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Through vulnerable storytelling and powerful in-depth teaching, Sheila Walsh offers a life-changing study on ten bedrock promises of God to give us a foundation for daily confidence, joy, and hope.
Study Gateway's First Listens: Find your next Bible study! Join host Shelley Leith as she curates first sessions of Bible studies on various themes each season, taught by some of the world’s most influential Christian authors, teachers, and pastors. To learn more, visit https://StudyGateway.com.
First Listens Season 3: Episode 6
The Shelter of God’s Promises
By Sheila Walsh
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: Hi there everyone! Welcome to First Listens! I’m your host, Shelley Leith, and in this podcast I bring you the first listens of the first sessions on Study Gateway so you can find your next video Bible study.
We’re in Season 3 of First Listens, which we’re calling Key Bible Passages Everyone Should Know. In this season, we’re hearing the first sessions of Bible studies on the Scripture passages that are seminal in the life of every Christian, such as Jeremiah 29:11 (everyone’s favorite verse), the Fruit of the Spirit, the Armor of God, the Sermon on the Mount, the Prodigal Son, the Promises of God, and the Lord’s Prayer. I hope that you’ll enjoy these episodes so much you’ll say, I’ve got to go watch that whole Bible study and learn about the rest of that passage!
This week we’re looking at the promises of God with Sheila Walsh in her study called The Shelter of God’s Promises. If you’ve ever seen a Sheila Walsh study, you’ll know that she is known for her vulnerable storytelling and powerful in-depth teaching. The Shelter of God’s Promises is a life-changing study on ten bedrock promises from God that give us a foundation for daily confidence, joy, and hope. In Session One, Sheila talks about the Promise of Jesus, which may seem a bit of an esoteric promise, but her point is that when the storm is particularly threatening, we need someone to hold on to.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHEILA WALSH: Do you ever find yourself asking the question, am I going to have enough here? Am I going to be enough here? So much is asked of me, and I don't know if I have enough to go around. When you hear that Christ offered peace in the midst of any storm, have you ever asked, what about this storm? Is this storm too intense? How can peace come in the midst of all this trouble?
When you hear the word grace, what comes to your mind? We're told His grace is enough. Have you ever felt a little left out in the cold? And you think, I'm not sure this grace is going to cover me here. Perhaps when you hear a text like, "All things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose," have you ever asked, how could anything good come from this?
We're told that nothing at all can separate us from the love of God and Christ. But do you ever feel as if you're somehow out there alone in a storm? You know that God exists, but has he left you to walk through this one alone? One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 91, speaks right to that.
It says, "He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust." Perhaps like me, you've asked some of these questions. Well, welcome. That's why we're here.
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I am so excited to welcome you all to this study on the shelter of God's promises. In a world that seems to change its values and commitments daily, we need something that we can stake our lives on. God has promised that His promises never change. They will never fail, and they're all fulfilled in the person, the living person of Jesus Christ, not just on paper but in Jesus Himself.
When the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, he reminded them of this rock-solid truth, "For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ." Well, it's my prayer that by the time we finish this study together, we would beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we have staked our lives on, what He has promised, what we can know is that there's shelter and the greatest storms of life. Sounds good? Let's pray.
Father, thank You so much that You have not left us alone on this Earth, but You have given us your Word. And not only that. you are the Word, the living Word of God. And you have given us promises that are not simply the kind of promises we hear in this world. They're the kind of promises that we can absolutely count on in the worst moments in life.
So, Lord, very intentionally, we bring our hearts, and our minds, and our ears, and our eyes to focus on the study of Your Word. Would You teach us? We are hungry for You. We want to know who You are in the midst of the greatest storms of life. Thank You that You have promised to be our shelter. In Jesus's name, amen.
Well, when I was 18 years old-- yes, what a memory-- my two best girlfriends from school-- Linda, and Moira, and I-- boarded a train from our home and air on the West coast of Scotland to go camping on the Cairngorm Mountains way up in Aviemore in the Eastern Highlands of Scotland. We thought that on the first day, we'd probably go fairly easy-- hiking maybe just three miles into the mountain range.
