How long, O Lord? | Psalm 13

Our reading this morning comes from Psalm 13.

Psalm 13, for the director of music, a Psalm of David.

How long, Lord, 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.

Morning again, church.

If you want to, it would be good to keep your Bible

open in front of you this morning

as we'll be in our text quite a bit.

You know, I'd say it would come as no surprise to you

if I was to announce from the pulpit

that life is unpredictable.

That's because there's ups and downs

in this pilgrimage that we're on, right?

We can be going so smoothly for a season.

Your job is satisfying, your friends and family

are enjoyable, your goals, your finances, health,

your outlook, it all seems so bright.

But then all of a sudden, life throws a curve ball at you.

Someone you know gets sick or they die,

you lose your job, a friend or family member betrays you.

The things you felt so secure in

suddenly feel so uncertain

and because of these external things,

whatever they might be, you then feel far from God

or completely abandoned altogether.

And so the question becomes, how do you,

how do we, the people of God, trust God

in the midst of these circumstances?

How do we trust him when we don't understand

what's happening, when you can't see the end in sight?

How do we trust God when you feel like

he's nowhere to be found?

These are valid questions and this morning in this Psalm,

we're gonna see the Psalmist, David,

question these things as well.

However, in the midst of his feelings,

he learned so wonderfully to navigate through it all,

leaving us a powerful lesson.

But before we get into our passage this morning,

I might invite you to join with me in prayer

and we'll ask our Father to help us understand

these words that we're looking at this morning.

Would you please join me in prayer?

Father God, we come to you in the midst

of all sorts of things happening in our lives.

We are so desperate to hear from you this morning.

We ask that you would hold our Lord Jesus Christ

high among us and that your spirit would lead us to him.

That our ears would be opened, our hearts softened

by the work that you, we beg of you this morning,

would do among us.

We ask for this for the sake of Christ

and in his name, amen.

You may have noticed as Sam read this passage out this morning,

it starts with the words, how long, Lord?

Lord, in fact, this isn't the only time David questions

God's seeming absence in this Psalm.

You may have noticed it was read out that phrase,

how long, four times in just two verses,

which tells us something as to the nature

of what's going on in David's heart here.

And it's this, for whatever reason, we're not really told,

David feels abandoned by God.

And not just for a short moment, it seems,

but for long enough for him to be questioning

if God was ever going to be seen in his life again.

That's why he asks in the rest of verse one,

will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

Notice that he feels abandoned.

That's why his prayer has such intense emotion to it

because we can presume that he's writing these words

off the back of an extended period of time

of feeling isolated from God.

That's what he means by saying,

how long will you hide your face from me?

It's language of isolation,

which for David has already lasted way too long,

meaning this season that he's in

doesn't seem to just be a little dip in the road kind of thing.

No, it seems to be a long-term stretch.

And our psalmist is feeling the weight of a sense of absence,

causing intense anguish in his heart.

He desires God so desperately,

but as David perceives it, God is nowhere to be found.

So he cries, how long Lord?

How long, how long, how long will it be like this?

Now what we're seeing here in the psalm

is so important for us to understand church

because what David is modeling for us

is no way a heartless exercise.

Now David isn't saying a prayer that he had learnt

to repeat as to get God's attention

because he knows that going to God like that

with vain repetitions, with heartless, rote, learnt words

will do nothing.

David knows that he has no sense of God in his life.

It's killing him.

He knows something is drastically not right.

So he doesn't ignore it or try to occupy himself

with other things.

No, he cries from the depths of his heart.

He howls, if you will, with a deep lament of honesty.

Saying, where are you?

How long is it going to be like this?

Are you really gone forever, God?

Have you ever felt like that?

Have you ever walked through an event,

gone through a dark valley and felt the crushing weight

of isolation from God?

Have you perceived to have been abandoned and cried out,

where are you in this, God?

What are you doing?

How long will it be like this?

How long will you let this happen to me?

And felt like your prayers were going nowhere,

like you were just speaking to the ceiling.

If you can say yes to that this morning,

if you can think of those times,

you may even be feeling like you're in one of those times

right now, then you're not alone.

Let me assure you of that.

