The Old Testament lesson is the 121st Psalm. I will 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. The word of the Lord. Heavenly Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart will be acceptable to you, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Please be seated. This particular Psalm, I think, is a familiar one to many people. Not quite at Psalm 23, 24, in terms of level of familiarity, but the language of it, I think, is something that people are familiar with. And it begins with that line, I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? I will lift up my eyes to the hills." Now, this psalm is a psalm of ascent. It's one of a number of psalms of ascent that we find here at this part of the Psalter. Psalms 120 through 134 are considered psalms of ascent, and they're intended to be sung while pilgrims are on their way to Jerusalem. There were three holy convocations in which all the men of Israel were to gather before the Lord in Jerusalem, Passover, Weeks, and Booths, the Feast of the Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths. And if you want to learn more about those, you go to Leviticus 23, and you have laid out for you there what they were all about. But what you had, though, along the way is pilgrims, and as they traveled, they sang. And they were literally going up, going up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is located on a mountain, not a terribly high mountain by the standards of the Cascade Mountains or the Rocky Mountains or even the Appalachian Mountains, but it's up, it's literally up. They're ascending up to Jerusalem. And if you follow the logic of this throughout the Old Testament in particular, but also in the New, there is an allusion to going up to Jerusalem, even if you were actually going down. There's a sense in which what's being addressed is something more than just a physical reality. Now, there is a physical reality, as I noted. They're actually practically going up to Jerusalem, and cities often were built on mountains because that made them easier to defend. So it's not an uncommon thing to see throughout the ancient Near Eastern walled cities, to see them on tops of hills and mountains. But metaphorically, this is also the case, that there's a kind of sort of going up, because in a real sense, This is reflecting the fact that when you go up, you're closer to heaven, and the idea is that there's something about Jerusalem and the location of the temple that helps us to enter into God's presence, or at least it was the case. Now, as we think about this, and we think about our own lives as Christians, how does this apply to you and me? I mean, we don't go to Jerusalem three times a year. We don't travel by, you know, the roads that they traveled, and we don't have camels and donkeys accompanying us, and we're not singing as we go like they did. In what sense does it make sense for us to use this to think about our own lives? Well, I think in a real way, we are on ascent. We are ascending to the New Jerusalem. As Christians, we're looking forward to that city with foundations that have been laid by God, whose designer and builder is God, we see that that's what Abraham had in mind. If you look at Hebrews 11, verse 10, we have the heroes of the faith listed for us in Hebrews 11, and we're told that Abraham was on a quest, on a journey, to a city that had those characteristics. Foundations that could not be shaken, a design developed by God and built by God himself. That's what he longed for. That's what he was on a pilgrimage to arrive at. But as Christians, we're also given an upward call. You remember when Paul was talking about the nature of his own life and his own faith, he refers to, in Philippians 14, this upward call that he had in Christ Jesus. Let me give you the... the exact way he puts it. He says, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus. We're on ascent, in other words, to the new Jerusalem to be in the presence of our King, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now there are hazards along the way. There were hazards in antiquity. You know, there were bandits. There were wild animals. There was the prospect of injury along the way. Of course, at that time, you didn't have ambulances or the state police to rely on for protection or for help if you found yourself in trouble. And they needed help from the Lord in order to make it. They didn't take it for granted that this was going to be an easy trek. In fact, if you think about it, if you were an enemy of Israel and you wanted to cause some trouble, you knew that there would be a lot of Israelites on the road three times a year. And you could lie in wait for them and harass them. and even harm them and rob them. So the pilgrims, these pilgrims on pilgrimage, on their way to the holy convocations, they long for God to protect them. And we have hazards on our way, too, and we need the Lord to protect us. Of course, the hazards that we face can be physical in character. It's not as though we never face challenging and frightening conditions. I've been in a number of situations that I have been glad that the Lord has provided actual physical protection for me. I was mugged at Machete Point one time in a dark alley in Boston. I was in a large gang fight that made it to the front page of the Boston Globe. In the early 1990s, a number of people got stabbed. The entire, you know, expanse of Blue Hill Avenue was cut off because the fight spilled into the street. I'm here today with you, well and unharmed by any of those things that occurred. And I can go through the course of my life and identify many other times where the Lord has protected me physically. But there's a greater hazard that we face that perhaps we don't think much about, and those are the hazards that are spiritual in character. And you don't need to be in a skating rink in Boston surrounded by a couple of gangs who are on the warpath for each other to be in a hazardous situation. You can be right in front of your computer. You can be right there watching television. You could be with some friends in a bar. You know, you can find yourself in situations where you're facing hazards that are really deadly in character, but the thing that is sort of at risk is your soul and your welfare spiritually. And so we need God to help us. We need God's protection in the course of our lives. And this psalm is intended to encourage us along that line. Have you ever spent any time reflecting on the word encourage? I've talked about this before, I know. But I think that in the course of our normal use of the word, we don't actually think about it in terms of courage at all. You know, when we think of encouragement, we think something along this line. Oh, you look so nice today. Or, you can do it. I know that every once in a while I feel like I can't do it, but you can do it. And that's fine, but if you look at the word and examine it, it doesn't take very much intelligence, if you know how to read English, to see the word courage right in the word encourage. In other words, what we see with encouragement is the act of placing courage or helping to stir up courage in another person. And as Christians, we ought to encourage each other in this way because we are in a battle. We're surrounded by these hazards that can really do a great deal of harm. And so we need to encourage each other. And the best way to encourage somebody, I think, is to give them not just some kind of vacuous statement like, buck up, buddy. But actually give them a reason for courage. And that reason, of course, as Christians we know, is the Lord is on your side. The Lord is there for you. You can draw on the strength that is yours if you acknowledge in faith that God is for you and is your keeper. By the way, that's what we see here in this psalm. Do you notice how often the word keeper comes up? See it there in verse, either keeps or keeper. See it there in verse three. He will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Verse four, behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. Verse five, the Lord is your keeper. The Lord is your shade at your right hand. Then jump down to verse seven. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. Verse 8, the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Does this bring anything to mind? A story from the Old Testament, perhaps? About two brothers? Remember the story of Cain and Abel? Cain didn't prove to be very good at keeping his brother Abel, right? In fact, he does just the opposite. He harms his brother Abel. He murders his brother Abel. And when he's addressed by the Lord, what's Cain's response? Am I my brother's keeper? Implying, no, you shouldn't expect that from me. But the very question that the Lord asks implies, yes, you are your brother's keeper, or I wouldn't have asked you where he was, right? There's something going on there that relates to this story. Now, keeping is helping. Keeping is sheltering. But the thing that perhaps struck you as odd as you heard this psalm read is that some of the things that we're told that our Keeper keeps us from are a little odd. I want to get into that a little bit because I think there's a great deal going on that is helpful if we can see what's going on. The first thing we're told there in verse 3, 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.'" But the thing I wanna focus on is that first clause in that third verse, he will not let your foot be moved. Now, you know, I grew up in the snow belt around the city of Buffalo and down into Western Pennsylvania. And I found myself at many times the victim of losing my balance on an icy surface. I remember one particular storm. I think this was 1978. If people can remember what occurred in 1978, you know what I'm getting at, the Great Blizzard. I remember I was on top of a hill living in an apartment complex, and the entire hill was just a brick road covered with a sheet of ice that must have been half an inch thick. In those days, we went to school anyway. Those were the days. In fact, I remember one particular day being in a school bus that jackknifed and went down the hill sideways all the way to the bottom. Fortunately, it didn't harm anybody. Just kind of harmed the mental state of the people in the bus. But I remember going down that hill that particular day. I must have slipped and fell. I'm not exaggerating, 15 times. I mean, by the time I got to the bottom of the hill, I was like one big bruise. And it wasn't just like a little slip, whoops. It was like every single time I went down, it was like full force, bone crushing kind of thing. And there was no sympathy, you know, I had to get to school anyway. And so I walked the mile and a half or so forth to get to school. But when you feel the, the world kind of turning because you have lost your foothold, you have a sense that, you know what? Having solid ground beneath your feet that has some friction is a good thing. Now, this is not dealing with that in particular, and maybe a better way to put it is that doesn't exhaust the meaning of this passage, that kind of physical sort of event. There's something more going on. Have you ever felt in the course of your life that the things that you believed in, the things that you thought were really solid, the things that you thought would never change, people, jobs, bank accounts, investments, you know what I'm getting at, suddenly have become very slippery. And you feel like you're going down. And you go down again and again, and it doesn't feel very good. Kind of shocks you, you feel that cold surge that just kind of goes through your body, like suddenly you're just made of