Holy Ambivalence

I invite you to take out your your Bibles this morning and we're going to be looking in the Old Testament in the book of Psalms, Psalm 13.

If you're using a pew Bible, if you don't have one, you find a pew Bible in front of you, you'll find that on page uh four hundred and fifty-three?

Psalm thirteen?

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?

Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God.

Light up my eyes, lest I sleep, the sleep of death.

Lest my enemies say, I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice, because I am shaken.

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.

The word of the Lord.

What's a pleasure to be speaking this morning and be speaking on this particular psalm which the Lord has really blessed me with in recent days.

I would like to begin with a with a an accounting of a true story this morning.

I'd like you to meet H.K.

H.K.

is a 37-year-old Army veteran who served multiple tours in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as several international humanitarian and missions in Africa.

He said that the most traumatic thing that he experienced in all of his military duty was not anything in Iraq, but it was something that happened one day in Somalia.

He told me about how he was passing out bags of rice and beans to the impoverished Somali people.

He was positioned at the gate of a flatbed truck at the end of a long line, like a fire brigade of soldiers passing bags one to another.

His job on the very end was to hand the bag to the Somali person next in line.

He told me of the deep satisfaction in being able to give life to people day after day.

However, one day during his shift, a band of local officials pulled up and demanded that the humanitarian truck leave.

The officials and their bodyguards were arguing with those in charge of the relief effort.

HK didn't understand the argument, it was all in another language.

There were many Somalians still in line waiting for food.

Soon H.K.'s commander ordered that the truck would be leaving soon due to the escalating hostility of the local official and their bodyguards.

When this was announced, the crowd began to riot.

They were about to be deprived of their food.

The government bodyguards, who were really thugs, began trying to pacify the people.

And all the while, H.K.

and his friends were moving as fast as they possibly could to unload the truck before they had to go.

One of the thugs began arguing with a woman in line.

She pleaded with him, and she was next in line.

The next thing HK knew is he turned around with a bag of food to hand it to this woman, and he was horrified by what he saw.

The thug had brutally assaulted her.

The woman stood severely damaged, in complete shock, staring at him, her life ebbing away.

The army soldiers were ordered to secure themselves, and the truck quickly departed.

H.K.

vividly recalls this horrific event in slow motion with striking detail.

It haunts him when he's awake, and it haunts him when he sleeps.

Questions about the brutality of humanity and the seeming impotence of God plague his thoughts.

And he's now beginning to ask the question why?

He wants to ask this question to God, but he feels he's not going to get an answer.

See, H.K.

was raised in a conservative Christian home.

He considers himself a believer.

But he couldn't square his experience in the military with what he was told to believe about God and to say to God.

He was angry and outraged and mad at God.

But he thought that these seething emotions were unfit for a child of God and even damning.

And so he didn't know what to do with them.

He just submerged.

Well, H.K.'s experience illustrates for us an extreme example of what is actually an all-too common dilemma for Christians living in a fallen world.

Namely, what are we to do when we feel negative emotions toward God?

Emotions that feel very illegal, very disloyal, and unfit for a child of God, maybe even damning.

And how do these emotions square up or fit in with our love and trust and praise of God?

Can the two even go together?

Well, in our passage this morning, I think we need to know from the outset that we are looking at a passage of Scripture that God chose to preserve for our benefit, for our modeling, and for us to learn from.

And this passage of the Psalms is going to address the very issues that are on the table with HK and what have been often on the table in our own lives.

I'd like to begin with just a little bit of background about the Psalms and about this particular kind of psalm before we get going here.

The Psalms, as many of you know, if you if you've been in the church for any period of time, you know the Psalms are Old Testament poetry.

They bespeak the language of the soul.

They get out in raw terms.

How we really feel and how we really are inside.

And it's wonderful that we have that.

The Psalms were Israel's hymns and songs and prayers.

And they are preserved for us as one of the prayer guides that we have.

I really want that to sink in.

Maybe when you think of a guide for prayer, you think of the Lord's Prayer, where the disciples came to Jesus and said, Teach us how to pray.

