Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Manage a Crisis | The Writings | Psalm 60

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

How do you act in the midst of a disaster? Are you able to fight your own battles? What does crisis look like to you right now? In today's episode, Tanya invites you to bring God into your battles like David does in Psalm 60. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Psalm 60

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. Have you ever gotten yourself into trouble? And in the moment where you could turn around and get out, you just dig a deeper hole instead. In the PR world, they call this bread and butter, crisis management. It's when companies and organizations need outside communication help because their own people keep making the hole deeper. Take for example the BP crisis, now known as the largest oil spill in history. While they were drilling on a platform in Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, 11 people were killed in the initial explosion. Then the rig sank, and over the next month, 134 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf. But at the beginning, Tony Hayward was the chief executive for BP. And, and And it took almost a year to dig the company out of the PR hole that he created with some of his comments following the disaster. He said things like, I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very modest on May 18th. And he also said,

We're very sorry for the massive disruption. It's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back on May 30. On June 18th, the BP chairman fired Hayward saying, it is clear, Tony has made remarks that have upset people. This is when they turned to Edelman, an outside PR firm to help them with their public relation side of the crisis, and launched a new campaign called We Make It Right, where the people impacted by the spill became the spokespeople for the campaign, and BP showed how they were

making things right instead of only talking about them. Managing a crisis is hard, and it's our nature to try to minimize the impact it has on people initially. Sometimes we try to deflect the blame somewhere else. But I think we can all relate to what Tony said, when we truly do just want it to be over. We don't want to have to go through and face day by day all the ways our missteps have impacted people. It's super uncomfortable. For a company like BP, crisis, management involved taking ownership and responsibility for what happened and walking through the daily steps to make it better. For a Christian, crisis management looks much the same, but we have a word for it, and that word is repentance. Rependance is recognizing our sin and our fault, but the difference is that

we have a savior who took ownership for it. When we have a crisis, we look to God to help us manage it, and we do that in prayer. If all that sounds more, spiritual and biblical and practical, don't worry because we're going to walk through what it looks like in Psalm 60, just like David did when he wrote this Psalm. King David and his army commander Joab were on something of a land grab. When the king to the north had his back turned, David sent Joab up to take advantage of the situation. But while David and Joab were fully occupied in the north with the Syrian war, the Edomites seized the opportunity and invaded the south of Judah, and they caused serious damage.

The inscription at the beginning of Psalm 60s suggests it was written when David got the news of Edom's massacre and was sending Joab South to defend against those southern invaders. And this created a lot of anxiety because the battle in the South would make him abandon his conquest in the north and would put into question the future and the safety of David's kingdom. This was a crisis. David writes like someone who realized,

that what he was doing on his own wasn't working. Things had been going well, so he and Job had been used to going into battle and taking advantage of opportunities without prayerful consideration. They were kind of assuming that God was with them, but had neglected a dependent kind of relationship with God, a prayerful one. When David realizes this, he starts the psalm saying, oh God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses, you have been angry. O restore us. You have made the land a quake. You have torn it open. Repair its breaches, for it totters. You have major people see hard things. You have given us wine to drink that made us stagger. It kind of sounds like David is blaming God for the disaster, doesn't it? But he's also starting to recognize what has happened.

God is angry about their sin. But it's because he is their father, who loves them without fail, that he is angry. If God was just angry and not loving, we would never be able to function under his perfection. But if God was only loving without righteous anger, we would never understand the severity of our sin. We would be complacent with excuses. But it's David's recognition of God's righteous love and anger that marks the turning point of the crisis and the Psalm. The troops needed something raised up high that they could look at to build their confidence in their army and in their leaders and in the battle. They needed a banner. And that banner was prayer. Tim Keller says the only banner of defense is prayer. To pray is to unfurl the ultimate royal colors. How serious are we

about prayer for crisis prevention, for crisis management? David and Joab went into this battle on their own, but it was the crisis that turned them toward God. It is often our disasters that reveal our need for God and turn us toward Him in prayer. It's often our crises that make prayer frequent part of our lives. But our battles are not against flesh and blood like David. We're foolish to think that we can face our battles without the presence of the Lord, but do we recognize what they really are? Paul describes our battles in Ephesion 612. It says, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Think about the battles you face. How would it change your life to have God in the battle with you? Anxiety, self-consumption, unmet expectations, dissatisfaction. What about disappointment, anger, greed, guilt, false accusation, shame, loneliness? To fight these kinds of battles, Paul says we must put on the armor of salvation of the gospel, of faith. Like David does at the end of Psalm 60, we need to remind ourselves who we are in Christ. David wrote, Oh, grant us help against the foe, for vain is the salvation of man.

With God, we shall do valiantly. It is He who will tread down our foes. With this kind of help against the enemy, anything that is distracting you, stealing your joy, your time, your confidence, your relationship with God. In anything, we are confident in the victory, because God has defeated death, the ultimate enemy. God has defeated sin, our ultimate enemy.

So we are accepted, we're forgiven, we're secured in his family. We have full access to God in prayer all the time. We know we will live with Him forever because of the resurrection. Can we remember these things without prayer? Can we make them part of our identity without prayer? I don't think so. Prayer is a living relationship with God. And His spirit plants these truths in us.

So our mind becomes more like His. our desires become more like His Lord. We often start our days in chaos. We look at the world to tell us what's important and how to spend our time. We need your help to face our battles so we can worship you with our minds and our hearts. We ask you to keep us grounded in your word and with your people and keep drawing us back to your banner and ultimately to you. Amen.