SPEAKER_01: If you have your copy of God's word, if you'd turn to Psalm 130 as we continue going through the Psalms in our summer series before we get back to Revelation later after, probably after Labor Day.
SPEAKER_01: So Psalm 130, Martin Luther counted this psalm among what he called the Pauline Psalms, Psalms so saturated with the gospel of grace that the Apostle Paul himself might have just written them.
SPEAKER_01: Luther said of it, the Psalm teaches that the forgiveness of sins is granted without merit.
SPEAKER_01: So, in fact, what we see from Martin Luther is that the entire seed of the Reformation can come out of Psalm 130 in and of itself.
SPEAKER_01: So let's read Psalm 130, and you will definitely hear what spurred our reformers to reform the church in this idea of forgiveness without merit.
SPEAKER_01: So Psalm 130, beginning in verse 1, a song of ascent, out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, O Lord, hear my voice.
SPEAKER_01: Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy.
SPEAKER_01: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
SPEAKER_01: But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.
SPEAKER_01: I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
SPEAKER_01: My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.
SPEAKER_01: O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption, and he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: Now I want to begin by asking you a question, and I ask you to be honest with yourself before God as you answer it.
SPEAKER_01: The question is, have you been in the depths?
SPEAKER_01: I do not mean have you ever had a bad week or have you had a bad day?
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been disappointed?
SPEAKER_01: I do not mean have you ever felt powerless?
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been in a situation where you felt powerless by physical limitations, by health, by your situation financially?
SPEAKER_01: I do not mean in that sense.
SPEAKER_01: I mean this.
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever come to a place where you looked at yourself, really looked inside your heart, and saw your sin for what it is, and felt yourself sinking under the weight of the sin and knew that no efforts could pull you out.
SPEAKER_01: Because, brothers and sisters, that's the reality of who we are.
SPEAKER_01: That we can feel under the weight of so many other things that press on us: health, financial situations, uh physical limitations, job limitations, whatever it is, you can you can just go down the list.
SPEAKER_01: We can realistically feel the pressure from those, and yet so many times we don't feel the pressure from sin.
SPEAKER_01: And in reality, all of those things do not have the eternal impact that the reality of the weight of sin does.
SPEAKER_01: We should feel the presence and the weight and the burden of sin in our lives more than any other burden that we carry.
SPEAKER_01: So when we think about sinking under the weight of sin and know that no efforts of our own can pull us out, have we been confronted with the reality of sin and the gravity of its consequences that we feel the dire, urgent, immediate need for Christ in our lives?
SPEAKER_01: Now, I would say, first of all, if you've never been there, uh I say this with all tenderness, you may never have truly understood the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: For the gospel is not just good advice for people who are doing well and uh can continue on their pathway with this little addition, like a fuel additive to help with the fuel cleaners.
SPEAKER_01: You know, sometimes you can put the fuel additive that helps the gasoline work better.
SPEAKER_01: Like I've got the gasoline in my life, I'm doing pretty good.
SPEAKER_01: I can just add Jesus, a little Jesus in as a fuel additive, and it's gonna help the gasoline that I provide work a little bit better.
SPEAKER_01: You don't you don't have any gasoline.
SPEAKER_01: You don't have anything to contribute that you may be saved.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel is good news for people who are drowning.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel is good news for people that have nothing.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel is good news for people who are enemies with God and cannot overcome him, cannot defeat him, cannot satisfy him.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel is good news for those who urgently need Christ to have right standing with God.
SPEAKER_01: And this psalm is a psalm of hope that is a rope thrown out to a drowning man.
SPEAKER_01: And so I'd I would encourage you, if you don't, if you haven't been there in that situation where you felt the weight of your sin and your need for Christ, my encouragement to you this morning is to read this psalm and listen to the sermon and come to faith in Christ and see Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And if you are in Christ, this is our weekly calibration.
SPEAKER_01: Your reminder.
SPEAKER_01: Sin is bad, sin is deadly, sin will weigh you down.
SPEAKER_01: But we have our remedy in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Continue every day to run to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Now we're going to walk through this psalm in our typical pattern of the Psalms to the three horizons.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, first, the historical horizon, what does it mean for the original readers and audience?