In fact, that's exactly what we are seeing in this,

this morning, for whatever reason,

God's chosen man, the king of Israel,

a man that was said to be after God's own heart

has no sense of God working in, through,

or around his life.

No, he has a sense of abandonment and it's crushing him.

It's weighing heavy on him because he feels

like his creator has forgotten him.

Yet what's going to become apparent to us this morning,

church, is that his perception of things,

our perception of things, well, it isn't always

so very accurate because what David feels here,

what he presumes to be the case,

isn't really the case at all.

Now, in saying that, that doesn't change the fact

that he feels abandoned, we can all feel isolated

from God from time to time, no doubt.

That's not being downplayed here this morning, not at all.

But as we'll see, the way God's people feel

in times of despair doesn't change what is true of God

or his love towards his people.

Now, in saying that, David knows what we know

and it's this, God never abandons his people

no matter how they might feel.

We saw this just a few weeks ago when we explored Psalm 22,

where this very same David penned the beautiful lyrics

in response to how he was feeling in the moment.

You might remember it, he started by asking,

my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Only to go on to remind himself that God saves those

who trust in him, which led David to end the whole Psalm

in praise and adoration of God's faithfulness.

You might remember it, in Psalm 22,

we saw that the Lord never leaves nor forsakes his people.

Not because we are deserving of this,

but because of his grace alone.

That's why we are never abandoned

because of God's unmerited favor,

because of his unmerited love alone.

Yet it seems that this message is something

that God has to continually remind his people of,

over and over and over and over again,

especially when hard times hit us.

For example, in the book of Isaiah,

while speaking to Israel,

Isaiah in the 49th chapter of his book,

he reports that God's people were lamenting,

and in their prayers they were saying,

the Lord has forsaken us, the Lord has forgotten us.

Why were they saying that?

Well, hard times had come.

That was a context of their prayer.

They were in exile, they had been taken out of Israel,

they were in Babylon,

and while they weren't in their home country,

they felt abandoned of God.

And so they cried out to him,

the Lord has forsaken us, the Lord has forgotten us.

I think this tells us something.

It tells us that the people of God

in the journey of following God,

of being his people, of being his children,

well, sometimes we're not always going to feel

so close to him in this pilgrimage,

especially in the dips and the valleys of this life.

We're not always going to have the warm and fuzzies.

So when those times hit, not if,

but when, when those hard times come,

then we mustn't be surprised by the temptation

to erroneously like David, like Israel, cry out,

the Lord has forsaken me, the Lord, he's forgotten me.

And I say this is erroneous because if you continue

to read on in Isaiah, especially verse 15,

the word of the Lord comes to his people.

And through Isaiah, he says,

can a mother forget the baby at her breast

and have no compassion for the child that she is born?

Though she may forget, I will never forget you.

See, I have you engraved on the palms of my hands.

That's a beautiful picture that the Lord gives his people here.

He's saying in effect, no,

though you may not feel like it right now, you're mine.

How could I ever forget you?

You're my children.

And more than that, I have each one of your names

essentially tattooed on my hands.

What an incredible picture that we have here, church.

The Lord is like a loving parent who adores his children.

So much so that our very names are written

on the palms of his hands.

Yet how quickly we forget this

when we don't see or feel him in our lives.

Now, I see this already in my own children.

I absolutely adore them.

They know that, but sometimes for whatever reason,

they have to go to their rooms.

Sometimes, you know, daddy has to close the door.

Sometimes daddy has to be in the next room

and they can't see me or feel me and they cry.

I have heard them verbatim say,

you don't love me anymore, daddy.

We have to explain to them, have we for a moment

stopped adoring you?

Have I for a second stopped knowing exactly where you are?

Have I stopped caring for your wellbeing?

Have you at any moment stopped being

my awesome little child?

Absolutely not.

No way.

17th century pastor, John Owen,

explains this very thing so well.

He says, God's love for his children is like the sun.

It's consistent.

Even though clouds might obscure it for a time,

it doesn't mean the sun isn't there.

No, it's always there.

And that's the thing.

The sun doesn't just disappear from existence

when it's overcast or raining.

