Trust in God's Unfailing Love - Pastor Tom Loghry
In Psalm 13, we see an example of David lamenting. The psalms come in several different genres and they all serve as examples of how we can approach God with all of the parts of our life!
Transcript:
Where do you turn when nothing seems to be going right? When there are no wins, when everything that you build up seems to just fall down again and again? Do you turn inward or do you look upward? You feel abandoned by God - do you go to God to express that feeling? How do you cope with the suffering?
Truth be told, we, we cope in all sorts of terrible ways. We obsess, we drink, we explode, we endlessly scroll. Do we go to God? So often, too often, we don't. In the Psalms, we find David and the people of God going to their God. They bring their complaint, they bring all their sorrow and lay it all out. They lament.
The Psalms are not monotone. I, I said last week that they have different genres. The psalms are, are lyrics really, that were once accompanied by instruments. We don't know what that musical notation is these days, but it's music that's all sorts of different genres. Last week we saw there's praise, and today we see that there is lament.
What is given to us in the Psalms of Lament is a model of how we can bring our sorrows to God. And so looking to Psalm 13, we consider the example of David. David writes, For the director of music, a Psalm of David. How long, Lord? Will you, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me. As we look at this psalm, there's two words that stand out that we hear again and again. How long, David says it four times. He says, how long? How long? How long? How long, O Lord.
David feels as though he's forgotten by God, as though God is hiding his face from him. And this, and that David is just simply left to wrestle with all his fears and thoughts. I mean, how many of us have been in that position where we're just consumed and it feels like there's this internal wrestling within us, and on the whole, he feels as though he is being defeated by his enemy, that those who are opposing him are are taking delight in the sorrow and the defeat that he's experiencing now. One of the things, just as a side note here, the thing that's great about the Psalms is that we can see how it coordinates with the things that happened to David in his life. His best friend was Jonathan, who was the son of King Saul, and one time he had a decent relationship with King Saul, but then all of a sudden things turned and King Saul decided that he wanted David dead.
And so we can see how this would relate to that. But there's also something, this great quality about the Psalms where it's kind of open-ended, that invites us to apply it to our own lives, to the enemies that we face in our own lives, whether those be human enemies, but ultimately spiritual enemies. And so whether you have a human opponent or not, when we go through hardship and suffering and temptation, all that, we can feel as though Satan's mocking us. And so this Psalm very much resonates with the experiences that are familiar to us all. All of us have have felt this way at some time in which it seems like God doesn't care about us. It seems like he's forgotten about us. And what's so significant here is that if the Bible even features this, that God doesn't try to paper, paper things over as though things are just always peachy. I mean, think about it, if these are kinda like bad reviews, a, a company wouldn't feature the bad reviews, but God inspired the bad reviews here. He inspired these complaints that are being expressed towards him.
And we see it elsewhere. We, we look in the Book of Lamentations, it's the book written by the prophet Jeremiah lamenting over the destruction of Jerusalem, in Lamentations 5:20 it says, why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us for so long? We go to Job. Many of you are familiar with the man Job who suffered so much. In Job 13:24 he says, why do you hide your face and consider me your enemy? So there's this, this Psalm 13 is not an aberration. We see throughout the scriptures how God has inspired the writers of scripture to express their complaints, to express their feelings of abandonment to him. And what this tells us is this, it tells us that God doesn't want to shut us down.
He doesn't want to tell you to shut up, take your complaints elsewhere. He invites us into His presence to express our feelings. And yet at the same time, and we, and we see this dynamic in the Psalm and we see it throughout the scriptures on the whole, when you read all the scripture together. What we learn is that our feelings are not absolute.
We have our feelings, but then we also understand the truth. And this is really, I can tell you this. This is very much the crux of pastoral ministry, and that's a ministry that's not just limited to me, but includes all of us in the body of Christ, in which we do come alongside people and their suffering.
How they're feeling, expressing those feelings of abandonment by God. But we also minister the truth of God's faithfulness, and that's what we see being brought forth here in this psalm. Now, the other thing that we notice here is that David is not just merely expressing his complaint. He's not just venting.
All of us like to vent and sometimes we just kind of wanna yell into the void, ah, this, that and the other. You know, yell in your car. That's, that's a good place to yell. No one else can hear you too, too much. David, but David's addressing God. He's looking to nowhere else but to God. And that, and that's important to notice because very often when we get frustrated, sometimes we can turn to the wrong places in laying out our complaint, we can try to find, you know, I said at the beginning, we can try to cope with things by turning to alcohol, turning to just amusement, you know, scrolling, television, all those things. Just trying to get our minds off of things.
