PRAYER - Psalm 13 - Where is God in Silence?

Welcome to the City Covenant Podcast.

We are a warm, welcoming church located in downtown Spokane, dedicated to practicing the way of Jesus in the heart of the city.

Please join us as we dive into the Word of God together.

We're looking at Psalm 13.

We're doing this sermon series on prayer as we are seeing the way that God calls us into prayer.

And so we're doing all these standalone sermons all summer on prayer.

So this week, what we're looking at in Psalm 13, I'm going to tell you this now while you're flipping to Psalm 13 in your Bible.

What we're looking at is how we pray our feelings.

Some of you guys have heard me talk about things like this before, but we've never looked at Psalm 13 here at City of Covenant before.

This is a prayer of lament, of a prayer where David is saying, God, I feel like I'm all alone.

I feel like I'm abandoned, right?

David is this guy who's really in touch with his feelings.

Some of you guys do a great job of being in touch with your feelings, right?

Some of you less less so, right?

Some of you guys, like literally a puppy food commercial comes on and right, and you're so in touch with your feelings you start crying, right?

And some of you are so out of touch with your feelings, you wish you could cry at something, right?

And and and it just feels like you don't know how to deal with your feelings, right?

So over here, right, we have people deep, deep feelers all the time, or there's people who feel nothing.

Um here's what the psalms do.

The psalms teach us how to deal with our feelings in prayer, so that we actually process our feelings with God in prayer, right?

So it and we'll talk about this more, but so it doesn't make feelings everything, and it doesn't make prayer or feelings nothing.

And so let's go ahead and read Psalm 13, and then we're gonna we're gonna pray together and then we're gonna look at it together, okay?

This is Psalm 13.

For the director of music, a psalm of David, right?

That's the superscription.

It's just this little thing telling us what it's about and who wrote it.

This is what David says.

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 fail or 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.

Friends, this is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray like David prayed.

Father, we um are all across the spectrum of experience this morning.

Some of us have incredible joy, some of us have um moments of incredible failings, of incredible hurt, of incredible um just of feeling like we are so desperate.

Lord, wherever we are right now, Lord, we pray that you would pull us closer to you.

Lord, that we would bring everything we have and everything we are to you.

God, help us, even this morning, learn in times of trouble how to turn toward you.

Lord, not by being fake, but by being honest and real.

God, in Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

Okay, guys, so um, as you read through this, you might have noticed we're something happening here.

You have the the psalm is broken into two sections.

Probably most of us notice that, right?

And so that's what we're gonna look at is today.

We'll look at these two sections.

The first four verses, right, you just see him total suffering.

Just he's in a brutal experience in life.

And then all of a sudden, you see this consolation come.

Um, but what's interesting is as you'll notice this, the suffering didn't tend, right?

So we don't move from like suffering to comfort, right?

We don't leave move from like suffering to everything's fixed.

We move from suffering to trust, right?

And so we'll talk today really just about these two things the nature of suffering and prayer, and then trust.

And so um, if you notice this, what's happening, just the structure of it, is David moves into this repetitive um move where he says, how long, how long, how long, right?

How long these these are these are these how longs of suffering, right?

Do you know what he says?

He says, I feel forgotten.

God, it feels like your face is hidden from me.

I'm I'm here on my own, wrestling with thoughts.

I'm I have so much sorrow, and it feels like my enemies are triumphing over me, right?

Um there's this movement.

What's happening here as he says these how longs?

He moves from the general to the specific, he moves from outward to inward.

So at the beginning, do you notice?

He begins with God.

He begins with saying, How long, God, will you forget me?

Then he talks about his circumstances, and then he moves to his own soul, right?

So he says, God, it just feels like I've been forgotten.

Then he moves in and says, This is how I'm really, this is where where I'm really at.

I'm just I'm wrestling, soul level on my own, and I need your help, God.

And then he actually just says, like it beyond his circumstances, he, you know, my enemies are getting me, and then just moves down to the soul level, right?

Look on me, God, and answer me, or you know, I have nothing without you.

Here's my question as we look, you know, you read a text like this.

I think all of us are driven toward questions like, this is these are David's how longs?

