Skip to content

The River ChurchSermons

Where Do You Look?

Phil Piasecki · Sunday, 5 July 2026 · 40:22 · 7,220 words

Listen to this message

Psalm 121 is the focus of a message that asks where we look when trials come. The pastor explains that the ancient pilgrims faced dangers on the hills, and today we also face trials that can distract us from God. He urges listeners to lift their eyes to the Lord, who is our keeper and personal God, and to bring our struggles to Him in prayer. The sermon calls anyone still searching for hope to consider following Christ.

What this sermon is about

Ranked by keyness against every other sermon in the corpus. Each one is a word this sermon actually said — nothing here was written by a model.

trial 15 traveler 8 hill 12 strawberry 5 personal 13 science 6 help 30 creator 11 dna 4 trouble 13 ark 6 philistines 5

Topics

Faith 3 Prayer 1 The Holy Spirit 1 Hope 1

Scripture referenced 14

Verified against the transcript. A reference the recording does not support is never listed here.

Psalms 121 1:36 Psalms 121 5:54 James 1 9:39 James 1 9:44 Deuteronomy 12:2-3 16:13 Deuteronomy 12:2-3 16:30 Colossians 1:16-17 22:00 1 Samuel 5:1-4 26:06 Psalms 46 28:16 Psalms 121 28:51 Psalms 121:5-8 28:53 1 Peter 2:24 37:40 Psalms 121 38:15 Romans 10:9 38:24

Transcript

Every word, as spoken, with the second it was said. Each word links to its own entry in the index.

Pre-service announcement — 7 lines, 0:34. Excluded from every count and search on this site, kept here so nothing is hidden.

Hey everyone, my name is Zach, and thanks for checking out one of our sermons today.

We are so glad that you're here, and we want to connect with you and your family.

The easiest way to do that is to text RIVERCHURCH to 97000.

There you can ask questions, submit prayer requests, and even support the River Church financially.

At the end of the day, we just want to connect with you and be a blessing in any way that we can.

You can also visit our website at theriverchurch.cc to learn more about us and what we have going on as a church.

Thanks again for joining us, and we hope you are blessed by today's message.

Well, good morning, church. Happy Fourth of July. I hope you guys had an incredible weekend.

Everybody still has all ten fingers out there, I hope.

I know, these fireworks, I keep my distance. I enjoy them, but I'm not in there lighting them up or anything.

It's a little too scary for me. So glad that you made it. I know we had a big weekend.

Excited to have you here this morning. If you're somewhere else, you're camping, you're watching online,

thank you for joining us this morning. My name is Pastor Phil, if you do not know me.

I'm our gathering pastor here, and also our young adult pastor.

Oh, that's very sweet, guys. Thank you.

Hey, I love that, okay? So let's get some good interaction here this morning.

You know, that's a good way to start it off. So thank you.

That's our young adult section there.

But yeah, just so blessed to be here with you this morning.

Excited about next week.

Pastor Josh, we sent him out there to the fairgrounds on the hottest day of the week last week to film that video.

So he did a good job persevering through that.

But yeah, just so blessed to get to share God's word with you this morning.

We are going to be in Psalm 121.

And today, this psalm, out of all the psalms we studied this summer,

this psalm is our first song of ascent.

So as the gathering pastor, as the one that's normally up here singing and leading,

I love the psalms. I love to see these songs that the Israelites were singing.

But these ones are some of my absolute favorites.

To give you some backstory on it, so three times a year, the Israelites from all over Israel,

they would travel up to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was at a higher elevation than most of the country.

So everybody would head up there for three festivals a year.

The Feast of Pentecost, Passover, and Tabernacle.

So they would go there to offer their sacrifices at the temple and celebrate these feasts.

And as they were walking to the city, they would literally be walking uphill to get there.

And these songs of ascent,

psalms of ascent were the ones that they would sing as they were ascending up to Jerusalem.

And that is where they get their names.

So they were their pilgrimage songs, or what we might consider they were their road trip songs.

