we're going to look at Psalm 13 this morning so if you turn there in your Bibles probably keep your psalm books open and that would work okay but get a nonmetrical translation when you open up your Bible so Psalm 13 and having just sung it let's read it again It always sounds different when you sing it and read it. This is the Word of God. It reads as follows. 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 day long? How long shall my enemies 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'm shaken. But I have trusted in your steadfast love, and my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. And I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me." From the first two verses to the last two verses, there's quite a bit of movement from what seems hopeless to what seems confirmed hopefulness. something of a petition right in the center. Well, let's think of Psalm 13 this morning. Let's see if we cannot apply it to our own lives or at least equip ourselves for what we know will happen in our lives, and that is times of distress, times of hopelessness. I want to begin this morning Thinking about running. Now there are probably a few of us here who enjoy the idea of running. Maybe even look forward to running. Maybe want to do it a couple times a day. But the rest of us would rather avoid that all the time. And there's a funny thing happens when you run, and maybe it happens in any sporting event, but I've found it especially in running, because in other sporting events, you have something to distract you, right? But in things like running and swimming, it's just exertion. That's all you got. And no matter how committed you are, no matter how prepared you are, at some point during that race, whether it's two laps or 20 miles, you get to a place where you're so tired, You're so mentally worn out, you're exhausted, and you start convincing yourself to stop. You start saying, this is really too much. Why would anyone do this? I've run very well today. I'm quite content with this time. I can't think that I would really be upset if I just stopped now. A reasonable person would stop now and be happy with this. The feelings and the reasons you come up with are very convincing because they accord with that somewhat nauseous, wanting to die feeling that you're having at the time. But you know what? No one ever gets to the end of the race and says, why didn't I listen to myself? Why didn't I stop? No one gets to the end of the race and says, I'm really disappointed that I didn't go with my gut there mid-race. But plenty of people get to the end and say, yeah, I really got to push through that. I'm glad I fought back, glad I argued with myself, glad I pushed through the hardship. And you know what, the first time you make a run like that and you have those feelings, you're caught off guard by them. You don't know, you didn't know they were coming. You knew it might be hard, but you didn't expect the overwhelming and absolutely convincing sensation that any fool would stop. And maybe you stopped. But each consecutive race, when you know you're going to hit that wall, and you know it's coming, and you know full well you're going to get to a point, no matter what your state of mind or your state of physical capability is, that you're going to hit a place where once again you're going to be convincing yourself that you should just stop and give up. And even when you know it's coming, you still have to fight and push through. And you still have to fight that battle all over again. Psalm 13 maybe feels very strange this morning. Because that whole set of thoughts you had mid-race, you rarely have. No one trains for a race and says, I'm gonna stop at like the three-quarter mark. I'm gonna give it all I have and then give up just before the end. The only time you have those thoughts is when they are overwhelming and convincing in the middle of the fight. And so maybe if we're not there this morning, Psalm 13 is gonna feel somewhat remote. But Psalm 13, is going to be exactly what you're feeling at some point, or at a number of points in your life. And when you have those feelings, they are going to feel altogether convincing. So again, Psalm 13 begins, how long, O Lord, will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? This is where it starts. If we think back on last few Psalms, and I realize we're spending like three months here, so I'm not asking you to remember a whole lot, but let me call to mind a few things. Psalm 11 was that whole, everyone's telling me to flee like a bird to my mountain. The foundations of society are falling apart, there's nothing you can do, just flee, run, save yourself. That's Psalm 11. Psalm 13, the wicked are bending the bow in the night. Or rather, Psalm 12. The godly are gone from the race of men. That's how David describes the situation in Psalm 12. The godly are gone. The battle seems lost, hopeless, pointless. Psalm 13. How long, O Lord, will you forget me? So you get the theme that's going on here. In this portion of the Psalter, we have the conflict of the kingdom. We're being introduced to the fact that there is a way that leads to death, and there