Psalm 51: Psalms of Lament

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Continuing unto this day as we're reflecting through the Psalms. Secondly, and we can better know God in ourselves. Right? We talked about Calvin, that we're growing in the knowledge of God in ourselves, and it's mutually dependent on one another. We're growing together. We're understanding who we are in light of God. We're understanding who God is as our creator. So through the Psalms, we better know ourselves and God. And finally, we commune with God. We commune with God. And we talked about communion is koinonia, fellowship with God. And we commune with God in two ways, right? We know God, we experience God, we encounter God. And secondly, we participate with Him in His mission through prayer. So Psalms is our great tutor, really, in teaching us how to pray. We also talked about that these Psalms were the seedbed for the Protestant Reformation. As Luther was spending month after month, week after week, through years of reflecting in the Psalms, that's where the beginnings of the Reformation came about. Luther was meditating, teaching, reflecting in the Psalms, and I proposed they can also be the seedbed of our reformation. A lot of times we all are wanting a renewal, a reformation, a revival personally. The Psalms can bring that, refreshing that renewal, encouraging us to be closer to God, with intimacy with God, learning about God. Then last week, I just gave us three ways that we can how we can read the Bible as we're meditating on the Psalms. I just mentioned that, you know, I've we've all been who whoever's been in church, the pastor always tells you, hey, we need to read the Bible. Very rarely, in my experience, did he say, here's how to read the Bible. Um, so I just gave us three ways that through the Psalms we can learn how we read the Bible. The first being we posture our heart. We don't just dive in and start reading through, okay, I'm gonna memorize these things, moving from one verse to the next, try to figure out, understand what's happening. No, before I even begin, I posture my heart, asking God, God, enlighten your scripture that I may know you. I'm posturing my heart to realize, recognize I am about to commune with the living God. This is a holy moment. This isn't just a time of academic exercise. No, this is a holy moment to encounter God. So before we even begin, right, we posture ourselves, God, here I am. Speak to me, my creator, my Lord, my savior. Secondly, we meditate on the words. We talked about meditate being muttering, right? Or or it's it's chewing the cut where cows will chew grass, swallow it, they regurgitate it back, chew on it some more, they they swallow it, they regurgitate it back. It's that whole concept. Meditating is murmuring scripture, right? We're continually reflecting on it, not just moving beyond it. No, I'm we're internalizing it, digesting it, meditating on the words, finally savoring God. Savoring is enjoying something slowly, deeply, attentively. I don't know about you, but for me, oftentimes, especially if we're in a Bible plan, we need to get from one point to the next. To slow down and just sit with a passage, to sit with a word, to sit with the section, meditating over it is the point. We're so that we can savor God. We're enjoying it slowly, deeply, attentively, allowing its goodness to speak to us. More than simply experiencing something, it's lingering over it with delight. And I gave the picture that of Mary versus Martha, right? That we can even approach the Bible like Martha. We have we have an agenda, we have things we've got to get done, right? Things we need to learn, things we need to understand, or we can be like Mary. I'm just here to sit with God. I want to sit at the feet of Jesus, enjoying Jesus, savoring Jesus. I proposed. If you learn these three things, you will never find time in the Bible, a waste of time or a chore. I feel like it will always be refreshing, renewing. If you're willing to sit long enough, savor long enough, meditate long enough, the word of God will change you, speak to you, transform you. It will be a lifelong journey of enjoying God through the Bible. We can learn that through the Psalms. And so we're going through seven weeks in the Psalms, and the encouragement is that we're reading three Psalms each day, just three. Three Psalms each day. We'll do a psalm every Sunday. And today we're talking about Psalms of Lament. Psalms of Lament. I mentioned last week that laments are the most psalms, most kind of psalms in the Psalm, in the book of Psalms. Uh there's at least 67 Psalms of Lament. Some people say there's even up to 80, depending on how they categorize them. So most of the Psalms are actually lamenting. Lamenting in English traces back to a Latin word referring to the sound of grief, or it's a howling. The basic meaning in Hebrew is to beat one's chest, and it's referring to a ritual of mourning the dead, and extending to gestures of cries and grief. And the word in both the Hebrew and in the Latin is revealing something profound. It's describing not merely sadness, right? It's it's sadness expressed, it's embodied, it's vocalized, it's a physical act of bringing our sadness open before God and community. We are lamenting, right, vocally, verbally, embodying our expression of sadness. There's 42 Psalms of lament that are individual focused. There's also 16 at least that are