I invite you to turn with me to Psalm 121. I don't know if you ever go looking through scripture for a passage that will encourage you. looking for those great promises of the Lord that will lift you up when you're down, when you feel you're weak, you need the strength of the Lord, and you go searching the scriptures, and you try to find something that's going to encourage your heart. I've got just the psalm for you, Psalm 121. I've preached this psalm before, not here. The last time I preached it, a mom came up to me after I had gone through this, and she said that this was the psalm that she would recite to her kids when they had night terrors. And they'd wake up in the middle of the night frightened, about their dreams, she would read them or recite this psalm to them. And by way of providence, just last night in the middle of the night, one of my children woke up. I was up working on the sermon and heard the little feet upstairs and go upstairs and ask, what's wrong? I'm scared. I pick him up and bring him back to his bed and I say, you can go to sleep because God's not sleeping. He's gonna take care of you right now. That's the psalm. It's a precious truth for all of God's children. Whether you have night terrors as a four-year-old or as a 94-year-old, this psalm has comfort for you. In part why I want to do this psalm is because we've spent the last, I don't know, 11 weeks in Hosea. It's been hard. If you've stuck with it, it's been hard. The message is severe, and we need to hear that. We need to hear the whole counsel of God, but I don't want us to miss the reality that God, for his people, is a tender, caring God. And I want you to see that. And so if you have your Bibles open to Psalm 121, look along as I read this wonderful passage. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper. The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Let's pray. I ask the Lord to apply this word to our heart. Father, you've given us tender words here in Psalm 121, and we pray that we would hear it with ears of faith, with a childlike belief. Lord, we all, each and every one of us needs a psalm like this, and so I pray that we would rejoice that you have given it to us and believe what you have written in your word. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. The main point of this psalm is not hard to understand. It's really right there on the surface. You know, some texts of scripture, you gotta pour over it, you try to dig down into the nuts and bolts of it to figure out what is this talking about? Not Psalm 121. It is as clear as day what it is trying to communicate to you. Ten times, the word you is used. The second person singular. That means that this is a personal psalm. It is written to God's people, certainly corporately, but it's individualized. It is for his individual children. It is for you to hear. 10 times that word is used. Six times the word keep is used if you have the ESV, or protect, or guard, or watch. depending on your translation, means it's about protection, it's about keeping, it's about guarding. Five times the word Lord is used, capital L-O-R-D, the proper name of God, Yahweh. is used, and he is always the one doing the keeping or the protecting. And so if you put that together, the very center of this psalm is the beginning of verse five, the Lord is your keeper. It's the center of the psalm theologically, it's the center of the psalm structurally, it is the very center of all of the language here. The Lord is your keeper. That's what God wants you to know. Now we get to spend a few moments contemplating that in our hearts, but that's basically what you need to walk away with today. The Lord is your keeper, and if you chew on that as a dog chews on a bone, you will not go away unnourished. You will be blessed to think about what that means for you that the Lord is your keeper. Having just walked through the book of Hosea, let me give you a little bit of theological context here. In Hosea, we saw a lot of judgment. The Lord was speaking primarily to an unbelieving people, to people who had heard his promises and rejected them, and so God was going to bring judgment on that people. But, lest we think that everyone in the Old Testament was an unbeliever, that's certainly not the case. The Old Testament is rich with examples of faith. We have Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Samuel, David, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, Hezekiah, Josiah, Daniel, Esther, Mordecai, people who are faithful to the Lord, who had absorbed the promises of God and trusted in him. There's a vibrant faith in the Old Testament. And one of the places that we see the vibrancy of faith is in the book of the Psalms. It is a book written by worshipers of God. It's the songbook of Israel. It is where you find the praises lifted to God by a people who loved Him and trusted Him. It's also a place to look for the deep faith of the people of God. It's a book that rises and falls like the terrain around us. You have hills and valleys. You have the praises of a heart that's just exalting in the greatness of God, and you've got the depths of despair of a person who feels like they've almost been abandoned by God. You have every range from sorrow to thanksgiving. praise to shock, you have this whole scope of emotions in the Psalms. And so we have a book that is the book of the faithful, the book of worshipers, the book of those who trust in the Lord, the book of those who are saved. And so it's so easy in a sense to take their words on our lips. We read this and we can almost immediately apply its truths to our own life, to our own circumstances, because it reflects the heart of a believer. Their