is a way that leads to life, and these two forces, the seat of the woman, the seat of the serpent, are not just, you know, sort of on opposite sides of the aisle. They are in all-out war. And here is the way the war feels sometimes. Here's the way the war feels within us at times. The first point we're gonna make this morning from the text is simply, very simply, maybe obviously, there are times when you're gonna feel this way. There are times when you have felt this way, even if the memory you look back on with somewhat rose-colored glasses and it doesn't seem as if it was that bad. There are times when you will feel this way. How long, O Lord, will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and of sorrow in my heart all day? How long will my enemies be exalted over me? In our limited vision, In our inability to see the mind of God, there will be times when we are saying to ourselves, God has forgotten me. I can make no other sense of this situation. There will be times when we feel that if God is good, and we know he is, he must have forgotten, or he must have changed his mind about me. And at this point, we need to remember God's words to Job. We're gonna remember God's words to Job over and over again when we come to these points in the Psalms. As Job lines out what seems like a very legitimate set of difficult circumstances, and as he seems to have a very difficult time making any sense of them, but he knows God is good, asking for answers that any one of us would feel are very reasonable to ask. God says, where were you? Do you know how? Can you? God speaks as the one who set the stars in place, who laid the foundations of the earth, the one who can do all things, not only the things that seem difficult for us, like taming wild beasts, but the ones who can hold the stars in orbit and keep the sun's nuclear furnace going and sustain all life on earth. And God says, can you do that? Because if you can do this, then I'm confident that you can understand my purposes in your life and the life of everyone else. And Job simply falls down in his face and says, you're right, Lord, I'm not you, and I would make a mess of this if I were. You are God, and you are good, and I can trust your good hands who have done all things well to make sense even of this. As Paul reminds us in Romans 8.28, God works all things together for good, for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. So will there be times when we feel like saying, and we do say, how long, O Lord, will you forget me? Forever? How long must you hide your face from me? How long will I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? These times come. These times come sometimes with great regularity. These times seem to recur. And these times feel overwhelming. And it's during these times that we ask ourselves, can I entrust myself to the Lord even when I'm feeling this way? Even when everything in me seems to want to do, to give up, to walk away. During these times, can we speak back to ourselves truth of who God is? The question is not, does God love his people? The question isn't even, Does God do the greatest good for them? The question we need to ask is, do we love God? And we've been asking our children that as adults since the day they could speak. But of course, that's a question we know that our children will have to continue asking themselves at every stage of life. Because it's during these times that we find out what the state of our heart is, When we can't see from our vantage point that the benefits of continuing to love God outweigh the costs. When from where we stand, it looks like it costs a lot more to continue loving and trusting the Lord than the benefit that we currently feel that is accruing to us. That's when we find out, do I love the Lord? Now, we know that the answer, do the benefits outweigh the costs, is always yes. And even when it feels as if we are having much more required of us than we're getting in return, we know that is a feeling that is not rooted in reality and it's not truth. But when we feel that way, when all evidence seems to indicate that, Can we still say, we love you, Lord, and not just, I love the benefits I used to recognize I was getting? Think of how often we are given these words in scripture. Psalm 12 says, the word of the Lord is pure, refined seven times. Even when things seem to be going sideways, can we say God's promises are true? Can we say like Job, though he slay me, I will hope in him, yet I will argue my case to his face. It's an interesting set of words, of statements put right next to each other. Though he slay me, I will hope in him, but I will argue my case to his face. And I think this is that dynamic we see here in Psalm 13. How long will you forget me, forever? Yet I will hope in him. Can we say like Joel, Think about this as I read it. Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit beyond the vines, nor the produce of the olive fail. and the fields yield no food, and the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God the Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like that of a deer's. He makes me to tread on high places. These are the times when we find out what God already knows, what is in our heart. So these times come, these times will come. There's this strange dynamic, we'll talk about it in a little bit, where, you know, when we're not in these times, it always feels a little bit much when we hear words like this. Like if you were running alongside your buddy and he's running the race, you know, you met him at a certain point and he's saying, look, I think I'm gonna quit. I'm thinking of dropping out. I mean, sure, I've been training for nine months, but I think I'm really happy with this. You would say, what are you kidding? You're not gonna stop now. You don't get any credit for not finishing the race. You've worked too hard for this. No, no, no, I'm serious. This is hurting too much. From that perspective, on the outside, you're saying, what, you've gotta be, I can't believe I'm hearing these words coming out of your mouth. But from the perspective of the man running, the one, or the woman running, the one who's in the middle of it, it's overwhelming. This is where we find out what is in our hearts. So we can prepare ourselves, right? We can say, Lord, we know that these difficult times will come. We know that this is part of the Christian experience. We do not have the sort of facile and misinformed faith that excludes hopelessness or difficulty from our Christian experience. We acknowledge, we will load into our understanding of following Jesus difficult times, hardships, persecutions, And maybe even times when we can't see that there's much benefit in continuing. We will know that that can and often is part of the valley of the shadow of death that we will experience as Christians. Because you can see how difficult it would be if this was not something that you thought could happen to a Christian. How difficult would it be when it happened? How hard would it be to continue on if you found out for the first time that hopelessness might be a part of the Christian experience for a time in that dark day. And yet, this isn't a lesson that we can learn in the book, is it? There are some things that book learning doesn't teach you very well. So we can add in today or remind ourselves today that this type of darkness can be a part of our Christian experience for a time and still be completely left breathless when that day comes. Because we don't learn this lesson in the book. We learn this lesson in the crucible. We learn this lesson when David's words don't seem a little overdramatic, but they seem like what's been going through our heads and coming off our lips for weeks. How long, oh Lord, will you forget me? 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 day? How long will my enemies be exalted over me? There's a little bit of repetition going on there, isn't there? How long? How long? How long? How long? And the indication seems to be like it can't be much longer, right, Lord? It can't possibly be much longer, right, Lord? Well, next point I want to make is simply that we need to take counsel in the word. And this is difficult because when we are experiencing dark times, we don't want to take counsel in the word. We might even say we don't want to take good counsel. Like the type of counsel we want to take is the sort of person who says, yeah, I'm going through it too. and then gives us bad counsel. I don't know why, but misery loves what? Misery loves company. We like to hear from people who are gonna tell us that all of our bad decisions in our discomfort are the same decisions they're making, and they're gonna say things like, well, sometimes, you know, you just gotta do what you gotta do. And they're gonna say things like, well, you know how it is, and you're gonna nod and go, yeah. but that's not the sort of counsel and comfort we need. In fact, it's not counsel or comfort. We also need to learn how to get out of our own heads sometimes and speak back to what's going on in our head. And this is maybe the hardest battle. Listen to verse two. How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemies be exalted over me? Verse two seems to have quite a bit of a variation of interpretation, not because it's all that difficult, but because what is said in the beginning of verse two, how long must I take counsel in my soul and the second part, and have sorrow in my heart all day long, don't seem to be, in the minds of many, like a matched pair. And so then they try to torture the sentence grammatically to try to make it match up more. But sometimes it seems like commentators know a lot about grammar and not enough about life. So tell me, Do you sometimes need to quit taking counsel from your own thoughts? Does the counsel you sometimes give yourself over and over and over again lead to you having sorrow in your heart all day long? And I think the answer is yes. How long must I take counsel in my soul? Maybe we could even put it this way, how long must I continue torturing myself? One of the things that we need to learn to do is speak back to ourselves, speak truth back to ourselves. I've said this before. Hopefully it's not something I say too often, but it's so true. That fruit of the spirit, that