We are going to look at Psalm 121 this evening, but before I read it, I'm going to make just a few remarks about it. A very beloved psalm for many, many Christians, probably for some of you out there as well. Psalm 121 is about help from the Lord. And when we consider this, we have to realize that there are many different ways that God helps his people. Sometimes he does it by giving us grace and strength to do things that it is our responsibility and duty to do, but there are some times that he helps us by doing for us what we cannot do at all. Psalm 121 focuses on God's help in what we cannot do at all, namely, preserving and protecting his people. Now this is true, of course, collectively of the whole church and the Psalm mentions that, but Psalm 121 is so interesting because it focuses even more on the individual believer. There is a very distinctive way that this Psalm expresses both the preserving and the protecting. The psalmist expresses trusting confidence in the Lord for his help to begin with, and then says that God keeps us. Six times he says that in this Psalm of just eight verses. Now, I usually read from the New American Standard Bible and you can't see it very clearly there. You can see it more clearly in the ESV and that happens to be what your pew Bible is. So if you want to follow along, let's turn to Psalm 121 and listen carefully to the word of the Lord. I want to emphasize that I believe the titles of the Psalms are inspired, and so I always read the titles as well. Psalm 121, a song of ascents. 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. I hope that struck you all of the times repeated that the Lord keeps you. He is your keeper. Now we can still break this psalm down into three parts, not six, but those three parts are confidence in God's help, the help of the ever watchful God, and the help of the ever protecting God. The Christian can trust the ever watchful God to help him by preserving and protecting him. So first, we're gonna see this evening confidence in God's help, and we draw that from verses one and two. Let me just run back there real quickly, a song of a sense. 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. Well, the hills, the mountains, to what mountains does the psalmist lift up his eyes here? Well, here's where these titles come in very handy at times. The title to this psalm helps us understand the significance of the answer to that question. There are 15 psalms of ascent. This is the second of them. This is the only one that is literally entitled, and it's not really reflected in the English, a psalm for the going up or a psalm toward the going up. This psalm views Judah's worshipers being still outside of Jerusalem, looking toward the ridge of hills on which the holy city was built, and especially towards Mount Zion on which the temple was built. That is where the psalmist lifts up his eyes. The temple represented God's presence among his people, and it was the direction in which a believer faced to pray, no matter where he was in the entire known world at the time, to show his trust in God to both hear and answer his prayer. It also tells us that no matter how great or powerful or stable anything in the world might seem, like mountains, like hills, The psalmist would not direct his trust there, but only to the God who dwells with the people and is for the people he has saved for his own possession. Now, let's stop there for a second, because what a lesson that is for us. We should ask ourselves at this point, to whom do we immediately automatically turn when we need help? How quickly do we recognize our helplessness and our neediness? Well, the psalmist then asks, from whence shall my help come? And he asks the question because it enables him to answer himself in order to express his great trust in God. My help comes from the Lord. That is a clear and exclusive statement as though he is saying, my help comes from none other than the Lord, and I would look nowhere else for it. There are two little details here that strengthen his expression of confident trust. One, he calls God by his covenant name, Yahweh, to affirm that his trust is in the covenant making and the covenant keeping God of his people. God has put himself on the line. That's what he's saying here. God has put himself on the line for the care, preservation, and protection of a people whom he has saved and possesses. He has given his oath and promise, and there is no one who can be more true and faithful to his word than the unchangeable God. That is a foundation for the great confidence that we should all have in His willingness and promise to help us in our need. The second detail, the psalmist identifies Him as the God who made heaven and earth. Now this is an appeal to God's omnipotence as a reason to trust Him for His help. If God was able to create the entire universe by simply speaking it into existence, then surely he is capable of helping us no matter how great our need or our danger. On the other hand, Think of the heathen false gods that the nations around Israel believed in, that called upon those gods that did not create the universe. How in the world could they have been of any help to anyone? And Jeremiah 10 points this out in verse 11. It says, thus you shall say to them, the gods that did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens. The true and living God, brothers and sisters, made the heavens and the earth. Who else would we trust for help? Especially in the things that we can do no part of ourselves. The old Puritan David Dixon wrote, nothing can satisfy faith except the all sufficiency of God who made heaven and earth of nothing and can give help where there is no appearance of relief. William Grinnell added to this, Saints should consider the power of God as available for