Written by Guy M. Richard |
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Sin is, fundamentally a rejection of God as God. It is idolatry at its very core or, as so many ministers and theologians have said down through the ages, it is “cosmic rebellion” against God. When we think or act as though there is no God, we are sinning—which is why it is possible for a good deed to be a sin. If we do good deeds in order to give glory to ourselves, then we are falling short of the glory of God and are, therefore, sinning. If we do good deeds out of a desire to be recognized or appreciated or simply to feel good about ourselves, then we are falling short of the glory of God and are, therefore, sinning. Sin is a complete anti-God state of thinking, speaking, desiring, intending, and doing.

It doesn’t take much in the way of discernment to see that something is drastically wrong with the world in which we live. The mere fact that people would even think of walking into an elementary school and casually and violently extinguishing the lives of the most precious and, yet, most vulnerable among us ought to be enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is not right in the universe. Who of us hasn’t watched with horror and profound grief as images from these kinds of ghastly events have been displayed on our televisions or our phones and ipads? Who of us, in these moments of unbelievable tragedy, hasn’t longed for a world that is utterly free of this kind of evil and injustice?
But we don’t need to confine ourselves to only looking at school shootings. Many other things in the world show us that something is wrong. We put locks—and, sometimes, alarms—on our houses, our cars, our offices, our schools, and our stores for a reason. We hire police officers and security guards, because we think that we need them. We take to the streets to protest injustice, because even the very authorities that we look to for protection oftentimes fail us. We buy and carry guns, because we want to protect what we have and don’t trust others to do it for us. Something is wrong with the world in which we live, and that much should be overwhelmingly obvious to us all.
But it doesn’t take much self-reflection to realize that whatever is wrong with the world is also within each of us. No one has ever had to teach anyone to lie or to steal or to be selfish. Those things seem to come naturally for every human being. We all know that the testimony of the apostle Paul in Romans 7:14-25 applies to us as well. We recognize that there is a battle going on inside of us between the things that we should do and the things that we actually find ourselves doing. We are all aware that we fall short in our thoughts, words, and deeds. We don’t always think the right things; we don’t always say the right things; and we certainly don’t always do the right things. And this isn’t just a problem “out there” in the world at large. It’s a problem “in here” within each of our hearts as well. Something within every man, woman, and child is not right. It doesn’t take a lot of soul-searching to see that. But I’m not so sure that every man, woman, and child would be able to put their finger on exactly what it is that isn’t right either within themselves or within the world.
The Bible teaches that the problem with the world and with every person living in it is something called sin. According to the Bible, sin has separated us from God and from one another. It has set us at enmity with God, with ourselves, and with everyone else around us. Sin has infected our hearts, our minds, and our wills such that every aspect of our human psychology is affected. We can’t think sinlessly. We can’t desire sinlessly. And we can’t speak and act sinlessly. The Bible says that even our best deeds are tainted with sin (see Isa. 64:6).
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[God’s] got you now, present tense. But he’s got you in the future too. He will keep you from evil. He will keep your life. He will keep your going out and coming in not just now but into eternity. It’s not just a promise for this life but for all time. God has promised good to his people throughout eternity.

We’ve been looking at psalms of courage this summer, and we’re finally at the end. We’re also at one of my favorite psalms of all.
The question is: where will you turn for help when life gets hard?
This is a question that’s highly relevant to some of you, because you need help, and you need it yesterday. You have bills you can’t pay, problems you can’t solve, relationships that need help. There’s a group of us here that are at the end of our resources, and we know we need help, and we’re not afraid to admit it. When I ask you where you turn for help, you’re not really surprised. You know you need to turn somewhere.
There’s a whole other group here, though, that is going to be surprised by this question. Most of us go through life not knowing that we need help. Even if we did, we’re like the proverbial guy that won’t stop for directions. We may know we need help, but we’re not prepared to admit it to anyone else. When I ask you where you turn for help, you’re a little bit surprised.
But the truth is, we all need help. And the psalmist asks: where will you turn for the help you need?
Thousands of years ago, this question was asked on a fairly regular basis. Psalm 121 is one of the Songs of Ascent. These are songs of pilgrims who sang them during their journey to Jerusalem for one of the three yearly festivals. They’re songs that are meant to help God’s people as they travel to worship.
The trip was sometimes dangerous. You had to walk or ride for miles. There were no real roads—those came later—but just well-worn paths across the valleys.
God had told them to go—to come where his presence was (1 Kings 8:10–11)—but the road was dangerous and uncertain.
Along the road, the people met threats above and threats below, most of which they could not see or predict. They were fully exposed to scorching heat and volatile weather. Robbers hid in the caves and hills, knowing exactly when to expect their victims. The people knew they had to go, but they did not know if they would all make it. Surely, some didn’t. So, they felt fragile, vulnerable, unsafe.Marshall Segal
Jesus himself would have taken this trip many times. This is a song for rough roads, both back then on the way to Jerusalem, and for us as well.