SPEAKER_01: The second, the Christological horizon, how does it connect us to Christ?
SPEAKER_01: And then third, the congregational horizon, what it means for us as the church, what it demands of us today.
SPEAKER_01: What does Psalm 130 mean for us as the church sitting here today?
SPEAKER_01: So, firstly, the historical horizon, a pilgrim's cry from the depths.
SPEAKER_01: So we notice the superscription, a song of ascent.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 130 is the 11th of 15 such songs, Psalm 120 through 134.
SPEAKER_01: It's considered the song book of the pilgrim.
SPEAKER_01: Three times a year, faithful Israelites went up to Jerusalem for the great feast.
SPEAKER_01: And no matter where you came from, you would go up, up to the hill country, up to Zion, up to the house of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And these 15 Psalms trace that journey, and the songs of ascent trace not merely just a geographical climb up to Jerusalem, but also a spiritual one.
SPEAKER_01: The movement of a needy people toward the presence of a holy God.
SPEAKER_01: So as we're physically going up in elevation to Jerusalem, we are also spiritually going to a place where we can be with a holy God and participate in the feast that He has commanded us to participate in in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: But notice, where does the pilgrim song begin?
SPEAKER_01: Not on the heights, not at the gates of Jerusalem, not halfway up.
SPEAKER_01: The pilgrim's song begins in the depths.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what are these depths?
SPEAKER_01: Now we've talked about this imagery before in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, the depths often refer to deep waters.
SPEAKER_01: And water in the Old Testament oftentimes refers to chaos.
SPEAKER_01: And so what we see here out of the depths, we see a place of chaos, of drowning, of death itself.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 69, I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me.
SPEAKER_01: We have this idea of just being stranded in the middle of a tumultuous ocean that you just have no hope.
SPEAKER_01: You have no hope of overcoming that.
SPEAKER_01: When Jonah was cast into the sea, he cried, out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and the deep surrounded me.
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah's prayer from the fish's belly is this psalm lived out.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, imagine Jonah's situation and connect this psalm with it.
SPEAKER_01: The depths, they're a place where you cannot touch the bottom, but yet the waters close in over your head, where you cannot save yourself.
SPEAKER_01: The depths are a place of drastic insufficiency, where you come to the realization that that which you need saving from, you possess not the power or the ability to do so yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And so, left to your own devices, you will drown and you will die.
SPEAKER_01: And notice verse 3 tells us precisely what has plunged this man into the deep.
SPEAKER_01: It is not his circumstances, it's not his enemies, it's not his mortgage, it's not his finances, it's not his health, it's none of those things that we could all list off that give us stress.
SPEAKER_01: What he says has put me in the depths is his iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: It is my sins against God, and that alone that has given me to the depths.
SPEAKER_01: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
SPEAKER_01: So we have a diagnosis.
SPEAKER_01: If you should mark iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: Now the word mark means to keep a record, to keep account.
SPEAKER_01: As a creditor, he keeps a ledger of debts.
SPEAKER_01: The psalm imagines God as a bookkeeper writing down every sin, every lie, every lust, every proud thought, every unkind word, every duty left undone.
SPEAKER_01: And then he asks the questions that we should ask of our own hearts this morning about this.
SPEAKER_01: Oh Lord, who could stand?
SPEAKER_01: Who can stand before God with a ledger?
SPEAKER_01: Who can stand before God in sin?
SPEAKER_01: No one.
SPEAKER_01: None can.
SPEAKER_01: Not David, the man after God's own heart, an adulterer and a murderer, not Abraham, who twice gave away his wife to save his own skin?
SPEAKER_01: Not Moses, who stroke the who struck the rock in anger and was barred from the land?
SPEAKER_01: Not Peter, who denied Christ three times, not Paul, the chief of sinners?
SPEAKER_01: The question is rhetorical, and the answer is no one.
SPEAKER_01: None is righteous, no, not one.
SPEAKER_01: Ancient Israel understood something that our generation has forgotten.
SPEAKER_01: The deepest human problem is not the circumstances that you find yourself in.
SPEAKER_01: The deepest human problem is not psychological.
SPEAKER_01: It's not political.