self-control that we long for, a big part of that is taking control of your thoughts and speaking truth. David is feeling cut off from God. David is feeling cut off from wise counsel. He's feeling cut off from the instruction he knows he needs from the Lord. He doesn't seem to be able to find much hope. And he's not alone in this. When we get alone with our thoughts, too often it is not a blessing. Too often the result is not one in which we find solutions. It results in us being psyched out, moving towards hopelessness. We play the problems over and over in our head. We relive and play out the worst case scenarios, the things that feel like inevitabilities but aren't. We play out the future situations in which the most possible pain is likely to happen. And we relive our past hurts over and over. and over again. I spent three days hearing that dog bite through my finger. Every thought I had for three days led back to the same thought. And then I got goosebumps, and then I had to physically shake myself, and then I had to move on to what I was actually doing. And that was, in microcosm, a reminder to me of how unproductive our thoughts can be, how prone we are to go back to what hurts and just sit in it like a dog returning. We need others to speak truth to us. We need the Word of God to be our meditation. We need a meditation upon His attributes to be the thought that begins moving through our heads more naturally. But this takes work, this takes the spiritual fruit of self-control, and then it takes more work, and more practice, and more commitment to that. And it's difficult, and it makes you feel hopeless when you're losing the game. It takes putting off unprofitable thinking and putting on profitable lines of thought. It takes putting off the thought that I see no way out of this and putting on the thought I know the Lord will deliver me, there must be a way out of this. That's a difficult thought to think more than once. Doesn't mean thinking happy thoughts because the truth is lots of profitable thoughts aren't happy thoughts. Lots of profitable thoughts are painful thoughts. But there's a difference between an unprofitable painful thought and a profitable one. There's a difference between just sticking your tongue in an ulcer because it hurts and scrubbing out the wound and getting a Band-Aid. We need to stop rehearsing the same hurts, counting our losses till we're out of our mind. Stop reliving the moments of loss. We need to quit being our own prophets of doom, because we're really good at that. We need to be thinking about what our responsibility before God is, and we need to be about the business of entrusting ourselves, even when it feels like this. That runner who runs, he hits the wall and he has to start reminding himself, no, I trained too long to quit. No, I want this too much. I need to remind myself of how much I want the goal. And when we hit this wall, we need to talk back profitable truth to ourselves. Profitable truth is redundant. We're not going to feel better quickly. We're not going to suddenly smile at the end of our thought. Maybe as soon as we get done speaking truth to ourself, our mind wants to go back and we have to actually do it all over again. And we have to continue doing that. a hundred more times in the next hour. We're not going to suddenly feel better, but we are going to start stepping off of that spiraling downward trend of doom and stepping onto the elevator of the very character, nature, and work of the Lord God of the heavens. We're going to be stepping firmly onto that stone that is our eternal rock. We're going to be standing upon who we know God is and what he has said he will do. And even when we can't seem to feel it or see it, we will be standing and we will be lifted by the Lord. We will be reminded that the one who tells oceans this far and no farther is certainly the one who can sort out the difficult family situation you're currently going through, the difficult marriage, the difficult behavior of your children, the difficulty of a corporate bureaucracy that you have to live in, or whatever seemingly insurmountable issues. None of these are difficult for the Lord God Almighty. Well, Hmm. There it is. Charles Spurgeon writes this. I thought it was helpful. I thought it was nice. We are all prone to play most on the worst strings. We set up monumental stones over the graves of our joys, but who thinks of erecting monuments of praise for mercies received? We write four books of lamentations and only one book of canticles. And we're far more at home in wailing out the misery than in chanting the Te Deum. The songs we like to sing to ourselves are the ones we hate. And the words we have difficult putting on are the ones that give us hope. I don't know why that is. I think it's because we're sinful and broken. But if we focus on what the Lord has done, then we no longer have to remain taking counsel from our minds that leads to sorrow in our heart all day long. I want us to look for a moment at the way in which David here speaks of Christ and the way that helps us in the middle of a hardship. So in verse three, or the third point we're gonna make is simply that as we see Christ go through the valley of the shadow of death, we can follow him with hope. So think about these words. 