Helping people move from knowing God is real to experiencing that He is real for them

Ministry can put us in front of people at the worst moments of their lives. A phone call at 11pm. A hallway conversation after the service. A text that starts, “I didn’t know who else to reach out to.” Someone is standing in front of us and they’re in a storm.

The question is: what do we actually give them?

Psalm 91 is a passage we return to often, and rightly so. But the greater encouragement we can give someone isn’t just pointing them to the psalm — it’s helping them grab hold of the personal God behind it. There’s a difference between knowing a truth generally and embracing our God specifically. This psalm is an invitation to the latter.

Shelter Is Personal, Not Generic

The psalmist doesn’t write about God in the abstract — he writes about God in the personal. “MY refuge. MY fortress. MY God.” Not “some” refuge — mine. Not “some” fortress — mine. That possessive language isn’t accidental. It’s the point.

When we’re shepherding people through hard seasons, there’s a temptation to reach for general comfort — “God is in control,” “everything happens for a reason,” “just trust Him.” Every one of them is true — but people in crisis often need more than agreement with a truth, they need to cling to the God of truth.

Our responsibility isn’t just to tell people God exists. It’s to help them experience Him as their God. That takes more than a good sermon or a well-timed verse — it means being deliberate and personal enough to help someone move from knowing God is real to experiencing that He is real for them, right now, in this. That kind of focused ministry sets them up for what Psalm 91 is honest about next: the storms are still coming.

Protection Doesn’t Mean Exemption

Here’s where Psalm 91 gets honest in a way we need to be honest with our people too. The psalmist doesn’t promise that storms won’t come. He promises that nothing reaches us outside of God’s sovereign care. Verse 10 — “There shall no evil befall thee” — isn’t a guarantee of a pain-free life. It’s a guarantee that nothing happens outside of His purposes.

That distinction matters enormously for the people we serve. When someone’s marriage is unraveling, or the diagnosis is bad, or the prodigal hasn’t come home — they need us to be honest that God’s protection doesn’t always look like rescue. Sometimes it looks like presence. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego weren’t kept out of the fire. They were kept in it — and the fire burned the ropes, not them.

We do our people a disservice when we imply that faith is a shield against suffering. We serve them well when we help them see that God is the filter through which every hard thing passes — and that Romans 8:28 is still true even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Promises Are More Useful Than Encouragement

Psalm 91 closes with God speaking directly — and what He offers aren’t suggestions. They’re covenant commitments. Deliver. Honor. Answer. Stay.

One of the most practical things we can do for struggling people is get them anchored to specific promises rather than general feelings. Feelings shift. Promises don’t. When we’re sitting across from someone who can’t see a way through, walking them to a concrete, written promise from God does something that encouragement alone can’t.

It also models something important — we act rather than sympathize, we open the Word together rather than point toward it from a distance, and often it means our hands may get dirty and our schedules upended.

The Question We Should Ask Ourselves

Psalm 91 ends with a challenge that’s as much for us as it is for anyone in our churches: Where do we run when the storm hits?

Ministry leaders are not exempt from the pressure, the fear, or the exhaustion that comes with hard seasons. We feel it too. And the people watching us — staff, volunteers, families — are paying attention to where we go when things get hard.

Let’s stay in the shelter ourselves. Let’s keep pointing everyone around us to the same place.

The storms aren’t going away, and thankfully neither is the shelter.