corporate, community focused. And though the majority of petitions are by individuals approaching God with particular needs. There are several that are actually corporate, which is important. We don't just lament individually in our own life. No, there are times we come together corporately and we lament collectively. For I don't know about you for you, but for me, I think for many of us, lamenting is a challenge, right? Lamenting is a challenge. I was reading a lot about emotions and emotional health this last week. Um, one book I was reading, the whole introduction, the first couple chapters, he was trying to argue that we are in an era of feeling. An era of feeling where we're defined by our feelings. We are who we feel we are. We go where our feelings tell us to go. We move based on where we feel like we should move. We we cut off friendships based on what we feel like would be best. His whole point is that we are living in this era where we're defined, dictated, directed by our feelings, talking more about emotions than we ever have before. But it's somehow in that context, in our context, where we're so obsessed with emotion and feeling and following our feelings. We've largely lost the practice of lamenting with God. Was his argument. We've lost the practice of lamenting. We're obsessed with emotion. We no longer know how to lament. Screaming our emotions, but not lamenting with God, which leads us to greater dysfunction. There's a guy by the name of Peter Schizero. I mentioned this book before. He popularized this concept through these books called Emotional Healthy Spirituality, and then he wrote a series with similar titles. And his whole point of basically the whole premise of all these books, emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. For a lot of people, this was groundbreaking. A lot of pastors, emotional health, spiritual maturity are inseparable. It's not possible, in his view, to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. He combines them. He says if we're mature in Christ, then we're emotionally mature as well. And this in these books, he has a concept where, especially in the church, he says we use God to run from God. And by that, he's saying that we have spiritual activities, whether it's going to church, even serving, we're going to read the Bible. Without we do all the action of being in church so that we don't have to do the hard work, the painful work of examining our own internal brokenness unto emotional maturity. So he's calling us to emotional health through his books. I mean, he throws around this word emotional health a lot. I don't know about you, but again, for me, emotional health is a word that I've used a lot, but I've never actually sat through until this last week and try to wrestle with what is emotional health? What actually is emotional maturity? I don't know. There's one side, you know, we could be like the think that it's it's kind of like the Lego movie. It's the Aurelian movie of deep philosophy and insight into human psychology where Emmett is so brainwashed by the culture of positivity that he has you no unique personality. I don't know if you've seen the movie, but the theme song is everything is awesome. And in the theme song, right, he's buying this $37 coffee and he loves it because everything is awesome, including the $37 coffee. When Emmett's co-workers ask him, you know, ask about him, they describe him as blank or ordinary or the guy who liked everything that everyone else liked. Whatever he was told to like is what he liked, always positive. Sometimes I think when you know, when we think of what is potentially emotional health, we can have that idea that we're just always positive, everything's always awesome. The $37 coffee is awesome. We live in this state of over-positivity. For me, when I was reflecting prior to this last week, I would have defined emotional health as just understanding and expressing emotions. It's just simply that. Understanding your emotions and expressing emotions. The more I thought about it, the more I read what other people were saying about it, where I say, no, that's actually not emotionally healthy. You can you can kind of function in this and still be very emotionally unhealthy. So I read through there's there's four different ways that the church leaders have defined emotional health through the years, and I'll give four of them. First one is a holy calm. First one is a holy calm. Jonathan Edwards described emotional health as a holy calm. We just celebrated the 250th anniversary of America. Before that, right, Jonathan Edwards was a pastor in colonial America, and he was integral in this first great awakening. I find it fascinating that every time it seems like July 4th comes around, this new debate comes up of hey, are we a Christian nation? Were we founded on any Christian principles at all? And all the media does everything they can to say, no, it's definitely not true. We're entirely secular, founded by totally secular people, right? But what they don't uh ever seem to acknowledge is that the seedbed of the colonial culture really heavily was influenced by the first great awakening. People repenting unto God, coming to repent of their sins, know God, experience God. And it was this religious fervor, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, that was driving a lot of the culture prior to the founding fathers signing the declaration. So then