Cry of the Heart (Part 4): When Hurt

Just before we jump into Psalm 4, I want to take a moment just to commend you on a couple of things as a church.

This is true in Butler County, in the Strip District, in Wexford, all three campuses, all the different services.

One of the things that we value here at Orchard Hill is that if the Bible says something, then we believe that that's authoritative for us.

And one of the things that the Bible says very clearly is that those with resources should use those resources, not just for themselves, but for those who don't have as much as they have.

Proverbs 19 talks about giving to the poor is like lending to God in numerous other places.

And I just want to commend you as a church family, again, all three locations, for your participation in the Elios Food Drive.

Food was given in the three locations given to people in need in all the different places.

I think there were six trucks of stuff from the Wexford location that went to the North Hills Food Bank.

So there will be people who don't have easy access to food that will eat because of just your generosity.

Beyond that, we give the light of life some different things, but just specifically in that.

And then along with that, uh just uh over the last month or so, we've had this In for 30 campaign, which was saying if you could give$30 for a month for a year, we could have a well with a filter system put in at the church that we helped to plant in Caracol, Haiti about two years ago.

And what this will do is this will allow that church to have clean water to give to people in their community, which will be an amazing ministry in that community and just that church providing good to people so that hopefully the people of the community will come and be able to hear the overall message of Jesus Christ.

And with the pledges that have come in and the gifts already, we have enough money and pledges to go ahead and drill that well and put that system into place.

So great job as a church.

And then uh this weekend uh there are the Elias boxes at the back in all three locations again, and just again, as a church, good job, just if you have some extra giving at how those funds are used when people come to the church and have some acute needs.

They're in a place of financial difficulty.

By and large, it's people within the church that we help to just navigate a season of their life where maybe things have gotten hard.

And and again, your generosity has allowed the church to do that, to be the church for so many people.

I also just want to say this uh, you know, again, we take commands seriously.

Way to go this weekend.

I think there are 37 baptisms and dedications, 31 in Wexford, four in Butler County, two in the Strip District.

We've taken the command be fruitful and multiply very seriously at this church.

So good job with that.

And you know, we do that twice a year, and every year we get 60, 70 babies that that are brought and dedicated, and just seeing the biological growth is just a beautiful thing in families coming.

So let's just take a moment and pray, and we'll jump into Psalm 4.

Father, we thank you just for all the families that came and brought children across the three locations today.

God, we thank you for just the generosity of people in this church community to the community on a whole.

And Father, we pray now as we center our thoughts around your word that you would speak to us.

God, if I've prepared things that don't reflect your truth, I pray you'd keep me from saying them.

And if there are things that would be beneficial in this moment that I have not prepared, I pray you'd prompt me to say those, and I would follow your leading even in this moment.

And we pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We've been in this series that we've called the cry of the heart.

And we were working through the first seven Psalms, simply looking at what the Psalms talk about as being some of the yearnings that many of us have.

So in Psalm 1, we saw the yearning for happiness.

In Psalm 2, the longing for control.

Then last week we talked about the cry of the heart when we're afraid.

And today in Psalm 4, we're going to look at the cry of the heart when we're hurt.

And when you first read the Psalm, this Psalm and 5 and 6, they all start to look like they blend together with a general sense of distress.

And this psalm doesn't have in its title, like Psalm 3 had, a clear reference.

And what that means is we don't know the exact setting of this psalm.

In Psalm 3, we knew that Absalom, David's son, was chasing David and trying to take over the kingdom from David.

Here, we don't know exactly what the situation is, although it's possible with the proximity to Psalm 3 that David wrote this while he was still in the throes of running from his son Absalom.

But either way, here's what we know for sure about this Psalm and why I say this is about hurt.

And that is in verse 1, it says, Give me relief from my distress.

So he's talking about something that's hard for him, something that's difficult.

And then he tells us what it is.

He says, This, how long, verse two, will you people turn my glory into shame?

Glory is a word in Hebrew that means heavy or weighty.

And so what he's doing is he's saying, How long will you people take what's important to me, what has most weight in my life, and let it become shameful for me?

