"A Spiritual 911" Psalm 120 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning, Psalm 120, let me read it for us.

In my distress I called to Yahweh, and he answered me.

Deliver me, O Yahweh, from lying lips from a deceitful tongue.

What shall be given to you, and what more shall be done to you, you deceitful tongue?

A warrior sharp arrows with glowing coals of the broom tree.

Woe to me that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the Kents of Kidar.

Too long have I had my dwelling place among those who hate peace.

I am for peace.

But when I speak they are for war.

My family, we have a kind of a ritual every year.

We go up to Word of Life in upstate New York, and it's an eight to ten or eleven-hour drive, depending on which way we go, and our kids look forward to it.

They look forward to it for months before it happens.

We take our minivan up, and then we have a DVD player in the minivan, and the kids get to you know watch movies basically.

Not at all how I remember road trips when I was a kid, but I've given up.

There's strategic negotiations about which movies to watch and in which order, and and I can't get involved in those negotiations.

I mess them up, but they come to an agreement, these three girls, and they've got everything charted out and arranged, and we've got our favorite places to stop for food, and it's a thing we do every year.

Our favorite, you know, songs we sing in the car, and our favorite sayings that we say in the car, like, Are we there yet?

and I'm hungry.

Um, but we have our routine and our ritual for this.

Our kids love it, and we do it every year.

It's a road trip with the family.

You know, this section of scripture, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134, these are songs for a road trip.

These are the songs of ascent.

There are 15 psalms written for the pilgrims that travel to Jerusalem, and they would make this pilgrimage three times a year.

I mean, some people would do it uh once a year, some people would do it once in a lifetime, but many Jews, if they had the means to do it and the financial resources to do it, would make this trip three times a year.

At the time of Christ, they would funnel from all over the Roman Empire, from Rome and Corinth and from Alexandria and Egypt, and even down from uh Ethiopia.

They would come in from modern-day Turkey and Saudi Arabia and they would funnel into Jerusalem.

And the Jews got there, of course, from the exile.

And you know this in the Old Testament.

The Assyrians uh conquered Israel and exiled them, brought them away into captivity.

The Babylonians conquered Judah and Jerusalem and took them into captivity and they spread them around.

Many of the Jews under the Assyrian attack fled to Egypt, and the Babylonians relocated, many of the Jews to Babylon and, of course, modern-day Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and they lived for generations in exile.

The temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, and generations went by of people wanting to go back to Jerusalem and longing for it.

You remember Daniel and Daniel 6 flinging open his window and praying, facing towards Jerusalem.

I mean, the Jews weren't allowed there.

There was nobody there.

There was no temple there, but there was a sense of hope and expectation that one day, then under Ezra and Nehemiah, the temple was rebuilt and Jerusalem was resettled.

But it's not like all the Jews came back.

I mean, Ezra 1, I think Nehemiah 6 or 7 lists the Jews that came back by name.

And we're talking with a relatively small number of people, and most of the Jews stayed in exile, stayed in the diaspora, even in the time of Christ, were living all over the Roman Empire, much like today, living all over the world.

Nevertheless, they would do pilgrimages back once the temple was rebuilt under Haggai and Ezra and then protected under Nehemiah.

It was Cyrus who gave the decree for them to come back.

And so the Jews begin to go back and they would go back a few times a year.

They'd go back for Passover, which are, you know, our spring.

They'd go back for Pentecost, which would be our summer, the feast of the booze, which would be our autumn or our fall.

And so every year they would do these journeys.

Now, these psalms, Psalm 120 to 134, were songs that were to be sung on these journeys.

They weren't originally written for that purpose.

They were written for all kinds of purposes.

I mean, some of them are from David, one of them is from uh two of them probably from Solomon.

These 15 psalms are written throughout the years.

But Ezra, who orchestrated the rebuilding of the temple, he compiled them into the order that they are now in this altar, and he made these the songs of ascent, the songs of the pilgrims, to be sung as they go back to Jerusalem.

These are incredible songs.

Remember, this is a world without minivans, without DVDs, without the rest stops.

And these massive families would make these pilgrimages.

You know these pilgrimages.

