“'He Will Keep Your Life': Hope in God's Keeping (Psalm 121)” | 11/8/2020
Psalm 121 | 11/8/20 | Will DuVal
One last thing I want to say before we dive into Psalm 121 this morning… actually, let me use Psalm 121 to do it. I told you last week with Psalm 47 - “ ‘God reigns over the nations;’: Hope in God’s RULE” that my hope was to give you some peace during election week, that our God is Sovereign over EVERY election, over every elected official...
Well this morning we’re in Psalm 121, and let me just tell you what Psalm 121 DOESN’T say, okay: It DOESN’T say -
“I lift up my eyes to the hills.
Where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from DONALD TRUMP”
And after that, Psalm 121 doesn’t go ON to say:
“JOE BIDEN will not let your foot be moved, now that he’s in the White House; JOE BIDEN is your keeper, and he who keeps you, Sleepy Joe, will not slumber.”
NO! We’re gonna come back to the REAL Psalm 121 here in a moment.
But look: I promise I’m not gonna dwell on the election all morning. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge it. So this was my FB post, from last night:
“To my Democrat friends: I genuinely pray that President-elect Biden lives up to the best of what you saw in him as a candidate.
To my Republican friends: I pray that your hope, security, identity, faith... is in Someone far greater than President Trump.
To my Christian friends: Regardless of who you voted for, remember that the One True King is still on His throne.
To my non-Christian friends: THAT King, Jesus, wants to be the Lord and Savior of your life; trust in Him tonight, and you think the party in Wilmington, DE is turnt?! (Luke 15:7)
And to Joe Biden: I am praying for you tonight.”
Because brothers and sisters - God’s word COMMANDS us to do that - 1 Timothy 2:1-4 “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
And so Father, we do that together, corporately this morning, as a church, YOUR church, here at West Hills… we pray for our newly elected officials, our earthly “kings” in “high positions”, our new Congressmen and women, judges and mayors, ALL of them but ESPECIALLY, the highest position of all in our land, President-elect Joe Biden. Father, we pray for Your wisdom and discernment in governance for him, that come January, he might govern in a way that allows us to “lead peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way.” Father, we pray for our CURRENT president, President Trump, that HE might do the same. That he too would govern his remaining 2 ½ months in a way that encourages Christians to live peacefully, quietly, godly and dignified. And Father, MOST of all, we pray for BOTH of these men - without knowing their hearts; only YOU know their hearts - but Your Word clearly tells us YOUR heart, Father; that YOUR heart’s greatest desire is that “ALL people would be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth,” the knowledge of JESUS, the Way, the Truth, and the LIFE. Jesus - YOU are our only hope, in life and in death. YOU are so much better, than any politician or party platform that this world has to offer. Jesus, you are OUR hearts’ greatest desire. So this morning we pray for our leaders, we pray for our country and its future, but more than that, Father, we pray for the Church, YOUR church, Father, that you purchased with the precious blood of your Son, that come what may these next 4 years, we would continue to be light and salt in an increasingly dark and corrosive world, and that we would never lose sight of the truth that OUR hope, is in You and You alone. In Jesus’ awesome name we pray, Amen.
This morning, as I said, we are studying Psalm 121, as we begin to wind down our “Psalms of Hope” series, we only have 3 Sundays left in the Psalms. I have so loved preaching through these psalms of hope, and I hope that you’ve loved studying, and internalizing, and applying them in your day to day life right alongside me. But this morning we come to a really important psalm, in this 121st chapter. Because we’ve been highlighting all these great, glorious truths about who God is, and the hope we have in Him because of it: Hope in God’s LISTENING (Ps 13), in God’s CARE (Ps 23), in God’s PROTECTION (Ps 27), in God’s REDEMPTION (Ps 30), in God’s DELIVERANCE (Ps 31), in God’s GOODNESS (Ps 33), in God’s FAITHFULNESS (Ps 42-43), in God’s HELP (Ps 46), in God’s TRUSTWORTHINESS (Ps 62), in God’s ENDURING (Ps 71), in God’s STRENGTH (Ps 73), in God’s RULE (Ps 47 for last week).
And ALL those things are true of God, and we should find GREAT hope in them all. But the question for you and me TODAY is: how about when life is STILL tough?
How about when you KNOW, and you TRUST, that God listens and cares and protects and redeems and rules and ALL of it… but life is STILL hard?
I was thinking about it more this past week: you really run a RISK when you preach a sermon series specifically on HOPE in the middle of a pandemic-filled election cycle. Because obviously my intention in this series has been to help us fix our eyes on JESUS in the midst of the chaos swirling around us; to remind us that our hope is NOT in this world, it’s in the world to come. But the risk I run in DOING that, is that you all leave here on Sundays feeling reassured and HOPEFUL, but then on MONDAY you get hit with the weight of the world again, and perhaps some of you feel even WORSE at that point, because now on top of the temptations to despair, you feel GUILTY that you’re not more hopeful! You think, “Gosh - the Bible is so hopeful, but it so often these days, if I’m honest, it seems like I struggle to be, so what does that say about me?”
If that’s you, if you’re experiencing some cognitive dissonance these days, between the hope you experience on Sundays and the despair that wants to creep in some Mondays, I just want to reassure you this morning that Psalm 121 is for YOU. Because the big takeaway here, the main idea of Psalm 121, is that as absolutely wonderful as it is, that God protects, and helps, and delivers and strengthens and ALL of it - the fact is, you and I need a God who goes even beyond THAT, who does even MORE than that...
We need a God who can SUSTAIN us, when things get tough.
A God who KEEPS us, in the midst of ongoing trials.
A God who will PRESERVE us, all the way to the end.
A God you can turn to in the hospital when you’re battling COVID and they won’t let your loved ones in, and it feels like you are otherwise left all on your own, with all of your scary risk factors…
A God who won’t leave you when you’re stuck in a rehab center for months trying to relearn how to walk and talk after undergoing major brain surgery for a stroke.
A God who won’t let go of you, when your father dies suddenly, tragically, in his early 50s and it sends you into a MAJOR crisis of faith, and you struggle to believe God is even still out there anymore…
These aren’t hypotheticals, friends; these are actual members of our church facing these kinds of hardships right now. Now, maybe you’re NOT; perhaps all things considered, life is pretty good for you right now. But I am sure that from time to time, ALL of us face the more commonplace, yet no less REAL trials of life, and all the more so during a global pandemic.
You need a God who is somehow gonna get you through the MONTHS ahead, being cooped up every day this winter, indoors, by yourself, with your three toddlers under the age of 4, listening to “Baby Shark” all day without killing yourself or all of them.
You need a God who’s gonna see you through the depression you’re experiencing as a result of working from home for the past 8 months, and desperately longing for real, face-to-face interaction with your workplace friends.
A God who won’t give up on you and turn His back on you, when watching services online Sunday mornings during quarantine, turned into continuing to watch online after the quarantine was lifted, NOT because you were scared to return in person, like most of those watching this morning, but rather, because it was EASIER - you got USED to watching in your PJs from the comfort of your own couch… and then that became, “Eh, I’ll sleep in and watch the service later in the day”, and now you’ve completely lost ANY rhythm of prioritizing corporate worship altogether.
Every ONE of these church members, and every one of US, needs a God who’s gonna KEEP us, through the ups and downs of life - our humps and slumps. And praise God, we have one!
