Help!

Help!

Psalm 121 

    Where do you go when you need help?  I guess it would depend on the situation.   Sometimes we go to whoever is closest by.  You might have heard about this incident, or one just like it. It happened around September 2011. According to a report in Salt Lake City, UT, Brandon Wright was riding his motorcycle on U.S. Highway 89 near the Utah State University campus on a Monday morning when a black BMW pulled out of a parking lot in front of him. Wright intentionally grounded his cycle to avoid getting hit — but his bike went up in flames and he slid underneath that BMW, which was also on fire. A witness and several others, including students and construction workers, watched it unfold. They called for help, but had no time to wait for emergency workers to arrive. "If we wait, we could lose him," the witness said. Rather than stand by, the group gathered together, lifted the vehicle up, and pulled Wright to safety. "It was a very big fire," the witness said. "When I lifted the car, it was very, very hot under there.”

Some people turn to their pastor for help.  Week after week, a man came to his preacher with a big problem. He said, “When I go to bed, I can’t sleep because I’m afraid of monsters under my bed. I know it’s silly, but I can’t help it.”  

His preacher recommended several different things; prayer, reading the Bible, singing hymns, keeping the lights on, but nothing worked. One Sunday the man came to church happy and well rested. He told his preacher that he got help from his friend the carpenter. The preacher asked, “What did he tell you to do?” The man said, “He told me just to cut the legs off my bed!” I guess that took care of his monster problem!

Where do you go for help in life? When you’re up against something you can’t handle, monsters real or otherwise? Where do you turn for help?

There are many times in life when we don’t know where to turn and who to seek for help. So what do we do? Or what should we do? If we are smart, we should turn to the Lord and seek His help.  Listen to the wisdom of these Psalms:

Psalm 9:9 “The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.”

Psalm 10:14 “But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless.”

Psalm 32:7 “You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

Psalm 34:17 “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles.”

Psalm 34:19 “The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.”

Psalm 46:1 “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”

Our text today comes from Psalm 121 where the author tells us to seek God for help by 