ice. And you see just how much you take for granted on a daily basis. These moments are revelatory. They really kind of show you that the things that you thought you could believe in, the things that you thought were solid, the things that you thought were reliable are not so. In an instant, things can change. What you really need is something that can't be moved. What you really need is something so solid you can rely on it in good times and bad. What you need is really not just something, but someone. Someone who is solid. Who has the power to hold you up. Who has the power to deliver you. Who has the power to keep you from falling. And that's what this is addressing. The Lord can keep your foot from slipping. The Lord can make certain that your foot is not moved. Now, what you need in order to read the Psalms profitably is kind of a poetic cast of mind. And poetry in our time, and I've talked about this before, poetry in our time is kind of, well, it's kind of, it's not what it was. Think about the great epic poems, you know, Paradise Lost, or Inferno by Dante, or The Aeneid by Virgil, or The Odyssey by Homer. Why is it that these guys just couldn't write it straight? Why did they have to resort to poetry, epic poetry? What is it about epics that call for a poetic mode of expression? In our day, we don't really see a connection between words and reality the way that people in earlier times did. We think that words are just artificial, arbitrary conventions that are agreed on by a particular society, and they're all up for grabs. And that's why we live in a world where People don't know what it means, or is means, or woman means, or man means. You get where I'm getting at? Because they think it's all just arbitrary. It's all just a matter of social convention. But in the past, when it comes to scripture, for example, or even in other cultures, there was a conviction that words were, in some sense, tied to reality in such a way that they could sort of transport you and help you understand things that were not just quotidian in character, but just actually spiritual and eternal in character. In other words, we live in a vast analogy. The analogy that we live in is creation, and creation speaks. It constantly is speaking to us. One of the things I think that characterizes the modern world is deafness. We don't want to hear what it has to say, so we'd rather not listen. And we claim that it's not saying anything at all, when in fact it's saying things all the time. We just don't like what's being said. So we live in an analog, and that's why people failed, I think, to draw from the Psalms as much as they could draw spiritually. Here's another confession. When I was a young preacher boy, all I wanted to do was read the Apostle Paul. I just loved abstractions and syllogisms and the logic and all that stuff. I wanted systematic theology. And when it came to poetry, Psalms, Who had time for that? You know, I thought, I want the meat of the word. I don't need that kind of stuff. But as I've grown older... I spend more and more time in the Psalms. I spend more and more time in those parts of the Scriptures that as a young man I didn't appreciate because as I've grown in my understanding of the way God works and the way the world is that he made, I've come to see that words that have the character that we see in the Psalms can communicate things to us that are really, really helpful and really, really needful and really reach us in ways that Well, sometimes abstractions and, you know, rarefied and consistent systematic theologies can't. Now, one of the things that we see in this psalm is that when we look up, we don't only see a helper who can keep us in times of need. We have threats that shine down on us from above. Now, initially, you might have wondered, and I know I wondered for the longest time, why should I be afraid of the sun and moon? Do you notice that in this passage that these are things that we ought to be concerned about? Look there at verse five, or verse six, I'm sorry. The sun should not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. I kind of like a sunny day. And when I look up in the night sky and I see a full moon, there's something about that that just is catching. But here we're told that these are things that should concern us. So let's think about it biblically. What we have with the sun and moon is sources of light and markers of time. Sources of light and markers of time. We see that in Genesis 1, verses 14 and 15. They're set in the sky in order to give us light and to help us mark the time. Now, thing to keep in mind, too, is that when you find yourself in a desert environment, the sun has a whole different character than it does in the Pacific Northwest. In the Pacific Northwest, we go for months longing to see the sun. Boy, it'd be nice to see that sun again. I hear there's an object in the sky, a big, round, shining thing. I don't know if I believe in it anymore. But when you find yourself in, say, Texas or Arizona, and it's just unrelenting, and even makes you feel oppressed to be in the sun. There's a kind of weight to it when you don't have relief. You have a different way of thinking about this and when we think about the light, often in scripture we're told that the light is something that speaks to us and is an analog to truth. Have you noticed that? Let me take you to a passage where this becomes really evident. This is 1 John 1, beginning at verse 5. And there's some psychology that's at work in the course of this passage. And by the way, psychology literally means study of the soul. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie, do not practice the truth. So you see, light, truth, darkness, lie. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, in other words, we lie to ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, then he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now here's the paradox. Why do people stay in the dark? Because they're afraid of what? Having their sins exposed. That's why they stay in the dark. But if you stay in the dark, the sins remain. The only way that they're removed is by stepping into the light. Because when it comes to the light of God's truth, His mercy occupies the same space as His truth. This is why, when you step into the light, confessing your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you of your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. But if you remain in the dark, the sins remain. Now, when it comes to this, when it comes to the fear that we have of having our sins exposed, there's a sense in which there's a merciless character to the light. We're afraid that there is no mercy to be found in it. We see, though, that in Christ there is both truth and mercy. But when we're left to ourselves and we're afraid of having our sins exposed, it's as though we find ourselves in the desert, exposed to this merciless and just unrelenting light. Another thing to consider is time. The moon, the sun, help us to mark the days and their passings. And there is a real sense in which time marches on mercilessly. We're on, you could say, a kind of conveyor belt. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way. I'd like to get off the conveyor belt, but the only way to get off the conveyor belt is to die. But what is at the end of that conveyor belt is just that thing. Each of us, the Lord Terry's, are being carried to the days of our death. And we all know this at a very visceral, deep level. And so the sun and the moon, sources of light and markers of time, but what they help us to understand is the passing of time. And we are in the wilderness, exposed, east of Eden. And we need shelter. We need the Lord to come between us and these things. We need the Lord to shade us and to provide us relief. He is our shade. He is the one that we can turn to. And then we're told at the very end of the psalm that he will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Now, what in the world is that supposed to mean, going out and coming in? Well, again, this is a way of putting things. This is a kind of idiom that you find in Hebraic thought, going out and coming in, to refer to the daily round. you know, going out in the morning to do your work, coming in in the evening to find rest, to come away from your work, to find shelter, going out into the world, coming home, returning home, going in. And in a real way, you can say that our daily round, our going out and our coming in, reflects the entire course of our lives. There's a kind of going out. There is a mourning to our lives. Childhood. Oh, those were great days. Wonder years, right? I love going back and kind of waxing nostalgic about the good old days when I would jump over things on my bike and hurt myself. Those were great days. Now I'm an older guy and I think, man, what was I thinking? I was awfully dumb. But anyway, I'm at the end of life where, you know, things are kind of breaking down. you know, on a daily basis, not just with my bike, but with me. You know, and I'm coming to that point where, you know, I'm going to be departing, going out in a sense, but also coming in. And that going out and that coming in can be the same thing if I'm on the road and I'm ascending to the new Jerusalem, and I'm welcome into God's presence at the end of my journey, at the end of my day, at the end of my life, And this is the promise that we have in this marvelous psalm, that he will keep our going out and coming in forevermore. Now again, when we think about this, are we just sort of writing off forevermore as just kind of a hyperbole? It's a kind of hyperbolic way of putting things to kind of make you, You know, feel good about life and so forth. Or is there some real promise there? Is there something implicit in this? Verse 7, I think, helps us to think about that. He will keep you from evil. He will keep your life. Here this past week, I had a chance to read a story that I wrote for little kids. It's called Daisy, and it has a happy ending. And when I was being asked about it, in particular about just writing stories as a Christian, the implicit sort of question was, why would you want to do that, and what does Christianity add to storytelling? And I just simply said this. Before Christianity, before the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, there was never a happy ending. Every story ended the same way. Everybody's dead. Think about Greek comedy, Greek tragedy. This is something I've noted before. In a tragedy, at the end, what do you see? A stage full of dead people. At the end of a Greek comedy, what do you see? A stage full of fools. But what the gospel does is show us that there is a happy ending possible, but it's only possible through the power of God. God can keep your life. God can make you wise. God is the one who can bring something out of nothing, can deliver us from death, who is our life, So my question for you, just to finish this off, is where does your help come from? What are you standing on? Is it gonna hold you up? Is it really gonna hold you up? You got that Bitcoin. It's made a comeback here recently. Is that gonna hold you up? My 401k isn't looking quite as good as it did last year. Maybe that won't. People even. What's gonna hold you up? There is someone who is better than a brother, who can look after your interests better than your mother, someone that you really need in your life because you are needy, whether you know it or can't admit it or not. With those things in mind, let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for the promises that we have in your word, and thank you for this wonderful psalm. In Christ's name, amen.