What are your howlongs, right?

What are the things you're processing?

As we read this this morning, what are the parts where you look and say, oh my goodness, that that's right.

I read David and I couldn't even get into the rest of the text, right?

That's where some of us are.

Um, that I couldn't even get into very much of the text because as soon as I hear David saying how long, all I'm thinking about are my things that I'm crying out to God for, right?

That's where a lot of us are at, maybe today, right?

Some of you have been praying and you say, How long, right, until my husband remembers who I am?

Right?

Others praying, how long until my daughter answers my text?

Or how long until this interview turns into a job, right?

How long until these divorce papers no longer define me, right?

How long until my prodigal son remembers his way home?

Right?

How long until this anxiety stops feeling like this unwelcome roommate, right?

How long until I stop pretending I'm okay?

How long until you answer?

How long until I believe you haven't forgotten me?

Right now, now you've arrived exactly where David is of that feeling of desolation.

Guys, I don't know what your how long sounds like, but here's what I do know.

I know you have one.

And before we hear anything else this morning, I want you to know this.

Is that God thought that this prayer was so important that he put it in the Bible?

Right?

David isn't chastised in this, he's canonized.

Isn't that wild that what we see here is David praying this prayer that, frankly, for me is a fairly upbeat person.

I'm a little uncomfortable with at times.

It feels like he could maybe bring it up a few notches, right?

It's just a little bit of a downer.

He's a little bit bummed out for maybe too long, right?

And you just look and say, no, no, no.

God doesn't say, you know, David, listen, we need you to bring it up a little bit.

You know, you're leading a nation.

Also, you know, people are looking to you spiritually.

They need to know that, you know, if they are a Jew, a good Jew, that things will work out well for them.

No, that's not what God does.

God says, Yep, David, keep bringing that toward me.

Keep bringing that toward me.

Right?

Here's what David does.

This is what's incredible.

Do you notice one thing?

David keeps using God's name in it.

God, David never stops calling God Lord.

In all of this, David, in the midst of all of his struggles, all of his strife, right, all of his suffering, he still knows that God is still actually there.

Right?

What we see is um in David's prayers in the Psalms, I mean, in some ways, if you if you realize it or not, sometimes as Christians, we read the Psalms and we don't know what to do with them.

Do you any of you guys ever feel like that?

Right?

There's like the mean psalms, right?

Where it's like, God, I want you to get my enemy, crack his kid's head against the rocks, things like that, right?

And then you're like, in the name of Jesus.

And you look and say, well, that does, that doesn't really line up with Jesus, right?

And so you're you're not sure what to do with it.

So some people um they basically we just ignore the the mean psalms, right?

And or we uh we ignore the desperate psalms.

But you know why?

Because Christians should dress themselves up a little bit, right?

Because you don't you don't want to be praying and and be a downer, you know?

And so and so, but here's what's wild.

I think the psalms are actually doing something different for us.

What the psalms are actually doing, and this, by the way, I'm getting this, and you some of you guys have heard me say this before.

I'm getting this from Tim Keller in his book.

It's literally called Prayer.

Um, he also has one called like praying the Psalms and like Praying Our Fears and Tears.

There's lots that Tim Keller talks about this.

I would definitely recommend Tim Keller's book called Just Psalms or Prayer, sorry, excuse me, um, if if you want to go deeper on this.

But here's what Keller's pushes on this is that ultimately what's happening is that you have like religious people who tend to often be uncomfortable with their feelings.

You have secular people in America who often kind of make feelings everything.

And what the Psalms do is teach us instead this third way to deal with our feelings, right?

Um rather than just looking at all this darkness, the rawness of what David is feeling, rather than just saying, as religious people, saying, oh, David feels a little bit inappropriate, right?

Um, instead, what it does is it it moves us toward this person perspective, this place where we're actually able in prayer to say, God, this is where I'm really at.

Guys, here's the thing.

If you truly believe that God, the author and finisher of all things, right, and the one who created and sustains the world, the one who truly knows your heart, if you believe those things doctrinally, what you actually also, whether you realize it or not, doctrinally believe, is that God knows how you really feel.

God knows what you really think.

