The Guardian Of My Soul

Thank you, worship team.

Appreciate that.

I'd like to ask you this morning to turn, if you would, in your Bibles to Psalm 121.

Psalm 121.

I'd like to read that.

I'd like to pray.

And then simply try to walk through this and listen and try to apply what God says to us this morning.

So follow along in your Bible if you have it.

Psalm 121.

A song of assent.

And now David begins to speak to us.

And through David, God speaks to us.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.

Where does my help come from?

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 or 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 forward and forevermore.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, I ask that you would take this powerful, simple, clear psalm and enable it to be living and active and powerful and sharp in our own lives.

I pray, Father, that my futile attempts to bring this to the fore would help and not get in the way of what you are wanting to say to us.

Heavenly Father, I ask that you would give us hearts that are longing to hear from you.

I pray you would give us ears that are open for what you are saying to us today.

And I pray that you would give us a spirit that wants to respond to you and to your word.

Father, if that happens, that will be a miracle.

So help us, I pray, in Christ's name.

Amen.

Whenever I think of this psalm, which I like to think of as the keeper of my soul, I think about a Monday.

About 12 years ago, Jane and I were living in Germany at the time.

I was pastoring an English-speaking church in the Black Forest.

I always take Mondays as my day off.

Somehow or another, Sunday is never a day of rest for me.

So Monday is my Sunday.

And I get out and I relax and I recreate.

That's what recreation is supposed to be, not just diversion, but recreation.

Recreation.

For me, that almost always involves going out for a hike or a long walk, as strenuous and as long as I can get away with, as long as Jane will allow me to.

Here, I tend to walk along the Greenway or along the Coolie by us, and that's really good, but it doesn't beat the Black Forest of Germany, the hills, the wooded ups and downs of Germany.

And so probably 50 out of 52 weeks a year, I would take off in the morning, and we could, from our backyard, I could immediately be on a trail that you could walk for hundreds of miles all over little villages and vineyards and woods and trails, and it was outstanding.

This particular October, it was cold, it was dark, it was drizzling, it was foggy, and it was kind of invigorating and miserable all at the same time.

So I was out, and uh my goal that day, I have to have a goal, of course, uh, I had seen in the walking map, the trail map that I had, not too far away a ruins of what was supposed to be an old castle that was run down and just rubble.

And it was there on the map, and so I was going along, and I had my backpack and I had my walking stick, and I was it was raining and I was getting wet, and I was drenched to the skin.

And I went for about five or six hours, and for all of the world I could not find that silly uh castle ruins.

So I was ready to give up.

I said, phooy with this, and I gave Jane a call on my cell phone and I said, Honey, I'm gonna be a little bit late.

I'm drenched, I'm tired, I'm cranky, I'm gonna go, and I'm just gonna stop at this village gust house that I had been to before.

Now, a gusthouse in uh the southern part of Germany, in every village has what they call a Gasthouse, and it is kind of a combination of what to us would be maybe a Starbucks or a pub or a local diner or restaurant where people just gather.

And so I walk into this Gasthaus, and the interesting thing about a German Gasthaus, especially in small villages, it's the hangout for the locals.

Those of us who are not local to that village are welcome, and they have maybe a total of maybe ten little tables.

They're normally pretty small.

Uh, and those tables will have perhaps a simple tablecloth and place settings and so forth.

But there's one table, and the minute you walk in, you understand there's two kinds of people in the guest house.

There's the locals, and there's the rest of us.

I was not a local.

Um, so I walk in, look around, and I quickly realized where I was to sit or not sit.

And where you do not sit is the Stum Tish.

And there's one particular table, uh, no tablecloth, no placemats, no nothing, no menus.

And that's where the locals go.

I think they get local prices too.

I think it's far probably far cheaper.

Almost any gust house you go into, you will notice one table that's different from the rest.

In our part of Germany, that was designated by a certain different lamp that was hung, different from all of the other lamps.