There's one in the New Testament where Jesus is brought with his family to the temple.

And remember, they accidentally leave him, and you think, how can you leave a kid somewhere?

But some of you have left kids at church.

I've been left at church.

Got home.

Where's Dad?

Oh go back and get him.

Some of you have given me rides home from just such an occasion.

These are big journeys.

It wasn't just a few kids, it was an extended family.

It could be up to 100 or 200 people traveling together multiple times a year.

And Ezra assembled these 15 psalms to be sung along the way.

They were there, the songs of the travel, the songs of the journey, or as they're titled here, The Songs of Ascent.

And I have been reading these every day.

This has been my devotional approach this year.

Every day since January 1st, I've been reading all the songs of Ascent.

Letting them sit in my heart.

And it's an incredible, really journey.

You've got to go through a spiritual journey.

When you become familiar with these Psalms, they're bringing you on the journey with them.

You see this geographic funneling that happens in these Psalms.

They start off in exile.

I mean, Psalm 120 that we just read down in verse 5.

Maybe you noticed it.

They're in Meshech and in Kedar.

Meshech is up on the other side of the Black Sea.

That's the end of the known world for the Israelites during Ezra's lifetime.

I mean, there's nothing past that.

Some of the pilgrims are coming from Arabia, from Kedar.

It's the far-flung reaches of Saudi Arabia.

So this is not the same person that's not in both of those places.

This is just saying we're everywhere.

We're out in exile.

And then you read through these Psalms and you start to see the pilgrims coming back.

In Psalm 121, they can see the mountains of Israel and they can see Lebanon.

Psalm 124, they're celebrating that they're going to come around the corner and see Jerusalem.

Psalm 125, they see Mount Zion.

Psalm 126, they're rejoicing like those who've who've crossed the river and come back from Babylon.

Psalm 128 through 134, they're back in Jerusalem.

And there's a joy as they're funneled back to the temple.

And that's how these 15 Psalms function.

They're the pilgrim song book, sung in captivity, repeated in exile.

And now for us to sing along with them.

You know, we don't do pilgrimages to Israel.

We might go as a tourist, but it's not a religious pilgrimage for us because Jesus has paved our way to heaven.

We don't go to a place on earth to worship.

He's in heaven for us.

Nevertheless, these psalms function as kind of a roadmap for worship from this world into the next, so to speak, from exile into the very presence of God.

But because we're not a pilgrimage type people, we're not often familiar with these songs.

I mean, if I were to ask you, is Psalm 120, any of do any of you have Psalm 120 as your favorite psalm?

I doubt anybody would say yes.

Most people don't even know what it's about.

If we hadn't have read it earlier, you would know nothing about it, most likely.

In a sense, it's overshadowed by Psalm 119, the Everest of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible about the majesty of God's word.

And then just the songs of ascent are tucked in there.

In fact, all this week people have said, What are we looking at now that we're done with James?

What's next Sunday?

And I would say, oh, Psalm 120, and I'd look at him.

If I would have said Psalm 23, they would have said, Oh, Psalm 22, of course.

Psalm 1, 2, Psalm 24.

Yeah, I love those Psalms.

Psalm 120, oh.

See you Sunday.

But I want you to experience this journey over these next two weeks.

We'll just look at two of these Psalms, Psalm 120 this week and Psalm 122 next.

And who knows, over the next few years we might dodge back in and out of these and pick up a few here and there.

But the journey begins really with a somber note.

It begins with sobriety.

I mean, these people are in exile.

They're away from the temple.

It starts with gloom in verse 1.

In my distress.

That's how these songs start, in my distress.

These are not going to be the happy, go-lucky kind of songs you might sing on a road trip.

This is not 99 bottles of root beer on the wall kind of song.

There's more sobriety to this.

In my distress, I called to Yahweh.

Verse 5, woe to me.

It begins with gloom and with worry.

It ends with lament.

But in a sense, this ends with reality.

This is where we are.

We are in exile.

This is not our home.

This world is not where we belong.

We have passport stamped for heaven.

That's where our king is.

We are living in exile.

We're strangers and pilgrims longing for a better place, longing for a better country.

