Summer Remix Part 2: Lamentations

Join us at Salt & Light Church as Pastor John preaches on lamentations. Today, John breaks down what it means to biblically lament.

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Okay. Well, welcome everybody. Welcome to our new sanctuary room for this week, right in a different spot. Anyway. So we uh they're in the process of like waxing the floors, and uh middle schoolers are tough on their floors, and it took them longer than they expected. So we're in here. Um, the bathroom, if anyone wants to know, just legit, if you go out this way, all the way down to the hall and to the left, the bathrooms are right over there, as well as water. So, as we do this, but I love our church, man. We're so flexible, we just kind of figure it out. You all made it. I don't think anyone turned around and missed us. Um, but yeah, thanks for being here. So uh in the month of August, we do something that I that I love. We do a sermon series called Remix, where what we do is is that we go through the over the past year different sermon series that we have preached. How many know, like in life, we will like learn something or God will speak to us, and then we will immediately move on to something else, right? And then we can forget what God has done. Well, we take the month of August to reflect back on what God has spoken to us through our sermon series. This summer we're doing something special where it's called the old school remix, where we're going back and we're re-preaching everything from the last six years. So any sermon series that we've talked about. And remixes are kind of fun. Whenever you hear remix, it's like somewhat familiar, but it's also not entirely familiar. Like you might recognize some things but add some new and some fresh stuff that's there. Well, today I'm gonna be taking a look at a sermon series that I that we did back um in 2022, four and a half years ago. Crazy on the book of Lamentations. And the book of Lamentations. You know, the Bible is a book that talks a lot about expressing grief. Talks a lot about the anger and frustration and angst that we have, and what we're supposed to do with that anger and frustration and angst. How many of you have ever expressed ang, have ever had anger, right? Frustration, grief, anything like that, right? Well, what do we do with that? What is it that we are supposed to, how are we supposed to release that? And God gives us this tool that we use in our worship called lamenting. And that is where we get the name of the book, Lamentations, is this process of lamenting. What lamenting is, it's to express grief, sorrow, regret, unhappiness about something to God. You know, 43% of the psalms are lament psalms. If you just open up the book of Psalms somewhere in the middle of the Bible, there's a 43% chance that you will find a psalm that talks about anger, frustration, or grief or something not right. And if you read some of the psalms, sometimes they're pretty dark, aren't they? Sometimes they express the full ugliness of our humanity. We see Jesus, he lamented right before he died. He's talking to God about all the frustration and angst and what he's about to go through. We see it over and over again. But this isn't natural to us, right? It isn't normal for us to always want that out. You ever have like relationships or friends? And if it just feels like, what if you had a friend that is every time you hung out, like 43% of the time, everything was just horrible and dark, and like after a while, you'd just be kind of like, I don't know if I want to hang out with this person anymore. Because like all of this anger or frustrations, or maybe you're that way, where you're kind of like, I don't, I'm going through a rough time, but I don't know if I want to spend all of this time just unloading on people, right? And because we have that mindset, we incorrectly take human characteristics and human thinkings and give it to God. We think, well, God's not interested in my anger or frustration. God doesn't want to hear all this stuff. God wants me to be happy. He wants me to sit and, you know, think about the good times or the hope. But God is not like us. He asks us to give all that stuff to us. In fact, not only does he ask us to do it, if we don't do that, if we don't lament, if we don't bring that to God, our worship is one-dimensional. We will not reach the depth of the relationship with God that we're seeking unless we learn to do that well. It's like any relationship, right? If you just keep things on the surface and you just talk about the weather, you're not going to grow a deepness of the relationship. It's when you go through something hard and difficult that you're bonded together. That is just the way we are built. So, this book of lamentations in the Old Testament, it goes through this process of lamenting. It's five chapters long. And this book is written by the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah wrote another longer prophetic book. And this takes place after the southern kingdom was conquered and taken captive by Babylon and the temple was destroyed. So you can imagine, we've talked about this in the past with the Old