Sermons in the Ascent Series

Morning, everyone. My name is Tom Sartorius. I'm one of the elders and partners here at Grace, and this morning's reading is from Psalm 120. I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. What will he do to you, Tom. You may have noticed Tom using a church Bible for that. We do not require elders to own their own Bibles, but we're hopeful that Tom will be able to acquire one in the coming months. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, this morning is the second part of our series called Ascent. Last week, Erin Winston, our children's pastor and pastor extraordinaire, opened the series up for us. And she kind of explained a little bit what it was, why we're doing it, where it's from. But as she was doing that, there was a little bit of sound issues. It was really nobody's fault, but no one was paying attention. No one heard what she said. So just to reorient us in this series, it is, this is one that's been a long time coming. I've kind of shared with you guys before. Sometimes we'll have series that we know we want to do. We know they'll be good for the church. We know we want to expose you guys to that thought process or information, but it just, it sometimes takes two, three, four years to work it into the calendar just right. And so we're all excited to finally be able to do this series. It is based on the Psalms of Ascent, which are Psalms 120 to 134. And what I didn't even know, I knew offhand that these existed, but I didn't really learn about them entirely until I read a book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson called Along Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a phenomenal book. If you get nothing else from this series, I hope you'll write down the name of that book and that you'll read it. It's a movement through all 15 of the Psalms of Ascent with some commentary before and after, and it will serve you. I just tell you, it will serve you better in your spiritual journey to read that than to listen to me preach about it for the next several weeks. I hope that I can do it justice, and I hope that it can focus our attention on the right things, but Eugene Peterson, to me, he's one of my favorite Christians that's ever lived. I think back in 2021, maybe, I read his autobiography just called Pastor about his story as a life in his life being a pastor, and it's one of the most personally impactful books I've ever read. So I'm really excited to expose you guys to what is probably his greatest work, a long obedience in the same direction. And these Psalms of Ascent are called the Psalms of Ascent because typically when you're going to Jerusalem, you're ascending, you're going up a mountain. No matter where you're coming from, Jerusalem's highly elevated compared to the rest of the country of Israel, give or take. And so usually when you're ascending, you're ascending to Jerusalem. So these are psalms that families were supposed to go through as they approached the city on pilgrimage. There's also a specific place in Jerusalem, the Temple stairs, I believe, where you were to pause when you arrived. You were to pause on the first step and sing this first psalm and pray over it as a family. Take the second step, do the second psalm. There's 15 psalms and 15 steps that aligned in this way. And overarching this entire series is this idea of pilgrimage, of a long obedience in the same direction, of the perseverance required by the Christian life, an acknowledgement that the Christian life is not simply a decision one day to accept Christ as our Savior and allow God to be the Lord of our life, but it is a daily decision that we renew. The Christian life is a long, steady obedience in the same direction. And so that idea serves as an umbrella over everything we talk about, that this implication that the Christian life is long and it is difficult, and we are pilgrims on a journey. This morning, we take the first step of that journey. The first psalm is Psalm 120, and that is a psalm of repentance. And when I think about repentance, I kind of think about it like this. Have you ever been in a space, your office, kids' room, kids' playroom, your kitchen, wherever it is, and you just look around and there's so much junk everywhere, you go, I can't live like this. This is disgusting. I have to clean this before I can do another thing. Have you ever had that impulse? If you have never had that impulse, you should clean your home this afternoon. Some of us would freak out. Some of you have that impulse so much that you will secretly clean your sister's house or your mom's house. You'll secretly go behind people and just clean at their place because you just want it to be nice for them. It's funny. I wrote this sermon a couple of weeks ago, but Jen took the kids. Lily's on fall break. Lily's my eight-year-old daughter. So she took Lily and John down to Jen's sister's house so the kids could play together and go to zoos and all the things that little kids do. And so I've been home alone since Thursday. And when I got up this morning, took a shower, went downstairs, got my Bible, got my notes, and went to go through the sermon. I go through the sermon on Sunday mornings just to make sure I'm familiar with it. And I went to go through the sermon. I'm standing in the kitchen, and I was like, I can't live like this. I can't do this. It just had four days of bachelor junk sitting around, you know? And I was like, I got to whirlwind clean this thing. So after I was able to clean the living room and the kitchen, I was able to get to work. But I don't know if you can relate to that, but I think most of us can. This idea where you just look around and you go, this is a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it right away before I can take another step. This, to me, is the heart of the beginning of repentance. Now, repentance gives a bad rap. We don't like to think about repentance. That one's hard. That's when we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to make better choices. We have to change things. Repentance is tough, and it might be uncomfortable to bring it up, but it's absolutely essential, and I hope that after this morning, that many of us can think about it perhaps in a different way and even seek to make it a habit. But along the lines of repentance being the first part of it, just kind of being disgusted with what's going on as we look around our life, Eugene Peterson says it like this, a