And so these Psalms of Ascent really do become our psalms.

This reality of it beginning with distress and ending with a sigh.

That's where many times we are in this world.

I think the best way to tackle Psalm 120 is looking at the time lapses in it.

Let me give you this outline so you can see all three of my points at once.

If you don't get them now, that's fine.

We'll go back through these one at a time.

But the psalm begins with past prayer, this confidence and past prayer have having been answered in the first two verses.

And then we look at future justice, where he wants you to be content that God will bring justice to the world in the middle paragraph.

And finally, the present distress that we're going to continue our life in distress.

Now, all the Psalms of Ascent are what's called epigrammatic psalms, which means they have one point.

They have one little nugget of truth, and the rest is built around them.

And so, in that sense, they're more like praise songs today than hymns.

These songs were meant to be easily memorized.

They're very short psalms.

I mean, most of them are seven verses, six verses.

This one, seven verses.

They're meant to you just to memorize and just to give you one point, one truth in the song.

And often it's the first or sometimes the last verse.

Here it's the first.

I was in distress, and I called to Yahweh, and he answered me.

Continuing in our present distress.

Let's look at these points one at a time.

First, the past prayer.

It wants you to have confidence, to take confidence in the power of prayer, and that your prayers have been answered by God.

In a sense, this psalm is a spiritual 911 call.

Imagine yourself, though, at night in bed, and you hear somebody in your house.

Not one of your children, you hear somebody stealing things from your house.

You hear perhaps a group of thieves.

They're talking.

There's no mystery here.

They're robbing your house.

And what would you do?

I know what some of you would do.

You would go get your gun and it would be on.

Some of you might call 911.

Let's go with a second category of person.

You dial 911 and you say, There's robbers in my house.

I hear them.

How do you know?

They say we're robbers and we're robbing your house.

There's there's no ambiguity.

And the dispatcher says, Okay, help's already there.

Help's already there.

Don't worry.

Help has been sent.

They've arrived.

They've got you taken care of.

And you might say, I don't hear any help.

I didn't hear any sirens.

I'm peering out the window.

There's no police cars.

There's no help here.

And the dispatcher says, Listen, all the help you're gonna get has arrived.

So just go back to bed, sleep tight, knowing that we've received your call.

Good night.

And you would not be able to go back to sleep.

There's no help in your house.

You feel like you've been left to fend for yourself.

So I want you to appreciate here that that's where this psalmist is in this psalm.

He says, I've cried out to God, and look at where verse 1 says, I was in distress, I cried out to Yahweh, Yahweh answered me.

So Yahweh has answered my prayer.

I was in distress, I cried out for help, God has answered me.

And so you would expect the rest of the psalm to be the happy kind of song.

But it is not.

You see very clearly, he is still in distress.

Deliver me.

He repeats it in verse 2 of Yahweh from lying lips, from the deceitful tongue.

His enemies have been around him, his enemies are after him.

They're lying about him, they're slandering him.

He is in exile.

And this was a common experience of the Jews in exile because they they stood out.

They kept their own language, they kept their own culture, their own food, their own dietary restrictions, their own friendships and fellowships.

They did not assimilate into the Babylonian culture like many of the other conquered groups did.

They stood out and they were persecuted.

You've read the book of Daniel, you understand what he was going through, and this is the case all the way, even into the Roman Empire, when they wouldn't bow before the emperor, they wouldn't worship in the temples.

Jews were persecuted for standing out, and that's the psalmist experience here.

He is one of those who stands out, and so he is persecuted.

He cries out to God for help, and God answers his prayer, and he's still in distress.

The robbers are still in the house.

The prayer has been answered, but there's no visible means.

There's no visible encouragement.

Can he go back to sleep?

This is what it's like to be a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, and he understands that.

But what's remarkable to me about this is that even though the persecution is ongoing, even though he's still the recipient of these lying lips and deceitful tongues, what's remarkable is that he has confidence that God answered his prayer.

From what?

I mean, clearly he's praying to be removed from his distress, and clearly he's still in his distress, so how can you say God answered his prayer?

Well, he says God answered his prayer, but how how would he know?

And there's a very powerful spiritual lesson here.

