Psalm 124
Back in 2003, maybe a little
more than a year into the war that we engaged in with the nation
of Iraq, some of you will remember that our president at that time
flew on a little jet airplane from the West Coast out onto
an aircraft carrier. He landed on that aircraft carrier
and greeted soldiers and mixed for a little while that he put
on a regular presidential business suit a little bit later and gave
a speech. And he gave a speech inspiring Americans to see and
have hope that we had accomplished a whole lot in the war against
a wicked regime that we thought had attacked us in the days of
September 11th, 2001. But over the president, there
was a banner, a banner that has caused him great trouble. And
it said, mission accomplished. Some of you will remember I don’t
know that he has ever lived it down because the mission wasn’t
yet accomplished. He didn’t say it in his speech,
but that’s what was stamped on the history books for his legacy. We all know that there was more
war, more danger, more difficulty for years to follow. Fast forward,
though, a couple of weeks ago, maybe 10 days ago, our president
in one of his, you know what I’m speaking of, his stream of
consciousness press conferences, where he just gets up there and
rambles and says whatever comes into his mind, was speaking positively
about the coronavirus. We’re winning. We’re making headway. We’re going to open America back
up again. And his positive rhetoric gives us all great hope because
we’re ready to shop. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready
for this shag to get cut off the top of my head. I’ve missed
two haircuts, and if this week passes, I’ll have missed a three.
And I go every four weeks on the dot and don’t miss a haircut.
But we’re all ready for things to open back up and be positive
and happy and normal again. We don’t know what that will
look like. We don’t know if that will ever come. But one reporter,
after hearing him say many positive things, used the George W. Bush banner against him and said,
Mr. President, are you saying mission is accomplished? And
realizing that trap, he said, no, I’m not saying mission is
accomplished. And dear friends, dear brothers
and sisters in the faith, who knows Is COVID-19 past us? I don’t think so. Who knows?
Will there be a resurgence? Will there, as was told us this
week, there be a dark winter? Only God knows. But we have marching
orders. We have marching orders from
the scripture that remind us to continue to live by faith. And as we continue to live by
faith, we continue to honor our neighbors and their health. We
buy these little soap dispensers from the place where we get our
groceries. side of the soap bottle says cleanliness is next to fill
in the blank godliness and so our challenge as christians is
to live by faith honor our neighbors and keep your hands clean right
we do those things that’s all we can do but living by faith
living by faith is a a significant action for the christian and
psalm 124 i believe is helpful at whatever point we are in in
our lives, it’s a helpful reminder that there will be more to come
in life. There will be COVID-20, right? There’ll be flu season next year.
Some of you will have heart procedures. Some of you will get cancer.
Some of you will be receiving treatments for this and that.
We’ll have broken bones. I can see on your faces memories
of just the last year. I’ve been in the hospital with
you. I’ve Heard you in hard times
and we all know these things about each other. And what’s
happened in the past is prologue to the future, isn’t it? We’ll
see hard times again. There will be more to come. But
as Psalm 124 will teach us in the next few moments, we need
to express our confidence in God. And we need to praise the
Lord for his salvation. I would imagine that many of
us over the last two or three months have experienced every
emotion. Some have come unraveled and
unglued and unhinged. We’ve been wringing our hands
wondering, what’s next? Will I get it? What will happen
to my loved ones? I know some of you have loved
ones who are in care facilities. You’ve been able to see them
or touch them or help them. We’ve had some in our congregation
who’ve lost their loved ones who they didn’t see for a couple
of months. It’s been a strange many, many
weeks. But thank goodness for celebrities,
right? Thank goodness they’re on social media, right? Thank
goodness that we can’t get our haircuts and neither can they,
and they love to show us their suffering as well. No, actually,
thank God for His covenant promises. Thank God for His sure promises,
His past deliverances, and that the days ahead, though we do
not know what is before us, that God is trustworthy, that His
promises can be hoped in. If you’re a Christian, you understand
that God cares for the birds of the air. God cares for the
flowers of the field. But also I would imagine as a
Christian, you’ve had some moments, maybe leading up to this crisis,
where you’ve taken God for granted. Life has sort of been on autopilot.
