While you're being seated, you can join me in your Bibles in Psalm 125. Thank you for praying for us and caring for us as we look ahead to surgery this week. I would recommend if you ever have a scary diagnosis and you have a time to look ahead to surgery, that you also have a job that requires you to study Psalm 125 for a whole week, it really works out pretty well. So God is good in all things. Let's pray before we read. Lord, you are good and kind. We pray that you would Call to mind once more your mercies and your kindnesses. These are the things that have always endured. We pray that now as we read and consider your word, you would use it to be kind to us, that you would do with your word what only you by your spirit can do. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Psalm 125, a song of ascents. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore. For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. Do good, O Lord, to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts. But those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evildoers. Peace be upon Israel. This is God's word. Well, to pull back the curtain on preaching and sermon writing a little bit. I don't know who the first one to say it was, but I've always appreciated the thought that really good preaching, you can tell it's really good preaching because it does two things at the same time. Really good preaching comforts the afflicted, and it afflicts the comfortable. I've always appreciated that. It's always been something to pray for and I thought about it this week because I can say with confidence that that is God's goal with Psalm 125. God's goal even today in this sermon is to bring great comfort to those who are afflicted and to those who are comfortable to bring you great affliction. Now, here's the secret, is that as a preacher, I can tell you that you can't aim at either of those. You can't go into a sermon saying, I'm here to afflict some people, or I'm going to get up there and comfort some people. Because at best you can only do one of those things. But when really good preaching uses the word of God to bring God's people into the presence of God, it's actually the presence of God that does both of those things at the same time in the same group of people. That as we together come into God's presence through his word, those who are walking with the Lord, those who belong to Jesus, will be comforted. And those who aren't and are pretending to walk with the Lord, they will find their security ripped away from them, which is itself an act of God's grace. So there are two problems we're seeking to address today in Psalm 125. The first is those here who belong to the Lord and do not fully enjoy the security that we have in Christ. And the second is those who are here and believe that they are secure but are not. Those are our two problems that Psalm 125 seeks to address. So as Ben mentioned and reminded us, we are well into our sermon series on the songs of ascent. Ascent means to go up. Each of these psalms has the idea in some way or another of going up to Jerusalem. Psalm 125 maybe is the most clear of all of them. And God's people would sing these. They would sing them throughout the year, of course, but they were especially the road trip songs as they would travel to Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem in ancient Israel. to celebrate three different feasts every year. We saw last week, Psalm 124, a celebration of deliverance, and then Psalm 125 is a celebration of security. And so what we're gonna see, your bulletin at the back has an outline on it. It'll be a little more important today than in some past weeks. There's a quote on it I'm going to refer to in a minute. But we're simply going to look at this in really two main ways. How do we enjoy the security that God has promised to us? How do we escape false security? Those are the two big ideas we want to pursue. So as we come to Psalm 125, verse 1, those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. What type of security do we have? The promise made to us in verse one is that we are unmovable. We're unmovable. What type of security do we have? I wouldn't normally do this, but I did put in your bulletin a long quote from a man named George Adams Smith. I appreciated this quote so much and I'm going to refer to it a couple times that I just put it all in there. I'm going to read it right now. I'm gonna add a couple words and I'm gonna refer to it a couple times because it really helps bring Psalm 125 alive. Psalm 125 uses the geography of Judea and Jerusalem as a parable. And the more we understand why that's happening, the better we're gonna be able to put it into our own hearts. So here's what he says, Judea was designed, and he means Judea was geographically designed by God, to produce in her inhabitants the sense of seclusion and security, though not to such a degree as to relieve them from the attractions of the world, which throbbed closely past, or to relax in them those habits of discipline, vigilance, and valor, which are the necessary elements of a nation's character. So I'll pause there. So he's saying God designed the geography of ancient Israel, especially Jerusalem, to provide security and to provide the need to still trust God for that security. They were secure, but the enemies were close enough that they had to keep praying to God and be alert. All right. So he goes on. In the position of Judea, there was not enough to tempt her people to put their confidence in herself. But there was enough to encourage to defend their freedom and a strenuous life. And while the isolation of their land was sufficient to confirm their calling to a discipline and destiny different from other people's, it was not so complete as to keep them in ignorance of the world or to release them from the temptations to mix with the world in combating which their discipline and destiny could alone be realized. I know he's writing like a scholar and big sentences that are too long, but he's simply saying the same thing in the second paragraph almost