Trust His Help

States, as I visit churches, one of the things that I feel like is noticeable is what kind of a heart they have for work outside of their own body. Every church has a lot of different needs. There are many needs in this community. And so to get to know a church that cares about what's going on on the other side of the world, is an incredible encouragement to us as we serve there. And that's what I feel like I've gotten to know as we get to know you more and more. So grateful for you, Jefferson Park, and your partnership and ministry. The other great gratitude that I have is a personal friendship with your senior pastor, with Keith. Megan and I, as we were driving into town, we were just reflecting on our first impressions of Keith, which I will not share with you. Keith and I started off playing basketball together, and I'll say that we, well, no, let's not say anything about that. But over the years, as our friendship has deepened, there's nobody that I'm more grateful for than Keith Goad. He's the kind of loyal friend, the kind of man who will speak truth to me, really just the kind of person that I need in my life to persevere in ministry. So I'm really grateful to God for him and just to be with all of you this morning. I want to start off telling just a story about my time in college. I became a believer in college at James Madison University through the witness of some fellow students who came to my dorm room and woke me from my mid-afternoon nap and shared Christ with me. When I was a junior in college, I moved off of campus with a number of my new Christian friends. And that was just an amazing time. It was kind of the first time to rent an apartment. We felt like we were grown up and had a blast that year doing a lot of different things. But at the end of that year, a number of us just felt like we missed being in the dormitories. We missed kind of rubbing shoulders with people who were at very different places than us spiritually. We wanted to be a witness for Christ in the dorms. So we put our names into the I don't know, the lottery or the hopper or whatever it is, to be placed back on campus. And so I was assigned a roommate in Gifford Hall with a student named Yusuf Hassan. He was from Iran. And I was so excited about this. I just, I was feeling like this was going to be so awesome. I remember the first night we were in the dormitory together. We had met and we had, you know, we were laying down in the bunks. I was on the top bunk. He was on the bottom. We just started talking after we turned out the lights. I probably talked for about two hours. He shared his Muslim faith with me. I was able to share with him my Christian testimony and talk about the gospel. And I felt like our relationship couldn't have gotten off to a better start. Just looking forward to a whole year of getting to know each other. Of course, I was hoping and praying that he would become a believer. Little did I know that that would be the last conversation, I think, of more than five minutes that I would ever have that year with Yusuf. You see, the next night, I discovered that Yusuf was a part of an online gaming community of some kind. So at 7 p.m. at night, he got in front of the computer console. Now, this was 1994, so I don't know what the game on the screen was. It just looked like words kind of scrolling in different colors. He was playing with people all over the U.S., and Yusuf's pattern was he would start playing this game at 7 p.m., and he would play it all night. When I say all night, I mean when I got up at 7 a.m. to get ready for my 8 o'clock classes, he would take that as his signal to turn the computer off and go to bed. And then he would sleep during the daylight hours, arising mere minutes before each of his classes, go into class, come back, and continue sleeping. And so Yusuf and I never really had any more significant conversations that year, if you can believe it. As I think back to that year, I've got these questions that I imagine going and asking Yousef. Things like, what is it about the game that draws you in so much? Why not break out of it every once in a while? Wouldn't it be better to talk to a live person like me than whatever you're trying to type to people through the computer? I thought of this recently when I read a book by an MIT professor named Sherry Turkle. It's called Alone Together, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She's writing on the effect of the new technological connectivity that we all find ourselves living in. Listen to just one thing that she writes in this book. The ties we form through the internet are not in the end the ties that bind, but they are the ties that preoccupy. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don't want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in real time. We are alone together. We go online because we are busy, but end up spending more time with technology and less with each other. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other. At the limit, we will settle for the inanimate, if that's what it takes. I wonder what you think about what she writes there, preoccupied, hiding through technology, alone, together. During that senior year of college, Yusuf and I were definitely alone together most of the time. And what makes me sad as I look back isn't so much that he missed out on a relationship with me, but that he missed an opportunity to get to know the God who made him. I pray that Yusuf has come to know him since then. Now we can talk about the way in which technological preoccupation keeps us from each other in relationships many times, but I want to use this idea as a metaphor this morning to think about our relationship with God. In the same way that Yusuf and I were in the dorm room with declining communication and little expectation of deeper relationship, I think that sometimes we as Christians can have the same thing going on in our relationships