SPEAKER_01: It's not economic.
SPEAKER_01: The deepest human problem is that we are guilty before a holy God, and the ledger is full, and we cannot pay.
SPEAKER_00: But in verse four, we see a turn.
SPEAKER_00: But with you, there's forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: We see that word in scripture so many times, the word but.
SPEAKER_01: We see this presentation of a diagnosis of a problem.
SPEAKER_01: You can't satisfy God, you stand before Him in sin, you have transgressions, or you're dead in your sin.
SPEAKER_01: But God.
SPEAKER_01: The scene shifts towards God.
SPEAKER_01: Now there's an action item, and it's on God's to-do list, and it's saving his people.
SPEAKER_01: The pilgrim does not climb out of the depths by his own effort.
SPEAKER_01: He does not say, But I will do better.
SPEAKER_01: I will do better, God.
SPEAKER_01: He says, But with you there is forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: Now, forgiveness is not something that God owes.
SPEAKER_01: God could still be God and not forgive a single one of us.
SPEAKER_01: And he would not be a lesser God.
SPEAKER_01: He owes us nothing.
SPEAKER_01: It would have taken away nothing for him, from him, to not forgive a single one.
SPEAKER_01: God in his uh in his um abilities and in his right, when Adam and Eve fell, he could have said, Fall and enjoy the consequences of your fall, O all of humanity, and sent every single last one of us to what we deserve in hell, and he would have been no lesser a God because of it.
SPEAKER_01: This is not something that God is obligated to do.
SPEAKER_01: This is what he does out of his covenant steadfast love that he made with his people.
SPEAKER_01: It is something that God has, forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: It dwells with him, it belongs to his very character.
SPEAKER_01: It flows out of the steadfast covenant love with his people, held out to all who cry for mercy.
SPEAKER_01: And then a phrase that sometimes we think of as a weird phrase in the Bible that you may be feared.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we would think that it should say that you may be loved.
SPEAKER_01: Let me fit good.
SPEAKER_01: You know, you forgive me, so I'm gonna love you.
SPEAKER_01: I remember when I was um when I was a kid, there was a brand of shirts that was that was in style, the no fear shirts.
SPEAKER_01: You know, they had like a no fear.
SPEAKER_01: It was like kind of a macho shirt.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us had them.
SPEAKER_01: And so um, you know, the cool thing in the 90s was the uh Christian t-shirt company, and we would get um a little catalog in the mail.
SPEAKER_01: This was like pre-internet, and uh like once a year, my mom would let my uh brothers and me pick out some cool Christian shirts, especially like when school season was coming around.
SPEAKER_01: And so we could get like two or three Christian t-shirts to wear, and we'd circle them on the catalog, you know, fill out the paper, she'd write a check and mail it in, and you get the shirts.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the shirts um was fear God.
SPEAKER_01: And I remember as a kid seeing that, and you kind of don't understand.
SPEAKER_01: What do you mean, fear God?
SPEAKER_01: I don't understand, you know, he's my savior, he's he's Jesus, he loves us.
SPEAKER_01: I don't, I don't, and so that can be hard for us to kind of fully wrap our minds around what does it mean to fear God?
SPEAKER_01: Why would the psalmist say, but with you there is forgiveness, and in that forgiveness, I'm now being delivered from that which I know is to be feared, standing before God in my iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: And so now, if I have forgiveness, I don't have to stand before God in my iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: I stand before God with the blood of Christ, counted righteous, so I'm not going to hell.
SPEAKER_01: Hell's something I should fear.
SPEAKER_01: I fear hell.
SPEAKER_01: Why does it say that you may be feared in reference to God?
SPEAKER_01: Here's why.
SPEAKER_01: Because grace does not make God small.
SPEAKER_01: Grace makes God great.
SPEAKER_01: The man who has been forgiven much does not treat God casually.
SPEAKER_01: He stands in awe of who God is.
SPEAKER_01: Cheap pardon breeds contempt.
SPEAKER_01: Costly mercy breeds reverence.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we as believers have to remember what it's like to be drowning in the depths.
SPEAKER_01: So we remember the amount of forgiveness that we have.
SPEAKER_01: It is very costly for God to forgive us.