as the first paragraph. God made the geography of Jerusalem and put his people where they were safe, but he kept the enemies close enough that they still had to trust him and they still had to be willing to defend and go to war when God called them to it. Alright, so all of that is to say that God is the best urban planner and that God when he brought his people up from Egypt out of the exodus during the exodus and he brought them into the promised land He brought them into a land that he had already designed to be a perfect parable Not just a land designed to be flowing with milk and honey and have some mountains where they would be safe But it would also serve as a parable for their spiritual life and it continues to serve as a parable for our spiritual life Today, alright That's all introduction again to this promise. What is the promise? Verse 1. You are, if you belong to God, unmovable. You cannot be moved. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. We are unmovable. We run into our first problem, don't we? Not many of us feel immovable. Is it immovable or unmovable? I'm gonna go with immovable from here on out. Immovable, not many of us feel immovable. We feel like we have been moved frequently. We feel like the ground underneath our feet moves and shifts. We don't feel immovable and I agree with that. While our security in the Lord is real, the danger is also real. It is interesting to consider that when God brought his people up out of Egypt, he could have gone through the Promised Land, he could have taken them into the mountains of Asia and found them a place that was hundreds of miles from any other enemy. And he didn't do that, did he? He put them smack in the middle of a bunch of people who would always be their enemies, and he did it on purpose. He did it so that they would have to continue to trust him as they lived in the security that he provided. And that's a perfect picture of our Christian life. God has delivered us out of death, he's delivered us from sin, from the guilt of sin, he's delivered us from hell, and he's brought us into his kingdom, but we're not yet delivered from all the dangers. We're not yet free from all the discomforts of life. And so it is true that while we have real security, the danger being so real around us, we often don't feel as secure as we really are. And here is the great first piece of news of the sermon, is that reality is always better than your feelings. That regardless of how you feel today about your security, if you belong to Jesus, you are secure. that your level of security does not rise and fall with your emotional appreciation of that same security. I get excited, nobody said amen yet, but you understand what we're saying. If you don't feel secure today, you are no less secure than the days when you do feel secure. As one author put it, you are as secure as God is strong. You are as secure as God is strong. However you feel, doesn't change the reality of God's promise and his faithfulness to his promises. Does God want you to enjoy your security? Does he want you to feel secure? Yes, he does. That's why we have a whole song to communicate to our hearts that security. But if you walk out of here today and it hasn't yet quite landed or you're still praying for that emotional experience of security, at least understand that your experience and the reality of that security are two different things. and that you will be until the end of your life as secure as God is strong. So we start there with the promise that we are immovable in the Lord and we go on to the picture of the promise now in verses one and two. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion which cannot be moved but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore. All right, so you kids can imagine this with me. You've been on road trips, and sometimes, here we are in the relatively flat Indiana, and one of the road trips some of you like to take is you like to go west. And you go west, and you get to Kansas, and you thought, I didn't think anything could be flatter than Indiana, and you were wrong. And you go, you're driving through Kansas, and off in the distance, you begin to see the mountains of Colorado. And they get, they're a little small at first, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it would have been, if you were an ancient Israelite. It wouldn't have been quite as fast, because you'd be walking. But you'd be walking up to Jerusalem, and the closer you got, the more you realize that it's really high up there. That Jerusalem was a city designed by God to be set in the mountains. And some of you know this, some of you might not know this, that Jerusalem wasn't set on a mountain, Jerusalem was set in a basin in the midst of seven mountains. It was a mountain city, not because it was on a mountain, but because it was surrounded by mountains. And those seven mountains represented geographical security. If anybody was going to come and attack Jerusalem, they had to go over or around the mountains. And it made it much more secure. You didn't have to defend nearly as much land. When you did go over the mountains to get to Jerusalem in the basin there, you felt extremely secure. And that picture of the mountains surrounding Jerusalem is the picture that God wants to communicate to our hearts and to his people as we travel to heavenly Jerusalem. That as the mountains surrounded ancient Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people. There's another picture in the Bible of a hen taking the chicks under her wing and protecting them, and that's a beautiful picture of God's tenderness, but here is a picture of immovable strength, that God has promised that I have surrounded you. Here's how Martin Luther talked about it. The Lord is around his people. Well, if that doesn't help us, then what will? He wants to be the skies over us, the walls next to us, and the pavement beneath us, so that if the devil would shoot at us, it is as if he shoots at God himself. If you are trusting the Lord today, one of the benefits of being a Christian, and there