Thirty-seven hours after my father died, my phone rang. “Dan, your mother only has hours to live. You need to come to the hospital now.”

Even now, over three years later, my heart rate speeds up as I recall the ICU doctor’s words. The first words I spoke after hanging up the phone were to my wife, Melissa. “I just can’t take this again. I have no emotional capital left. How am I going to make it?”

What I needed at that moment, and in the hours that followed, was exactly what my mother had needed just two days before when we told her that her husband, our father, was in his last hours: endurance to continue trusting in the God who never fails to love us, even when all we see is a frowning providence. The razor’s-edge difference between doubt and assurance lies in the strength to believe God loves us when circumstances scream otherwise.

Such moments of crisis reveal the profound need for a deep assurance of God’s love.

Grasping Niagara

In his book Children of the Living God, Sinclair Ferguson recognizes that, for many Christians, “the reality of the love of God for us is often the last thing in the world to dawn upon us. As we fix our eyes upon ourselves, our past failures, our present guilt, it seems impossible to us that the Father could love us” (27). This seeming impossibility underscores our need for divine strength to truly grasp God’s love.

In Ephesians 3:14, Paul introduces a prayer for the Ephesians with the words “for this reason” (picking up his train of thought from 3:1) precisely because of our tendency to doubt God’s love and grace. Paul’s two opening chapters lifted us up to the towering heights of what the Father has done for us in Christ by the Spirit. Imagine standing beneath the plummeting waters of Niagara Falls, trying to take a drink. The sheer force and volume might just make it impossible. In the same way, we have no natural capacity to grasp the magnitude of what the Father has graciously done for us in Christ. We cannot comprehend the depth of God’s love without divine strength.

And so, Paul prays that the Father may grant us to “have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18–19). If we are to find doubt-banishing assurance in the Niagara of Christ’s unfathomable love for us, we need a strength we do not naturally possess.

When my wife was three months into her pregnancy with our oldest child, Hannah, I started journaling prayers to the Father about the daughter I had yet to meet. Each morning, I’d write a prayer about my desire for her to come to know the Father and Jesus Christ (John 17:3). These written prayers revealed my heart’s deep desires.

“Your Father wants you to grasp the ungraspable so your heart will be strengthened in hard times.”

The same is true of Paul’s prayers. But we can go a step further. As inspired Scripture, Paul’s prayers are “breathed out by God” himself (2 Timothy 3:16). Paul prayed this prayer because the Father wanted him to pray it. God-inspired prayers like Ephesians 3:14–19 reveal the very depths of the Father’s heart for us. The Father wanted Paul to pray this because he sovereignly intended to grant his requests. Your Father wants you to grasp the ungraspable so your heart will be strengthened in hard times.

None Left Out

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with severe introspection and regular bouts of doubt. I have talked to many Christians who also struggle with assurance. On the other hand, my wife does not struggle with too much introspection. She rarely, if ever, experiences doubt. From time to time, I find myself envying her and other Christians with the same experience. On the surface, I seem to require more strength to grasp Christ’s vast love than they do.

In God’s kindness, Paul reassures us that our particular inclinations will not exclude us from a deeper experience of God’s love. Paul prays that we would have the strength to grasp this love “with all the saints” (Ephesians 3:18), whether Jews or Gentiles (2:11, 17–18), husbands or wives (5:22–33), children or parents (6:1–4), slaves or masters (6:5–9). This unity in experiencing God’s love emphasizes that his grace and strength extend to every believer, regardless of background, personality, or struggles. Paul prays with confidence that all believers can receive the strength to grasp the depth of Christ’s love, even those with a past marked by fear and uncertainty.

I am helped by remembering that Paul’s prayer is a corporate prayer. You, like me, may read Paul’s prayer and think mainly in terms of yourself rather than the whole church. But every “you” in Ephesians 3:14–19 is plural. So, when Paul prays that God would grant strength to comprehend “with all the saints,” I think he means every singular “you” within the plural “you” of the church at Ephesus, but he also implies that God answers this request mainly when the saints are gathered together. The Father loves to answer this corporate request within the gathered church.