SPEAKER_01: When you know that the holy God, who could justly damn you, has instead freely forgiven you, you do not swagger into his presence, you fall on your face in awe and wonder of who he is.
SPEAKER_01: Proverbs 9 10 tells us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: So, what's the posture?
SPEAKER_01: What does this forgiven pilgrim do?
SPEAKER_01: Well, in verses 5 and 6, it says, He waits.
SPEAKER_01: I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
SPEAKER_01: My soul waits for the Lord more than watchman for the morning, more than watchman for the morning.
SPEAKER_01: Repeats that phrase.
SPEAKER_01: Picture the watchman on the walls of Jerusalem in the last hour of the night.
SPEAKER_01: It's cold, it's dark, every shadow they see could be an enemy.
SPEAKER_01: But the watchman is not anxious about whether or not morning will come.
SPEAKER_01: The watchman has never seen a night that did not end.
SPEAKER_01: His waiting is a certain waiting.
SPEAKER_01: My shift will come to an end.
SPEAKER_01: The sun will rise.
SPEAKER_01: He strains at night for sure.
SPEAKER_01: He's anxious about what he sees, sure.
SPEAKER_01: But he's eager for the sun to come.
SPEAKER_01: Now, the repetition of saying this frame is twice this phrase twice is the psalmist is saying, My hope in God is more certain than the rising of the sun.
SPEAKER_01: None of you questioned that the sun was going to rise this morning.
SPEAKER_01: We knew it would.
SPEAKER_01: Every single one of us in this room, every day we've been alive, the sun has risen every single morning, a hundred percent dependable.
SPEAKER_01: We haven't had a morning that it hasn't risen.
SPEAKER_01: What the psalmist is saying is you our hope in God is infinitely more certain than the rising of the sun.
SPEAKER_00: And what does that word hope rest?
SPEAKER_00: Waits for the Lord, in his word.
SPEAKER_00: Not in his feelings.
SPEAKER_01: He's not hoping in the Lord based on his feelings, not based on his circumstances.
SPEAKER_01: His hope rests completely in the word of God and in his promises.
SPEAKER_01: And then in verse 7 and 8, the pilgrim turns from his own soul to the whole assembly.
SPEAKER_01: We've kind of seen this several times in other psalms where there's the congregational horizon naturally comes at the end of the psalm.
SPEAKER_01: And he says, O Israel, hope in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Personal deliverance immediately turns into a public proclamation.
SPEAKER_01: And he anchors that call in two great words: steadfast love, the covenant love of God, his Hesed love that has sworn an oath and cannot quit, and the word plentiful redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Now, redemption is the paying of a price to set a slave free.
SPEAKER_01: And it's not a casual redemption, not a barely enough redemption.
SPEAKER_01: It is a plentiful redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Redemption with room to spare, redemption that reflects being purchased by the fullness of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: But notice how the psalm ends, and he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: The psalm says he will.
SPEAKER_01: Future tense, the Old Testament pilgrim sang this song of redemption that he had not yet seen.
SPEAKER_01: The price had not yet been paid.
SPEAKER_01: Every lamb slain on Israel's altar said, Not yet, not yet, not this blood.
SPEAKER_01: The psalm ends leaning forward, waiting for morning, waiting for the sun to rise.
SPEAKER_01: It gives us a taste of what's to come.
SPEAKER_01: There's a much better sequel ahead for the people of God.
SPEAKER_01: A week ago, Friday, we went with eager anticipation and saw the new Spider-Man movie.
SPEAKER_01: Spider-Man Brand New Day.
SPEAKER_01: And I had bought our tickets way in advance because the theaters were selling out fast.
SPEAKER_01: I think it broke the record for the biggest opening weekend ever.
SPEAKER_01: And it did not disappoint.
SPEAKER_01: It was a great movie.
SPEAKER_01: And it was a great sequel to the last movie.
SPEAKER_01: And the last movie did a great job of leaving you on this cliffhanger of what's to come.
SPEAKER_01: And those rascals waited five years to go from the last movie to this one.
SPEAKER_01: Five long years where we had to sit and wait for what's going to happen in the next Spider-Man movie.
SPEAKER_00: It was great.
