Mourning Into Dancing: Psalm 30 (SEEN SERIES)

Tears, regret, and long nights can make it feel like you’re sliding into a pit with no way out. I walk through Psalm 30 with you as a song of praise that tells the truth about suffering and still refuses to give up on joy, showing the God who heals, delivers, and restores life in the darkest places.

I look back at the women we’ve been studying and the ways God keeps meeting people who feel unseen or stuck: the hunched woman in Luke 13, Hagar, the bleeding woman, Leah, and Elizabeth. The thread running through every story is hope for healing and a reason to speak praise out loud, not just privately. God meets us in lament, restores what feels dead, and turns mourning into dancing.

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Transcript

Vignettes Of Women Restored

Teresa Whiting 0:00

I see the hunched woman saying the same thing. I see Hagar being seen by God. I see the bleeding woman being healed and saying, God, you've taken my mourning and you've turned it into dancing. I see Leah and Elizabeth. He has brought fruit where there was barrenness. He's brought life into the dark places. He's brought soul satisfaction to those who have unfulfilled longings. God is still doing this today. He's doing this all around us and hopefully in us. Hi, friend. Welcome to Beauty in the Brokenness, where we have honest conversations about the Bible, our real life struggles, and the hope God brings for healing. I'm your host, Teresa Whiting, an author, Bible teacher, and trauma-informed life coach, but mostly a friend and fellow struggler. No matter who you are or where you've been, I'm inviting you to encounter the God who is still creating beauty right in the midst of your brokenness. Psalm 30 is a song of praise to the God who answers our prayers. He lifts us from the depths of despair and transforms our weeping into rejoicing. The Lord is our hope, our healer, and our deliverer. We see this so vividly in the life of the hunched woman that we've been studying from Luke chapter 13. I want to read Psalm 30, and then we'll talk about the beautiful things that it teaches us about the heart of God. So I'm going to read from the ESV. I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol. You restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit. Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name, for his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. As for me, I said in my prosperity, I shall never be moved. By your favor, O Lord, you made my mountains stand strong. You hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy. What profit is there in my death if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me. O Lord, be my helper. You have turned for me my morning into dancing. You have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness. O that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever. So I read it in the ESV, but as we go through the study notes, I'm going to be quoting from the NIV. I love to use different versions whenever I'm studying scripture. And I highly recommend that you use apps like Bible Hub or Blue Letter Bible or Logo Software where you can kind of compare and contrast different versions of scripture. When we look at this psalm, it's easy to see how the hunched woman could have related to this, these verses about Lord, you lifted me, you didn't allow my enemies to gloat over me. You brought me up. You made me stand firm. I can see how she might have experienced some of the things in this psalm, but I also can see those things in my own life. One of the phrases that really resonated with me was where the psalmist said, You lifted me out of the depths, you spared me from going down into the pit. I I always talk about my life before I knew Christ. I felt like I was on this path of self-destruction. I was kind of just going down a slimy pit. And I feel like God reached down and rescued me. He pulled me out of that pit. Whenever I share my rescue story, I always love to share some of these verses from Ephesians chapter 2, which say, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. That's my story. That's our story. We were dead in our sins, and God made us alive in Christ. And that's something I don't want to forget. I don't want to get so far along in my Christian life that I forget what God rescued me from. But not just then, not just when he first saved me, but on a regular basis, God lifts me up. He pulls me out of the depths of despair, of regret, of sorrow and pain. And he also, when I am in those places, he laments with me. He sits in the dark with me. One of my favorite verses is verse 7, where it says, Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm. But when you hid your face, I was dismayed. That idea of being favored, it was it's God's delight, his pleasure in us. The psalmist is saying, Lord, by your goodness, by your delight, by your good pleasure, you make me stand strong and firm like a mountain. But when you hide your face from me, when we're not in that close face-to-face fellowship, it says, I was dismayed. That word means terrified, disturbed, alarmed. And I wonder, as I think about my own life and as you think about your life, when you are face to face with God, when when he is delighting in you, in and you're delighting in his presence, there is a strength and a power there. But when we're not face to face with him, are we even troubled? Do we even know that we're not face to face with him? Or are we too busy, too distracted, too engrossed in our own lives to realize that we have pulled away from him, or that it's been a while since we've sat and spoken with him. For the psalmist, it's God's presence that brought safety, security, strength, power. I