with God. That is to say, we can start off really well. have intimate communication, have desire for growth in our relationship with him, and yet as time progresses, sometimes, because of preoccupation, because of busyness, really because of lowering expectations, we can fail to experience what he intends for us to. I wonder this morning if you would describe yourself in any of those ways. Distracted, preoccupied, whether by technology or just the complexity of life. I wonder if you would say this morning that you long to return to a place of deeper connection with Him, a place where you're praying specific prayers and seeing God answer them. I wonder if when someone asks you the question, how are you doing spiritually, you immediately think of activities, going to church, reading the Bible, prayer, or do you think of intimacy with God Himself? As we look at Psalm 121 this morning, I want us to consider our relationships with God. I want you to think about your relationship with Him. The psalm is really a call for us to look to Him for help and to trust Him. And it does really call us to expect more from Him and less from ourselves. I wanna give a main idea for the sermon. You can write this down. This is what I think summarizes the main point of the text. God's people look to him for help because they trust he will keep them safe. God's people look to him for help because they trust he will keep them safe. So the two points will be first, God's people look to him for help. That'll be verses one and two. And then God's people trust he will keep them safe in verses three through eight. Let me just read the first two verses again. 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." You'll notice in your Bible a small font introduction there before those verses that just says, a song of ascents. The 15 psalms from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134 are a collection, it seems. They all have that introduction. We don't know exactly what it means. These psalms may have been sung by pilgrims as they were traveling to Jerusalem. A lot of the psalms actually talk about Jerusalem itself. So it may kind of be a pilgrim song. They're all really short. The kind of things that you'll have stick in your head, like the chorus to He Will Hold Me Fast. You might find yourself singing that on your way home from church. That's kind of the way these psalms are. Verse one there immediately raises some questions that we want to answer. We want to know, what is making this writer cry out for help? That's really what's going on, right? He's asking for help. So we want to know what's going on in his life. Why is he looking up to the hills? The context of the psalm tells us that he's facing some kind of a need, some kind of danger even. He speaks of needing the Lord to keep or guard him again and again. He's concerned with his foot sliding. He mentions being kept safe from all evil. So I think this is easy enough for us to picture. Think of a time in your life where you were desperate for help, where you might have been crying out, God help me, I need your help. But why the hills there? Why does he lift up his eyes to the hills? Does he see danger in the hills? Sometimes raiders would kind of hide in the mountain areas and swoop down on travelers in the valleys, perhaps to rob them or even kill them. So he may have been looking up to the hills thinking, is danger about to fall on me? I think it's probably more likely that he's actually looking to the hills and considering where he's going to get help. It was common in the ancient Near East to build shrines to different gods on mountaintops. It's the same way in China today. Almost all of the Buddhist shrines are built on mountaintops. And Mount Zion, Jerusalem itself, where the temple was, was also built on a mountain. So it may kind of frame his question in this way. In my need, which of these mountains holds the help for me? Regardless of which one of these things is true, the psalmist, as he lifts up his eyes to the hills, is asking a question that we can relate to. Where does my help come from? That's a universal question, regardless of where you're from, regardless of how old you are, regardless of what's going on in your life. Where do you get help from? I know I'm just coming into town, I haven't spent a long time with this congregation, so I don't know exactly what's happening in many of your lives. But I imagine that there are kind of three kind of categories as we think about this question, where does our help come from? Some of you are here this morning, and when I ask you to consider what's going on in your life that makes you need help, you immediately think of something. There is some overwhelming and pressing need that you have. In this situation, you come to the psalm hungry. You just need to read the words and take them into your soul. They're food for you. My help comes from the Lord. I was in this situation since I was with you last. My dad got hip surgery. He ended up contracting an infection, a MRSA infection that would take his life. He spent about six months in the hospital. For much of that time, I was overseas, unable to be with him. And then as I was able to come and spend time with him in the hospital, I just felt desperate. I was desperate, number one, to help my dad, that he would recover from this disease, but there was nothing I could do other than pray. I was desperate even more that he would respond to the gospel, that he would believe in Jesus and be saved. And there again, as we could read the Bible together, I could talk with him, but I was powerless to do anything other than pray. My prayers were really short. God help me, help my dad, You're the only one who can do something. Psalm 121 was sweet to me then. So some of you this morning may find yourself there, some clear, some desperate, some overwhelming need. There are others of you here that come to this text aware of many needs. So I say, where do you need help? And you say, where don't I need help? I need help in lots of ways, at work, at home, in relationships, financial pressures, all kinds of things going on in my life. I was thinking about it. We have a three-year-old. Over the last year, he's been learning to speak more. which is really cute in a lot of different ways. But he's cutest when he throws temper tantrums. So I think he got this from his siblings. I would say no to him, and he would say, you never let me do that. And then he would stare at me. But that wouldn't be enough, so he'd wanna punctuate that with some time references, but he would get them mixed up. So he'd say, you never let me do that, every day, all the time, last year. which of course would only make us laugh. But that might be you as you think about help. Where do you need help? Every day, all the time, last year. As I process this psalm, it's the struggle with anger that makes me think about every day, all the time, last year. I used to get angry mainly on the basketball court and when I was driving. Now I see anger cropping up in all kinds of different places. I can be angry with my kids. I can be angry with my spouse. I can get angry over blog posts and articles I'll read in the newspaper. Realizing that I can't control my anger is what makes me cry out, where does my help come from? I know the anger is sinful, but I seem powerless to change it. So I can only cry out with the psalmist, God help me, you have to change this in me. There's a third category that some of you may find yourself in, and that's not very aware of your need for help at all. So the test here is the yawn test. Do you read Psalm 121 and yawn, perhaps thinking that you are strong enough not to need help? This is the sense of self-reliance that is in many of us. I mean, none of us would say if we're well-taught God helps those who help themselves, but we often live like it, don't we? To be sure, God never means for us to be lazy or waiting around for a divine handout when we're supposed to be busy about his business. But friends, self-reliance is ultimately a terrible place for us to find ourselves in in our Christian lives. We are fragile people with incredible needs, and God designed us to see those needs and to cry out to him for help. So I don't know where you find yourself this morning. Desperate for help? Every day, all the time, last year, needing help? or not very aware of your need for help and needing to face that. Whatever the case, I think the psalmist means to teach us by example how to face trouble in our lives. So what he's given us here in just the first two verses is a three-step process, something that we can lock in our minds. This is what you do when you're in trouble. So let's look briefly, three things. First, look up. Lift up your eyes. This is a rejection of despair. When overwhelmed, struggling, confused, we can often just give in to despondency. We can be similar to Jack Nicholson's character in that movie that walks into the psychiatric office and says, has it ever occurred to you that this is just as good as it gets? We laugh at that, but we can live like it sometimes. So first, we need to look up, adopt a posture that rejects despair and looks to God. Secondly, we need to ask. He says, where does my help come from? Two things you're asking when you're looking to God for help. I mean, number one is you're just acknowledging that you need it and asking him to provide what you lack. But secondly, you're asking where you're gonna get it. This is a rejection of self-reliance. God made us able to do many things, but with the reminders we have of our fragility, we are people who need to look to him. I was thinking as we were driving here that GPS has kept many of us men from ever needing to ask for help anymore. It's been a great blessing to the wives who don't have to groan over their husband's unwillingness to ask for help. But in many ways, that can just be a further cover-up to the way we act so often. I was thinking in China where we live, most people who live around us are atheists. They're taught that way from a young age. I used to bristle at the accusation that some of my friends would kind of direct my way that religion is just a crutch for weak people. That's what they would say. That's to some degree what they've been taught. You know, they would say it's part of a larger argument that it was come up with at a time when pre-scientific people didn't know how to explain the world that we live in. We've moved on from that. Now you just trust yourself. And that's really the number one answer. If you ask people in China, what do you believe? They will say, I believe in myself. It's an expression of self-confidence. I used to try to just attack that idea in many different ways. I've found with people I'm in a relationship with, I just need to wait. Because those 22-year-olds that would say that to me as life has gone along, many of them have come back and say, you know what, I need help. That commercial says life comes at you fast, right? And as life comes at us, it exposes the fact that we were made to need help. I think as Christians, we need to make sure that we don't act like atheists by failing to pray. I think sometimes the question of how's your prayer life isn't very helpful because it's too abstract. The question is, are you asking for specific help with the specific things going on in your life? How many things are you anxious about? How many things are you complaining about to others that you haven't prayed about? So first look up, second ask, and then third declare. Declare what you believe to be true. My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. This is a rejection of idolatry. He answers first by telling us the name of God. It is Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel, who made promises to his people. He's thereby rejecting idols and false gods around him. This is the God who made the