An absent-minded bishop was travelling by train to a distant part of his diocese. On the way he lost his ticket. He was well-known to the train guards, and when he became agitated about his loss they reassurd him. 'It's quite all right, sir. You needn't worry. We know you, and we're prepared to take you without your ticket.' To which the somewhat irate bishop replied, 'It may be all right for you, but what about me? I don't know where I'm going.'

Where is Australia going? What's going to happen to this crazy world?

Why is Australia's suicide rate one of the highest in the world? What's going to happen to this generation of 5 to 14 year olds, who will have witnessed 13,000 deaths by violence on TV? Where are our young people going? A major Italian women's magazine, Grazia, reports that teenagers wrote to their 'agony column' years ago with questions about etiquette ('What sort of dress will I wear to ...?') Today they want to know the whereabouts of a good abortionist.

Why are half of all US marriages destined to break up? For his book Intimacy - a Sex or Love Experience?, published in Australia, author, psychologist/sociologist Dr. Paul Wilson, interviewed 1300 couples, gathering data about their intimate lives. He found that many married people were very lonely, particularly in the 30s and 40s group. 'Society has devalued motherhood and women are frustrated. Men don't really know how to handle the complex needs of their wives. The Australian male doesn't know - his upbringing hasn't encouraged him - to show affection. He doesn't know how to cope with his feelings - or the feelings of his wife.' Dr. Wilson spent three years in his research - and in the meantime his own marriage broke down!

What are we going to do about the half of our world's peoples who are dying early because they don't eat enough? Or the other half who die early because they eat too much?

Or the incredible injustices in our world? El Salvador, in Central America, has 2% of its people owning 60% of the land!

Or inflation? An editorial in the July/September 1979 Institute of Public Affairs Review says: 'Inflation is not an economic crisis, it's a crisis of morality ... If there were a self-imposed standstill on incomes for a period of 12 months - and this would inflict no great hardship on most of us - we would have virtually succeeded in breaking the back of inflation.'

God's plan make a hopeful beginning, but man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end to God's glory, but a present the other side's winning!

From the 16th to 18th centuries, man took his cues from a divinely-illumined conscience. He was 'inner-directed', says Robert Harvey, in his book The Restless Heart. Then he became 'other-directed' - appealing to the consensus of the group. Today he's 'random-directed' - no longer, in our pluralistic society, having a 'common morality'.

How are the forces of secular humanism to be arrested? The psalmist answers quite simply: 'By becoming God-directed'! 'If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?' He asks in verse 3 (AV). His response: we must believe three things about God.

1. The Lord is trustworthy - so we can go on believing in Him! (1-3)

He's the same yesterday, today, and forever! So He's still there! The statement of faith in verse 1 is found also in oter Psalms (7, 16, 31, 57, 71). If you look around, things do seem hopeless. But widen your horizons - look up! Fear sees only the immediate perils. Faith takes in the larger distances. Let's remember - the events around us will pass; they are transitory. But there are immense realities that overshadow these events.

There was once a priceless printer's error in the program of a performance of Handel's Messiah. It listed the Hallelujah Chorus as follows, 'The Lord God Omnipotent resigneth!' God hasn't resigned. Having created the world, he controls and governs it, and is involved in its affairs. He directs history according to His wise and loving purpose. No matter what is happening in the world, God knows all about it and has the situation in hand.

This psalm was almost certainly written by David when he was oppressed in the court of King Saul. Some of his faint-hearted friends were advising him to make his getaway 'while the going was good'. 'The situation's hopeless; there's nothing you can do; you're fighting a lost cause!' Be an escapist, they told him. Go back to the mountains he knew and loved so well.

The temptation to opt out has always been with us. We all have our emotional mountains, says Leonard Griffith, to which we can flee and from which we can watch the world going to hell - mountains of neutrality, inactivity, resignation, self-righteousness and disgust.