You’ve done well in life. You’ve been healthy. You’ve stayed
strong. Your income has remained steady.
You’ve had all the blessings of this life. And you know the
danger of that, right? God warned his people of that
in the old covenant over and over. When I deliver you from
Egypt and we make it through the wilderness and I drop you
off in the promised land and you’re eating grapes from vineyards
you didn’t plant. You’re drinking water from cisterns
you did not dig. You’re living inside walled cities
and homes that you did not build. but God provided. You’ll get
fat. You’ll eat well. Things will
go well for you. And guess what? You’ll forget
God. He warned them of that. And I think we can see some spiritual
parallel between us in 2020 America. We’re prosperous. We’re healthy.
We have, I mean, these things we have in our pockets, in our
hands that communicate up in space and give us all the information
we need. We keep up with our loved ones
from it. We have cars. We came in today, airbags. We
have food, refrigerators. grocery stores, even these last
many weeks. Have any of y’all gone hungry?
I don’t think so. We’re very blessed. But we take
God for granted. And I think sometimes we live
as if there is no God. Our checkbook is our power. Our
health gives us confidence. And we fail to trust God. But
even worse than that, We fail to come into his house and give
thanks. And so these many weeks without church, these many weeks
without gathering together as God’s people, they’ve been difficult.
We’ve had things to listen to, things to look at, things to
read, and God has been good to us. But there’s still a sting
of pain, a sting of punishment, I do believe. Because now we
come to church and we sing a little louder, don’t we? We give thanks
a little more. We recognize who we are and who
God is. And yes, we may be flourishing. We may have a little extra around
the waist because we eat so good. But we’ve come to realize that
God is our provider, that it is in him we live, move, and
have our being. And apart from him, we have nothing. We are nothing. So how does Psalm
124 help us in a time like this? I want us to think of Psalm 124
from three perspectives. The first perspective is a look
back. And this is a look back in your
life to see there were times like the psalmist, like the people
of God, where you were in the grip of death and God took care
of you. God saved you. I think back to
about 18 months ago, our family was coming home from a trip to
Virginia. And we were on the dark portion of the highway,
Highway 52, coming out of Mount Airy down towards Winston-Salem.
And right in front of us, within 50 feet, a Christmas tree farmer
who had brought his harvest down the mountain was making his way
into one of the towns of North Carolina to sell his trees. His
trailer was not on his truck, and it was sitting sideways in
the interstate. And in God’s providence, we slowed
down from, well, I drive fast, I won’t tell you. But we slowed
down. We saw something up ahead. Saw
some lights. We slowed down enough. But all
of a sudden, within 50 feet, there was a Christmas tree trailer
loaded. No lights, no reflectors. Fully
loaded, sitting sideways in the left-hand lane. And when you’re
traveling fast, and young people, this is why you’re not supposed
to drive fast, because your response time is low. But thank the Lord
the brakes worked. Thank the Lord for those Honda
engineers who said, we want a car to stop not in 150 feet, but
in 80 feet. Thank the Lord for Michelin.
Thank the Lord for all those people who, they go to Virginia
Tech and Georgia Tech, and they go to all these schools, and
they got their pocket protectors and their calculators, right?
They were the smart kids in school. Thank the Lord for them because
they make cars that stop. But our whole family realized
we could have been goners. And that’s a memorable moment.
And I’m sure you have memorable moments where you were in death’s
grip, but God relieved you. And it could be that you were
in the pre-surgery operating room wondering, am I gonna come
out of this alive? I’ve been in the heart cath waiting
area with several in our congregation whose hearts weren’t working
right. And the prayer with them was that God would see them through
and these doctors and nurses and technicians would have wisdom.