them. They should impress it upon their souls until all of their doubts and fears are silenced. So let me ask again. To whom do you immediately look for help to preserve, protect, and care for you at all times, especially in the evil day? If not this God, why not? And if it is to this God that you do look, praise him for his faithfulness and strengthen your confidence in him. Now the psalmist explains that God is worthy of our trust in him to help us at all times. And we move to the second point. He begins here with the help of the ever watchful God. This provides both an additional reason that we can trust him to help us and a way by which he helps us. As a reason, the psalmist gives each of us God's promise that he will not allow your foot to slip. For each one of you, God helps you by keeping you. He preserves us in our salvation by preserving us in our faith, and brothers and sisters, that is something we cannot do. Apart from the preserving grace of God to keep us in the faith, none of us would last more than about five seconds. He preserves us in it that we can persevere in it. And so as we walk the path of the Christian faith in life, looking to the Lord for his help, scripture says to run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. Paul tells us, brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. These are calls to perseverance. We can only do those things of perseverance in the faith because of God's preserving help that sovereignly keeps us in the faith. What's more, he's able to do this because he does not and never will slumber nor sleep. God is never off duty. He is never unaware of what every single one of his people face. He's never unaware of anything. He alone is the omniscient God. So we've seen him as the omnipotent God. Now we see him as the omniscient God. He never needs nor takes a break from his watchful care and preservation of his people. Your foot, Christian, will not so much as slip from the path you walk by faith, he will not allow it. You're his, and his care for you is born of his love for you. On the other hand, you remember those false gods that we mentioned a while ago? Their followers often explained their conspicuous failure to answer prayer and conspicuous absence from the scene by a need for a break from their regular watch. When Elijah stood against the 450 prophets of Baal, they called in vain upon Baal to consume the sacrifice. Scripture says, and it came about at noon that Elijah mocked them and said, call out with a loud voice, for he is a God. Either he is occupied or gone aside or is on a journey, or perhaps he's asleep and needs to be awakened. Brothers and sisters, the true and living God needs no such excuse. He never slumbers nor sleeps. Now that is very significant and important because we ourselves cannot constantly be on the lookout every moment of every day and night for dangers to our faith and well-being that face us every day, with which we can't deal anyway. God is able to. And not just as a watchman to warn us, but as the caretaker who preserves us. And to put the seal on this, if God is able to help, that is to say, preserve and protect his whole people, Israel, by being ever with them and ever watchful, then surely he can do the same for each individual believer among his people. Our God, the only true and living God, will never need to be awakened. He always knows we need to be preserved, and He will always keep us. Now let's move to the help of the ever-protecting God. Notice first that the Lord protects personally. The psalm goes on to say the Lord is your keeper. Now the original language in Hebrew adds emphasis that we could translate, the Lord himself is your keeper. Now we know, being involved in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that the Lord, in the way that he carries out his decree in Providence, often uses instruments to give us help. Instruments such as angels and other Christians in the care of his people. Of the angels, it is said, are they not all ministering spirits sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation? And when it comes to help from fellow Christians, Jesus said, truly I say to you to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me. That is Christian ministering to the needs of Christian. But when we say that it is God himself who is our helper and keeper, there's no contradiction there. The psalmist points out that even in these instances, the omnipresent and sovereign God is still with us and himself is ensuring through those instruments of angels and fellow Christians and so on, ensuring that we are preserved and protected. This is telling us what God told Joshua, that the Lord our God is with us wherever we go. So we can approach our life of service to God in His strength and with courage. It is an assurance very much like the one that Paul gave us. If God is for us, who is against us? Now, besides that. This psalm is so interesting just because of the little details that come along. Notice that he had just said that the Lord keeps Israel, the whole of his church, all of his people, but here it becomes more personal because he says the Lord is your keeper and the word your is in the singular. The Lord is the personal protector of each one of his people. His attention is on you, Christian. on each one of you. You see, the psalmist began the psalm by saying, in effect, the Lord is my keeper. Now he says, the Lord is your keeper too. You can trust him to give you help for all of the same reasons that I trust him. Furthermore, the Lord is near, always near to you so that you cannot be separated from Him. Now, here's another detail that I want you to follow very carefully, the explanation of it, so that you can see how the psalmist shows us this truth, that you cannot be separated from Him. Look at