Hope for a Hurting Heart Lamentations 3:1-26 (Oct 16) Dan Meyer

Bow your heads with me.

Heavenly Father, Lord, we do pray that your spirit would be with us this morning.

Oh God.

Lord, would you move in this place?

Oh Lord, as you already have.

Oh God, as we open up your word, oh Lord, that you have blessed us with God, that you have chosen to preserve God, that you would have your people learn from that your spirit, oh God, would guide us through so that our hearts may be changed, that we would know you more, oh God, Lord, as we do that this morning, Lord, would you be glorified, oh God?

Would we be changed?

Would we become more like Jesus Christ, oh God?

Would our ears be open?

Would our hearts be softened to be ministered to by your Holy Spirit, oh God?

We need you in this place, oh Lord.

We are desperate for you.

God, if you're not here, Lord, we might as well go home.

So, Lord, would you be here?

God, would you be moving?

We ask all of this in the mighty name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

You may take your seats.

Well, it was five years ago, almost to the day, uh that I felt led by the Lord to walk the streets, downtown Newmarket, and pray and uh kind of get an idea of the landscape of churches in this town.

I grew up in Newmarket and uh I have a massive heart for this town.

And um my heart was, my dream was, my prayer was that the Lord would plant a God-glorifying vertical worship church that is about the Word of God.

And five years later, I've had a little bit to help here and there, which has been amazing, but the Lord has done the work.

And so that's a glory story.

Your church is a glory story.

I've been praying for a long time, and people have been praying longer than I have, and for the better part of a decade, those prayers have been going up to God, and He is answering those prayers.

Well, my name is Daniel Meyer, and I have the privilege of serving on staff at uh the other campus.

All right, so so good to be with you this morning.

We are in Lamentations.

So if you want to flip over there in your Bibles, Lamentations, it's a little book kind of wedged right between Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Um we're gonna be in chapter three, we're gonna be dealing with verses one through twenty six.

So we have a lot of scripture to get through this morning, so we're gonna be good students of God's word.

And our message today is entitled this Hope for a Hurting Heart.

Hope for a hurting heart.

Have you ever had a hurting heart?

I know I have.

I know I have.

Well, if you have gone through something where you're thinking, oh Lord, I it doesn't even look like tomorrow is going to come.

That's how bad it hurts.

Circumstance in your life has has made it so that it hurts so bad, the pain is so deep that you don't even want to see tomorrow.

Well, this message is for you.

If you're sitting next to someone who is going through so much pain right now, this message is for you.

One day, I'm sure of it, if you're human, at some point you will go through a pain in your life that hurts so bad.

And so this message is for you.

But the message of, sorry, the the the reality of hurt is only overcome with the reality of hope.

And so don't be fooled.

We're gonna be talking a lot about hurt today, but there is hope at the end of the tunnel.

We are moving towards hope.

If we don't have hope, we are lost.

Without hope in God and in Jesus Christ, our our life will just spiral into depression and eventually into an eternity separated from God.

We need hope.

And in the middle of this little book, Lamentations, that Jeremiah wrote, we see this great, amazing look into the heart of who God is, and thus it will give us hope.

So I want to show you uh just where we're going today, and uh we're gonna have three points.

And the first point is gonna deal with the first uh 20 verses, all right?

And so it's really gonna deal with the hurt that we're facing and what Jeremiah went through as he was writing this uh lamentation.

The second point is really the source of hope as we see the character of who our God is dealing with verses 21 through 24, and the and the last point is just on those last two verses, 25 and 26, and uh that's really gonna apply the entire text and message, so stick with me.

We will apply this whole thing.

Alongside this whole message, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a biography of this great missionary from the 19th century, and I think just talking about what he went through and going alongside what's going on in Lamentations, hopefully that will help us understand a little bit more and relate a little bit more to the text.

His name was John G.

Patton.

Maybe you've heard of him.

He was a Scottish missionary who did a couple of missionary journeys out to the New Hebride Islands, which is now Vanuatu.

And uh he went there only 19 years after two other missionaries, John Williams and James Harris, went there.

Um, but when John William and James Harris went there, within five minutes of being on the island, they were clubbed to death and eaten by the cannibalistic tribes on the island.

So you can see that uh Patton is going into a very grim situation, but he feels strongly called by God to go and serve the people on this island and and loved ones.

Be sure that there is hurt, but there is so much hope.