And you can see the fear on people’s face. It’s a life and death situation.
And on and on we could go about these near death experiences
where the grip of death could have taken us under. Some of
you have been soldiers in wars. You’ve had bullets whizzing by
your heads, and your body was preserved by Almighty God. But
there are also spiritual battles. You know, as Christians, we are
forgiven of our sins. We’re justified. God sees us
just as if we’ve never sinned and just as if we’ve always obeyed. But we still live in this world
where there is evil. The world tempts us to live certain
ways according to its ways. We know the devil tempts us,
but we also know that we have remaining sin in us. We know
our hearts are deceitful and that the spirit is willing, but
the flesh is weak. And some of you may find yourselves
during various stages of your life where you are in the death
grips of struggles with sin. And God has rescued you from
that wickedness. And so as you take a look back
over your life, we’re much like the psalmist who in verses 1
through 7 recounts God’s goodness. Then he says, let Israel say,
or it’s like the song leader at church. Sing it again, church. When people rose up against us,
they would have swallowed us up alive. When their anger was
kindled against us, the flood would have swept us away. The
torrent would have gone over us. Then over us would have gone
the raging waters. We have escaped like a bird from
the snare of the fowlers. The snare is broken and we have
escaped. The psalmist is writing these words after the fact. This
is after a horrible period of life where death’s grip was around
the psalmist. We don’t know exactly what the
psalmist is speaking of, but you have the language of an earthquake,
the ground opening up and swallowing you. It’s the language of a flood,
mighty waters sweeping through and knocking over your home and
taking away your possessions. It’s the language of beasts,
wild beasts coming into your habitation and eating you alive.
It’s the language of a trap, the trap of a fowler or a birder,
sneering birds that they might eat them. And the language of
the psalmist is rather a strong picture, isn’t it? It reminds
us of Jonah. Have you read the story of Jonah
lately? He was supposed to go to Nineveh. He goes to not Nineveh.
He gets on a boat. The tempest comes up. They toss
him overboard. The sea is calm. And as he’s
going down to the bottom of the ocean, he cries out to the Lord
for help. And it says the cords of death were tangled around
him. The seaweed and the things under the water were keeping
him down where he could not float up. And he cried out to the Lord.
Or think of the exiles who were taken off to Babylon where they
could not worship God and live for him. They were away from
Jerusalem and Judah and the promised land. And they cried out to God. Or how about King David? during
all those years where he was to rule and reign over Israel,
and he was to continue to increase the borders of the promised land
until from Dan to Beersheba, north and south and east and
west, the promised land was as big as God promised Israel it
would be. But David had some hard battles
to fight, not just with Saul, but the Philistines, and then
later Absalom, his own son, rose up against him. But this is a
Psalm of David, and likely he’s looking back. after a particular
spot of trouble and saying, oh God, you have been good to Israel,
to your people. I want you to think beyond your
hospital stays. Think beyond your tangle in the
Walmart parking lot and maybe getting your car dented. You
know, we have these struggles. Maybe they’re with the car or
with our health or other things, economic, but think bigger than
that. You were once dead in your sins
and trespasses. You were once like Jonah under
the ocean of your sin, and the cords of death had entangled
you. They wrapped around your legs and your ankles and your
body, and there was no way that you could float to the top. There
was no way that you could float to the top and gasp for air again
and live a life. And so as we look back on our
lives, the little salvations, but the great big one, where
God and Christ released us from Satan’s grip. So it’s good to
look back, isn’t it? It’s also good to look around. Christianity is a corporate religion. A lot of times we see, especially
on cards, little greeting cards, we see Christianity reduced to
Hallmark Christianity. I’ll give you an example, Jeremiah
29 11. You graduate from school, you
get a bunch of cards, and half of them have Jeremiah 29 11. Dear graduate, I know the plans
I have for you to, declares the Lord, to prosper you, not to
harm you, give you a hope and a future. Those are great words,
aren’t they? But they weren’t first written to you, the high
school graduate. Though, it works. Guess who they
were written to? They were written to the exiles.