are many, is that God said, I have surrounded you with myself. I am the mountains all around you, and no one can get to you unless they go through me. And what can go through God? Nothing. So that's the picture. The promises that we are immovable, the picture of the promise that helps us feel that or appreciate it is that God has surrounded his people. He surrounded Jerusalem with these mountains and he surrounds you and your life with himself and his power. Now there's one bonus promise in verse 3. It says, God gives one more reason in verse 3, while he will not let wickedness conquer his people. Notice what he says first of all the word scepter you kids I want to make sure you understand these words a scepter is what a king would have held It was a symbol of a king's power and when it says the scepter of wickedness It means the reign or the rule of wickedness the power of wickedness and so God is saying the power of wickedness will not rest on on the land given to the righteous. The power of wickedness will not come and dwell permanently in Jerusalem. He doesn't say that wickedness will never come near. He doesn't say that wickedness will never affect us. But he says it will not come to rest. It will not abide forever. And then he gives a reason. And he says the reason I'm going to keep wickedness from dwelling in your midst is to keep you from stretching out your hands to do wrong. This is really interesting to me. It sort of takes a turn that you don't expect when you're reading Psalm 125. God says to his people, I'm gonna protect you, not just because I love you, not just because I care for you, not just because I care for my name. I'm gonna protect you because I know you, and I know evil, and I know that evil begets more evil, and all of us know this in our own life. What's the surest way to bring about sin? Well, it's to start with sin. What's the most common result of sin? more sin, right? So this is just what happens in our relationships, even in our hearts in the quiet times. Sin begets sin. And the more wickedness is allowed to go unchecked, the more sin is going to result in response to that wickedness. And so because God knows us, and he knows the nature of wickedness, he says, I'm not going to let evil come against you in such a way as to conquer you, because I'm not going to let you fall into sin. This is a great, great, wonderful promise. It's an additional promise, not just that I'm secure from people attacking me and bringing me out of the will of God. God is saying, I will not let evil win you over because I won't let evil, I won't let evil win over you because I won't let evil win you over. God is committed not just to the safety of his people, but to the righteousness of his people as well. So we have a promise, which is that we are immovable. We have a picture of it, which is the mountains that surround Jerusalem. And we have a bonus promise, which is that God is gonna protect us also to keep us from sinning in response to the sin of the world. And to put this in another way, God will never Let somebody harm you so much that you have to sin in response to it. And those of you who hate sin should be glad for that. Because we know what it's like, we know that feeling that the easiest way to respond to sinful anger is more anger. The easiest way to respond to violence is more violence. And God said when wickedness comes close, and it will come close to you, it's never going to win over you. because God won't let it win you over. And so we want to enjoy the security, which brings us to asking the question, who is it that gets to enjoy this security? Who is it that is allowed to say, I am immovable, I've been surrounded by the Lord, nothing can touch me apart from his will. Psalm 125 gives us three types of people, and they're really the same type of people, gives us three ways to describe those who would be secure in the Lord. So if you want to enjoy the security, here's the checklist for you. Number one, those who trust, verse one, those who trust in the Lord. Number two, the righteous, verse three, the land allotted to the righteous. And number three, those who do good. Do good, O Lord, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in heart. If you want to enjoy this type of security, if you want to not just be secure, but to feel it, you must be somebody who trusts the Lord, somebody who's righteous, and somebody who does good. Now, if you know your Bibles well enough, you'll know that those are not three types of people, but three ways to describe the same person. And so the first way that we gain the security that we long for is to put our trust in the Lord. And the way this worked out in ancient Israel is the same way it works out now. They had to trust in the Lord. They had a physical way to trust in the Lord. It wouldn't have been enough to say, I'm trusting in God to keep me safe. You still had to go to Jerusalem and stand inside the walls of Jerusalem and let God protect you there. If you want to be secure, It's not enough to be close to the people of God, you must be one of the people of God. You must be somebody who has put your trust consciously and regularly in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's very likely that there are people here who have not yet done that. That you're around people who are secure, which sometimes can give you that false security, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But if we want to enjoy true security, it begins by trusting the Lord, which comes with the promise that he will surround us and take care of us. When you trust in the Lord, the Bible tells us that you become a righteous person. And this happens not because you've earned something or you've purchased something, what happens then is when you put your trust in the Lord, he gives you his righteousness. The Lord's righteousness is imputed to us, it's put on our account so that we can stand and say that by faith I am righteous, by faith I am justified. I've been declared innocent by God of my many sins because Jesus has died for me, paying for my sins, and he has given