At the end of his life, he had, through the gospel of Jesus Christ, converted 100% of the people on the island he was serving on.

A hundred percent of the people that were cannibalistic savages were turned to the reality and their hearts were changed to love Jesus Christ.

And if you were to go to these islands today, uh 85% of the people would say they're Christian, and a large majority of that evangelical Christians.

The Lord has done a mighty work.

And if you want to learn more about him, he has an autobiography, you can go figure that out as well.

But this message is about hope, but we gotta get through the hurt, all right?

So turn in your Bibles.

Lamentations chapter 3, um, verses 1 through 26.

Lamentations 3 · chapter mention

But this is our first hope, our first point.

It's this my heart hurts and life is hard.

My heart hurts and life is hard.

The Bible makes no apologies for the brutally way it expresses the truths about the human experience.

The Bible is brutally honest about this.

Life is hard.

Listen, there will be trouble.

Maybe you've just come out of that season.

Maybe you're going through it right now, and I can tell you, if you haven't, it's probably coming.

Not every day is filled with sunshine and rainbows.

Jeremiah starts this chapter by saying this I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.

You see, Jeremiah is made up of five different acrostic poems, and it's split up into five chapters.

And one, two, uh, four, and five are really about the nation of Israel.

But chapter three is a personal lament.

He's talking about himself.

This is a very personal, raw, emotional passage of Scripture that really opens up the very depths of the trouble in the person's heart.

This is as bad as it gets.

There's no point in beating around the bush.

I could stand up here and tell you that if you would just put your faith in Jesus Christ, everything in your life from this point forward will be fantastic.

It's just not true.

You will see eternity one day, but tomorrow still might have pain.

Life is hard.

Jeremiah walks through these twenty first verses here in the third chapter, and what I see is four symptoms of a hurting heart.

Four symptoms of a hurting heart.

And in the verses two to six, I see the first symptom, and maybe you can relate to this.

And the first symptom is that you're sitting in darkness.

Let's read from verse two.

It says this He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.

Surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away.

He has broken my bones.

He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation.

He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.

John Patton and his pregnant wife Mary arrived on one of the new Haberdine Islands on November 5th, 1858.

He was only 33 years old.

And on February 12th, 1959, exactly 130 years before I was born, his son was born.

You're gonna try to figure out how old I am now, but his son was born, and uh and uh everything seemed to be going very well.

Um a few weeks later, he uh writes about this moment.

He says, this in a moment, altogether unexpectedly, she died on March 3rd.

To crown my sorrows and complete my loneliness, the dear baby boy, whom we had named after her father, Peter Robert Robson, was taken from me after one week's sickness on the 20th of March.

Let those who have ever passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me.

As for all others, it would be more than vain to try and paint my sorrows.

He goes on, he says, I felt her loss beyond all conception or description in that dark land.

It was very difficult to be resigned, left alone, and in sorrowful circumstances.

Have you ever felt this way?

Have you ever felt like Jeremiah did, as he says, My bones have been broken, I am sitting in darkness, there's no light or patent who traveled half the world away to follow what the Lord has called him to do.

And within three months of being there, his wife died.

His baby boy, newborn, died.

And there he is alone on an island, surrounded by people who hate him, digging two graves, one much smaller than the other, next to his little mission house.

Have you ever sat in darkness?

Have you felt that pain where there's just no way of getting out?

I've sat there.

I've been there.

Me and my wife, we we've gone through two miscarriages.

Some people have been through way worse, I know, but sitting in that moment, the pain with our first child, the pain, not being able to even console my wife, not knowing when this hurt will go away, helpless circumstance of life.

Hard, terrible.

And then for our third child, same same thing.

Hard pain.

Have you lost a spouse?

Maybe you're sitting here and you come in and you're smiling, and someone says, How are you doing?

You say, Great, but really down deep you're hurting.

And that's okay.

You've lost a child, maybe a good friend, and it's difficult.

Sitting in darkness.

So much hurt, but there is hope.

But the second symptom of a hurting heart I see here is that you feel trapped.

Have you felt this way?

Feeling trapped.

In verse 7 through 9, Jeremiah goes on and says this He has walled me about so that I cannot escape.

He has made my chains heavy.

Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.

He has blocked my ways with blocks of stone.

He has made my paths crooked.

You see, Jeremiah, he's he's in so much distress.

He says, It's like there's stone walls around me.

It's like a stone maze, and every turn I take, it just gets more confusing, and I and I can't get out.