person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. So a person before knowing Jesus has to look around at their life and be so disgusted with the way things are going, with the current state of affairs, with what's happening on their inside life and in their outside life. And be so disgusted with it that they go how we do in a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it. That moment has to come, has to precipitate genuine repentance. So he says, and I think as a Christian, because most of us in the room are Christians, as a Christian, we can think about it this way. We have to be so disgusted with the areas of our life that we have not yet relinquished to God. Because we've given our lives to God, right? But we've all got these little pockets where we know God probably doesn't want this habit in our life. He probably doesn't want this attitude. He probably doesn't want this pattern. He probably doesn't want this in my life. But I'm a Christian, and I'm good, and I'm pretty squared away. So I'm just going to keep this. This is under the lordship of God. Yes, this is my Christian life. This is my personal life. It's under the lordship of me. I'm going to continue to run things here. And Eugene says, until we get disgusted with how this feels, we will never convert it over to the Lordship of God in our life and take a step towards the Christian path. So one of the objects this morning is to help us think about our sin and look at the things that we have in our life in certain ways that make us miserable and make us disgusted and cause us to wake up in the morning going, who am I? Or cause us to finish an argument with our spouse and think, what was that all about? Or after we lose our mind on our kids, we go, what in the world, where did that come from? Or after we just go through a day thinking everyone's annoying or everyone's a moron or everyone's an idiot, and then we get home and we're like, is this really, do I want to be this angry? In those moments, we should reflect and become upset at the mess around us that our sin is making. David did it like this in the Psalm. Tom just read it for us. It starts off doing exactly this. I call on the Lord in And I think that's great. It's a great way to start off repentance. Last week, Aaron preached about, when I struggle, where does my help come from? Does it come from the mountains? Does it come from the altars on the mountains that serve me in different ways, that allow escapes and outs in different ways? And the psalmist says, no, lift your eyes up to God. Your help comes from God, creator of heaven and earth. So this repentance starts out in the exact right way. He looks to God in his distress. It's the song we just sang, God, I need you. We look to God in our distress. Run to the Father, fall into grace. So in his distress, he looks to God, which is the right way to start in repentance. Very first thing, I can't do this. I'm not going to white knuckle my way out of this sin or out of this attitude or out of this way of life. I need your help, God. And then he laments his sin. He laments his lying lips and his hypocrisy. He laments who he is and who he has become because of where he is and who he's surrounded himself with. He reaches a place of disgust with his sin, and so he cries out to God in his distress. And as I wrote this sermon, it occurred to me that for this to make sense, we can't just exist in the hypothetical and talk about vague sins that we deal with, you deal with, David dealt with, I dealt with, you know, whatever. We would need a specific example, and that example could only come from me. So I'm going to share with you more about my personal life than I want to. Don't get nervous. It's not any bad. Because I think we need to actually walk through a sin together to help us get this idea. Somebody did this for me, and it's what helped me understand the idea. So a couple, two, three months ago, Jen and I were finishing up the day, and Jen's my wife, and we got in a little spat, just a little normal marriage tiff, you know, not a huge deal. And we don't really do a lot of those. We're not fighters. Fighting with Jen's like kicking a puppy. So you can't really do anything there. You just feel terrible and shut up. You're right. I'm sorry. So we don't do a lot of anger and frustration in the house. We really don't. But we were frustrated with each other this night. And I honestly don't remember what it was about or what brought it on. I think it was probably just our typical disagreement, which is she's annoyed at me with something and I'm annoyed at her for having the audacity to be annoyed with me. And so then we butt heads. And towards the end of the conversation, I hit her with this one. This is a classic marriage argument. I don't know if you've used it before. I would not recommend if you don't mean it. But I hit it with, you know, lately I haven't even felt like you've liked me very much, which is kind of the emotional jujitsu of, do you see how all this is your fault? Because you haven't been being kind to me. You haven't been being the wife that I deserve. How do you expect me to do the things you want me to do when you don't even like me? It didn't land and we went to bed. And that whole night I was tossing and turning because I realized that the whole disagreement, I was reflecting on the last couple weeks, months of my life. And I realized that the whole disagreement was my fault because of some bad patterns in my life. And I knew that I needed to confess. I knew that I needed to apologize. And so I couldn't sleep. I'm just waiting for her to wake up so I can pounce on her with apologies and love, right? I just, I need this to be right, and I need her to know that I know it's my fault. And so I get up, I make us coffee. That's the peace offering, coffee on the nightstand. And when she wakes up, I said, hey, listen, I'm super sorry. She said, okay, tell me more. I said, the argument that we had last night was 100% my fault. She goes, what makes you think that? And I said, I just realized that all I've wanted from anyone in my life for the past couple of months is just to leave me alone. I've just been living selfishly. I just feel pulled in every direction. And all I want from anyone all the time is just leave me alone. And I said, that's a really cruddy way to be a father. It's a really cruddy way to be a husband. And by the way, I'm really sorry. It takes some special kind of chutzpah to accuse you of not liking me when I've been acting