Grapevine Ministries
Messages from the bible to uplift and encourage those that need a word from the Lord, to strengthen their faith. Ps Phillip Barker is an itinerant pastor in Perth, Western Australia.
Grapevine Ministries
Part 1 Intro to Psalm 91 The Secret Place
What if safety isn’t the absence of danger but the presence of Someone stronger than your fear? We’re kicking off a multi-week journey through Psalm 91 by sitting with the opening line and its bold invitation to dwell in the secret place, not just drop by when life unravels. From there, we get practical about what abiding looks like on ordinary days and how that steady closeness reshapes our reactions when trouble lands on the doorstep.
We unpack the imagery of shadow and wings—language that speaks to nearness, warmth, and shelter—and make space for a tension many of us feel: bruises fade, but words linger. You’ll hear why inner refuge matters when criticism bites, why context keeps us from using verses like charms, and how the psalm’s ambiguity on authorship actually helps us apply it to modern anxieties, illness, ageing, and the long ache of uncertainty. Rather than offering a thin promise of pain-free living, we lean into a richer truth: presence in the storm, strength for today, and a posture that keeps us grounded when headlines and heartaches try to move us.
This conversation also tackles the shift from inherited belief to lived faith. We talk about moving beyond borrowed convictions, building a relationship with God that’s at least as real as your closest human bond, and choosing to run to God first when life shakes. Expect honest stories, thoughtful takeaways, and a clear path forward as we map out the weeks ahead—verse by verse, promise by promise. If you’re ready to anchor your mind and heart in a refuge that travels with you, press play, share this with a friend who needs hope, and don’t forget to follow, rate, and leave a review to help others find the show.
Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world - Welcome to Grapevine Ministries.
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Okay, here we go. Now we're going to start talking about Psalm 91, and um I'm hoping that I'm gonna get this into the right perspective, but I want to break this down over a period of weeks. So we first need to start off with what is Psalm 91? Well, it's a powerful hymn of trust, offering profound comfort by picturing God as our all-encompassing refuge and fortress against life's perils. It promises divine protection, security under his wings, and assurance of his presence for those who choose to abide in the secret place of the most high. Now, the main content, because we're only going to start right at the very start, Psalm 91 is a song of confidence, often read during times of fear, sickness, or uncertainty, and it contrasts the chaos of the world with the security found in God. Now, we're only talking about the secret place at the moment, which is in verse one. It says, to dwell in the secret place or shelter of the most high means to live in constant, close fellowship with God, not just visiting him in emergencies, right? So and it goes on a little bit further about abiding in his shadow. This imagery sort of it suggests close proximity again, like a chick under the mother's bird's wings is a place of total protection and comfort. So in saying that, how do you behave when trouble hits your life? Do you cope? Do you go to pieces or do you go to God? Now, I want us to all turn to Psalm 91, and I want us to look at the psalm in great depth today because I believe that the Lord has laid it upon my heart to share with you Psalm 91. Now, part of this might have might have started when I started listening to this new uh Christian artist, a guy by the name of Solomon Ray. Now, I'm not normally a jazz or um how'd you say blues type um music listener, but this guy sings about Psalm 91, and it's he does such a beautiful job with it. I just felt led to to read it and studied it in a little bit more depth, and rather than me uh reading out the whole psalm because it's not a short one, and I would like you to be on a journey with me as we go through Psalm 91. So over the next six or seven weeks, um, I'm sort of hoping to do it within six to seven weeks, maybe a little bit longer, depends on how I'm traveling. But you know, so as I teach this, hopefully you'll be led to highlight certain parts of this psalm and do your own research and study into it in depth. But like I said, um if you want to listen to Solomon Ray, and this it the song is called Psalm 91. Okay, so it's it's there. I'm not a promoter of other people's music or anything, but it's just sort of it touched my heart in such a way. Now we all know little rimy uh rhymes or what do they call them, limericks, I think it is. Um, you know, you think colloquial sayings that people use throughout the course of their life that they don't really take much notice of, or they don't really understand the real concept of what they're actually saying. They just say these sayings because other people saying, you know, and one that I'm thinking of right now is like sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Now, it's a simple statement that we all know, we know this quite well, yet behind it is a profound philosophy. You know that the sticks and stones may touch you, they may cut your flesh, they may do all sorts of things to inflict pain and bruising on your body. But you know that if people call you names, that there's a choice of whether to listen to them or whether to let them not affect you or to penetrate your heart and hurt you. In a way, that statement is an expression of how we can be in the midst of trouble yet not let the same trouble touch us or harm us. Its ability to sting in the midst of waves and the billows, it's well within my soul. Excuse me. I I give you a classic example, right? It says in the word of God, okay, that um words are very powerful, they're sharper than a two-edged sword. And I know from my own childhood, yeah, look, uh, if someone hits you or throws a rock at you or something like that, okay, it leaves a mark, it hurts for a while, you know, a day later or maybe a week later, you've forgotten all about it. But if that same person, rather than hitting you with a stick or throwing stones at you, said something deep and meaningful against a family member, or something in relation to maybe you might have a slight imperfection, like a speech impediment, or you've got a limp, or like me, I had bright red hair and freckles, you know. And when people say things, it it's it quite seriously can hurt you more than any sticks or stones. In saying that, I just want to move on because I got a lot of information to get through, and I want to make sure that I get all these messages across to you as best I can. Now, I heard a sermon some time ago, uh, it was by a guy named Um Leonard Griffiths, and he entitled um his message A Gospel for the Middle Ages, and this was just on verse 6 of Psalm 91. Now, I know we have a lot of middle-aged listeners, so I have to watch what I say, but the reality is we have a lot of older folks. Well, there we go, I've said it. I put my foot in my mouth already. Look, the reality of the fact is we have a lot of senior people within you know uh my podcast that listeners primarily brought about by a combination of things. Part of it is due to COVID, another one is especially during summer, we have uh a lot of senior people that uh don't want to go out in the extreme weather conditions. So now that we've said that we should move on, okay. With me now being in that same demographic, I I must admit, all right. And there are many pressures and trials and tribulations that enter into life at this stage. That's why we he titled it a gospel for the middle ages. Whereas realistically, it should have been put a little way for our middle ages, not actually the demographic of the age of a person, you know, like talking the 20th century, so to speak. When crisis enters into life, and we all find that, and we also find well, I found myself in my short time in partial ministry that many who are vocal in their faith, when the times of trouble enter in their they become shattered and disillusioned as to what is happening to them. As the hymn says, Will your anchor hold when the storms of life come in, when the clouds unfold their winds of strife? Sounds pretty doom and gloomy from my perspective, you know, but that's where the psalmist is going. I believe that in the word of God, one of the greatest ways that God has to reveal Himself apart from the Word of God to a world that is dying and in sin and lost is the testimony and the witnesses of believers when they enter into trouble in their life. And that's another reason I wrote my book, uh Walking on Sunshine, because people need to hear testimonies. Um it um it allows people to be motivated to stick with their faith, to to press into it. So with that in mind, when they come into suffering, how will they cope or do they cope? The question that I pose to us by the Spirit of God and by the psalmist here in 91 is how do you behave when trouble hits your life? Do you cope? Do you go to pieces or do you go to God? The question that we should ask today is is there a way of surviving life here in our century? Troubled life, perplexed, stressful, anxious, with all of the threats that are on our body and are on our soul, is there a way that God has given us that we might survive without a scratch? Now, the setting for the psalmist is interesting because we don't really know what it is. One thing we do know is that the psalmist is describing the ongoing sovereign protection of God's people, that God is ever protecting them in all dangers and terrors which surround them day after day after day. Now, literally, the psalmist will be fulfilled in the Massianic kingdom, and we see that in Psalm 96 through a hundred, it depicts prophetically what will happen upon the earth here when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the original setting of the psalm is unknown. Some pe people think that David wrote the psalm, and it is to a certain degree, it has a connection with 2 Samuel 24. And remember, when David took a census of the people, and God had not led him to do such a thing, because he did that, God sent famine to the land. Some believe that the psalmist is David talking about how God will relieve the famine. I don't believe that because there's not a note of repentance within the psalm, and you would imagine that if David was being cursed by God with famine for his sin, that there would be an air of repentance or repentance within these verses, but there is not. The song is how as we go through the trouble, God is with us and God will bring us through it. Now, so there's no repentance in there, and if you have a look at a lot of the the psalms done by David, they always end up with some form of repentance in there. A lot more of the uh biblical scholars uh have a tendency to believe that um perhaps this psalm was written by Moses because Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses, and we're already heard this morning is that the psalm before it, so some believe that Moses is talking about Joshua and Caleb as they went into the promised land. Those who, the word of God says, followed the Lord fully, and as a reward for their faith and their abiding and dwelling in the secret place of the most high, God let them live amongst the dead, amidst their graves. Well, I don't know what the context of the psalm is, but I know this that perhaps the very fact that it was undefined and we're not sure what the historic content is, is perhaps a way that the Holy Spirit is able to apply it to your life and mine. We've got to make sure that we put things in the right context, and this is why I say you always read before that scripture and after that scripture. So many people take words out of context. In other words, because it's underlined or undefined, we can apply these dangers to the dangers that we face, these trials to the trials that we have, and that we can therefore in turn choose to abide in God and trust in God, as these saints did, no matter what befalled us, God is saying, I will protect you, I will be with you. Whereas that God was the last place that I went. Now, I know it sounds odd saying that, um, but you've got to understand all of us are on a journey, and the thing is that we don't all start in the same place. Now, I know people that are born and bred into a Christian family, and then they go to Bible college and they do all their studies, and then they enter into ministry, and they've always had God in their life, but have they always had God as their close personal friend? And the reason I say that is not because I'm I'm I'm not uh judging anybody in any way, shape, or form, but I got taught when I was going through Bible college that just because someone is living in a Christian family, it does not mean that that person has actually really made Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Uh, you can't live your life on the back of someone else's faith. And the reason I say that