people will move on and will say, since it's the 250, I just thought I mentioned this, but people will move on to say, well, okay, but the founding fathers, they were definitely not orthodox Christians, right? They had some very unorthodox views and beliefs. And it's true, probably most of them, maybe half of them, did have unorthodox views. But the founding philosophers, particularly John Locke, was a deeply devoted follower of Jesus. And his philosophy wasn't just a mere philosophy, it was a theology that he was writing, that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So he was writing a theology that these founding fathers adapted. And so a lot of the founding of this country was based in Christian theology, based in repentance. Jonathan Edwards was in the middle of this great awakening, and it was wild. The stories are just absurd, right? And it kind of divided the church in some ways into what they called old lights and new lights. The old lights were seeing kind of this religious fervor in churches of people being emotionally overwhelmed and excited and just burdened and crying and wailing in the midst of church. And the old lights were saying, Well, this is way too much. This is emotionalism. This is not, this is disorder. This is not orderly. This is this is uncomfortable. The new lights were pressing into this revival, and particularly George Whitfield, calling people to be born again. You need to be born again where you experientially know the living God. Jonathan Edwards, though he was a new light, he also tried to somewhat sit in the middle. And he he developed what he what he thought emotional health was of a holy calm, a holy calm. And he divided that there are good affections towards God, and that our heart is full of these emotions, full of love, full of passion, full of joy, full of affection. And it's it encompasses everything within us that we're full of emotion, that's healthy affection. There's also passions, though, that might be sudden or violent or erratic emotional spikes, flashes of anger or waves of panic or superficial hype. Passions for him were reactive temporarily, and so he believed that we should maintain holy affections, but in a calm where we are controlled, where there's an inner peace, where no matter what is happening circumstantially, our our passion, our great affections remain steadfast. For him, this was emotional health, a fullness of affections toward God, while internal peace that maintains through any circumstance. Another version of emotional health through church leaders, what I'd just call the enthusiast or the charismatic. If you've ever been in like a charismatic church, it's kind of an unspoken rule. It seems like the emotionally healthy are the ones that are the most passionate, right? The ones that are spiritually mature are the ones that are most expressive. John Wimber, who founded the Vineyard Movement, he wrote, I'm not interested in manufactured hype or emotionalism, but I am interested in emotional reality. If God has touched your life, changed your heart, healed your brokenness, how can you not respond with emotion? To be emotionally frozen in the presence of a living God is what is truly unnatural. Bill Johnson, who came, who was Beth at Bethel Church in Reading, California, came out of the vineyard movement as well. He wrote similarly, Many have quieted the whisper of the spirit in the name of self-control. But self-control is a fruit of the spirit, not a control of the spirit. When the presence of God comes, it stirs our emotions and demands expression. To suppress that holy enthusiasm out of fear of emotionalism is to shut down the very life of the spirit that is trying to release in our midst. The point is there is some in the church today, especially the Pentecostal movement, they will see spiritual maturity as emotional fervor in the church. And you feel that. If you've ever been in a charismatic church, you feel the pressure. That's just and is partially how they're defining emotional health, spiritual maturity. Another way that church leaders have defined emotional maturity is false self versus true self. False self versus true self. Peter Schizero, who I just mentioned earlier with emotionally healthy spirituality, he follows this line of thinking. It comes largely from Thomas Merton, who is a Catholic monk, American. I mean, Kentucky died in the late 1960s. He defined the false self as this artificial identity that's built entirely on our desire of ego. It's the versions that we're seeking validation, status, comfort, control, believing that it's worth it's defined by external factors. So it's like we're defined by our identity in our job, and in the houses that we can buy, in the cars that we can drive, and how our reputation is in the community. He says these things are external and fragile, and the false self lives in this perpetual state of anxiety, defensiveness, competition. Why? Because they can be changed, taken at any point. Martin argued that the false self can even be highly religious, using morality, church attendance, piety, just another way to feel superior to others. He writes, every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. This is the man I want myself to be, but who cannot exist because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. That's contracts to what he describes as the true self, the hidden reality, our authentic identity as it exists