Taking Our Sadness to God (Psalm 42)

Well, my oldest daughter is 14.

She'll be 15 this year.

She reminds me almost every day that she'll be driving soon.

And she will.

And yet, one of the things that it dawned on me this week that I've never stopped doing since the first day that we brought her home is I've never stopped reading out loud to my children.

Now, my days are numbered, I know this, but even now I'm continuing to read.

We're making our way through the Harry Potter series again, and I love everything about it.

I love the story, I love the time with family, I love trying to do different voices.

But one of the things that has been really special about this is when you read a story out loud, you sort of put it on in a way far more than when you just read it to yourself.

And what I mean is that my children have grown accustomed to a few times a book, they will see me start crying as I'm reading out loud.

And it's always awkward.

They're like making eyes like he's crying again.

Like, what's so sad right now?

But whenever something happens, some emotion is brought to the fore.

And it's usually somebody who is being a faithful friend at great cost to themselves, someone who shows courage when they know that they cannot win, or somebody just meeting somebody else in a moment of helplessness, it draws out in me emotion.

And the reason I'm so thankful for this is because I found my emotions later in life.

I don't know if you can relate to this.

Perhaps you grew up in a family where your emotions weren't really welcomed to the table.

Maybe you grew up in a family where your emotions were seen as an inconvenience.

And if that's you, one of the good graces of God is that He has given us art, be it paintings or fiction or films, that help us to find within us what is beneath the surface.

One of the things I love about the Bible is that it, how much more so?

How much more so does the Bible validate our emotional life?

How much more so does the Bible validate us as emotional beings and doesn't see our emotions as a liability, but shows us how to identify them and not only identify them, shows us how to bring our emotions, how to bring all of ourselves before God.

And so what I want to do this morning is I'm gonna read Psalm 42, which is it's a sad psalm.

We're gonna have to sort of put on our emotion.

We're gonna have to put on sadness a little bit as we make our way through this.

And so why don't we read this and ask God to help us?

Psalm 42.

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and appear before God?

My tears have been my food day and night.

While they say to me all the day long, Where is your God?

These things I remember as I pour out my soul.

How would I go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival?

Why are you cast down, O my soul?

And why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

My soul is cast down within me.

Therefore I remember you, from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar, deep calls to deep, at the roar of your waterfalls, all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me?

Why do I go on mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, Where is your God?

Why are you cast down, O my soul?

And why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.

The word of the Lord.

Let's pray and ask for God's help.

Father, what a passage.

And we praise you and we thank you that you have preserved this passage for us for thousands of years.

And that over the centuries your people have found a voice in it and a way back to you.

And we ask that you would teach us how to do the same thing.

As you've drawn near to us in Jesus, we pray that you would meet us in this passage now.

Amen.

So my outline this morning is twofold.

We're invited to identify our sadness, and then we are told, we're taught, what to do with our sadness.

We're shown what to do with it.

So we're invited to identify our sadness, and then we're shown what to do with it.

And it's funny, as I've worked on this passage this week, it dawned on me that so often pastor types can read a psalm like this about sadness, and then we just talk about how to think about it.

How to think about sadness when the gift of this psalm, and so many others like it, is not just to think about our sadness, but to actually begin to process it and to embody what it looks like to bring and to take our sadness along with every other emotion to God.

And so that's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna think about processing our sadness so that we can then take it to God.

I had lunch with somebody this week, one of you this week, and you spoke of two people that you love and care for passing in the last two weeks.

This is sad.

And the sadness of life is really relentless.

There are certainly breaks from it.

It's not all sad.

But what the Bible wants us to do is to acknowledge that a relentless part of life is that sadness continually comes our way.

Continually comes our way.

And the problem is we don't like sadness, and so so often we try to bypass it.

This feeling is so heavy at times, it makes us feel vulnerable and helpless and hopeless at times, and so many of us know what it is at times to almost try to circumvent it with a defensive posture.

And here's what I mean.

Give you an example.

This this past week, I was talking to my sister.

You know, unfortunately, my mother has estranged herself from me and my sister, and it and it's sad.

But my sister called me this week and she said, My mom, mom returned my Mother's Day gift.

She didn't keep it.

And I share this with you because you might relate to, I didn't feel sad initially.

I was just angry at the situation.

I almost wanted to get angry at my sister.

Like, well, just don't do that, no.

There's a part of us that wants to bypass this holy emotion of sadness, and yet when we do that, we miss a profound opportunity to bring who we are and what we are dealing with to God.

And so it's one thing to sort of say sadness is a holy emotion.

It's another thing to be able to recognize it in ourselves.

