Sorrow in My Heart All the Day

Psalm 13 is a solid promise, to those who feel that God is very far away and does not care or concern himself with our pain, that his love is steadfast and his salvation never leaves.

I want to thank all of you who came up and sang “Everything is Awesome” to me this week. That was great. Or made suggestions about songs we could sing before math class. Also pretty good. I think Brad King came up with Count Your Blessings. That was clever.

We’re going to continue our look at God’s inspired songbook this week with a psalm that is just about the opposite of the psalm we looked at last week. Last week’s Psalm contained the line. ‘You have put more joy in my heart. In this week’s Psalm’, David laments. I have sorrow in my heart all the day. Psalm 4 and Psalm 13 are just a few pages apart in your Bible, but they appear to be worlds apart in their perspective, and they’re written by the same guy. Same guy wrote both songs. How can that be? What’s the right way to think about God and how do we approach him? Does God give us joy, or does he allow us to sit in our sorrow? One of the reasons that people love to read the Book of Psalms is that it spans the range of emotion and experience. No matter what you’re going through or how you’re feeling, there is a psalm for you. There’s a psalm that will speak to you. And what the Psalms do so well is they bring each emotion and experience into perspective through the gospel. And they don’t just leave you where you are to stew in your feelings. It’s not like an Adele song where the world is broken, an awful end of song, right? There’s a hope. There’s a joyfulness. The Psalms help everyone in whatever season of life they’re in. They help us think about our experience in a way that that draws us closer to the Lord and also builds up our trust in the Lord. And since the way we feel and see and experience life is constantly changing, the same guy can write both Psalms. You can write them both, which is great for us because we’re always the same person, right? We don’t become a different person. We’re the same person. And there are times when we need different psalms to express what’s happening inside of us. Because what’s changed is what’s going on in our hearts and minds. Sometimes you’re on the mountaintop, right? But sometimes you’re in the valley. Sometimes it feels like the wind is at your back. But sometimes it feels like it is right in your face. Truth does not change, but our circumstances do. And so to get to the unchanging truth of the gospel from the different places where we start, we need to have scripture to guide us from where we are. Have you ever heard the expression that God will meet you where you’re at? You’ve heard that before. God will meet you where you’re at. Nowhere is that more clearly seen than in the Psalter.

Psalm 13 is for people who are in great despair, really, really great despair. And that might be the starting place you’re at this morning. That might be how you got up and came to church this morning. You’re in a place of despair. Perhaps you’re in a place or you’re heading toward a place where you’re struggling to just get out of bed in the morning. But maybe not. Maybe that’s not you today. You might be you might be feeling like you’re flying high right now. You’re doing really well. Everything’s lining up for you. You might be feeling like everything is going exactly how you hoped, and you just want to praise God and oh no, why are we talking about some depressing psalm this morning? How did I end up here? I don’t want to be there today. Well, let me encourage you, if that’s you, if that’s where you’re at, you’re feeling great and things are going well and you’re feeling very blessed and very contented in life, let me let me offer that. Today is the best day you could possibly have to do some mental planning for future suffering. You’re like, well, that’s not what I wanted to do, but it’s the best time to do it. The worst time to build a tornado shelter is during a tornado. Right? It’s when things are going reasonably well, and life is somewhat stable that you need to think about what it means to live in a broken world and on mission for Christ. The worst time to develop your theology of suffering is when you’re suffering. That’s not when you want to be doing that. You want to be building it, building it now, when life is good. The doctrinal truths that explains suffering are the tools that you’ll need when it eventually comes. So it’s good to be thinking about these things at all times. It’s part of our growth in Christ. It’s part of the way we become more like Jesus. Psalm 13 is for those who feel like God’s love has failed. You just feel like God’s love has failed. And that you’ve been forgotten. Psalm 13 is a solid promise to those who feel that God is very far away, or he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t concern himself with our pain. It’s a promise that his love is steadfast and that his salvation never leaves. You’ll see a very familiar pattern to Psalm 13. It starts in despair. In the middle of it’s filled with pleading, and at the end there’s hope. We see this pattern so often in the Psalms. We might argue that it’s God’s divinely suggested pattern for processing hardships.