Again, possibly that he had left his kingdom, his throne, and was running for his life, hiding in caves.

And then we see this at the end of verse 2, it says, How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?

Now, this is the NIV.

This is what we typically use here.

The ESV, the English Standard Version, is more clear and basically saying, How long will you tell lies?

How long will you speak falsehood?

In other words, what's likely happening here for David is that he's saying, Here's my situation.

I'm in distress, my glory's being turned to shame, and people are saying things about me that are not true.

And in fact, when we come to the end of the Psalm, verse 8, we see that this was an evening psalm.

In other words, that this was his reflection before he basically went to bed.

He was saying, What I'm doing right now is I'm trying to make sense of my hurt.

And here's what is probably true for many of us, and that is we all have something that has been a hurt.

Some of us might have hurts that are circumstances that are beyond our control.

They seem huge.

Some of us have smaller hurts.

But what this psalm seems to really deal with is interpersonal hurts, where we've been hurt by somebody, by somebody who is saying things about us that isn't true, who's who's diminishing something that's important to us in our lives.

And certainly we could apply it more broadly, but that seems to be the more specific part of this.

And so, what I'd like to do is simply talk about some of our typical approaches to hurts in general, and then move from that to talking about how do we actually take our hurts and give them to God.

So, what do we do when we're hurt?

Well, the first thing that many of us will do is we'll just simply avoid it.

And what I mean when I say that is we'll minimize it, we'll stuff it, we'll ignore it.

In other words, we'll say, I'm not hurt, I'm not the kind of person who can be hurt, and we'll tell ourselves we just need to go on and do whatever we need to do, and so we won't do anything other than just avoid the pain.

Some of us, secondly, will seek to avenge our hurt.

Now, when I say that, what I'm referring to, and again, if this isn't an interpersonal hurt, it's a little harder to know what to avenge, but if it's an interpersonal hurt, what we'll do is we'll say, I want to make somebody else hurt because I hurt.

There's a story just in the news this week about a lady named Jannaire Garadeau, and she found out that her husband was having an affair.

And so she went to the home of the lady that he was having the affair with, sat in the home with a gun, waited for the woman to come home and shot and killed the woman, and then turned the gun on herself.

Now it's easy when you hear that to be like, okay, now that's avenging a hurt.

But sometimes the way that hurts are avenged in our world may not be with a gun, but it may be with words or with silent treatments or with gossip and slander, ways that we make somebody else pay because we're hurt and we want other people to hurt.

So some of us will avoid our hurts, some of us will avenge it, some of us will wallow in it.

And when I say wallow in it, I'm not referring here to seeking legitimate help, seeking counsel, seeking spiritual counsel or therapy or something like that.

What I'm referring to here is the culture that we live in that almost enjoys being a victim that says, I'm hurt and this person hurt me, and now it becomes a part of our identity, where we start to feel some kind of virtue because of our victimhood.

And that's, in a sense, wallowing in it.

And then that leads to what I would say is the healthy approach, and this is what we're going to see in this psalm, and that is we can address our hurt.

And here's where we see this verse four and five.

It says, Tremble and do not sin.

When you are on your bed, search your hearts and be silent.

Offer the sacrifices of the righteous and trust in the Lord.

I mentioned that this psalm has some different translations between the NIV, the New Living Translation, the ESV, the NASB, all these different translations.

And here's what that means when somebody says these translations read differently.

What it means is that the Hebrew, which underlies our Old Testament generally, is a language that isn't always as easy to pin down what something modifies or the exact referent point in language.

So the English Standard Version here says that we should be angry and do not sin.

And I actually think that that's a good translation.

And the reason I think that is because Ephesians chapter 4, verse 26 quotes it, and in the translation of the Greek it says, be angry and do not sin.

Ephesians 4:26

And so I think that's a good reason to say maybe that was the interpretation that's best.

Here's what the English Standard Version Study Bible says about this.

It says, Be angry and do not sin.

This should perhaps be taken as a conditional sentence.

If you feel anger at those who slander you, which you may well do, nevertheless do not sin by seeking revenge against them.

The way to prevent sin is to ponder and be silent.