Well, it was pretty wild-- actually, a little wilder than we had anticipated. So we thought, let's pitch our tents while there was still enough daylight to see what we were doing. We found what looked to be a good place to spend the first night, and then we lit a small fire to boil water because even in the wild, we Scots cannot survive without a decent cup of tea.
Well, before I settled into my tent that first night, I climbed to the highest vantage point to watch the sun set behind the mountains. It was spectacular. The mountains were still covered in snow. And to see the sun, this big ball of fire setting behind the mountain was just glorious. And then I climbed back down, crawled into my sleeping bag, turned on my flashlight and pulled out my Bible, and I read what is one of my favorite Psalms.
And it seemed particularly fitting that night. It's Psalm 121 if you want to read along with me. And I'm reading from the New international Version of the Bible. But David calls this Psalm A song of ascents sense. So really, to be up in the mountains in Scotland and to read these words was quite a wonderful moment. Here's what the Psalmist said.
"I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip-- He who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you. The Lord is your shade your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all harm-- he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore." And with that, I went to sleep.
Well, when I woke up the next morning, I was freezing cold, and it was drizzly outside. Drizzle is-- how to explain it? It's the name that we give the rain in Scotland. It's not really a decent downpour, but it's enough to get you soaking wet. So I changed into warmer clothes for the day. And once we settled on where we were from our map and where we wanted to be by sunset, we began packing up and set off on our first real day of expedition into the mountains.
The hike was a lot more demanding that first day, not just because of the drizzle. But the wind-- I mean, the wind just blew in our faces. And at times, we almost couldn't see where we were going.
By sunset, however, we managed to log in 10 miles. We were very proud of ourselves. And we tried to find some shelter to pitch our tents. Well, once I had my tent well and truly anchored into the ground, I tried to light a fire, and so did the others.
And honestly, tried is as far as any of us got that night because as soon as we had a little flame going, the wind just blew it right off. And at times, it sounded like it was a wolf howling in the mountains. And sitting there and the dark and the cold, the winds just rushing around us, I felt very tempted to remind God of His promise that He would neither be slumbering nor sleeping, but watching over us that night.
Well, there was nothing else to do. So Moira, and Linda, and I decided we may as well evade the storm and turn in for the rest of the night. I pulled two sweaters over my sweats, and I burrowed deep down into my sleeping bag. I listened to the wind howling for a while. And then before I knew it, once again, I'd fallen into a deep sleep.
Well, the next thing I knew, I was wide awake, but I had no clue what was going on. At first, I couldn't remember where I was. And more pressing, something was sitting on me. And it was so dark, but I couldn't breathe. I felt around the dark for my flashlight, and I turned this beam on the roof of my small tent.
I couldn't see what it was, but something outside was flattening the tent and me. I tried to call for Moira or Linda to help. But the noise of the wind was so loud, and I felt so muffled by the weight on my chest, so all I could do was thrash my knees out my sleeping bag, pushed away from the tent till I could see what was sitting on it.
I crawled out to see what had to be the largest woolliest Scottish sheep you have ever seen in your life. I mean, it was a bruiser. Well, honestly, I don't know which one of us was more surprised-- me are the sheep. But the sheep seemed to make peace with the relationship far faster than I did.
And I could see it was not moving. It had no intentions of moving for the rest of the night. I made one unsuccessful move to move its woolly self off the tent, but it was not going to work. There was no point in waking Moira or Linda. We were all in one-man tents, and there was no room for anybody else in there.
So I thought, hmm, what to do? I didn't think I wanted to join the sheep in his lean-to. So I pulled my sleeping bag out of the tent, and I tried to come up with a plan. I remembered that I saw a little cave cut into the side of the mountain when we were looking for a place to pitch our tent. So using my flashlight, I made my way back to the cave. And after making sure I wasn't joining in anything in there that might see me as a late-night snack, I crawled inside.
I made myself as comfortable as I could, got into my sleeping bag, and I settled in for the rest of the night. And you know what, even though the wind was howling outside, the way that the cave was cut into the mountain, I was completely 100% sheltered. It was the unlikeliest of places. But when it seemed I was at my most vulnerable, I found myself more secure than I had been at all in that trip.