If your understanding of God's response is based upon your circumstances, you're going to be disappointed.

Most of our prayers, or many of our prayers anyway, fall into that category where we're asking God to change our circumstances.

God's so-and-so sick, would you heal them?

Or this person is dying, would you let them live?

Or this marriage is in tattered or in distress.

Would you would you restore it?

Would you strengthen it?

And oftentimes our prayers are in light of circumstances, and we're asking God to change the circumstance.

Lord, here this appears to be the circumstance, this appears to be the trial, would you fix it or change it?

And then it's not fixed and it's not changed.

And the psalmist says God has answered your prayer.

So I deduce from this that confidence in answered prayer does not come from circumstances, but it comes from you knowing the character of God.

Do you believe that God hears your prayers?

Do you believe that he's attentive?

That he's kind, that he wants what's best for you.

If you believe those things and you know that he has answered your prayer, even when your circumstances unchanged, it is a very grave spiritual mistake for you to look at the character of God through the window of your circumstances.

For you to deduce what's outside your house, so to speak, by looking through the window of your circumstances.

Our circumstances are a cloudy window.

Sometimes the shutters are closed.

You can't see to God through your circumstances very well, usually.

Now, sometimes God changes your circumstances, that is true.

Sometimes you pray for healing and you pray for restoration in marriages, and God does give those things, but a huge warning to try to learn about the character of God from changing circumstances.

Always better to learn about the character of God from his word, from what you know to be true about God, unclouded by your circumstances.

Confidence in answered prayer comes from the character of God, not from circumstances.

This reminds me of Jonah 2, verse 2.

Jonah 2:2

It's almost an identical verse, is verse 1 here.

Jonah 2, remember he's supposed to go to Nineveh, he goes to not Nineveh.

The ship is in a storm, people are praying and they're, you know, worshiping their false gods, and they start hurling the cargo over the side, they throw Jonah over the side.

Jonah's now drowning, he gets swallowed by a fish.

This is not a good day.

I mean, being swallowed by a fish is not good, to be clear.

That's not the happy ending for Jonah.

He doesn't know the fish is an obedient fish taking him to you know Nineveh.

He doesn't know he's going to be yakked out on the shore, which is also not a good ending either for Jonah.

In the middle of the belly of the whale, do you remember how he starts his prayer?

Jonah 2, verse 2.

Jonah 2:2

I cried out to Yahweh and he answered me.

Out of my distress.

You're in a fish, dude.

Out of your distress.

Jonah knew he cried to God and God answered him.

Out of the storm, into the sea, into the whale, answered prayer.

That's the psalmist here.

In exile, in persecution, he prays.

And listen, brothers or sisters, often we find ourselves in the mess of life and the mud of life.

And we pray that God would take us out of the mess or take us out of the mud and the muck of life.

We ask God to help us, and God doesn't take us out, he leaves us in.

He leaves us in the mud.

Then you think this is this is not what I'm asking for, but you have to understand that the mud is what God wants you in right now.

In fact, it's what God would give you if you had the sense to pray for it.

Remember at the end of James, we said the prayer of the righteous man avails much, and when the person is praying, even to their own harm, God answers their prayer for what is most for his glory and best for that person.

It's just so often we're so shallow in what we define as good for us.

We think being out of the mess, being out of the muck, being out of the mud is what would be good for us if only the pain went away, if only the marriage was fixed, if only the illness was gone, that would be what is good for us.

And God leaves us in the mud because we don't have enough sense to pray for the sanctification that comes from it.

God moves in mysterious ways as wonders to perform.

He plants his foot in the sea and he rides upon the storm.

And we pray that God would make the storm go away.

He doesn't make it go away, he's still damps in it.

He causes the waves.

And we have confidence that he hears our prayer regardless.

Second, we're supposed to be content in future justice.

We have confidence in past prayer, but we're supposed to be content in future justice.

And this is kind of leaving our standard American-ish timeline.

We want to go from past to present to future, but the psalmist doesn't.

He bypasses the present.

We'll get there momentarily.

But for now we're leapfrogging it and we're up into the future.

What shall be given to you?

What more shall be done to you?