Have you felt this way?

That you're praying to God, but it just doesn't seem to be answered.

You feel trapped.

John Patton went through this as well.

He writes this he says, One morning at daybreak I found my house surrounded by armed men, and a chief intimated that they had assembled to take my life.

Seeing that I was entirely in their hands, I knelt down and gave myself away, body and soul, to the Lord Jesus for what seemed to be the last time on earth.

You see, is that is that you right now?

Maybe, maybe not literally, that there's a bunch of people surrounding your house with guns trying to kill you, but it sure does feel that way.

It sure does feel like it.

Feels like everyone's against you.

You're you're trapped.

There's no escape, there's no tomorrow.

Is the burden you're carrying so great that it feels like the chains around your neck are heavy, as Jeremiah says in verse 7.

The third symptom of a hurting heart from verse 10 to 13 is that you feel attacked.

You feel attacked.

You're sitting in darkness, you feel trapped, but you also feel attacked.

And verse 10 says this he is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding.

He turns aside my steps and tore me to pieces.

He has made me desolate.

He bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.

He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver.

Attacked.

Attacked.

Not just trapped, but someone's actively looking to get you.

Patton had this happen to him many times, as you can imagine.

He was on this tribe in the middle of this tribe, and people often would have attempts on his life.

Um, do you have anyone like this in your family who maybe is really opposed to Christianity?

Or maybe you're sitting here right now and you're opposed to Christianity.

Someone dragged you in here and you're willing to sit down.

But and but what happens is whenever something's really bad going on in their life or they're sick, they're like, hey, could you pray to your God for me?

Could you just pray for me?

Right?

Well, this happened a lot to Patton as well.

The people hated him, but whenever someone would get sick in the tribe, they would ask him to come and pray, which is kind of funny.

But of course, he would oblige as a pastor, and his prayers were active and working, and people were being healed, so they would continue to ask him.

Well, this one time he he went to go pray with this gentleman who was apparently sick, but it was an an it was an ambush, it was a trap.

And so he walked into this situation, and the man jumped out from under the covers and with a big dagger put it right up to John Patton's heart.

And he writes this about that moment.

He says, I durst neither move nor speak, except that my heart kept praying to the Lord to spare me, or if it was my time to come to take me home to glory with himself.

There passed a few moments of awful suspense.

My sight went and came.

Not a word had been spoken except to Jesus.

And maybe you feel this way, that there's a dagger up to your heart, and maybe not literally, but it sure does feel like it.

Your spouse has turned on you.

Your children have turned on you.

A good friend that said they would always be there for you just isn't there anymore.

And you feel attacked, you feel hated, you feel like people would rather you not be around.

Well, the fourth thing, the fourth symptom of a hurting heart is found in what I see in verse 14 to 20, and it's being emotionally distraught.

Emotionally distraught.

You can't keep it together.

And this really overlaps all of the other things, but especially here in verse 14, it says, I have become the laughing stock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all the day long.

He has filled me with bitterness, he has sated me with wormwood, he has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes.

My soul is bereft of peace.

I have forgotten what happiness is.

So I say, My endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.

Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.

My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

What I haven't really told you yet is about Patton is that when he was in Scotland before he left, he had a very, very successful ministry.

Uh he was teaching five, six, seven hundred people every day.

He had orphanages.

More people were coming to salvation in the Lord in Scotland through his ministry than had happened in decades.

And when he had this calling, he felt this urge to go to these islands half the world away, people thought he was crazy.

Maybe rightly so.

People said, How could you do this?

Look at the work that the Lord is doing here.

How could you go?

But he had such a calling.

And in fact, one person named uh Mr.

Dixon, an older gentleman, uh, probably one of his mentors, he said this to uh uh uh John Patton.

He said, The cannibals, you will be eaten by cannibals.

It's probably a good warning because only 19 years earlier, two other missionaries were eaten by cannibals.

This was recent in the memory.

This wasn't, you know, today where we don't have that as much on earth in most places, but it was it was then, it was in 1858, and this was a real problem.

He said, You'll be eaten by cannibals.

But uh John Patton, a godly man, very godly man, and and very um kind of funny too, witty, right?

He had good remarks.

If you ever read him, you'll enjoy it, I'm sure.

But he said this back to Mr.

Dixon.

He said, Mr.

Dixon, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms.

I confess to you that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by cannibals or by worms.

And in the great day my resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.

See, truth and humor can go together, all right?