That is, reflection on how the Lord has shown himself trustworthy.

This does not discourage the faithful from using legal recourse when necessary.

Instead, it speaks against personal revenge and circumvents that circumvents the law and consumes the lives of the vengeful.

And so what does it say?

It says, be angry, do not sin, and then trust the Lord.

So be angry here, I would say, is to acknowledge it, to say, go ahead and let yourself feel it.

So if we're going to deal with sin, what we're actually going to end up doing is we're going to say, I'm going to feel the weight of what's happened when somebody has hurt me.

And it's the complete opposite of saying, in essence, I'm going to ignore this or avoid it.

Then when it says, do not sin, I think what it's saying is limit it.

In other words, now don't do something that's out of bounds.

In other words, limit your reaction so that whatever you do, you're doing in a way that is that is honoring unto God.

And then it says, trust God.

Trust God, which I think is referring here in verse 5 to giving it to God.

And the reason we can give it to God in this text is verse 1, it says, answer me when I call.

Hear me, God.

And hearing isn't saying, God, hear me, because I don't think you'll hear me.

It's saying, respond to me.

Have a heart for where I am and what I've done.

And then verse 7 and 8 talks about joy, the joy of the harvest and wine and rest and sleep.

And then verse 6 talks about God's face shining on them, which is a reference to number 6, by the way, the little blessing that we did over the children.

May your face shine on us in the midst of this.

In other words, here's what he's doing.

He's saying, People are against me.

I'm hurt.

I have all this all this sense of righteous anger, in a sense, at what people have done, but I am going to be angry and not sin, and I'm going to trust God because God is ultimately good.

He brings real joy.

In other words, I don't have to fret in my circumstances when I know the God who holds all circumstances.

Here's how Alexander Gross wrote about this in 1632.

He said, Where Christ reveals himself, there is satisfaction in the slenderest portion.

And without Christ, there is emptiness in the greatest fullness.

Now I do want you just to notice one thing that's true in this psalm.

And that is this psalm does not say to address the person.

Now I'm not suggesting that you never address the person, but a lot of times when people talk about being hurt, what they say is you have to go back to the person and tell them exactly how hurt you've been and help them basically repent of what they've done.

And that's not altogether a bad approach, but but I'm not sure that that's entirely biblical.

And here's why.

In the book of Proverbs, we're given contrary advice on several topics.

One of them is what to do when we're hurt.

In fact, in Proverbs 19, 11, we're told that it's to a person's glory to overlook an offense.

And then in Proverbs chapter 27, verse 6, we're told that the wounds of a friend are faithful, or faithful are the wounds of a friend.

Proverbs 27:6

And what the the two are basically saying is sometimes the best thing you can do is be quiet when you're offended.

In other words, don't say anything.

And sometimes the best thing you can do is tell somebody how they've hurt you because the wounds of a friend actually help somebody.

And the point of Proverbs is to say you have to have wisdom to know the difference, to know which thing to do when.

And what Psalms 4 does here, Psalm 4 does here, is it says, when you're hurt, if you will acknowledge it or feel it, if you'll limit it and give it to God, then you may or may not need to deal directly with the person who's hurt you.

But here's the real question.

I can say this, and yet I know in my own life when I experience hurts, when people say things that are unkind, untrue, when people turn and all of a sudden are mean and in different ways speak against you.

That's again what was happening for David.

That to simply say, well, I should acknowledge it, limit it, and give it to God leaves me kind of cold.

Because I say, okay, I get it, but but how do I actually do that?

So how do we really trust God when we're hurt?

In other words, when we're hurt, what is it that will help us actually give this to God?

And from this psalm, let me suggest three different things.

The first is we need to remember the voices that we listen to and how important those are.

And here's where we see this.

In this psalm, there are a couple times when the idea of people speaking is used.

Verse 2 and verse 6.

Verse 2 says, How long will you people turn my glory into shame?

In other words, they're speaking about him and the lies.

Verse 6.

Many, Lord, are asking, Who will bring us prosperity?

And here's what he's doing.

He's basically saying that there's all kinds of people talking.