I love a good road trip.

I don't know about you, but just getting in the car, putting some music on,

and driving is just something that I love to do.

There's nothing better than just putting on one of your favorite songs.

Maybe it's worship music.

It's not always worship music.

Even for me, I like to put on, maybe back in the day, was some like Dashboard Confessional.

All right, this is kind of aging me a little bit.

I'm like an elder emo, they call me.

But maybe some Dashboard Confessional or like some Counting Crows,

some good 90s music as you're driving down the road.

I hope right now you can think of your song, right?

Just that road trip band, that road trip song that you love to listen to.

I was thinking back just to some of the road trips that I've taken in my life.

And some of you know Pastor Ernesto.

He was a pastor here for many years when he was in his early 20s.

He was very influential in my life, along with Pastor Jason in the middle school

and the high school youth group.

And I remember back in high school, Pastor Ernesto one day calls me up and he's like,

hey, what are you doing tonight?

Do you want to drive with me to Chicago tonight?

I got to go to Moody, pick up some books from the college there and bring them back.

I don't want to make the drive myself.

Like, what are you doing?

I'm like, yeah.

That was awesome.

I'm imagining this, right?

Firing up some good music, some good conversation, driving there.

So he's like, hey, I'll pick you up.

I got something going on tonight.

I'm going to pick you up late.

We'll drive through the night.

We'll crash.

We'll get the books.

We'll head home.

Well, if you know Pastor Ernesto, somehow he always managed to have the smallest car possible.

So it was like, do you want the big one or the small one?

Yeah, I'll take the small one.

That looks like it's maybe about to fall apart.

And he picks me up in the middle of January and we hop in this car.

And about 30 minutes into the night, I'm like, I'm going to go to Chicago.

I'm going to go to Chicago.

And about 30 minutes into the drive, I realize we have no heat in this car.

So it's probably 10 degrees, literally frost on the windows that I was able to scrape off with my nails.

I had my coat, but I needed like 10 more pairs of socks, you know.

And then we're driving and it's about 1 a.m. and we get pulled over by a cop.

And I remember he was just like, hey, just like you're sleeping.

I don't want this cop asking any questions about, you know, what we're doing out here at 1 a.m.

So he tried to get out of the ticket.

I think he got a speeding ticket, too.

And we eventually.

We eventually made it, sang some fun songs on the way, you know, enjoyed some music.

But I was thinking about this road trip, right?

It sounded great, but, man, there were some dangers, some perils along the way.

The frost on the window, the cop pulling us over, and this tiny little car that felt like it was not going to make it.

All right.

And we managed to get there.

And that's what's happening in this psalm here that we're about to read together.

We see our pilgrim at the beginning of his journey.

All right.

He is beginning his walk towards Jerusalem for one of these festivals.

And he looks up to the hills and he sees the hills that are full of potential perils and dangers.

So let's read this together this morning.

Psalm 121.

If you have your Bibles, turn there.

We're going to be really just in this psalm for most of the morning.

Starting in verse 1, it says,

From where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved.

He who keeps you will not slumber.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper.

The Lord is your shade on your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil.

He will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in.

From this time forth and forevermore.

Let's pray together this morning.

Dear Lord, we come to you just thankful for who you are.

Thankful for this opportunity to just be together, to get to study your word together.

Lord, I pray that your Holy Spirit would speak through me.

That your Holy Spirit would be present in this place.

Lord, softening our hearts to hear from you.

That we would look at the psalm, Lord, and see in what ways it is teaching us to be more like you.

To rely more on you, Lord.

So be with us this morning.

Help us just.

Enjoy this time together as your people and your church.

We love you.

We ask all of this in your name.

So the question I want to ask you this morning is where do you look?

In times of trouble, when trial comes, where do you look?

We have our pilgrim here and he says, I lift my eyes to the hills.

Where does my help come from?

He's asking this question.

Where do I need to look for my help?

And this is the question that I want you to ponder.

In your own life, to wrestle with this morning is where are you looking in times of trouble?