And that is a wonderful model that we have.

Let us never lose that model of prayer.

But it's only one of many models of prayer that we have.

The Psalms are one of the most important books of prayer that we have that teach us how to do relationship with God.

This particular psalm that we're going to look at is called technically a lament psalm or a psalm of complaint.

I wonder how many psalms do you think could be classified as lament psalms?

One or two, four or five, ten or eleven.

It's interesting.

This actually surprised me.

And I knew it before and I forgot it, and it surprised me again.

Almost a third.

It depends on how you count them, but almost one-third, that would be 50 Psalms of the 150 can be classified as lament and complaint psalms, where the writer is expressing in really raw terms a complaint to the Lord about his circumstances, about his life, and about the Lord himself, even.

Well, with that as kind of our background, I'd like us to move in to look at this psalm, and there's three really clear movements in this psalm.

Each of them are two verses each.

So two, two, and two.

And I've entitled each section with a question that I think God is encouraging us to ask behind these verses.

Can I be completely honest with God?

Does God really care about what happens to me?

Am I remembering God's promises and his track record with me?

So these are the three uh three questions that we're going to look at this morning.

So we'll begin with the first.

Can I be that honest with God?

I wonder if you felt a little uneasy when I read this psalm.

I tried to figure out a way that we might read this in a dramatic way.

I find myself wanting to edit the language here and put this in really, really kind, soft kind of words.

But that's not what these words are.

If you really want to get a flavor of these, read a translation like The Message or one of those that really try to bring out the emotion of the passage.

These are very raw words.

They define or describe the psalmist, David, who is in a kind of despair of hope.

This despair has grown out of trouble and pain as it usually does in our lives.

And look, look at the kinds of things that he's saying to God.

He's putting out there that God is not showing up.

He feels like God's far away.

He feels like God has abandoned him.

He has internal wrestlings.

There's a head game going on in his life.

And it's out of control.

And he has sorrow and sadness that's settling in.

He's feeling very alone.

And then there's an enemy who's just uh kicking his tail, as it were, and seems to have free reign.

Where are you, Lord?

And how long is this going to go on?

What David says here, I think, is almost shocking to some of us.

We might struggle to say this kind of thing, this kind of honesty, to another person.

We might struggle to say this to our own spouse or to a brother or sister or close friend, let alone to God.

But David refuses to tell God what he thinks God might want him to say.

David is honest with God about what's in his heart.

He sees it and he names it.

And he's not going to tone it down.

He's not going to give a kind of Sunday school answer to what's happening in him.

He just brings all the rawness of his despair, despairing hope before the Lord.

This is what it means partly to walk with God.

Because walking with God and praying to God means we're relating to God.

And this is the language of relationship.

This is what it means to do relationship.

It means to be honest and to engage where you are, not where you think you should be, not where the other person expects you to be.

You engage them where you really are.

That's how you do relationship well.

Where you are may be a really bad place.

It really may be.

It may say all kinds of things about the temptation that you're in, or the sin that you're in, or the blindness that you have, or the pain or hurt that you have in your life, but it's where you are.

And if you don't bring where you are to someone, and you don't bring it to God, whatever you're doing, you're not relating to Him.

And if we think that prayer is something other than relating to God, that prayer maybe is just saying a set of words that are the right kind of word, said in the right kind of way, and that's what will kind of ease our life and make things well with God, we're really missing an opportunity.

Because the Lord preserves 50 Psalms for us to teach us and to impress upon us that you can be yourself with me.

I am big enough to take it.

Another way I think that I would want to put this is do you have the courage to name your despair before the Lord?

Do you have that kind of courage?

It's like lancing a boil where there's an infection under the skin.

I know, gross image.

But really, if you nurse that and just keep it covered, and where's it going?

And there's an emotional boil that creates created in us all the time in various ways.

And it's usually pain and suffering that brings us to that point, and we just try to skirt around it.

That's why I think I think this kind of practice is just not that common.

