Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas
Pastor Chuck Trusty — Wednesday evening service, July 22, 2026 Psalm 107 · The Godliness Series (A7) · Between the Fools and the Storm-Tossed
► Watch this lesson on video (50:46)
The One Point
Foolishness creates instability — and instability is what opens the door to the storm.
Where This Sits in the Psalm
Psalm 107 has walked us through four groups of God’s own people who DRIFTED, and every one of them got there a little at a time . . . the wanderers stopped adding anything to their saving faith . . . and the prisoners simply ignored the watchman, and the watchman is the pastor God set inside the church, so they pushed His warnings aside and let the preaching go in one ear and out the other until the darkness closed in around them. Then the drifting heart, which is the quietest of them all — it does not argue with the correction, it just resists it. Preacher, I KNOW this is wrong, but . . . and that man is not in chains yet, but he is walking toward them with his eyes wide open.
Then come the fools. “Fools because of their transgression, and because of their iniquities, are afflicted” (Psalm 107:17). Transgression (doing the thing we were not supposed to do) is one act — but iniquity is what happens when we stack those transgressions one on top of another until they harden into a HABIT . . . and when a man habitually transgresses, the consequences are already on the horizon whether he sees them or not.
Sunday evening we take up the last group, the storm-tossed, who “reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end” (Psalm 107:27). But NOBODY goes from being a fool straight into a raging storm in one step . . . there is always a season in between — quiet, unassuming, and for that very reason overlooked by nearly everybody who is living in it — and that season is what I want us to look at tonight.
The House That Was Condemned
A few years back a family not far from here had their house condemned. No tornado ever hit it . . . it never flooded . . . the inspector came out over some smaller thing altogether and found that the foundation had been shifting and cracking for YEARS, and nobody had noticed a bit of it — because from the street everything looked absolutely normal, the paint was fresh, the lawn was mowed, the windows were clean.
But underneath, the part that was actually holding that house up had been quietly giving way — board by board and crack by crack — until one day the doors would not open right, and the floors began to bounce in the middle, and a crack ran up the living room wall clear to the ceiling . . . and by the time the problem was VISIBLE it had been growing invisibly for a long, long time.
Now NOTICE what got that house condemned. It was not one bad storm . . . that house had been made vulnerable to the first good wind that came along, because the structure that should have held it together had been compromised — and nobody was aware of it.
That is a description of the unsteady soul, seen from the outside — still showing up, still sitting in the pew, still saying all the right things . . . but underneath, the foundation has been WEAKENING — not gone, mind you, just weakening, quietly and slowly and almost invisibly — and that soul is now vulnerable to a storm it would have ridden out without any trouble at all a short time ago.
What James Calls It
James gives us the picture of what this looks like in a man’s spiritual life. He is describing somebody who keeps asking God for wisdom and never actually takes possession of what he asked for . . . and then he says it in seven words — “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8).
Not unstable in SOME of his ways . . . in ALL of them. When a soul loses its spiritual footing the instability spreads — and it spreads EVERYWHERE . . . if I lose my balance I do not lose it only in this corner of the room and keep it over in that one, and if I am having trouble standing upright, I have that trouble over the whole room.
So foolishness and carelessness and living by impulse are not only a moral problem, though they are certainly that — they are a STRUCTURAL problem, and they weaken the framework that holds a believer’s life together.
The Quiet Signs
Not one of these is dramatic — that is exactly the danger in them. They edge their way in.
Convictions weaken. Things that once felt absolutely SETTLED — preacher, there is no way under the sun I would ever do that — begin to feel negotiable . . . and not because we stopped believing in right and wrong . . . but because carelessness dulls the edge of a conviction the same way it dulls the edge of a knife — that knife used to slice right through, and you dull the edge and it will not slice through ANYTHING anymore.
Priorities shift. The things that used to come FIRST get pushed back to second . . . then to third . . . and now they barely make the list at all.
Habits decay. Prayer, the Word, faithful attendance, owning it when we are wrong — not one of these collapses all at once . . . they SLIP, a little at a time.
Discernment goes. That is nothing but a fancy word for understanding that consequences are REAL, and what happens is that we begin to unplug our behavior from what our behavior costs . . . and that old spiritual instinct that used to say I cannot put my finger on what is wrong with that, but something about it is not right — we simply quit listening to it.