heavens and the earth. He roots his confidence in the creating power of God, the one true God. Declaring the truth is a strategy for remembering the truth. We know the phrase here, it's used in the Apostles' Creed, I believe in God the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth. But we need to call that truth to mind specifically in the things that we're praying for. So God who made the mountains and the rivers, I need help to talk to my neighbor about the gospel. God who made the stars and calls them each by name, I need help to overcome this addiction that plagues me. God who creates life itself, I need help to raise my children with grace and patience. So he gives us an example to follow, and that really is our first application this morning. Do this. When you're facing trouble, look up, ask, and declare. But all of that leads us to an important question, I think. Why is it that we can have confidence in this God? How do I know that I can rely on him to help me in what's going on in my life? I think it's an important question because it deals with our motivation for asking. So let's consider secondly that God's people trust that he will keep them safe and read verses three through eight. 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 wonder if you notice the shift in pronouns between verses 1 and 2 and 3 through 8. The I, my, my becomes your, you, Israel. What's happening there is the psalmist goes from thinking about himself to now exhorting others. He has something to say to the other believers around him. And I think that teaches us something important about the single qualification for ministering to other people. What is it? Personal faith. If you have faith in the Lord and know how to get help from him through prayer, you're ready to help other people. I think that's really, really significant. I think all of us struggle to some degree with thinking that somebody else is the one who's supposed to minister in that situation. We're slow to think that God wants to use us. I've been to seminary. I went to seminary with two of your pastors. There are many wonderful things about seminary. They teach you things that are helpful there, but they do not teach you this. This is something that can only be learned personally. You and God. When you're in trouble, and you look to him for help and find him sufficient, you're ready to turn to the person next to you and say, I know where the help is. I can point you there. So I think that's something we should notice just with the transition. But how is it that the psalmist helps us? Because truth be told, often we're the ones with the issue. We struggle with going to God for help. So he gives us reasons we can trust God, motivations. Let's look at several. First, he won't let your foot be moved. That's what he says there in verse 3. It's an image of a hiker. I don't know if any of you like hiking, kind of going through the mountains. Think about travelers over a mountain path that gets slippery. And just thinking back to my own limited hiking experience, I've spent some time in Colorado and I remember one time a friend said, let's just go hiking up this path, it seemed like a good idea. But then he said, let's leave the path and go scrambling over those boulders and make it up to that ridge. And I was young and dumb, so I said, okay, let's go ahead and do that. Well, it was the kind of thing where we got to points where we couldn't go back, but going forward just seemed to get worse and worse and worse. There were several points at which I just felt like if my foot were to lose its spot, if it were to slide on rocks, I would be finished. And we got up to the top and looked down, and it was like, why did we do that? That was a really terrible idea. But the idea of a foot sliding is a really scary one. A sliding foot in the Bible is actually an image of judgment. So in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses writes this about the enemies of God. This is God speaking, vengeance is mine and recompense. For the time when their foot shall slip, for the day of their calamity is at hand and their doom comes swiftly. When God there speaks of his enemies, he's talking about anyone who is not redeemed and brought into his family. If you're here this morning and you're not a born-again Christian, God's speaking about you there. He's saying that the time will come when your foot shall slide. And what that means is the wrath that he has justly, rightly against sin will come upon you. You're actually a rebel against him, no matter how encouraging your neighbors are about you being a nice person. If you've never come to the place in your life where you've been willing to turn away from sin, trusting in yourself and living for yourself, and put your trust in God's chosen provision for sin, which is Jesus Christ died on the cross. If you've never done that, if you've never turned from sin and trusted in Christ, then you should know that this is talking about you. Your foot shall slide in due time. But the really good news this morning is that you don't have to stay there. You don't have to do anything more than have a change of heart where you say, I don't want to follow sin and self anymore. God, I want to trust in Jesus Christ. I want him to pay the penalty for me on the cross. I want to be redeemed and to become your child. You can do that by faith this morning. And I would encourage you to do that. If you do, and brothers and sisters, everyone who has done that, we are finally then able to claim this promise. He will not let your foot be moved. What an amazing transition from your foot shall slide in due time to he, it's almost like he's saying your feet are there in that precarious, mountain spot, and you could lose your footing, but I've got your ankles. They're not going anywhere. It's incredible encouragement for all of us. He will not let your foot be moved. He will preserve you by his power. That's the first