The Question and Answer
And the psalm begins with a question that the psalmist asks of himself.
I lift up my eyes to the hills.From where does my help come?
It’s possible that the speaker is looking to the hills in fear, scared of robbers who might be lurking there. But the term “lift up my eyes” is generally a positive one, as shown in Psalm 123: “To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!” So it’s possible that the pilgrim is approaching Jerusalem. And he asks himself the question as he gets closer: where does my help come from?
This is an important question for all of us to answer. Where does your help come from? Where do you get the help you need as you travel on dangerous paths on the way to your eternal home?
We need to do an honesty check here. I recently read a quote that really got me. Family therapist Jay Haley famously told his clients, “I don’t address problems; I address attempted solutions.” What are the attempted solutions that you turn to for help? What friends and coping mechanisms and strategies help you when you experience danger or trouble or need help?
I want you to think about this. How would you answer the question, “From where does my help come from?” The answer really matters.
The truth is, when we get into trouble, our first response is not usually to turn to God for help. We have all kinds of other places we turn for the help we need. Where will you turn when your life falls apart, or you feel discouraged or despondent, or you face a problem you just can’t solve on your own?
Here’s how the psalmist answered: “My help comes from the LORD.” That is a good answer! But what I love about the psalm is that he doesn’t stop there. This psalm is a meditation on why the Lord is so qualified to be the source of the help that we need. He doesn’t just give us the answer; he gives us the reasons why it’s good to turn to God for help.
It’s important we learn the answer. Where does our help come from? The Lord. Jesus is the helper of his people now and for eternity.
But it’s also good to learn the reasons for the answer. And the psalmist gives us three.
The Reasons
Why does our help come from the Lord? Because the Lord is a good helper for three reasons:
He is a good helper because he is the Creator.
Verse 2 says:
My help comes from the LORD,who made heaven and earth.
What qualifies the LORD to be our helper? He is the maker of heaven and earth. He is the Creator, and that makes him uniquely qualified to help us.
The Lord is not some tribal deity. He’s not just some minor god with limited power. Think about who God is.
As far as we know, the observable universe is some 90 billion light years wide, but we don’t even know. The Milky Way Galaxy alone has some 100 billion to 400 billion stars. God created all of it. How powerful is the Lord? We can’t even comprehend his power. He is very qualified to help you.
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The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”
That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.
In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.
“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said.
By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”
That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside.
She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal.
That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.”
She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools.
The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.
In Wrobel’s state of Vermont, homeschool applications are up 75 percent. And that’s in the northeast, where regulations are strictest. The phenomenon is exploding across the country. In North Carolina, the site for registering homeschools crashed last summer. In California, applications for homeschooling tripled from 2020 to 2021. In Alaska, more than a quarter of students in the state are now homeschooled.
In Texas and Florida, parents are not required to notify the state, so it’s hard to know exactly how many kids are learning at home. But just one South Florida school, Jupiter Farms Elementary, saw 10 percent of its student population withdraw for this school year. Almost all of them are being taught at home.
The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.
These were changes that rocked every American family.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that the homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home.
All of this is undermining the old, Democratic-educational complex — the powerful teacher unions and the office-holders beholden to those unions —  that has long maintained an iron-clad grip on tens of thousands of schools and the fate of tens of millions of American students. And it is forcing a long overdue reimagining of the way we educate children: the subjects they study, the values instilled in them, and the economy for which they are being prepared.
In the beginning, the homeschoolers fell into two camps: hippies and evangelicals. The people who thought the corporate-military-industrial state existed to create cookie-cutter yes-men, and those who didn’t want government employees poisoning their kids with talk of evolution and sex education.
But they had one thing in common: Both groups distrusted the establishment and felt they could do a far better job educating their children.
It was the late 1970s. Vietnam had just come to an end, and a long-fomenting conservative movement spearheaded by Ronald Reagan was on the verge of toppling the old political elites and taking the White House. It was a moment of great discontent.
Out of this discontent emerged a cadre of parents frustrated with the mediocrity and bureaucratization of the public-school system.
That group included Roy and Diane Speed, of Bethel, Connecticut. They were unusual: He’d spent high school in Beirut and Paris, and done a Peace Corps stint in Mali; she was a management consultant who had studied chemistry. When their two kids were still young, they started teaching them at home.
“It was a lifestyle choice,” Diane Speed told me. They immersed themselves in the writings of the patron saints of the modern homeschooling movement like John Holt, a product of Philips Exeter Academy and Yale who had taught elementary school and had come around to the view that children should not be forced to learn. “It can get pretty radical,” Roy Speed said.
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