Uh and in that part of Germany, most of the Stamtisch, the that special table for the insiders, there was also a bell up there, kind of like a cowbell.

I never figured out what in the world that was for.

But I knew my place when I walked in.

Tired, wet.

So I sat down as close to the Stomptish as I could get.

There were four other people in that gasthouse.

There were two elderly men, I don't mean my age, I mean elderly men, and two other people.

Um one of the men was seating at the table, sitting at the table, and he he just kind of kept his face a little bit down, didn't move, didn't talk.

I'm not even sure he blinked.

He had no contact whatsoever with the other three people at the table or with anybody else in the ghost house.

There was another man there who, well, the the other two people besides these two men was a man and a woman.

The man was the proprietor and also the cook.

The woman was the wife of the proprietor and was the waitress.

Um, these two men, the one I've just described, the other, he was talking.

And I know enough German that I can, as I said in the first service, I can get into trouble, but not always out of trouble with my German.

Uh Flemish?

Fluent, no problem there.

But German, a little more hard, a little more difficult.

So I sat there and I listened, and actually I could understand what he was saying.

This man was he was really anxious.

As I listened, I realized later that week he was going to be going into a hospital.

Now, in that location, in that culture, men of that age, going into a hospital is like I'm going there to die.

That's what hospitals are for.

You go to and you die.

And as a matter of fact, this man had been diagnosed with cancer, and he was going to be going in for cancer treatment, and he was afraid.

And he was talking, he was trying to engage the others around him.

That first man, no reaction.

The proprietor and his wife, they politely listened, kind of, and changed the subject as quickly as possible because him talking about his anxiety of death made them profoundly uncomfortable.

So I'm observing all of this going on just right over here, as close as that second microphone is.

Now, I had in front of me the text of Psalm 121.

I had written it out with a marker on a piece of paper, and part of what I was doing during that walk was memorizing Psalm 121.

Now, it had rained, that paper was absolutely soggy, the blue marker was dribbling down.

I could barely, I mean, you know, you've probably been there, but that's all right.

I was dripping and everything.

So I had Psalm 121 in front of me, which we have just read and we are going to look at this morning.

But the day before, this was a Monday, in our church service the day before, uh we had sung, I Have a Maker.

He formed my heart.

Before even time began, my life was in his hand.

He knows my name.

He knows my every thought.

He sees each tear that falls.

And he hears me when I call.

I have a Father.

He calls me his own.

He'll never leave me, no matter where I go.

Now, interesting play going on here, interaction going on between Psalm 121.

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 stumble.

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 or 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 have a Maker, He formed my heart.

Before even time began, my life was in his hand.

He knows my name.

He knows my every thought.

He sees each tear that falls, and he hears me when I call.

I have a father.

He calls me his own.

He'll never leave me, no matter where I go.

And as I was, the this psalm and this song were all mumbled up in my uh thinking, and I looked around and I thought this man who is all withdrawn in himself, not interacting with those around him, what does he need?

Well, he needs the father.

He needs a keeper, he needs a protector, he needs someone.

He just doesn't, he doesn't know how to interact with those around him.

He probably doesn't know what to do with the thoughts and feelings in his own heart and mind.

And my heart just went out to him and I was thinking, he needs the father, he needs this keeper.

That's what he needs.

That's what I need.

That's what he needs.

And the man who was going in that week for cancer treatment, in his opinion, he was probably going to die.

What does he need?

He needs someone to protect him.

He needs some assurance about God who is able to see him through that situation.

What does the proprietor need?

What does the proprietor's wife need?

What do you need?

What do I need?

I need a keeper of my soul.

I need a father who knows my name, who has promised to be there for me and to help me no matter where I go, who experiences and understands my tears.

You may think that an ornary old guy like me has no tears.

Baloney, I just don't let you see them most of the time.

Just like you don't usually let me see yours.

But I know they're there.

What do we need?