Testament. You can imagine what it would feel like. How would you feel if all of a sudden a foreign nation came in, conquered you, kidnapped you, and took you to another place? What would you think about the world, about God and God's protection and what that means for you? Well, this book, Lamentations, is written in response to that. It's a lament to God about all that stuff that's there. And it's interesting, even though it's a very deep book and it talks about very hard topics, it's actually extremely poetic and very beautiful. The way it is structured, is structured like an acrostic. So every single chapter, every single sentence, new line is the is another letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It would be like if this was written where the first line is A, then B, C, D, E, all the way through through the whole Hebrew alphabet. And in fact, chapter three, for some reason, goes A, B, B, B, C, C, C through the Hebrew alphabet. So it's very poetic. So even as we read it in our language, sometimes it's awkward because, like, if you ever, you can imagine like writing this beautiful poem, translating it into another language. Sometimes you read it and you're like, wait, what are you saying? But it's it's we lose something in the beauty of this. And it just kind of gives us an idea that God views our lamenting and even the ugliness as beautiful, that that can still be something of beauty as we worship God. In fact, this book is something that uh the Jews will still do today. They'll recite the book of Lamentations on a fast day of Tishbaav, where they have an entire day of mourning and lamenting, and they'll recite this book. Well, we preached this sermon in 2022 when our word of the year was restore. And our word of the year, every year we have this year, our word of the year is salt and light, which is also the name of our church. But in 2022, we had this verse that we just felt really would be what God would be doing through us. And it came from Lamentations 5, where it says, Restore us, Lord, and bring us back to you again. Give us back the joys we once had. And it's interesting, this talking about restoration, this beautiful verse is kind of tucked in a book of the Bible that is very dark and that has a lot of ugliness to it. And we spent 2022 and we opened the year with this book and saying, if you want restoration in God's life, if you want to see those areas of your heart be restored, you have to learn how to lament. You have to learn how to take that to God. And if you're finding and you're struggling in having areas of just feeling God's restoration, I think that this is the key to help unlock that fullness of the restoration, learning how to lament. And we see a roadmap of what will how Jeremiah did it and what we'll go ahead and look at it. So I'm going to start by reading the first couple of verses in Lamentations 1 as we go through. So Jeremiah starts out this book, and the first thing he does is he just focuses on what he sees. He's just being honest about the situation. So it says, How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations. She who was a queen among the provinces has now become a slave. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears on her cheeks. Among all her lovers, there is no one to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her, they have become her enemies. So he starts by just saying, How deserted is this place? Like just honesty, like this place is not a place that we want to be. And he uses this language of marriage. Throughout the Old Testament, you see that the relationship between God's people and God is like a marriage. It's a sacred covenant that's supposed to be honored and cherished. And over and over again we see there's this theme that whenever Israel turns their backs on God, it's like they're prostituting themselves. It's like you're cheating on God with other prostitutes and other cheap gods and other horrible practices that you do, not honoring the poor, not fighting um against injustice, not uh coming to Yahweh with good worship, but by worshiping these false idols. And we see this theme of prostitute kind of coming up again and again as we see it here. It says, Jerusalem has sinned greatly, and so has become unclean. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her naked. She herself groans and turns away. Her filthiness clung to her skirts. She did not consider her future, her fall was astounding. There was none to comfort her. Look, Lord, on my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed. So we see a very honest picture of what's going on, and that's the first part that I want to focus on today about the process of biblical lament, is that it force biblical lament forces you to be honest. The first thing that Jeremiah does is it's kind of like a contractor coming in. If you have like work that needs to be done kind of in your house, right, and you're like, man, my house is falling apart, I know what's going on. You call in a contractor to come in and say, okay, your floor is sinking here, your roof is leaking, you have this situation going on with your electrical, you have everything else, and you just kind of