Christians often wrestle with doubt in isolation, striving to preach the gospel to their lonely heart. However, the best place where assurance replaces doubt is in the gathering of the whole church. It is in the fellowship of believers, united in our need for grace, that the strength to comprehend Christ’s love is most powerfully imparted. Here, amid our brothers and sisters in Christ, we find that our collective faith and mutual encouragement help to dispel the dark shadows of doubt. The gathered church becomes a sanctuary where our wavering hearts are fortified (Psalm 73:16–17), and together we grasp the boundless love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Our Father does not want any of his children left out of his warm home of assurance, including you.

Our Naming Father

When it comes to replacing doubt with assurance, it truly matters to whom we pray. In light of the towering doctrinal heights of Ephesians 1–2, Paul kneels “before the Father” — and not just any father, but the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15). A better translation of “every family” might be “the whole family in heaven and on earth,” emphasizing the unity of all believers under the fatherhood of God. The whole family is named by the Father.

Earlier, Paul described the Ephesians before their conversion as alienated, outsiders, and strangers without hope (Ephesians 2:12). But now the Father has named them. Isaiah 62:2–4 illustrates what it means for the Father to name us. Although God’s people were returning from exile, they still felt forsaken. Then Isaiah says,

You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. . . . You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

In a similar way, Paul tells us that God has “predestined us for adoption to himself as sons” (Ephesians 1:5) and that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). In other words, the Father and the Son have named us sons of God and the bride of Christ. The name we carry in this world, even amidst our relational trials, is this: “My delight is in you.”

This is one crucial reason we gather: to hear and be reminded through faith that the Father actually delights in us. Only the love of this Father can cast out our doubt when we are weak.

When the news that my mother was in her final hours drained the strength out of me, the Father provided the strength I needed to grasp more of the ungraspable love of Christ, especially as I gathered with all the saints in the weeks and months that followed. In the midst of my profound grief and weakness, the assurance of God’s love “strengthened [me] with power through his Spirit” (Ephesians 3:16) in the gathering of the saints, to the praise of the Father’s glorious grace (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14).

Audio Transcript

God is our refuge and our fortress. And in that great refuge psalm of Psalm 91, we are given this glorious promise: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1). Such a high promise prompted APJ listener Anna to write in. Anna lives in Atlanta. “Pastor John, hello, and thank you for your faithful labors,” she writes. “My question comes from Psalm 91:1. What does it mean to ‘dwell in the shelter of the Most High’ and to ‘abide in the shadow of the Almighty?’ Is there a New Testament equivalent to this for believers in Christ? And is the practice of daily Scripture reading part of it?” Pastor John, what would you say to Anna?

Yes, there is a New Testament equivalent, and yes, Scripture reading is certainly part of the way you keep dwelling in the shelter of the Most High. But to get at the actual meaning, let’s quote the psalm, Psalm 91, and then look at an event from the life of a martyred missionary, Jim Elliot, whose biography is titled, by his wife, Shadow of the Almighty.

Safe in His Shelter

The phrase comes from Psalm 91, which begins like this:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High     will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,     my God, in whom I trust.”

And then it continues in verse 7 with these amazing words:

A thousand [arrows] may fall at your side,     ten thousand at your right hand,     but it will not come near you.You will only look with your eyes     and see the recompense of the wicked.Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place . . .

So, it sounds like to dwell in the shadow of the Almighty and in the shelter of the Most High means that if someone throws a spear at you, it will not hit you.

For the Sake of Gain

So was Elizabeth Elliot naive, unbiblical, when she titled her husband’s biography Shadow of the Almighty, even though he and four others were speared to death by the Huaorani Indians on January 8, 1956, in Ecuador, while they were trying to evangelize them? She’s been asked that question. She’s with the Lord now, but she was asked that question, and I personally spoke to her many times. Most people considered her confidence in God’s sovereignty to be a little bit misplaced. Here was her answer at the end of the book. You can read it on the last pages of that biography:

The world did not recognize the truth of the second clause in Jim Elliot’s credo: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

“They trusted implicitly in the blood of the Lamb, that it had absolutely secured their future happiness forever.”