So would you stand with me as you’re able, and turn in your Bibles... Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
3 He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
4 Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
8 The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
This is the word of the Lord... (LET’S PRAY…)
-
Now, to give you some context here, Psalms 120-134 are all delineated in their superscriptions as “Song of Ascents”. Commentators inform us that they were “pilgrim songs to be sung when the Israelites ‘ascended’ to Jerusalem for their annual feasts.” (Walvoord & Zuck, 882)
So that’s the backdrop for the visual that we get there in v1: “I lift up my eyes to the hills.” J.M. Boice explains (1076-77): “This can mean either of two things. First, for a pilgrim approaching Jerusalem the mountains around the city suggested Jerusalem itself, and Jerusalem was God’s city, the place God has chosen for his earthly dwelling. Therefore, to look ‘to the hills’ really meant looking to God as one’s true help… OR, Second, the stanza can be a rejection of the hills for God himself. The mountains, with their high places, had been centers for Canaanite religion. Their gods were identified with the mountains, and they were worshiped there with cultic prostitution. These ‘high places’ are mentioned 78 times in the OT, where we are told that the Jews did not destroy them when they occupied Canaan and that they often worshipped there themselves. If this is what the psalmist is thinking of, what he is telling us is that his gaze did not stop when he looked upward to the hills, but that he looked beyond them to God, who made the mountains… To worship the gods of the mountains or any other gods or even the mountains themselves is idolatry, and it is as useless as it is wicked. What we need is not the gods of nature, but nature’s God.”
I love how Boice puts that: we NEED not the gods of nature, but nature’s God. We NEED the God, V2: “who made heaven and earth”. Scripture continually connects our trust in God back to who He is as CREATOR -
Psalm 33, which we already examined together: “we trust in his holy name”… why? Because “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,” (vv21, 6)
Psalm 96:5 “For all the gods of the peoples are idols, (don’t trust them; they’re powerless…)
But the Lord made the heavens.”
Nehemiah 9:5-6 “bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting”… Why? Because: “You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; therefore the host of heaven worships you.”
Creation is the PROOF that God is ABLE to help us in our time of need. If He can make galaxies and geckos, solar systems and sunflowers, he is certainly able to keep you and me from stumbling. He has the power. He has ALL power; God is “omnipotent” - ALL-powerful - we’ll discuss that in greater depth next week with Psalm 139. But suffice it to say here, if He can create and uphold the UNIVERSE by the power of His word, I think he can handle your mid-life crisis. Your friend-group drama at school, students. I don’t mean to make light of our problems this morning. Many of you are facing REAL, DIFFICULT stuff right now; and to YOU, in the moment, it FEELS overwhelming. But all the more reason you need to be ENCOURAGED, and uplifted, and reassured by the hope of v2 here: that your “help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.”
It would be like, silly analogy: say I wanted to take my daughter Ellery out of school for a day, and the policy is you need to notify the teacher; it would be like Ellery freaking out over my ability, whether or not I was able to send a quick email to her teacher to give her the heads up. When she WATCHES me write a 5,000 word sermon, a 10-page PAPER, every single WEEK! “Baby, I think I can handle a 10 second email.” That’s what our problems are to God. That doesn’t mean He doesn’t CARE about them. God loves us enough to take our worries seriously. But Creation is the proof of His almighty power, so you and I don’t need to worry about His ability to help us in our time of need.
Then the psalmist offers us 2 of His OWN illustrations of God’s helping protection over us:
1) a “vigilant watchman” in vv3-4: (“he will not slumber”); and then...
2) an umbrella in vv5-6: (“shade at our right hand”)
That might strike us today as a bit of an odd choice of imagery, but Boice explains (1077): “There is genuine danger of sun-stroke in such hot regions as the Near East… (And then there was SOME thought too, in antiquity, as v6 suggests, that not only can the SUN strike you by day, physically, but the MOON can also strike you with mental and emotional afflictions by night; that’s where our word LUNATIC comes from; werewolves... the idea that things like the lunar cycle can really affect on us. Other interpreters think the psalmist’s point is that God will protect you from both heat by day and cold by night…) I think what he really means, is that nothing, by day or by night, heat or cold, physical or psychological, NOTHING can harm us if God is keeping watch over us. As Boice says, “He is our shade against the visible perils of the day as well as the hidden perils of the night.”
Because v3: “he who keeps you will not slumber.”
V4: “he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.”
