GAURD RAILS: DON'T BLOW UP YOUR LIFE | Lament | Jeff Gustafson

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yeah, hi, Redeemer. It's great to be with you guys. Yeah, my name is Jeff Gustafson, associate pastor at Northgate Church in Ramsey, former intern. It's all true. It's fun to be back here, back in this room. I remember like being an intern, and we would have small groups in this room, and like my set my baby daughter in the middle of our small group circle with some of you guys. And uh remember doing that, and it was powerful. She's 23 now, so it's like it's been a minute. Um but if if churches had BFFs, Redeemer would be Northgate's BFF. Like we love you guys. There's like a this all this connection with the staff and relationships with so many of you guys, if there's familiar faces from you know 20 plus years ago, whatever it was when I was here. So uh it's great to be with you. Um so I understand that you are in a message series and it's it's called guardrails. And the idea here is that nobody wants to blow up their life, right? Nobody sets out to wreck their life, to uh destroy their reputation or their marriage or their financial situation. Like we don't plan to do that. What happens is that we make a choice, like one choice at a time. Little choice here, little choice there, little choice there. And what happens is we we tend to drift, we tend to veer off course, and then sometimes we find ourselves going over the cliff, and that's when things happen. But the idea in this series is like, what if we could set up guardrails? What would those practices look like? What would it look like to do things, to put things in place that we don't veer off course, that keep us in line in a relationship with God? And uh yeah, Pastor Ben kicked off the series last week talking about um renewing your mind. And like I think that's probably the thing that if I picked anything, I think that's probably like the number one thing. That's a huge, important guardrail to put in place. When he called me kind of last minute because of this this tragic accident and said, Hey, um, can you do this? We talked a little bit and I said, I think I have something uh to share with the congregation that maybe fits in. Um and it's it maybe wouldn't be the first thing that you would think of, but as I think about this more and more in terms of guardrails and what you want to set up in your life, I think this is just a critically important practice. And it's the practice of lament. I'll talk in a minute just about how that fits in with guardrails. But what is lament? Lament is essentially the practice of expressing our grief to God over what is broken in the world. Lament is different than mourning and complaining, although it's it's kind of like that. Essentially what it is, it's it's getting out our emotions, getting out our feelings from our perspective, telling them to God, but doing it in the context of a relationship with God, being honest about our pain, but we bring it to God. That's really what lament is. And lament's all over the Bible. There's a whole book of the Bible called Lamentations. It's what it is, it's filled with lament. And the Psalms are packed with lament, probably 30 to 65 of the 150 Psalms are Psalms of Lament, depending on how you classify them or count them. And if you read those psalms, you see that they really are laments. It's it's people like David and the other psalmist pouring out their hearts to God, sharing these raw feelings, anger, grief, sadness. We see it happen over and over in the Bible. I think that learning to lament is really one of the most important guardrails that we can put up because life is full of suffering, isn't it? There's a lot of pain. There's bound to come some trouble in your life. You're bound to experience difficulties. Lament is one way that we can process, that we can express that hurt and all of those feelings anger, grief, sadness, confusion, by giving it to God. Without lament, the danger is that we end up taking those feelings and we just kind of stuff them inside. Or we vent them out at people in harmful directions. But what God gives us, He gives us this way to bring those to Him. Because if we keep stuffing them all aside, if we keep shooting them at people, those are those decisions, one after another, after another, that can cause us to go off course in fear. And I've seen lives of people who crashed because they didn't have this practice. They weren't knowing how, they weren't knowing that you even could lament, that this was the thing to do. So I think lament is really this important guardrail that we can set up in our lives to keep us walking with God, especially in difficult times. So let me ask you this. Do you know how to lament? Do you have tools to bring your grief to God? To tell God the stuff that's breaking your heart that you see in the world around you. I don't know where it started for me. Um I don't know how I kind of first learned to lament. I think it's probably just a gift, just something, God's grace. Maybe it's because a lot of my favorite singers sing sad songs. And kind of singing along, you just kind of learn to do it. But it was a gift to do that. I remember one time after my dad died, I found myself singing some of Sarah Grove's songs over and over and over again. Like I think it's good to have songs like that that you can sing. Do you know the kind of songs I'm talking about? The songs that it's good to have music on when you sing them. You're not just singing them by yourself because there's a lot of times when you can't hit any of the notes between the sobs. I think you need some songs like that. I think everybody needs a few. Because part of our reality is that things are not the way they're supposed to be a lot of times, right? Awful things happen. A fire destroys a house. A criminal robs us of our sense of security. A child dies. A tragic accident happens. There's so many things around us that are not the way that they're supposed to be. When we begin following Jesus, our troubles don't all disappear, do they? Jesus promised actually in this world that we would have trouble. He tells us, unless you um take up your cross, this instrument of suffering, and follow me, you cannot be my disciples. We follow him into suffering. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian, said it like this: He said, Um, when Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die. Jesus went to the cross, and when we follow him, we follow him into suffering. I don't know if you guys have altar calls here at Redeemer. Would this be a good time for an altar call? Who wants to follow Jesus into suffering? Yeah. I mean, when we think about it, maybe we do. But just seriously, there is suffering in life. The Christian life is full of it, but let's be honest too, the non-Christian life is full of suffering also. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Sometimes these moments of suffering can be disorienting. I remember um a few years ago, I went back to my alma mater Gustavus, where I went to college, but I went back with my kids doing a college visit, and everything had changed. Like they built up all these new buildings, and uh the campus looked totally different from when I was a student. And I'm sure the students there loved it, but for me, it was like, where am I? Like I don't recognize any of this. It was kind of disorienting. I think sometimes when we enter into suffering, it can feel like that to us. It feels disorienting, where am I? I think we feel that sometimes when a family member is not at the table for a birthday celebration for whatever reason. When a marriage ends, when a job changes, when we start a new school, when the problems of this world intensify. Maybe you look around and you see people around you turning away from God and you're like, what world am I living in? Or you see the ugly reality of racism or corruption or violence, or maybe it impacts you in a new way. Suffering has a way of disorienting us. We want to go back to the way things were. Maybe things weren't all that great. Beforehand, we want to go back to the way things are supposed to be. And the trials and troubles and the pain of life are particularly disorienting to our relationship with God. Sometimes for some of you, you know exactly what I'm talking about because you're in that spot right now. And for others, you've been there. You've lived this. And I think for all of us, we're gonna be there at some point. But what do you do in that in-between space when you enter into it and you kind of go, I don't even know where I'm at now? Things are not the way they're supposed to be. It's disorienting and uncomfortable and even excruciating. I think one of the things that one of the things that, uh, one of the hardest things is how we feel lost in our relationship with God in those moments. God, where are you? God, why is this happening now? God, why won't you do something? Why won't you fix this? All the questions. So, what do you do when you're in that space? When your mind is full of questions and your heart is full of pain, and you feel lost in your relationship with God. That's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about lament. Today I want to look at another one of those Psalms of Lament, Psalm 13, which is probably the clearest example of lament in the Bible. It's like, it's very straightforward. It's six verses long. I'd encourage you, it's short. This is one to memorize. That's kind of part of what it looks like to renew your mind is to meditate on scripture, to memorize it, and this is a good one to do. Psalm 13 kind of goes straight through lament, and there's there's four steps. So I want to outline them for you like this. Address God, bring the complaint, cry for help, and decide to trust. A B C D. See how I did that? It's kind of cute, I think. It's cute and simple, maybe, but I want to give it to you like that because lament isn't really ABCD in reality, right? Like I've been with moms in the waiting room in children's hospital who've just lost a kid. And it's not ABCD. It's just like a snivelling, snoveling mess. But sometimes you kind of need something to hold on to. Um, like when you don't know what else to do. Kind of like when I was a kid, they taught us like if your clothes ever set fire, you need to stop, drop, and roll. Like you just need to know what to do. I think when this, when suffering and pain like this hits you, you need to know what to do. And so here you go. We'll give you A, B, C, D. Address God, bring the complaint, cry for help, decide to trust. Let's talk about each of those. First of all, address God. The main thing that distinguishes lament from grief in general is that it lament happens in the context of a relationship with God. We're bringing our heartache to Him. David asks God a question. He says, How long, Lord? And in doing that, he does two things. He addresses God by name, so he's talking directly to God, and then he asks a question that invites a response. Whatever it is that David is suffering here, it's clear he's not willing to suffer alone. He wants to bring God into this. How long, O Lord? I think for some people, an obstacle to lament is like that they don't want to bring God into that. And sometimes it's because of fear that if I bring God into this and he doesn't resolve it, then I'm never going to be able to trust him. And so we just kind of hold on to it then. We don't even give it to God, which in some ways actually destroys our trust in our relationship with him in kind of a different way, a slow, quiet way, as we stop trusting him to even bring our things to him. Let me make it clear though, David doesn't share that fear. He just brings it right to God. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? And that question, in a way, is actually a form of praise. Think about this with me. The psalms are resources for worship, they're songs for worship. And the lament psalms are part of that too. They're songs for worship. And so lament is kind of it's an expression of trust. It's worshiping God by putting our trust in Him, by bringing our things to God. Think about it like this the hypothetical situation. Imagine I go home this afternoon and my kids say to me, How long, oh dad? Will you forget us forever? It's already three o'clock, and we haven't even had lunch yet. I don't think in that situation that they would be disrespecting me. I think it would actually be the opposite. What they'd be doing is remembering, hey, we've got a history. You're dad, you you usually make lunch. You usually take care of us. And now it's three o'clock and we don't see any lunch. What gives? What's going on? This is weird. After all, they're they're when they're hungry, they ask me about lunch. They don't ask you. They come to me because they're my kids. Because they trust me, because we have a relationship. I think it's the same thing with God. We go to God because we have a relationship with Him. We say, God, where are you? God, you're supposed to be the one who takes care of me when things are falling apart everywhere. You're supposed to be the one who's there when I'm hurting, when I'm confused, when I don't know what's going on, when I don't know what to do. God, where are you in this? It's an expression of trust to Him. Did David or did God really forget David? No. But did David feel like God forgot him? I'm sure that he did. Because we all have moments like that where we think that God has forgotten us. Where we're kind of like, God, where are you? David didn't understand what was going on. I can't understand why you're not here, why you're not doing something about this already. So then he just cries out to God. He brings it to God. And I think about how kids learn to trust their parents in kind of the same way. Like when an infant cries, they don't know what's going on. They know something's not right, but they don't know what it is. They just cry out. But what they learn is that when they cry, somebody comes, mom comes, dad comes and picks that child up and wraps them in their arms and comforts them and helps them and gives them the thing that they need. When that process is repeated over and over again. Psychologists say that what's happening is that a secure attachment is being built. And I think the same thing happens with us and God. When we call out to him again and again. Just like what happens in healthy families when a child calls and a parent comes and picks them up and cares for them. When we call out to God, we learn to trust him. We learn that he comes. We learn that he shows up. We learn that he is there. I don't think that God needs to, I don't think lament is about us telling God what's wrong with the world. I think he knows really well what's wrong with the world. It's a lot of what we've done. But I think we need to tell God what's wrong with the world because we need to learn that he is trustworthy, that we can go to him when it's hard. So that's the first step. Address God. Now here's the second: bring your complaint. A lot of times people talk about venting their feelings. And I think the truth is we probably need at some level, in some way, to be able to express our emotions to God, the hard things that are in our heart. We need, we need a way at least to get them out, to get rid of those things. The problem is that how we do it oftentimes is that we'll vent to one friend about another friend, right? Or we'll vent to our spouse about the kids, or we'll vent to that customer service representative. You know, we'll really give them the business. Or then we'll vent to the manager about the customer service representative. That happens too. The Bible talks about those kind of things, it tells us, you know, it warns us against gossip and slander and outbursts of anger. But the Bible doesn't say a lot about venting, actually, outside of the context of lament. I think this is the biblical way for us to express those feelings. I think he gives us this to express these feelings to God. He gives us the Psalms as a model. He gives us as a tool to set up guardrails in our life. This is what we do. We bring the complaint. Listen to how David does it. He says, How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemies triumph over me? David's got a list of gripes here. He feels like he's forgotten by God. He feels lost, like he thinks God's hiding from him. He feels stuck in his head with thoughts spinning over and over again. Have you ever been there? He feels overwhelmed by the weight of sorrow and having to experience that day after day after day. He feels like a loser. Feels like his enemies are triumphing over him. This is a pretty good template for expressing your pain to God. I mean, that's kind of a good model of what that looks like. I wonder if you have any of those kind of questions. The how long, Lord, questions. How long is this gonna hurt? How long am I gonna be out of work? How long am I gonna feel alone? How long are people gonna discount me? I think sometimes the most important step in processing our pain with God is just simply naming it. When we're naming it, we're not absolutely trying to figure out how long, like a time frame. We're