And one of the things that happens when we get ourselves into trouble spiritually, emotionally, when we start to do things that aren't honoring to God, is that we put ourselves in a place where we start listening to voices of people.

If you've ever been around me and somebody will say, Well, people say, or people are saying, you'll hear me always say, Well, which people?

And the reason I do that is because usually what people mean when they say people are saying is they mean I have an opinion and I found one person who agreed with me, and so people are saying, and I want to use people as a club to get you to basically agree with what I'm saying.

And usually people say, Well, I don't want to tell you which people.

And I say, okay, then leave them out of it.

Tell me what you think.

If you don't want to tell me which people, then then tell me your opinion.

Don't don't tell me their opinion.

And my point is this, and that is, if you listen to the voices of ethereal people, you will find that your hurts are bigger, your your challenges seem bigger than what they are.

Now, we also see here that there's the comfort of friends in this psalm, throughout the psalm, he uses the plural.

Now, if it's correct that he was on the run for his life, he's basically uh pulling into the idea here of community, and he's saying, I need some other people in my life.

This is one of the reasons here at Orchard Hill that we're so consistent in saying, get into a group, get into a study, that coming on the weekend is great, sitting in rows and and worshiping and listening to teaching is great, but but get into community where somebody can know you and you know them, and your stories intersect, and in those moments you find the support that you need.

Because sometimes we need to bring our hurts to others.

In fact, Jesus says something about this in Matthew chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

What does he say?

He says, Blessed are those who mourn for what?

They shall be comforted.

So what does that mean?

It means that that one of the ways we experience blessing is when our mourning meets comfort.

In other words, one of the things that happens when we're hurt, when we're sad, and we bring it to community, is that somebody brings us comfort, and when they bring us comfort, we actually feel blessed because somebody knows us in the depth of our hurt.

But if we listen to the voices that are kind of ethereal and out there rather than the voices of community, voices of people who care, what will happen is we'll only hear God or who will make us prosper, who will give us any hope.

And what this is all really pointing to is the need to hear God's voice.

You may be here and be saying, Well, I don't even know if I believe in God or if I think about church and if somebody hurts me, I just want to hurt them back.

I don't care about any of this.

But but what you see here is that when you hear God's voice in the scriptures, what it says is if you can limit your reaction and if you can trust God, that ultimately this will be better for you.

This is where you'll find joy, this is where you'll find rest, this is where you'll find security.

And here's how you know this is true.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where somebody had had been bugging you and you'd been saving up kind of a zinger of a line to give back to them?

And then you drop the line, how do you feel after you do that?

Well, it depends on what kind of pathology you have, but but but but chances are what happens is your first reaction is, ah, that felt good, and then you feel lousy later.

Like, like, did I really stoop into that level?

Was that really what I wanted to do?

I can't believe I shouldn't have done that.

Because what we're doing in that moment is we're entering into the fray rather than saying, God, this is yours.

And even if you're not sure of your own standing with God or your own relationship, to be able to say, God, I'm gonna trust that you're going to work in this rather than me trying to take charge of it is such a good thing to do.

And really what we're referring to here when we say the voices that we listen to is coming to a point where we're able to say, I'm not listening to the voices of culture, but I'm listening to God's voice through community, through his word, that will help me.

And what this really moves to is our own self-talk.

And what I mean when I say that is we all talk to ourselves.

Martin Lloyd Jones, in his book, Spiritual Depression, which is a great read, said this at one point.

He said, Here's the problem for most of us when it comes to spiritual depression, and that is we listen to ourselves too much and we talk to ourselves too little.

In other words, we listen to those voices that say, Oh, I'll never prosper, or this hurt, this lie is going to destroy me rather than talking to ourselves about God's word and what's true.

And so we need to be careful and see the importance of the voices we listen to.

But there's something else here, and that is I think we need to see the importance of the songs that we sing.

Now you may say, okay, where is that in here?

I'm glad you asked.

In the title, we see this.

It says, for the director of music with stringed instruments, the Psalm of David.

So here's what this is about.

What happens here is that David is basically saying, Here, I wrote this and I want you to put it to music, and I'm going to sing it at night.