That means you don't need to dress up your prayers to Him, because if you do, He knows you're being fake, right?

So what you can do, and what's happening here is David is openly and honestly praying and saying, God, this is really my emotions.

This is where I'm really at this moment.

Now, we might look and say, God, as Christians, this isn't where I want to be forever.

And I know that and you know that, but this is really where I am right now.

I think that's so much more freeing than us feeling is that we need to fake it until we make it with God.

Guys, you do that enough probably already with the people around you.

Man, how isolated do you feel socially and spiritually if you're doing that with God too?

Right?

No wonder we look and say, boy, I decided to end up walking away from the Christian faith because it offered me so little.

Well, it's gonna offer you very little if our whole time we're being fake with the one who knows us the best, right?

And then we feel like we're lying to everybody, right?

We feel like we're lying to our friends, we feel like we're lying to God, we feel like we're lying to ourselves.

And instead, what we have here in the Psalms is this tremendous resource that shows us here's how to pray.

Pray really openly and honestly to God because you know what He already knows it.

And what's wild is you start praying, right, and processing your emotions and start processing your feelings.

Oftentimes they change, right?

Sometimes in American culture, what we want to do is, you know, somebody has aggrieved you or right, something bad's happened to you, and we just put it on repeat and we got to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it.

And guess what?

Nothing ever seems to change, right?

We just we just keep the story on repeat.

What's wild is you start bringing these things to the Lord, and God actually starts working in your heart.

You start actually thinking differently about this, right?

You start praying differently over time, right?

Because as you just you come and you bring these things to the Lord in prayer, he actually starts working in your heart in it.

Guys, I just I want to tell you, as we come and we see David praying openly and honestly, there's something I don't want to skip though.

David is exhausted.

And guys, suffering is exhausting.

And what I want you to know right now is if you are suffering and you're exhausted, that makes sense.

That's what David experienced.

Right?

Some of us are in this spot where we the suffering has been taking such an emotional toll on our souls.

It it feels like we're so exhausted, we can't even do the Christian stuff anymore, right?

You you can't pray, you can't read the Bible, you can't fast.

It's hard to even get up and go to church because you don't know if you can tell that story one more time and you just say, I just I just I can't do it.

Right?

You don't have to raise your hands, but I know some of us right now are, right?

That that's us.

That describes you right now.

I I want to tell you something about the beauty of the Christian church when it brings hope and healing to people's souls.

The the Christian church, when it is functioning the way it's supposed to, is such an amazing self toward the wounded person.

Right?

Because you come in instead into a body of believers, and you say, I can't pray.

I I don't even feel like I can pray anymore.

Guys, and some of you guys have heard me tell this story from the book of Exodus, where Moses is holding his hands up in prayer.

Do you guys remember this?

And Moses is holding his hands up in prayer, but he becomes so spiritually exhausted and physically exhausted he can't hold his hands up in prayer anymore.

And so you know what happens?

Two of his friends come up on his side, right?

You have Aaron and her, and they they hold his arms up in prayer.

You know why he didn't have the strength to pray anymore.

Guys, that's what the Christian church does for you.

When you don't have the strength to pray anymore, we'll pray for you.

Right?

That that's the church surrounding people that are broken.

Right?

That's why we do the Apostles' Creed together.

You look and say, I can't, I can't even say those words right now.

And we say, Well, we'll say those for you right now, right?

Until you have the strength to say that on your own for you once again, right?

Because we're actually in this together, right?

You look and say, I can't read the Bible, I can't even get there.

It takes so much spiritual energy for me to even read the word.

I can barely crack my Bible open.

Good news.

Neils just read the Bible for you, right?

He read it, right?

I read the Bible to you, right?

And that's part of what church is.

You look and say, You're you're in this spot where you get to be administered to, right?

That's what happens when you are in a very rough spot.

You have people are reading it to you.

People are reading it for you.

Right?

People are explaining it to you.

Maybe it's even this part where you look and say, All I can do is like the only strength I have is to turn on my Bible reading app and like listen to the audio Bible.

Great, listen to the audio Bible, right?

And you it gives you this means to stick in it, right?