wholly unlikable for the last two months. My bad. And she laughed, and she said, I'm glad you know. And then we were good. We were good. But that tossing and turning all night, being concerned with the disagreement, wanting to get to the bottom of what was going on and motivating there. That was the process that the Holy Spirit used to bring me to a point of disgust with myself. Because what a terrible thing it is to go through life, especially as a father, a husband, and a pastor, and all you want is for people to leave you alone? Dude, you've made some bad choices. You have misaligned your life with what you need to do if that's really what you want is to be left alone. And so that's not an option. So I had to come to a place of disgust where it shook me so much that I could actually stop and let the Holy Spirit help me see where I had been selfish and confess that to my wife. So first I had to confess it to God at four in the morning and then I had to confess it to at seven in the morning. Because I got to this place of disgust where I looked at my life and I said, I can't live like this anymore. I have to clean it up. Right? But if we're going to truly repent of a sin, after we confess, we have to consider. Once we confess our sin, yes, this is in me. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, I have this habit, this pattern, this attitude. Yes, I've been making exceptions for myself in this way. I confess my sin. After that, we must consider the consequences of our sin. David says it this way, Psalm 123-4. I don't know what burning coals of a broom brush are, but I don't want them. I'd like to not find out experientially. He says, he stops and he considers. What will happen if I continue in this pattern? What will happen if I continue to be surrounded by lying tongues and deceitful lips and I continue to have lying tongues and deceitful lips? Well, what will happen in this instance is that God is going to allow warriors to come in and punish us on his behalf. The consequences of this sin are grave. And so it's good for me to sit and face those consequences and look at the reality that my sin could bring about. For me, in different times and ages and places throughout the church, the threat of divine punishment has served the church well to get us to make better decisions in our life. But for me, that's never worked super great. For me, I have to think about the actual literal results of my sin if it goes unchecked. And so to consider your sin is to think through the impact that it's having on the people around you. So in that season of selfishness in my life, which was just a season. I've only been selfish about two or three months out of my life. Everywhere else is super giving. So how about in that heightened activity of selfishness in my life in that particular season? I did the exercise the next day in the office. I sat down, I had my quiet time, and I made myself go through the exercise of how can this sin hurt the people around me? And the first thing that was brought to mind was Lily, my eight-year-old daughter. And I immediately just felt terrible because I've noticed this with other people's kids before I had kids. And now that I have kids, I see that it's absolutely true. When there's a little kid, three is like the height of cute. Three is super cute. One, two, three, it's all great. Four is pretty great. Five, all right, most of the time. But eventually, somewhere around five, six years old, it's like, all right, you're just an annoying little kid now. You've transitioned. You've got a goofy-looking smile. You do dumb stuff. You're always saying, look at me, when you do some regular thing that every kid in the world can do. Like, look at me, dad. Yeah, I mean, you jumped. That's really great. You know, like, every kid gets to this annoying phase until they're cool again. Like, they're, I don't know, 23. And part of what was requiring energy from me was to engage with Lily, to laugh at her jokes, to watch her dance, to give her the attention that she wants from her dad. But my selfishness, and this is hard to say, my selfishness was penalizing her for being eight. Not bad, not unreasonable, not demanding, not selfish. My own junk, as her dad, was penalizing my daughter for simply being eight. What does it communicate to her if I'm annoyed with her at every turn? It teaches her that she's fundamentally annoying. What an awful thing for a father to do to a daughter. It taught John similar lessons. When I didn't want to do trucks or have the dinosaurs fight again, or listen, I'm so bad at engaging in imaginative play. You be the dad. Oh, jeez, I am the dad, and he doesn't want to play. But by not doing those things, what I teach him is I don't want to be with him. I don't want to indulge him. I don't want to. I just want, I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to do my thing. You do your thing, John. I distance myself from him. And then worse than that, the way that it hurts Jen is because she sees me annoyed with the load and the burden of the family, because she's sweet and because she's selfless, she takes on more of it. She tries to protect me by protecting me from the kids, and she takes on a bigger burden in the home. And that engenders in her resentment for always having to pick up my slack because I'm always in a grumpy mood because I always want to be left alone. It's completely unacceptable. And then you think about how it makes the staff feel at church when my door is constantly closed and I never want to talk to anybody and I go quick into meetings and out of meetings and I'm not available because I just want to be left alone. The ripples of this are terrible for a husband and a father and a pastor. But it's an important step in the process of repentance to think through the consequences of your sin if it goes unchecked. The question, after we realize our sin, after we've come to a place of disgust and we've said, I've got to clean this up, as we begin to clean, the question we should all learn to ask about our sin, we need to do the mental exercise to help with the disgust. The question we should learn to ask is, who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? Who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? I don't know what your sin is. I genuinely hope by now that you've been thinking along with me. That when I talked about the idea of confessing sins, that maybe you started to go through your mind and what the wake of your last few