What do we need?

That's what this Psalm is all about.

So I'd like to just kind of try to unpack it here a little bit.

This is part of the Psalms of Ascent.

We looked at one last week.

We're looking at a second one this week.

There's 15 Psalms, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134, that form a little book of Psalms within the big book of Psalms, kind of a unit of Psalms, Psalms of the Soul, Psalms in which the author is speaking about his spiritual life.

And these were designed, or at least were later used, by people in Israel who would take a pilgrimage and they would travel three times a year with other people from their little village and with their family.

And they would go up to Mount Zion.

They would go up to the Temple Mount, the highest spot in Judah.

And they would journey.

It would take them several days, depending upon where they lived.

Israel was not a large country, but you don't get very far very fast on your feet.

And so these were pilgrimage psalms.

They would go up in the spring for the Passover, the Feast of Passover.

They would go up in early summer for the Feast of Pentecost.

They would go up for the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall.

Three times a year.

A band of people who were taking their faith seriously.

And this was a spiritual guidebook, as it were, these Psalms.

And they read them and they sang them probably together.

And this was a devotional guide for the faithful of Israel as they were taking their journey up through the hills, going to Mount Zion, to Jerusalem.

It's very highly, extremely likely that when Mary and Joseph and 12-year-old Jesus went up to Jerusalem together with others in their family and others, that as they took their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that they read or sang this psalm.

Isn't that interesting?

We've got a devotional guide that ministered to, I'm convinced, I'll ask him when I get there, but I'm convinced that Jesus almost certainly meditated on this psalm.

Jesus, I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come?

Jesus says, He knows where he's going.

He knows what would happen 20 some years later.

Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord.

I can just imagine young Jesus nurturing his soul with this.

He, God the Father, will not let my foot be moved.

He who keeps me, Jesus, the Father, will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is my helper, the Lord is my shade on my right hand.

The sun shall not strike me by day, the moon by night.

The Lord will keep me from evil, he will keep me my life, the Lord will keep my going out and my coming in from this time forward and forevermore.

Don't you suppose that Jesus did something to nurture his spiritual life, or did he not need it?

Yeah, I think he needed it.

He was human like us.

We need it.

We need these kinds of psalms.

Not because there's something here we don't know, but because we need to keep knowing it.

We need to know it again, or we need to know it in a new area of our lives.

The main thought of this psalm is really pretty simple.

In fact, it's a simple psalm, simple to read, not simple to live out consistently in our lives.

God is your keeper and your protector.

Yours.

He wants to be.

He offers to be.

You need him to be, just like I do.

God is your keeper and your protector as you journey through life on your way home.

Jerusalem was a picture of that which is our ultimate home.

We've talked about that in the last several months, a new heaven and a new earth.

Home, capital H, where we belong.

We're not home here.

As we journey through life, we must know that God is our keeper and our protector, your keeper, your protector, mine.

And he may be perfectly trusted to keep perfect watch over you.

Does anybody here besides me need that?

What area of your life do you need that for?

Is maybe better the question.

The interesting thing is that he repeats himself time and time again in these short verses.

There is one word, a verb, that is in many different translations, translated differently, sometimes watch, preserve, guard, or keep.

And sometimes in a given translation, several of those appear as the verbs in these eight verses.

My friends, it's all one and the same word in the original language.

It's one word.

So I'm just going to call it for the sake of argument, watches over.

So verse 3, he watches over you.

Verse 4, he who watches over you.

Verse 5, the Lord watches over you.

Verse 7, the Lord will keep you from harm, and he will watch over your life.

Verse 8, the Lord will watch over your comings and your goings.

What do you think he's trying to say to us?

Duh.

It's pretty simple.

He watches over us.

And boy, do we need that.

Sometimes I get it for a while, or in a given area of my life.

And you probably do too.

Sometimes you actually get it, and you actually experience God as your keeper, protector, the guardian, the one you can trust throughout all of life.