see what's going on and just like, hey, don't sugarcoat what's going on in my house. Like, tell me what is happening. And that's what Jeremiah is doing at the very beginning, at the very front. The language is very graphic here as we look at it. I mean, when it says here, just think about some of this. So you're talking about Israel and God's people prostituting itself, like when it says here, her filthness clung to her skirts. So, what is this a picture of? If you have a prostitute who's having sex with lots of people, what do you think is seeing on the outside of her skirt? Right? Gross fluid is what it's talking about. That's pretty offensive stuff to read in the Bible. It is disgusting. It is like something that's it's supposed to shock you to say, oh my gosh, like sin is ugly, right? Like it, you read this and it's just being honest about like, man, what God's people has done has just been so filthy. And what has what we have been doing as a people has just been completely horrible. Biblical amment forces you to be honest. It does not easily dismiss death. It doesn't, true biblical amment doesn't put blinders on. You ever have that thing? And I realize why we do this sometimes when someone will ask you, hey, how's your week been? And you're like, good. You're like, I'm a little tired, but truthfully, you are barely holding it together. You know what I'm talking about? Where we will put those binders on, we will, and there are places for that where it's appropriate for us to be like, I don't know if I'm gonna get into this with every single person. But the problem is a lot of times we can do that with God. We can come to worship and say, okay, I've had a really hard week. I'm gonna come in to worship and I'm just gonna put a smile on my face and I'm just gonna sing the songs. And that's what one of the songs was. We did, I mean, as we were singing that, I'm sorry for when I've just gone through the motions. Heather talked about that up here. I was I was the same thing. I was just like, Lord, man, I am sorry. Those times that I have just come where I've just not been honest with you. Like biblical lament starts with being honest, not sugarcoating it. When we lament, we need to be specific. When we have anger and frustrations, if we are angry at God, we need to tell him why we are angry and what he did to make us angry. When we have sinned, we need to be honest about what our sin is. It's one of the tenets of recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous, um, CR, celebrate recovery. You go through and you write down every nasty bad thing you did. Everything. You do not sugarcoat, you do not pretend like everything was okay or minimize anything. You are honest about where you were and what you have done. When you're in pain, we need to be honest. When you're angry with God, when you doubt that God even exists. It's not only okay that you do that, God asks you to do that. He asks you to bring that to him. So biblical amendment forces you to be honest. The next thing that biblical amend does is biblical amend forces you to feel. There's this shift in chapter one. Verses one through eleven and then verse 12. That's so amazing, so poetic that I I love. The first half was an honest look at what's happening, where you go into the nitty-gritty of what's going on. Now the language shifts and it turns into feeling language and personal language. So what happens is Jerusalem shifts into something becoming personal. It's a personal thing that happens. So if Jerusalem is, as if almost Jerusalem is personifying words here. I won't read everything for the sake of time, but listen to some of this language that we see here. It says, It is nothing to you, all you who pass by. Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me, that the Lord has brought on me in the days of his fierce anger? This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit. My children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed. I called to my allies, but they betrayed me. My priests and my elders perish in this city while they search for food to keep themselves alive. People have heard my groaning, but there is no one to comfort me. It's so genius here. And so poetic. Jeremiah forces you to be honest, to look and say, the city is desolate. This is everything that was done. But now let's feel the weight of that truth. We have the truth, but now we want to sit down. And that happens to us all the time, right? We could hear about a tragedy, but just keep it in our minds and not bring it down to our feels, right? You listen to we have this, all these fires going on in smoke hand, like kind of a horrible thing that's going on. And that's something that, like, oh man, I hear that's information, and that's really bad, and that really stinks. But unless you really know somebody, or unless you're like involved, all of a sudden it kind of takes on a different thing where you know somebody who maybe lost their life or lost everything. All of a sudden it becomes personalized. And all of a sudden, that tragedy that you hear about that's in your brain goes down to your feelings. And this is what Jeremiah is doing. He's saying, let's not just think