weeks have looked like or months. And I hope that you started to kind of go, I wonder what I need to confess. I wonder where my messes are. I wonder where the pockets of my life are that I haven't surrendered to the Lordship of God and I'm still ruling the roost there. And maybe those are the things that are actually making me miserable or anxious or whatever sometimes. I hope that you've begun to do that exercise. And I hope that as I was walking through the consequences of my sin with the people that I love the most, that you were starting to spin forward and think about the consequences of your sin with the people you love the most. Maybe it's selfishness like me. Maybe there's a secret habit or addiction that you're fostering. Maybe there's an attitude that you're maintaining. I'll tell you this, if you can't think of one, if you're sitting there going, gosh, I don't know what I need to confess or repent of, this is tricky. Well, then yours is pride. So that's easy to figure out. And if you still don't know what it is, ask your wife. She knows. She'll tell you. Ask your sister. Ask your best friend. Hey, I need to think about confession and repentance, but I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. I promise you they do. They'll help you out. But I hope that you've been doing that math and thinking along with me. But even as we confess and consider our sin, that's still not repentance. Repentance requires this last step. After we confess and consider, we must commence. After we confess our sin, we consider its consequences. We must commence. We must step. We must move. David are going to be if the sin goes unchecked. And he chooses to commence and take a step and go, I can't be here anymore. I have to move. I have to move away from what the world offers and towards what God offers. This whole Psalm follows the prescription that Eugene Peterson laid out at the beginning when he said that we have to be thoroughly disgusted with things the way they are before we can take a step towards God. It is not lost on me that in this sacred portion of the solemn book of Psalms, in these songs of ascent that were written by David for every generation of worshiper that would ever follow him to go through them every year in their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That a Jewish person would know these Psalms as well as a lifelong Christian knows the Christmas story out of Luke 2. And the angels appeared over the shepherds giving watch of the flock by night. It's all very familiar stuff for us. To the Jewish person, these Psalms of Ascent were just as familiar. You heard them every year. You heard your granddad give them, and then you heard your dad give them, and then you gave them. They were part of their life. An absolutely crucial spiritual linchpin in the life of a Hebrew in ancient Israel. And it is not lost on me that something of that great of import was started intentionally with repentance. He could have picked any topic. He could have started anywhere he wanted. He could have talked about the greatness of God. He could have talked about our need for God. He could have talked about the glory of God. He could have talked about loving our family. He could have talked about joy. He could have talked about all these things, but he starts with repentance. And I think it's so important because the first step of every journey towards God is always repentance. The first step of every journey towards God is always, always, always genuine repentance. To confess, to consider, and then to commence, to move. The most clear example of repentance in the Bible that I see is found in the book of Acts in chapter 2. Jesus has died. He rose again on Easter. He spent 40 days ministering to the people in and around Jerusalem, specifically the disciples. He ascended up into heaven. And then he told the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come. And they waited for 40 more days. And then at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came. And when the Holy Spirit came, Peter goes out on the balcony and he preaches to thousands of people in and around the Jerusalem area. And these are the same people who were a part of the mobs 80 days ago who crucified Christ. And he goes out there and he tells them who that Jesus was that they crucified. And they said, we believe. What do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. The very first step he asks them to take in their Christian journey is to repent. And it's to repent. This is a fundamental repentance of all Christianity, I believe. What are they to repent of? I believe that specifically what they needed to repent of in this instance is repent of who you thought Jesus was before I told you the truth about him. That's the fundamental repentance of Christianity. And if you're here today and you're not a Christian because you came with a spouse or you're just checking it out or you're considering or whatever. If you are going to become a believer, the Bible urges you to make this fundamental repentance of Christianity, which is whoever I thought Jesus was before I came in here today, I now agree with who he says he is. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God who came to take away the sins of the world. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross to make a path for us to heaven and reclaim creation. And he's coming back again to get us. Revelation 19, crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh to rescue creation back to its maker. That's what it is to be a Christian. And so the fundamental repentance of Christianity is to repent, move away from, confess, consider, and commence away from who we thought Jesus was and move towards who he is. And in this way, all repentance is saying some version of no to the lies of the world and what it offers and to our little kingdoms and fiefdoms in our own lives. And moving towards, as we confess that sin, we consider the consequences and then we commence our movement towards God in this pilgrimage of a long obedience in the same direction. Confession is fundamentally, or repentance is fundamentally a rejection of the world and an acceptance of God. And you know, in September, September 10th, I opened up a series called The Traits of Grace. And I said, this sermon is going to be, I think, the most important sermon I've delivered in several years at Grace. And I rolled out for you discipleship pathways. And I encouraged us to be step takers, people who