Because so often we we we jump to other emotions.

Anger.

We jump to frustration, we jump to something else that makes us feel like we can grab and control the situation instead of acknowledging I'm vulnerable.

This emotion is hard and heavy.

Not only do we want to protect ourselves, we want to protect others, and so we bypass this emotion.

And I say that because I'm not the only one in this room, surely, who struggles to find sadness when it comes.

And I invite you, even as you continue to come to Jesus with your emotions, to look for the ways that maybe you haven't identified, sadness, first of all.

Because it is a relentless emotion that comes upon us.

And the good news is the psalmist doesn't shy away from this kind of vulnerability.

I mean, look at this.

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul pants for you, O God.

And commentators almost universally know, I mean, given the context of this psalm, that we are not to imagine a sort of picturesque Thomas Kincaid painting, a deer by a bubbling brook.

I mean, one commentator says, no, we're to imagine that this deer has been running for its life, that hunters and dogs are pursuing it, and it is, it is on the verge of dying, and it is dying for thirst.

This is a wounded and vulnerable animal.

Have you ever felt so sad that you felt like you were fighting for your survival?

My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, where is your God?

Have you ever felt so distraught that you weren't even able to cry yourself to sleep?

And when you cry like this, your eyes get puffy and red, and it wears you out.

Have you ever been so sick with grief that you couldn't eat?

This is not how we want to be seen by anyone.

No wonder so many of us would rather adopt a posture of defensiveness rather than acknowledging this sadness.

And yet the psalmist leans into it with honesty, eyes wide open, puffy and red as they might be.

In verse 5, he says that he feels cast down, thrown to the ground, in turmoil internally.

This is a person who feels helpless.

All of your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

I don't know how long it's been since you've read the story of Jonah.

We're going to look at that in a few weeks.

He almost verbatim borrows this line when he's plunged into the sea.

He says, This, you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me.

All of your waves and your billows, they passed over me.

And the psalmist says, I feel like that in my sadness.

These are your waves, God.

There will be seasons when every person in this room feels like this.

And we will long for relief.

We were made for relief.

But here's what the psalm is showing us.

Longing for relief doesn't mean bypassing sadness and grief.

Longing for relief does not mean bypassing sadness and grief.

And Christians of all people should know that while sadness is unpleasant, it's heavy, by itself, sadness cannot keep us from hope.

This is good news.

Because so often when we feel sad, we feel like there's something wrong with us.

And the Bible relentlessly tells us that God meets us where we are.

Our sadness might make us feel hopeless, but the reality is that sadness by itself cannot keep us from hope.

In fact, sadness helps us to see reality as it really is.

It helps us to see ourselves as we really are.

We were created for a world of glory, a world that is perfect.

We feel that in our bones.

That's why we're so discontent with so much of life.

We're made for something else, and yet we live in a world that is fallen and bruised and broken by sin.

We live in a world where relationships are often estranged, where children sometimes are wayward, where diseases often overpower treatment, where death feels like forever.

And the answer from the scriptures is not just be strong.

The answer is not merely put your head down and keep grinding it out.

The answer is not lock those feelings away somewhere deep and dark where they never see the light of day and just keep plugging along.

Here's why.

And, you know, one famous reformer says that our knowledge of God and our knowledge of self, it's a little chicken and the egg sort of thing going.

To truly know God is to begin to truly know yourself.

And to truly know yourself is to truly begin to know God because we are made in his image, after all.

It's counterproductive to hide from ourselves.

And just as a side note, and this could be a whole nother sermon, but getting to know yourself is hard work.

It's hard.

And you might find that there are seasons that you are so overwhelmed that you need help.

That's part of what the Christian community is for.

But sometimes we need special help from counselors who know what they're doing.

And that is not an unholy endeavor.

And I bring that up because some of you might be terrified of that thought, terrified of the thought that you might need medication for a season.

But if you ever feel like, gosh, what if I need a counselor?

I would love to talk to you about that.

Offer some recommendations.

Do you know that we have finances that are set aside to help you pursue counseling?

And it's just important for you to know that.

We need to get to know ourselves.

And in any way that we can help you do that, it would be an honor to do that.

So as we get to know our sadness, it really is critical that we know ourselves, but that is not the end in and of itself.

This leads to our second point.

What do we do with our sadness?

What does it look like to take this to God?

The psalmist shows us.

Taking our sadness to God, it's just another way of saying coming to God with all that we are.

Honestly.

We get to come to Him with vulnerability.

You know, the Bible tells us over and over again that the Lord is our strength, and that doesn't mean, as we sometimes hear it, be strong for God.