SPEAKER_00: It was a great sequel.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 130 does this much better.
SPEAKER_01: It leaves you hanging on the hope that's to come for the people in that time.
SPEAKER_01: There's a better Redeemer coming your way.
SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to the second horizon, the Christological horizon, the Redeemer who entered the depths.
SPEAKER_01: And how does this psalm find its home in Jesus Christ?
SPEAKER_01: We asked that of every psalm.
SPEAKER_01: For the Psalms were Jesus' songbook, he had them, he sang them, he read them.
SPEAKER_01: He sang the songs of ascent as he went up to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus would have sang this psalm.
SPEAKER_01: And as he sings this, let's remember where his final ascent to Jerusalem led him.
SPEAKER_01: The final time that he entered Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Now think of this.
SPEAKER_01: Who alone amongst the sons of Adam?
SPEAKER_01: That sounds very Narnia-ish.
SPEAKER_01: Sons who among you, who amongst the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, could hear this question in verse three?
SPEAKER_01: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?
SPEAKER_01: And answer, I could.
SPEAKER_01: Only one.
SPEAKER_01: Only the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He is the only man who lived whose ledger was clean.
SPEAKER_01: If anyone deserved to see the depths, it was him.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, deserved never to see the depths, it was him.
SPEAKER_01: We deserved the depths, Christ didn't.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, here is the wonder of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Where do we find him?
SPEAKER_01: Where do we see Jesus, the one, the only one who can say, I can stand rightly before God, and yet where do we find him?
SPEAKER_01: We find him in the depths.
SPEAKER_01: He who knew no sin was made sin for us.
SPEAKER_01: In Gethsemane he began to be sorrowful even unto death, on the cross, the deep waters of divine judgment, the floods that should have closed in over our heads, and all of God's people that was reserved for us instead closed in over his.
SPEAKER_01: When Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_01: That was Psalm 130, verse 1, in its ultimate depth, the sinless son crying out from the depths that were not his but ours.
SPEAKER_01: He was marked with iniquities, but not his own.
SPEAKER_01: He was marked with our iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
SPEAKER_01: Remember Jonah praying this Psalm's language from the belly of the fish and the depth of the sea.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus himself said, As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah went into the depths for his own sin.
SPEAKER_01: Christ went into the depths for ours.
SPEAKER_01: This is why Jesus said, Something greater than Jonah is here.
SPEAKER_01: And what of the watchman waiting for the morning?
SPEAKER_01: Well, my friends, on the third day morning came.
SPEAKER_01: The women went to the tomb very early when the sun had risen and the night of death was over.
SPEAKER_01: Every watchman on every wall of Israel who ever strained his eyes toward the east was, without knowing it, a picture of what was to come on that first resurrection Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_01: The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God's sunrise upon the human race.
SPEAKER_01: The waiting of verse 6, my soul waits for the Lord more than the watchman for the morning.
SPEAKER_01: The waiting of verse 6 is answered with an empty tomb.
SPEAKER_01: And now the last verse, he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: He already has.
SPEAKER_01: In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace.
SPEAKER_01: There is plentiful redemption of verse 7, the riches of grace lavished upon us.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see now why verse 4 says that forgiveness leads to fear?
SPEAKER_01: Come to Calvary and look.
SPEAKER_01: There is where with you there is forgiveness was purchased.
SPEAKER_01: Forgiveness is free to us, but it was not cheap to God.
SPEAKER_01: It cost him the blood of his own son, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And when we see, when we look at the cross and we see our Savior and we see how much our pardon cost, we should never treat sin lightly.
SPEAKER_01: And we should never treat God casually.
SPEAKER_01: There is forgiveness with him that he may be feared.
SPEAKER_01: Colossians 2 says that in the very language of the ledger, God has canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, nailing it to the cross.
SPEAKER_01: The book in which God marked iniquities, Christ took it and nailed it to his cross and wrote across it in his own blood, paid in full.
SPEAKER_01: Tatalisti.
SPEAKER_01: It is finished.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps you know the feeling of paying off a car.
SPEAKER_01: You finally get that title in the mail, and you get the ledger from the bank, and there's a stamp on it paid in full.