about this, let's feel this. You see, it's important when we're lamenting that we don't only bring the facts to God, that we also bring our feelings to God as well. Now, depending on personalities, there's a range God has made us all very different. I find that kind of practically, for the most part, you can separate people into two categories: people who think, who are kind of ruled, who are like thinking forward, and people who are feelings forward. You know what I mean? And we shift and everyone's a little bit different. But it's important for those who are thinking forward that we bring the facts to God, that we are honest, we intellectually are honest with God about what's happening, but it's important that we also bring our feelings to God as well. I'm very thinking forward. I can live in my head. It's hard to get down to my heart. It's hard for me to bring that heart. I can bring my head to Jesus, no problem. I love studying God's word in the Bible intellectually, but sometimes that distance between my head and my heart, while only a foot or two, I guess more like a foot, feels like a mile. That distance is really hard for me. When I'm lamenting, I need to bring that feel. It's not just enough to be an intellectual exercise. But the same thing with those who are feelings focused, focused, because sometimes, if you're feelings focused, you could say, these are all my feelings, God, and I bring everything to you. But one of the most important things is that if you're feelings focused, that you're also honest with what's happening. Hey, God, this is what I'm feeling, but this is the truth. And that's okay. You can have your feelings, feelings just are what they are, but then you bring to God and say, okay, this is what I'm feeling, but this is what is actually true, God. You bring both. We need to be honest, and we need to bring our feelings to God as a pro as while we're lamenting. It's so easy for us to do one or the other. Or neither. It's maybe the easier way to do it. Where we just expect that God just wants us to be happy and show of emotions and cheery. It's not the way life is. It's not who God created us to be. Well, when we are in our process of lamenting, God doesn't just want us to stay here. He doesn't just want us to bring the honesty, to bring the anger and frustration and grief to him. He doesn't just want us to feel it. And then, all right, well, sounds good. On your way, right? There's a process that as we go through when we see this happening, that there's hope. Lamentations three, in the middle of this utter, and for the sake of time, I'm not even going into all of it. You're just getting flavors of it, of the depth of the pain and the depth of the destruction and the anger towards God. The fact that God would allow his people to be conquered. There's all of that going on. You have this really beautiful passage in the middle of it in Lamentations 3. So in the middle of the horrible stuff that's going on, you have this passage that says, Yet I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. So again, right now, he immediately says, Yet I'm calling to mind. So I'm bringing to mind, and because of that I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I say this to myself, the Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young, for no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion. So great is his unfailing love, for he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone. There is so much here that's jam-packed. But there's one theme that runs through this, that what biblically lament does, is that biblical lament remembers God's faithfulness while questioning. See, in the middle of the questioning, you Jeremiah remembers God's faithfulness. Many times we think that that has to be a binary state, that we either have to remember God's faithfulness or be questioning, and both can't exist in the same space. But this is showing us absolutely not that they can both exist together. That you can believe in the hope and the faithfulness, but yet you can also question. And that's okay. We're reminded that God is faithful. Verse 22, as we look on it says, Because God's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. The worship, the word there is chesed, which is a type of love and faithfulness that is covenant-based. It is the type of thing like a marriage, when you make a covenant, like to have and to hold, like I will forever be uh bonded to you. It's that type of language, that word chesed. So it's like my compassion towards you is not based on what you did, it's based on who I am in my covenant. And this is translated elsewhere where it says they are new every morning, where elsewhere it says his mercies are new every morning. Have you ever heard that phrase before? That God's mercies are new every morning, it comes from right here, Lamentations 3. What a powerful verse. That idea that his mercies are new every morning in the midst of one of the darkest days of Israel's history. That you have this beautiful flower in the midst of just this burnt up crisp of this prayer. I love that. His mercies, his chassed, his loving kindness is new every single time you wake up. It's like