These hills in biblical times would have been filled with many different dangers.

There would have been robbers and thieves waiting for them.

You have to think about it.

The enemy countries, these robbers, these thieves literally would have known their schedule.

Hey, guys, three times a year, these guys are going to walk the same road.

Let's set up a trap.

Let's see what we can do.

Let's see what we can get from them.

They would have been animals that they would have had to encounter.

They didn't get to hide.

They didn't get to hop in a car and just, you know, drive there.

This was a dangerous journey.

The environment would have had extreme heat, extreme cold, sharp, slippery rocks that they are traversing over.

And also many of these hills had what were called high places.

So these high places were where pagans would worship their false gods.

They would find these hills and try to get as close to their gods as they could.

And they would set up these areas for sacrifice and for worship.

And as they are traveling to Jerusalem,

they would have come across these areas.

So can you relate?

We are all on this journey in our life.

We are all marching forward in our walk with the Lord, on our walk in this life.

And our path so often can seem like it's full of trouble.

Or maybe today, immediately, you go, man, Pastor Phil, I can immediately think of the trouble that I am in right now.

You don't even understand what I'm going through, the diagnosis that I had, the family issues that I had.

The things that I am dealing with, my job environment.

Whatever it is, you can think of that trial right now in your life.

And you may be asking the same question.

Where does my help come from?

It's a normal question.

It's a natural question for us to ask.

Look to the Lord and go, who is going to help me in this situation?

Where will my help come from?

And what is your first instinct?

Where do you look?

I preached James 1 to the young adults a few weeks ago.

And we were...

We were looking at how in James 1 it says,

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you experience trials of various kinds.

And it says, when you experience them.

Not if you experience them, but when you experience them.

And I shared with them one of our current trials.

So you guys are going to have to hear this story one more time.

But I felt like it went so well with this.

We have three beautiful children.

My daughter is ten.

My son is almost eight.

Our youngest is almost three years old.

And she's leaving the auditorium right now.

She's also potty training, which is awesome.

So we are dealing with our youngest.

She is incredible.

We are so blessed by her.

But she is so stubborn.

She has my stubbornness plus my wife's times three.

Because she's the third child or something.

I don't know what the equation is.

But whatever it is, she's got it.

Some of you out there right now, you might be thinking, that was my kid.

Or maybe that's you currently.

You know, the middle schoolers, high schoolers in here.

Maybe you still are that stubborn child.

But we are in a season of this with her right now.

And to give you an example, a few weeks ago.

And she loves strawberries.

She does eat well.

She eats her fruits and veggies.

So we're doing something right.

But she was eating a strawberry.

And she ate it.

And she dropped the rest of it on the ground.

And Mary says, you know, Eden, pick that up.

Throw that away.

And she looks at her and she says, no, you throw it away.

And it's like...

All right.

Like, here it goes, right?

Like, this is beginning.

Here's an opportunity for us to teach her, to discipline her, to direct her.

And it's like, okay, no, Eden.

Pick it up.

No.

Mommy do it.

And Mary, I can picture her.

She had just gotten back from Costco.

And she pulls up the roll of toilet paper that we just bought.

And she sits down and she's like, I got all day, right?

Like, I will be here all day until you pick up that strawberry and throw it away.

So finally, after, you know, 10 minutes of discipline and through tears,

she picks that strawberry up and she drops it in the garbage can.

And I kid you not, okay, I joked at the first gathering.

There's no embellishment here, all right?

This is not a Pastor Roy story, all right?

So this is all truth.

And she walks away and something in her brain clicks.

And through tears, she runs back to the garbage can.

She puts her hand in the garbage can.

She pulls out the strawberry, sets it back on the table and says, mommy, throw it away.

All right.

We thought we had won.

But here we go again, right?

So then again, after another 10 minutes of back and forth and discipline,

she finally takes that strawberry and she puts it on the edge of the garbage can.

No, that's not.

You have not thrown it away yet.

And her little finger goes and dumps it in and runs away in tears.

