2026-10-25 Life Abundant: Be Still Psalm 46
Life Abundant: Be Still
Psalm 46
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
October 25, 2026
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult. Selah
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
God will help it when the morning dawns.
6 The nations are in an uproar; the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice; the earth melts.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah
8 Come, behold the works of the Lord;
see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
10 ”Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations;
I am exalted in the earth.”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah
Back at the beginning of the summer, which honestly feels like about three years ago, we started something together. I’m not sure I fully knew where it was headed at the time. But looking back, I think we’ve been walking through three movements of faith.
First came Jesus Worldview. For ten weeks we looked again at the life of Jesus. Not the Jesus we think we already know, but the Jesus we actually meet in the stories. We asked what it would mean to line our thinking up with that of the One we say we follow. That was the knowing part of faith.
Then came Take Heart, which we just wrapped up. That one was about courage. And courage almost always involves movement. You step out, you speak up, you walk into something you can’t see the end of. That was the doing part of faith.
Today we start the third movement. This one is about being.
Now, if you’ve spent any time in church world, you’ve probably heard people talk about “knowing, being, doing,” usually in that order. And you may have noticed we didn’t do it in that order. I’d love to tell you that was some brilliant theological strategy on my part. It wasn’t. But I’ve come to think it might be right anyway. Because most of us don’t get around to being until we’ve completely worn ourselves out on doing. I know that’s been true for me.
The series we begin today is called Life Abundant, and it comes from John 10:10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Over the next five weeks we’re going to explore what Life Abundant looks like through the lens of faith. Throughout the next five weeks, five ways of being that leads to the abundant life Jesus came to offer: Be Still. Pay Attention. Let Go. Make Room. Give Thanks. Each one builds on the one before it, which means (and I say this with all the love in my heart) you need to be here all five weeks. I’ll be taking attendance. Not really. Maybe a little.
And we start, of all places, with stillness. Which, if you know me at all, is a little funny. My mother tells me my very first word—before Mama or Dada—my first word was “go.” So me teaching anyone about stillness is a bit like asking a hummingbird to lead a meditation retreat. But maybe that’s exactly why I need this one.
When most of us hear “be still,” we picture something peaceful. A lake at sunrise. That first sip of coffee before the world turns on. A sunset over the Gulf (which, let’s be honest, we’re a little spoiled on around here).
But that’s not where this verse comes from.
Listen again to how Psalm 46 opens. The earth changes. The mountains shake and tumble into the heart of the sea. The waters roar and foam. A few verses later the nations are in an uproar and kingdoms are tottering. This is not a “peaceful easy feeling” psalm. This is a psalm written while everything is coming apart.
The psalm is attributed to the Korahites, a family of temple singers, and it’s one of what scholars call the “songs of Zion,” songs about God’s presence with the people in Jerusalem. Many think it comes out of a time when the city itself was under threat. Some connect it with the Assyrian army camped outside Jerusalem’s walls in the days of King Hezekiah. We can’t know for sure. But whatever the setting, the people who first sang this weren’t lounging in hammocks along Dunedin Causeway. These folks were terrified.
Centuries later, Martin Luther drew from this psalm when he wrote “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” right in the middle of his own season of upheaval. It’s the psalm a lot of people turn to when the ground beneath their feet is shifting.
And right in the middle of all that shaking, God says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
The Hebrew word behind “be still” is raphah. It means to let go. To loosen your grip. To let your hands drop. Some translations say “cease striving.” I love that picture. Unclench your fists. Put it down.
And notice who’s being spoken to. The verse right before says God makes wars cease, breaks the bow, shatters the spear, burns the shields with fire. So “be still” is said first to the warring nations. Stop. Put down your weapons. It’s a command before it’s a comfort. And then, I think, it’s spoken to the rest of us too, the ones standing there watching the mountains slide into the sea.
One more thing. Three times in this psalm you’ll see the word Selah. Nobody’s completely sure what it means, but most scholars think it marked a pause. Which tells me the people who wrote this built stillness right into the song.
So stillness isn’t what we get once the chaos is over. It’s what we practice right in the middle of it.
When I think about times I’ve enjoyed stillness in my life, I sometimes think back to my grandmother’s porch nestled in a valley in East Tennessee just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We would go to Granny and Pa’s nearly every Sunday . . . and on the thirty-minute trek between the town and the woods, you could almost feel yourself beginning to breathe a little deeper. Time slowed down there on that porch as we listened to the droning of the whippoorwills, sipping the sweetest iced tea known to humankind, catching up on the latest talk (read: gossip), and occasionally stringing the green beans after the harvest.
I think about that porch sometimes. And if I’m honest, it makes me a little wistful, because my kids never really had one. Not like that. Their childhood had plenty of good things in it, but it ran on a different clock, one marked by screens and schedules and whatever was next. I don’t say that to shame any parent in this room. Most of us were just doing our best inside a world that kept speeding up. But something got lost along the way, and I’m not sure any of us noticed it leaving.
So let me ask you. What was your porch?
Maybe it was fishing off a dock with your granddad, neither of you saying much. Maybe it was shelling peas, or a long drive with the windows down, or sitting in somebody’s kitchen while the biscuits baked. Maybe it was something you used to do in your twenties, a walk, a journal, a prayer you used to pray, that just slipped away when life got full.
I’m going to pause for just a moment and invite you to remember a time when life felt a little slower . . .
Hold onto that. We’ll come back to it.
Here’s the thing. If being still is hard for you, I don’t think it’s merely a personal failure. It’s not just that you need more discipline, or a better meditation app. (There are apps for that, by the way. Lots of them. Which is its own kind of funny.)