They were written to Israel and Babylon. God was saying, you’re
miserable here, I love you, your punishment is over, I’m gonna
bring you back. And so very often we make Christianity an individual
thing. But the Bible is more full of
plurals than singulars. The Bible, if you will, allow
for a little southernism, has more yalls in it than just singular
yous. But we make Christianity individual
and not corporate. But Christianity is for the covenant
community. I love that we’re kind of in a half moon crescent.
round shape here because I can see all of you more. When we
go back next door, you know, some of y’all are a mile away.
You know, when 50 of us worship in a 400-seat room and y’all
scatter around like y’all have all got the crud, which may have
been appropriate last time we met in there, it’s different. But I love to be able to just
look this way and that and see your faces. And in the covenant
community, in the covenant of redeemed, I can look at each
of you and say, I know that you are children of God, rescued
by Jesus, that when he died on the cross, when his blood was
shed, it was shed for you and you and you and you and us. But I can also look around and
see and remember the little salvations. As we walk together through life,
and you’ve been through hardships, through family struggles, through
financial struggles, through job loss, through scares with
your heart and your health and cancer, and you fill in the blank. We’ve done it together. And we
look around and say, not only are all of us in Christ Jesus,
but the Lord has given us these many and wonderful deliverances
in our lives. He saved us from car wrecks or
gotten us through them. He’s gotten us through all these
dangers, toils and snares. as we live life together in covenant
relationship. And so there’s a sense where
every Sunday as we sing, what a friend we have in Jesus, we’re
singing it up into the sky and saying, Lord, thank you for being
our friend. But we’re saying it to one another, aren’t we?
Because I know and you know what’s going on in each of your lives.
We know each other well. And so we know then when so-and-so
here and so-and-so there is singing, what a friend we have in Jesus,
that it’s meant something to them specifically. in various
stages and phases of life. And so as we look back at God’s
blessings in our own lives and in the life of our church, we
also look around today and see, isn’t it wonderful what God has
done in Christ for each of us, but also for the little salvations? There’s a number in the Bible
that probably won’t mean very much to you until I explain it.
And it’s the number 42,360. I bet you have no idea what that
number is. Well, you’re about to find out. That’s the number of refugees
who decided not to stay in Babylon, as God did allow. Some of the
exiles stayed in Babylon forever. But 42,360 decided to be pioneers
and leave Babylon and go back to destroyed, torn down, rubble-heaped
Jerusalem and rebuild the wall, rebuild their houses, and rebuild
the temple. And why did they do that? Was
it a nice neighborhood with good schools? No, it wasn’t. It was
a bad situation to go back to Jerusalem. But they had a desire
in their heart, these 42,360. And these were just the heads
of households. Their servants went, their wives
went, their children went. And so the number was probably
more like a quarter of a million. But this number of people said,
we want to go back. We want to rebuild and we want
to reestablish the temple worship of God at Jerusalem so that the
witness of Yahweh from Jerusalem, from Judah, from Jerusalem would
be made known among all the kingdoms of the world. For at that point,
everybody knew Israel was in ruins. They disobeyed their God
and their God punished them and they carried them off. Don’t
you think the deportation of a million people was in the Jerusalem
Times and we can’t say the Babylon Bee because there is one now,
right? Which is a fun read if you haven’t looked at it. It
was in all the newspapers. It was on the television screens.