also notice a lot of contrasts in this psalm. Talks about God's anger lasting for a moment, but his favor lasting for a lifetime. Verse 11 says, You turned my wailing into dancing, or my mourning, my weeping into dancing. You removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy. Lament has been a big part of the scene series, and we have talked about lament and how God welcomes our lament, and how lament is supposed to be a language that we're very familiar with. But it doesn't always stay as lament. That word, actually, where he says, You have turned my wailing into dancing, that can be translated, you have turned my lament or my mourning into dancing. The Hebrews use dancing in their celebration, in their praise. It's a picture of celebration and joy and freedom. It says, You've put off my sackcloth. Sackcloth was this coarse, loose clothing. Think of like um burlap, right? That's kind of what sackcloth is. They would wear that when they were lamenting. And it says, You have, in the original language, it says, you have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness. So, in other words, God has taken that dry, hard, itchy thing and clothed me instead with joy, gladness, rejoicing. Okay, I know I did this already with Psalm 71, but this is a different psalm. And one of the things I love to do, as you know, is look at what is the psalmist doing in this psalm and what is God doing. And we see the psalmist saying, I will exalt, I called to you, I said, I cried, I sing your praise, I won't be silent. The psalmist infers that he has been weeping and rejoicing, that he's been mourning and dancing, that he's spoken praise and he's been silenced. But when we look at God, look at the things that God does for the psalmist and for you and I. You lifted me out of the depths, you didn't let my enemies gloat over you, you healed me, you brought me up from the realm of the dead, you spared me from going down to the pit, you favored me, you hid your face, you turned my wailing into dancing, you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy. We can look at that list and we can say, Yes, there are things on that list that I can specifically say God has done for me. My story is not exactly like the psalmist, it's not exactly like yours, but we have a lot in common. All of us at one time were dead, and God has made us alive in Christ. Maybe that's where you are today. Maybe we're you're in a place of celebrating all the goodness God has done to you. Or maybe you're in the place of verses eight and nine, where you're saying, To you, Lord, I call, to the Lord I cried for mercy. What is gained if I'm silenced, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Verse 10, hear, Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. This psalm kind of hits it all. Whether you are mourning or whether you are celebrating and dancing, there are things that we can all relate to. That's why I love the psalms so much. They hit the whole gamut of our emotions, even in one psalm. It's up, it's down, it's mourning, it's celebrating. And as the psalm closes, you see this celebration, you see this, the psalmist coming at a place of saying, God, look at what you've done. Look what you've done in my life. I I see the woman, the hunched woman, saying the same thing. I see Hagar being seen by God. I see the bleeding woman being healed and saying, God, you've taken my morning and you've turned it into dancing. I see Leah and Elizabeth, and I see my sisters, the ones who I've done this study with, the ones who I know have walked through deep, dark waters, and God has restored. He has brought fruit where there was barrenness. He's brought life into the dark places, he's brought soul satisfaction to those who have unfulfilled longings. God is still doing this today. He's doing this all around us and hopefully in us. And so the psalm closes with that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever. This is such a fitting psalm to have toward the end of the scene series because we can look back over the women that we've studied. We can look back, hopefully, prayerfully, at our own lives, and we can see God's healing, his deliverance, his presence in the midst of the darkness. We can see him walking beside us, being face to face with us, carrying us through hard times. And then we can speak that praise aloud. We can shout it, we can sing it, we can share it with one another. One of the things I hope you'll do is you'll get this study and you'll do it with a group of friends, and together you can share the goodness of God. And whether it's this study or something else. Sometimes we go to church on Sundays and we have opportunities to communally sing praise to God. We have opportunities to lift his name with our voices, with songs of praise. And that is a beautiful opportunity. I want to encourage you to be a part of that. But when the service is over, I want to encourage you to find somebody around you and tell them about the goodness of God in your own life. And like the psalmist, let's speak and sing his praise forever. Thanks for hanging out with me today on Beauty and the Brokenness. To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWiting.com slash episode dash one four eight to find all the show notes. To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWiting.com slash episode dash one four nine to find all the show notes. If you're interested in being kept up to date on what's happening with scene, maybe being on my prayer team and helping the launch of this book, I have a link for that in the show notes. I would love for you to join the scene team. In closing, I want to leave you with this prayer from numbers 6, 24 to 26. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.