And here's where the verb tense changes in verse 3.

What more shall it's a future tense?

What more is going to be done to you?

You deceitful tongue.

A warrior sharp arrows with glowing coals of the broom tree.

And this is, you know, it's it's an idiom in Hebrew.

It's not really one that we have.

We don't have broom trees.

The closest American thing might be the big yucca trees in like Yucca Valley out by 29 palms, that high desert area.

There's these massive 15-foot kind of cactus things that have a bit of a crevice in the middle of it.

And they have those in Arabia, and they could be lit on fire, and it would act like a torch.

It'd burn from the middle.

It's called a broom tree.

And here the image is of an archer who shoots an arrow and it hits the tree, and the tree catches on fire and falls on the archer.

And so the psalmist here is looking to the future when God will judge the liars, when God will judge the slanderers.

The liars here in the slanderers, those who are lying lips in verse 2, deceitful tongue in verse 2.

I think he's talking not about himself, although it could be true about him as well, but I think he's asking for deliverance from his enemies.

The deliverance isn't come yet.

He prayed for God to take his enemies away.

He prayed for God to write the record, to correct the slander.

And God hasn't done that.

He has left him in there.

And so he says, what more can be done other than what will be done to them in the future?

The broom tree will fall on their head.

They will be crushed by God in his judgment.

Perhaps you've been the victim of slander, of lies.

And you know, there's it's almost no more harmful way to go after a person than to lie about them and to slander them because it's an assault on their character and their integrity, and you know, they're not there usually, and so they can't defend themselves, and the you know, the truth gets stymied and the lie is all the way around the world, so to speak.

And, you know, it's it's our instinct to try to fight back.

Somebody tells a lie about you, you want to fight, but you want to set the record straight.

The world needs to know that I'm the victim here, that I'm been wronged.

But there's no way to do that, and you know this.

And somebody slanders you, you, you know, if you announce that they're lying about you, you're just spreading the slander, right?

If you write on Facebook, this is a lie.

Now everybody, all of your friends now see the lie.

You can't wrestle with somebody in the mud without yourself getting muddy.

And so the more you try to fight the slander, the more the slander spreads.

Can you privately appeal to the person who's lying about you?

To his character?

To his honor?

Spurgeon said, you can't appeal to the honor of a slanderer because he has no honor.

It's a futile effort.

The more you cry for justice, the more the liar is encouraged just to lob fresh insults your way.

You may as well beg a mountain lion not to pounce on you.

That'll do as much good as asking a liar to stop lying about you.

And so you're stuck there, and you're you're where the psalmist is saying, you know what, God will judge in the future.

God hears all the lies that are spread, and God will vindicate me.

God is the God of truth.

He's the Lord of truth.

And he will judge every lie.

You should have a little bit of confidence that if people have to lie about you, it means they don't have anything on you, right?

They had to lie about Jesus.

They listened to all of his teaching, and at the end they decided to condemn him to death.

Remember the charge?

This always stuck out to me.

They finally accused him of saying you shouldn't pay taxes to Caesar.

Do you remember he was directly asked that in the temple in front of everybody?

Should you pay taxes to Caesar?

And he says, just show me a uh denarius.

Whose image is on it?

Caesar.

Well, give it back to Caesar then.

What a brilliant answer.

And yet they accused him of saying we shouldn't pay taxes to Caesar.

And get him sentenced to death.

Somebody lies about you and slanders about you, you should be encouraged by a couple things.

One, they don't know the truth.

You know, the truth that's in your heart is worse than what they're saying, right?

You know, they're out there lying, they're saying, oh, so-and-so, he likes to drown kittens in his backyard.

I'm making this up, of course.

He likes to drown kittens.

And you want to defend yourself and you want to say, I do not like drowning kittens, put on Facebook.

Just so all of my friends know I've never drowned a kitten.

But they have to say that.

They don't know the truth in your heart, though.

The truth is you've harbored worse thoughts than drowning kittens.

You're a worse sinner than they know.

The truth is worse than that.

They just don't know it.

So take a little bit of confidence from that.

And secondly, take some confidence by the fact that they have to spread a lie because your your integrity is such they can't cling on anything that they do know.

In the end, you just know that God will judge.

There's a boomerang effect with these lies.

People shoot lies and they shoot slander and it comes back and it gets them.

I saw a video this week of an ISIS fighter in India in 2015.

He took his cell phone out and he showed a police barracks outside of his little apartment complex, and he mounts his cell phone on the wall and he goes and gets a RPG or rocket-propelled like launcher thing and puts it on his shoulder.

And this is all being recorded on the cell phone, and it must have been uploaded immediately, and you can see why I know that.

Because he aims the rocket launcher at the police barracks and pulls the trigger, and the rocket blows up on his shoulder.

Blows up his whole, I'm sure it blew up the phone that was recording this too.

An incredible scene.

He tried to attack other people and it blew up on his shoulder.

Told one of my friends who's in the military about that video, and he goes, Oh, amateurs.

This is what the liar and the slanderer is like.

He tries to take you out with fiction and it blows up on himself.

But it hasn't blown up yet.

That's the image in this psalm.

The fuse is lit, it's still ticking, and it's pointed at you.

And are you supposed to feel better about it, knowing that ultimately in the future God will judge the person?

You have to ask yourself, is that good enough for you?

Can you live in a world where there's evil just with the answer that one day God will judge it?

You know, non-Christians kind of mock Christianity for this.

This is the problem of evil.

How can you believe in a God who is all good and all-knowing and all-powerful and yet evil exists?

And you say we say, Well, God will judge it in the future.

God will judge every evil deed.

And they say, that's not a sufficient answer because why isn't he judging it now?

And we say, because he's patient.

And they say that's that doesn't work.

You know, the Egyptians were slaughtering all the Hebrew babies.

And then God didn't stop it.

It wasn't until eighty years that God sent the plague of the firstborn.

Eighty years later.

For eighty years that justice went unchecked, ungiven.

Is that a good enough answer for you?

And I think it has to be.

If you don't believe that God is going to judge sin and forgive those who place their faith in him, then there's no other starting point.

There's no other way to begin this pilgrimage, this pilgrimage to worship God.

There's no other way to be drawn near to worshiping God, then this is the little entry gate here.

Do you believe God's gonna judge sinners?

Do you believe that he's gonna rescue those who place their faith in him?

Even though we go through trials, even though we're in the mud, you have to.

Because if you don't, there's nothing.

You can tap out on this first psalm here.

You don't need to go through the whole Psalm of Ascent.

Jerusalem's not gonna make any sense to you when you get there.

If you don't start your journey by saying God is going to judge the evildoer.

Well, thirdly, thirdly, we continue in our present distress.

We have confidence that God has answered our prayer.

We're content that He will judge the evildoer.

But that past and that future doesn't fix where we are right now.

We're still here in the middle, right now, on this little island where there's arrows coming after us.

There's broom trees on fire after us.

It doesn't fix where we are.

As I mentioned, Meshech here in verse 5, that's on the other side of the Black Sea.

Kidar is the Arabian desert.

Right now, he's off in exile.

And even says, woe to me that I'm here.

Woe to me that I dwell in these tents.

It's not a house.

He's not even in a house.

Too long, he says.

Too long in verse 6.

It's been too long.

He's been dwelling among those people who hate peace.

You know, God's church has always been the kind of innocent little bird that's attacked by the hawks of this world.

The vultures have always been fierce against her.

And that's where we are for too long, it seems.

And so what do you do?

You know, in the future God will judge the liar, in the future, God will judge the persecutor.

In the past, I have confidence he's hearing my prayers.

He's answered them.

So what now?

Well, you keep crying out for God.

You keep praying to God.

You know, what if every lie somebody told actually worked for your good?

Would you want people to keep lying about you?

Yes is the answer.

Yes.

If every lie someone told about you actually turned out for your good.

And it often does in God's providence.

Somebody slanders you, and it often turns out that somebody else defends you in a more powerful way than you could have defended yourself, and you come out looking better than you were when you started.

And you had a promise that every lie would work that way.

And here's the little mystery here is that it does.

Even if it's just this, every lie someone tells about you, every time you're slandered, it should drive you to God in prayer.