reason to trust him. The second reason he gives here is that he does not sleep. He actually says that several times. Verse three and verse four, he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. You know, if you think about it, the best friend you have, the best human friends you've ever had, still lets you down from time to time. We still fall asleep on the job as friends sometimes, don't we? The psalmist here is saying that God is not like any human helper. He doesn't help you for a little while and then forget and get preoccupied and leave you in your hour of need. I was thinking about my kids and what they experience when they ask me for help with their homework. You know, I'm good for about two minutes, so I'll start a math problem with Caroline, and we'll get part of way into the math problem, and then the phone will ring, or there's somebody at the door, a delivery man, or some child needs help in the bathroom, and she finally realizes she's got to do the problem herself. That's the way we are as human helpers many times. But God is consistent. He's always holding your foot. The never-sleeping nature of God is a precious theological truth. And then look at verse four. He expands it, not just to the way it affects us. He says, behold, he who keeps Israel does not slumber or sleep. So he expands it from the individual Christian to the whole people of God. He's keeping them. He's protecting and preserving his church. An example of that that's really encouraged me as I've meditated on this is just the incredible testimony of the church in China. from 1949 to 1979. I mean, a time of incredible persecution, where really a fledgling church was left without anybody from the outside, any foreign missionaries, and was subjected to systematic and really terrible persecution, where even seven or eight Christians gathering together was dangerous and could cost you your life. In the 1980s, as missionaries went back in and expected to find not much less, not much left, instead they found a church that had multiplied and grown. And I feel like there's no other explanation for that than the preserving power of God. He kept his church. But we can think about it even on the level of just one church. Jefferson Park, as you think about your many decades of existence, the seasons of ministry that have gone on here, listen to the older saints as they tell of God's faithfulness to this church, the way he has protected and preserved you. He doesn't sleep. Let that encourage your soul today. But there's a third reason he gives here that we should trust him. And that's that God is our keeper. That's really the big idea of the whole section. He's already used the word keeps twice. He uses it six times all together. The word means to protect, to guard, to keep safe. My kids have started playing soccer this past year, and so to them, a keeper is just another name for goalie, right? In youth soccer, things can break down for a team really quickly. So we had games this past year where the game just started, I'm in a conversation with my wife or somebody else, and it's already 3-0. And you're like, how did that happen? And that would happen regularly to my boys' team, 3-0, 5-0, 7-0, until we got Eric. And somebody really should check Eric's birth certificate. He's tall, he's coordinated, he's smart. Everything turns around when you have a good keeper in soccer. Well, God is the keeper of all keepers. Look at what that means here. Verse 5. He is the shade on your right hand. That word shade is also translated shadow. Like in Psalm 91.1, he who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. You're kept safe because there's a shadow over you. It gives you shelter. That should encourage you. It reminds you that nothing makes it to you that doesn't pass through God's hands first. He is on the right hand, it says. That's the place of an advocate or a protector. Psalm 16, eight says, I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Then verses six and seven, that shadow means that the sun will not strike you by day or the moon by night. Now in the hot July sun, it's not hard for us to imagine what that image is of the sun's rays striking you. The difference between being out in the sun versus in the shade is a huge difference. But that idea of the moon, the moon's rays striking you is a little different for us. In the ancient Near East, the moon's rays were thought to be harmful, even thought to make people crazy. That's where we get the idea of being moonstruck. But he might simply be referring to the cold of the night up in the mountains. Either way, day and night, he's saying all the time, he keeps his children. And then verses seven and eight summarize the keeping, guarding, protecting nature of God. He will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. He will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. I read one book that said that Orthodox Jews still recite verse eight as they go out of their home each day. He will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. God is the keeper of his children, their lives, their faith, their souls, their eternity. It's really a psalm about assurance, isn't it? It's meant to reassure you. You should take the promises in and chew on them. But I want us to think about applying these assurances in three different ways specifically. First to our expectations, then to our fears, and then to our prayers. So first, let's apply this psalm to our expectations. And what I mean is this. What do you expect from God? If I'm reading my audience right, there are some of you here that are new Christians. You're probably just excited to be a child of God and trusting him to take care of you. Praying simple and clear prayers, you're good. Stay there, okay? Many of you, I think, have been a Christian for a long time. There are many mature saints in this room, which is wonderful. But I think if you're like me, as we are a Christian for a