And the footing loosens. When I was younger I used to watch older folks who seemed always frightened of falling, and I could not understand it for the life of me — two or three little steps should be no big deal - just hop down and go on about your business. But you do not get to be EIGHTY overnight . . . and you do not lose that kind of steadiness overnight either. It is a little dab here and a little dab there.
The Gyroscope
I have never really understood how a gyroscope works. But you know what one is — a wheel spinning inside a little frame — and when it is spinning fast you can push on it, you can rotate it, you can do all manner of things to it, and it resists every bit of that and stays upright.
What happens when it slows down? It begins to WOBBLE . . . and eventually it falls over.
The spiritual disciplines are the SPIN. Prayer, the Word, worship, fellowship, obedience — these are what hold a soul upright when the world leans on it and tempts it to compromise . . . and if you take those five out of a life it is only a matter of time before the world pushes and we start to WOBBLE.
The fool is the man who let the spin slow down out of pure carelessness. The unsteady soul is the believer whose gyroscope has already slowed . . . and who does not yet realize how exposed all those small compromises have left him.
What Foolishness Does to the House We Build
“Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands” (Proverbs 14:1). Now NOTICE that — she plucks it down with her OWN hands. She does not need any help from anybody, and it is not the work of some outside force. She does it herself.
The foolish man is his own demolition crew — and here is the thing about him, he is usually not swinging a sledgehammer at all . . . the damage works like a TERMITE.
Termites do not knock a house down in one visit — they move in quietly, they settle into the wood, and they eat a little here and a little there, every single day . . . you cannot hear them, you cannot see them from the outside, the paint is good and the gutters are clean and the lawn is fine . . . but inside the walls the wood that is supposed to hold everything together is being hollowed out, slowly and steadily and almost entirely invisibly. Then one day something shifts that is not supposed to shift — a door frame goes crooked, a floor sags, somebody leans on a wall and it gives more than it ought to — and the inspector finds that what looked like a solid house is being held together by almost nothing.
Foolishness is that termite. It does not destroy a believer’s life in one dramatic moment — it moves in through the neglected prayer and the skipped worship and the compromised conviction and the rationalized exception . . . and it hollows out the structure a little at a time . . . until the soul that looks perfectly fine on the outside is barely holding together on the inside.
Why the Storm Finds Them
Look again at how the psalm describes the storm-tossed. “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end” (Psalm 107:27).
What does that sound like to you? It sounds like somebody who was ALREADY unsteady before the storm ever hit him . . . a man who is rooted and grounded and spiritually balanced does not reel like a drunken man at the first wave — the storm SHAKES him, and the storm is difficult, no question about it — but he does not immediately lose all control of himself.
Two trees stand in the same field — same wind, same rain. One of them has deep roots, and it leans way over and the branches go everywhere, but the root system HOLDS, and when the storm passes that tree is still standing . . . the other one is just as tall and looks every bit as impressive, but its roots never had to go deep.
And there is the KEY to the whole thing. It is human nature not to do one bit more than we have to do — if there is surface water available, the roots stay right up there on the surface, and we will not force them downward until the water on top dries up . . . I used to be proud of the calluses on my hands, but I had a good many blisters before those calluses ever showed up.
The same storm hits the shallow tree and over it goes — and not because the storm was any worse for one tree than for the other, but because the foundation was not THERE . . . the storm is not what determines the outcome. The ROOTS are.
And when a soul is already unsteady, EVERYTHING about that storm gets worse. Temptations grow stronger, because there is less left to hold on to . . . emotions grow louder, because there is no anchor down there . . . decisions grow riskier, because the edge of the knife is dull and we have unplugged our behavior from the consequence . . . relationships grow strained, because a reeling man cannot hold steady connections with anybody . . . and the consequences grow heavier, because every step now falls on a shifting foundation.
The Storm Is Mercy
Somebody may be sitting here tonight looking at his own life and thinking, if God loved me He would not let a storm come. If God really loved me, why did He let me get cancer? That is MY own storm and yours is a different one — but the question comes out the same way . . . if God loves me, why did this happen?
I am not speaking down to a soul in this house. I have been in this exact place myself.
The storm is not the evidence that God has abandoned the unsteady soul. The storm is the evidence that God has NOT given up on the unsteady soul.
Think about a doctor. A patient comes in for a routine exam, and the doctor runs the tests and looks at the results and finds a serious condition — one that has been developing quietly for a good while with very few symptoms on the outside . . . like the termites.