in the mind and love of God, fully present within us, does not need to compete, prove ourselves, it defend its reputation. So he he identifies this struggle of emotional health, of moving from our false self. We're pursuing ideas of ego of what we want to be unto our true self of who we are. He says, in order to become myself, I may I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, moving from performance or the pursuit of an image to vulnerability, to love, moving from self-seeking pride to a hidden service, usefulness. For Thomas Merton, Peter Schizero, many like that. They believe emotional health is understanding and finding contentment in our true self. We no longer are pursuing this ego of our false self. Finally, Calvin kind of writes in this sense that the emotional health is a clear mind leading to an orderly life. A clear mind leading to an orderly life. And the spirit is like lenses that allows us to see and understand and know what the truth of scripture is. So the scripture is so the Spirit of God enlightens Scripture to our mind. It renews our mind. It changes our mind. It changes how we think. As our mind is renewed, as our mind is transformed, then our will, the seat of emotions, desires, and choice, be also becomes transformed, leading to an orderly moral life. He thinks a clear mind leads to a moral life and is focused on self-denial, sobriety, moderation, bearing the cross. Oftentimes in Pentecostal Presbyterian churches, what do we call them? We call them the frozen chosen. The frozen chosen, right? Because the one, they're chosen, and two, they're frozen. And even Presbyterians will joke about it. But for them, if you're understanding where it's coming from, Calvin believed that this orderly controlled life was based in being enlightened by the Spirit of God through the Scripture. And as more we are aligned in our mind, we're going to live an orderly controlled life. Which, so the history of Presbyterianism and the way that we function, if you go into Presbyterian church where it's very orderly controlled, right? It's driven a lot of ways by how Calvin himself was understanding what is spiritual maturity, what is emotional health. So four different ways that church leaders have defined spiritual maturity, emotional health. Jonathan Edwards, a holy cong, right? Our affections are full in our heart. Our passions for God are deep. Our love for God is deep. Constant, but there's an inner peace that is unshakable through any circumstance. It's a holy, calm. The vineyard movement, charismatic movement, focusing on emotional health and spiritual maturity being an expressive one. That as we encounter God, we can fully express all that we are, right? And so in the worship, you might have hour-long worship, even longer, of expressing joy and dancing and celebration. Why? Because they're seeing that as spiritual maturity, that is emotional health. Thomas Merton, the false self-true self, focusing on removing ourselves from our pursuit of ego, unto just identifying who we already are with God, finding peace in that where we can love one another. Or Calvin's, we have a have a clear mind through scripture unto an orderly life. And just kind of rereading a reflection on all these different Christian leaders who've kind of wrote on emotional health. So reflecting, well, what it what do I think? Emotional health is. In all things I can do everything who's through Christ who strengthens me. Paul found the mystery of satisfaction in Christ, spiritual maturity, emotional health. And I believe at least a part of that learning of what is that secret, that mystery that he discovered is learning to lament with God. To lament with God. So what is a lament? Lamenting is expressing, verbalizing to God the pain we are currently experiencing to restore satisfaction in God. I don't know if you know, but life is painful. We are always in this pursuit of to live this life that has no pain. We're always dreaming that at some point, in some way, we'll have enough money, enough status, enough of the things that will protect us, enough comfort that we no longer have pain. And then pain steps in in some way or some form. Life is painful. And there are three ways we often deal with pain. I found one is emotional dumping. We just we'll just complain to everybody, God, anyone who will listen, here is my pain. More maybe for men, we we emotionally deaden. We don't dump, we just deaden. We don't feel anymore, right? We don't want to communicate our pain. We don't want to talk about it, we don't want to think about it, we don't want to know about it. We hide it, we emotionally die. A third one sometimes, people emotionally deconstruct. Emotionally deconstruct how we're dealing with pain, people emotionally dumping, emotionally deadening, emotionally deconstructing. I've known several people, you probably do too, who grew up in a church or even came to the church you know later in life and then left the church. Left the church. A lot of times it starts with emotional deconstructing. Something in their life was a pain point. Either personally, they started experiencing pain. How did they deal with that pain? They began deconstructing. Was any of this really true? Or they experienced a pain in the church, relationally, community. And then that pain, and the way they deal with that pain, they start questioning, doubting. Or they just see a pain in the broader general sense of