And we won.

And honestly, she's been much more well-behaved since then.

So I think we're getting somewhere with her.

But this is one of our current trials in our life.

And I was convicted reading this.

Where do I go?

I look first in these things, right?

I'll be honest.

Most of the time with the kids, it's like I'm looking to my wife.

I'm going, you got to help me.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm screwing this up probably.

Like, what do you suggest?

What should we do here?

Or it's to Google.

I'm like, how to, you know, break a three-year-old, right?

Like, how to survive this?

Like, please help me.

And I'm looking to whatever the internet says.

And I was challenged, do I take it to the Lord first, right?

Am I spending time in prayer for my kids, for me and my wife?

And patience and discernment with how to guide her during this trial.

And the mountains here for our traveler were filled with many other places to look than God.

And that's what the enemy wants us to do.

He wants us to look anywhere else during our trials other than to the Lord.

And these high places of worship of other false gods,

man, they would have been a distraction for our traveler.

You may not have worship.

You may not have worshipped on any fall places, worshiped any false religions recently,

but you may have looked to other things in times of trouble other than Jesus.

I was thinking us men, right?

Do you retreat in times of trouble, maybe back into your work?

It's like life's hard, life's heavy.

I just, let me get another job.

Let me get that next client.

Let me just work harder.

Maybe as a man, it's down into your man cave, right?

Just let me get home.

Let me escape from the troubles of today.

You know, it's alcohol.

Let me just have a cold.

Hold beer and put the game on and I can just forget about my troubles.

And we try to, as men, we try to get all big and burly and act like I don't need anybody, right?

I don't need nobody.

I got this, God.

You're busy, God, with other problems, with other people.

I'll handle this.

Actually, let me, give me a little extra, right?

Like I can handle this.

Let me take it.

And we hold these things until we break instead of looking to the Lord.

Or ladies, maybe it's, you know, you retreat into your self-care, right?

I just, I don't know.

Family's tough.

Work is beating me up.

I just need a spa day, right?

Get my nails done.

Get my toes done.

You know, get me refocused on these things.

Or maybe your husband's bugging you and it's like I just got to escape into those romance novels that you know you shouldn't be reading, right?

You shouldn't be reading in the first place.

But let me just escape to this thing and focus on what the world wants me to focus on instead of fixing my eyes on the Lord.

Or it's just going to a friend maybe first.

To vent.

To ask for advice.

To complain before taking it to Jesus.

I think of our students in here, young adults.

Maybe it's, you know, life's hard.

I'm going to fix my eyes on working harder in school or being a better athlete or growing in my job or going to social media and getting that validation that will make me feel good for a minute, right?

But that is so fleeting.

Instead of fixing our eyes on Christ.

Instead of casting our cares.

That is so important to be reminded that we are called to look to him and to cast our anxieties on him.

I love in Deuteronomy 12, 2 through 3, we see instructions to the Israelites as they came in and they were conquering the promised land.

The Lord said,

The Lord had charged them with removing these high places.

Deuteronomy 12, 2 through 3, it says,

You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods.

On the high mountain and on the hills and under every green tree, you shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their ashram with fire.

You shall chop down the carved images of their gods and destroy them.

You shall destroy their name out of that place.

The Israelites were told to remove these areas completely.

Get rid of them.

Everything that I listed before, not all of those things are necessarily sins.

Some of them were, but anything that we look to first before Christ, anything that we place in that high place in our life, if it's not God, it is sin in our life.

And we have to look inward and be honest with ourselves.

I can't list every single thing that we might be struggling with.

It's up to you, right, as a believer, to look in your heart and go, God, show me what I look to first instead of you.

Show me what that is and help me remove it completely.

Because the Israelites consistently would get rid of some of it, right?

They would knock down a few altars.

And we were just reading in our Bible reading last night, it's like they left two golden calves up just for some reason, right?

It's like, let's get rid of 80%, but these ones are kind of nice.

We'll leave these up.

And they would always come.