I would say even, even our, our friends, even our spouses, while they are good, and it's great that we can share our sorrows with them, ultimately, they cannot bear our burden completely. And there are some very good friends out there who have tried. Maybe some of you are those good friends where your friend comes to you with all their sorrows, and you try to help them, but you cannot bear the complete burden of what they're going through.
Only God can hear that. And this is what we find David doing. He's turning to God. And so he, in verses three and four, he says, look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I'll sleep in death, and my enemy will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. Now, when David is calling for God to give light to his eyes, we can kind of understand a dual sense here.
He's, there's a very literal sense of if your eyes go dark, you're dead, basically. So he is saying, protect my life. But there's also this sense that we do find in scripture in which light to the eyes is, is a joyous state of, of being. Proverbs 15:30 kind of captures this, this sense. It says, light in a messenger's eyes brings joy to the heart, and good news gives health to the bone.
So the idea is that if the messenger has light in his eyes, you can tell it's, it's good news. So you're, so you're happy. So we can understand this both, I think there's definitely a literal sense here in which David is concerned given his enemy's opposition towards him, but also he just wants, he, he wants the joy of life, not just mere existence. Altogether though, whether it, you know, both that literal sense and also just that sense of desiring a happy life, the fear that hangs over him and which hangs over us all, is this fear of death. The existential fear of death pervades everything. So if you think of anything that you're afraid of, anything that you're anxious about, if you boil it all the way down, it all really goes back down to death in some way.
You're, you have this great anxiety and fear about a dying, of your life coming to nothing. And so death is that common denominator that needs to be addressed, which only God can address. Now it's interesting when, when we see sorrow in the Old Testament, we think, we might be tempted to think, well, maybe that's just an Old Testament phenomenon, and that the Christians, they have, they have a perfectly joyous life. They don't know any sorrow. Now, if you read the New Testament closely, you know that's not the case. Jesus promised his disciples suffering. He promised them the way of the cross. And I, I think one, one passage that especially captures this from the Book of Revelation, it's, it, it pairs up with this language of, of how long, of a desire for justice on the part of believers because of how much injustice they've suffered in their life. In Revelation six, verses nine through eleven says when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who've been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. Now, just a side note there, you might be wondering what are they doing underneath the altar.
The reason is, is what happens on an altar, you offer sacrifices, blood is shed. These are the believers whose blood has been shed as an offering of, of sacrifice unto God, a sacrifice of praise. So these believers are crying out. It says they called out in a loud voice, how long, sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?
Then each one of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been. How about that? They lay this cry out before God. God gives them this white robe, which is their assurance.
He says, hold up, more of you need to die. This is, this is the Christian life. The Christian life is the way of the cross. It is a way of death that goes over to life because of Jesus Christ. Just as his way of the cross, his going to the cross, was also the way which led to his resurrection three days later.
And so going back to David, he's, he's laid out his, his complaint, his sorrows, his concern. We see him take this sharp turn here in verses five and six.
He asserts his trust and faith in God and takes up a defiant note of praise, he says, but I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me.
The reason why David can take this sharp turn is because he knows the reality of God's unfailing love, not just personally in his own life. We can imagine that he knew God's love when he enabled him to overcome Goliath and the mercy that he, and protection he experienced from God up to his this point in his his life, but also looking back upon God's unfailing love towards his people.
This is a love that goes back. Well, it goes back to the beginning, but we see this idea of unfailing love articulated in the Book of Exodus. In Exodus 15:13 says, in your unfailing love, you'll lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you'll guide them to your holy dwelling. In, in the, in the book of Jeremiah, and this would be after the time of David, the prophet says, the Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness. And so it's in light of God's faithfulness to his people, notably, despite their faithlessness to him, that David's able to rejoice. The unfailing love of God is his assurance. Now to take us back to the book of of Lamentations, we see this sort of acknowledgement expressed by the prophet Jeremiah. It says, because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They're new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, the Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let Him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust-- there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to the one who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace. For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.
I think the prophet's words there are so profound because they're so real. There is no Pollyannish sort of promise that, oh, you're gonna believe in God and everything's gonna go great. Now Jeremiah is like, your face is gonna be in the dust. You're gonna bear a yoke in this life.