Christianity around the world. And how do they deal with that person? Again, they start questioning, they start doubting. And I've seen it continually, I've seen people move through it lots of ways. How they're dealing with that pain is deconstructing, it generally leads to the same place of greater confusion, further away from God, more lost. Oftentimes, when I've when I've seen people wrestling through that, wrestling through the pain, I've heard people tell them, I've heard pastors say it. Hey, you know what? God can handle your questions. Question Him, doubt him, deconstruct him, do it. You know, and and I've seen that the outcome generally is the same. We're not capable enough, we're not smart enough to figure out the truth. Instead of emotionally deconstructing, I would encourage us that we should learn the process, the path of lamenting. So, what do we lament? We lament sin, quite simply. And there's sin in three ways. We lament our own sin. We personally have sin that we lament. We lament sins against us. Every human being has had had other sinners in relationships that have caused sin against them. We're lamenting sins against us, and we're lamenting the general effects of sin. But I think the most important thing in lamenting is understanding why we lament, and it's restoring our satisfaction, our joy, our peace in God. Why do we lament? It's not often what we think when we think of lamenting. You know, I know a lot of times when we think, okay, I need to lament, it's like I just need to get it all off my chest. God just needs to know exactly how I feel, right? And I'm gonna tell him all the things that I'm angry about. I think we're missing the point of why we lament. We're not just lamenting to get it off our chest. No, we're restoring satisfaction in God. Or sometimes we might go to a place of lament just as a tool of manipulation. I had a friend who was at a point in life where he was just very frustrated. He was upset, he was he felt stuck in a job that God wouldn't get him out of. He had applied for like hundreds of jobs. And he was like, God, you're not moving me, right? This is this is your fault. He felt stuck in a marriage that he was he felt tricked into. He's like, God, you tricked me into marrying this woman. And he went on and on about how like terrible his life was. And he was just, he he was in he was in a place where he was like, you know what, I'm just I hate my life, I hate life. And he he came to this place um in the church where he was like, you know what, I'm just gonna tell people I don't think God is good anymore. God is good, he's not good, like he's not done anything for me. And the more I talked to him, I'm like, you know, it's kind of like a two-year-old who didn't get the candy and saying, Hey, I hate you, my parents, to try to manipulate him to give them the candy. And I'm like, you're just trying to manipulate God by saying you hate him so that maybe he'll come through with to the things that you want, you know, and that was his version of lament. It was a tool of manipulation. Both of those are not good ways to lament, getting it just getting it off your chest or a tool of manipulation. No, we must understand why we lament. The one book that I read of him saying we've lost the art of lamenting. Part of it is kind of these points of we think of lament is either I just need to get it off my chest and yell at God and tell him all the things I don't like, or we think, hey, maybe this is my tool of manipulation to get you to do what I want you to do. Neither of those work, and neither of those is the point. The point of lamenting is we're restoring our satisfaction in God. There's a reason why most of the Psalms are Psalms of lament, because how we deal with pain oftentimes dictates how we're walking with God. So it's important that we understand how to lament. I'll give us four ways that we lament that seen through the Psalms. And the first is we're acknowledging the pain of sin. We acknowledge the pain of sin. Sin is painful, and we acknowledge it. Psalm 51 starts to the choir master. The Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. You all remember the story? Uriah's out fighting. He's one of the mighty men, one of the 30, the special forces. David definitely knew Uriah. He was like a warrior warrior, right? Oh Uriah's out fighting. David's hanging back in Jerusalem. Sees Uriah's wife, asks the other guys, hey, well, who's that lady up there bathing on the roof? Oh, well, that's Uriah's wife. Still, he said, okay, well, we'll bring her to me. Right? She gets pregnant. He tries to get Uriah to come and and and have sex with her so that so that potentially he could be hidden, covered up, right? Uriah was a Hittite, probably of a different skin color, slightly than David. The baby would have probably come out a little bit different. But you know, he's still trying to cover it up, right? Uriah refused to, right? His men are fighting. He's not gonna, he's not gonna have sex with his wife. His men are still fighting. So David said, okay, well, let's let's get Uriah killed. Put him out on the front. Uriah gets killed. Bathsheba mourns for seven days, then he then she marries David. She has the baby. So probably a year later, David has been been dealing with this, hiding this, right? Nathan comes to him. A year after David first was committing the sin. Nathan, the prophet, went to him, confronted him. David is crying out for mercy. It took him one whole year. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, not because of according to his his his his sentiment of lament or anything else. No, have mercy on me simply because you're merciful, you're loving, you're abundant in mercy. I'm begging, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions. My sin is ever before me. At this point, one year later, now he's saying clearly, okay, I have sinned. It took him a while. We often try to remove sin by either rationalization or denial, or like David did, he tried to hide, continued compounding his sin as he was hiding, trying to rationalize it, even maybe, right? This is a Hittite who converted to become a Jew. Rationalizing. That's why in regeneration, the hardest step, the first step, is admitting our sin. Some sins are very clear, right? Some sins everybody sees, everybody knows. My dad used to always talk about that that alcoholism is one of those things that everybody points to. Says, well, okay, we know you you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. Whereas everybody else can kind of hide, they can rationalize, they can deny, which is why for most of us, the step one of admitting is very hard. Coming to a place of, okay, I sin. And a lot of times it's like sins against us lead us to a place of sin. And so it's us admitting that sin begets sin, and we need to come repentant, weep, and be sorrowful. As Paul writes, you became sorrowful as God intended, and so we're not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance, changing of our mindsets that leads to salvation and leaves no regret. Worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you. What earnestness, what eagerness to clear, to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. So how we are lamenting. We're acknowledging the pain of sin in a place of godly sorrow. It could be our own sin, it could be sins against us, it could be general sins in the world, right? That we're acknowledging in a godly place of sorrow. Secondly, we cling to the truth through our lamentation, our expression of sorrow to God. We're clinging to the truth, not deconstructing the truth. No, we are clinging to the truth. You see this through Psalms of Lament. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words, blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being. You teach me wisdom in the secret heart. In moments of pain, we are all we're most vulnerable to lies about ourselves, to lies about God, to lies about others. So through our lamentation, we cling to the truth. We are vulnerable to a lie in moments of pain. So we must bringing our lamentation, cling to the truth. We lament unto truth. Third, we're growing in our dependence on God. Growing in our dependence on God. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, I shall be water whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Asking God, let me hear it. Let me let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, blot out my iniquities, create in me a clean heart, O God, renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence. Take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, uphold me with the willing spirit. You can hear throughout the most of the laments a growing sense of dependency, a desperation for God, a hope in God, a trust in God. Right? It's not a deconstructing of God. No, it's a dependency of God. A moving from a place of acknowledging the pain of sin and godly sorrow, clinging to the truth, growing in our dependence. Finally, most psalms end in some sense of praise. Most psalms of lament. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. O God, you will not despise. So do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in right sacrifices and burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, then bulls will be offered on your altar. Our lament is leading to a place of praise. Our pain is turning into praise. Our weeping is moving to worship. We talked about three ways that we praise him last week. We're praising his provision, right? His work, what he is actively doing, that he is saving, he is redeeming, right? We can praise his work on the cross. We praise his person. It's not only what he does, it's also who he is. He's mercy, he's loving kindness, he's goodness, he's beauty. So we can praise him just in his person. We praise him in his position, that he is sovereign, he is ruler, he is wise, he is all-powerful, all-knowing, he is profoundly God. We praise him. So, how do we restore our satisfaction in God through the pain of life? How is our weeping turned into worship? We all experience the effects of sin. It could be our own sin, other people's sins, the general brokenness of the world, and that causes pain. It universally creates sadness. So I'd ask you, how do you respond to pain? Is it through emotional deadening? I've done that. I've been there. Man, I'm I'm done. I'm not gonna feel no more. You know, I don't like feeling, it hurts. Emotional dumping, just we might even pay counselors. Hey, I just want someone to listen to me. I have my friend who's a counselor, she's like, at least half people just want someone to listen to them. They don't want any advice at all. You know, I could be playing playing Tetris and they wouldn't care. Emotional dumping or emotional deconstructing. I'm starting to doubt. Like, this doesn't this pain doesn't seem like it would line up with