PSALMS FOR CHRISTMAS: A Fresh Start

Hi, I'm Shelby Abbott, and this is Psalms for Christmas Time, a podcast mini-series from Family Life with pastor and author Dane Ortland. Dane has written a book, In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 Daily Devotions Through the Psalms. And all this month, with a gift of any amount, not only will your donation be matched, we'll send you a copy of the book to dive deeper into the Psalms and stir your affections for Jesus Christ.

To learn more about how to give, visit familylifetoday.com. Inevitably during this time when Christmas rolls around, the end of the day comes, everybody goes to sleep on Christmas night, they start to look forward to already the next thing, which is often New Year's. And so New Year's comes with a lot of traditions in and of itself, and one of those things happens to be resolutions, or they start thinking about new beginnings.

They start thinking about, what do I want to do differently this year that I'm just not pleased with from this last year? And we get a picture of that real human experience of what we're longing for in the Psalms as well. And so today we're going to look at Psalm 121 with pastor and author Dane Ortland.

Dane, we're thinking about these things. We're in this Christmas season, and New Year's is just around the corner. Many people have a tendency to do that, to say, how can I turn over a new leaf? What do we learn from this Psalm, specifically in Psalm 121, that we can apply to our lives? Well, we learn who God is all over again, and receive this in the spirit in which I mean it, we can become a Christian all over again, as we read this Psalm and take fresh refuge in God. It's a short Psalm, maybe I could just read it here, Shelby, for us, and we can enjoy it afresh. I lift my eyes to the hills, 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.

We go to sleep, God never does. The Lord is your keeper, that means your protector, your guardian, he's your bouncer. The Lord is your shade on your right hand. So not only does he protect you, he keeps you, in a sense, comfortable.

He keeps the sun off of you. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. And the Psalm ends in this way, 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 forever more. Application, as we go into 2022, God is not with us just on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sunday. He is with us in our going out and our coming in. He's not just with us in our home or apartment or at work, he's not just with us in a good week we've had, he's with us all the time and what we've just celebrated at Christmas is proof of that in the Incarnation. So brother, if God's mercies are new every morning, Lamentations 3, they're certainly new every year.

And let's draw fresh strength from his mercies. I gotta be honest, I feel a little ambivalent about New Year's resolutions. I do too, actually.

I don't know how I feel about them. I feel the need for it every year and I understand the heart behind it. I really do. I get it. Yeah. But in terms of, let me do this, then I know I'm going to fail by mid-February with, yeah.

Oh, I know. And so we got to handle these resolutions with such care. I mean, yes, let's resolve by the grace of God to keep growing and New Year's is a good time to do that, but let's not act in such a way that we think actually our standing with God or our growth in Christ is up to us. So that as we proceed through January and into February, we're just setting ourselves up to fail and be disappointed and discouraged more than we ever were. Maybe the New Year's resolution many of us need to make is, I've broken a lot of New Year's resolutions and this year I resolve to let God love me. This year I resolve to let God be rich in mercy, Ephesians 2, to me in a way that I never have before.

Okay, what do you mean by that? To be melted and lifted into growth, not to try to crowbar myself into growth through new resolutions. Getting off of that treadmill and letting God love us in a way that we have never allowed him to before.

I mean, here's what I believe, Shelby. It is in our pockets of deepest shame, regret, and anguish that God loves us the most. And I think a lot of times our New Year's resolutions do not reflect that. Yeah, I think when I make resolutions and have broken them in the past, I kind of feel disappointed in myself and I think I transfer that over onto God when I mess up in some form or fashion.

I think he's standing there maybe with his arms folded, kind of got a clipboard under his arm with a checklist of all the things I didn't do. But Scripture gives us a totally different picture of that. What you mentioned from Lamentations, if they're new every morning, it's a metaphor for the fact that they're new all the time. We don't need to run away from God when we mess things up. We need to run to him because he openly embraces us.

Exactly right. And so if as we mess up, we feel guilty and our conscience is feeling condemned, that's the enemy doing that. If our conscience is pricked and we feel convicted and it pulls us to Jesus Christ, that's the Holy Spirit doing that. So yeah, if we go into the New Year, okay, we got these resolutions, we're well-meaning, we want to do them by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, but then we start screwing it up, it is so easy to believe in our heart that the heat of God's love has cooled just a few degrees. Why do we believe that?

Because that's how we are, if we're honest. God's not like us. Maybe a New Year's resolution is to say, I'm going to get my Bible and a couple of good books to help me learn that God actually, his love is on another plane than what mine is. That's my New Year's resolution, to know what the love of God is really like, to repent out of my bad theology of what God believes about me when I break my resolutions.

So I want to keep growing in that myself as we go into the New Year. As we kind of wrap up this small podcast series, I want to recommend to you by Dane Orlin, In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 daily devotions through the Psalms. And in addition to that, one of the books that has been super impactful in my life is another book that you've written called Gentle and Lowly, which helped me peel back the layers on what my misconceptions were about Jesus and what he feels for me. Thank you for being with us in this podcast series, Dane, deeply grateful for you and thankful for what the Lord is doing through you and your ministry. What an honor and a joy to talk with you, Shelby. Thank you.