is because when I first got married, um my wife was Catholic, okay? And uh she was, you know, like from her perspective, she was quite strict about her Catholic background uh because of her European upbringing. And the thing was, is that um when I met her, she was saying things like, if we get married, the kids go to Catholic school and we go to church and all this sort of stuff, and I'm saying, okay, that's fine, that's well and good. But I found very, very quickly that I couldn't live on her faith. So I had to seek my own relationship with God, and the first thing I found was the Catholic Church was the wrong place for me. Now, I'm not uh speaking ill of any Catholics, everybody meets God at their own place and on their own journey, and they choose where they go from there. And I've met I've met a lot of um Catholics, um you know, Greek Orthodox, Protestants, Presbyterians, uh, Baptists. Um, the list goes on and on. And they have found that they've come to a journey in their life where they've realized that they need to have something more, and they that the only way to go is to become a word of faith Christian. So you ask Jesus to come to live inside of you and dwell with you, and then you make your decisions on on your journey. And we're all at different places. I mean, I've known people that have been in church like twenty, thirty years, but they're still a young Christian. And I've known other people that have only been in a church environment, depending on their background that they've come from, that they've only been a Christian like one or two years, and they are a very mature Christian because they understand the principles and the relationship that they have to have with God. Not wanting to confuse anybody by this, but what I'm saying is that everything that I was learning and um before I got ill and ended up in the wheelchair, um, was a lot of people telling us that, hey, we need to change our outlook on God and all this sort of stuff. And I found myself searching for something, knowing that the Catholic faith that I had wasn't enough for me, and and I believe that was the Holy Spirit leading me. And so eventually we ended up in a word of faith church, and once the crisis hit, everything fell into a deep hole, and we were in a place of doom and gloom, and um really, really going through some troubling times, and we thought, what's gone wrong? We're actually you know good, solid Christians now, and we're going to church and we're doing the right thing, and then just everything fell in a heap. Now, I can't tell you why, but all I can tell you is that the one thing I found out of this, because my wife was always buying me books to read about this person and that person and everything else, uh, and eventually I realized that uh my relationship with God was in the wrong place. Now, I don't want to tell you the whole story, otherwise, no one will buy my book. So at the moment, my book Walking on Sunshine by Philip Barker is available in uh Kurong Books, uh Google Books, uh Victory Life Church, and you can buy it um hard copy, soft copy, or an e-book. Um just throwing that out there. But the thing is, I found that the thing that was wrong with um my walk with Christ was my relationship with God, okay. I had to make him, or I didn't have to, but I mean, uh put it this way, it says, I knew that my relationship with him was not as good as my relationship with my wife, and I realized that I had to have this close personal relationship with God, and I believe that we all need to have that. We need to have our own personal relationship with our Heavenly Father in such a way that we could literally go to him and without any fanfare or fancy prayers or anything like that, we can actually sit there and say, Okay, Lord, um this is um this is what's happening. Um I need to change my relationship with you. It can't be a one-way street, it's not all give, give, give, and give nothing back. It's like any relationship. You've got to have give and take in both sides of your relationship. Psalm 91 is all about letting us know that we can abide under his wings, we can actually rest ourselves in Christ ourselves. Even though it's in the Old Testament, I mean it's not talking about Jesus per se, but we know that we have the the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and Jesus would just say, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. So we know this is the Biden under the protection of God, and it also talks through many other scriptures, and I'll relate to some of them as we get further into this teaching. But the thing is, um, we have to remember that when we're when we're looking at our relationships with God, we have to make sure that we know that we can be in that safe place. In other words, it doesn't mean that you will not go through troubles, for man is born into this world, as Job says, as the sparks fly upwards, man is born unto trouble. But the point of the psalm is there is that there's when we're going through troubles, God is with us. If we abide in him, he abides in us. The proposition of the of the psalm is that his is that he abide if we abide in God, verse one dwell in God, dwell in the secret place, abide under his shadow, trust in God, live in God, make God your habitation, and nothing will harm you. He is the safest place to be in. So I want to talk about a safe place, and we'll talk about that next week as we go deeper into Psalm 91. And I'm bound to miss some parts of this. Uh, without a doubt, uh, there will be bits that I'll miss for time's sake purposes, but that's why I'm changing all my social media and everything to a revolve around Grapevine Ministries. So there is going to be several ways that you can contact me via social ministry, um, Facebook, Instagram, also um through the book. Um, you can also go online and find me through my podcast and everything. I want to make sure that everybody is in a situation where they can get the answers that they need. Now it doesn't matter whether you are in Germany, in in the US, whether you're in New Zealand, Australia, or whatever. The thing is, there's nothing to stop you being able to communicate with me and for me to be able to answer your questions or to help support you with what you're going through at this particular point of time in your life. I believe 2026 is a year of growth. Okay, and that is for you to grow spiritually and for you to be able to grow holistically in your life. And I believe that good things lie ahead for those that want to press into God. All right, we'll talk to you next week. God bless for now.