So let’s start by meeting David, where he is in the depths of his despair. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1-2)

There’s a very important question that faces us right away with this psalm. And the answer to this question is so important that it shapes everything about how we proceed through life. It shapes our thought patterns, our prayer life. It shapes the way we grieve. (Have I built it up enough?) It’s a very important question. And the question is … Can God forget about us? Can You forget about us? Is that possible? I forget where I put my wallet, my car keys and my phone on a daily basis. Daily basis. It is epidemic in my life. If they are in the first place. I look, that was a minor miracle that I found him there. And the reason that that I lose these things – well, there’s two reasons, actually. There’s two reasons that I lose these things. The first is I am not careful about where I put them down. It’s not in a consistent place. It’s not in its home, as my wife suggests it should have. Put it in it’s home. You’ll always know where it is, right? I don’t have that for it. And the second thing, and maybe more importantly, I’m not thinking about them when I put them down, I don’t make a mental note as to where I put them. And so I don’t have anything to go back to find these things. I have tried to fix this, and I believe the condition is incurable.

David brings a pretty stiff charge against God here. It’s a pretty serious charge in the first line of the song. How long, O Lord. Will you forget me forever? What is he saying? Is he suggesting that God had so much on his mind that he forgot the situation that he put David in? Didn’t remember where he sat him down. Didn’t realize where things were going to go for him there. Is it suggesting that God has become so tied up in other situations, things that are far more important, that He didn’t make a mental note to come back to David, help him out? The second line shows us that that is not what David means by ‘forget’. But it’s even more challenging question about God. ‘How long will you hide your face from me?’ Hiding is an active decision. It’s an action. It’s not like forgetting something. Forgetting something is a mistake. Hiding is not a mistake. When you hide, you are making a decision not to be found. And the Psalms are poems. They tend to overlap with one another. The lines build up to paint a picture. And so if you put them together, forgetting with the concealing, you have a God who actively does not care. And so we can make a little change to our important question. ‘Would God purposely forget about us?’ Would he hide himself when we need him the most?

I tell you, a lot of people feel this way. A lot of people feel just like this. If you spent any time in scripture, including in the Psalms of David, you probably know that the answer to this question is no. You probably know that God doesn’t actually forget us and hide from us when we need him. But it sure can feel like that, doesn’t it? On occasion? Doesn’t it feel like that?

And that’s the point. That’s why he wrote this psalm. That’s why David wrote this song for God’s people to sing. He’s giving words to some very real and very raw feelings. There’s another psalm that was written by another author named Asaph, who expresses his questions to God in a very similar way. I want to read that to you. That’s Psalm 77, verses 7-9. “Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has His steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” You can feel that way. When you’re going through a trial, it can feel like God has somehow moved on from his program of blessing and grace and encouragement for you. And this is especially true when you’re suffering that isn’t tied directly to your sin. When you can’t draw a straight line from ‘here’s what I did wrong, here’s how I sin, here’s how I rebelled against God’, to ‘and this was the consequence and therefore, I understand’. When you can’t draw that straight line, it makes the suffering even harder to deal with. And that’s the situation that David is writing about here. There are plenty of Psalms where the author acknowledges that his sin is directly tied to the circumstances. But this isn’t the case here. This suffering is coming from enemies. This is coming from just living in the hard world, trying to trying to swim upstream toward the Lord while the whole rest of the world seems to be dragging you back downstream away from Him. This is for parents who raise their kids in the knowledge of the Lord, but they have now rejected him and they’ve rejected you in the process. This is for people at work who were told to celebrate the sinful lifestyles of other people or lose your job. This is for those who are desperately trying to save their marriage, but they have a spouse who will not reconcile and is dead set on leaving and ruining your family. How long, O Lord. How long? Don’t you see what’s happening here? Can’t you see the situation that I’m in? Can’t you see the struggle that’s going inside? Don’t you see how hard it is? When do you plan to show up with justice and righteousness? Or wisdom, or wisdom to make it through. Do you see that in verse 2? See that in verse 2? How long must I take counsel in my own soul?