to me the righteousness that he earned with his perfect life. But then thirdly, those who would be secure must be those who do good. Do good, O Lord, to those who are good. I'm really glad that that verse, verse four, isn't the only verse in Psalm 125. I'm really glad it doesn't just say, do good to the Lord to those who are good. If that was the only phrase we had to think about this morning, we might despair. We might know that I don't do enough good to earn God's goodness to me. We might think about it in a sort of twisted way like that. But that's not what it means. When those who trust in the Lord are saved, they are saved by God's free grace. God gives them salvation freely. He bestows righteousness freely. They don't purchase it in any way. They simply trust Him and He gives it freely. And with that free grace comes more grace. And whoever God gives the free grace of salvation to, He gives the free grace of sanctification to. And whoever is joined to Jesus by faith begins a new journey in life where they will desire to do good and they will find the ability to do good growing in their hearts. Do good to the Lord to those who are good does not mean repay the good people for their goodness. It means, Lord, you can see the people that you are already working in. You can see by the goodness of their life that they are already drawing on the bank of your grace in order to do good. therefore do more good to them. When God does good to those who are good, he is not rewarding their inherent goodness, but he's paying grace upon grace. It is only grace that allows us to do any good, and when that good rises to God as something pleasing to him, and he does more good to us, it's not us earning anything. It's just God giving grace upon grace upon grace. So if you would enjoy the security that God has for his people, you must trust in the Lord to become righteous and you must live a life that is good. You must be devoted to doing good. Those are the people that are most secure. Danny spent some time before he left in First John, which is a great book to go and consider eternal security. And it addresses both of these problems, those who are too comfortable and those who are too afflicted. And if you look in your life and you really pray for God to show you, not just the bad things, and we focus on that sometimes too much, but have you asked God to show you the good things? The proof that you belong to him. The desires that you have now that you didn't used to have. The goodness that you do that you didn't used to do. Those are things that testify to our heart that we really belong to God. So this is the promise, the picture, and who it is that gets to enjoy it. Which now brings us to considering the warning. The other purpose of this psalm is to bring a warning to those who live in false security. Verse five. But those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evildoers. Peace be upon Israel. The warning is to those people who turn aside to their crooked ways. In verse 5, those people are not the outside enemies attacking Jerusalem, but they are residents of Jerusalem who are refusing to walk in the light of the Lord. There's a question about this psalm about when it was written. Some psalms tell us in the heading who wrote it or when it was written, and we don't know when Psalm 125 was written, but we have a decent guess. And that guess is that Psalm 125 was likely written after the exile. There are a few songs that were written after God's people were taken out of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was burned, razed to the ground, and God's people were taken away into slavery. And there are some songs we call post-exilic songs, where God's people look back and they sing about Jerusalem. as a memory and as a future promise. And if that's true, if this is a post-exilic psalm, it carries even more weight because the people who are singing it are not saying that the physical place of Jerusalem was our safety, but God was our safety. There were people in the Old Covenant, just as there are people here, possibly today, who were trusting in the Old Covenant. They were trusting in their physical proximity to Jerusalem for their safety. I'm part of Israel. I have the right card. I have the right genetics. I have the right ancestry. Surely I will be safe. But only those who trust in the Lord would be saved. And this brings us back to Smith's quote there in your bulletin. It's one thing to be in the people of God, to live around Jerusalem, but when the enemies were coming, what did you have to do to be safe? You had to run inside the walls of Jerusalem. And it's one thing to be in church and to be around God's people and to sort of have a second-hand feeling of safety. But when the hard times really come, are you running inside the walls or are you staying outside the walls? There were people in the old covenant, just as there are people in the new covenant, who had false security, who believed that they were secure, who believed that nothing could ever touch Jerusalem because it's a perfect city. And then they had to watch it burn to the ground. There are people who think nothing bad can ever happen to me because I'm close to the people of God, because I go to church every week. Years ago, we were trying to help a marriage, a man in a marriage, and I remember talking to him, and there was church discipline involved and things like that, and we were just round after round of trying to get him to see his sin and come to Jesus and all these things. And I remember him saying, Well, at least I know that God is for me. And I said, why in the world do you think God is for you? How in the world could you get that from everything we've been saying? And he proved by his actions and his lack of faith that God has not yet seen fit to save him. Jesus says in Matthew 7 that many will say on the last day, Lord, Lord, look at all the stuff we did in your name. I had perfect attendance at church. My tithe check never bounced. I went to all the work days. I did what I was supposed to do. And Jesus will say, on that day, he