And that is how I embrace the promises of God. No matter what might be raging around you at this very moment, God promises shelter and cover when you're at your most vulnerable and alone and sometimes when you least expect it. I want to stop here just for a moment almost before we dive into the study and just look at the way the word promise has impacted your ability to believe what God has said in His Word about you and about your life.
As I continue to have amazing opportunities to share with women from all walks of life, I see that many of us are what I would call malnourished. We're starved for spiritual truths that we may well have forgotten or maybe, honestly, we've never learned them. We don't know how to grab hold of God's promises in scripture as our anchors in the daily storms of life. For some of us, it may well be that somebody else has let us down. And we think, well, you said you would do this, and you didn't. Is God any different? Will God let me down too?
I think another reason is that we haven't take time to really read or understand the promises that God has given us in His Word. And I think, too, that part of the issue is the deterioration of the very word promise in our culture. When you hear the word promise, what comes to your mind? Do you think of promises that have been made to you and broken? Do you think of maybe promises you've made yourself? I will lose 10 pounds by Christmas.
Maybe you think, of the millions of promises made to us every single day through TV, magazine commercials that never seem to deliver on what they promise. In our pop culture, a promise no longer means you can count on my spoken word to be true and absolute-- no. It's a word that we use very, very loosely. A promise can be used as superficially as in a commercial for anti-wrinkle cream.
And we know the claims aren't going to be true. We don't consciously think, wow, that ad is lying to me. I'm not going to look 30 years younger by Tuesday. But we just don't overinvest ourselves in what is promised if we use the cream for 30 days.
But on a deeper level, perhaps you wrote your own wedding vows, and you made a promise to your spouse. But in the midst of the harshness of life, you've lost your footing, and you have drifted far away from the promises. You stand there on that day in a beautiful white dress, and you say, for better or for worse, for richer for poorer, but you can't imagine in that moment what other moments in life are going to look like. And somehow the word promise gets lighter and lighter in weight.
So perhaps for you, the word promise is a reminder of how relationships can fall short and only disappoint us. I can't live up to what I promised leaves us with guilt at the end of the day. But I want to look at what the Bible said a promise really is. In the Greek, the word for promise is derived from the word proclaim, which means to proclaim upon.
The source word is logos, which means word. For the Greeks, logos was an important term used to mean the source of all things-- the meaning of the cosmos, reality. And the apostle John knew this when he wrote the Gospel. So he was appealing to the cultural philosophical understanding of the word. He knew logos was an important word that communicated the very essence of truth.
Well, in Judaism, logos refers to how God communicates with the human race through His creative Word, His divine wisdom. In Christianity, logos becomes personal. In Christianity, logos is personified in Jesus.
Logos is used, you'll remember, in John, chapter 1, verse 1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So the word logos is the second person of the Trinity. The Word Jesus is the promise. Jesus is the Word shown up in the flesh. Jesus is Gods promise in the flesh.
I really want this definition to sink in deeply, deeply into our minds and hearts. Jesus is the promise, and all His promises are true. It's not just that Jesus makes promises.
Jesus is the very promise of God.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: So the Promise of Jesus is not some esoteric idea about prophecy fulfillment, but Jesus is the logos – the word, the embodiment of all the promises of God. We are listening to Sheila Walsh teaching The Shelter of God’s Promises, which is published by HarperChristian Resources and it streams on Study Gateway. Study Gateway is a streaming video service, and we’re the only one that has a subscription plan especially for small groups. For our First Listens listeners, we offer you an exclusive rate on our small group plan. When you use the promo code FIRST at studygateway.com, you’ll get a 20% discount on a small group plan for up to 20 people, and that discount lasts for the life of your subscription!
And, for a complete experience with The Shelter of God’s Promises, take advantage of our publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide designed to be used with the videos. You’ll get the group discussion questions and leader materials, the Scripture text and key ideas, and personal Bible study and reflection exercises to do between sessions. Get all the details at Studygateway.com.
And now, let’s return to Sheila Walsh.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHEILA WALSH: As we study together, my prayer is we'll read the promises of God together with new eyes and renewed hearts. When we believe a promise in His word, it's like we're standing in agreement with Jesus that He is who He says He is and can be trusted with every single part of our lives.