I know it wasn't common for many, many years in my own life, in my own walk with the Lord.

I think there's two reasons why we are hesitant to have this kind of honesty with the Lord.

The first and foremost may be that we simply don't know our heart.

We're not raised in a culture, in a country, at a time that we are taught to think about what's going on deep below the surface.

We're taught to manage image.

I guarantee we're taught this in so many ways.

We are people of image.

All of life is about image.

It's about looking good and saying the right thing and managing everything to make it go just the way we want things to go, and our lives will be smooth.

We're not taught to reflect about what's going on below the surface.

We're not taught to reflect on what our deep desires really are, to pay attention to those kinds of things.

But paying attention to our hearts will tell us, I'm going to quote an author here, will tell us what we're doing with God and what we're doing with others.

Don't pay attention to your heart, and you may be blinded to what you're doing with God, what you're really doing with Him.

Last week when Walt was teaching us from James, and James hurls out his rebuff.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is being an enemy with God?

Wow.

Yeah.

That's true.

I wonder how many of us would ever think of that.

About wow, what where am I creating idols in my heart?

Like at what level do I have idolatry going on in my heart?

The church fathers said, John Calvin one in particular named this.

He said, the heart is an idle factory.

A factory.

A factory is put out product, man, at a high rate.

So it's not like one a year.

I mean, they they're putting them out.

And the more I pay attention to my own heart, the more I see my heart is an idle factory.

Man, it is automated.

It has great efficiency.

Because I have all kinds of crutches to make my life go well and to keep me from depending on the Lord.

And to keep me from finding my all-in-all in Him.

I've got tons of those things that are operating, and I don't see them, and then they come up.

I feel this desire in my heart, and I think, wow, I can't believe what just came into my heart.

The desire that's really there, that I just actually nurse that for a few moments.

And it felt really sweet to do that.

Yeah, I'm at one level with you.

I'm a spiritual adulterer.

I know that.

And I think the older I get as a believer, I'm going to see that to be more true.

And so it's when you begin to go into your heart and begin to kind of put in play the admonition we have in the Old Testament.

Above all guarding, we're told, guard your heart, because out of it are the issues of life.

When we begin to kind of guard our heart a little more carefully and reflect on it, we begin to see the kind of demandingness and the self-centeredness.

It's really down there.

So it's kind of an irony is that we don't want to go to our heart.

We want to stay on the surface level, maybe, or we don't want to go very deep.

And maybe we think we're really going to be dealing with sin if we do that.

The reality is, we'll be missing.

Much sin.

We won't see the half, the tenth of what's really at the core of who we are.

We won't see the kinds of idols that are alive and well and operating.

But to do this, to do that well, we have to be grounded in the gospel.

We have to be grounded well.

Not only once, but regularly.

We have to be fighting for the gospel in our lives.

We have to be daily in the word, in the word to settle the gospel in our hearts.

That Jesus is our righteousness.

That he's our all-in-all.

That he delights in us because of Christ, not because I've been good enough today.

We have to be grounded in the gospel.

And the more we're grounded, the more readily we can face what's really in our heart.

We can face it with grief, and yet we can face it with shalom.

We can face it with rejoicing.

Because Jesus has our back.

He's paid our sin debt.

He's forgiven us.

He's inviting us on this journey to grow in Him and to not be afraid.

I think there's a second reason why we're not very likely to follow David here.

I think we're afraid it's wrong to do so.

I thought that for decades.

Even as a pastor, I thought that was wrong.

There's just because he's questioning God.

I mean, he's God is never in the wrong.

The New Testament puts it this way.

You know, let God be true and every man a liar.

God is always justified in what he does.

But that's a whole different animal than being truthful with what's inside of you.

It's not a question of whether God is right or wrong.

And really, what I'm trying to encourage you today, it's not even a question of whether it's wrong for you to do this, because God is giving us this passage and 49 others to invite us to have truth in the inner man and to walk with God in such a way that we tell God what's really going on in us.

And that we get that to the surface, and so we can begin to see what's really in our heart.