So use that.

And after four years of being on the island in his first uh stint there, he he went and traveled through Australia and then back to Scotland, kind of trumpeting the idea and uh trying to kind of get some more support for missionaries to go to these islands that he saw the need.

But you can imagine the response he got on his return.

You can imagine what people were saying to him.

You can imagine the conversation he had with his in-laws as he returned.

Our daughter is dead because of you.

Our grandson isn't here now because of you.

Why would you take our pregnant daughter half the world away to this tribe?

To these islands?

He had other people that were saying similar things to him.

He writes this, he says, Conscious that I had to the last inch of my life tried to do my duty, I left all results in the hands of my only Lord, and all circumstances to his unerring judgment.

Hard things were also occasionally spoken to my face.

One dear friend, for instance, said, You should have not left.

You should have stood at the post of duty till you fell.

It would have been to your honor and better for the cause of the mission.

Do you see?

People are like, Why would you go there?

It would have been better if you just stayed here, did your work, and then died.

Now you're dishonorable.

It would have been honoring to you if you'd stayed.

And John doing the work that the Lord had called him to do is being now the laughing stock of all people, just like Jeremiah was.

Notice here, look in look in verse 17 or 18.

You notice that in verse 18, it's the first time that Jeremiah actually mentions the name of the Lord.

Do you see that there?

It's Yahweh, but in your Bibles it's probably translated Lord in all capitals, right?

You see that there?

Well, that's the first time in this whole chapter that Jeremiah actually mentions the name of the Lord.

He goes 17 verses without mentioning God's name.

This shows the the abandonment he is feeling.

This shows how distant he is from God as he's wrestling through all of his hurt and all of his trouble and all of his pain.

Have you ever felt like this, so far from God that you can't even bring yourself to utter his name?

And maybe it's not that dramatic uh for you, but maybe it looks more like this.

You're hurt, you're offended, you're in pain, and you feel the call of the Holy Spirit leading you to prayer, and you go, Oh no, no, I'll do that later.

No, no, no, not right now.

No, I can't pray.

I don't even have anything to say to God right now.

Or Or the Holy Spirit is calling you to his word that you would read and study it, and you're like, no, no, no, I don't have time.

I'll just sleep instead.

You see, you see, the joy will come when we see that God is using these things, or even placing these things in our life so that we would love him more.

The joy will come when we see that God is using these things, or even placing these things in our life, so that we would love him more, that we would depend on him more.

And this leads us to our second point.

Loved ones, there's been a lot of hurt.

We're going through a lot, things are tough, but there's hope.

There's hope.

And the second point is this: my heart hurts and God is my great portion.

My heart hurts and God is my great portion.

This is where hope comes from.

Let's look in our Bibles and read this together because the next four verses here have inspired, encouraged the people of God for thousands of years.

And here we are this morning able to read this together.

In verse 21, it says this, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.

Great is your faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion, says my soul.

Therefore I will hope in him.

Therefore, I will hope in him.

And this is where hope comes from.

This is the great truth about our God, the unchanging truth that he is great.

Look at the text, look at the text.

In verse 21, it says this, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

Whenever you see the word but in scripture, just go, thank you, Lord, for the word but.

Alright?

Because verses 1 through 20 are hard.

Verses 1 through 20 are bringing out all the pain and the misery and the suffering in my life.

And verse 21 starts out with this.

But.

You see that, loved ones?

There's hope.

All of this pain, but this I will call to mind.

And therefore I will have hope.

You see, what I think Jeremiah is saying here is that the key to unlocking the door of hope in your life is remembering who your God is.

The key to unlocking the door of hope in your life is remembering who your God is.

This is the secret of this whole text.

Big problems in life are only overcome by a bigger view of God.

Big problems in life, all your pain, all your suffering, all the circumstance, is only overcome by a bigger view of who your God is.

The battle for hope in your life is not fought in your circumstance.

It's fought in your mind.

The battle for hope in your life, loved ones, is not fought in your circumstance.

You can't change what the world will do.

But it's fought in your mind.

God's character has to be the foundation of our hope as we recall who He is.

John Patton wrote this, and what a great testimony he has.

He said this Whatever trials have befallen me in my earthly pilgrimage, I have never had the trial of doubting that perhaps, after all, Jesus had made some mistake.

No, my blessed Lord Jesus makes no mistake.

When we all see his meaning, we shall then understand what we now can only trustfully believe, that all is well.