every time you wake up, that odometer is clicked. All of that pain, anger, frustration, angst, sin, every morning it is clicked afresh. His mercies don't run out. You don't get to the end of it. It may feel like we do, but no matter how bad it gets today, God gives you new mercies. Amen. It's an exciting thing. We can cheer for it. So in the middle of this lamentation, we see that his grace is not consumed. The grace of God isn't ever terminated. It doesn't fail. Even though he may permit suffering, we see that the compassion is according to his faithful love. So this brings us to the end of Lamentations as we read through. Lamentations 5, verse 19 through 22. It says, You, Lord, reign forever. Your throne endures from generation to generation. Why do you always forget us? So even here you see, Lord, you reign forever. It's great. Why do you always forget us? And why do you forsake us? Right? It's like this just seems a little bit bipolar. It's like, you're absolutely right. That's how our worship sometimes sounds, right? God, you are so good, where the hell are you? Right? Just to be like, what is happening? Like, that is just the way that worship is, and that is invited in. And I love that part. Lord, you reign forever, your throne endures from generation to generation. Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us? And then we get to the verse that was our word of the year in 2020, this idea of restoration that is so important. Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return, renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure. In verse 21, another translation is Give us the joys we once had. How many of us want the joys that we once had? Man, I look at my kids and the way they wake up in the morning, and I'm like, I wish I woke up at 6 a.m. as happy as you are, right? Or I look at that. I mean, even this week, we we have talked about it. We were at camp. There were two weeks of camp straight. And I was at a kid's camp and just seeing all the way from fourth graders all the way to those about ready to go into college, and all the adults just worshiping the heart out, and I'm worshiping, and you get in it, and it's like, God, man, that joy is there. And sometimes we have these amazing mountaintop experiences, and then we drive down the mountain, it's like, where were like, where is that? Like we can pray for that and say, God, give us that same joy that we had. I mean, this is all restoration language. When we need to be restored, it's because something was taken from us. God, give us, give me back what was taken. The recipe for getting that back is through lament. That's the vehicle of how we bring that in. What's fascinating? So, this is the very end of the book, the very end of Lamentations. Here's the most fascinating part to me. Look how it ends. We'll read verse 21. Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return. Renew our days as of old. Would be perfect if it ended there, wouldn't it? How it actually ends is unless you have utterly rejected us and you are angry with us beyond measure. Amen, let's pray. It just ends. In fact, what's fascinating is even there throughout church history, there have been times where they're praying and lamenting and talking about this, and they will just whack off that last verse. They just cut it off. Verse 22 is just gone. Or what they'll do is they'll actually flip it. They'll put verse 22 before uh 21. Why did you forsake us for long because you have utterly rejected us and then restore it? Like they'll flip it in their readings because it just ends in a weird way. You know, lamentations end in what's kind of called like a minor chord. You know, like music, what a minor chord is? Like a minor chord is where you put like three notes at the same time, and it's something that has kind of an unsettled feeling to it. It's something that, like, as you listen to it, it's kind of a moody feeling. And if you don't know anything about music, there's something about minor chords that you don't end a song in a minor chord because it just feels off. And even if you don't know anything about music, you know, sometimes you hear something, you're like, I don't know why that doesn't sound right, but it just does not sound right. You know what I'm talking about? Like, that's what it happens. And that's how lamentations end. I have an example of this that I'm gonna go ahead and play that I had, and this is what Lamentations does. Like, isn't that horrible? You know what I mean? Oh, we're doing it again. There we go. Isn't it like horrible? It's just like it just it like it just doesn't feel right. Like, or even if you don't know anything about music, you just know like that should not end that way. It is not satisfying to my ears. Because why? Because we it just there's something in our brains that just wants that completion. We want to end on a good note. You heard that phrase before, ending on a good note. That's where this comes from. There's these laws and these things that you do with music where you end in the right note, and if you don't, it's weird and we don't like it. Lamentations ends in a minor chord, it ends boom, and it just is left there. And it's