See, pagans in antiquity conceived of their gods in very anthropomorphized ways, humanized ways. People for millennia having been making gods in our OWN image. We assume that God must be like us. We’re NOT omnipotent. We’re actually VERY limited. We’re so limited, we’ve actually got to lay down, and close our eyes, and shut our brain off, power down, for at LEAST a few hours every couple days, or we will literally DIE. The longest recorded time without sleep in all of HISTORY, is 11 days. You try and push it and stay up for 12, you DIE. After just THREE days, you’ll start to hallucinate. Scientists aren’t even exactly sure WHY; the best explanation is probably just that God wants to remind us that we’re not Him. That we are very human, limited, and finite. And He is NOT. But for ALMOST as long as people have been around, we’ve been dreaming up these OTHER gods, who ARE like us, and who we can therefore manipulate to do our bidding. God tells us in His word that He’s made us in HIS image; that’s the most glorious fact in ALL of Creation. And yet, in our sinful rebellion, our desire like Adam and Eve to BE gods, we turn around and fashion gods in OUR image instead. The Bible calls this IDOLATRY. And God hates it. And as Boice said, it’s as USELESS as it is wicked.
The idea of God sleeping brings to mind the story of the prophet Elijah from 1 Kings 18. The wicked King Ahab wanted to kill Elijah because he wouldn’t shut up about Yahweh being the real god, and Baal, the Canaanite god who Ahab preferred because he was humanized, supposedly able to be manipulated; so Elijah said, “Tell ya what, why don’t we put it to a test. We’ll both build altars, and sacrifice a bull to put on each, and then we’ll both pray to our gods and see once and for all which one is real.” So Ahab assembled 450 prophets of Baal. And Elijah marched up Mt. Carmel all by himself. And the prophets of Baal went first, and they prayed, and prayed, and prayed some more, ALL day, hours on end, but nothing. So Elijah started TAUNTING them: “Remember - you created Baal in YOUR image; he’s like YOU. Maybe he’s just a little hard of hearing; you should pray LOUDER. Maybe he’s relieving himself; did you check Heaven’s bathroom? Maybe he’s away on vacation; did He leave an “out of office” message? Or maybe he’s just ASLEEP. You better get louder and wake him up.”
So the prophets of Baal “cried aloud and cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances, until the blood gushed out upon them.” But v29 tells us: “No one answered; no one paid attention.”
Then it’s Elijah’s turn. And he decides he’s REALLY gonna rub it in. So he builds his altar, and DOWSES the whole thing in gallons and gallons of water, just to really pour it on, literally, how much more powerful HIS God, Yahweh, is. And you know the rest of the story, God sends a fireball from heaven to consume the offering, there’s a great revival amongst the people, and they round up all the prophets of Baal and slaughter all 450.
The point of the story is that real gods don’t sleep. They don’t need to be awakened. Yahweh is standing guard, he’s watching out for you, and he never takes a break. Not so much as a nap.
And that means, v3: “He will not let your foot be moved”. Jude 24 says God “is able to keep you from stumbling”.
Now, here’s what I want to do the rest of the sermon: we’ve got to answer the question, “In what sense does God promise not to let my FOOT be moved”, to keep me from stumbling, because if you and I are honest this morning, I don’t know about you, but I feel like most of my LIFE is nothing BUT stumbling! I’m such a sinner, even the GOOD choices I’ve made in life, I stumbled into. Stumbling is the story of my LIFE: I had no IDEA what I was doing when I proposed to Polly. Deciding to have kids. Moving to St. Louis. Entering into the ministry. Don’t ask me how the Lord called me into ministry; I wasn’t listening whenever he did; I trust that He made the call, but I was too busy stumbling around to pick up the phone. The story of MY life is God redeeming my stumbling and using it DESPITE me for His own good purposes.
But that still leaves us with the question: how can God honestly promise he won’t let our feet be moved? Sometimes it feels like life is nothing but CONSTANT movement. The psalmist is gonna say in v7: “The Lord will keep you from all evil.”
Now some of y’all got some explaining to do! Because you just called Joe Biden pure EVIL on your Twitter feed on Monday, but by Friday he’d won the election. So if the Lord promises to keep you from all evil, either HE’S a liar or YOU are!