So maybe, maybe you've experienced being out of work.

Some of you have been out of work and have been desperate.

And maybe you've found found that God took care of you, protected you, provided for you.

And so maybe you have that worked out in this area of your life for a while at least.

But at that moment, what other area of your life is there?

So I can trust him for my finances, can I trust him for my health?

Or I get it for my health, can I trust him for with my kids?

Or can I trust him with my loneliness?

Or can I trust him with my fear that things are going to go poorly for me?

Or that they are going poorly.

For me now, or whatever it is.

I don't know what area in your life you need to focus on God as the keeper of your soul, but I'm quite confident that you do.

So as we're going through this, I want you to be thinking about what that is.

You see, he keeps repeating it because we need to keep telling ourselves who God is and what he has promised.

Soul talk.

We need to say, soul?

Walt?

Will you or will you not believe that God is your protector and watching over you?

Walt, what are you thinking?

I have to do that, don't you?

Well, you do.

I hope you do it.

That's the question.

And I hope I do it more consistently than I do.

He's talking to himself.

O soul, O soul, why are you downcast, O my soul?

Psalm 103, praise the Lord, O my soul, O my soul, why are you downcast?

Soul talk.

We talk to ourselves.

We allow the Word of God to give us words that feed our soul.

That's why they're revealed to us.

He uses here a metaphor of the spiritual life as a journey, a journey homeward, a journey that's leading somewhere, a journey that's leading towards him.

In the New Testament, the primary metaphor for the spiritual life seems to be disciple.

And obviously true and right that we allow ourselves to be influenced and shaped by the master.

We learn the attitudes and the skills and the mindset of the one that we allow to influence us.

We have a mentor, we have a master, we're the disciple, we're the learner, and as we go along, we we're disciples.

Beautiful, powerful picture.

In the Psalms of Ascent, as elsewhere in often in the Old Testament, it's a different picture.

It's the picture of a spiritual pilgrimage.

A pilgrimage.

Different metaphor, but being on a journey.

You see, the problem is if we're not careful, we see ourselves wrong.

This idea, let me try to put it this way, the Bible portrays us as pilgrims.

That's how we are supposed to see ourselves.

Not residents who settle in here.

Pilgrims are not simply people with funny Dutch hats that came from Delfthaven and crossed the Atlantic.

Pilgrims are people who are on a journey, they're going somewhere, and until they get there, they don't settle in.

They don't become residents who settle in.

Are we pilgrims or are we comfortable residents here?

When we become comfortable residents here, we run into serious problems.

This matter of not being residents, uh, we had the privilege for 30 years to live overseas.

We were not residents.

Twenty-two years we lived in Belgium, eight years we lived in Germany.

The whole time we had a temporary visa.

You think temporary might just mean for a few weeks.

In this case, 30 years long, two different countries.

We lived there, we had a home, we raised our family, we spoke the language, especially Belgium, less so Germany.

But that was not our home.

We had come there and we were going somewhere else.

We had wonderful friends, people we loved, people we served, all of our friends were residents, they were nationals.

There was always something different about us.

And we really integrated in that community, and people accepted us almost as like the rest of them, but there was always something different, and we had good friendships, but they weren't quite the same because we were just there for a season.

We're passing through.

Spiritual pilgrims, we are to be understanding that this is not our residence.

This is not our home.

We're not supposed to settle in.

And we have a problem with this, especially in our North American culture, Western Europe culture as well, where we have affluence, we have a good life, we have nice homes, we have nice cars.

Nothing wrong with any of that, except it makes it hard for us to not see this is where I really belong.

And the believer in Christ does not belong here.

This is a foreign place.

Friendship with the world is enmity or hostility towards God.

And if we look around and we think, boy, that's pretty good here, then we're missing God's understanding of our calling.

You are not called to settle down in this life.

It doesn't mean you have to move 27 times like some of us have.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the emotional sense of this is really where I belong.