It doesn't even vanish during thunderstorms.

That's right there the whole time behind those big,

big frightening clouds.

Yeah, for some reason, I don't know about you,

but my mind, it loves to concentrate on the clouds.

I love to meditate on the thunder and the lightning.

And in the process, I think we forget about the warmth

of the sun that we enjoyed just moments before.

And that's what we're seeing in our text

for us this morning, church.

David's mind isn't on what he knows to be true

about God's love for his children.

No, his mind is on what he sees and feels around him.

His mind is squarely fixed on the so-called clouds.

And as he feels the weather, as he has no comfort,

as he has no warmth,

he starts to feel forgotten and forsaken.

And he wrestles with his own thoughts of abandonment,

going on to say there in verse two,

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?

Brothers and sisters, this is so very raw,

so honest what David is bringing to his God,

his creator, our God.

David is saying in effect that because he isn't feeling

a closeness with God, because he can't see him doing

anything in his life because this enemy,

whatever or whoever it might be,

he is left with his own dark thoughts,

his own dark thinking, his own planning

with what to do next.

And it's causing him serious distress.

And because he can't stop meditating on those thoughts

of abandonment on these what ifs and what next,

it's causing him to spiral.

And here for just a moment, I wanna pause

and acknowledge that some of us in this room

are more prone to this than others.

To meditate on the what ifs and the what nexts of this life.

And it's a consistent battle with your mind

to keep yourself from absolutely spiraling out of control.

As a pastor, as I get to meet different personalities,

I'm continually amazed by some people

how they're able to compartmentalize things

that are going on around their life.

While others are like, what about this?

What about that?

Haven't you thought of this?

All of us in this room have different personalities

and battles that come.

And with those differences, we have to deal with them.

But we do it in community.

And we learn to understand and love

and serve one another in the midst of those things.

I know of people that when they become fixated on a problem

when there's something going on

that they're tempted to isolate themselves from community.

And though that seems like the most natural thing

in the world to do to deal with that stress,

it actually causes them to spiral even more.

So they've had to learn to fight against isolating themselves.

And they have been so helped by different brothers

and sisters in the church who they've sat with

and maybe verbal processed with.

They've been helped by people in the church

that have walked a similar path

and might be a little further down the road.

I've heard of reports of people being so encouraged

because not only have they sat with people

that have listened to them, but more than that,

they have prayed with them.

They've encouraged them.

They've sat with them as they've gone with their anxieties

before the Lord and prayed with them.

And that's the thing, church.

God has designed us to be in community,

to be in a community of loving, serving, praying people.

And we're to encourage one another to keep going to God

with our various anxieties,

meaning none of you in this room need to go through

what you are going through alone.

No, you're among brothers and sisters, but more than that,

more than having a loving, serving, praying community

around you, you have a faithful savior who loves you more

than you could possibly ever hope to imagine.

We heard it in that beautiful prayer this morning from Tim.

Christ has given his life for you.

I want you to hear this this morning.

If you are here, if you're feeling isolated, abandoned,

if you feel hopeless, if you're feeling defeated,

and don't keep those emotions bottled up.

Don't seek to keep that to yourself any longer.

Brother, sister, God is not ignorant to you

or frustrated by your struggles or pain or depression.

He cares about you, and you can trust him

with what you're going through.

That's why what we're told in the book of Hebrews

is so wonderful, so powerful for the people of God.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who

has ascended into heaven, Jesus, the Son of God,

they're told firmly to the faith we profess.

We don't have a high priest who's

unable to empathize with our weaknesses,

but we have one who has been tempted in every way,

just as we are, yet he didn't sin.

Let us then approach God's throne.

Let us approach his throne of grace with confidence

so that we may receive mercy and find grace

to help us in our time of need.

Brothers and sisters, when we're down,

when we're obsessing over things in our lives,

when we're spiraling with the what ifs and the what nexts,

we all know that change is needed.

And grace comes when we go before the one who

offers himself to us freely.

And so the cry that we see in this Psalm, on one level,

it's an invitation, an invitation to honestly see

and name the thing that you're experiencing

and go to God with it.

And here this morning, this is God's invitation.