And we can begin to move toward the healing that we really want.

John Piper put it this way one time.

I loved his answer.

You know, is it ever right to question God?

He said, Of course God's never in the wrong.

But if you think he is, by all means tell him.

He already knows.

And he loves you.

And he wants to relate to you like a good parent, like a good father.

This incidentally is probably part of our other reason why we have difficulty with this.

It's maybe how we were raised, or maybe how we raised our own kids.

We don't like, we don't like the language of lament and complaint.

Our parents did not like the language of lament, did they?

Some of you in the older, older generation, I think it was even more solid, but in my generation enough that, whew, uh, I knew those boundaries, and believe me, it was a few steps.

Um my kids had way more leadway than I had.

But I'm wondering, even, parents, what are we teaching our children in this?

Because we're going to teach them something about how to relate to God by how we relate to them, by how what we allow them to be in our presence.

There is a kind of tight robe to walk, but can I just say it, if we never allow our kids to bring complaint in all the raw emotion that they have, because we're we're gonna snuff them out because they're being disrespectful, we're shutting their hearts down and they're going into hiding.

You all know that if you've had parents like that, because you've been in hiding with them, you went into hiding.

I went into hiding.

And you just never brought that to them.

And your relationship showed because they never knew what was really going on there, and they never had enough security, a loving security, be able to be who they are and get it to the surface and have you, as a parent, help them think through where their heart really is and what it really says about them, and to walk in those places, and that's where our children can find healing and where they can learn to be real with God.

Wow, you've really got something there.

So I want to just kind of sum up here.

I'm taking the most time on this first question because I think it's probably the most important for us.

Come out of hiding.

That's what God's telling us in this passage, essentially.

Come out of hiding.

I'm pretty sure there are a number of you here today who are angry at God.

You're incensed at him, even.

Your life has taken some turns and you are really ticked about it.

And if I were to ask you, do you feel like you can bring that to the Lord?

You might say, heavens no.

Not anywhere ready near to do that.

Come out of hiding.

If you know Christ, you can come to your good, good Father.

You can bring your heart.

He's not going to whack you or knock your teeth out.

He's not going to jam a bar of soap down your throat and rake it across your teeth.

He is big enough to hear your heart.

And he's going to help you minister.

He's going to minister to your heart as you put it on the table.

The Spirit of God is going to begin to open up what's really going on in that heart and where healing can be found in Him.

It's risky.

But it's way more risky to stay in isolation.

Because I don't think you're going to make forward progress anytime soon.

So let's move on to a second question.

These would be verses three and four.

And here I only want to say just a few things about this one.

The second question is: does God really care about what happens to me?

You know what it's like to be in the thick of it?

You know what it's like to feel alone, to feel abandoned, to feel betrayed at some level?

What do you like to do when that happens?

Many of us like to just retreat.

There's something in us that wants to retreat.

Maybe you want to lash back, but there's something in you probably that just wants to retreat.

But it's amazing there's a lot of boldness in what David does.

He's just put his heart on the table about God, and now he's going to push into some requests.

And they're really bold requests.

They're simple, but they're bold.

He's really asking God, can you consider my world?

Would you consider my world?

Would you engage me?

Would you bring me life and restoration?

Would you uphold my dignity?

My enemies are out to destroy me.

Can you have my back in this?

It's really a kind of cry.

A cry of the heart for the Lord to move in.

This man is fighting.

He's fighting for himself.

I love this.

Is one of the ways, by the way, that we can fight for one another.

If you have eyes to see your brothers and sisters, you will see many of your brothers and sisters at various times who are in these deep, dark places.

And you can fight for them with these same kinds of petitions.

You can fight for them on their behalf.

But here, God is encouraging us to fight for ourselves.

To move into prayer and petition, even when you feel like God is a million miles away.

The truth is, God has a deep investment in you.

He has a vested interest in you.

He is your father.

And the real truth is, he hasn't abandoned you.

He just has your life up-ended right now.

He has you on the anvil.