You look and say, I can't, I I just it's so hard for me to go to church and tell that story one more time.

I'm gonna tell you this, and I need you to hear me for a second.

I know this is gonna sound like a weird thing to say as a pastor.

Okay, I have told people before if you just can barely go to church, come in five minutes late, sneak into the balcony, don't write balcony sitters, I'm not talking about you, and um and leave five minutes early.

Take communion, leave.

If that's what you need to do right now, do that.

If you look and say, I just I want to be here, I just I can't do the greeting time.

I just I don't have the capacity to do that.

Listen, if your options are either I'm just gonna bail all together, or you're gonna get 90% of community life at church, go with 90%.

I know that sounds like a weird thing to say as a pastor, but 90 is way better than zero, right?

Some of us, we just don't have the capacity at a given moment to to do the whole social thing once again.

And I say this, and you're this is gonna surprise some of you guys, but I'm a real serious extrovert.

Okay.

Some of you guys aren't there right now, right?

And it's hard.

And that's okay, actually.

Right?

And you look and say, what is God still doing in my life?

Because here's what I'm convinced of.

He certainly isn't gone.

Right?

Some of you guys and say, I can't even believe a lot of this stuff anymore.

Guess what?

Isolation is the enemy of belief.

So don't give in to isolation.

Okay, so in the midst of all that suffering, David prays these four verses.

And what's weird is it takes a turn.

And you're right, you don't have to be a Bible scholar to understand like something shifted there in David's prayer, right?

And you move from suffering to trust, right?

All of a sudden he starts talking to God and saying, But God, you know, I love you, you love me, you're the God of salvation.

And then he says, and God, that's why I sing praise to you.

Because you're so good.

And you look and say, wait, what?

David, how'd you get there?

Right?

How in the midst of suffering can you look at everything that's happening to you, David, and say, God was good in that moment, right?

You just said that God forgot you, he hid his face from you, right?

He left you all alone to wrestle with your thoughts with all your deep sorrow, and then he let your enemy triumph over you.

You look and say, how do we get from that to this?

Guys, I'll tell you how he got from that to this.

It was spiritual progress.

He kept growing, he kept staying in the river of grace and kept actually sticking with and knowing that God was still with him.

Right?

This probably wasn't immediate for David.

And it's probably not immediate for you.

Right?

This tends not to be all these epiphanies all the time, right?

I grew up in a church tradition where what I grew up thinking was the real move of the Holy Spirit was immediate and ecstatic, and that was how God moved when God moved.

And here's what I would say now is that does happen sometimes.

And a lot of the times, it tends to be low and slow, right?

Sometimes God's over here grilling, and sometimes God's over here doing barbecue, and it's taking eight hours to you know cook a brisket, right?

And and what we're seeing instead is that he's in a process with you.

You're having spiritual transformation.

And honestly, David has spiritual transformation, right?

When he's in all this suffering, he might have been in that moment of not being able to truly see and be able to express trust, right?

But but little by little, with gradual prayer, you the the skies start opening up, right?

You start being able to see the face of Jesus better, right?

But here's the thing it's not that the suffering goes away, right?

It's almost like I think like with the picture that came to my mind when I was reading through this, is there's like a, let's say, a horizontal axis and a and a vertical axis.

And so the horizontal axis, and this is what we think is gonna happen, is you go from like, you know, if over here is suffering, you look and say, okay, over here is like ecstasy or comfort or whatever, right?

But actually, what's fascinating is that's not even just, you know, that's not even the way that Paul describes it, right?

Paul says the opposite of suffering isn't comfort.

The opposite opposite of suffering is glory.

Romans 8, 18 says, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is revealed to us.

Right?

So I've got this horizontal axis between suffering and glory.

And David was over here in suffering, and guess what?

Verses 5 and 6, still there.

That didn't change.

He's still suffering.

It didn't get fixed.

But there's this vertical axis.

And you know what the vertical axis is?

On this vertical axis, instead, what he sees is not just this difference between between um excuse me, I'm missing the word all of a sudden, right?

Between suffering and comfort or suffering and glory, what he's now seeing is this other axis of trust or self-reliance.