I read in Colossians chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, we read this, "For by Him, all things were created-- things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." That is a promise, I mean, a reality that we can cling to through all seasons of life. He Himself holds everything together. So we can trust a God who is holding the entire universe together to hold us together, even when, honestly, everything is falling apart.
He is a creator of you and me. But not just that, He didn't just create a planet and say, well, good luck. He is the sustainer of you and me.
If you know me at all, you know that music has been pretty much an integral part of my life since I can remember. For me, it's like a shelter. It's like a cleft in the rock. It's a place that I go to praise God and be strengthened. It's just a place for me of remembering what's always true, no matter what might be true for a minute.
I don't know if you're familiar with author and teacher Louie Giglio. Well, I love his heart for worship. He has such a gift for ushering people into the very throne room of God. Well, I watched a little YouTube video, and it was fascinating. He was talking about how big God is, how amazing the universe is, and how God the creator is holding it all together.
But he went on to show something that blew my mind. He went on to say that we can trust God because of how intricately He knows what we need. He mentioned a word, laminin. And unless you remember that from biology or you're in the medical field, you might not remember the term or know the term. But laminin is a family of proteins that literally holds our body together. They connect one cell with the other. And without them, literally, we would fall apart.
Here's what's amazing. When you look at the structure of a laminin molecule, they have the shape of a cross. This is not a Christian rendition of the laminin molecule. This is a scientific portrayal.
It's wonderful. Jesus the promise is holding this fallen world and our fallen lives, literally holding us together. Do you see how we need his promises? Because we need something to hold on to, and it's someone, Jesus that we need to hold on to, the one who is holding everything together.
The night that I spent tucked into the cleft of the mountain in my homeland in Scotland reminds me of one of the most dramatic encounters that anyone has ever had with the One who holds all things together. Perhaps you remember the story. It's found in Exodus. And it's when Moses had spent 40 days in the mountain with God and received the Ten Commandments.
But when he came back down to where the Israelites were camped below, he discovered that they had been worshipping an idol that they had created themselves while he was up meeting with God. Moses was furious. I'm sure he was broken-hearted too, so disappointed.
He smashed the tablets of stone that God Himself had written on. God at that point told His servant Moses He was prepared to turn His back on the people. But Moses, which shows the heart of a leader, begged Him to have mercy on the people. And at a time when God should have abandoned His faithless people, He showed them He is full of mercy. And even when we are faithless, He will be our shelter.
Then Moses asked God to show him His glory. Wow. We read an Exodus chapter 33, verse 21, "Then the Lord said, 'There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I've passed by. Then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.'"
What a beautiful picture of God protecting Moses from the full glory of His face, yet doing it by pulling him close to His side and protecting him. I think this picture is staggering and magnificent and yet so personal, so intimate. What I see in this picture is when our greatest need is to hold on to something, God offers Himself.
God offers Himself for us to hold onto. But not only that, He is the one. He is the one in the worst moments of life who is holding on to us.
From the very beginning, God made a promise, and God had a plan. You can trace His promises back to the Garden of Eden when Eve disobeyed God, when she picked fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and shared it with her husband Adam, we lost our place in paradise. Sin became our birthright. But God in His grace and mercy promised deliverance before He banished Adam and Eve and us from that perfect place of no pain, no worry, no storms.
If you take a look at Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, which captures that moment, it says this, "So the Lord God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.'"
The promise was that the seed of Adam and Eve would crush Satan's head and destroy him for eternity. And that seed is Jesus Christ. Satan would bruise Christ's heel, meaning there would be pain and suffering ahead for the Messiah.
The promise for you and I today is that there is a limit to the time that the enemy will be able to have free reign on this Earth and that even during this limited time and space, Christ Himself will walk with us every step of this journey. Whenever I'm faced with a difficult passage in my life or a friend is going through something difficult, I remind myself again, and again, and again, girls, we don't belong here. We are travelers in this world, headed back to that garden, our true home with God.
But we come upon, as you know, many detours in the journey. And this detour takes us from the garden, across mountains and rivers to a cross high on a hill where Christ Himself paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we can be free. Even as Christ was placed in a grave carved into the cleft of a rock, He went there as a fulfillment of Gods promise to you and to me that death would be swallowed up in victory, for no grave could hold Him.