It doesn't mean, as we so often hear, well, if you're a Christian, you ought to be stronger than you are.

No, it means coming to God with your weakness and allowing him to meet you because he is strong enough for you.

If you feel weak, you're in a perfect place.

I mean, what Paul tells us in Romans 5, when we were yet weak, Christ died for us.

If you feel weak, if you feel ungodly, you're in the perfect position to be met by a God who draws near to weakness and ungodliness.

Psalmist says, like a deer that is panting for its life, I need you.

When shall I come and appear before God?

He longs to be in the presence of God.

He longs to see Him, as the New Testament would say, face to face.

And here's how I find this Psalm to be so helpful and refreshing.

The psalmist doesn't give us a trite formula.

Just go to God and He'll fix it.

That's what we want.

But that's also not what we want because we know that's not our experience.

If you are in a hard place, rarely, rarely, rarely is something as simple as like, God help, I feel better.

Because behind that is we often just don't want to feel weak anymore.

We don't want to need a strong God.

We want to feel self-sufficient, and the good news is we're not, and God meets us.

Where do we see this?

I mean, on the one hand, he says, I'm desperate for you.

I'm desperate for you.

And on the other hand, he says, Where are you?

I'm desperate for you.

Where are you?

And at times it can feel like God is distant.

At times it can feel like God is no match for our sadness.

But notice what he's doing.

He's continuing to go back to God.

If you feel weak and sad and you are going to God, you are going where you ought to go.

And the thing is, he is not waiting for you to get on the other side of your sadness for him to meet you.

This almost tells us somewhere else, he walks through the valley of the shadow of death with us.

He walks with us in sadness.

Verse 5 and verse 11 use the exact same words.

It's a copy.

And I think it's important to note that because if coming to God were the quick fix, then I'm sad, I'm longing, I want to see you, hope in God, and that would be the end.

But it's not the end.

Because then he gets sad again, and then he says the same thing.

I mean, he's showing us that coming to God with our weakness, with our sadness, it never stops.

We're created for communion with God, where we need him always, where he is there for us always.

In between verse 5, you see, your breakers and your waves have gone over me, and then it's up.

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and then why have you forgotten me?

Do you see?

Do you feel the roller coaster of this passage?

Here's the point.

Worship doesn't automatically remove sadness from our lives.

Instead, worship is an invitation to bring that sadness.

And here's what's remarkable about this.

This feels counterintuitive because modern worship culture and modern worship experiences, we've trained ourselves to think of worship as an escape from the rest of life.

That we go to worship to check our sadness and our sin and our weeks at the door, to have goosebumps, and goosebumps are good, and if you never have them as a Christian, that is another problem.

But that's not what worship is for.

Worship is not something that we go to and approach as an escape from the rest of life.

Worship is the process of bringing who we are and what our weeks and emotions have been like, and laying them at the feet of Jesus and saying, Meet me as I am.

Worship is not an escape.

It is a strengthening and an ability to come to the God who made us with our lives, with our weakness, with our sadness.

I think most of us, if we're honest, we think that we can be too sad or too depressed to worship.

And that is not a biblical notion.

We have been formed by an idea that worship is an escape from sadness.

Many of you know.

That Melissa and I lost our first son after six days.

If you don't know that, you have questions, we're happy to chat about that.

But here's what I want to say.

In that season, we didn't miss a Sunday of worship.

And I'm not saying you have to not miss any.

And it's not a boast, it really isn't.

We felt an utter pull and a draw to continue to gather with God's people.

That doesn't mean that we didn't like spiral into dark places.

That doesn't mean that we weren't overwhelmed with deep sadness.

But part of the reason that we were drawn to worship is because, yes, I knew we would sing songs of praise.

But I also knew that we would sing psalms of lament, songs of lament.

I knew that we would sing songs for the weak and the weary.

For those who are burdened by their sin, those who are burdened by their grief, those who are burdened by the sadness and the hardship of life, that there would be songs that express that.

And so for that reason, one of the reasons, I mean, you see in our bullets in every week, you might wonder, what is this song of comfort?

I mean, yeah, we want to sort of usually kind of start and end on a high note, sing a song that you can kind of tap your foot to.

There is an emotional element, but we also are committed to singing a song of comfort and not comfy.

Comfort there is not comfy.

The original meaning of the word comfort was centered on strengthening.

In the old prayer book, you have words, you have the comfortable words after your confession of sin.

These aren't comfy words, they're words of strengthening that lift you up.

And so we're committed to singing songs of comfort, not comfy songs, but songs that acknowledge, give you voice.