take our next step of obedience, kind of like being on a pilgrimage. I said that everybody has in front of them a step of obedience that they need to take. And I want to encourage you to take yours. And I challenged us on September 10th. Listen, the most important thing we can do over the next few years is not build a building, is not grow the church, is to allow God to grow us in our depth spiritually. I challenged you to begin to take your spiritual growth personally, to begin to prioritize it, to begin to prioritize personal holiness. And now here we are at the onset of another series. And God has brought this theme back around of repentance and confession and a beginning of a move towards him. So I'm inviting you as we move through this series together, as we reflect on the one that we just had and what it asks of us, on this journey towards God with grace. And if you want to do that, if you want to take your spiritual health seriously, then that journey begins with the step of repentance. So what I'm going to do, instead of closing us out in prayer, is I'm going to let Aaron continue to pray. And I'm going to invite you to respond to what you've just heard in a time of your own prayer. If you're not sure what to confess, if you're not sure where to start, ask that God would open your eyes and let you see. Where are the attitudes and actions and habits in my life that don't need to be there that are actually causing me misery that I might not recognize? Ask God to make you disgusted with the pockets of sin in your life. And then in prayer, consider how that sin could hurt the people that you love the most if it goes unchecked. And then in prayer, if you feel so led, begin to take steps towards God in that area. And let's have a time of repentance together this morning as we take our first step on this journey towards God in the Psalms of Ascent.

Good morning, Grace. I'm David. I'm one of the elders here,. The Lord will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore. Well, good morning, Grace. I am Erin. I get the honor of being one of the pastors here. And I am going to channel a little. I didn't do it. It wasn't me. I'm going to channel a little Nate, maybe that's what it was, that's what the, you know. I'm going to channel a little Nate right now and tell you that I am so excited to be here with you today that I get the opportunity to introduce our new sermon series and it's my favorite. But in all actuality, it is. As a staff, we gather periodically to kind of plan out sermon series as we look at semesters that are coming. And for like the last four years, I have come with my little sheet of ideas, and I pitched this one. I promise it's not me. I pitched this one every single year and it goes up on the whiteboard and it gets looked at and everybody says like, yeah, we could do that. We think it and then we get down to the cuts at the end and it always gets wiped off the board and so until this last time all of a sudden it was it stayed on the board and we get to do it and then Nate comes to me and says hey would you like to be the one that actually gets to introduce the sermon series and and then also speak on your favorite one and I was like, yes, that's fantastic. So it is a banner day for me and I will try to contain my excitement. There's just no guarantee. So hang on if it gets a little over the top. But for the next seven weeks, we as a church get to journey together through what are known as the Songs of Ascent. The Bible itself contains 150 different psalms. And towards the back of the psalms, number 120 to 135 to be exact, are little psalms, and I say little because they're shorter, but they actually bear a second heading of Song of Ascent. These psalms were written as reminders to the Israelites of their past, of their history, of the faithfulness of God to them in the midst of their seasons of despair and hopelessness. They were used during all of the pilgrimages that were taken as they went from their places outlying to Jerusalem for the feasts. So it was a road trip of sorts. And I know everyone in here at some point in time has taken a road trip, I'm going to assume. If you've taken a road trip with children, it was a testing period. Just saying, testing of sanity and testing of quite possibly every single one of the fruits of the spirit. And if you came out the end of the road trip with at least one of those still intact, count it as a win. Just count it as a win. It's a good thing. But I remember as a kid taking road trips with my family. We lived in an area that we were a couple of hours away from relatives. And so we would pile into the station wagon. Yes, I will date myself. We would pile into the station wagon. Mom and dad had the front, my brother had the middle, and I had the back. Because it was kind of like little fiefdoms. And there was this need to keep peace in the kingdom. You must separate the two children because if not, it was the constant, you know, she looked at me the wrong way. And then the fighting ensued. So I took over the back. I had my pillow. I had my book. I had my flashlight. And away we went. And the flashlight was to read at night, of course. It was also to irritate my brother with, but I never admitted to that one. But it was a good thing. Nowadays, though, when these kids pile into the vans that they're taking on road trips with their parents, they have switches. For those of you of a different generation, it's not a piece of wood that your parents used to threaten you with. A switch is actually a video game. There's iPads, and then there's headphones. That is a gift from God to the parents as well because the parents have them also. So it's a good thing. It's peace in the kingdom, remember. That's what we all want. But the one thing that I know that's happening inside of those headphones now and was happening inside of my station wagon years ago and even further back was there was always music. There was always song. The genre changed depending upon who was in the car. But there was song. And to me, song and music is just food for the soul. And so for the Israelites, these Psalms of ascent were their music. These Psalms were a way for them to prepare their hearts as they took that journey to be in the presence of God in Jerusalem. They also used these psalms in a continued way to get closer to God. Once they got to Jerusalem, there were 15 steps that went from the outer court to the inner court of the temple. And so they would stop on the first