Looking up

Looking down, and

Looking all around

1. Body
1. Look Up — The Creator is our Protector. (vv. 1-2)
1. What do you see when you look up? 
1. Psalm 121 is a song of ascent. Pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem sang, chanted aloud or recited to themselves this psalm. On their way to Zion, God’s holy hill, they couldn’t help but notice other hills, other high places. The psalmist surveyed these -- the places of the shrines and Asherah poles where unspeakable sacrifices took place to placate fearsome gods, and he asked, “From where will my help come?”
2. The psalmist turned his gaze higher still, to the heavens -- the sun, the Egyptian god; the moon, the god of the Chaldeans; the stars, studied by ancient astrologers to discern their messages and their impact on the future. These were attractive and visible gods. “From where will my help come?”
3. “From where will my help come?” is a huge life question to settle.
4. Things haven’t changed much. We still look to the high places.
5. Some climb the corporate ladder and aspire to the boardrooms on the 37th floor. Many look for help to Capitol Hill, to address societal ills up there in Washington (or Moscow or Tokyo or Beijing). Huge numbers of people are star-struck by astronomical athletic salaries. And everyone with an IRA or 401(k) loves the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indexes, as long as they go up, up and up.
6. The high places have their allure, and many put their trust there.  What do you see when you look up?
2. Where do you find help?
1. As you read through this Psalm, what would you consider to be the key word?  I believe that it is intentional that the words “keep(s)” and “keeper” appear a total of six times in the eight verses of this Psalm. So let’s pause  a moment to understand the meaning of the word.
2. The Hebrew word is “shamar” which comes from a root word that originally described a sheepfold. When a shepherd was out in the wilderness he would gather thorn bushes to erect a makeshift corral for the sheep at night. Those thorns would then protect and guard the sheep from harm. So the word came to convey the idea of guarding and protecting.  Therefore, with the repetition of that one word, we are called to harken back to the 23rd Psalm:  The Lord is my Shepherd.
3. My help comes from the creator. 
1. I wonder how many times in our lives we seek our help somewhere else because, even though we may not voice it out loud, we fear deep inside that God is just not capable of dealing with whatever difficulties and problems I might be facing in my life. 
2. But if God created the entire world, including you and me, don’t you think He’s perfectly capable of helping us with our relationship issues or our finances or our health or our problems at work?
3. From Colossians 1:16 — For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. — (ESV)Look Down - Our God guides His People. (vv. 3-6)
4. Where do you stand? — Solid Rock or Sinking Sand?
5. God’s got this - 24/7/365. 
1. Unlike Baal and the other gods that were worshipped on the hilltops, God never sleeps or slumbers. The account of Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 is actually rather amusing, especially as Elijah taunts those prophets:
2. And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” And they cried aloud and cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances, until the blood gushed out upon them. And as midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation, but there was no voice. No one answered; no one paid attention.  1 Kings 18:27-29 (ESV)
3. From Jude 1:24-25  — Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. — (ESV)
6. Your Keeper
1. Matt Floding is the dean of students at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich. Before that, he spent 20 years in ministry as chaplain at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa.
2. He writes online about how Sally Henningfeld knew the truth of this.
3. First, you must picture the North-West Iowa community of Orange City. Picture a lovely community platted out on one square mile. After 130-some years, it now spills over that border, though developers pose no threat to the alternating fields of corn and soybeans that surround the town.
4. Sally lived on a high place -- a hill just outside of town, on the northwest corner, in what was referred to for years as “the county home.” That was where her parents had deposited her and her sister, both cognitively disabled, in 1955. I had become legal guardian to this 70-year-old woman to prevent the appearance of conflict of interest over medical and financial decisions.
5. From the county home Sally could see the other high places.
6. On the town’s southwest corner stand grain elevators -- representing the financial base of the community.
7. At the center, the courthouse of Sioux County, Lady Justice standing proudly on top -- representing power.
8. South and center stands Zwemer Hall with its proud tower, the “Old Main” of Northwestern College’s campus -- representing knowledge.
9. Sally could see them all clearly from the park bench on the lawn -- but with this ironic twist. Though she could visually associate with these high places, her life was not about money. Social Security provided her room and board and a $35-a-month spending allowance supplemented by $1 an hour for wiping off the dining room tables.
10. Her life was not about education and knowledge. She loved coloring books and could manage to scrawl her own name in cursive.
11. Her life was not about power. She was a ward of the state, and when she finally needed to move to a nursing home, most of her belongings ended up in a dumpster within an hour’s time. There was no family to claim them and no need to store them.
12. But there was another high place in the town -- the church steeple.
13. There this woman of low estate was elevated, through participation in Friendship Bible Studies. It was from the church that she welcomed a steady trickle of visitors. The church provided the opportunity to worship with dignity with others who loved and trusted Jesus. And at her life’s end, it was the church that paid for her cemetery plot.
14. You see, The Lord, who made heaven and earth, was and is Sally’s keeper.Look All Around - The Lord cares about You. (vv. 7-8)
7. All that you are — “keep your life”
8. Wherever you are — “going in and coming out”
9. Forever, you are — “from this time forth and forevermore”
10. Being kept…
1. God keeps you through danger, but not necessarily from danger
2. From Isaiah 43:1-2:
1. But now thus says the LORD,
2. he who created you, O Jacob,
3. he who formed you, O Israel:
4. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
5. I have called you by name, you are mine.
6. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
7. and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
8. when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
9. and the flame shall not consume you.
3. Notice here that it is assumed that God’s people will go through difficulties – God uses the word “when”, not the word “if” when describing the difficulties of life using the imagery of floods and fires. So God clearly never promised to keep us from encountering danger in our lives. The familiar words of Jesus confirm that fact:
4. From John 16:33 — I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
5. Again, Jesus says we will, not we might, have tribulation in this world.
6. But in both passages, we have the promise that God will not leave us alone when we go through those difficult times. He will be with us. And it is His presence during those times that allow us to have peace, even in the midst of tribulation.

1. Conclusion 
1. Even though it seems like there are innumerable places where we can try to find help, we really only have two options.
1. Self
1. Let’s be honest. Even those of us who are genuine Christ followers often start here, don’t we? We don’t want to bother God with the things we consider to be “small stuff”, so we just try to handle those things in our own power and strength. We rely upon our intelligence, our own plans, our own strength and our own resources. Anything I do to try and find help apart from God is essentially relying upon what I can do for myself.
2. But what we ultimately find is that we are not capable, we are not really caring and we certainly aren’t constant.
2. God
1. In his book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson does a really good job of why we need to make God the first place we go to find help. We’ll close our time with those words:
2. The great danger of Christian discipleship is that we should have two religions: a glorious, biblical Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world, that in the cross and resurrection of Christ makes eternity alive in us, a magnificent gospel of Genesis and Romans and Revelation; and, then, an everyday religion that we make do with during the week between the time of leaving the world and arriving in heaven. We save the Sunday gospel for the big crises of existence. For mundane trivialities - the time when our foot slips on a loose stone, or the heat of the sun gets too much for us, or the influence of the moon gets us down – we use the everyday religion of the “Reader’s Digest” reprint, advice from a friend, an Ann Landers column, the huckstered wisdom of a talk-show celebrity…But Psalm 121 says that the same faith that works in the big things works in the little things. The God of Genesis 1 who brought light out of darkness is also the God of this day who guards you against every evil.
3. And… we end with the question with which we began:  Where does your help come from?