My friends, if you know Christ by grace, through faith, having come to trust in Christ, you no longer belong here.

And God has a great deal to say to pilgrims.

Not much to say to residents who settle in.

So how do we view ourselves?

Another way of looking at that is expatriates who are neither citizens nor immigrants.

It's kind of an interesting experience.

We were, we called ourselves, and we were, we were called by others, expatriates.

That means we're outside of the place we really belong.

Our friends were citizens, inhabitants of that place in a way that was different.

Nor were we immigrants.

We didn't go to Belgium or to Germany to live there the rest of our lives.

Wouldn't have been anything wrong with that, but that just wasn't our calling.

But that made a difference.

We didn't take on Belgian or German nationality.

We didn't, we didn't, that was not our basic identity.

We were inherently, consciously, and very obviously, not from there.

Just like walking into that Stummtisch and I don't belong, or into the Gasthaus, and I don't belong there with the locals.

We don't belong here in the same way.

Another picture.

How do we see ourselves?

We are to be spiritual travelers, not religious tourists.

There's a big difference.

You may go to Belgium or Germany or wherever you want to go as a tourist.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

A tourist travels around, sees interesting things, picks up a few souvenirs, hopefully gets a good tour guide who can explain some of the interesting things going on, and then they leave.

One of the problems is as Christians, if we're not careful, we begin to act like spiritual tourists.

And if we're not careful, pastors get pushed into or volunteer for the role of being a religious tour guide.

So I will show you a whole bunch of interesting things that uh that you can find.

There's a few shrines here and there, a few trinkets that you can take with you.

That is not my job.

If you want me to be a spiritual tour guide, you better find another church or wait until we leave.

That's just not what I'm here for.

God has little to say to spiritual tourists, religious tourists.

We're travelers on our way home.

And in the process throughout the Bible, God issues, as it were, a travel advisory.

The journey, my friends, says God, said Jesus, in the world you shall have tribulation, be of good cheer.

I've overcome the world.

The journey is difficult and perilous, but take heart.

Difficult and perilous, but take heart.

The Lord is your sure keeper, and he can be totally trusted to protect you as you travel with him home.

But pay attention to the travel advisory.

If we think that this is not a dangerous and difficult place, then we are not in touch with the way the New Testament presents the life of believers.

And if you go to most of the places in the world where the believers don't have it so well, they are more conscious of the fact that this life is dangerous and difficult.

And maybe when we experience that or sense that or begin to tell ourselves that, as the Bible does so many times, maybe as we talk to ourselves and remind ourselves of the truth that is revealed, just maybe that will help us.

Don't you think?

So let's just, this is a really simple text passage.

There's four couplets of two verses each.

Verses one and two, three and four, five and six, seven and eight.

And they all are variations on the same theme.

And it won't take us long to walk through these.

Verses one and two.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.

From where does my help come?

My help doesn't come from the hills.

My help comes from the Lord, the one who made the hills.

My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

My keeper made it all.

This picture of the hills, sometimes in the Bible, the hills are seen as a place of refuge.

But normally, especially in the Old Testament, the hills were seen as a place of danger, and there was a sense of dread filled with robbers and unknown and worse than robberies that would take place.

And as these pilgrims traveled from their little villages up through the hills, we have a romanticized picture of what that was.

It was not a safe journey.

Now, when we travel, we tend to go down I-29 with a nice car, paved highway, cruise control, and the radio soothing our souls.

That's not what these travelers experienced.

Maybe we ought to change the image a little bit.

Take a young woman who finds herself in a place in the middle of the city at the wrong time of day where she suddenly realizes, yikes, what am I doing here?

I had a similar experience a number of years ago.

I found myself driving through the North Philly, North Philadelphia, at 2 in the morning on a Sunday night, and I stopped in the stop sign or stop light, I want to just keep on going, and looked around, and I said, I don't belong here.

There is danger everywhere I look.