Monasticism has taken many forms. The old Catholics retreated to monasteries to contemplate. Sectarians withdraw from the evil world and separate themselves from its people and institutions as well as from its sins. Jesus wasn't like this. Perhaps the greatest descriptive statement about Him says 'He made up His mind, and set out on His way to Jerusalem' (Lk 9:51). He believed in facing the issues, and His followers are called to do the same. One of the saddest verses in all literature is Matthew 27:24 - 'Pilate took some water, and washed his hands ... and said 'I am not responsible!' - a baptism into irresponsibility.

So the psalmist's message is that when the going's tough, don't opt out. Think about God. As the old saying has it, 'He who has God, and everything else, has no more than he who has God only. And he who has everything else and not God, has nothing!' There is only one God - nothing else is as big!

And He's working His purpose out, as year succeeds to year ... And the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

2. The Lord is holy - so we, too, must take a stand against lawlessness (4-6)

The King is in His residence, says the psalmist. He's not in flight. His 'city has foundations' (Heb 11:10). He's 'in His holy temple' - present among His people in the world. But He's also on His throne in heaven; He's sovereign. (cf Isa 6:1) And he's watching all things all the time. He's not like a genie, those strange supernatural creatures in the stories of the Arabian nights. A man would rub a magic bottle and a genie would come, a powerful magic creature that would do great things. Then he's go back into the bottle. God isn't around only when we ask Him or think of Him. The God of the Bible is always there, always watchful.

And He's not only watching us when we worship, but also when our employer isn't, and when we're filling in our tax return!

Together with His holiness and His watchfulness, the psalmist tells us God is judging sinners: He's the Judge of the living and the dead. His judgment is not an impersonal 'Wrath' which rebounds on those who violate the universe's physical or emotional laws, but the divine anger against the sin which destroys us. The psalmist isn't saying either that 'God hates the sin but loves the sinner': the Hebrew language is somewhat concrete on these issues. The sin and the sinner are an abomination to God. Of course, the Christian says, rightly, that judgment is 'God's love labouring to make us loveable' (CS Lewis) God's judgment isn't merely a theoretical thing, either. He bends history to judgment, and it becomes actualised in events like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the scorching simoom which blows in from the desert. What we sow, we'll surely reap!

An ungodly farmer wrote to a Christian: 'I stole the seed, I stole the fertiliser. I ploughed, sowed and reaped on Sundays when you were all in church - and I've had more bushels to the acre than any of the Christians around here in my October harvest.' The Christian wrote back, courteously: 'God does not always settle His accounts in October.'

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. 'The way to become wise is to honour the Lord'. (Ps 111:10)

A note in passing: when we stand against society's lawlessness, let us appear to be more like Jesus than the Pharisees! Christians are sometimes seen (and heard) only when they're 'against' something, or when the sins in question are 'sins of the flesh' rather than the other great issues of greed, discrimination, or injustice ...

3. The Lord is righteous - so we must keep on doing good (11:7)

The Lord loves goodness, so must we. He expects us to live right: ours is a 'belief that behaves'. (Note how often the NT talks about judgment of our 'works', our actions). We have two great commandments - to love God, and love others. To love God only may lead to an irrelevant piety. To love others only may result in a form of godless humanism. And to love God and others means that we'll work for change in God's world. All that's required for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing! Righteousness, says one of the Bible's proverbs (14:34) 'makes a nation great; sin is a disgrace to any nation'.

Of course, before you get into a kind of righteous activism, you must get righteous yourself. And this 'salvation' is not something you earn, but a gift from God you receive. Because our lives are sometimes godly (loving good), sometimes devilish (choosing evil), we need God's cleansing power to do His will, and be co-redeemers of a lost world with Him.

What good can I do? You must answer that by asking another question: what gifts/resources have I been given that will match another's needs? Right here this morning: who needs me? Is there a visitor who needs a warm welcome? A lonely person who needs a friendly greeting? A brother or sister with a spiritual or emotional burden who needs to share it with me, and have me pray with him or her? You don't need to be organised to 'move towards' the sick, the lonely, the deprived. Love always finds a way!

Psalm 11, then, is a song of confidence in God. It's the answer of faith to the cry of fear. Wickedness won't triumph in the long run. If your situation's in a mess, think about God - He can be trusted, He'll judge the living and the dead, and He'll do it righteously...