There are forces in our world that benefit from our not being still.
This week I was at a conference where Kat Armas was speaking. She’s a writer and theologian; she told a story that I haven’t been able to shake.
She described a political strategist, a man who worked at the highest levels of government, who openly explained how he dealt with opposition. His strategy was to “flood the zone.” Overwhelm people with so much information, so much noise, so many outrages coming so fast, that nobody can keep up. People can’t tell what’s true. They can’t focus on any one thing long enough to respond to it. And eventually they get so tired they stop trying.
That’s not an accident. That’s a strategy. When we’re overwhelmed, we’re easier to manage.
Now, I want to be careful here. This isn’t about one person or one party. Every side does it. Every industry does it. Scripture has a word for systems like this, the ones that want us productive and distracted and exhausted and easy to sell to. The Bible calls it empire. It’s an old pattern. It just has new tools.
Some of you saw the documentary The Social Dilemma a few years back. It’s the one where the people who built our social media platforms sit in front of the camera and admit what they built. One line from it has stuck with a lot of people: “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” The app isn’t really what’s being sold. Our attention is. Every minute we scroll is a minute somebody gets to sell.
Kat had a name for the story that system tells us. She called it “the gospel of hustle.” And it really is a kind of gospel, isn’t it? It’s good news, or it pretends to be. It says your worth equals your output. Rest is something you earn. If you’re tired, you’re doing it right. If you’re busy, you matter.
I’ve believed that gospel. Some days I still do.
Which brings us back to John 10:10. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” I used to picture that thief as someone breaking in at night. But I wonder if the thief in our day mostly doesn’t need to break in. We hand over the keys ourselves, one notification at a time. And what gets stolen is our attention, our time, our rest, and maybe a little bit of our soul.
So what do we do with all that? The good news is that God’s people have been here before.
Go back to Egypt. In Exodus 5, after Moses asks Pharaoh to let the people go, Pharaoh’s answer is to make the work harder. No more straw for the bricks. Go find your own straw. And by the way, the quota stays the same. Same number of bricks, every single day. No days off. No margin. Your value is exactly equal to your output.
That’s the economy the Hebrew people came out of.
And then after the escape from bondage in Egypt, out in the wilderness, before they ever get to Mount Sinai, before the Ten Commandments, God gives them manna. Bread from heaven every morning. And with the manna comes this strange instruction in Exodus 16. Gather enough for today. On the sixth day, gather twice as much. And on the seventh day, don’t gather anything at all. Rest. There will be enough.
Can you imagine what that sounded like to people who’d spent their whole lives making bricks? No quota? A whole day where nothing gets produced, and we still eat?
When the commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy, the reason given for the Sabbath is striking. In Deuteronomy 5:15, God says, more or less: keep the Sabbath, and remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and I brought you out. Rest is how you remember you’re not property anymore.
Walter Brueggemann wrote a little book called Sabbath as Resistance, and his point is that Sabbath was never a lifestyle tip. It wasn’t self-care the way we use that phrase now. It was an act of resistance by recently enslaved people against a whole society built on extraction. Every seventh day they were saying, with their bodies and their time: Pharaoh doesn’t own us. Our worth isn’t measured in bricks.
I wonder if we need that more than we know. Because Pharaoh’s still around. He just doesn’t go by Pharaoh anymore. He goes by productivity. Or the algorithm. Or “just one more email before bed.”
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Rest is not a luxury. It’s not a reward for having worked hard enough. It’s not a sign that you’re lazy, or behind.
Rest is part of what makes us human. It was woven into creation from the very beginning, when God rested on the seventh day. And God wasn’t tired. God was showing us what a whole life looks like.
To be still is to remember that we’re creatures, not machines. That we were beloved before we ever produced anything. And that we’ll still be beloved on the days we produce nothing at all.
This is where abundant life comes in. The word Jesus uses in John 10:10 for “abundantly” is perissos. It means overflowing. More than enough. Beyond measure. But here’s the catch. You don’t get abundant life by cramming more into your life. You receive it. It’s a gift. And you can’t receive anything with clenched fists.
Raphah. Let your hands drop.
So here’s the invitation for this week.
I’d love to tell you to take a full Sabbath day. And if you can, please do. But I also know some of you just laughed at me in your head. So let’s start smaller. Take a Sabbath half-day this week. Pick a morning or an afternoon, and for those few hours:
No news.
No social media.
No work of any kind. Not your job, and not the laundry either.
I know. It sounds simple, and it’s going to feel almost impossible. You’ll reach for your phone without even thinking about it. Your mind will start building a to-do list. That’s okay. Just notice it and set it down again.
And remember that porch we thought about a few minutes ago? Your porch? Maybe this is the week you go back to it. String the beans. Sit on the dock. Take that drive with the windows down.
Think of it as a small act of holy defiance. A way of thumbing your nose at every system that profits from your exhaustion, most of which you and I don’t even realize we’re part of. Every hour you spend being still is an hour Pharaoh doesn’t get.
The mountains may still be shaking this week. The waters may still roar. The news is going to keep coming whether we’re watching or not. Be still anyway. Let your hands drop. Know that God is God, and you are not, and that is very good news.
Because you can’t pay attention to what you never slow down long enough to see. Which is exactly where we’re headed next week.
Let’s close today by sitting in silence together for just a moment, then I’ll close with prayer.
[Silence]
Go now into a world that will not stop shaking. But you can stop. May the God who is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, meet you in the stillness. And may you know, deep in your bones, that you are loved for who you are, not for what you produce. Amen.