step and they would sing. They would pause. They would move to the next step. They would sing another song. Remember, there's 15 steps. There's 15 songs. God's good that way. He just is. It's nice and orderly. And I know to a lot of you all, though, you went, I'm going to stop and I'm going to sing. And then I'm going to take another step and then I'm going to sing wrong. I'm going to take them two by two and I'm going to be the first one to the top. I know there's a competitive spirit in here. I have been with you all on many occasions. But yes, this is one of those really cool times for us where scripture makes an invitation. It invites us to slow down, to think very deeply about the story of God. And it's an opportunity for us to reframe our mindset, to orient our hearts, and to direct our steps toward God and who we are in him. And so this morning when I got to pick my psalm, Psalm 121 is the direction I felt I wanted to go and to look at the question, where does my help come from? And then especially in light of the society that we live in today that has entire marketing plans and TV shows out there all about the help that we need, even though we personally think we have it all together. Right? So if I gave you the little jingle, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, right? He's there to help the minute you need it. Or not too terribly long ago, Zoe, my daughter, introduced me to a random show on Netflix. It's called Alone. They take 10 survivalists and drop them in I don't even know where back I don't know what it's called it's like way up in the upper back part of Canada where they get to deal with weather and bears and moose and all of this stuff and they are dropped by themselves on an island with a thing of bear spray and a satellite phone. And their whole objective is to stay there the longest. They want to be the last one to actually pick up that phone and call for help. And if they do, they win. They don't know what their other friends are doing. So it's a competition in their brain at this point in time to see how long they can last. But that's the, let's just push a button. Once we push, once we've exhausted all of our resources and we think that we're going to have to call for help, we finally push that button and get their help. And isn't that just like us? Because we believe the lies of the world that tell us that we're strong enough, that we can do it all by ourselves. We are so capable. Just keep trying. Just keep striving. Just keep doing all the things. And I am wired as a helper. For those of y'all that know personality traits, that's mine. I'm a helper. And helpers don't ask for help. We don't like to. It goes against every part of our being. Let's just put it that way. It's kind of like the toddler that says, I do it myself. Like that's, that is very much me. And if anybody has walked with me or been around me over the last couple of years, you saw a lot of this, I do it myself and stubbornness as I walked a journey with aging parents. I specifically remember a time when I knew my dad needed some help. I said he needed the help, right? He's trying to take care of mom. He needs to get out. It's time for you to do some help. I arranged for him to have some help so he could get out and play golf. The people come and he's talking to them and this is great. Thank you so much. We'll be in touch. They leave. He turns around and looks at me, and he says, thanks so much for doing that, but I don't need any help. Like father, like daughter, I come by it naturally. But you know what? Then there was a medical issue, so then we had to call the help in because he couldn't do what he needed to do, and so guess what? I won. I did. I won. It was me. And over the course of the next few years, the same, those little things would happen. I'd exert my help and eventually it would get used and all was good. Um, little victories here and there until it wasn't until my feet got taken out completely from underneath me. And this was May of this past year in 2024. My mom had died in December of 2022. My dad was here. All was good. He was having a great time, living his best life. We were enjoying our time with him. And then last spring we had some issues. We had a couple health falls. We had a couple falls. The last fall ended us up in the ER. Scan reveals four broken ribs and a compression fracture, which mind you, they also say, oh, that wasn't caused by this ball. It had to have, tough old bird. That's all I got to say, tough old bird. But then they also proceed to say, oh, well, wait, his white blood cell count is exceptionally high, so we think there's an infection. And then, oh, his cardiac enzymes have gone up too, and we're not sure why, because they continue to climb. Excuse me, stop, wait. Two weeks ago, we had a physical. This was the healthiest 90-year-old you've ever met. What has just happened? My feet are gone. And all I wanted in that moment was for the weight that had just been dropped on my shoulders to be lifted off. It needed to go away. I wanted to push that button and have it just disappear. I wanted to hit rewind and go back two weeks when the doctor said it's the healthiest 90-year-old he'd ever seen. What is this? And so as I continued to read through Psalm 121 in preparation, the first verse, this, I lift my eyes to the mountains from where does my help come? It spoke directly to even the residual, exhausted, scared, unsure, weary daughter. And so when we look at that verse that says, I lift my eyes to the mountains, we're starting with the Israelites on the beginning of their journey towards Jerusalem. They're standing and they're looking towards Jerusalem in these moments. And they're surrounded by these huge mountains. This is one of those places where scripture asks us to stop, though. You're preconceived a notion about mountain. What does it say? They're strong. They're stable. They're majestic. And to the Israelites, it also could have meant that they were this promise of Mount Zion and the meeting of the presence of God. But what happens if I also said to you, these mountains were anything but friendly? They look up. So first of all, that tells you they're going to start climbing. Everything they did was by foot. It's rocks, it's pebbles, it's obstacles that they're having to climb. It's hot and it's full of twists and turns and blind corners and around every blind corner is a robber waiting for these pilgrims as they make their way into Jerusalem. Not the