struggles are ours, and so their praises can become ours as well. We have, in one sense, more in common with the Old Testament authors of the Psalms than you do with your unbelieving neighbor. You have more in common with those who are 3,400 years old than you do with the person living next to you if they don't know Christ. We find that the people in the Old Testament who knew God knew their need for God. In times of trouble and prosperity, they cast themselves on the Lord. Their interactions with God are as many and as diverse as our experiences are as well. So while we don't know the particular setting of the Psalm 121, who wrote it, when they wrote it exactly, what circumstances they're in when they wrote it, in one sense it doesn't matter. Because this is a psalm of somebody who is looking to God for help. And so if you are looking to God for help, if you've ever looked to God for help, this psalm is to be applied to your circumstance, to your setting. And so we apply it to our hearts. Something to notice about this psalm that I hope will encourage you. There's no command in this psalm. As you read through it, there's no imperatives. There's no call to repentance. As we've seen so often in Hosea, no call to turn, no call to beg God for forgiveness. It's just a description of who God is and what he does. And there are times where you need that. There are times where you need to kinda stop and remember who God is and what he's like. This is a psalm of rest is what I wanna commend to you. I'm not really calling you to do anything. The psalm's not calling you to do anything. It's calling you to sit and look at God. and what He offers to you. I may by mistake throw in some imperatives in there just by default, but I want you to rest. I want you to enjoy what's here, what's true about God. So as we break this down, let me give you three aspects of God's protection for you so that you'll look to Him for help. Three aspects of God's protection. The first aspect is that the Lord is your powerful protector. The Lord is your powerful protector. Verses one and two declares, I lift my eyes up to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. That's pretty much the only scenario we know about the psalmist. He's looking up to the hills. And as he looks up, he asks this question, from where does my help come? Mountains would be a place of power, a place of idolatry, and a place of danger. Mountains have multiple implications in the Old Testament. And even today, if you look at a mountain, you just stop and think, that thing looks powerful. Even though it's not doing anything, it's just sitting there. It's just a... Testimony to the power of God in creation. And so you look at mountains and you just have this almost heart sense of the power involved, this thing that just dwarfs you, that dominates the skyline, that you can't escape from, that you can't really do anything to. It's always gonna be there. You could put your shovel to it for a thousand years and you're not even gonna make a dent in it. This mountain's there as a feature of strength in our world. The mountains in the Old Testament were also a place of idolatry. It would be the place where people would erect pagan shrines or altars. It would be the high places where they would go up and they would worship their god closer to the heavens. And so as the psalmist looks up, he might see power, or he might see a place where false gods are worshiped, a place that he could go and call out to another god, or he could offer a sacrifice, and he lifts his eyes up to the hills. literally mountains, or it could be a place of danger. It could be a place of danger because mountain paths could be treacherous. There were no guardrails. You could be trying to go from one place to another and you have to cross mountains and you cross through a rocky terrain, your foot could slip and you could tumble down, you could get injured or die. Mountains could also be dangerous because they were unpoliced and so there could be robbers there waiting to fall on you. So mountains could be a place of power, a place of idolatry, a place of danger. Regardless of what he's looking at and what he's thinking about, the question comes up to his mind, from where does my help come? You look around at our world, you see places of power, you see places of idolatry, you see places of danger. Where does my help come from? He gives us the answer. My help comes from the Lord. who made heaven and earth. Whether his eyes look to power, to idolatry or danger, there's one place where his help ultimately comes from. It comes from the Lord. To ask for help is basically in a way to ask for assistance. We know what it means. It's not a technical word. It doesn't require much elaboration. You ask for help because you need some help. You need a hand. You're in a position of powerlessness and you need somebody to come and give you some help. That's what he's asking for. Psalm 146, five. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God. Or Deuteronomy 33, seven. "'Hear, O Lord, the voice of Judah "'and bring him into his people. "'With your hands contend for him "'and be a help against his adversaries.'" He recognizes his need for help and his help comes from the Lord. Who's your help? The answer of the psalmist is it's Yahweh. If you're unaware, when you see capital L-O-R-D in your Bible, it means Yahweh. That's the name that the Lord gave to Moses when he asked, who should I say has sent me? And the Lord says, I am has sent you. Yahweh basically means I am, it's God's self-existence, His lack of reliance on anybody or anything else. And because He is not reliant on anybody or anything else, He is not dependent on anybody or anything else to fulfill His word. And so his self-existent nature, I am, means that he can do whatever he is going to do. And so if he speaks a word, he is going to accomplish it. And so Yahweh became associated with the covenant-keeping name of God. If you hear the name Yahweh, you should think God is a God who exists on his own and keeps all of his promises. And so as the psalmist says, my help comes from the Lord, he is acknowledging that the one who is self-existent and not dependent on anybody else and who keeps his promises is the help that he needs. My help comes from the Lord. And he goes on to give further description of who this Yahweh is. Who is the one who gives help? Who is this Yahweh? Who's your help? Who's gonna help you? Oh, just the one who made everything. The maker of heaven and earth. That's who the Lord is. It's so almost understated, you can't help but be amused by it. Who's the one who's gonna help you? The maker of everything you see. That's who's gonna help you. The one, therefore, who has all power at his disposal. The one who spoke light into existence, who said, let there be light, and there was light. The one who said, let the earth come forth, and it came forth. Let it produce animals, and it produced animals. The one who made heaven and earth and all that it contains. That's who your help is. My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. This is a statement of both fact and faith. It's a statement of fact because that's who he is. It's a statement of faith because he's saying it's my help. That's my help. You might be able to tacitly acknowledge that God made heaven and earth, but are you able to move from fact to faith? Fact says God made the heaven and earth. Faith says that God who made heaven and earth is my helper. You need to move from fact to faith. When you ask the question, whatever circumstances you're in, where does my help come from? Psalm 121, my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. It's not just the Lord is help, it is the Lord is my help. This is just a jewel resting on the ground in your path for you to pick up and enjoy. It's right there on the surface for you. No big exegetical digging here. God made everything. He's offering his help to you. Do you accept it? It's almost as if this is a little bit of a catechism for us in our daily life, for you to take on your own lips and in your heart to ask the question, who is my help? The Lord, who is the Lord? The maker of heaven and earth. This isn't to become some sort of mantra in moments of distress, it is to be a refreshment in your moments of need. So God is your powerful protector. The one who has all power is right there for you. That's the first element we want to see. Second, I want you to look to God as your persistent protector. God's your powerful protector. He's your persistent protector. There's a shift in the text between verse two and verse three. Verses one and two is very personal, I and my are used. And then verse three through the rest of the chapter turns to that you and your. And it's almost as if the psalmist has taken in his heart the belief that God is his help and now he has somebody else coming alongside him and applying to his heart all these wonderful truths about who God is. Speaking to the psalmist, he will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. It changes it a little bit. You've taken on that faith, the Lord is my helper, and now somebody is speaking to you to remember more about this God who is your help. So we receive these wonderful truths The Lord is a persistent helper and protector because he is an unsleeping shepherd. The Lord is an unsleeping shepherd is the gist of verses three and four. It says he will not let your foot be moved. What does not letting your foot be moved mean? Well, I think it's a clear metaphor. It's as if you're walking along a path, even a mountainous path, a rocky terrain, and at any moment your foot could slip and you go tumbling down that hill. The great danger and peril. And the point is that God is right there. God is your guardrail. Not only your guardrail, but he is going to place your foot in just the right place so that you are not going to stumble or slip. It means protection from your foot slipping off the path. In non-metaphorical terms, what does that mean? How do we think about how God keeps our foot from not stumbling? How does he actually keep our foot on the path? Maybe it'd be worth for you to turn to 1 Peter, chapter one, verses three through five. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, in verse five, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. The main guardianship that the Lord does in your life, and I'm not opposed to thinking that God guards you in the minutia of your daily living, but the main way, the main way that God is protecting you in this life is He is guarding you to inherit the salvation that He has promised to you through Jesus Christ. He is guarding you by His power through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. This is one of the key answers to the question, if I am being guarded by God, then why all this heartache, why all this pain, why all the difficulties in this life? God said he wasn't gonna let my foot stumble, and yet it feels like I stumble every day. Well, God is guarding you for the salvation that is going to be revealed in the day of Christ Jesus. When you inherit all of the promises, he's guarding you through faith. His power guarding you through faith. You trust in Him, He protects you. So back to Psalm 121, he says, you will not let your foot be moved. And you think, well, how often or how frequently is that going to be taken care of? On what basis do you have this