And he has good, good purposes in all of it.

And though you can't see it right now because the fog is too thick, you will see it.

And so fight.

Come to your Father, come out of hiding, make intercession, put simple, bold requests out that God would come to you and bring deliverance and light.

Well, finally, the third question.

Am I remembering God's promises and his track record?

This is verses five and six.

You know, I think to be human is to forget.

It's really interesting.

There's a practice in ancient Israel that they were told to do this, and they sometimes maybe just did it on their own, but they would take stones when God gave a mighty deliverance or God did something just amazing that they wanted to remember, they would take stones, very stones, and they would set them up.

Because in the generations to come, they could tell their children and they could remember themselves that God had been faithful to them.

And they didn't want to forget that.

Well, we live by faith, not by sight.

And we need to have stones in our lives because we forget the many ways that the Lord blesses us and the many ways that He provides for us.

The psalmist ends these Psalms with these two verses that really seem kind of odd.

When on the one breath you've just said to the Lord, where are you?

and how long are you going to do this?

And my whole life is coming apart, and I feel abandoned, and where's your face?

You're hiding it from me.

And now he's going to end this psalm by saying he remembers the steadfast love of the Lord.

And that God is going to bring a deliverance, and he's going to sing about it from the depth of his heart.

What's going on here with this?

How do these two things kind of go together?

Well, commentators and expositors give some different explanation of this, and it's very interesting how they do that.

I think it kind of betrays some things here.

Some people think, well, this is really, you know, we live in the first part of the Psalm for a long time, and then eventually God lifts the cloud and we come out at the end.

And to be sure, there are times when God does that.

There are lengthy depressions and disparities that we can be in that may last a long, long time, maybe years.

But I think a more normal experience for us, it runs in a different direction.

A more normal experience for us is that as we are venting our heart and putting it out there, God is already beginning to give us some healing and we're beginning to get some insight and see some things that we were missing and that we might not have seen had we kept silent and gone, had we submerged and gone into hiding.

But since we put it on the table, we're beginning to see God is bringing to mind that he really keeps his promises.

He is the God of loyal love to his people.

That's who the living God is.

He's always been that to his people.

He is loyal, loyal to love his people.

I want to encourage you to hear what God is saying here in this model prayer.

As you're honest with God, as you tell him where you are, you don't need to slink away in shame.

You don't need to go away and feel ashamed that I shouldn't have really told him how I felt.

You can be confident that you can bring before him at the same time in the next breath, praise as you think of it, as you remember his faithfulness.

You can lay that out before him and thank him for that.

You can operate with a kind of holy ambivalence in your life.

And that's really how our walk of faith is going to go.

In this broken world, we're going to always have a kind of holy ambivalence.

It's the battle of the inner nature with the flesh and the spirit.

And God is calling us in this passage to move toward him.

Move toward him and not move away.

I want to end our time here.

We can enter this psalm in a richer way, I think, than an Old Testament saint ever could.

We who know the living Lord Jesus, we who know the Messiah who's come, and who is our righteousness, who paid our sin debt, who is our all-in-all, we who have the Holy Spirit who lives within us, who opens up our heart, and who advocates inside of us to bring us to the love of God and remind us of the love of God, and who brings us to holiness and to see, gives us eyes to see what's really going on in our heart and to be able to just confess it and sit in it and depend upon the Lord and not hide and run from it.

We who know that we have God as our Father through Jesus, that we've been adopted into his family, we have tremendous privilege to take up these prayers and to make them our own in our lives.

May the Lord grant us to do that.

Will you join me as I lead us in a closing prayer?

And I'd like for you to just think for a moment with me of and maybe ask the Lord to open up to you just one area in your life that you really are hiding from Him.

May you ask Him to just give you some eyes to see.

Ask Him to stir the Holy Spirit in you and give you the courage to be honest with God about where you really are, and to do it with the confidence that you're his child if you trust in him.

Our Father, we grant that you would do this, that you would stir your spirit in us, you would grow us and help us be a people who are true.

And we ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.