People are gonna wanna strike you right in the face, offer your face to be struck. Why, if, if it was all that you'd be like, oh, well I'm just depressed now. I have no hope. I'm going to despair. The hope is this, is that he says, for no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion. So great is his unfailing love. God will not fail to show his love towards you.
You will suffer now. But the depths, the full riches of God's love will be revealed in full on the day of Christ's return when the dead are raised and we are completely restored to God because of what Christ has done, and we will live with him forever. Now, even in this life, we can see the love of God, his unfailing love, his faithfulness.
Lord willing, you live a long life and you'll have hard times, but you'll know good times. But ultimately, it'll all culminate in this perfect restoration that God has in store for us in Christ. When we think about God's unfailing love towards us, if, if we would ever doubt it, we should look no further than Jesus Christ.
The fact that the Father would send his son, that God the Son, the Son of God would come in human flesh to suffer what we've endured, so that by his perfect sacrifice we might be saved. The writer of Hebrews in Hebrews two verses 10 through 15 says, in bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.
So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says, I'll declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly. I'll sing your praises. And again, I'll put my trust in him. And again he says, here I am, I and the children God has given me. Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil-- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Jesus looked face right in the, look, Jesus looked death right in the eyes.
He knows what it is to be afraid, but greater than his fear was his faith, his trust in the father, verse 13, he says, I will put my trust in him.
And so Jesus has set the model. He has set the example. He, he truly fulfills Psalm 13 here because he knew that the father's love would not fail, that he would not be given to the grip of death forever and ever and ever, but that he'd be raised three days later. And so it is with us, so that we no longer have need to live in fear of death. We are no longer slaves to death. Christ entered into this world in order to overcome, to break the death's power, and so we are liberated from that fear as we trust in him.
As we trust in God's unfailing love, and so we know God's present goodness and mercy towards us as he's given us mercy. But as I said just moments ago, this is going to be revealed in full when Christ returns. In Christ the new creation has come, the old is gone, the new is here, and as it says in Revelation 21 verse four, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
There will be no more death or mourning, or crying, or pain for the old order of things has passed away. Without this promise, without what Christ has done, we have no hope. We can only be given over to despair because ultimately death wins unless Christ has defeated death. Psalms 13 is an invitation to go to God.
Go to God when you feel abandoned by him. Turn to no one and nothing else. Go right to him and tell him how you're feeling. Will he remove every tear in this moment? No. We live in a veil of tears. We are not promised an easy life. We live in a broken world. We live in the world of the cross. But when you go to him, you will experience, you will know his presence.
Our union with Christ places us in his footsteps. Christ was rejected by those around him. The people around him were all kinds of trouble. He was neglected and abandoned by them, but not by God. Yes, from the cross, he cries, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But this is the same Jesus who knew the father's presence in the Garden of Gethsemane as he contemplated this very fate, is the same Jesus who told his disciples in John 16:32, A time is coming and it in fact has come when you'll be scattered, each to your own home. You'll leave me all alone.
Yet I am not alone, for my father is with me. Christ was not abandoned. He was laid dead in the grave, but he was not abandoned to death. He was raised to new life. So it is with us. We cry. How long? How long? How long? How long? But we are not abandoned. We will be raised with Christ to new life. The Lord has been good to us, wretched sinners that we are, and we will see the complete riches of his mercy when Christ returns and the kingdom of God appears on earth as it is in heaven.
Let us pray.
Dear Father, we come before you and we do say, father, that sometimes it, sometimes it feels like we're all alone. It feels like you don't hear us, and we wonder, father, what are you up to? Why aren't things going as, as we might have hoped.
But Father, we go to you and to no one else expressing all that is on our heart because we trust in your unfailing love. We lay these burdens at your feet, father because we can't bear them on our own. Father, we come to you because you're the only one that can liberate us from this great fear that otherwise surrounds us, this fear of death.
Father, we give you thanks that in Jesus Christ we have no need to live in fear any longer. Father, fill our hearts with rejoicing and praise. Just as David had this hallelujah to raise. Because he knew your unfailing love and he trusted in you. Help us to trust you, father, in all likewise. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Intro/Outro Song
Title: River Meditation
Artist: Jason Shaw
Source:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jason_Shaw/Audionautix_Acoustic/RIVER_MEDITATION___________2-58
License:(CC BY 3.0 US)