SPEAKER_01: It feels good.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you get it on the house, you've paid off your mortgage, you get that paperwork, you but it belongs to you and the state, because you still have to pay property taxes on it, but we won't.
SPEAKER_01: Go away, Rabbit.
SPEAKER_01: It's not the point of this.
SPEAKER_01: It just feels good when when when you've paid off a debt, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Any kind of debt.
SPEAKER_01: And we're just talking about when we're when we talk about paying off a car, these are little.
SPEAKER_01: These are little bitty things.
SPEAKER_01: You paid on a car for four, five years, and you get that, and you feel so good about it.
SPEAKER_01: From Adam to the last.
SPEAKER_01: And in one fail sweep, he took a ledger.
SPEAKER_01: And 2,000 years ago, my name was there, my all my sins are there, all of my iniquities for all time were there.
SPEAKER_01: And he nailed it onto the cross and said, It's done.
SPEAKER_01: It's finished.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not even born yet.
SPEAKER_01: It's done.
SPEAKER_01: The work is done, paid for in full.
SPEAKER_01: And when we receive Christ, that's what we get.
SPEAKER_01: That's what we get.
SPEAKER_01: We get this ledger that says, You're paid up.
SPEAKER_01: You have no debt with God.
SPEAKER_01: You are in good standing with the Heavenly Father.
SPEAKER_01: When this psalm points us to the gospel, when all of Scripture teaches us the gospel, what we have to understand about Christ Jesus is this Christ Jesus is not part of God.
SPEAKER_01: You know, the Trinity, it's so difficult to understand.
SPEAKER_01: Well, we can't.
SPEAKER_01: We can't fully understand it.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus is not a third of God.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know that Jesus Christ, Scripture calls him the fullness of God?
SPEAKER_01: The fullness of God in Christ Jesus has been given to us.
SPEAKER_01: And he is more glorious and radiant than the very Son that lights our day.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I would urge you to regularly consider how glorious and radiant Jesus Christ is.
SPEAKER_01: We should meditate on this regularly, for in so doing, we battle and resist the temptation of so often belittling him.
SPEAKER_01: For every time that we fail to recognize the radiance and the glory of Jesus Christ in our lives, it is worse, infinitely worse, than ignoring the radiance of the hot sun on a hot summer August day with no clouds.
SPEAKER_01: Which we all are very familiar with, how that feels.
SPEAKER_01: It would be like going outside at high noon in August on a cloudless day, and thinking you have to take a candle with you so that you can see.
SPEAKER_01: You have the relentless power of the sun roasting down on you, booming its light much farther than the eye can see, illuminating the world around you and giving you life.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, when we neglect to remember our forgiveness in Christ and the fullness of God in Christ given to us and appropriately fear and have reverence for our great God, it is like forgetting that the sun is out and thinking that we have to go and operate during the day with no light.
SPEAKER_01: And so we take a little candle with us, a little candle that can't hold anything in comparison to the sun.
SPEAKER_01: What is a candle in comparison to the sun?
SPEAKER_01: And when we neglect to recognize the fullness of Christ in our lives, that's what we do.
SPEAKER_01: We go out and we depend on ourselves and we ignore the glorious radiance of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Christ is the fullness of God, and He is fully capable and plentiful to redeem us from our sins.
SPEAKER_01: He is capable to bring us out of the depths, and He is capable to cast our sins as far as the East is from the West.
SPEAKER_01: So, church, remember who you belong to.
SPEAKER_01: Regularly reflect upon the glorious radiance of Christ and the fullness of God in Him and live your life in the light of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, the congregational horizon of people who hope in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So, what does this mean for us?
SPEAKER_01: What does this mean for the church this morning?
SPEAKER_01: Well, let me press it home in four ways briefly.
SPEAKER_01: To the Christian, in four different areas of your life.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you identify with one of these.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe all of us have identified with one of these at different times in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: First, to the Christian in the depths.
SPEAKER_01: I would urge you this morning to cry out.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you are in the depths right now.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it is guilt over a sin that you keep returning to, perhaps a darkness of the soul that you cannot explain.
SPEAKER_01: Learn from this psalm where prayer begins.
SPEAKER_01: It begins in the depths.