just saying this is hard, this hurts, this is the thing that's hard. I know in my own experience, like being able to name the thing that's hard has oftentimes opened the door for healing for me. I went through a stretch a number of years ago where um I was feeling uh like my brain was foggy all the time. I was feeling exhausted. Um frequently I was getting ornery more than is normal, more than is usual, more than is acceptable. And I didn't know what was going on. Like I look back now and it's like crystal clear, but at the time it was kind of a mystery. And I would just start praying, God, why is this happening? And kind of as I started to lean in, I started to wonder, is this grief? I'd lost my dad a couple years ago, and like the feelings had kind of started to surface, but they surfaced in these other ways. And when I was able to finally say, Oh, yeah, God, I just missed my dad. Like that's when tears came, that's when relief came, that's when healing started to come. I think there's something that's powerful, but when we're able to name it and actually bring it to God, I think sometimes people are afraid to name the thing. And sometimes that fear is because if we name it, we know that there's a lot of feeling there. And sometimes maybe the hurt or fear or shame also comes along with anger. Like, and that's pretty normal. Like anger is often a flip side of those emotions. And sometimes we fear bringing anger to God. Because what if I bring my anger to God? Because we think of God like, well, he's probably just like us. Like when someone gets angry with us, we get angry right back. But God's not like that. He can handle our anger. He's not gonna, he's not gonna withdraw from the relationship. He's not gonna come back at you and crush you in his anger. He knows what you're feeling, he knows you've got emotions. And he's actually given us a model for what to do to bring these to him. He wants to, he wants to hear about it from us. I mean, obviously, we don't want to get lost in our anger. We don't want it to turn into bitterness, but that's I think why we express. It to him so that it doesn't, so that we don't get stuck there. That's why this becomes a guardrail, because if we have a way of bringing these heavy emotions to God, we don't get stuck. And I think with a little bit of humility, with a little bit of recognizing that we don't see the whole picture, that there might be things that God sees that we don't understand. We can bring our anger to God, saying, God, I don't get this. Why aren't you here? Why aren't you doing something about that? And he can meet us in the midst of our thing, in the midst of the situation, as we invite him to do something about the problem that we see. And that's actually the third step in the process of lament. First, address God, second, bring the complaint, and third, cry for help. The Psalm continues. Verse 3, look on me and answer, Lord my God, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. And my enemies will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. David makes one request here. He says, Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. In other words, restore to me health, restore to me life. Otherwise, I'm gonna die here. That's what's gonna happen. He feels like he's dying and he wants to live, and so that's what he asks for. Give light to my eyes. The thing we ask might not actually even be the thing we need. But I don't think it's all that important that we get the exact thing right. I think the important thing is that we just cry out to God. We ask him, we go to him and we say, help. We might not have to have exactly the right words. We just need this desperate cry for help. And give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death is a pretty desperate cry. But here's the thing that you need to know about lament. Lament brings hope. It just does. Lament brings hope. When we tell God our troubles, when we invite him into the situation, the atmosphere changes. There's no place for hopelessness in lament because we are with God. And when we call on him, it opens the door full of possibilities. Now the situation may not change the way that we want it to change. It might not change in the time that we want it to change. But something does change in the situation. What changes is that when we call on God, hope enters the room. Lament opens the door for hope. When it comes to lament, we don't grieve like those who have no hope. We don't do anything like those who have no hope. Because as followers of Jesus Christ, we have a God who sent his son into this world to die for us, to suffer on our behalf. He's a man of sorrows who's familiar with suffering. He suffered on the cross to show us that he loves us, to give us the forgiveness of our sins. And then he rose from the dead so that we know that we could have the promise of eternal life with him, that we could live with him under his loving leadership even right now. Because of Jesus Christ, we have hope. Lament leads Christians into a real and substantial hope, not like a hope, not a wishy-washy hope, not a hope like I want things to get better, or maybe there's a chance of things working out. Not like that. But a hope in terms of we have this hope as an anchor for the soul firm and secure. A hope that endures, a hope that can handle suffering, a hope that can lead us to rejoice in suffering, because we begin to see that while we don't enjoy suffering, that this is not the end, because God can use it as a tool for transformation in us. God won't waste our suffering, and we find meaning and purpose and sometimes help to help us persevere and to endure as we discover that this is not the end of our story. Indeed, our sufferings become a vehicle that takes us to a place, sometimes that's far better. The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, he says, For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we cry for help because we want the circumstances in our life to change. And sometimes they do change because we cry out. Sometimes God intervenes and answers our prayers in a powerful way. But asking God and asking for his help, crying out to him, dramatically alters the spiritual landscape in a different way. Asking expresses our dependence on him and invites hope into the equation. It allows us to see our suffering, the suffering that we're experiencing in the context of God's big story. And that's why asking is a crucial step in the process of lament. So here they are. Address God, bring the complaint, cry for help, and finally decide to trust. I think my favorite line in this whole psalm comes right here at the end as David concludes, but I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me. I love those words, but I trust. They mark a turning point. David's not denying the reality of his suffering. He's not pretending that everything is going to be alright. He's been adamant about how his situation feels. How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? And he knows exactly what's at stake. If God doesn't come through, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. Even still, in all of that, maybe because all of that, David is able to uh, he's able to audaciously express his confidence in God, regardless of what he's experiencing. But I trust in your unfailing love. And with that confidence, it gives him joy access to joy in the midst of suffering. My heart rejoices in your salvation. That confidence also enables him to remember his history with God and even sing the Lord's praises. Pastor Gene Peterson, author of the Message Version of the Bible, he once said that all true prayer pursued far enough will become praise. It does not always get there quickly, it does not always get there easily, but the end is always praise. I mean, it's true, it doesn't always get there quickly or easily, does it? Going through lament is not like driving through a town in rural North Dakota where you get through in 30 seconds, you don't even have to pause for a stop sign. Lament is not like that. Lament is a lot more like driving through a desert wilderness, isn't it? Where you don't know how long you've been there and you don't know how long you have to go. But you just keep following the road. What Peterson is saying, and I think is true, is we engage with God and we we engage with Him in prayer, eventually the road does bring us back to praise. So you might be wondering, what do I do after I've done this? All right, Pastor, I listened. I did ABCD. I prayed the prayer, I read the psalm. It still hurts. What do I do now? That's a really good question. And the answer is a lot harder than that. Sometimes I don't know what to do in those situations. Maybe a thing to do is pray that prayer again and again and again. Pray that psalm until you've got it down by heart. So that's the thing that finally helps you fall asleep at night because you've just been praying this to God over and over and over again. Maybe that's what you do. Maybe what you do is you wait. Maybe like David was he was wrestling, and maybe at some point you just stop wrestling and just wait. He was wrestling with his thoughts. Maybe you just wait for God to show up. Maybe you just do the next right thing. The next thing that God puts in front of you to do that's good. Maybe you just go and work on the garden outside or make a dinner or call a friend. And you just keep doing the next right thing, even when you don't feel God, even when you don't feel his presence. Because that's what it looks like to walk by faith and not by sight and not by feeling. But maybe above all, the thing I would tell you to do is just watch for him. In the midst of this, as you're waiting and as it hurts, to just watch for him. David sings in another psalm, another lament psalm, Psalm 59, you are my strength, I watch for you. You, God, are my fortress, my God on whom I can rely. So watch for him to strengthen you. Watch for him to comfort you and sustain you. Watch for him to lead you out of the wilderness because you can be assured that he will do it. Our God is a faithful God. When we're in the midst of suffering and pain, we follow Jesus Christ to the cross. And we're not immune to suffering and problems and difficulties, but we follow the one who suffered for us. And he bore our pain and our suffering. It's for our sake that he died. And he did not stay dead. On the third day, he rose from the dead, and he is alive. And so we don't just follow him into suffering. Listen to this, we don't just follow him into suffering. We follow him out. Because he is alive, and our hope is in him. There will be a day when there will be no more dying or mourning or crying and pain. There will be a day when he wipes away every tear from our eyes. That day might not be today. But he is here now too. He's alive and he loves you and he will hold you up even in the midst of your suffering. So here's what I want to invite you to do. Watch for him. Even as you lament. Let's pray. God, I thank you that you are with us and that you are a God of hope, even in the midst of suffering. I'm sure there's people who are suffering here today. I'm sure we think about Pastor Ben and his family, and we say, Come, Lord Jesus, come and help. Come and help that family that he loves, that he cares about. Wrap your arms around them and wrap your arms around those who are hurting here too. We lift them to you and we pray these things in Jesus' name. All God's people said, Amen.