Everybody knew that Yahweh had punished His people. And so it
was for His own glory and their good that they came back. And so as they sang together
again for the first time, as the smoke rose from the altar
again for the first time, as they lived in their houses and
walked among the city and traded in the markets once again, don’t
you think it was a special moment in time? And friends, that’s
what church is like for us week by week. We look around the room
and say, salvation through faith in Jesus for each and every one
of us, for all of us. But we also recognize the little
salvations, the little deliverances. When we say the creed, we say
it with a little extra oomph as we maybe land upon a phrase
that helps us say how we feel about who God is and what he’s
done for us. And so it’s important to come
to church together, not only so that we praise God, But we
encourage one another in the togetherness of singing and praising
and worshiping and affirming our salvation. And so, yes, we
look back at God’s past mercies and near-death experiences. We
look around and we recount them and sing about them and say things
about them. But there’s also an important
aspect of this psalm, and I think it’s the most important one.
And it’s a look up. Yes, we look back. Yes, we look
around. But most important thing we do as Christians is we look
up. Every Sunday, as we gather for
worship, we gather for what we call in the Christian faith,
a divine dialogue. And it’s mediated through the
minister. And we’ve seen a lot of churches
in modern day America get through that. A lot of modern day churches
are a whole lot of singing and a little pep talk. But one of
the blessings I think we have in our associate reform Presbyterian
theology of worship that also stands in a long line of Christian
denominations worshiping is we see worship as a dialogue. It’s
something we participate in. God speaks, we respond. God speaks,
we listen. God speaks, we confess our sins.
We confess our sins, he assures us a pardon. Receive his blessing
so we give back tithes and offerings and on and on we go in this divine
dialogue But the very first thing that God says to you every Sunday
And as I’ll catch it as we’ve read Psalm 124 It’s the very
last verse of Psalm 124. It’s verse 8 our help is in the
name of the Lord who made heaven and earth That’s the very first
thing that I say to y’all on behalf of God Almighty, as we
come out of our silent prayer, asking that God might help us
worship Him and hear from Him that day. The wake up thing,
I say, right? Because y’all are heads down,
eyes closed. I say, brothers and sisters of
the Lord Jesus Christ, then what? Our help is in the name of the
Lord who made heaven and earth. And so we are affirming our very
first action in our service of worship. We are affirming that
we can’t worship God without His help. We’re affirming that
we wouldn’t worship God without his help. We’re affirming that
if it were not for Yahweh, I could not have arrived here safely,
or come in health, or come with provisions, or have eaten breakfast,
or had daily bread, and on and on. We’re affirming that like
the words of the Apostle Paul in Acts, it is in him that we
live, move and have our being, or as Jesus says to the disciples,
apart from me, you can do nothing. Dear friends, as we look up to
God, we know that there will be many dangers and toils and
snares all around us. Every day, every moment of the
day, we live in a sin-filled, cursed world. We live in a dark
and dying world. We live amidst a crooked and
depraved generation that even has COVID-19 creeping around
in the darkness, the invisible disease. And we know that we
will have physical and spiritual dangers, toils and snares until
God takes us home and until we are glorified. And our constant
task as Christians is to do what the psalmist has taught us today.
Look back and say, my help has been in the name of the Lord,
the maker of heaven and earth. He’s taken really good care of
me. Our task is to look around, especially as we gather together
for worship and say to one another and say to ourselves, hasn’t
God been good to the covenant community of faith? But our job
also, and our most important task is, is to keep looking up
and to constantly say, maybe it’s on your sick bed. Maybe
it’s in the pre-op room. Maybe it’s when you are facing
a Monday morning that you don’t want to face. My help is in the
name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Let me remind you
of one of God’s great promises. We find this promise in Romans
chapter eight. If God is for us, you can fill
in the blank, who can be against us? He who did not spare his
own son, how will he not also together with him, that’s an
important part of that passage, with him whom he did not spare,
but he gave him up for us, how will he not graciously give us
all things? So look back, look around, but
keep looking up. Let’s pray together. Our help
is in the name of you, our Lord and God, maker of heaven and
earth. Help us not to forget this, no matter what comes our
way. And we pray for your help and
blessing in Jesus’ name, amen.