So what he's doing is at night, he's singing this to himself because as he sings it, he is helping it come alive for himself.

Now, I'm gonna borrow some material here for the next few minutes from Matt Chandler, unapologetically.

And he says that in the Bible there are some 400 times that singing is mentioned, 50 of which are commands.

In other words, we're commanded to sing.

Well, why are we commanded to sing?

Are we commanded to sing because God needs some encouragement?

No, we're commanded to sing because it does something for us.

And what happens when we sing is we bring spirit.

To a situation.

Spiritual power is unleashed.

And there's at least three things in the Bible that happen when we sing.

The spiritual power is unleashed when we sing to remember and repent.

And there's a couple places that we see this.

In 1 Samuel chapter 16, verse 14, when Saul is disturbed, David comes and plays the harp for him, and music soothes his soul.

1 Samuel 16:14

And then in Deuteronomy 31, verse 21, we see that music is used to confront somebody so that they'll turn the other way.

Deuteronomy 31:21

You see, here's what I know, and that is after this message is done, you'll go home, you'll remember it a little bit, but some of the songs that we sing, you'll remember for a long time.

Maybe not the song here, if it's the only time you hear it, but if you hear it repeatedly, it starts to get in your head, and the more you hear it, it will help you remember what it is that we're talking about, and it will help you to be comforted and to be challenged appropriately at different times.

But music also has the power to help God's word dwell in us richly.

That's what Colossians chapter 3, verse 16 says.

Colossians 3:16

In other words, it moves from our head to our heart.

That we don't just say, Oh, I know the truth, but music helps us internalize the truth, helps it become something that we live all the time.

Gordon Fee, theologian of another era, put it this way.

He said, Show me a church's songs, and I will show you their theology.

Because what we sing ultimately goes into our hearts.

This is one of the reasons why we work hard at Orchard Hill to choose songs that reflect good theology.

Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have some poetic license in the music that we use.

But what it means is that we understand that if you sing songs long enough, they become part of the way that you think, the way that you interpret the world.

And so it's important that we sing songs, that they become a part of our mindset and understand that the songs that we sing will matter.

In fact, uh there's an older song, and sometimes people pick on the newer songs.

Let me pick on an older song, where the theology is just bad.

Do you remember the old song, trust and obey?

Anybody remember that?

Trust and obey, trust and obey.

For there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.

Um, there's a line in there that says, if we trust and obey, there will never be a cloud in the sky.

That is just awful theology.

And what happens is you sing that over time and you start going, Oh yeah, if I trust and obey, then everything will go my way.

There will never be a cloud, and then you get a cloud, something goes wrong, and you start saying, Where is God now?

Why is God not coming through?

And you start to feel like God's let you down.

You see, our songs, the songs we sing matter.

And can I just say this?

I love all kinds of music.

I don't listen to the songs a lot of times that we play here because my style palette's maybe a little more out there, but I know my own soul well enough to know there are times that I need worship music, not music that's written by people who don't believe.

Because sometimes when my soul is in turmoil, it's struggling, I need to reaffirm what I believe through music.

So the songs we sing matter.

And then the last point of this about the songs that we sing is that spiritual power is unleashed basically through our songs.

We see this in 1 Samuel 16, 14, when I mentioned about David and Saul playing, and in Joshua 6, when the people go out to go around Jericho, what leads the way?

Do you realize it was the band and the choir that led the way?

I mean, how goofy is that as a military strategy?

We're gonna send the band.

We're gonna have have the choir go first.

You know, we're about to take on, you know, another city, you know, zealonopel's gonna fall.

And um, you know, let's send Dan and Joey and David in the group and they'll go play for that.

I mean, that's what they were doing.

Well, what's happening is that music has a power to address spiritual issues.

And this is why sometimes when we're hurt and we don't even see it as a spiritual issue, we'll let our own inkling to say, I need to get back at somebody, I need to preserve and protect, I need to do different things, and we'll miss that that maybe God wants us to learn to trust him in the midst of something.

And then here's the last kind of way that we trust in the middle of our hurts.

And I'm just going to say we need to see the importance of the grace that we need.

Verse 1 says, answer me when I call to you my righteous God.