Sorry, I’m getting distracted by the election again; let’s make it less political and even more serious: There are millions of Christians, all around the world this morning, who are suffering SEVERE persecution for their faith in Christ. I subscribe to Voice of the Martyrs; here’s a recent email I got from them, entitled “Thousands Displaced in Mozambique”: It reads, “Elisa arrived home just in time to see Islamists murder her father and her husband, who was a pastor. Her uncle had already been beheaded. Grief-stricken and fearing for their lives, Elisa and 18 members of her family headed south, joining more than 200,000 others fleeing the Islamists’ advance.”
So if you’re Elisa, and you pick up your Bible for comfort, and you happen to flip open to Psalm 121 and you read, “The Lord will keep you from all evil”, what would YOU think? Do we have to redefine “evil” to try and get God off the hook, so that God doesn’t seem like a CRAZY person watching Christians down here get SLAUGHTERED, beheaded, for his name, all while He tosses out empty platitudes like “I’ll be your shade on a sunny day”. Either we’ve got to do some SERIOUS exegetical gymnastics to try and get God off the hook here for bold-face lying and breaking a promise…
OR. Or. God has something else in mind, when He promises to sustain us. To preserve us. To KEEP us. That’s the verb the psalmist uses SIX times in just these 8 short verses - shamar, in Hebrew: “to keep, watch, preserve”; by the way, as an aside, I love the observation W.S. Plumer makes in his commentary, that (1098): “Good men must be very unbelieving to make it necessary for the Almighty so often to assure them of his preserving and protecting care, as he does no less than six times in this short Psalm”. If we had faith even as tiny as a mustard seed we’d move mountains; not too many of us doing that. No, our faith is WEAK! But praise God his faithfulness to US is sufficient. And here IS his faithfulness to us, friends: this is what God is promising us, when He says “I am your KEEPER” in v5. When he says, “I’ll keep you from all evil” in v7.
Does it mean we’ll never encounter evil? Like we’ll be totally insulated from it? No! Remember, Jesus warned his disciples of just the OPPOSITE! If they persecute ME, they’re gonna come for you too. In this world you WILL have trouble.
Notice something very important about v7:
God doesn’t promise to “keep you from all DANGER”
If you think about the apostle Paul’s list in Romans 8:38-39 - of all the things that God promises cannot keep us from Him… Paul says, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Now if you flip over to 2 Cor 11:23-29 and check out the list of troubles that Paul lists that he has personally dealt over the course of his ministry as an apostle… “imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, etc. etc.” You start to notice something: Paul specifically dealt with EVERY SINGLE TYPE of calamity that he mentioned in Rom 8:38-39! And ultimately, he would end up DYING for the faith, at the hand of a Roman sword. God doesn’t promise to keep us from DANGER in this life.
Speaking of martyrs, this psalm was historically one of the very FAVORITES of many Christian martyrs, and they would recite it joyfully as they marched to their DEATHS! Is that some kind of bad joke… like, did they totally MISS the sick IRONY of Psalm 121… OR, did they understand something about the TRUE interpretation of this psalm that you and I desperately need to appreciate this morning...
That God doesn’t promise to keep us from all DANGER, but he DOES promise to keep us from all EVIL, and that “he will keep your LIFE.” Your LIFE.
What’s you LIFE, friends? The 80… 90 years you will spend on this earth? The Bible says that’s just a blip on the RADAR screen of your life. The Bible says that part of what it MEANS to be “created in God’s image” is to be created for ETERNITY. That our souls are ETERNAL. We were built to live FOREVER! We’re not LIKE appliances these days. We all complain “they don’t make dishwashers like they used to”; nowadays they DESIGN them to only last 5-10 years, so you’ll HAVE to buy a new one. But God’s not in sales. He builds us to LAST! To live for ETERNITY!
But that means if that dishwasher’s gonna last to the end of TIME, you better take really REALLY good care of it. You better have a MAINTENANCE plan that’s ALSO built to last. Designed to PRESERVE. God’s gonna have to KEEP us.