And they would always come back to this idolatry, this worship of false gods.

And it consistently caused them to stumble.

And us, in our walk, we have to be willing to say, I'm done with those things.

I got to get rid of those things.

And I have to fix my eyes on the Lord first.

And we're all tempted to look to these different things.

When we ask the question, where should we look?

We know that it's to God.

We have to be reminded of this.

And our traveler here in the psalm, he quickly reminds himself of that.

I love how...

How quick he answers his own question.

He says, you know, I lift my eyes to the hills.

Where does my help come from?

And he says, my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

And then continuing in verse 3, he says,

And I just think, I picture him having these anxieties of his travel and asking this question.

And so quickly.

Answering his own question.

That his help comes from the Lord, the creator of all things.

I want to say this morning that if we believe God created everything,

how can that not influence how we believe he can help us in our times of trouble?

So bear with me for a minute.

I just want to nerd out on a little bit of science with you.

I know you didn't come here for science class.

Some of you are like, never ever send me back to science class.

But I think there's a few interesting things that we can look at when we believe.

And I think there's a few interesting things that we can look at when we believe.

And I think there's a few interesting things that we can look at when we believe.

One example is the force of gravity.

If it was altered, they say just 1 in 10 to the 60th power.

That's 1 with 60 zeros after it.

So imagine that fraction.

If it was changed just that much, the universe would either collapse in on itself

or it would expand so rapidly it would cease to exist.

But our God, our engineer, the creator, he made this place perfectly to hold together,

to be what it is.

It was created.

It was not an accident that this world was created.

It was created by our one true God.

Or if we zoom in onto the cell, the cell, the body is just continually giving God glory

and praise for how incredibly it is made in the cell.

Charles Darwin once said that he thought the human cell was just a simple microscopic lump

That was his belief.

But we know today that the living cell is this digital automated factor.

That is more complex than any machine ever built by humanity.

It's said that one single gram of DNA can store 215 million gigabytes of data.

Bill Gates even said that DNA, it's like a computer program,

but far more advanced than any software ever created.

Can I say you cannot have a complex digital code without a programmer, right?

Somebody put this into place and we know that it was our God.

Just the earth that we live on here today, right?

There is a magnetic field and atmosphere that God put in place that protects us every single

day from the solar winds and radiation from the sun.

It's said that if the earth was any closer to the sun, we would burn up.

If it was any further away, we would freeze to death.

You cannot tell me that that was an accident.

Colossians 1, 16 to 17.

I just love how it puts it.

It says,

In heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,

all things were created through him and for him.

And he is before all things.

And in him, all things hold together.

He himself, the creator God, is holding us together, is holding this universe together.

So you might ask, right, why are we nerding out, right?

What's the point of talking about cosmic gravity and DNA and atmosphere?

It points to this.

It points to this intelligent creator.

And I want us to know that as Christians, we don't have to bury our head in the sand

and ignore science, right?

The world wants to say to us that if you just read one more book, you'd understand that,

you know, it was a big bang and there's no God that created all of this.

No, it is the opposite.

That as we understand the science behind everything, it points to somebody who made it.

And we don't have to ignore it.

We can learn these things.

And if it's something you've ever struggled with,

God's not afraid of your questions, right?

God's not afraid of you trying to take science and take creation

and find the place where, man, it comes together in perfect harmony.

Have those conversations with him.

Look for resources that can help strengthen your understanding of God as our creator.

Because when we understand that we are not accidents, okay?

You are not an accident.

You are not here by accident today.

It was not some just, you know, mishap that created you, right?

God knit you together.

You are not here in your mother's womb.

In this world, he created it.

And when we understand that, we can comprehend better that,

man, the God who created everything, who created me,

is there to help me in my time of need.

If he was willing to put all this together, surely he cares for me.

And we need to understand that truth in our anxious hearts.

When we are struggling, when we are looking at the trials of life going,

God, I don't know what to do, right?

Where does my help come from?

And I can go, my help comes from God.

I can go, my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and the maker of earth.