Now I've mentioned that the different versions translate part of this Psalm differently.

Again, the English Standard Version says, answer me when I call God of my righteousness.

Do you hear the difference?

My righteous God, God of my righteousness.

The New Living Translation says basically, hear me or answer me, God who declares me innocent.

And the difference is really this simple, and that is that the way that they're seeing which Hebrew word modifies which word is just a different translation.

But if you take the number of translations that basically say, God my righteousness, or God who declares me innocent, it's overall greater than the ones that say, God my righteousness.

And here's why this is important.

And that is, I think what David is doing right at the beginning is he's saying, God, you're the one who declares me innocent.

And what he's doing is he's saying, I understand.

You see him use the word grace and mercy right in that verse.

He says, Be gracious to me, have mercy on me.

What he's doing is he's saying, God, I realize that I'm not superior to these other people.

See, one of the things that happens when we're hurt is that we start to feel virtuous.

It's self-righteousness.

And what happens is we start to say, Well, I'm right, they're wrong, they're bad, I'm good, I'm godly, they're not.

And we start to feed on that sense of goodness in ourselves.

And what it does is it actually makes the hurt, makes the pain of that hurt kind of numb.

But what we're doing is we're avoiding coming to God and saying, God, you're my righteousness.

God, you're the one who declares me innocent.

Because here's what grace means.

Grace means that at the end of the day, I don't come to God saying, God, I've done something well.

Like even in something that somebody says where I can say that's a lie, like David here, he's not saying I'm right, they're wrong.

He's saying, God, you're my righteousness.

You're the one who has done for me what I can never do.

And this is one of the reasons that we emphasize when we do baptisms and dedications, that there's no act that a parent does for a child that allows a child to have salvation, that our salvation comes when we recognize that it's Jesus Christ who's done what we can never do.

And when we live in that reality, what happens when we get hurt, when we have things that go wrong is we say, God, I haven't done everything right, and therefore I can treat somebody who's hurt me with grace because I realize I'm the recipient of grace.

But if I don't think that I really need grace, if I think I've done everything right, then what will happen is I'll say, they're gonna pay.

It's only as I come to encounter and believe to the depth of my being, the grace that God has given to me, that I can live with grace toward people who've hurt me.

You know, our culture right now is interesting in this way, and that is everybody says, uh, you know, in a sense, everything's good except for, and then there's a whole list of things that if you do them, people on social media will just pounce.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

And why do people pounce on social media?

Well, part of why they pounce is because it feels good.

I'm not like them, they're bad, I'm good.

I would never do that, I would never have said that thing that they said, even though I was 16 at the time, 12 at the time, I'd never be like that.

Self-righteousness.

You see, the real answer to unity in our world, the real answer to a church community saying, saying we're different than the whole world isn't saying we do everything better, it's saying we realize that we don't, and it's our understanding and our love of what God has done for us through Jesus Christ that makes us different, and that is different in this world.

And so when we're hurt, when when we experience it, if we can say, I'll feel it, I'll limit it, but I'm gonna give it to God, and I can give it to God by hearing his word, by reinforcing it with music, and by savoring the grace that God has given me, then what I'll do is I'll be able to respond to hurt without being devastated by it.

Now, I don't know what hurt you've suffered.

Some of us here have had hurts that are unspeakable.

And if that's you, I'm so sorry.

Some of us have had hurts that that, if we told them, would seem small in comparison to others.

But what I know is whatever hurt you're walking through feels big when you're there.

And God wants to give you, wants to give me a glimpse into having peace and joy in the midst of that hurt, an evening psalm where we can say, I can lay down at night and I can sleep because God will give me rest, whatever is going on in my world.

And that's what God offers to you and God offers to me.

Father, we pray today that you would help each one of us here just to respond to hurts well.

And God, for those of us who who are maybe gathered here who say, I don't even know about who you are, God, or this idea of Jesus or grace, I pray even in this moment there would just be a desire to say, I'd like to believe that maybe God, you're like this.

And in that be able to respond differently to the hurts that I have.

So, Father, we pray this today in Jesus' name.

Amen.