What Does My Help Come From?!

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Preaching the Sunday-morning service at Lighthouse LaGrande, Jacob Phillips takes Psalm 121:1-2 as his text — I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help; my help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth — and preaches the question he announces at the text: what do you do when you need help? The sermon's frame is travel. Everyone in the room is headed for heaven or hell, and the two destinations run in opposite directions (Matthew 7:14: broad is the way to destruction, strait and narrow the way to life). Nobody drifts into heaven accidentally; you get there intentionally, and the sermon's refrain governs everything after it: orientation decides direction, and direction decides destination. Like the singers of the psalm on the steps of the temple, a believer has to lift his eyes toward the house of God before he can walk toward it. Help, then, is first a matter of where you are looking. Depression and oppression work by keeping the head down; Psalm 24:7 answers by commanding the gates to lift up their heads so the King of glory can come in, and Psalm 20 promises surrounded, outnumbered men that God will send them help from the sanctuary and strengthen them out of Zion.

The middle of the sermon insists that this help comes from a God who is anything but weak: the maker of heaven and earth, who spoke light into being, parted the Red Sea with the blast of His nostrils, fed five thousand, stilled the storm, and fed a prophet by ravens. The believer's problem, Phillips argues, is rarely a faith problem; it is an orientation problem. Peter walked on the water while his eyes were on Jesus and began to sink when he noticed the wind — the wind had not changed, his perspective had, from contrary to boisterous. The theology of help runs through Hebrews 4:14-16: a great high priest who was tempted in all points yet without sin, and therefore an invitation to come boldly to the throne of grace for mercy and grace to help in time of need. Temptation itself has a built-in exit (1 Corinthians 10:13), and grace is not a cover for sin but a teacher against it (Titus 2:11). The sermon's word study gives the close its picture: the Greek behind "help" is the word used in Acts 27:17, when sailors in a named storm used helps, undergirding — frapping — the ship, running ropes under the hull and tightening them to hold a breaking vessel together. God's help holds a falling-apart life together the same way.

Phillips seals it with his own family. In 2019 his little son was suffering intestinal pain so severe he would scream within half an hour of eating; doctors suspected Crohn's disease and called it incurable. After a long night of the boy crying "Daddy, make it stop," the family took him into their home church in the small hours, and the child crawled under the altar and prayed the only prayer he had: "God, help me." He slept, ate the next day without screaming — pizza included, as the father's faith-with-works test — and, Phillips testifies, has never had another problem. The altar call simply extends the invitation: step out, lift your head, and say it — help me, God.

Scripture index: Psalm 121:1-2; Matthew 7:14; Psalm 24:7; Psalm 20:1-2; Hebrews 4:14-16; 1 Corinthians 10:13; Titus 2:11; Acts 27:17.