This morning we'll be in Psalm 121. That's on page 516 in your pew Bibles. So I'll read that now. I think you guys have probably turned there by now. So this is the word of the Lord. 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. As you would, join with me now. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Amen. Let's pray. Father, you are good. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, and so we believe that your word can convict and encourage and can change hearts more powerfully than a well-spoken or a not well-spoken message can. And so, Lord, we pray that your spirit will work this morning, help us to focus on your word and not on the distractions of our world, of our week, Lord, not on the many ideas or worries running around in our heads and in our hearts. But Lord, calm our spirits, help us focus on you. And I pray this all in your son's name. Amen. So I was talking to a few of our guys on the Bulgaria trip. You might know the walds. They're lifeguards. And I was talking to them about the most dangerous thing that they can do as lifeguards. And so for them, they told me that the most dangerous thing you can do is to save somebody. So it's dangerous for the lifeguards to save somebody that's drowning. You can't simply just have courage and jump in and save somebody that's drowning. ends in tragedy. But you have to have the technical ability to perform a rescue. There's a right way to do it, and it's very important that you get it right. Because when you're drowning, or when somebody's drowning, fear takes over. You're consumed by fear, and as you gasp for breath, and as you're desperate for oxygen, you do everything in your power to get that down into your lungs. And so as you fight for your life, a drowning person will begin thrashing about. They don't think about proper swimming technique, they just start flailing their arms trying to get their head above water. And sometimes, in this fear-induced frenzy, they'll grab on to the person trying to save them. They'll grab on to them so tight that their rescuer can't breathe, or they'll flail so hard they'll hit the rescuer and they'll hurt them. or they'll unknowingly grab on to the lifeguard to push themselves up to get oxygen, and they'll drown the person trying to save them. This all is a result of fear. Fear causes this response. It would be far better to relax and to trust the one that's rescuing you, but fear simply doesn't allow that. Fear causes us to look inward for our salvation when you're drowning, and fear causes us to look inward for our salvation spiritually when we're afraid. It would be much safer for us to look Godward for our salvation. So this psalm speaks to our fear. As the rider looks longingly to the hills, that's where Jerusalem would be. No matter where you are in Israel, Jerusalem is always up. The temple is always uphill. And so walking there would be incredibly dangerous. So that's where the roaming gangs of thieves would hide out. They would hide out in the mountains and jump out and try to get you when you're in the mountains. There's dramatic changes of temperature in the mountains. It would be incredibly hot in the day, incredibly cold at night. So if you were to twist an ankle or if you were unable to continue, you'd be a sitting duck to the thieves and you'd be at the mercy of the weather. And so this is a dangerous thing that's going on, the psalmist is writing on. So the psalm speaks to our fear, but it doesn't, contrary to our popular culture, the psalm doesn't say, you know what, just believe in the indomitable human spirit. Just keep going. Trust in yourself. Far from that. It doesn't point to our own strength or our own goodness. Instead, it points to our great God. And that's where our help comes from. That's who causes our fear to be calmed. And so while I don't think any of you are afraid of thieves right now, you might be afraid of the drastic change in temperature. It's very hot out. I think we're all afraid of something this morning. Maybe it's that your son or daughter is about to go to college, and you're afraid that you haven't done enough to prepare them. Maybe it's not your son or daughter that's headed off, but it's students that you've shepherded for seven years, and you're worried that you haven't done enough. That's for me. Maybe you're the one headed to college, or you're headed to a new school, and you fear that you're just not ready. Or maybe you fear what's going to happen to our country if a certain political candidate is elected. Or maybe you fear what others will think if you don't keep up those appearances of a perfect life. Or what's going to happen if the economy takes? Or maybe you're afraid of what will happen if your church doesn't hire a full-time senior pastor as soon as possible. We're all afraid something. Whatever produces existential fear deep inside you, it's goading you, it's tempting you to take control of anything that you possibly can. Friends, you're not drowning in water this morning, but I know you're fighting to breathe because of the fear around you. We've all We've all looked longingly to heaven or known deep down what the righteous thing for us to do is, but then also thought, that's a big ask. I can't do that. And that's the good news, right? You're not fighting alone. The gospel teaches it's not up to you to do the righteous thing. God changes your heart and empowers you to glorify him. So that forgiveness that seems impossible to give or that relationship that seems beyond repair or that addiction that you can't beat on your own, that's not a battle that you'll win unless you turn to God and our God fights for his people. So this morning, we'll look at three reasons why we can look to God to calm our fears and to be our help when things look impossible. So our three points, very simple, and they point to the nature of God. And you'll see them in your outline. So God is vigilant, God is powerful, and God is present. But before we get to those, you'll see that there's the first point, and that discusses God's character and how God's character never changes. So this is an important foundation for us so that when we say God is vigilant, God is powerful, God is present, we don't subtly change that to something like God was vigilant or God was powerful. But we can say because God's nature never changes, he was and he still is powerful. This is one of my favorite doctrines. It's called the immutability of God. It's His unchangingness. So the psalmist draws this out by constantly pointing back to creation. So if he's pointing back to the creation account, it's as if to say the eternal God that made heaven, that made earth, he was powerful enough to do that at the start, and he's going to be powerful enough forever. So he points back to creation multiple times. So we see this most obviously in verse 2. If you look at this, my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. There's nothing more obvious for the creation account than that. But we also see a more subtle trail of this throughout the psalm. So, for instance, we see that God is still more powerful than the cosmic powers of the sun and the moon that he created. And you'll notice the word keep or keeper. That's repeated over and over and over again in this psalm. So if you were, you don't have to. We should sometime, but you don't have to right now. If you were to turn back to Genesis chapter 2 verse 15, you would see that God put the man in the garden to work it and to keep it. That's the same word, to work and to keep. And so Adam was charged with doing these things because it mirrored what God had done in creation. So God had created and upheld the universe, so now Adam is to work and to keep it. And then everywhere else, when these two words are used, work and keep, it is always used in reference to the temple. And so you see like the Levites are to work and to keep in the temple. And so it points us back to the heavenly realm. It points us back to who God is. So God made creation. God upholds creation. And so nothing in creation can challenge him because he does not change. He doesn't grow weak with age. Our God is immutable. He's unchangingly vigilant. He's unchangingly powerful. And he's unchangingly present. So if we get into God's vigilance, we see that in verses three and four. So God, 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. So in these verses, we see something that God will do and something that he won't do. So God will keep your foot from being moved. So we already kind of talked about how dangerous it was to walk through the mountains, to walk through the hills to get to Jerusalem. So a twisted ankle could be deadly. And they weren't traveling in state-of-the-art hiking boots. They were traveling in sandals, not even Crocs. They didn't have sport mode on their sandals back then. So if you've been hiking, you know how easy it is to twist an ankle or to slip. So a single rock can move under your foot, or you could slightly shift your weight too far to one side, or dirt could be loose and you don't recognize it, and all of a sudden your balance is thrown off and you have a twisted ankle. You're in pain. So every single step that the psalmist took to get to Jerusalem could have ended in disaster, but God, Yahweh, the creator of heaven and earth, pays special attention to each and every step that the psalmist takes and that we take. And so this vigilance puts him in stark contrast with the other false gods, the pagan gods in the ancient Near East. So there's lots of stories about these Canaanite gods, or these pagan gods, that would be angry because they couldn't sleep. They would try to sleep, and maybe the humans would wake them up. Or they would be trying to sleep, but they couldn't fall asleep because the humans were too loud. That sounds familiar, right? That sounds like a god created in our image. But that's what they thought, right? And so these gods, in anger because they couldn't sleep, would withhold food, or they would send judgment on the people. Those are the false gods. But our God doesn't fall asleep. Our God doesn't fall into a deep sleep, which is the word slumber. He doesn't even get drowsy. Our God doesn't slumber. or sleep. And so when we combine this attentiveness of watching over our every step with God's boundless alertness, we begin to get a picture of God's hyper-vigilance. He's watching everything. So if you look at the end of verse 3 and the beginning of verse 4, you see this. You see, He who keeps you and He who keeps Israel. So that first one is singular. So it's not, I'm going to sound very Southern, it's not he who keeps y'all. It's he who keeps you, singular. So you could rightly replace that you with your name. You could say he who keeps Travis will not slumber. He who keeps Reebok will not slumber. And God looks down and watches over you as his child with the utmost attentiveness. Sometimes we think God's love for us is kind of like our relationship when we buy a bag of grapes. So if you buy a bag of grapes, you're going to get some good ones and some bad ones. No one takes the bad grapes out of their bag and puts them in another bag, hopefully. Nobody does that. But you buy the bag as a whole. And so I think some of us, we think we're the bad grapes of the bunch. God saved our family, God saved our church, and he kind of got stuck with me, the bad grape. But that is not true. God cares for the collective, but God cares for you as an individual. The child of God, the maker of heaven and earth, watches over you. but he also watches over or keeps Israel. So a bunch of individuals comprise Israel, just like several individuals comprise your family or comprise a church. So that means that we can be confident that God vigilantly watches over us as individuals. But he also watches over our loved ones. He watches over our church. He watches over our family. God's intense focus is on you as an individual, but also on us as the body of Christ. So, Batman is one of my favorite superheroes. He is my favorite superhero. So much so, Ben's going to maybe get mad at me for this, but he let me borrow a coffee table book about six and a half years ago. It was about the making of the Dark Knight trilogy. I still have it. I haven't given it up. Hopefully he doesn't watch the recording. So a lot of uninformed people say that Batman isn't a proper hero because he doesn't have any superpowers. He's just a rich guy that can't sleep. But he's the hero that I think all of us most try to be like. So at the end of The Dark Knight, the movie, Officer Gordon says of Batman, he's the hero that Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Here's what I think applies to us. He's the silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight. So that last line, a dark knight, doesn't apply to us, but the other ones do, right? We try to be a silent guardian. We try to be a watchful protector. So we live as though that we have to be these things for our life. We have to watch over our own life, our family, our kids, our house, our finances, everything. It's up to us to watch out for them. When we lift our eyes up to the hills, we don't ask where our help will come from, but we lift our eyes up to the hills to make sure everything's as it ought to be. Batman employs cameras and gadgets to watch out for the Joker and the Penguin and the Riddler. But we use helicopter parenting, we use micromanaging, we use nagging to make sure that everything is just how we want it to be. Friends, Batman falls short, and if Batman falls short, you too are going to fall short. But the maker of heaven and earth will not fall short. Our God will not let even your foot be moved. He who keeps you will neither slumber nor sleep. So child of God, take comfort in this. Fear not. God has redeemed you singularly. He has called you by name. You are his. So let this knowledge of God's vigilance permeate your heart and wash away your fears. We serve a vigilant God. But he's not just vigilant, God is also powerful. So without his power, his vigilance wouldn't be much comfort to us. But in verses five through seven, we see how powerful our God really is. It starts in verse five, the Lord is your keeper. So if you ever see in the Old Testament, Lord, in all caps, all capital letters, that means it's the personal name of God that's being used, Yahweh. or Jehovah, and the text described him as our keeper. So you see that word repeated throughout the psalm, and it can be also translated not just as keep or keeper, but to guard or to protect. So, for example, verse 5 could read, Yahweh is your guardian, or Yahweh is your protector. We often forget the mighty power of our protector, but think about it. One day in Bulgaria, we were walking around the city center in Plovdiv after church, and there were a few young women out in kind of the square that were promoting a new wine. And to do it, they were dressed as angels, all white and had these big white wings on. They had attracted a small crowd, but I told our translator, who was 17 or 18, I was like, those aren't biblically accurate angels. He's like, yeah, I know. I was like, well, you should act like they are. Go fall down before them and cry out, depart from me or I will surely die. He didn't do it. But that's the response to angels in the Bible. People cry out in terror. They said, this angel that's come before me is here to kill me. And the reason I tell you this is because angels worship one far mightier than they are. So if a single angel can reduce the strongest man to a crying heap on the floor, and a multitude of angels worship God, that worship Yahweh, then it's Yahweh who guarded us. What do we have to fear? How mighty is the God that we serve? The