And the reality was the people who live there experience danger every time they went outside of their home.

And there's a sense in which if we don't realize that we live in a dangerous setting, if we're lulled to sleep by beautiful decorations, and I love these, Jodi, where is she and her crew?

Beautiful.

But if we're not careful, it just kind of eases us into a wrong understanding of this life and this world and what it's all about.

So he says, I lift up my eyes to the hills, and where does my help come from?

My help doesn't come from the hills.

I need help in the middle of the hills.

Behind the hills, I see the maker of the hills.

Behind the dangers that we say, see, the circumstances in our life, the situations that we face.

Our help doesn't come from those, it comes from the one who is Lord of heaven and earth, who has all things in his hands.

And we need not fear because he made all of this, he can handle all of this, he can take care of us wherever we happen to go.

He is in sovereign control.

If he is my keeper, then even if I'm in a place that does involve risk and danger and I am in trouble, I turn to my God.

I turn to my God who has promised to be my keeper.

Don't you?

Yeah.

We do at times.

Don't I?

Yeah, I do at times.

And then, like you, I lose focus and then I say to myself, Walt, God is your keeper.

Verses three and four.

He is our vigilant watchman.

He will not let your foot be moved.

He who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel will neither sleep nor slumber.

Now, in this situation, um, the the background of this is that the pagan religions around Israel, one of the themes within the pagan religions is that they had to do all kinds of things to wake up God and get his attention.

So you would have the priests who would yell and shout or cut themselves to get God's attention because that dumb statue didn't seem to do anything, and so they felt like they had to shake up their idol, their God, and get his attention.

We don't have to shake up God, we don't have to cut ourselves, we don't have to yell and scream.

He will not let your foot be moved.

He isn't slumbering.

How ludicrous to think that God is asleep.

And yet, God, where are you?

Why aren't you answering my prayers?

I have no sense whatsoever of your presence with me.

True, there's times we have no sense of his presence with us.

Does that change the fact that he is the keeper of our soul, that he is a vigilant watchman, that our keeper never sleeps?

I normally don't sleep very well.

Um thankfully I'm married to a woman who sleeps wonderfully solidly, her head hits the pillow and she goes to sleep.

I I would love to be like you, Jane.

My head hits the pillow, and two hours later my mind is still going, and then I wake up in the middle of the night, and invariably, when I wake up in the middle of the night, there's a bit of panic in a sense of something that's going wrong, and I've often had a dream that the weight of the world has been on my shoulders, I'm not able to carry it.

Stupid.

So I I often wake up, and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can't get back to sleep.

Does anybody else have that problem?

Um and it's not only those of us who have hair this color.

I saw some hands go up.

No, I don't just, as a little mantra, say, uh, my keeper never sleeps so I can, my keeper never sleeps so I can, my keeper never sleeps so I can, as though I'm going to hypnotize myself.

That's not what this is all about.

But I speak to myself and I say, Walt, why are you fussing and fretting over these things?

Does God not have this in his control?

And my friends, it really helps.

We're supposed to talk to ourselves and remind ourselves about who God is and his faithfulness and his goodness.

Um I have probably told you of a little plaque that I saw in a guest room.

We were missionaries, we'd come back and we'd stay with our supporters.

And this one uh guest room, these wonderful friends of ours, I was going over to turn off the light, and there was this little plaque on the bedside table that said, Tonight, as you go to sleep, leave your problems with God.

He'll be up all night anyway.

Oh.

Boy, do I need that.

And then I forget it and I need it again, and I forget it and I need it again, don't you?

The fact that I forget it doesn't change the reality that it's true.

Verse 5 and 6 the Lord is your keeper, the Lord is your shade on your right hand, the sun shall not harm you by strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

He is our shield, our shade.

My keeper protects and shields me.

And he uses the imagery of protection from sun and protection from moon.

We understand the first, the second is a little bit further away from our world of thinking and our worldview, but we know the dangers of the sun.