Best for us, best for the cause most dear to us, best for the good of others and the glory of God.

Do you see this?

Do you see?

Jesus makes no mistake.

The pain you're going through, the hurt, the affliction, the circumstance, the sin of others, or the sin of yourself, God wastes none of it.

He's made no mistake.

This will be for the best for you, the cause most dear to you, the good of others, and for the glory of God.

A mentor of mine once said to me, Daniel, uh, if you can remember these three things, or if whenever you're teaching, get the people you're teaching to remember these three things, you will be able to get through anything in life.

And I was like, okay, what are they?

And he said this.

Number one, if you can remember this, that God is sovereign.

He's over all things, he's in control.

God is sovereign.

Number two, that God is good.

He is sovereign and he is also good.

And then number three, that God loves you.

If you can imprint those three truths in the back of your mind that any circumstance you're walking through, that you can call to mind those truths about who our God is, you can get through anything.

Because he controls all things.

He is good, and he loves you.

Let's walk through these verses here.

They are so incredible.

In verse 22, we see this: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

Some of us here need to hear that more than others.

Some of us need to hear that again and again and again.

Listen, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

Jeremiah wrote this before Christ came to earth and died for his church.

And we can see that Jeremiah was right that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases as Israel was disobedient, as Israel went astray.

No, no, no, there is a Messiah coming, and he came.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

Jesus died on a cross.

He called people to himself, and he said, Trust in me, believe in me for the salvation of your life, and I will take care of your sins.

I will die for your sins, and you can be with the Father for all eternity through me and me alone, is what Jesus said.

And if you were to trust in Jesus right now, listen, not all your trouble will go away, but you will have a hope of eternity.

You will have a hope and you will have the Holy Spirit working in you and for you.

I wrote down six things as I meditated on the love of the Lord never ceasing and the implications of that.

And if you'd like to write these down, feel free.

Just six observations in my own life.

And the first one was this is that since the love of the Lord never ceases, it is not contingent on our behavior.

The love of the Lord is not contingent on our behavior.

He doesn't love you because you came to church this morning.

And he won't stop loving you because you're at the cottage next weekend.

He doesn't love you because you do good.

He loves you because of what Christ did.

The second thing is this that his love never ceases, so it's not wavering in its degrees.

He doesn't love you more or less as the days go by.

It's never wavering.

He loves you perfectly through Jesus Christ.

Always.

Number three, that he will finish in you what he has started.

If he has saved you, his love never ceases.

He will continually save you and you will be with him in glory.

We learn that in Philippians 1, 6.

Number four, your your sin is crushed by the love of God for all eternity.

Just another implication of his love forever, that everything you've done is crushed by the love of God for all eternity.

Number five, you are not a foster kid in the kingdom of God.

You are adopted.

It's not like you get to a certain age and God just lets you go.

You don't become an adult in the kingdom of God and and you're no longer part of his family.

No, no, no.

You're adopted.

The love of the Lord never ceases.

And number six, we can be sure that God will not change in the future.

We can have hope for tomorrow.

We can know all the things we just went through that they will apply tomorrow because the love of the Lord never ceases.

Jeremiah goes on.

He says this he says, His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.

The love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.

Let that sink in.

Let that truth be so true for you today.

Today was a hard day.

Just wait till tomorrow morning.

His mercies are new every morning.

You mess up again tomorrow, there's a fresh bag of mercy waiting for you the next day.

The mercy of God never ends.

It is new every morning.

Mercy is the concept of withholding punishment.

So we have sinned against a holy God and we deserve punishment, but in his mercy, he is withholding his punishment.

Instead of punishment, he is giving us grace.

That is mercy.

And you can think about it this way as well.

If you had like a sin credit card, you guys got a lot of experience with credit cards?

Alright?

Some more than others.

But if you had a sin credit card, we've maxed that thing out.

We've been swiping all day, every day, for our whole lives, and it's and it's at its limit and it's incruing interest.

And God comes by and he says, It's forgiven.

You don't have to pay it.

And then the next day you go and you start swiping that card again, but his mercies are new every morning.

You don't have to pay it.

Jesus paid off your sin credit card debt.

See, God's mercies at time are difficult to see.

And God's mercy means that the end game of all affliction in your life is mercy.

All the pain we're going through is leading to God's mercy if you are a child of God.

We have to ask ourselves, do you believe this?

Do you believe, and this is this is so fundamental to your to your walk and your maturity in Christ, do you believe that God uses affliction and pain to show his mercy?