problem that we have is that we often define strength by our own experiences. So many of you, if you've seen young kids try to bring in the groceries from the car, you might see a little three or four-year-old trying to bring in a gallon of milk. He's got two hands around it. He's struggling to get it in. Then his dad brings it in with a bunch of other groceries. And the young kid, his mind is blown. How is my dad so strong that he can carry in a gallon of milk? So a lot of times, we are the same way. We can hardly comprehend how God could protect us from things that seem so big to us. How could God protect me from addiction to pornography or from the self-centered pride that comes with our self-degeneration? How could God protect me from cancer or from persecution or from being left out or from depression? This challenge is so intimidating. How could anybody be so strong, so powerful as to protect me from these things? But for God, it's nothing. Look at verse 6. Verse 6 says that even the sun and the moon can't hurt you. And I'll take that literally. Consider it like the cosmic power. So like the Egyptian sun god of Ra was the most powerful deity in Egypt. He was brushed aside by the God of Israel. He was nothing. And the moon is often associated with going crazy. So you get the word lunacy from the word lunar. You kind of see how it works. It has no effect against the impenetrable armor of God. And so this protection from the sun and the moon, the protection during the day and during the night, points us back to God's vigilance. We do not serve a weak God. The God that is so powerful that He simply spoke and creation obeyed invites us to call Him Father. And in verse 7, He promises that He will keep or guard you from all evil. So think about how precise that language is. Yahweh will keep you from all evil. If you change one word, be totally different. So if it was not Yahweh, if it was an unknowable God, or the universe will guard you from all evil, that puts us in a bit of a bind, because we have to figure out which God is going to protect us. If it's Yahweh might protect you from all evil, or Yahweh could protect you from all evil, then we really have to hope that we run into evil on a good day, when God's up to it. Or what if it's, Yahweh will submit you to all evil. That's certainly no good, right? Or this last one, Yahweh will guard you from some evil, or Yahweh will guard you from a little bit of evil. That's no foundation to build your life on, right? But no, Yahweh will guard you from all evil. He will guard your life. A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with Will Owens. We've met pretty much every week for the past several years. And this was the day before he was moving out to Colorado. So we were at Wasabi. I think he saw something on TV. But all of a sudden, he just said, you know, if I had to get attacked by an animal that could kill me, I think I'd want it to be a shark, because I like my chances against a shark. And I've been a youth pastor for seven years, so not much surprises me. But I had to clarify. I said, you mean any shark, like in the ocean? You against the great white shark in the middle of the ocean. You like your chances. He said, yeah. I could just punch the shark in the nose. It would swim away. I'd be all right. OK. We all think we're more powerful than we really are. We all think that we have to be Superman. You guys know Superman. He's unbeatable. He's invincible. He's super strong. He can fly. He's powerful. And we think that we have to be the same way. We see this in any number of ways. So the ancient philosophy of stoicism is gaining popularity among young men because young men think they have to be strong and powerful. We idolize strength in athletes and strength in leaders. Signs of weaknesses are to be avoided at all costs, and we lie to ourselves or our spouses or our kids or our friends or our church when they ask, how are you? And we say, everything's fine, because we're deeply afraid to admit the opposite. While Superman might be powerful, he's not all powerful though. If you were to stumble across some kryptonite, Superman would just be a strong guy. With kryptonite, Will would probably have a better chance against Superman than he would against a shark. If Superman fails, you fail. But the good news is that God's power is made perfect in our weakness. The sun and the moon can't hurt us because the God of the universe protects us. In our fear, we look inward for strength. We look for strength in all the wrong places. The psalmist lifts his eye to Zion's hill for help, while we're tempted to lift our eyes to Capitol Hill for help. The psalmist cries to the maker of heaven and earth for help, while we, with the poet William Ernest Henley, say, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. left to our own strength, left to our own power, our own ingenuity, our odds might be favorable in this world. But with God, our odds are guaranteed. Our God is powerful and he preserves us in such a way that without the will of our Heavenly Father, not even a hair can fall from our head. So we've seen that God is vigilant and that God is powerful. However, if the deist is right, so the deist will say God made the earth and then he walked away, like a watchmaker makes a watch and then lets the watch go. If the deist is right and God is vigilant and he's powerful but he's not present, that's a very little comfort to us. But verse 8 speaks against this. Verse 8 teaches us that our God is present. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. I think we all know this intuitively, but the mention of your going and your coming doesn't mean that God's only with you in those events. You know, like the mom that drops her kid off at the bus stop, right, and then picks the kid up at the bus stop, but doesn't have anything to do with the kid when, well, the kid's at school, right? This is what's known as Amerism. It describes the two bookends of something and includes everything in between. So God is with us as we go to faraway places like Connecticut or Mexico or Peru or Bulgaria. And He's with us when we come home. He's with us as we go out about our daily business. God doesn't stay in His ivory tower. God's not inaccessible. So consider what that means for our prayer life. So God is with you while you walk from class to class. God's with you while you do the dishes or while you walk in the yard or work in the yard. He's with you while you drive to work and as you take your kids to school. God's with you while you do all of these seemingly mundane things and he's ready for prayer. You see that God is the maker of all things and all places, so he can be with you in all places. And since God even created time, God is with you forever. He doesn't get old, doesn't get worn out, his warranty doesn't end. God is with you forever. So I work with families, I know how much parents want to be in two places at once. The closest superpower to that is The Flash, who has super speed. Nearly all of the comics and all the TV shows about The Flash center on the idea that he might not be fast enough to be two places at once. He might not be able to save his love interest and also the city at the same time. When we talk to somebody that's grieving, they almost always say, you know, I should have been there. But whatever they were doing at the time was less important than being with their loved one when tragedy struck. But that's just not possible. It's not possible for the flash to be everywhere at once. And it's not possible for you to be with everyone everywhere all the time. But it is possible for God. That's not to say that God is in all creation. We're not pantheists. God is overall creation. He's with you wherever you go. In your most joyous celebration, in your darkest hour, the maker of heaven and earth is by your side. And so we worship a triune God that is vigilant and powerful and present. We see this most perfectly in Jesus. So if you were to read the story of Jesus' crucifixion in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you would see a slight difference in the story. So in Matthew 27, the robbers crucified with Jesus revile him. They make fun of him. In Mark 15, the robbers revile Jesus. But in Luke 23, only one of the robbers does that. And the second robber rebukes him and says to Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. To which Jesus responds, truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. So what does this mean? It means that for hours, As they were nailed to the cross, fighting to stay alive, two men used that energy to revile Jesus, to make fun of Him. But at some point, that man's heart was changed. Even on the cross, in the most physically, emotionally, and spiritually painful time of his time on earth, Jesus was looking out for his sheep. He was looking out for the souls of one of his people. He didn't tune them out because he was in pain. It means that as the lifeblood of Jesus flowed out of him and he could scarcely have the strength to breathe, the Son of God had the power to save somebody's soul. And it means that for one robber, despite all that he had done to deserve punishment on earth, his Savior was present for him as the last person he saw on earth and the first person that welcomed him into paradise. But that was only true for one of the robbers. The other continually reviled Jesus. He spent his dying breaths blaspheming God and lashing out in anger. This man had obviously failed to stay vigilant. If he had been caught, he lacked the power to save himself and his misery was only beginning. Friends, your strength will fail. your cleverness will run out. And the facade that you build up around your life to make it look perfect will crumble. If you rely on yourself, you will never make it. But if you're afraid because you don't know how to overcome sin, or you're afraid to face the trials of tomorrow, can lean on the maker of heaven and earth who is vigilant and powerful and present. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for who you are. You are a God that does not change. So our ultimate hope and ultimate comfort is in you. Lord, I pray that you would still our fears, Lord, our Love for you would overcome the fear that we have of the world, because you're over everything. So Lord, comfort us. Give us endurance as we face trials and temptations. Give us peace in the midst of the storm, I pray. I pray this all in your Son's name. Amen.