This isn't something that I'm making up this morning.

This is something we see in our text.

This is God's invitation to his throne of grace.

This is his invitation to his people.

This is God's heart towards those that trust in him.

This is what the laments which make up so much of the Psalms

are all about.

God says to his people, as a father to a child, come to me.

Come and bring every part of yourself,

even in the most desolate, most desperate places, come to me.

Let's be encouraged by that this morning.

Let's be honest with God in our prayers, which brings us

to the second part of our Psalm.

It's David's plea.

We see this in verses 3 and 4.

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've overcome him and my foes

will rejoice when I fall.

You may notice it, it's so raw, isn't it?

It's this son calling out to a father while in danger.

And he's so desperate for God to do something

about what's going on in his life.

And I want to point that out to you.

He's desperate for God to do something in his life,

meaning his prayer isn't just to the universe

in the off chance that maybe someone out there will hear him,

but it's directed to God himself.

He says, look on me, answer me, Lord my God.

Again, this is what the Psalm is directing all God's people

to do.

It's directing us to not bottle up our emotions

and to not swallow what's going on in our lives

and say, she'll be right, mate, sra, sra.

I'm sorry, I sounded like someone from Queensland then.

This Psalm is directing us to take everything before God,

to pour our hearts out before him,

to be raw and honest with what's going on.

And this tells us something about how God wants us

to interact with him.

First, David knows that God is personal,

that he's intimate with his people,

because people can go, God's people can go to him in such a way.

Second, in the midst of this raw emotion and fear,

David knows that God is faithful because he

is a covenant making and keeping God.

And I say that because David uses the covenant name Lord

to address God in this Psalm.

Now, you might be here this morning

and you've never heard that word before.

And I would love to spend lots of time on it,

but for time's sake, I'll give you a simple kind of thing

to it.

A covenant and a contract are not the same thing.

That's because a contract is usually between equals

and is made by an agreement.

And terms and conditions are made.

And if it's broken, then the contract is over.

A covenant, on the other hand, at least in the way

the Bible presents it, is between a greater and lesser

party.

And a covenant, as God makes it throughout the Bible

with his people, is unconditional,

meaning that when God makes a promise,

its fulfillment doesn't rely on who he makes it with.

No, its fulfillment relies on his grace to accomplish it,

on his unfailing love to bring that promise to come to pass.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the title, the Lord, is wrapped up

in this covenantal language.

The Lord is God's covenant making and keeping name

that he revealed to Israel.

And that's what I want you to notice here in our text.

David is praying the covenantal name of God

all throughout this prayer.

And that's important to note, because he's

bringing his sadness, his honesty,

before the face of God.

And he's praying, I'm pleading with you,

to act in accordance with your name,

to act in accordance with your character,

to act in accordance with your promises and to your grace.

And this is where arguably the most important word

in the Psalm comes into play, because it reveals the trust

that David has in God's character.

It's a small word, but it's a word right there in verse 5.

It's the word, but why is this word so important?

How does that reveal David's trust in the Lord?

Because this is what's known for you English geeks out there,

a contrasting conjunction, meaning that everything

that has been said before is about to be strikingly

different with what comes next.

You may have noticed as we've worked our way through this Psalm

this morning, there's a structure.

David's prayer pretty much goes like this, God, where are you?

How long is it going to be like this?

What's happening here?

Answer me.

I'm dying.

Help me.

I don't know what to do.

But his prayer goes from God, I'm in a mess.

But Lord, I'm scared.

But God, I don't know what's happening here.

But what, David?

But I trust in your unfailing love.

See that church?

David's saying, I see all of this.

I feel all of this, but I trust you in it all.

This is what makes verses five and six so amazing,

is that there's nothing in this Psalm

to indicate to us any change in David's circumstances.

It seems like nothing has changed

except our Psalmist perspective on things.

How did this perspective change?

Well, it seemed to change because David

takes his focus off the so-called clouds,

off his own thoughts of abandonment,

and he starts to remind himself of God's covenantal character.

He starts to remind himself of the Lord's unfailing love.

David took his focus off his emotions,

off what he perceived to be the case,

and he placed it on God's covenantal character

on his unfailing love.