Do you believe that God uses affliction and pain to show his mercy?

It's a really important statement because the entire truth of the gospel hinges on this.

Consider this for a moment.

God ordained that the most heinous of injustices would take place, that Jesus Christ would die on a cross.

Jesus Christ, holy, perfect, never sinned, blameless, without any deceit in his mouth, would go to the cross and die.

He didn't deserve it.

It was injustice.

He was not guilty, yet he went to it.

But look, but look at the reward.

God uses the affliction.

He uses the pain to bring the biggest mercy the world has ever seen.

He took the greatest sin in human history to give the greatest mercy the world has ever seen.

And how can we not relate to our Savior in this?

Do you think that the Lord can take your pain and your misery and your suffering and turn it into mercy?

Yes, he can.

His mercies are new every single morning.

I find that, I think I'm just reading the text and I feel like Jeremiah is just welling up inside as he gets to this part.

He's talking about the love of God never ceasing, his mercy's never ending.

And he just kind of bursts out and he says, Great is your faithfulness.

Oh God, great is your faithfulness.

He sees that even though there is verses 1 through 20, all of that pain, all of that misery that he attributes to God.

He says through 1 through 20 that he has done this to me.

He's talking about God, that he has not answered my prayer, that he is a lion in waiting.

He's talking about God, yet he is using all of these things to show his faithfulness.

He's using all of this to show his promises are true, that his love never ceases, his mercies are new every morning.

Oh God, great is your faithfulness.

I wrote down seven things why in my life I've seen God's true faithfulness.

And you can write these down if you wish.

I'll go through them quickly here.

Number one, just as a prayer.

Number one, God, you have shown you are faithful by not allowing me to enjoy my sin forever, but showing me that there is great joy in you.

Great, oh God, is your faithfulness.

Secondly, God, you are faithful.

You have shown me that you are faithful because even though I change and I mess up at times, God, you are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Thirdly, you have shown me you are faithful because you have a plan that is greater than I can understand.

Number four, you have shown that you are faithful because you are working all things together for good for those who love you.

Romans 8, 28.

God, you are faithful.

God, you are faithful.

You have shown your faithfulness is great because you have disciplined me and not allowed me to live continually in my ignorance.

God, you are faithful.

Number six, you have shown you are faithful because you've always done what you said you would do.

God, you are faithful.

Number seven, you have shown you are faithful because you comfort my hurting heart even when I don't deserve it.

God, you are surely faithful.

Great is your faithfulness.

Well, this brings us to the last two verses of this text.

And the third point is this is that my heart hurts, and I will wait.

And I will wait.

Verse 25 and 26 say this the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

You see this?

You see this?

Just a couple of points of application here.

Um, in verse 25, favor is given to the one who waits.

Do you see that in the text, loved ones?

You see that?

It says the Lord is good to those who wait for him.

So there is favor to the one who waits.

If you're waiting on the Lord, he is good to you and to the soul who seeks him.

But the question kind of arises, I think, in our minds is like, okay, well, what is waiting?

Like, what does that what does that look like?

Uh just last week in small groups, someone said, you know, I trust in God, I believe in all his promises, but it's that waiting piece, you know?

Like, I keep praying, but like when, you know, when's this gonna happen?

And and I said, well, the Lord's probably just teaching you how to wait more on him.

But what is waiting on the Lord?

What does it look like?

Anybody go to Sunday school here?

Nobody went to Sunday school?

Not this morning.

Obviously, you're in this.

When you were a kid, did you guys go to Sunday school?

You remember that song?

Right?

You finish it for me, alright?

Read your Bible, pray every day, annual.

Okay, so like five of you went to Sunday school.

Let's do this again.

Read your Bible, pray every day, annual.

You just copied the last people, you didn't actually know it.

That's okay.

That's okay.

But isn't that so true?

Let us never graduate from that truth.

How waiting on the Lord and how we will grow is being in prayer, being in the Word.

Let the Lord show you his faithfulness through his word, through his spirit.

But I think the answer of what does waiting look like in our lives is answered in verse 26.

Alright, so we gotta be really good students of God's word here, okay?

So this one verse, verse 26, when I'm preparing for this message, took me four hours just on this one verse.

I'm not trying to brag, it's just because I'm not really good at Hebrew, alright?

So it took me like four hours just to get through this one verse, and especially one word in this verse.

It just was very difficult.