He knew to put all this together.

Surely he understands your financial crisis, right?

He put together our DNA.

Surely he understands your diagnosis, right?

He hasn't forgotten these trials in our life.

I love how Charles Spurgeon put it.

He said,

For our comfort, for our help, we look to the creator of it all.

And we trust in him, that the one who holds the stars in place,

that he is walking alongside of us right now, in this moment,

he is here with us.

And we trust and we believe that.

And I love in verse 3, there's this small little detail

that can be so easy to overlook,

but it says that he will not let your foot be moved.

He who keeps you will not slumber.

This fact that God does not sleep

was something that the Israelites would have needed to be reminded of

because it was a common belief that the pagan gods often slept.

That when these false religions,

when they were praying to their pagan gods and not getting an answer,

the thought was, oh, they must be sleeping.

They would do things to try to wake their gods up.

They would cut themselves.

They would sacrifice children and babies

and just do horrific things to try to get the attention of their God

and wake them up.

And our psalmist here reminds us that our God,

the one true God, does not sleep.

And there are so many amazing stories throughout Scripture

that really show us this.

I think God just loved, in the Old Testament especially,

like flexing on these pagan gods,

just like showing them what's up,

that he was the one true God.

And one of my favorite stories of this is in 1 Samuel 5, 1 through 4.

I want to read this for us this morning.

It says,

When the Philistines captured the ark of God,

they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod.

Then the Philistines took the ark of God

and brought it into the house of Dagon

and set it up beside Dagon.

And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day,

behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground

before the ark of the Lord.

So they took Dagon and they put him back in his place.

But when they rose early again the next morning,

behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground

before the ark of the Lord.

And the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying

cut off on the threshold.

Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him.

It's a little backstory of this.

The Philistines, right, Israelites, like arch enemies,

they came in and they stole the ark of the covenant.

The ark of the covenant was the location where God had decided

this is where he was going to reveal his presence to his people.

It was in the temple.

You know, the priests would go in

and they would get to experience the manifest presence of God.

And the Philistines, they stole it.

And they took it.

And they set it in the room in their temple with their God, right?

Their false God, Dagon.

And we see in the morning they come in

and this statue is face down worshiping Yahweh, right?

God's like, okay, you're going to put me in here with this?

Like, I'm going to get, I'm going to show you who's the boss, right?

And they go, that's weird.

I wonder how he fell down.

They pull him back up.

They set him back up again.

And the next morning, again, face down,

the hands of the statue cut off,

the head of the statue cut off,

because of the presence of Yahweh.

And the incredible thing is the Philistines decide,

man, this is way more trouble than we bargained for.

Like, get this thing out of here.

And they literally load it up on cattle

and they send it back to the Israelites.

Like, we don't want to mess with this at all anymore.

And I think this is so crucial because this God,

our God, the one true God,

the universe creating, false God destroying,

one true God is our very present help in time of need.

Psalm 46, one says,

God is our refuge and our strength,

a very present help in trouble.

This God that created everything,

that rules over it all is here for us.

You may think, right?

Yeah, I believe that.

I understand there's a big God,

but does he really care for me, right?

Is he really a personal God as well?

And this traveler in the Psalms,

he needed to be reminded of this,

not just God as creator, right?

We look to him as our creator,

but we also,

we also look to him as our keeper.

Go back to Psalm 121 with me,

verses five through eight.

It says,

the Lord is your keeper.

The Lord is your shade on your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil.

He will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out

and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.

He is a personal God.

And a couple of things just stick out to me

from these verses.

We see the tense of the word

as they shift.

The first couple of verses,

it's where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord.

And then it shifts to you and your,

like somebody else is speaking.

And the thought is here

that in verses three through eight,

that it's actually a more seasoned traveler

who starts talking to our anxious traveler.

I can picture it.

Our anxious traveler asks the question,

where does my help come from?

Okay, it comes from God,

the creator of heaven and earth.

And then our experienced traveler

comes in and says,

yeah, he created that,

but he also is your personal keeper.