verse five, look at that second line, that strange second line in verse five, the Lord is your shade on your right hand. Various commentators over the years have done all sorts of interpretational gymnastics trying to give the right understanding of that line. I believe that most of them have missed the point. They picture the psalmist usually walking through the desert towards the temple in Jerusalem and make this about shade on the way protecting from dangerous heat. Brothers and sisters, I was born in Phoenix, Arizona in the middle of July. I know something about heat in the desert. And yes, shade can protect us in that way. And it is a rest and refreshment from the heat. And we could actually apply that to the heat of the daily Christian life and understand God to be a refuge. But I don't think that's the point of this. Jerusalem is not Phoenix. Jerusalem's almost 2,600 feet elevation. It receives about 22 inches of rain a year. It can reach 100 degrees, but that's uncommon. And so it's not literally about shade from the heat of the day. In the Hebrew, this does not literally say the Lord is the shade on your right hand. Bad translation. No, it literally says God is the shadow at your right hand. Now, why is that significant? Well, as for the significance of being at the right hand, consider Psalm 16, 8, where the psalmist says, I have set the Lord continually before me, because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. At the right hand means the closeness, the fellowship, and the availability and readiness to help. Psalm 73, 23 says, nevertheless, I am continually with thee, thou has taken hold of my right hand. Now let me ask this question, considering that this says, God is the shadow at your right hand, how close and inseparable is your shadow from you? You can't escape your shadow. If God is the shadow at your right hand, Christian, doesn't that tell you that he is so close and so constantly with you that you cannot detach yourself from the one who has taken hold of your right hand in fellowship and friendship and is always there to protect you, standing between you and danger, between you and evil? The Lord your keeper, Christian, is the shadow you can't get away from. nor should you want to, as needy and as helpless as you are. Who else would you trust in and call upon for help but the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who is with you and able at the same time to be with every other Christian, the one in whose shadow we walk, so to speak, So you see, the Lord protects personally. But that leads us into the next part of this. Look at verse six. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. This is connected with what we just brought out. And again, many commentators relegate this to the heat of the day that God protects us from sunstroke. Yes, I have read that. And he protects us from the so-called danger of moonstroke or lunacy caused by the physical influences of the moon on man. And some try to get around the obvious lunacy of that interpretation by saying that the people of that day believed the moon influenced people that way, even though we now know that's not true. What? It makes me want to ask them, did you forget that the Bible is the inspired word of God, given by God? And as figurative and symbolic as the Psalms often are, do you really think it is something that literal and ludicrous in view here? Well, the key as always is what the Bible tells us elsewhere. The Bible tells us and speaks to us elsewhere and says to us that the day-to-day Christian life, with its fiery trials and difficulties, is like a walk through an intensely hot day. The night is said to hold many dangers and temptations for us Christians who once led lives in which our carousing took place at night, and in which many dangers still lurk from the hands of those of the night and darkness of unbelief who oppose us. The most graphic, symbolic occasion of God's protecting his people from immediate dangers, pursuing them day and night, seeking to destroy them, was in the wilderness when God accompanied them in their journey toward the promised land as what? A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. A cloud to shadow them. being always close, and shade them by protecting them from the dangers of fiery trials and difficulties, like Pharaoh's army, as they walk through this life with him. A pillar of fire at night to light their way and chase away the dangers, like Pharaoh's army, that face us when we must walk through the world of darkness. We sang Psalm 91 a little while ago because I was going to quote it here because it is very significant. It confirms this interpretation of Psalm 121 and its significant application to each of God's people. It says, you will not be afraid of the terror by night or of the arrow that flies by day, of the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or of the destruction that lays waste at noon. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not approach you. You will only look on with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked. For you have made the Lord my refuge, even the Most High your dwelling place. No evil will befall you, nor will any plague come near your tent. Brothers and sisters, our God protects us day and night from dangers that seek to destroy us from without and within. And that's what that reference is about. Now, we also find out here that the Lord protects from evil. Look at verse 7. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. In this facet of the Christian life, we need the Lord's help and protection more than any of the others. This is at the heart of our salvation by which God protects us from the power and the consequences of our own evil. But there's even more than that here. When addressing that petition of the Lord's prayer that is so relevant and applicable to this promise and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, J.C. Ryle wrote, We include under the word evil everything that can hurt us, either in body or soul, and especially every weapon of that great author of evil, the devil. We confess that evil is in us and around us and near us and on every side, and that we have no power to deliver ourselves from it. We apply to the strong for strength. We cast ourselves on him for protection." Brothers and sisters, he could have been preaching Psalm 121 with that quote. Our Lord, in effect, tells us in that petition of the Lord's Prayer to apply the promise of Psalm 121 by prayer for God to fulfill it for us. Providentially, I saw that quote from Ryle as I was working on this sermon a long time ago. I saw the quote on Facebook. It was attached to a comment by John Calvin that I think is worth hearing as well. As Calvin wrote, were we well persuaded of his invincible power, that would be invincible support against all temptation, end quote. This is our help from God who made heaven and earth, who keeps us by protecting us from all evil. He keeps our saved souls from succumbing to evil and the evil one unto spiritual death. It's his promise, his acting to fulfill the promise and our reason to pray for that promise with assurance that he will do it. Our help that we need because we have no power to deliver ourselves from evil comes from the Lord, only from the Lord. And finally, the Lord protects all of life throughout life. Verse eight says, the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Now there's a Lutheran commentator that I read on the Psalms sometimes, his name is Leupold, and he points out that this tells us that God's protection of each of his people extends to the whole sphere and totality of a man's activities. Furthermore, he says, it extends to the whole category of time. And then he draws this principle out when he writes, generally speaking, there is nothing to which the providential care of God does not extend. One has the feeling that every sphere of influence to which this care extends has been touched. Such treatment of the subject carries with it, listen to these words, sturdy reassurance. Now, the one thing that Leupold doesn't address is the word at the end, forevermore. Brothers and sisters, let's remember that at the end of this world, this world in which we need God's preservation and protection, care and help, at the end, God will keep us as his own in perfect blessedness throughout all of eternity. Now, after hearing all of this, some of it may seem counter to your experience in life, but let's understand something. God does not promise here to remove the Christian so that he never experiences any of these occasions. He promises to be our helper in the midst of all of these occasions. We can hear this echoed right in our own confession as the providence of God doth in general reach to all creatures so after a most special manner. it taketh care of his church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof." Like Joseph could say to his brothers, so we can say to the whole world, and as for you, you meant evil against me. But God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result to preserve many people alive. Now it's forever. The Christian can trust the ever-watchful God to help him by preserving and protecting him. Thomas Watson wrote, God loves to help when things seem past hope. He creates deliverance. He brought Isaac out of a dead womb and Messiah out of a virgin's. Oh, how his power shines forth when he overcomes seeming impossibilities and works a cure when things look desperate. End quote. Our help in our helplessness and neediness comes from the Lord. Now one more thing, you may be asking yourself at this point, where is Christ in all of this? Well, let's remember that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of our covenant making and covenant keeping God's promises. All of the promises of God are yes in Jesus Christ. He is the one at the right hand of God who has the responsibility and authority for everything that we have seen tonight. because he is both Lord and Christ. He is the crucified and risen Savior of his people. And so I want to close today with tonight with the words of Thomas Brooks, and I want you to listen to this carefully. And I sure hope that it moves you the way that it moves me, brothers and sisters. Oh, sirs, there is in a crucified Jesus something proportionate to all the straits, needs, necessities and desires of his poor people. Follow this carefully. He is bred to nourish them, a garment to cover and adorn them, a physician to heal them, a counselor to advise them, a captain to defend them, a prince to rule them, a prophet to teach them, a priest to make atonement for them, a husband to protect them, a father to provide for them, a brother to relieve them, a foundation to support them, a head to guide them, a treasure to enrich them, a son to enlighten them. and a fountain to cleanse them. What more can any Christian desire to satisfy him and save him and to make him holy and happy in time and eternity?" Understand, brothers and sisters, when the psalmist looked to Mount Zion for help, he was fixing his spiritual eyes on Christ. So should we. Amen. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we are so weak. We are helpless. We are needy. And we are so weak, but also so slow sometimes to lift our eyes up to the one from whom alone our help can come. make us more quick to do so, make us recognize more and more how desperately dependent we are upon You. And, O Lord, grant to us that confidence in Your help that we see in the psalmist as we look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. We ask this in His name, amen.