Getting Ready for Sunday: Psalm 121

Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
    From where does my help come?
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.

Welcome to Getting ready for Sunday, a podcast of first Lutheran Church. Each week, I introduced the readings for the upcoming Sunday with some notes and explanation so you can be ready for worship when you arrive. I look at the Old Testament, Psalm epistle and Gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday and offer a few notes and explanation. This week, we're doing something different. We're continuing our series on raising children in the faith, which means that we've departed from the lectionary. So the psalm that I've chosen for Sunday, October 8, is Psalm 121. I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth, He will not let your foot be moved. He who helps you will not slumber, Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper. The Lord is your shade at 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 you're going out. And you're coming in from this time forth, and forevermore. Here hence the reading. This Psalm is the beginning of a section called about is titled A Song of a sense, as in going up. The idea is that there's a whole set of psalms that the people of Israel would sing or pray as they were heading up to Jerusalem for the great feasts. They would do this several times of year as required by God's law to come to Jerusalem, where the temple is to offer the appropriate sacrifices, to do the appropriate celebrations, and to be in God's presence for that required Festival. It's also something you could sing every time you were heading up to Jerusalem. It's a song of a sense, because Jerusalem, the trip was always upward, you always go up to Jerusalem. And so you can imagine you are down beneath Jerusalem. And you read these words, I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth, and you're looking up at the city of Jerusalem, where the temple was, where God said that he was in a special way, his presence in the middle of that city. It goes through a number of promises, though, that God will give to his people. And the point of this psalm is to prepare people who are coming into God's presence, who are making the journey to where God is, and reminding them why they go and they worship that God. As we consider what we do in worship, it's very similar. We look up, up not to a city on a hill, we look up our altar space, to where God promised to be in a special way through His Word and Sacraments, through the proclamation of the gospel, and through his body and blood of Holy Communion. And God promises to be there in a very special way, in a way that he isn't in other places. Not in your homes, not out in fields, not at work. He is there with his grace through the means of grace in his word, and his sacraments. And so all of these promises that he will not let your food your foot be moved, that he is your keeper and your shade, that He the Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. We turn to the divine service where God comes to us on Sunday mornings to give us His grace. That is why we go to church. It's this song of a sense where God comes down to us. That's it for Psalm 121. We'll see you on Sunday. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai