to change us. We're inviting you to be God in this temple. We are inviting ourselves to this stillness that produces a confidence that allows you to be God.

It allows you to do the work that you do inside of us. And so, Lord, we yield our bodies to you as a living sacrifice, which is reasonable. And we thank you for being faithful to us. And we will worship you in spirit and in truth.

We will trust you, Lord, for what we need to shine as lights in this darkened time. We bless you for it, God. As we heard in the worship service this morning, you are with us. Oh, God, you are fighting for us.

Help us to yield. Help us to put our hands down. Help us to be still and know that you are God. In Jesus' name. If you could hold on to the bread and the juice till everybody receives it, then we'll partake of it together.

Praise God. If you'd be kind enough to take the juice first, please. And pray this prayer with me. Satan can't condemn me because the blood of Jesus has covered all my sin. I belong to God and I will be everything that he longs for me to be.

I've opened my heart to his forgiveness and to his promise of new life and everlasting life in Jesus' name. Hallelujah. Now, if you take the bread and say these words, Satan can't stop me because God has cleansed me, come into my life and given me promises that I will become everything he says I will be.

I'm learning to be still and know that he is God in Jesus' name. Amen. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.