God I would I would guess would be with God. So I'm gonna deconstruct this. Or or or are you growing in your lament, your ability to lament? I'll say it again, our moments of greatest vulnerability to lies. I really believe are in our moments of pain. So when you're hurting, where do you go first? To distraction, to social media, to other people, maybe, or to God? Have your personal wounds drawn you closer to God or pushed you further away? Is your suffering producing bitterness or deeper dependence? Is your lament leading you toward trusting Him or more toward doubt? Another one of my friends, he got Lyme disease in his 40s, owned a business, doing great, rocking and rolling. He thought he was on top of the world. He would go to church and he was a Christian, but he was like, you know, lit, he thought he was just rocking, right? Got Lyme disease. And it took two years for them to figure out what it was. He just, and it came pretty quickly, immediately, all of a sudden, he felt like he was dead. He couldn't get out of bed, he couldn't move, he was thrown up like hundreds of times a day. He was he was like, This is it. I'm dead. Doctors don't know what's wrong with me, and like I can't function, lost his business, all these things. Probably 12 years now. He hadn't worked a day since. Thankfully, he had had enough saved that he's he's been able to live and function. But he he's he's gone 12 years suffering and pain. A lot of times he can't feel his whole body's tingling. The way he describes it is like a massive, like painful life, right? And if you ask him, he'd be like, you know what? But at the same time, I wouldn't give this up for anything. Like, well, why is that? That seems crazy. He's like, Nothing has driven me more to dependence on God, to love for God, to intimacy with God, to desperation for God. I was living in this fake world, but now I've come into the reality of knowing God, my Savior, my lover, my king. He's like, I lost all my good working years, pretty much. You know, I mean, and it the stories just continue on. He's he lives on like an extreme budget now. It's hard to it's hard to retire when you're 45 years old. He lives on like an extreme budget at the moment, lost his business. But he he says he's through the pain, he lamented unto God. And he's like, Man, I have never been more alive, more thankful, more moved, more motivated by the goodness of God. Because my pain led me toward God, not away from God. His testimonies like that are always encouraging. And we all maybe don't have that level of pain where our whole life just stops, right? We can't we can't work anymore. We have to, you know, continually. He's probably gone a hundred doctors all over, like every experimental thing on the internet. He's gone and researched it and tried it. And you know, most of us don't have that level of pain, right? Um, but we all have do have some pain, and we all have a choice in how we let that pain lead us. Is it going to lead us into lamenting into greater truth? I'm clinging to truth with all my heart. I know what is truth, I know what the Bible says. I'm clinging to it, I'm declaring it, I'm speaking it over myself and others. I'm in greater dependence. Lord, I know now my state. This was his whole point of the purpose of pain in his life, is he learned his dependence. Before that, it's hard to really believe we're totally dependent on God. Right? It's hard to believe. It was hard for him to see, at least, right? Because he was so self-sufficient, self-self-motivated, he was self-driven, he was so capable. All of a sudden he's not. Now he's like realizing the actual state of all of us, that we're all perfectly deeply dependent on God. We need God for him, growing in dependence, leading to praise. He talks about, he's like, you know, I wake up, I can't do a lot of things. Man, I can turn the worship music on. I'll sit out there on his balcony. He lives downtown Denver. He's like, I'm gonna praise God over the city, singing the glory of God over Denver. How do we restore satisfaction in God as we go through pain? We lament unto truth, dependence and praise. So I encourage us all today that we lament unto God, unto greater communion with God, believing the truth of God, in dependence on God, ever praising God, letting our lamenting turning our pain into praise, our weeping into worship. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we uh Lord just thank you that Lord you have empathy and comfort us, Lord, through this life, and that Lord, we Lord, can can grow in our dependence and our trust of you, and just a realization of your nearness, of your kindness, of your grace, of your mercy, of um just your love, Lord, as we walk through life. So I just pray that all of us, Lord, would learn to just deal with pain, Lord, in a way that drives us towards you, drives us to love you, drives us to know our dependence in you, drives us to hope in you evermore, Lord, and that whatever, whatever, whatever comes our way, like Paul, Lord, we would be ones that say we know the secret, the mystery of contentment, of satisfaction, that our soul is full, regardless of circumstance. Why is it a mystery, God? Because it it's confusing. So, Lord, reveal it to us that Jesus, you are the eternal water. Lord, you are the bread of life that satisfies our soul. And Lord, just give us that great joy, that great satisfaction, um, that great hunger through all of life. Amen.