So I'm gonna take the next four hours and show you from God's word.

Uh, just we'll get the Coles Notes version and uh we'll go through this quickly.

You guys are a lot smarter than me, so we can get through this a little bit quicker.

Um it is good.

Let's read verse 26.

Look in your Bibles.

It says this it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

You know, like that's very similar to the first verse, right?

Just kind of added in quietly there.

But it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

So what I did is I wanted to see, okay, it says wait quietly.

I wanted to look at the Hebrew and understand what that word meant, because we have the same word wait, right, in verse 25.

So they should be the, you think it'd be the same word, but it's not the same word.

The translators have had to translate it as wait, but it's not the same word that is in verse 25.

And then while I was studying this and I was reading other translations, like the King James Version, for instance, it says, I'm paraphrasing, but it says more something like this.

It says, It is good that one would both hope and wait for the salvation of the Lord.

And then I'm like, well, where'd you get that word from?

Like, where's hope in this text?

And I want that word, and I'm trying to figure out what that means.

And so what I did is I looked at the Hebrew again, and I'm like, yeah, there is two words there.

There's there's two words, and so did they miss that word, or or what is it?

Then I'm like, okay, well, um, we also see hope in our text, right?

In verse 21 and 24, you see that there, all right?

So then I went to those words.

I said, okay, hope.

Different word in verse 26.

Different word twice.

Hope and wait, or just wait quietly, or not sure.

And and as I studied, I could understand why the translators did this, because it is kind of confusing.

Um so we have two words there, and and and the first word can really be translated in some way as wait, and then the second word can also be translated wait quietly.

So the ESV, they just said, okay, well, let's just do wait quietly.

They're just repeating themselves a bit.

KJV, they're like, oh, it's more hope, so let's put hope and wait.

That's okay too.

But what I found is that that first word is used elsewhere in scripture, and even by Jeremiah in the book of Jeremiah.

And Jeremiah uses it in a very interesting way.

He uses it to describe a temptuous storm.

And the word is is literally whirling, like spinning, like whirling, like a dance move, or like a spin, uh, like as a storm as it spins around, right?

And I'm like, okay, and then it's also used in scripture, like in the Psalms as I was brought forth in iniquity, talking about like child labor.

And you're like, okay, I can understand a storm and labor being similar in description.

But how can I reconcile that in this text?

Why is that word there?

It is good that one should whirl whirling and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord, and uh this is why it took me so long.

I'm sitting there trying to figure this out, and and it kind of hit me.

And I and I think what Jeremiah is saying here is that amongst verses 1 through 20, the pain, the sitting in darkness, feeling trapped, feeling attacked, emotionally distraught, so much is going wrong.

My life is a wreck, I can hardly even speak to God.

I am in so much pain amongst all of that, as your heart is whirling, as your heart is like a temptuous storm, as it feels like the pains of labor.

It's it's so difficult right now.

And amongst all of that, we have two choices.

We can either try to fix the situation ourselves and sit in self-pity because of it, or we can wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Do you see that?

Do you see that?

Our hearts may be turning and spinning.

And our initial response might be, I should say something.

I should fix this.

I should tell them what's what.

And the Lord says, no.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Will we wait quietly through our hurt?

Will we trust in God?

Will we see that his love never ceases, that his mercies never come to an end, and that his faithfulness is great?

I'm going to leave you with one more quote from John Patton, and then I'm going to pray, and the worship team is going to come up and lead us in one more song.

But John Patton said this right near the end of his autobiography.

He said, I pity from the depth of my heart every human being who, from for whatever reason, is a stranger to the most ennobling, uplifting, and consoling experience that can come to the soul of a man.

Blessed communion with the Father of our spirits through the gracious union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Would you stand with me and we'll pray?

Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you, O God, that you do not leave us, Lord, that you do not forsake us, God.

Lord, that right now there's hurting people in this room going through things that they don't even want to talk about.

Lord, but you know.

You know the depths of their heart.

You know their circumstance, oh God.

You know what you're leading them through, God, and how you will show your mercy to them, oh God.

Lord, we thank you, Lord, that you are a God of grace, God.

You are a God of mercy, that your love never ceases.

Lord, that you are wonderful.

God, that you are incredible.

And Lord, that your faithfulness is so, so great.

God, would you be with us now as we allow the Holy Spirit to convict us, God, as we worship your great name in praise.

Oh Lord, would you be glorified?

Be with us, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.