done very purposefully. Like Jeremiah leaves it here, he leaves it unresolved. This book of lamentations is an unfinished story. There is no clear-cut resolution. There isn't a triumphal return to God's people. There's not even a promise of God's people. We see elsewhere in Ezekiel, somewhere else, that there were false prophets going around and saying, hey, this whole thing that's going on, this will only be for five years, and then God will actually save us and bring us back. So don't even worry about it. We're all good. Everything's fine. And God calls out that that's false prophecy because what people were doing is they were sugarcoating the situation and not recognizing the trueness of what was going on. Jeremiah leaves it out there and saying it's ultimately up to God about what happens here. There's a great quote by Orson Wells that says, if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop the story. Right? Depends on where you stop. Well, the beautiful part for us as Christians, when we read Lamentations, we know that the story doesn't end on that bad chord. It doesn't end on that bad note. Because we know that the story ends with Jesus. That is not the ending. That is not the end. Lamentations is unresolved because Jeremiah knows that there is something that is going to be coming that will actually solve the problem, that will actually bring about the fullness and restoration. Our final point this morning, as we look through this process, is that biblical lament invites Jesus to remove the sting. We lament our grief. We bring the pain to him, but we also ask Jesus to remove that sting of sin and death. The death happens and the sin exists, but we just remove the sting from that. There's this great verse, 1 Corinthians 5, right here, where Paul is quoting Hosea, another Old Testament prophet. It says, Where, O death is your victory, where O death is your sting. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. So it's this picture of that the sting of sin and death, that the pain associated away with that is taken away with Jesus. Now the death still exists, and the st sin still exists, but the sting can be resolved through Jesus. It's an amazing thing that can happen. As we go through lament, lamentations gives us this really great process by which we go. We start by just being honest, not sugarcoating. We then make sure that we bring our feelings, and then we remember God's faithfulness and the hope. We bring in the hope. But then the last part of lamenting is that we invite Jesus to come in to help remove that sting. That we don't have to stay there. It's okay for us to stay there, and it's okay for us to be in that situation. But we just invite Jesus and remember that Jesus can remove that in our lives. Let's go ahead and stand as we end. What's something that you can lament? I know it's hard to do at the end of a sermon series or at the end of a sermon. Maybe you're already thinking about what snack is on the table you might want to grab, where you're gonna go to lunch or whatever else. But let's just take a moment. And let's just think through what is something that this week God is asking you to lament through. Take a moment and just tell Jesus right now. Just be honest about what you are feeling right now. Take a minute. So, Lord, right now we come to you. I love how we even we sang that song. That's just something that we can be honest about. That sometimes we just go through motions, sometimes we just go through that. But bring us our hearts back to worship, God. I pray that you would help every one of us just to be honest with ourselves, but also honest with you. I pray against the times and that word in our heads that say, I have to pretend that everything is okay, and I have to pretend like everything is fine. I pray that you would help create a container here, a safe place for all of us as a church, that there are those times, if in we go through life with our coworkers and everything else, that this would just be a place where we can just be honest and say, I had a horrible week and I don't even know how I got here today. That we would be able to do that for each other, that we could be honest. I pray, Lord, that we would bring all of that, our feelings to you. Help me in that huge distance between my head and my heart to be able to be honest about how what is actually going on and honest about my feelings. Help us to remember your faithfulness, and that it's okay that we can just seem so disjointed in our prayers, teetering between faithfulness and hope and despair. That there's place and space for that. And I pray, Lord, that as we invite you in to remove that sting from us, that you'd simply do what you said you will do, which is grant us healing. I pray that we would be a restored people. I pray that we would be a people who would experience the fullness of you. That you would turn us into the men and women of God you want us to be, and the areas of our souls that are hollow or thin, that you would begin to restore, give us the joys that we once had. In your name we pray. Amen. Amen. Will I leave you with this blessing? The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his shalom.