Um I force myself to go to the dermatologist once a year to get a full-body check and find out uh, you know, where the cancer is going to appear.

No.

Um, and invariably, when I talk to a dermatologist, he or she says, Now, you do use sunscreen, right?

And I start counting the tiles on the floor and then feeling guilty and uh look for another dermatologist that might not ask me that question.

Um hopefully you're better than I am, and you've learned that too much sun can be dangerous, and so you protect yourselves.

I don't know what number of sunscreen you prefer to use.

Six, eight, fifty, something like that, you know, whatever.

God's number as sunscreen is infinity.

God will protect you.

He is our protector, he is our shield, he is our shade.

It talks about the sun by day and the moon by night.

In the worldview then, and who knows, maybe it's true, there was as much concern about too much exposure to the moon as we have of too much exposure to the sun.

They thought that you would get lunacy, lun, lunar, the moon.

You would be influenced by the moon, that you would be emotionally upset.

They talked about lunatics.

Where does that come from?

That comes from the concern that the moon influences us in a negative way.

That may be true.

I don't know.

What did I know about sunscreen?

You know, I'm just a just whatever.

All right.

Our keeper is our protector and our shield.

Um he keeps saying the same thing, doesn't he?

Finally, verses 7 and 8.

He keeps us from all harm.

Just as comprehensive as it gets.

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 forward and forevermore.

No more imagery, no more metaphor, just a blanket statement.

He will protect you in the evil and from the evil.

Now that raises for me, and if you're thinking, probably for you, a zillion questions, because we have uh bad things that happen to us all the time.

This is not saying that we will not have problems or we will not be uh in, that evil will have no influence over us.

It is saying that God makes sure and certain promises that as my sovereign protector and keeper, I need not fear evil throughout all of my life, in all of the circumstances, all of the time, period.

That's just what it says.

So what do I do with that?

Well, when I'm fearful of evil, and there's times where I have feelings of uh of a fear of the evilness around me, um, I talk to myself, I say, soul, oh my soul.

Um who did God say he is?

It is either he is either who he said he is or he is a liar and might as well chuck your faith and forget all of this Christian stuff.

He either is who he's revealed himself to be, or he's not.

There are times I experience that, and there's times that I have trouble experiencing that.

It does not change who God is.

But when I focus on the truth of God's character and goodness, and in this case his Protection, it makes all of the difference in the world.

So, what does this say to us?

Just for me at least, I came up with four or five practical applications for Walt.

They probably have nothing to do with any of you, but just listen in and figure, yeah, he's a strange guy.

So this means I can sleep soundly because God does not.

Boy, is that meaningful for me?

I don't always do it.

I don't always get it.

But it's always true.

He's up all night anyway.

I don't have to solve the world's problem.

I don't have to figure it all out.

I can just I can't just easily shut it out.

But as I focus on God, it really does make a difference for me.

I can sleep soundly because God does not.

And you may also trust Him in the same way.

It's true.

God is bigger than my biggest problem.

Whatever my need or my task is today, I can count on the fact that God is bigger.

I can't solve my problems.

I can solve some of them, but those aren't my problems.

The things I solve, it's not my problem.

That's not what bothers me.

It's the situations I'm in where I don't know how to get out or I don't know what to do.

No matter how big the problem is you are facing currently, and I know too little about you to know where most of you, what major problems you're facing.

I just know people enough, and I'm a person enough to know you have problems, big ones, things you can't resolve, things that keep you awake at night, things that create fear, things that dog your heels.

There is no problem of which God is not bigger.

That's simply the fact.

God makes sure and certain promises to pilgrims, to expatriates, and to spiritual travelers, but there's not many promises in the Bible for residents, immigrants, and spiritual tourists.

I'm talking about the spiritual life.

Tremendous promises.

He has pledged himself to be the pilgrim's portion.