SPEAKER_01: You do not have to climb out of the pit to pray.
SPEAKER_01: The pit is precisely where prayer is born.
SPEAKER_01: Out of the depths I cry to you.
SPEAKER_01: As Jonah cried out to the Lord from the belly of the well, which he found himself in due to his own rebellion against God, is no different for us.
SPEAKER_01: If you find yourself in the depths, do not wait till you muster up enough strength to get a little bit closer to God before you start crying out to him and praying to him because it's not going to happen.
SPEAKER_01: Cry out to the Lord from your struggles, from your place of being in the depths, cry out to God.
SPEAKER_01: In the 1660s, the great Puritan John Owen, one of my favorites, perhaps the best theologian England ever produced, passed through a season of spiritual darkness so severe that he's, as he later told a friend, he had preached forgiveness to others while scarcely daring to believe it for himself.
SPEAKER_01: And God brought him through by one verse, this verse in Psalm 130.
SPEAKER_01: But with you, there is forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: Owen wrote an exposition of Psalm 130 that runs to hundreds of pages.
SPEAKER_01: Imagine that.
SPEAKER_01: In these eight verses, John Owen writes a commentary that takes up hundreds of pages.
SPEAKER_01: And the heart of it is his own testimony that the storm broke, the clouds gave way, when he stopped looking at the greatness of his sin and started looking at the greatness of God's forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: And if Psalm 130 could hold John Owen, it is sufficient to hold any and all of us in here.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, to the complacent, I would tell you to take the ledger seriously.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you in this room are not in the depths, and that is your danger.
SPEAKER_01: You may have never trembled at verse 3.
SPEAKER_01: You compare yourself to your neighbor, and you come out well enough.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm here, I'm at church.
SPEAKER_01: More people in Tyler this morning are not at church than are at church.
SPEAKER_01: I volunteer, I serve, I tithe.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a pretty good guy.
SPEAKER_01: Unless you meet the standard of Jesus Christ, you have not arrived.
SPEAKER_01: God marks iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: Every idle word the Lord Jesus said will be brought to judgment.
SPEAKER_01: If you've never asked who could stand, ask it now, while it is still today.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's better to face the ledger this morning when there's a redeemer to flee to, flee to Christ than at the last day when the books are opened and your chance is shut.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, to the waiting.
SPEAKER_01: Hope in his word.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you in this room have prayed and prayed and prayed, and the answer has not come.
SPEAKER_01: The prodigal son has not come home, the illness has not lifted, the night is long and dark, and the sorrow is deep.
SPEAKER_01: Hear the psalm, in his word I hope.
SPEAKER_01: Feelings rise and fall like the tide, the word of God stands fast.
SPEAKER_01: Wait like the watchman, not because you can see the sun, but because you know the sun's coming.
SPEAKER_01: You know that God has promised you morning.
SPEAKER_01: He has never once broken his word, and he will not begin with you.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we must root our faith in the word of God and not in our feelings.
SPEAKER_01: Our feelings are fickle.
SPEAKER_01: And if we base our relationship with God, our thoughts of God, our relationship with God on our feelings, then we are limiting God to our emotional instabilities because we're a messed up group of people.
SPEAKER_01: We really are.
SPEAKER_01: Even as the redeemed, we still got issues.
SPEAKER_01: And if we are limiting God based on how we feel, then we're making God very small.
SPEAKER_01: We mustn't view God through an emotional lens based on how we feel.
SPEAKER_01: You know what that's like?
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember Hall?
SPEAKER_01: Y'all remember the Forest Festival when it comes to Atlanta every year?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you had a fair or carnival that you went through, went to.
SPEAKER_01: Not as popular as they used to be.
SPEAKER_01: Back in the, you know, the 90s is the best time to be alive, by the way, if I haven't said that before.
SPEAKER_01: Back in the 90s, we would go to the Forest Festival every year in this little small town in Atlanta.
SPEAKER_01: They had all the little carnival rides that were very safe, even though they were set up within 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_01: You know, what were we thinking?
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, they would have the fun houses, like the maize houses, and they had them, the trick mirrors in it.
SPEAKER_01: And you you've all seen these mirrors in these fun houses, and you go, and one makes you really, you know, kind of short and tubby, and the other one makes you really tall and then just distorts you.