In other words, he took his very real emotions

of feeling abandoned and those thoughts of God

casting him off and never coming back,

and he held them up to God

and what he had revealed about himself.

He had revealed about himself,

and he found his own thoughts and feelings wanting.

What a beautiful lesson we see here for ourselves, church.

The feelings that you have in your heart,

absolutely they are real.

Yes, our emotions shouldn't be pushed away or ignored,

but our perception of things.

It's not always so accurate in light of God's character

as revealed in his word.

So we have a choice, my dear brothers and sisters,

we can be ruled by our emotions,

ignoring what God has revealed about himself

and continue to spiral or through it all.

We can lay it all before him,

but in the doing, trust his character

in his unfailing love for his people.

As far as we know, we don't see it in our text this morning,

David had more questions than answers,

but he was able to say,

I'm an absolute pickle,

but I'm going back to what I know.

And so David, he holds onto God's character

in the midst of it all,

onto what he had revealed of himself.

That's what he clings to here.

He's holding onto the truth and he's saying,

there is a God who knows everything about me,

everything that is going on in my life,

every mistake, every fear, every dashed hope,

every joyless moment.

He knows everything that I'm going through,

but he's still with me.

I trust that he's committed.

I trust that he's not leaving me

because of his grace alone,

and I will rejoice in his salvation.

And it's as he did this,

as our psalmist renews his mind on God's character,

on what he knows to be true,

it leads him to worship our God as we see there

in verses five and six.

God fulfills his promises to his people.

That's why David, though he doesn't feel it in the moment,

he can say, my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing the Lord's praise for he has been good to me.

You know, it's just a few weeks ago

when Tony did the Christmas talk,

that we learned the word salvation,

it's actually found in the name Jesus.

That's what Jesus means.

It means salvation of the Lord or the Lord saves.

And in the big picture of the Bible,

the Lord, he came to us in the person of Jesus.

And it's this Jesus who had no sin

that chose to die on a cross

and to endure judgment that we deserve for our sin.

But then we know he rose from the dead in victory over sin.

The Bible says that anyone from anywhere

who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

David knew enough to know that you can count on God's salvation

in this fallen world.

And he knew that you can count on God's character

and his unfailing love.

That is the whole point of this psalm.

It's to honestly come before our God

with your hurts to cry out to him in your worries

and to look to the one who loves you,

to the one who has ultimately saved you

in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And brothers and sisters, as we do this,

as we honestly come before our God,

as we meditate on the gospel,

it will lead us to praise and worship him.

It's what we're gonna do now.

Each and every single one of us in this room

has a version of Psalm 13.

What's yours?

What's your sadness?

What's your lament?

Whatever it is, God invites you, dear one,

to bring it to him,

to come to him, to be honest and raw with him,

to cry out in your desperation, to plead with him.

The good news is this, and we have to remember it.

We don't mourn like those who have no hope.

No, it's because of what the Lord Jesus Christ

did for his people that we are able

to go to the throne of grace and know

that beyond a shadow of a doubt,

because of the sake of Christ, we are heard,

even when we don't feel it in the moment.

That's what I want us to do as a church this morning,

as a community.

We're gonna stand and reflect on what we've heard this morning,

and then after, we're gonna come to the Lord's table,

and we're gonna be reminded of why we can rejoice

in the Lord Jesus Christ this morning.

Would we do that together?

Let's pray, then we'll sing,

and then we'll come to the Lord's table.

Would you please pray with me?

Father God, we are so thankful for the gospel.

We are so thankful that we can come to you this morning

and know that we are heard.

That like sheep that are in the darkest of valleys,

we can know that you're rod and your staff,

that they comfort us.

Father, we are so thankful for the Lord Jesus Christ

that we can come before the throne of grace,

that you've put us in a community of people

that love you and are seeking you.

We ask, Lord, that wherever we are this morning,

in our own minds, with our own understanding of things,

that you would help us by your spirit

to know the gospel, to love Jesus,

that we would turn our eyes upon him.

And Lord, please make us into a community

that deeply care and love for one another,

have love for one another, genuine love for one another.

We ask for this in Jesus' name, amen.