He is your personal God.

And he will do all these things specifically for you.

Verses three through eight,

we see the verb keep six different times.

Okay, and this word keep is so important

because we know in the reality of life,

like I said, so many of you right now could go,

okay, I hear this.

God's protecting me.

God's keeping me, man.

I feel like I'm getting beat up by life right now.

All right, I don't feel like I'm being kept.

I don't feel like I'm being kept.

I don't feel like I'm being helped.

I don't feel like I'm being strengthened.

And we look at the reality of our physical life

and we might have trouble, right,

reconciling that with this psalm.

And the reality is this word keep,

it was the word shamar,

which was used for a guardian watchman or a shepherd.

It was a shepherd guarding his sheep.

And when a shepherd guards his sheep,

it doesn't mean that they won't ever walk through trials,

right?

It doesn't ever mean that they won't experience a storm,

but that shepherd will ensure the flock

makes it to their final destination.

God does not promise a life free of hazards, right?

We can look all throughout scripture

and see his disciples.

We can see Jesus himself, right,

in the garden of Gethsemane,

going through the difficulty

that he was about to face on the cross.

But we know that God,

he promises that the hazards

will not have the final say over your soul.

This is an eternal keeping here.

This is not a guarantee of physical,

it's a guarantee of spiritual security.

So we can read this Psalm

and know that as we walk through the trials of life,

our personal God is walking alongside of us,

that he is seeing us through

to our eternal destination with him.

And he is protecting us daily from things

that we will never even know that he protected us from.

Or maybe one day in eternity,

we'll be able to see and God will go,

hey, man, you remember that day you turned right

instead of left?

Like you didn't know,

but I protected you from this.

But sometimes these trials of life,

they do touch us.

And even when they touch us,

our personal God is there encouraging us,

sustaining us and teaching us something through it.

Some of you may have heard this story,

but a couple of years ago,

summer of 2024,

we got one of the wildest,

hardest phone calls that we ever received personally.

At the time, my brother and sister-in-law,

they were missionaries serving in the Middle East.

They'd been there,

they'd been there for about eight-ish years.

And we were up north on vacation.

We get a call from my sister-in-law saying,

hey, we need to meet now.

We need to get the whole family on FaceTime.

And I remember her picture popping up

and my brother wasn't there with her.

And it's like, okay, this, you know,

something is going on.

And she informed us that that night,

he and two other missionary friends had been arrested.

They were at the local mall sharing the gospel

and somebody snitched on them, all right?

Like it was some mall cops big day to like,

you know, do something.

And they called the police

and the police came and took them.

No, no call your family.

No, let anybody know what's going on.

Just came and arrested them.

And the next two weeks were really some of the wildest

of our entire life.

We had no idea what was going on.

We had no idea what the charges were.

We were trying to find out and get updates on,

you know, how he was being treated,

if and when he was going to be released.

His wife was told through the U.S. Embassy

that it was wise for them to flee.

So,

her and her two kids had to leave,

leave their belongings,

leave everything they had

and get out of the country

before she was potentially arrested

and separated from her kids.

And back in the States,

we were here working through it,

trying to figure out what was going on.

And we had been asked by higher ups

in mission organizations

and even in the U.S. government

to not tell anybody about it.

So the fear was that if word got out

that a Christian missionary in the Middle East

was in prison,

that it could really make like national news.

And if it made it,

if it made the news,

the fear was that country

would then feel even more pressure

from their people

to prosecute him really

to the fullest extent of their law.

So here we were trying to figure out

what was going on.

Here he is in prison for two weeks.

And there are so many amazing details

that I just,

I do not have time to share this morning.

I wish that I did.

He was here at the first gathering.

They're here visiting this summer.

So he did,

he did get out,

which was incredible.

After two weeks,

they released him

and he was told to flee the country

and never come back.

A country where they got married in,

where they had two of their kids in,

had to have friends help get their stuff

out of the country

and they had to leave

and never come back.

And again, like I said,

there's so many incredible details.