David saying I’m looking for guidance. I’m looking for wisdom that will show me the right way, the right path forward. And all I have is of my own ideas. All I have is the counsel that’s going on in my own heart. You ever, you ever just lay on your bed and wrestle with what to do next. And every plan you come up with stinks. You ever do that? Just everything you can think of, every way forward that you can conceive of is just terrible. All you can see are negative outcomes.

I feel this way a lot. It is why people end up with sorrow in their heart. Right. And how it just becomes a normal part of their daily routine. You know, there’s a reason that depression and anxiety are on the rise in our culture. I don’t know all of the factors, but I can tell you from Scripture that one of the sources is trying to find solutions to life’s problems from the counsel of our own souls. That’s a big part of it. Being true to yourself isn’t a way toward human flourishing. Broken spirits and worldly wisdom – they don’t lead to joy. We need God to intervene. And that’s what David’s crying out for here – is for God to intervene. Lord, I can’t climb out of this despair unless you disclose yourself. Unless you come out of hiding, unless you come from wherever it is that you are, and you intervene. And remember me. And save me. Now, here’s the hardest part of this song, in my opinion. This whole scenario, where David is in pain and he’s searching for God, who appears to be hiding or forgetful. It’s all part of God’s plan. We know David’s theology. David does not believe in a God with limited knowledge and power. If he did, he wouldn’t cry out to the Lord at all. If he believed that God had limited knowledge and limited power, why then cry out to God? No one cries out to God if they think he can’t help. No one prays for God to intervene while simultaneously wondering if he’s even capable of intervention. The only reason to cry out how long, o Lord, is that you believe that God knows the length of time before he will bring an end to the suffering. So tell me, God, how long is it going to be? And that means that he’s allowing for the suffering. He’s giving time to the suffering before he intervenes. And then that time has a purpose in it. There’s a reason for it. When David moves from despair to pleading and then to hope, we see the purpose.

“Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say ‘I have prevailed over him’, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.” (Psalm 13:3-4)

Now, at first this may sound like another negative part of the psalm. Everybody’s had experienced their fair share of pessimistic Eeyore types who list off all the ways that things are probably going to go wrong and end badly. Right? Everybody’s spent time around those kinds of folks. Right? When I’m not careful, I become that sort of person. This is a direction my heart can go when I’m not being careful about how I think. Back when we were dating, Rachel gave me a stuffed Eeyore as a present. Subtle. But we can all find ourselves doing it right. There are times when we all do this, especially when we’re forgetful of the Lord and we try to find solutions using our own resources, coming to the end of things, we can become pessimistic. But understand, that’s not what David is doing here. David is pleading to the Lord in an accurate way. In a truthful way. Look how He starts. Consider me and answer me, O Lord, my God. Consider my situation. Answer me when they ask questions about when you’re going to intervene. He says, light up my eyes. That is David’s way of saying show up so I can see; you make my eyes see you, see the power, see the answers. I want to see you work in glory, in power in the world. Light my eyes up so that I can see you working here. And then he describes what will happen if the Lord doesn’t come through for him. There are three lests. We don’t we don’t use the word lest anymore. We use the phrase or else. Okay. That’s what lest means. Here’s what’s going to happen: if God doesn’t intervene, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Now, for David, that is not hyperbole. That might be hyperbole for us, and that’s fine. But it’s not for David. His enemies actually wanted to kill him. His own King, Saul, wanted to kill him. ‘Lest my enemies say I have prevailed over him.’ So the problem isn’t just that an innocent man would lose his life, but that the enemy of this man would win. Lest my foes rejoice because I’m shaken.’ So not only would they defeat David and declare victory, they’d throw a party over it. They’d celebrate it. Taken together, all three of these lests means that if the Lord doesn’t show up, evil is not only going to win, it’s going to feel like a winner. It’s going to declare it’s win. It’s going to run a victory lap unless David’s lord comes in power and lights up his eyes and intervenes in this situation and shows how great he is. How come God hasn’t done it? And he’s right. See, that is what’s going to happen. It’s not being pessimistic. He’s being realistic. David knows full well what will happen without God intervening into his suffering. He knows. And we should too, because this is true of all suffering, Church. This is true of all suffering. Without God’s intervening, grace and power, evil will get the win. Experiencing evil causes us to see our need for God’s intervening grace. So then what’s the purpose then, of the time in God delaying his intervention?