And what if it did nothing other than that?

Would have the only effect of somebody lying about you and slandering you, would have the only effect of it was it made you pray to God more?

Would it then be worth it?

Would it then have a sanctifying effect that would outweigh the harm?

Listen, it's no sign of weakness in a person that he finds himself in a position where all he can do is pray.

It's no sign of a weakness of a person where he says, listen, I'm not content with this world.

I'm not content with what's happening.

I'm not content to live in a world where six-year-olds have have horrible lives and then die.

I'm not content for that kind of world.

But it's it's the world I'm in.

Here we are.

We're all here.

And so let's let's pray.

Let's be drawn close to God.

Let's go on this pilgrimage.

Let's go find God.

Let's go worship Him.

Is that enough?

Sometimes in counseling scenarios or in people asking for help with their marriages or you know, their kids are sick or whatever the issue is, and you listen to the story, and at the end of it, sometimes all I can say is we should pray for grace.

That's what we should do.

We should just pray for grace.

You think, is that the best advice you have, Pastor, is to pray for God's grace?

Yes.

Yes, it is.

Nothing more profound than that.

Let's ask God to give us grace.

Because right now we're in a different land.

We're off in exile.

This is not our home.

We long for the place where liars will not be welcomed.

We long for the place where slander will not be tolerated.

We long for the place where Jesus will reign and wipe away every tear from eye.

And the liars will have their place in the lake of fire.

But therein is the problem, isn't it?

That we are all liars.

That we have shot those arrows of slander.

That they come back towards us.

In a sense, these last few verses here, five, six, and seven, they read like the Beatitudes in reverse, don't they?

Blessed are the broken.

Blessed are the persecuted.

Blessed are those who are hungry for righteousness.

Blessed are those who mourn over their spiritual condition.

We're for peace and we speak peace, but therefore war.

We understand that there is peace here, is the Hebrew word shalom.

There is a shalom between God and man.

There is a way for mankind to have peace with God, and it comes through Jesus Christ who takes our sin on himself.

I began this morning by asking you this question.

Who has Psalm 120 as their favorite psalm?

And the answer is nobody.

Whose psalm is this?

Whose psalm does this who does this psalm belong to?

Well, if you read it again, you see the person of Christ in this psalm so perfectly.

They lied about him.

He cried out to God in the garden, and God heard his his prayer and yet did not take the cup away.

The lies of mankind delivered him to death.

The arrows that were shot by us by our own slandering tongues, those arrows that should have come back on us, they fell on him instead.

He takes our, you know, the flaming broom tree falls on him instead.

He takes our punishment, he takes our wrath.

He dwelt in a in a world that he made, but he didn't really belong in in that sense.

He came to his own, his own did not receive him, John says.

Yet he knows that by dwelling here, he creates a better world.

By dwelling here, he makes a home for us.

He was for peace, we received him as if he was for war.

And yet the peace, the promise of shalom, remains.

That if people turn to Christ and place their faith in him, he can forgive them of their sins.

He can cause them to be at peace with God.

He extends peace to the world.

But only for those who place their faith in him.

I said earlier, we don't go on pilgrimages.

Because Jesus has paved the way for us.

It doesn't go through to Jerusalem.

It goes to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of heaven.

Not through the Levites, but through a city of innumerable angels.

Not through the wear and the garb of travelers, but through angels in festal gatherings.

Not through some list up the steps of the temple here on earth, but our names are enrolled in heaven, in the Lamb's Book of Life.

That's the pilgrimage we're on.

It's a pilgrimage that anyone can come on who places their faith in Christ.

Lord, we're grateful that you have given us this psalm to start our journey into heaven.

We know that now we're aliens and strangers and exiles, but we know that you will lead us safely home.

That is our prayer.

We know they do so to our own sanctification.

We trust you for that.

We're grateful that you were sinless, that you never lied, you never slandered, you never offended God or man.

And yet we rebelled against you.

And Lord, we're thankful that you have offered salvation, forgiveness for those who place their faith in you.

I pray that many would do so even this morning.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at IBCBA.com.

Here is the parting word of Pastor Jesse.

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