I feel weak, I feel weary, I feel sad, I feel overwhelmed, and I can say all of these things in worship to God.

I don't hide from them, I take them to Him.

It's important.

It's really important.

And this is what Paul's getting at when he says in Romans 12, we are commanded to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep.

We're called to always do both.

How do you do that?

Worship is meant to form that in us.

So we sing songs that give voice where we need strengthening.

You know, Bonhoeffer talks about the Psalms and he shows us how beautiful the whole book of Psalms, the Psalter, is.

And he says the Psalms belong to the community more than they belong to the individual.

And he goes on to explain what he means.

He says, only in the whole body of Christ does the whole Psalter become a reality, a whole which is in which the individual can never fully comprehend on his own.

Even if a verse or a psalm is not one's own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship.

Do you see what he's saying?

We can't feel every emotion at the same time.

And so if you are joyful and you read a psalm of lament, you might say, That's not where I am, but you still read it because somebody else is there.

And if you were down in the dust and you come to a psalm that says, I praise you, for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made, you might say, I don't really feel that right now.

No, but somebody else does.

Likewise, the psalms that we sing ought to reflect this reality.

The gift of worship is that we come together, expressing the whole range of human existence, the whole range of human experience, and we offer that to God together.

And as we offer that to God together, he forms us and enables us to meet one another together.

And you might wonder if God really cared about our sorrow, why wouldn't he just remove it when we come to him?

You know, David tells us in Psalm 56, you have kept account of my tossings.

Put my tears in your bottle.

Are they not in your book?

He keeps record.

Not just an intellectual record.

I know you feel sad, but that must be very difficult for you.

Our God is not like that.

When the Son of God takes on flesh, he does so, doesn't he?

In order to put on grief, our grief?

Doesn't he do that in order to put on our weakness?

Doesn't he endure and experience the whole range of human experience in a fallen world?

Yes, he does.

Isaiah tells us that he was a man of sorrows.

That he was acquainted with grief.

John tells us when his friend Lazarus dies, he wept.

He didn't get a little misty.

He didn't leak a little bit, he blubbered.

Because he felt sadness for what it is and what it does.

He knew what it was to be sad, to be acquainted with grief.

And he knew sadness so that he could ultimately take all of it upon himself on the cross.

Sorrow from death, sorrow from sickness, sorrow from divorce, sorrow from our sins that we can't seem to shake.

The psalmist says in verse 10, as with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me.

While they say to me all the day long, where is your God?

And as Jesus was enduring deadly wounds in his bones on the cross, didn't people say the same kind of thing to him?

Matthew 27 tells us, they said, If you're the Son of God, come down from that cross.

He trusts in God.

Let God deliver him now if God desires to.

Jesus had to be mocked.

He had to endure his own deadly wound, not for himself, not for himself, but for us.

He cares deeply about our sorrow and our sadness and our weakness and the days that feel utterly hopeless.

He experienced all of this and takes it upon himself so that by his resurrection he can guarantee that we get the world we were created for in the first place.

A world of glory.

That John records for us in Revelation 21, where Jesus Himself wipes away every tear from our eyes.

Every tear, and he knows every tear.

He's kept track of them.

Neither mourning nor crying, can you imagine?

Nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

And the Christian hope is that this day is inevitable.

By Jesus' resurrection from the dead, he has promised it, he has guaranteed it for us.

And we are encouraged, comforted, strengthened to fix our eyes on that day.

And we fix our eyes on that day by continuing to come to Jesus with our weakness.

By continuing to come to Jesus honestly about what makes us sad.

And how that messes with our ego because I must be more fragile and weak than I thought I could be.

If this makes me sad, yes, we are far more fragile.

Jesus has a heart for the weak and the vulnerable, and you are weak and vulnerable, so Jesus has a heart for you.

We get to come to God with our sadness because we have a hope that is stronger and more fixed than anything we can imagine, even if there are Sundays or Mondays or Tuesdays where that hope is a borrowed hope.

Where that joy is a borrowed joy, where you have to borrow it from the people next to you.

But I tell you, if you feel like that, the sadness that they get to borrow from you is just as much a gift.

It really is.

We get to borrow joy, anchored in a reality that one day sadness will be no more.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven.

You were so kind and you were so gracious.

And we confess that there are times where we can't see it through the blur of our own tears and our eyes.

But we ask that you would meet us again and again.

We ask that you would strengthen us to come before you in our weakness.

We ask that you would use those sitting around us to believe for us, to rejoice for us, to have hope for us when we don't feel that capacity in ourselves, and that by your Spirit you would always meet us again with Jesus.

And we pray this in his name.

Amen.