Not the tourist who wants to be entertained with religious things, not the one who wants to settle in.

Not the one who wants to make his citizenship here.

No, the pilgrim's portion is our God.

The psalm persuades me that despite the peril, I need fear no evil.

The outcome is certain.

I don't always know how to get there, but I know God wins.

I don't know a lot about the book of Revelation, but what I do know is that God wins, and I'm going to journey with him, and he is the victor, and we will somehow or another, I will muddle through, and God will persevere, and he will hold me in his hands.

We are not on our way to Mount Doom.

This is not the fellowship of the rings.

I am not Frodo.

God is not some kind of a glorified Gandalf who appears every once in a while.

Now, the way that's portrayed is there's this horrible weight and this sense of impending doom.

We must not view our Christian life that way.

That is not the journey we are on.

We are going through difficult and dark places, but our destiny is sure, not because we're so strong, but because God has promised to go with us and to protect us and to guide us and to be our portion.

This does not mean that we have no problems.

Of course not.

It means that God protects us from ultimate evil.

God protects us.

Now the promise of this psalm is not that we shall never stub our toes, but that no journey, no illness, no injury, no accident, no distress will evilly overpower us.

The testimony of Scripture in this regard is absolutely unmistakable.

Deuteronomy 31, verse 8 says, The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you.

Deuteronomy 31:8

He will never leave you nor forsake you.

Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged.

Now, either that is true or it is a lie.

I walk by faith and not by sight.

I take God at his word, and I believe that is the gospel truth.

The Lord Himself will go before me and will be with me.

He will never leave me, nor will he forsake me.

I must not be afraid, I must not be discouraged, because I know who my God is, even though I don't experience it in quite the way I would want to in this moment.

But that's because we're on a journey.

Hebrews 13, 5 and 6, a New Testament version of the same thought.

God has said, Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you, so we may confidently say, the Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me?

One of my favorite verses of all times.

I don't always experience it at the emotional level.

My circumstances don't always look like it, but that is always true.

And a believer lives his life by faith, taking God at his word, and then arranging our lives accordingly, having our world be overshadowed not by what we see, but by who God is.

1 Corinthians 10, 13, no time of testing has taken you except as common to man, and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tested beyond what you are able, but will, with the time of testing, provide a way of escape that you might be able to endure it.

It doesn't mean there is no testing, it means it will not overpower you as we draw upon the resources that God provides, and he promises a way through or a way around or he'll take it away.

Do I always get there?

Do I always experience that?

No, but that doesn't make it not true.

What God says is true, not just what my experience is.

We walk by faith and not by sight.

Romans 8 35 and following, who shall separate us from the love of Christ shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors, not in ourselves, but through him who loved us.

For I am sure, it is certain, I believe, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, or anything else in all creation is able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is something you build your life on.

That's true.

It's been revealed to us.

And when we don't feel it, we talk to ourselves and we say, Oh my soul, what in the world are you thinking?

Why are you so messed up?

You've experienced the faithfulness of God so many times in the past.

Do you think he's changed?

Oh, he's probably asleep tonight.

So we do all of these things, and God just says, I'm your Maker.

I have a Maker.

He formed my heart.

Before even time began, my life was in his hands.

He knows my name.

He knows my every thought.

He sees each tear that falls, and he hears me when I call.

I have a father.

He calls me his own.

He'll never leave me no matter where I go.

It's Psalm 121, just recast.

That's what those people in that guest house needed.

That's what I need, and that's what you need as well.

So I just encourage you to take and meditate and live by faith according to what's revealed in this psalm.

Would you do that?

Let me ask you to stand for the benediction.

Now, my friends, go into the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to that which is good.

And we've heard an awful lot of good this morning in this psalm.

Honor all men.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Maybe that's you.

Probably that's you.

Sometimes that's you.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Anyone identify without support the weak.

Help the suffering.

Restore the wandering and share the gospel.

Love and serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.

God bless.

And amen.