longer and longer time, we can sometimes experience a lowering of our expectations towards God. I mean, one of the reasons this can happen is that our expectations at first can be incomplete or incorrect. So I remember being a new Christian and thinking that I could kind of look at my different sin struggles and expect that God was going to help me overcome them in the next 12 to 18 months. Okay, and so as I've been a Christian longer and realized that his work in my life is going to be a lifetime, it's going to be slow, it's going to be progressive, I will struggle with indwelling sin until I die. So some of it can be that our expectations were wrong at the beginning. But what I'm after here is that as hard things happen to us in life or to those around us, we can start to wonder, I wonder if God really bothers. with the things that are going on in my little life. We can start to feel strange about asking him to do specific things, to intervene where we need help. And so my concern is that if we're not careful that our trust can erode as we lower our expectations of God in our lives. We can have subtle doubt that he is keeping us, that he is protecting us, that he is growing us. The God who says he will keep your life and he's gonna guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore is a God you can trust to help you grow today. Don't lower your expectations of him. Pursue a level of intimacy with him that there are things you're praying for today, this week that are specific. Don't find yourself merely praying, God bless me and everyone I know all the time. Move from those kind of general prayers to asking him for specific help. Surely that's what this Psalm of Assurance is meant to point us to. Don't lower your expectations. But let's apply it to our fears as well. It says that he will keep us from all evil, all harm, These words are meant to dispel anxiety as we look to the future. And we might say, but I know bad things happen to Christians, right? Megan and I had a good friend who served with us in China for many years. She died of cancer three years ago. And I've, in the process of her battling with cancer and then afterwards, we're good friends with her, her husband and her kids that she left behind. I've kind of made a promise to myself that I would always try to apply scriptures like these to her and to him. And kind of ask the question, well, did he keep her foot from being moved? Did he guard her life? And of course, the answer is yes, but we've got to answer the question in a way that zooms out a little bit, don't we? If we're going to deal with our fears. Because if it's just a matter of, God, keep anything bad from ever happening to me, then we know we're not going to be able to read this psalm with faith, because we know that hard things happen. But friends, it really does change hardship and suffering to know that God uses them redemptively. You've gotta believe that in the core of your soul. You've gotta believe that he's taking that really, really painful, terrible situation and using it for good. And I think the greatest thing we can do to strengthen our trust muscles is to look regularly at the cross and just consider these words on Jesus' lips. Because when he looked up his eyes to the hill of Calvary, from the short term, he didn't see any help. We could look at it and say, well, if Jesus was praying these words, God did let his foot be moved. God didn't guard his life. God didn't keep his going out and his coming in from this time forth and forevermore. But we know that would be a mistake, right? We could only say that if we look at it from the standpoint of Good Friday. If we look at it from the standpoint of Easter and the resurrection of his son from the grave and the accomplishment of his redemptive plan for all of his people, then we would say that is very wrong. God used the greatest injustice. He used the greatest pain. He used the greatest sorrow to keep his children forevermore. And with our muscles so strengthened, we can then look at the trials of our own life. and the lives of those around us. He did keep Brandy. He did keep her husband Matt. He did keep their children. He just intended to use that redemptively in all of their lives and the lives of many more people who knew their testimony. So brothers and sisters, apply this psalm to your fears today. As you look out into the future and see many anxious things, Trust that God will keep you, even if it means walking through hardship. Finally, we should apply this psalm to our prayers. Psalm 121 never tells us specifically to pray, does it? But it should make you want to. If you see your need for help and you see God's commitment to you, prayerlessness just doesn't make any sense. What are you worried about right now that you're not praying about? What kind of relationship are you cultivating with the God who loves you this way? I began by talking about my relationship with my roommate Yusuf. When I think back to us living in the same dormitory room together, so much potential for relationship, but distraction, preoccupation just got in the way. It happened to be a computer game. It could just as easily have been something else that got in the way of that. Brothers and sisters, we don't want our relationships with God to be like that, do we? We should never be too busy for a God this committed to our good, committed to be our help, a God who has shown himself to love us enough to give his only son for us all. We've got no reason to be alone together with him. So let's lift up our eyes to him this morning. Let's ask where our help comes from. And let's declare that it comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. Let's pray together. Our Father, you've been so much better to us than we deserve. It's a joy for us to read these words of love written from you to us this morning. I pray that you would write them on our hearts. Give us faith to trust you. In Jesus' name, Amen.