If you want to hear more about it,

I'd love to share that with you.

He also recorded a podcast

with Voice of the Martyrs,

which is a really incredible mission organization.

So I can share that with you as well

if you come find me after.

But I share this story

because we had to trust him.

We had to trust in those moments

that he had a very personal God with them

there in prison,

in that jail cell, right?

They were out just praying with people

and sharing the gospel

and then two weeks in prison.

And we believe that

everything that he went through,

God worked through him

to sustain him,

worked through him in that environment

to see a few people,

inmates actually come to know the Lord

through his time in there.

And we believe that it was a personal God

that eventually got him out

and got him released

for us back here in the States

trying to just go through life

and act like everything was fine

because we couldn't talk about it.

We had a very personal God here

strengthening us,

encouraging us,

walking alongside of us.

I had multiple Sundays here

leading worship

where nobody knew what was going on.

And I had to get up here

and just trust the Lord, right?

That this real personal God

who loves and cares for us

was with him

and was with us

and giving us peace.

And we saw the Lord work

in incredible ways through that

and he's still working through that

in incredible ways.

But the truth is

when we put our faith in Jesus Christ

we can know that he will see us

through to the end of our journey.

We knew that

if it didn't turn out well physically,

that spiritually the Lord had him.

The Lord was going to keep him

and the Lord was going to sustain him.

We have this personal God.

And we know that he is a personal God

because God the Father sent God the Son

down here in the flesh, right?

God taking on flesh for us.

So where do we look, right?

Do we lift our eyes to the hills of life,

to the trials and the tribulations

that are always set before us?

And do we let those just crush us, right?

Or do we set our eyes to the things

this world wants to tell us,

will sustain us,

will encourage us?

Or do we set our eyes to God, our creator,

to God, our creator,

to God, our keeper,

and to God, our salvation?

When you lift your eyes, man,

can we all be challenged together today

to lift our eyes, not to these hills of life,

but to lift our eyes to the hill of Calvary

where Jesus himself, God in the flesh,

gave his life for us, right?

Where he sacrificed himself

so that we could be kept

as the Psalm is trying to teach us, right?

That we will be kept until eternity with him.

1 Peter 2.24 says,

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree,

that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

By his wounds, you have been healed.

Christ, he bore our sins that we may have life.

If you don't know Christ today,

please don't let today pass

without understanding this truth, right?

That Jesus himself, God in the flesh,

came and died for you on that cross,

And rose again

so that you could have this comfort

that Psalm 121 is offering to us here.

All through his death, burial, and resurrection.

Romans 10.9 tells us how to do that.

If you confess with your mouth

that Jesus is Lord

and believe in your heart

that God raised him from the dead,

you will be saved.

I want to say this morning

that if you are struggling through this, right?

If you are, man, just weighed down

by the hills of love,

if you are being weighed down

by going to the things of this world,

I pray today will be the day

that you could give that to God.

If you need prayer for this,

after this last song,

I'm going to be down front over here.

I would love to talk to you,

to pray with you, to encourage you.

If you need to know the Lord,

I would love to walk you through that.

But I hope, church, just this morning,

that we were reminded, right?

That we have a very personal God,

a God that created everything,

yet still cares deeply for us individually.

That he is here.

You're keeping us from life to death

in eternity with him

when we know him as our savior.

Would you pray with me?

Dear Lord, we love you.

We just thank you, Lord,

that we can look to you today,

Lord, for our strength.

When we say, where does our help come from?

We can have that answer,

that we know that it comes from you, Lord.

That you are our firm foundation,

that we can build our life upon.

And even when the trials do come, Lord,

as they will,

that we know that you are there with us,

leading us, walking us through it,

that you are keeping us through to eternity, Lord.

I ask that this morning,

we would just be reminded of who you are again

as we respond in a song of worship, Lord.

Help us just take this time to reflect

and to give our troubles and our trials

and put them in your hands, God.

We love you.

We ask all of this in your holy and your precious name.

Listen to this message