And so he's still suffering, but he says, But God, you're trustworthy.

And somehow now I can see it.

It took me a long time.

Do you see what David says in his trust?

He says, God.

I trust in your unfailing love.

The word, though, here that's used is a special Hebrew word called Hesed.

So years ago, some of you guys know I got hit by this car.

I was supposed to take a class by God named Ian Proven.

So I got, this was like 20 years ago, or 25 years ago.

So instead I got CDs of all the lectures I was supposed to listen to.

And I was stuck up in Chuila, like on my couch with my leg elevated.

And so I just listened to Ian Provin lectures like on repeat.

This is before I knew about Tim Keller.

And so that's why I listened to those.

And so anyway, so I'm listening to Ian Provin lectures, and Ian Provin does something interesting.

He's real big.

He's a Scottish guy who talks a lot and he has this very thick Scottish accent, and he'll talk a lot about Hesed.

And but when he says the S, it sounds different than us, right?

And so as he's talking about Hesed, he's talking about this word that in the Hebrew is so rich and full of meaning that most translations now don't translate it from like one word to one word.

They don't say hesed equals love, because they they say, no, that's not enough.

That's not enough depth.

NIV just says hesed to love.

The ESV will say things like unfailing love or steadfast love, right?

But it's this love that it's this love that says God remains faithful because of his covenant commitment, right?

It's not a term that simply means like affection, right?

It's it's a love of out of loyalty, right?

It's a it's a faithful love.

It's this committed kindness.

And you look at this, guys.

David does not move from despair to sweet optimism, right?

He's not just a real this is not the power of positive thinking.

This is him very soberly looking and realizing stuff sucks.

I am stuck here.

Things are really, really bad.

Yet God is still with me.

Right?

It's not that he moves from despair to optimism.

He moves from despair to memory.

He moves and remembers who God is, what he's about.

He doesn't, it's not that David's figured out anything new about God.

Right?

He climbs out of the pit by remembering not something new, but something ancient, right?

He remembers the God who delivered Israel out of Egypt, right?

The one who kept covenant with Abraham, who remained faithful in the wilderness.

Right?

God never changed just because David was blind to him for a while.

And David ultimately has he has faith in God and he can trust in him.

You have to realize this, guys.

Faith is not somehow confidence in our circumstances, it's confidence in God's character even when our circumstances don't change.

Right?

David, if you go 10 Psalms later, David didn't say, right?

David didn't say, hey, you know, um I used to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but now everything got better.

No, David says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, your rod and they staff, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Why?

Because God's present with him.

That's the shift.

The shift is David knowing that God is with him, right?

It's it's his presence, not just removing the pain.

Right?

We all ask these questions of how long?

How long until you make everything right, God?

How long until everything sad becomes untrue?

Right?

It's the cry of creation that Paul talks about in Romans, right?

It's the cry of the martyrs in Revelation, it's the prayer of the Christian church ever since it says, Come, Lord Jesus.

Because we keep saying, God, how long?

Friends, if that's your prayer right now, you are smack dab in the middle of the right Christian prayer.

That's normal Christian life.

Because we like Jesus are now acquainted with suffering.

When David says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow death, you are with me.

There's a shepherd that was with him.

It doesn't reach its culmination ultimately until hundreds of years later.

And there's one man who says, I am the good shepherd, the shepherd you've always heard about, the shepherd who you've always appended that would walk with you.

There was one shepherd.

And it was in Jesus said, I've been walking with you all along.

And now I've come to be with you.

And I want you to know me.

Right?

Every other worldview seems to say if God loves you, he'll keep you from suffering.

You can definitively say that the father loved the son.

And the father loved the son so much that it wasn't that he that Jesus didn't experience suffering.

It was that the father and the son were so close that the son suffered on our behalf.

So you look and say, if God loves you so much, will he automatically take away the suffering?

No, that's not the story.

It's that if God loves you so much, he will suffer with you.

On the cross, God himself descends lower and lower and lower until he suffers like we suffer.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven, we thank you for your kindness.

We thank you for your goodness.

Lord, would you be with us?

Lord, we are sufferers.

And we could never make it without you.

We love you, God.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you for listening.

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