I'll never forget that night that spent in the Cairngorms, how I made my way in the dark into the cleft of that rock and found a place of shelter. In my travels on this Earth, I can never forget every single one of us are invited from the worst storms of our lives to find our safe hiding place in God. God provided shelter for Moses-- interestingly enough, not in a moment of shining triumph, but when his heart was broken by the faithfulness of those around him.
Is your heart broken by the faithlessness of those around you? Have you been betrayed or left alone? Did someone that made a promise to you that they would be there-- did they fail you? When your heart is broken, Christ is our cleft in the rock. When the people failed to live up to one promise, God's glory caused Moses's his face to shine as He reiterated His promise one more time. Our faithlessness does nothing to diminish God's faithfulness.
Let me just repeat that even just for myself. Our faithlessness does nothing to diminish the faithfulness of God. Whatever God says, we can stake our lives on. And Christ came to show us who our father is.
Looking again at the rest of the promise verse, Paul said, in Christ, all the promises of God are fulfilled, "For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ. And so through Him, the 'Amen' is spoken to us to the glory of God."
Isn't that beautiful? Isn't it so mysteriously complicated, and yet, in some ways, so beautifully simple? Isn't that just like God to come down to the most elemental way of things? In His creation, there is darkness. There's light. There's a beginning, the end, heavens and the earth, water and rock, body and blood, your broken heart and His. There are his promises and his unbreakable commitment to keep them.
All of God's promises are affirmed in the sacrificial death of Jesus, for in Christ, the answer to all the promises is, yes. And the believers respond, amen. God is glorified by the fulfillment of His promises to us and His promises through us.
This actually may have been a creedal statement by early believers. They are the affirmation of God. His promises are true. And I'll say, yes, they are true. Amen to that.
What a privilege to be the glorification of God as He keeps us promise to us. Normally, we doubt whether a promise maker will always be a promise keeper when everything is said and done. But the witness of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is this-- God kept His most difficult promise.
The Father is truly the only promise maker that is always, always a promise keeper. A promise from God is a promise kept. There is Christ. There is yes. And we say, amen. I love that. Can I pray for you as we close?
Lord, thank you so much for the privilege of this time together. Thank you that not only do we have a promise-making God, but we have a promise-keeping God. And that in the sacrificial death of Christ and Resurrection, you kept your most heartbreaking promise to us, that you would provide away from the Garden, through a cross, and all the way home.
Thank you that as we study your promises, we will discover at a greater and greater depth that all your promises are true and that, truly, you have offered for us a shelter from all the storms of life. So when we hear Your promises and our spirit, we cry, amen. I'm looking forward to this time together. Thanks.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: “The Father is truly the only promise maker who is always a promise keeper.” I hope you enjoyed your first listen to the first session of The Shelter of God’s Promises, a video Bible study by Sheila Walsh, published by HarperChristian Resources and streaming on Study Gateway.
It might be interesting to go to Study Gateway and WATCH this session – we have it unlocked so our First Listens listeners can watch it for free. What you’ll be able to see is Sheila speaking to a group of people, which is always more interesting than just a talking head, and her main points and Scriptures are reinforced on the screen. You can go to studygateway.com and watch the entirety of Session One at no charge.
Here at Study Gateway you can find your favorite authors, pastors and Bible teachers, all in one place. We’re the only streaming video subscription service that offers a small group-sized plan, AND has user-based pricing for churches, no matter what the size. And don’t forget, you can use the promo code FIRST to get a 20% savings on a small group plan for the life of your subscription.
With Study Gateway, you also get a direct link to our store, where you get publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide for The Shelter of God’s Promises. The study guide gives you what you need to have a great group experience with watching the videos and discussing them, then you have between-sessions activities to help you dig deeper into the Scriptures and apply them to your life. Is The Shelter of God’s Promises going to be your next study? Get started right now by going to studygateway.com, click start free trial, choose the monthly small group plan, and use the promo code FIRST.
Make sure you rate and review this podcast so other people can find this show too. And come back next week for our last episode for the season on Key Bible Passages Everyone Should Know. Our final episode comes to us from America’s Pastor, Max Lucado, and he’s teaching us about the Lord’s Prayer in Before Amen. See you next time on Study Gateway’s First Listens.
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