guarantee that God will not let your foot be moved? If somebody in this room made that offer to you or made that promise, I'm not gonna let your foot be moved, one of your responses would legitimately be, yeah, but you need to sleep. That's why when there are any kind of watches or guards that are put on duty, they watch for a certain length of time because humans need to sleep. If you go, according to some studies, three to four days without sleeping, that's when you begin hallucinating. We are made to sleep. It's a reflection of our constant dependence on God because when you sleep, you are so vulnerable. Sometimes we walk in, not sometimes, every night we go into our kid's room after they've gone to sleep just to check on them, tuck them in, and they wouldn't know if an atomic bomb went off. They're so dead asleep. It's a position of vulnerability. It's just a human characteristic that we sleep. And so even the best guardian needs to go to bed and get some rest and get ready for duty again. God is not a man that he needs to sleep. On what basis is he gonna watch that your foot doesn't stumble between now and the day of Christ Jesus? On the basis that he has unblinking eyes and unsleeping needs. He doesn't need to sleep. He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. You remember what Elijah did when he was combating with the prophets of Baal, and they were calling out to him, to Baal, to rain fire down on their sacrifice? And Elijah starts to mock them, In 1 Kings 18.27, he says, cry aloud for he is a God. Either he is musing or he is relieving himself or he is on a journey or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened. Not our God. He doesn't take a nap. He doesn't doze off. He is always keeping his unblinking eye on you. He's out, he's watching out for you at all times. So just like I put my son to bed last night and told him, you can go to sleep because God's not going to sleep. That can be a comforting lullaby for you. You can go to sleep, God's not going to. He's gonna keep his eye on you, watch out for you. He's your keeper. To be a keeper is to be a watchful guardian who watches for attacks against a city. It has the responsibility of the well-being of others. That is our God and he never slumbers. He never leaves his post. He is always on duty. The Lord is a persistent protector because he's an unsleeping guardian. He's also unfailing in his guardianship. He says in verses 5 and 6, the Lord is your keeper. The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. This is another way of saying the same thing. As the psalmist considers the different parts of the day, the sun during the day, the moon at night, it just means the totality of the day, you are going to be protected. During the day, God is your shade. At night, he is your shade. He is going to protect you at all times. He's on your right hand. That means he's proximity to you. He's close to you. He's always going to be nearby you. He's so close that you live in his shade. Provides shade to you all the time. He can do that because he's not sleeping. Quite literally, as you go to bed tonight, I encourage you, think on these things. Ponder the God who is not going to sleep even though you are. Ponder the God who is your shade on your right hand, who's so close to you, he's never going to leave your side. Ponder the fact that when you wake up tomorrow, he's still with you. He kept you during the night, he'll keep you during the day, and he'll keep you at night again, and he'll do that on and on until the day of Christ Jesus. He will bring you home. So the Lord is our powerful protector. He's our persistent protector. He's also our purposeful protector. Verse seven, the Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. Here in verse seven, we find out in what way God protects us or what he protects us from. It says that he will keep us from all evil. The Lord will keep you from all evil. Evil is a word that can be used for a wide array of applications. It refers to that which is of bad quality. It could be like an evil apple. It means it's decayed, it's no good, it's not worth eating. Something that's inferior, or ugly, or unwholesome, or morally depraved, or objectionable, or vicious, or harmful, or adverse, or bad. And the Lord is making a statement to us here that he will keep us from all evil. Now if you ponder this as we should, you might think that this verse stings a little bit. Because you get this great promise, the Lord will keep you from all evil, all harm, And you think, well, where was God when such and such happened? Where was God when I felt this? There could be a very real objection that's reasonably thought through to this verse when you hear, God will keep you from all evil, and the reasonable objection would be, yeah, right. Not saying it's a good one, or a faith-filled one, But it's a real one. Has he kept you from all evil? And we never minimize scripture, nor do we interpret it based on our experiences. We don't bring our experiences to the scripture and let it twist the words to make it mean what we want it to mean. We let the scripture come to us and interpret our experiences. That's the way we do it. That's the humble submission of the Christian, is you put yourself under God's word, and you let the word of God interpret your experiences rather than the other way around. But we still need to think about this. In what way can we agree that God keeps us from all evil? Another way to put it is, what does it mean that he keeps us from all evil? And we might add, That if it means anything, it doesn't mean that we don't experience pain, suffering, catastrophe, heartache, sorrow, tears, weeping, slander, lies, war, famine, persecution. I would say some of those things are evil. It doesn't mean that we don't taste of some of those things. So how do we understand this? I wonder about this verse. I don't know if you wonder about it and think deeply about what this means. I wonder about it because just yesterday, I watched a celebration of life service for a friend of ours who died at the age of 47 of cancer, left behind her husband, and three daughters who still live at home. Wonder about it because also yesterday, found out that a man that I partnered in the gospel with, appreciated very much, went to be with the Lord. I wonder about it because our own dear Gary is on a ventilator. I wonder about it because there are believers right now in North Korea who are in a prison cell or in a labor camp and nobody has a clue where they went, they just disappeared in the middle of the night. How is it that the Lord will keep you from all evil? Let's take some observations here and think about what this means. First, observation about verse seven is that it says, the Lord will keep you from all evil. It's not anybody else. It is the Lord, it is Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God. And because it's him who keeps us from all evil, we have to rely on his definition of what is evil for us. We can't rely on our definition. Since he's the one who's doing the watch, he's the one doing the keeping and the guarding, guard, whatever, who's guarding us, we need to rely on what his definition of what we need to be kept from is. We need to think about how he protects us from evil. And that's really important because he of all people, the Holy One of Israel, who dwells in unapproachable light, certainly knows evil better than we do. And so I think that coming to this verse, we first come to it with posture of faith, because it's the Lord who keeps us. He may not keep us in the ways that we would keep us. Second, The claim is comprehensive. There's no getting around this. It just says the Lord will keep you from all evil. In other words, the Lord has not done his job if he has set up a fence around you that has gaps in it that evil can come through to get you. He has only fulfilled this promise if he has kept you from all evil, again, allowing it to be defined as he defines it. That's the second observation. The Lord will not just keep you from some evil, most evil, or evil of certain kinds. He will keep you from all evil. Third observation is that the scripture is not so ignorant of the human situation that it could make a claim like this without realizing people experience pain and suffering and the effects of evil. Just look back at Psalm 120, verse one. You could almost open any page of the Bible at random and find an example of this, but Psalm 120 verse one is as good an example as any. It says, in my distress I called to the Lord. Here you've got somebody in distress. So the scripture is not ignorant of the different circumstances that humans find themselves in, even believing humans find themselves in. They find themselves in situations that are distressing. And yet it still makes a claim that the Lord will keep you from all evil. Psalm 121 is not the Pollyanna of the Psalms that just tries to see the good in everything. It has a real context, understanding that humans go through all kinds of experiences. The fourth observation. is that the following statement of verse seven elaborates on the meaning of the first statement. Hebrew poetry works in parallelism. That means it makes often two statements that are to be not disconnected from each other, but connected, and they interpret one another. So when it says that the Lord will keep you from all evil, it's elaborated on by what comes up in verse seven. At the end of verse seven, he will keep your life. Life is the word nefesh, and it means the whole of you, not just your physical existence. So I understand that this verse means that God will keep you from all evil in such a way that he will preserve you as a person from the disastrous effects that would come from evil. I think that's the biggest interpretive key is to understand that the way God is protecting you from evil is such a way that he preserves your life. The fifth observation would be to bring in some statements from Jesus. In Luke chapter 12, verse 23, Jesus makes this statement about life. He says, for life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Jesus, who is the Son of God and God incarnate, speaks about life, and as he speaks about it, he wants us to understand that life is more than just about what you wear and what you eat. And so if there are things in your life that hinder the things that you wear or the things that you eat, or even diseases in your physical body, he has a more comprehensive understanding of your life than just those things. And so he is looking at the perspective of what you are and what your life is. And so as we come to understand how God protects us, it's not necessarily in such a way that you will not experience physical harm, physical danger, but it will be a way in which you will not experience the utter deterioration of what God considers to be your life, namely your soul. Matthew chapter 16, verse 25 and 26, Jesus says, for whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? What shall a man give in return for his soul? So as we put this together, we understand what God is out to protect you from, the evil that he is seeking to protect you from is evil that will destroy your soul. That's the life he's concerned about. Let's put an example to this. You know the story of Joseph. Joseph, who was a righteous young man, was not well liked by his brothers. And his brothers threw him into a pit, having