List Biblical Promises about God’s KEEPING our faith: (and I’m just gonna warn you again, sometimes I get accused of trying to cram too much Scripture into one sermon. It’s a firehose. If I’m gonna be critiqued for ANYTHING, being TOO biblical is fine by me. And this morning, I’m gonna INTENTIONALLY do it again - because I want to overwhelm you with the biblical truth of God’s KEEPING mercy over us. We Calvinists call this the “perseverance of the saints”. One of the most hotly debated theological questions amongst Christians is “Can a true Christian LOSE their faith?” We tackled that back in February in our tough texts series. And I exposited Hebrews 6 for you. The most frequently cited passage by ARMENIANS, those Christians who believe we CAN lose our faith, and I showed you why they’re wrong. Why YOU’RE wrong. We’ve got some Armenians who worship with us here at West Hills. We love you. But you’re wrong. You’re DEAD wrong. And I would argue DANGEROUSLY wrong, on this very very important theological question. So let me try and hit some of the highlights:
Philippians 1:6 “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
-Okay, what’s the good work? Well, what’s the BEST work, that God works in ANY person’s life? It’s our SALVATION! God’s rescue of a guilty, otherwise CONDEMNED sinner from the clutches of death, and sin, and HELL by the power of Jesus’ blood; His LIBERATING us and adopting us into His perfect Heavenly family - THAT’S the greatest work that’s EVER been done in MY life, in your life, in the life of ANYONE who repents and turns to Christ in faith. SALVATION!
-But here’s the thing: the NT uses the verb for “save” - sodzo - in ALL THREE verb tenses: past, present, and future. There’s a very real sense, VITALLY important sense, in which believers HAVE BEEN SAVED… WERE SAVED. As the great hymn goes, “The hour I first believed!” God worked a MIRACLE in your heart - spiritual rebirth, death to life.
Ephesians 2:8 “by grace you have been saved through faith.”
2 Corinthians 5:17 “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.[b] The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. ” It’s DONE. Finished. Your salvation is complete. Secure. There’s nothing that needs to be added TO it, it cannot be taken AWAY from you. That is AMAZING news this morning, brothers and sisters! The Bible calls it “Justification”. It’s a legal term that means “declared innocent”. You and I stood guilty in God’s court of Law, condemned in our sin of high treason and rebellion against the King of the Universe. But Jesus stepped into the courtroom and willingly took upon himself the punishment that was rightfully owed you and me; We did the crime, HE did the time. And the Bible says His sacrificial death, in our place, on that cross, JUSTIFIED us, it “made us INNOCENT”; Jesus paid the PENALTY for our sin.
Romans 5:1 - “we have been (past tense) justified by faith; we [now] have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Praise God!
Now, that’d be good enough news on its own! But the good news of the GOSPEL gets even BETTER than that! Because the NT says we aren’t just “saved”, past tense; we’re also BEING saved - present tense.
1 Corinthians 15:2 “I preached to you the gospel, by which you are being saved”
1 Corinthians 1:18 “the word of the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved”
The Bible calls this SANCTIFICATION. This present tense, ongoing salvation that God works in and through our lives. And it’s a beautiful thing, that God in His mercy would free us not just from the PENALTY of sin, at our justification, but from the POWER of sin as well, progressively, over time, as we are further and further sanctified; we are “being saved”, being SET FREE from the power, the grip, that sin still holds in some ways over our hearts.
But the good news is even better than even THAT, friends. Because it’s not just the penalty of sin. Not just the POWER of sin. God promises that one day we will BE saved - future tense - from the very PRESENCE of sin altogether, in Heaven.
1 Thessalonians 5:9 “God has destined us… to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ”
Romans 5:9 ties the past and future together for us nicely: “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. ”
Scripture calls this “Glorification”.