will say to some, I never knew you. It is possible to be saved and not feel like you're saved. And that's what the first four verses are all about. it is frighteningly also possible to not be saved and to think wrongly that you are. And that is the worst tragedy. And it is possible that there are people here today who have lived in false security and need to hear the warning that those who turn aside to their crooked ways, those who are still nursing their sin and pretending outwardly to follow Jesus but still giving themselves to their own desires secretly, The Lord will lead away with evildoers. So this is the warning, and this is something I can't prescribe, I can't point to you and say this is you. This is only something God through his Holy Spirit can do. And it may be that everybody here who professes Jesus is a genuine born-again believer, and we would praise God for that, wouldn't we? But Jesus also says there will always be tares among the wheat, that in the church there will always be people pretending There will always be people who are bearing, I'm bouncing around scripture passages now, but the parable of the sower says there are always going to be people who show some fruit, but it dries up really quickly. So this is you, this warning, this discomfort you feel today, the ground moving underneath your feet is the grace of God. When God says to somebody who's not saved that they're not saved, he's not being mean. There's nothing more kind he could do to you than to convince you that you are outside the city where you will be secure. So this is an invitation to anyone who has not genuinely put their trust in the Lord to do that today. Well, as we come to a close, some of you who have been here for most of this sermon series will think to yourself, well, Jared hasn't said anything about the conversations of Psalm 125. I thought maybe we'd get by one sermon without him saying anything about it. No such luck. Let's consider finally the conversation of Psalm 125. Who is singing and to whom are they singing? In Psalm 125, there's one verse that is addressed as a prayer to God. That's verse four. Do good, O Lord, to those who are good. That's a prayer to God. The rest of Psalm 125, verses one, two, three, and five, are all directed from the king to the people. This is a song where the king, figuratively speaking, is singing to instruct the people about the security that they have in the Lord. If this was written during the times of David and Solomon, kings like that, this is the king declaring to his people what God has used him to secure for them. If this was written as a post-exilic song, it was written by faith, imagining a time where the king would be singing to his people. Regardless, this is a song today where by faith we need to hear Jesus singing to us today. We need to imagine a king standing up in front of his people and saying, those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion which cannot be moved but abides forever. If by faith you can hear Jesus saying to you, as the mountains surround Jerusalem so the Lord surrounds his people, If you walk out of here not with Jared's voice in your ears, but Jesus' voice in your heart, you will begin to enjoy the security you have. Psalm 125 is a song where the king says to his people, you are secure. And it's one thing for me to tell you you are secure because I can't protect you from anything. But when the king of the universe, who made all things by the word of his power, who stood in the desert facing the enemy that you could never face and said no to Satan three times, who walked up to the gates of death that none of you can beat and none of us can beat, and walked right through, when that king says, oh, you're secure, then you have every reason to listen. When King Jesus prays for his people, those prayers will always be answered. It's one thing for me to pray for you, Lord, do good to those who are good, but if you can, by faith, hear Jesus calling down the blessings of his Father on the people that he has paid for, then you will feel the security that God has won for you. Robert Murray McShane said most famously, if I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. If your ears could hear Jesus today bringing your name to his father and said, do good to them, they belong to me, what would you be afraid of? Not a thing. And Jesus is praying for you by name right now. He is praying for what he has paid for when Jesus prays, do good to those who are good. He's praying for what he has paid for and he is declaring to us the result of all of that. And so when he ends the Psalm by saying, peace be upon Israel, it is not an empty wish. of hurting people. I just hope God brings us peace. It is the declaration of the king. I have earned it. I have bought it. I have won it. I'm declaring it and I will secure and keep the peace until you come to the city. You couldn't be more secure than you are right now. And if you would enjoy that, pray for ears to hear the king speak. Sing Psalm 125 this week. Look to the cross, look to the empty grave as the proof that God has accepted the sacrifice of your Savior, that no sin will be held against you, that death cannot hold you, and that no enemy of this world will ever conquer the people of God. You are as secure as God is strong. Let's stand and pray together. Father, it's a good time for my favorite prayer from Scripture. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We believe, we trust, we accept Jesus saying that we're safe, and we also confess, Lord, how thin and weak our faith often is. So would you strengthen the faith of each of your people here today, that they could hear with faith the Savior saying, peace be upon Israel. Lord, we pray especially for any who might not yet be saved, who are thinking about becoming Christians, who are young children looking and considering, would you be so gracious as to take away every last bit of false security so that they would run into the city and find in Jesus true security? We look to you for all of this and we praise you for it in Jesus' name, amen.