SPEAKER_01: That's what it does.
SPEAKER_01: When we view God through our emotions, you distort him.
SPEAKER_01: That's what you do.
SPEAKER_01: You're viewing God, and you're not going to see the reality of who he is.
SPEAKER_01: You're just going to see a distortion of what your emotions are going to give you.
SPEAKER_01: We must consistently calibrate our hearts, our souls, our minds to view God rightly through his word.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we're here today.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we come back Wednesday night.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we come back next Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_01: We are regularly calibrating our hearts, minds, and souls to the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: I will never have a new gospel to give you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell you the same old gospel story every single week as long as the Lord gives me time to preach up here.
SPEAKER_01: It's not changing.
SPEAKER_01: But we as the people need to hear it over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: Forth to the church together, say it to one another.
SPEAKER_01: We notice the psalm does not end at private devotion.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that amazing?
SPEAKER_01: So many of these psalms don't go towards private devotion, they go towards public worship.
SPEAKER_01: We need to take note of this in Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: It ends with the man turning to the congregation, O Israel, hope in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: That is your calling to one another.
SPEAKER_01: When your brother or your sister is in the depths, you are the voice that says, Hope in the Lord, with him is plentiful redemption.
SPEAKER_01: We are a congregation of watchmen who are to keep watch together through the night.
SPEAKER_01: And if a brother or sister is going through a dark night of the soul, we are called to stand watch over them and point them to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: We are to remind one another that the morning is sure.
SPEAKER_01: We are not to let anyone in this fellowship sink alone.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I want to close and speak as plainly as I know how and tell you again the old gospel story.
SPEAKER_01: On the evening of May 24th, 1738, a fellow missionary named John Wesley, a man who had crossed an ocean to convert others, confessed he was not converted himself.
SPEAKER_01: He attended Evensong at St.
SPEAKER_01: Paul's Cathedral in London, and the choir that afternoon sang an anthem on this very psalm, Out of the Depths have I called unto thee, O Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Wesley was in the depths, moral, earnest, religious, and yet lost.
SPEAKER_01: That same evening he went unwillingly to a little meeting at Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading Luther's preface to the book of Romans, and as he heard the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, he said, I felt my heart strangely warmed.
SPEAKER_01: I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins, even mine.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 130 in the afternoon, the gospel in the evening, a soul brought up from the depths by nightfall.
SPEAKER_01: That can be your story today.
SPEAKER_01: Here is the good news.
SPEAKER_01: You are in the depths, whether you feel it or not, verse 3 puts you there.
SPEAKER_01: For if God should mark your iniquities, you could not stand.
SPEAKER_01: But the Son of God has gone down to the depths for sinners.
SPEAKER_01: He bore the flood of judgment on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: He lay in the belly of the earth, and on the third day the morning broke, and he rose and he lives, and with him and only in him there is forgiveness, full, free, plentiful redemption for everyone who will call upon the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: He will never run out.
SPEAKER_01: There's enough redemption there for anyone and everyone who has ever existed.
SPEAKER_01: And what must you do?
SPEAKER_01: What did the psalmist say?
SPEAKER_01: And what did he do?
SPEAKER_01: Cry out.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't say, Lord, look at my record.
SPEAKER_00: Because your record will sink you.
SPEAKER_01: But Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.
SPEAKER_01: Confess your sin.
SPEAKER_01: Trust not in yourself, but in Christ crucified and risen.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved.
SPEAKER_01: Not everyone who cleans himself up first, but everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Not everyone who feels worthy, everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
SPEAKER_01: And if you will call on him today, then hear the promise which with the psalm ends, now sealed with the blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He will redeem you from all of your iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: All of them.
SPEAKER_01: The ones you remember and the ones you have forgotten, the ones from thirty years ago and the ones from this week.
SPEAKER_01: Plentiful redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Redemption with room to spare.
SPEAKER_01: Room enough for you.
SPEAKER_01: So my plea to you this morning, O sinner, is to hope in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: My plea to you, O saint, hope in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Be a watchman, because morning's coming.
SPEAKER_01: For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, we thank you for Christ.