That doctor has two choices in front of him. He can say nothing and send the patient home and let him go on living the way he has been living — feeling fine on the outside while the thing goes right on developing on the inside — and that is the COMFORTABLE choice for both of them . . . or he can sit that man down and tell him the truth — I need to show you something. This is serious. We have to deal with it now, because if we wait, some bad things are going to happen.
The second conversation is hard, and it is uncomfortable, and in the moment it can even feel CRUEL . . . doctor, I feel fine . . . preacher, I am doing fine . . . but inside you are NOT fine. Now which one of those doctors loved that patient more?
The storm is God telling the TRUTH. It is God sitting the unsteady soul down and saying, look at this . . . it is serious . . . something has been weakening in here, and I love you too much to let it go one step further. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Hebrews 12:6).
The storm strips away the illusions and silences the excuses and removes the distractions . . . and it brings the soul to the one place God has been trying to get it to - all along — honest, humble DEPENDENCE on Him. We are NOTHING if we are not dependent on God. And one of the things a storm does is show us that we have tried everything under the sun and we are still on that boat, still going up and down, still going back and forth . . . you cannot fix your own problems. Have you not learned that yet? All right — now that you are depending on Me, we can do something.
Without humility we never get to the point of depending on God at all.
The Mercy of Being Warned Early
Storms are merciful, but they are not PAINLESS. And here is the mercy in tonight’s lesson, and the reason I wanted us to stop on the unsteady soul before we ever move on to the storm-tossed.
If you are in this room this evening and your soul feels unsteady — if some of what I have described sounds uncomfortably familiar — then you are NOT in the storm yet. You are still in the season before it. You can see the clouds out there on the horizon and the wind is barely beginning to gust and the water is still fairly calm . . . but you know what is coming.
That means you still have a CHOICE. The drifting heart can stop drifting . . . the fool can quit being careless . . . the unsteady soul can get its balance back before the storm ever hits.
Is the tornado warning that wakes you at two in the morning a bad thing? It is a GIFT . . . you either ignore it and suffer the consequences, or you pay attention and go do what you already know good and well you ought to do. And He does not set that alarm off one time and quit — He sets it off over and over and over before He ever allows the storm to rise. He whispers through conviction . . . He speaks through His Word, which we far too often ignore . . . He calls through the fellowship of other believers . . . He warns through the conscience . . . He PLEADS through the watchman.
How many times have the sirens gone off before we finally paid attention?
The Way Back
Five returns, and they match the five disciplines.
Return to prayer — not every once in a while when it occurs to us, but DAILY, honest conversation with God . . . that is not asking too much of any of us.
Return to Scripture. Forget the television — open the Book and let the Holy Spirit speak to you exactly where you are . . . because God KNOWS where you are, and He knows how to speak to you right there.
Return to fellowship. The people of God are part of how God STEADIES us — so do not pull away from them.
Return to obedience — not when it happens to be convenient, but because He is Lord and Master and we owe Him that.
Return to wisdom. Quit living by impulse — start living in ORDER. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not (without finding fault with us for asking); and it shall be given him” (James 1:5).
And do not try to fix all five at once — pick the ONE you are weakest in and start right there.
One Question
Sunday night I asked four questions. Tonight I only want to ask ONE, and I do not want it answered out loud — just between you and God — and I do not want it to slide right past unnoticed.
Is your soul steady right now?
Not your circumstances — your SOUL. Are you grounded and rooted . . . or have you been wobbling? And has that wobble been going on for a good while now?
If the honest answer is yes . . . you already know the path back.
The unsteady soul is not a HOPELESS soul — it is a soul God is still pursuing, still calling, still working to restore . . . so the question is not whether God is ready to steady you. The question is whether you are ready to let Him.
“He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven” (Psalm 107:29–30).
And NOTICE the last of it, which we will pick up in the next lesson. He does not merely make the storm go away . . . He does not only still the wind and calm the water and then leave us floating in a raft somewhere out in a quiet place — He bringeth them unto their DESIRED HAVEN, the place they were going to in the first place.
Think about that.
Scripture Used
Psalm 107:17 · Psalm 107:27 · Psalm 107:29–30 · Proverbs 14:1 · James 1:5 · James 1:8 · Hebrews 12:6 (all KJV)
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