Well, again, here’s the hard truth. The delay in the timing of God’s intervention is designed to cause dependence in us. It’s designed to cause us to build up our trust in Him. God isn’t late or forgetful or hiding. He’s just doing work, and the work he’s doing is in you. He’s doing work in you. What feels like to us that God’s forgetfulness or hiding is actually the time that God has set aside to build our persevering trust in him. Can you see why it’s so important that we understand this before we go into suffering? You see why it’s so important to be thinking on these things. This is incredibly hard to say to someone who’s in the midst of it, who’s going through it. To those of you this morning and I know you’re there, because some of you talked to me between services, to those of you who are just wrecked right now over something that’s going on in your life. Let me assure you, God has not forgotten. God has not forgotten, and God is not hiding. The Lord has ushered you into a season where you will be acutely aware of your need to depend on his promise to you, that evil will not win and that he will.

And it’s designed to develop in you a heart cry to the Lord. And this cry to the Lord is not just for simple justice. My teacher, Don Carson, wrote a book called How Long, O Lord. It’s a great book. I highly recommend it to you if you’re suffering especially. And in it, he writes, ‘When we feel we have been suffering unjustly, we may cry out for justice, outraged at injustice. But is it justice we really want? Why then the cross? If justice will suffice, Jesus died in vain. Or to put it another way, if God had simply been just with Jesus, he would not have sent him to the cross. Is it simple justice we want?’ It’s a good question. The way David ends this psalm shows us that there’s more of a solution to his ordeal than simply justice.

“But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me.” (Psalm 13:5-6)

So what we might expect here at the end of the Psalm is a firm trust in God coming to destroy David’s enemies. Right? That might be what we would expect to see here. And by the way, that is a type of psalm. We do have those in the Psalter, too. It’s called an Imprecatory Psalm. And it’s the kind of psalm where you call on God to come down and break the teeth of his enemies, and things like that. And we’re going to be looking at one of those here in a few weeks. But this psalm ends differently. David’s hope here isn’t in God’s wrath. It’s in his steadfast love and salvation. And those two concepts are parallel to each other. It’s the love of God that doesn’t end, that is expressed through the way God saves his people. They’re complementary ideas. See, when you trust in the Lord, God’s love never goes away. Never goes away. It’s certainly not portioned out to you through your circumstances. God doesn’t love you more when he’s giving you things and love you less when he takes them away. That’s not how God is. He doesn’t say, Oh, I want to. I love this person, so I’m going to show them. I’m going to give them more things, more blessings. I don’t love this person as much, so I’m going to take things away from them or give them less. Is that the way it works with your kids? When you love them more, do you give them more? And when you love them less, do you do you take things away from them? You say, Kyle, that’s not even the right categories of things. That doesn’t even make sense. That question doesn’t even make sense. I don’t love them more or less at all. It doesn’t ebb and flow like that at all. Doesn’t with God’s kids either. Not at all. See, when you’re in in God’s family, the love of God is abundant and sufficient, and it never ebbs or flows. It’s a fixed reality. I love you. You are my kid. You are in my family. Nothing will change that. Nothing increases that. Nothing decreases that. It’s abundant and it’s fixed. That’s steadfastness. And the steadfast love of God saves; it’s most clearly seen in its saving function. Now, when we think of the saving love of God, we’re usually thinking of God saving us from our sins. And that’s the biggest part of it, for sure. When we look at Scripture as a whole, we see that God’s salvation, His saving love is love that covers over our sins because Jesus took our sins away and took the punishment for our sins. And so we are set free. We are definitely saved from ourselves. But here in this psalm, David is talking about being saved out of this evil world, and this predicament that he’s in, that God will save him in this predicament. God’s salvation will ultimately do that, too. It will ultimately do that too. David’s heart rejoices because this evil doesn’t ultimately take him down. He knows that despite his circumstances, God has dealt bountifully with him. He can’t see it or feel it right now, but he knows it. Even when he’s searching for God and he’s asking questions about how long this evil is going to last, he knows that ultimately, he has nothing to worry about because he has been redeemed out of this evil world. But the saving love of God.