picture that we have in our brain. And then to add to all of that physical part, there's also a whole line of temptation. Because on the tops of some of these hills sit altars, altars set up to false gods. So you are in this place of hopelessness and despair. You are headed towards the presence of your God. And yet, somewhere in the middle, there's this offer of, you having trouble with your crops? Come see the God of rain. He'll fix it. You having trouble with infertility? Oh, oh, well, wait a second. The God of fertility is right here. Just make a stop right here. Drop your offerings here. It's simpler. You don't have to keep climbing. We're going to stop right here. It'll be all better. And the thing is, is that, yeah, it might be for a minute. It might be just in the middle of that for a second. You've kind of offloaded it so it feels a little bit better. But that instant gratification only leads to further despair. Counterfeit gods are not going to get us what we need. And isn't this just like our journey as Christians, as disciples of Christ? We aren't promised easy. We aren't promised this easy little path. No, no, no. We're promised an uphill climb. We're promised obstacles and rocks and stones in our way. We're promised weird things around corners that might take our feet out from underneath us. It's what we're promised. We also have the temptations that we face too, right? We face whatever it is at this moment for you. The temptation to give it away to an instant gratification. And the thing is, though, our goal is eternal. And so we cannot sacrifice tomorrow's joy on today's pleasure. We just can't. What we need to do is we need to focus on the eternal. And that's what the next verse actually says to us. Because if we pass over those counterfeit gods, if we don't allow the temptations to get to us, the thing that we have waiting is that my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. And the really cool part here, y'all, is Lord is capitalized in the Hebrew that the name of God here is Yahweh, which is the I am is the all-powerful and the one with all authority so the one that created the mountains and the earth and who created you and who created me is our button he's our satellite phone he is our help at all times. But why is it so difficult for us to get our gaze above what is sitting here and tempting us? Why is it so hard for us to look past the things around us in this world? Well, we live in a broken world. That's probably the easiest answer to this. And the world wants us to do absolutely nothing but focus on our circumstances and how awful it is. Because that keeps our head down here and not on him. You know, you see the news today and it is all about the devastation from two hurricanes. It's all of the crazy that is involved in an election cycle. It could also be there's something happening inside of your marriage. It could be a medical diagnosis that you've recently received. Or maybe it's one that you've had for a while that just won't change. Maybe it's your marriage. Maybe it's a prodigal kid. Maybe it is somehow you're involved in school and you're just done and you want to give up. The world convinces us to stay in those moments. Because guess what? Remember, I do it myself. You can fix it. If you stay focused on it, you can fix it. But how tired are we in trying to do it ourselves and constantly striving in all these moments to fix it? I don't know about y'all, but we're exhausted. I'm exhausted. And so when I sat in that hospital room, done, exhausted, spinning, all of the what ifs, not knowing what was going on with my dad, there was a moment when I just kind of said, I'm done. And it was as if God reached down and took my chin and he lifted it all the way up and said, your gaze is wrong. Your gaze needs to be on me, not on what's going on around you. Now my circumstance at that moment, nothing changed with my dad, but what did change was that now my source of strength was not me. I was not looking into my own for my source of strength. I knew very much that every bit of patience and strength and the ability to put one foot in front of the other was coming directly from him. And David was very sweet to us to read the entire psalm. And there's one of the verses in the psalm where God refers to himself as our keeper. And I just love this moment and what it implies. Because to me, it implies a level of care and a level of attention that only comes from love. It can only come from a place of love. We are his beloved. And when we suffer, when we're in pain, he's in pain also. And Psalm 91 verse 4 is a beautiful picture to me of this idea of keeper. And it says that he will cover you with his feathers and under his wings you will find refuge and his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. Thank you. So y'all, he's watching us. So in those moments like me sitting in the hospital, he saw me in my moment of need. He's going to protect us from the harshness of the circumstances around us. He's going to try his best to protect us from the fears and those anxieties that creep in in those quiet moments. He's our place of retreat when the world around us just feels like it's way too much. And so I look back over the course of those last couple of weeks and all of the stuff that was going on with my dad, and I can now, you know, hindsight's 20-20, right? You can go back and I can see God's hand offering so much of his provision and so much of his protection with every step that I took. And so often that provision and that protection came in the people that he put in my path. There was a time when dad was at, I call it Little Wake Med, so the one that's over there on Durant. Because of all this weird cardiac stuff, they moved him to Big Wake Med. We had a little brief moment of, he had had some mental decline due to all the medications. Adjusted medications, his sweet little personality came back out. We got him settled at Big Wake Med. And it was a good night. I left because he kicked me out. But I left. I came home. And not, I don't know, a little bit later, I received this random text. Kind of out of the blue. And all it said was, I just visited your dad. And he's smiling and he's cracking jokes. Sleep well. The text was from Connor Brannon, who is a friend of a lot of people here at Grace and someone whom I call a friend as well. And it was an amazing gift to me to know that Connor's at the hospital while my dad's there. And then the next night, and dad had had a horribly