So biblically, there are three dimensions to our salvation - justification, sanctification, and glorification. Past, present and future. And what does any of this have to do with Psalm 121 and God’s promise to “keep” us? We already said that’s not a temporal promise: that CAN’T be a promise for THIS life only, for THIS world, or else God would be a liar; No, God must have a much BIGGER “keeping” in mind here. And I think the “keeping” he has in mind is EXACTLY the same kind of “keeping”, “COMPLETING” work that Paul is referencing here in Philippians 1:6 when he promises that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
God WILL complete His good work of salvation in your life - all 3 dimensions. Those God JUSTIFIES, He WILL Sanctify. And those He SANCTIFIES, He WILL glorify.
And we don’t have to speculate about that being the “good work” Paul’s alluding to in Philippians, because we can flip over to Romans 8, where Paul writes what I just said almost VERBATIM:
Romans 8:28-30 “For those who love God, all things work together for good,[h] for those who are called according to his purpose. [Now, all too often we stop right there, in v28. And again: that would be an AWESOME enough promise on its own. If it only applied to THIS life. Like, if the promise was that one day on my deathbed I’ll be able to look back and realize how God perfectly orchestrated all the events of my life, even the tough times, and worked them together in His master plan for my ultimate good. I couldn’t see it at the time, but now I see it - my parents’ divorce, those tough years of marriage, my kids’ wandering from the faith; ALL of it makes sense. But if we actually read Romans 8:28 in context, I don’t think that’s the promise. It’s even better than that. Because vv29-30 say:
29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
And here in Romans, and this gets us into some pretty crazy, mind-bending, time-warping type theological stuff, but because God is omniscient, and transcends time and space, here, God even talks about our GLORIFICATION in the past tense. In God’s mind, once He’s set His mind to the plan - to save us: to justify, sanctify, and glorify us - it’s already as good as done. Why? Again, let’s bring it back to Psalm 121: BECAUSE GOD KEEPS US. Because “He will not let your foot be moved”; If you’re standing on the ROCK, on Christ, you’re built on a firm foundation. The winds and storms of life will come. But God will preserve you. Keep you. Keep your FAITH. THAT’S what He keeps; God keeps the FAITH, of those He calls.
Jude addresses his short letter in the NT this way: “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ:”; those who are CALLED will be KEPT.
Hebrews 12:2 “Let us... look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith”
-The “founder and IMPROVER”? Founder and “enhancer”?
-No! “Perfecter” - raise your hand this morning if you’ve got PERFECT faith? Okay, then I have to conclude that means unless God’s a LIAR, He’s just not DONE with you yet. He’s still WORKING on you, perfecting your faith. For your remaining days on this earth, until at last He brings you home and your faith becomes SIGHT, and is finally, ultimately, PERFECTED. He WILL do it. He perfects that which he founds. Jesus doesn’t start jobs he doesn’t intend to FINISH. You’re a work in progress. Some of us take more work than others! :) But God’s promise is to see the job through to completion. To perfection.
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 - reiterates this same promise: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.”
-He WILL do it - He will “sanctify you COMPLETELY”, to COMPLETION, to PERFECTION.
1 Corinthians 1:8-9 “[God] will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful.”
1 Peter 1:5 “you… by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. ”
CONCLUSION: [Invitation to follow Him.]
But friends: God only keeps those he CALLS. How do you know if you’re called? Well in one sense, I am calling you now. You are ALL receiving God’s GENERAL calling this morning. The call to repent of your sins and trust in Jesus. Whether or not you will ALSO receive God’s effectual calling, the calling that only the HOLY SPIRIT can make on your life this morning - that is between you and God. But here’s what I’ll tell you. It IS between you and God. I’m as Reformed as they come, and I’m certainly not saying you have ANYTHING to contribute to your own salvation, it has to be ALL God’s doing. But you STILL have a ROLE to play. Hebrews 3:15 declares, ““Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts”. That’s a choice YOU can make this morning. You’re hearing his voice. Speaking to you, through his word - SO MUCH of his word this morning, passage after passage about his choosing, saving, KEEPING
END: Jude 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, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time[h] and now and forever. Amen.”