Now, how does he know that? How does he know? How does he know that? How can he, in one moment despair of his life falling apart, and then sing a praise song about God dealing bountifully with him? How can that all be in this one short song? What does he base that salvation on? Well, it’s the promises. We don’t have time this morning to review all of the promises that David knows at this point in history. But we can say very briefly that he knows for certain that his throne will last forever. He’s been promised that his reign will never end. That there will always be someone who will be seated on his throne, his descendant over all of God’s people. He knew God’s people would be a blessing to all of the nations because his great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham, had been promised that the nation that Abraham would come from, Abraham would be a blessing to every nation on the earth. And he also knew that God promised Adam and Eve in the garden that the sin that they introduced into the world would ultimately be crushed and destroyed by the descendant of the woman that this descendant was going to wipe out sin forever and destroy death and evil.

In other words, he knew God’s salvation meant the complete undoing of all evil and that God’s people would be redeemed out of the evil. The salvation that David sang about, we know more fully. We know the complete picture of how the Lord saves. We know the way that God deals bountifully and saves fully is through Jesus and His work on the cross. And this is where that Don Carson quote I mentioned earlier, where we can agree with it. Our hope isn’t rooted in simple justice. It’s rooted in the saving and redeeming grace that Jesus bought for us on the cross. We wouldn’t really want simple justice. We wouldn’t want God to simply come and give everyone what they deserve. We wouldn’t want it, because the moment that God came to deliver that to our enemies. he’d also have to deliver it to our friends. And to our family. And to us. Our hope is more complex than that. We’re not putting our hope in God’s justice. We’re putting our hope in God’s justifying grace. We’re putting it in the justice that Jesus took for us on the cross when he came and took our sin and died for it to set us free of the penalty of our rebellion against God. We’re trusting in a God who not only will crush evil but save his people because through the death of Jesus Christ, our evil has been justly dealt with, crushed and destroyed forever. Do you believe that? Are you trusting in the sure salvation of Christ?

One of my favorite pastors passed away this last week. He was a man named Tim Keller, who was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. I read a lot of his stuff. I listen to a lot of his sermons. I commend him to you. He’s a fantastic teacher. And so I’ve been doing a lot more of that this week, listening to his stuff, reading his stuff. And I came across a quote of his that I think nicely sums up the tension of this Psalm, because I do believe there is a tension here. There’s a tension in this psalm. There are plenty of you here listening today that would say, Kyle, I get the progression of the Psalm. I understand the flow of it. I see what you’re saying. But I am in the tornado right now and I did not rebuild my shelter. And I don’t have that prebuilt understanding of the gospel that I can cling to. I’m way more ‘How long, O Lord”, than I am ‘My heart shall rejoice in your salvation’. I’m way more verses one and two than I am. Five and six. That’s this is where I am right now. And I think the temptation for those of you who are there today would be to say, you know, if my heart isn’t singing, then maybe I’m not trusting. Maybe there’s something wrong with my faith if I don’t feel this way here at the end. Tim Keller was a master of illustration and he said this: ‘If you’re falling off a cliff. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.’ Salvation is not finally based on the strength of your faith, but on the object of your faith. Do you understand? Do you see that? Do you see the joy of that? If you’re falling, grab hold of the strong branch of God’s saving grace. Now, you may feel strong with confidence as you reach out and you grab that branch because everything’s going well for you. But you might be weak with doubt and searching because you’re in a lot of pain. Either way, reach out and grab the branch. Reach out and grab it. Because it’s not the strength of your faith. it’s the strength of Christ that saves you. May be weak, but he is strong. Trust the strength of the branch of God’s saving grace. No evil in this world ultimately wins, because Jesus has already won. I want to close today with some time of silent prayer. I’m going to give you just a few moments of silent prayer. Then I’ll close this in prayer for the service. I want to just give you some time to reflect on these truths. Go before the Lord.