Now, what did he mean by that? What did she mean when she quoted it? Well, they both meant this: if God sees fit to let the arrow that flies by day or the spear of a Huaorani Indian to kill one of God’s children, God has done it for the sake of gain. Jim Elliot said “to gain what he cannot lose.” God has done it for gain, not loss. And I think she’s right. I think he was right. That’s a right interpretation of Psalm 91.

Here’s why I think that: Satan tried to use Psalm 91 in Matthew 4:6 to tempt Jesus to jump off the temple, because Psalm 91 promises that the angels are going to catch you. But Jesus won’t use Psalm 91 that way. Neither did Stephen when he was stoned to death. Neither did James when he was beheaded. Neither did Paul when he was beaten repeatedly with rods. Neither did Jesus as he bent down over the cross. None of them understood Psalm 91 to mean that God’s children will never suffer at the hands of their enemies.

Everything You Need

So what does it mean? I mean, Satan was trying to get them to think it meant that. What does it mean to abide in the shadow of the Almighty if you can be killed in the shadow of the Almighty? Well, let’s go to the New Testament counterpart of this text. So Anna asks, “Is there a New Testament counterpart?” There are several. For example,

Jude 21 says, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” I think that is virtually the same as “Keep yourselves in the shadow of the Almighty.”
Or Jesus says in John 15:9, “Abide in my love,” which I think is the same as “Abide in the shelter of the Most High.”

In other words, dwelling in the shadow of the Almighty and abiding in the shelter of the Most High means trusting implicitly in the love of God, the power of God, to give you everything you need to do his will and glorify his name, whether you live or die. Or to say it another way: dwelling in the shadow of the Most High and keeping yourself in the love of God means trusting the love of God and the wisdom of God and the power of God to protect you from everything that could destroy you utterly.

Never Defeated

Now, why do I say that? One of the clearest reasons for saying that is found in Romans 8:32–39, maybe the greatest paragraph in the Bible. Paul argues that God’s love for his elect, his adopted children, proven in the death of his Son Jesus, means that he will, with absolute certainty, “graciously give us all things.”

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

“If we are in the shadow of the Almighty, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.”

Answer: he will. But what does that mean — all things? And he goes on to explain, and he even uses the Psalms to explain it. He argues that if we are in the love of Christ, in the shadow of the Almighty, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Then he throws out a few possibilities of what might separate us, and it shows he’s really quite aware of Psalm 91. He says, “Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” (Romans 8:35) — or he might have added, “or a Huaorani Indian spear?”

And then he quotes Psalm 44:22: “As it is written, ‘For your sake [not sin’s sake; your sake] we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered’” (Romans 8:36). So even the Psalms knew God’s people die while doing good. Then he shouts the answer: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).

So Paul is saying Christians can keep themselves in the love of God and in the shadow of the Almighty and still be slaughtered like sheep, and yet be more than conquerors. So if the arrow that flies by day goes straight into your chest, and you drop dead in the cause of Christ, it does not defeat you. You are more than a conqueror.

Step into Everlasting Presence

How are you more than a conqueror? Because the very arrow that seemed to get the victory becomes your servant and accomplishes God’s sovereign purpose in the world. And God’s saving purpose for your life is everlasting presence. Here’s how the book of Revelation says it: “And they conquered [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11).

So they die in persecution, but they conquer Satan. How? This is the answer to Anna’s question. How do you dwell in the shelter of the Most High? They trusted implicitly in the blood of the Lamb, that it had absolutely secured for them their future happiness forever. And they opened their mouth and gave testimony. And the fear of death did not stop them. And in that moment, they were safe in the shadow of the Almighty, and they conquered the devil and they entered paradise. I think that’s the kind of triumphant safety that God is calling us to in Psalm 91.

Knowing God as Father
Knowing that God is our Father is one thing; understanding how we should relate to him as such is another. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Malachi 1:6–14 to demonstrate how knowing God as Father should lead us to honor him.