intended to kill him, but sell him to some men on their way to Egypt, and so he enters into slavery. They wanted Joseph dead, and the next best thing was just to get him out of the country and to have his life be of no significance. They wanted him out of the picture, and so they sell him into slavery. Joseph experienced all kinds of evil. He was then lied about by Potiphar's wife. He was forgotten about in prison. He experienced all kinds of things that we would consider evil. And so we'd have to ask the question, would Joseph consider Psalm 121 verse seven to be true? Would Joseph say, the Lord has kept me from all evil? We don't have to wonder too much about it because Joseph says in Genesis 50 verse 20 when he speaks to his brothers, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Does Joseph agree with Psalm 121 verse seven? Every word. His brothers intended to get Joseph out of the picture and do all the harm that they could to him. But as Joseph saw the true picture of it, he realizes that their evil intentions never came to fruition. They were never accomplished. They didn't come to pass because God meant the evil that they were doing for Joseph's good, and not just Joseph's good, but even his brother's good who did evil against him. Who won that battle? Not the brothers who meant evil, the God who did good won that battle. They meant harm, they meant calamity, they meant misery and death, but their actions fell short. Why? Because through it all, God was his guardian. And their arrows of evil couldn't get through to do harm to Joseph. In the ultimate sense, God was a wall about him. I asked the question, would our friend who passed away, and we saw her celebration of life, would she agree with Psalm 121, verse seven? The Lord kept her from all evil. She had a blog that was posted after she passed away. She had written, obviously, before she had passed away, to be posted after she had died. And she wrote this. If you are reading this, it means the Lord has taken me home to be with him. I am no longer in pain. I am no longer taking chemo and dealing with side effects. My body is new and restored. My housing has been upgraded to a mansion and I'm enjoying praising the Lord every moment of the day. I'm reunited with my mom and other family and friends who have passed away before me. Please don't be sad for me. Trust me, I'm in a much better place than you are right now. During my cancer journey, or whatever you want to call it, I was never afraid to die. I knew that because of my relationship with God. I would spend eternity with Him. Even though the journey was hard, the Lord was with me every step of the way, and I am so thankful for that. If I had the opportunity to ask her, is Psalm 121 verse seven true? I think the answer has to be every single word. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. God's work as your protector is so meticulously purposeful that the Lord will keep, verse eight, you're going out and you're coming in from this time forth and forevermore. If you are in Christ, if you know Christ Jesus as your Lord and Savior, there is no day that you will wake up abandoned by God. There is no step you will take that will not be accompanied by God as your shade on your right hand. There is no moment that you will not know the presence of the Lord. You may not know it experientially. You may cry out, God, where are you? But there will come a day when you will be able to look back and say, amen, Psalm 121 verse seven is true, every last word of it. If you need any proof of God's care for you, you just have to look at the cross, brothers and sisters. At the cross, we see the ultimate care of God for us. We see the place where Christ was tormented and crucified in your place for your sins. You see the place where Christ's soul was crushed and you were saved. You see the place where Christ called out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me so that you never have to call that out? You see the place of God's care at the cross. And if you've received the forgiveness of sins that Christ purchased at the cross, then Christian, God has kept your foot from stumbling into the abyss of hell and torment forever. If you have tasted of the forgiveness of Christ at the cross, then Christian, God has placed you with Christ in the heavenlies, and at your death or when he returns, you are with him forever to never know pain or suffering or torment any longer. Hasn't God proven enough at the cross to be worthy of your cry? I look up to the hills. Where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. And you could add, not that you add to scripture, who died for me. It's true. Every last word of it. It's for your good and for your comfort. What a good God we have. Let's pray. Father, you are our keeper, a tender one at that. You're our shepherd. You lead us besides still waters and green pastures, but even in the valley of the shadow of death, we don't need to fear evil, for you are with us. Your rod and your staff, they comfort us, Lord. At times, admittedly, we're not comforted experientially. At times, we wonder where you are. God, I pray, having worked through this psalm together, that Psalm 121 would not be far from our hearts. It would be near to us. Its truths would comfort us and help us in moments of distress when we call out, where does our help come from? And we would look to you, the maker of heaven and earth, the one who gave his son for us. We thank you for the care and protection that you have lavished on us. Oh Lord, if we look back, there isn't a day that you haven't been working to guard us and protect us, and we thank you. May you keep this truth on our hearts, we pray in Christ's name, amen.