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 day? How long shall my enemies be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God. Lift 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 and my heart shall rejoice in your salvation and I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me." Have you ever gotten counsel from someone and at the end of it you go, yeah, but you don't have any of these problems. You write them off. Yeah, I would be able to do that too if my life were like yours, right? And you write them off. You don't really consider the counsel. You consider what you think you know of the person, and you write off the counsel. If you knew what I knew, you would think what you said was foolish, too. And maybe we're inclined to read this, and as we start to apply it to Christ, say, yeah, well, if my life were like yours, I mean, when did Jesus ever need to sing this sort of thing? When was Jesus ever hopeless? When did the one who spoke all things into being ever worry about how it would turn out? When did the one who is the source of all purpose ever feel as if there was no purpose to anything? And our answer needs to be a reminder of the fact that these songs were written to speak of Christ. These songs were written to help us as a secondary. And as David writes them, he's writing words that apply to his situation loosely, but look forward to the situation of Christ, our high priest, who is tempted in all ways like us, yet without sin, who suffered in all ways, we might say, much worse than us, yet without sin, who felt the hopelessness of hell much more keenly, having been there. having endured it, like us, yet without sin. We need to remember that David speaks as the messianic forerunner. We need to remember that as David speaks, he speaks of Christ. We need to remember that the covenant God made with David was the highest point of redemptive history prior to Christ. We learn more in God's covenant with David about the coming Messiah than at any other point that David and what was given to David was sufficient for 600 years of pointing the way to the coming Messiah. And as David writes here, he doesn't just write of his own hopeless time, he writes of the coming and greater King, the Lord Jesus. And as Jesus endured this, He not only shows us how we are to act when we endure suffering, but He gives us confidence of knowing that the Lord does save, the Lord does keep His promises, and because the Lord kept His promise to His Son, raised Him up, declaring Him to be the Son of God with power as He raised Him from the dead, as He provided for Him in all of His hopeless times, That is not just the example, but it is the means of our salvation. We will absolutely come through this victoriously. The Lord will absolutely overrule in every situation because the Lord has kept his promise to the Lord Jesus. Jesus cries out. Consider me and save me. Jesus cries out as the son of man who has been raised up in power. Jesus says, give me strength, keep your holy one from corruption or I will sleep the sleep of death. Jesus says, give light to my eyes or my enemies will boast over me. And throughout the ages, From the time of Isaiah and before, down through the time of Christ, when people passed by and said, he saved others, he cannot save himself. If he is the son of God and if the Lord takes pleasure in him, let him come down off the cross that we may believe. And as down through the ages, people have mocked and spat and said, follow the God that fails, bow down to the one who died. And as Christ cries out, the Lord answered him. And as you cry out, you have confidence the Lord will answer. This needs to be the counsel of our minds. This needs to be the song that we play in our heads. Consider me and answer me, O Lord, my God. Give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death. Lest my enemies say I have prevailed over him. Lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. And as we sing that, we have confidence because the Lord has kept his promise. Because of what Christ has done, we will overcome. So let me shift slightly. We've already said as we focus on Christ, we see not only an example of how to endure in difficult times, but also we see the one that is our surety that we will overcome, we will push through in difficult times. Let's think of the reasons that's true. Why do we have the confidence of asking in faith no matter how difficult the situation is? And I think the first one we can think about is the fact that Christ shows us that even in death itself, we are not overcome and we are not conquered. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We've mentioned it before, but have you ever had the experience of reading the Psalms and thinking, David's a little overdramatic? Like every time we hear David sing about something, he's ready to die. He's going to die if something doesn't change. And we think, I've known people like this. We've known people who talk this way before, you know, pop quizzes in the fourth grade. But the reality is, that we felt like this legitimately or illegitimately at plenty of times in our life. Maybe it was a marriage issue. Maybe it was a children issue. Maybe it was a health issue. But there were times whenever circumstances that really were difficult or just seemed difficult had us overwhelmed, and we felt at the breaking point, at the point of death. And during those times, we need to remember During times when we're saying to ourself, I can't do this much longer, I can't take much more of this, if this continues, I'm not sure how much more I can take. During those times, we need to remember that the Lord doesn't just promise to deliver us, but even on through death itself, he will be our constant guide. Now that doesn't feel like a big comfort at first, But it really is. When we play the worst case scenario game, when we say, okay, what's the worst that could happen? And then we utter that out loud for our own ears to hear. Oh, I could lose the house and I could die. When we play that out loud for ourselves and make ourselves hear it, we have the comfort of knowing that the Lord didn't just save Jesus from death, he saved him through death. And He won't just save you from death, but He'll save you through death. And nothing can shake. Houses can be shaken, health can be shaken, but you have inherited a kingdom that cannot be shaken, that is secured eternally in heaven for you. Jesus. the one who sang this song most truly, the one who gives it to you and says, I found this helpful when I was going through a difficult time. I think you'll find it helpful too. And since the Lord answered me when I sang this, I have every confidence he'll answer you. So here, you can borrow this. You can borrow this. And we not only sing it and find it helpful like we would find a Hallmark card helpful, like, oh, that's nice, I like that. But we find it helpful knowing that when the Lord Jesus sang this, he was saved, and in his salvation, as my head, as my forerunner, as my husband, as my king, as the mighty warrior that he is, I know, I'm not just hopeful, I'm not just confident, but I know the Lord will answer me. who is represented in and trusting in Christ. And so we get to the last two verses, but I have trusted in your steadfast love and my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. And I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. And we think, how did we get here from the first two verses? How do we go from how long will you forget me? Will you forget me forever? To the place where we're saying, but I have trusted and I will rejoice and I will sing because you have been really good to me. It seems odd to start a sentence with, will you in fact be forgetting me forever, and end with, I will sing because you have dealt bountifully with me. If I came home and my wife started a sentence with, will you continue forgetting me forever, and ended with, but I will continue singing to you because you have dealt so well with me, I would think that it was a confusing day. But what we have in this psalm is a confession of the way we will often feel and the words we can utter to the Lord. When he says, cast all your anxieties upon me, he doesn't mean just cast, just cast those sinless concerns. He means cast all your fears and anxieties, all of your weakness and brokenness on him because his shoulders are broad enough to carry it and he is saving you from all of it and has paid for it all through Christ. And so we can say things to the Lord like verses 1, 2, and 3. And it doesn't have to be a confession of faithlessness or an act of breaking faith with the Lord or a statement of disgust. But rather, it is a mission of what the Lord is already telling us we will go through and feel at times. And as we're going through that, as we're acknowledging that to ourselves, as we're acknowledging to the Lord, as we're saying, I've hit the wall once again, as you told me I would and I can't believe how difficult it is. We can even make that a statement of faith as we bring it to the Lord and as we set it upon Him and we take all of those feelings and all of the circumstances and say, yet I will sing of your salvation because I have put my trust in you and you have dealt well with me. And when we say you have dealt well with me, we don't just mean When I take an average of the Lord's dealings with me over the last 10 to 15 years, you have done more good for me than bad for me. Of course, that would be true if we could find a way to actually run that, but we don't just mean that. We don't even mean since the day I was born, you have generally been better to me than worse. We mean that you have always done well for me. And you have always done well for all your people. And you did well for David, who suffered more than me. And you did well for Christ, who suffered what all humanity deserved. And because you've done all that, I have every confidence that despite the way I'm feeling right now, which is you've forgotten me and I want to give up, that you will continue dealing bountifully with me, because it's what you do. It's who you are, so let me sing. Let's pray and sing right now.