rough day, and Connor checked on him that night and just let me know that he was finally resting. He was like, you can rest too. Thank you. It was just a good thing. And then a few hours later is when I received the call that my dad was on the decline. Things had changed very rapidly. And as we headed to the hospital, it was Connor who met us in the room just after my dad had passed. It was Connor who hugged us. It was Connor who prayed with us. And it was Connor who offered the most beautiful words of encouragement to a girl who had just lost her daddy. That, my friends, is God's providence and God's provision wrapped up in human form. And there's nothing more beautiful than that. And so as I look, this will forever be for me a moment marked in time of God's faithfulness to me and to my family to have provided Connor in those moments. We don't do this by ourselves. The Israelites didn't walk their paths alone either. They started out together. They moved along these mountain paths. They met up with other pilgrims. They supported each other. They loved on each other. And they knew the verses out of Ecclesiastes that talk very specifically about two being better than one. And if one falls down, the other one's there to help them up. And it also goes on to say, pity who falls but has no one to help them up. We were never meant to walk this spiritual journey alone. This journey of faith is not supposed to be done alone. Who are your people? Who do you walk with? Who do you trust to reach down and pick you up when you fall? Who do you trust to be the most vulnerable with and say, this situation stinks and have them look at you and go, yeah, it does. But guess what? I got you and so does God. Those are the people we need in our lives. This past weekend, I got to go to the beach with my girlfriends. These were my college girlfriends and I will not tell you how long it's been since I was in college. So let's just say it had been a few years had passed. But these were girls that I had done life with for at least four years and then quite a few years after. We had been in each other's weddings. We had rocked babies together, all of the things. And then I moved. I'm the only one. I left Kentucky, but I will say I came to the promised land. So it's been good. But I left. They all stayed in and around the Lexington area and they've kept in touch really well. They do monthly brunches. They do all the things. They include me periodically on a group text, which is great fun. And so we've kept up with each other. And then just, I don't know, a couple months ago, random group text comes out. Next thing you know is within less than a week's period of time, we have planned a weekend at the beach, and they're coming here. Six of them are going to journey from Kentucky to Topsail just to make sure that they could pick me up along the way. And so the minute we all got together, the room is just full of love and laughter and some tears. And the years that had gone in between had washed away. And while they had walked together, not everyone's stories were known. And so we took time and we shared and we held each other's stories and we talked about hard marriages and we talked about even harder divorces and custody issues. We talked about cancer battles. We talked about seasons with kids that were hard. Even one of them now is raising her seven-year-old grandchild. We talked about harder seasons of aging parents, Alzheimer's, hospice, and then grief that comes from losing a parent. And even for a few of us, this feeling of being an orphan when you've lost two parents suddenly. But then we also got to talk about weddings and we got to talk about grandbabies and we got to talk about new marriages and love that they didn't know still existed. And happiness that they didn't know was still possible. And so often in these moments, these conversations circled back to God and his faithfulness to provide and to protect during all of these journeys. And the acknowledgement that these journeys were hard, but out of that acknowledgement came this place of gratitude. This place of saying, like, I am so grateful that I got to walk it with him. And now that I'm on the other side, I can honestly say I'm better for having done it. Wouldn't want to do it without him, but I'm definitely better for having done it. So as we sat in these moments and we cried and we laughed until our faces hurt, something settled in my bones. Something that I didn't realize until I sat in that room. And that was how much my soul needed those girls in that moment. But you know what? My God knew that that's what I needed. And out of his kindness to me, that's what he gave my sweet, weary heart was that time of rest and love and reflection with six of the most amazing women that I am privileged and honored to call my friends. Y'all, our God is also a steadfast friend to us. We can trust him with our problems. We can trust him with our failures, with our lives. And we know and we can know with all certainty. And I say that again, we can know with all certainty that he'll be there with his hands outstretched, ready to help us. He's going to cover us with those feathers. He's going to be on constant watch so that we can rest. He's going to be our shade. And the one that I love the most is when the world just gets to be too much and we're ready to say, I'm done. He's going to carry you. We just have to be willing to look up. And I said this in the note, in the grace fund, but I think it bears repeating. That our prayer is that through our sacred journey in which God has encountered through places and people and situations that we are changed. We invite you to join us in this season. Invite you to slow down, to open your Bible, to take a look at these Psalms. Read them slowly and prayerfully and obediently. And don't look just to gather information or check a box. Pray, read, and allow the Holy Spirit to do his thing, which is change. And I would also say, don't forget to look up. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for loving us. It is a privilege and it is an honor to be yours. So in these times and this craziness that is the season that we live in, we ask that you slow us down. We ask that you give us the opportunity to pray, to read, and to most importantly look up. Look up past the distractions. Look up past all the things that the world wants for us to grab our attention and to focus our gaze on you. And Lord, we love you. It's in your name we pray. Amen.