After a couple of weeks in Proverbs, we shifted over to a psalm today. It’s a beautiful morning with joyful music that we’ve just sung in a very difficult psalm. Some directional help as we go forward. We are going to start by plunging down as it were a massive dark wave, and then we will ride it back up to join to the top, the daylight of the great grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. As we look to the reading of God’s word, if you please join with me in prayer. Lord, you know that we are dull of hearts and prone to sin, prone to carelessness. So we ask you to open our eyes to the truths of your gospel, that you would unplug our ears, that we would hear your word. Father, that it would please you to transform us by the power of your Holy spirit. Oh, gracious God, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth. So make us hungry today for this heavenly food that it would nourish us in the ways of eternal life. And this we pray through Jesus Christ, the bread of heaven.
Amen. Beginning in verse one, a Psalm of David, Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my please for mercy. In your faithfulness, answer me in your righteousness. Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. For the enemy has pursued my soul. He has crushed my life to the ground. He has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me. My heart within me is appalled. I remember the days I meditate on all that you have done. I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hand to you. My soul thirst for you like a parched land. Answer me quickly, O Lord. My spirit fails. Hide not your Martin Luther as a theological our house, shaking his fist as it were at a corrupt church and at the devil, a solitary tour de force. The author of a mighty fortress is our God and the great engine of the Reformation. And yet during a time when he was hidden away, busy translating the Bible into German. He was hiding from those who were trying to take his life. He wrote this to a fellow friend and reformer.
He said, I sit here at ease, hardened and unfeeling. Alas, praying little, grieving little for the church of God, burning rather in the fierce fires of my untamed flesh. It comes to this, I should be a fire in the spirit. In reality, I a fire in the flesh with lust, laziness, idleness, sleepiness. It’s perhaps because you’ve all ceased praying for me that God has turned away from me. For the last eight days, I have written nothing, nor prayed, nor studied, partly From self-indulgence, partly from another vexating handicap. I really cannot stand it any longer. Pray for me, I beg you, for in my seclusion here I am submerged in sins. Not quite the picture of victorious Christian living that we would think of a great reformer. What are we supposed to do with moments like these? How do they come and what, if anything, can we do when they fall upon us? These are hard and pressing times for our faith. They are what one 16th century writer referred to as the dark night of the soul. The moments we feel like God has hidden himself from us, our doubts, our difficulties assail us at these times.
We also recognize that this is a part of a life of faith for God’s people. The Lord has promised never to leave us nor forsake us. And so that we must let then our desperation for the Lord fuel our desire to draw near him, even when we are wanting to be pushed away. God’s people can experience a sense of the the Lord’s withdrawing the influence of his grace, his love, and his favor towards them. A sense that the Lord has withdrawn his presence, his light, his consolation. We’re going to look this morning then, what are some of the reasons or the causes that we might feel like the Lord has left us, and what then of the cure? Well, first looking at the causes, looking at Psalm 143 here with David. His opening listening prayers, Hear my prayer, O God, give ear to my please for mercy. In your faithfulness, answer me in your righteousness. Now, we don’t know the specifics of David’s trouble. Many things it could be, but we’re not told exactly what. He’s appealing, of course, to the Lord’s mercy and uprightness. Then in verse 3, he said, For the enemy has pursued my soul.
He has crushed my life to the ground. He has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Don’t know exactly believe what that refers to, but he is in dire straits. And he continues in verse 4, Therefore my spirit fains within me. My heart within is appalled. I remember the days of old. I meditate in all that you have done. I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you. My soul thirst for you like a parched land. He’s hard-pressed and is compounded by this inner sense of loss and abandonment. Where is God at? Why am I going through these difficult circumstances. The Holy spirit uses these feelings of withdrawal to teach us both our own nature and the nature of God’s great grace. In verse 2, Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. David has appealed to God’s righteousness, and in doing so, he knows there’s no way that he measures up to it. He sees the sheer grace of it all. He has a proper assessment of himself. God’s withdrawal helps us to see our own sinfulness. Period Minister Joseph Simon, he gets this illustration of a gardener to highlight this.
He mentions how when the gardener is diligently weeding out the garden and caring for it, it seems fair and pleasant. Its fruits and flowers, wholesome herbs, and useful trees are abounding. But if the gardener stops pulling weeds, then the true nature of the ground is immediately seen. It’s quickly overrun with thisdles and weeds. God’s absence helps us to see our own depravity and our need of his great grace. We could think that, Oh, we’re doing really well. It really is a good and kind God who’s pulling out all the weeds around us. When given our own run, we see what quickly can arise from the soil. In the book of 2 Chronicles 32, it says that the Lord left King Hezecaia to himself in order to test him and know all that was in his heart. We also know that Hezecaia didn’t do so well with that testing. He had just experienced this great military deliverance from the Lord and saved Jerusalem. He was even cured of a terminal sickness. But then left to himself, his pride grew. When special envoices came from Babylon, he was showing him all the great things of his kingdom and all that he had accomplished, forgetting so quickly of the Lord’s kindness to him and his own need of his provision.
Of course, the Babylonians later came and entirely sacked Jerusalem. Left to his own, he slides into his pride. In the Lord’s seeming absence, we see the wonder of his free grace in our desperate need of it. And this David has come to now, Enter not into judgment with your servant. He knows entirely the need of sovereign grace. He’s not coming there saying, God, judge me by my righteousness and give me what I deserve. He is asking God to give him from the bounty and the abundance of his mercy and goodness. In Psalm 73, the Psalm declares, When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in my heart, I was brutish and ignorant. I was like a beast toward you, towards God. Nevertheless, I’m continually with you. You hold my right-hand. You guide me. It’s your counsel. And afterwards, you will receive me into glory. All of it’s God. All those great things, it’s the Lord doing this. Well, another cause for the sense of God withdrawing his presence is also just simply to correct us. It’s a pruning of the soul that is so necessary. His hiddenness brings our pride and our foolishness down.
He teaches us in those withdrawal moments to be hungry and thirsty for him, to humble ourselves. In Psalm 42, David writes, As a deer, pants were flowing stream, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirst for God, for the living God. God puts us at times through a moment of dryness so that we would learn the hunger and the thirst for him. His withdrawal teaches us this, to bring us to that awareness. And God’s hiddenness also corrects us when we neglect the means of grace, when we cease to be watchful over our souls. We have a tendency always to make everything about us, that we’re priority number one. The Lord in his kindness, he corrects us from that. He teaches us what we read in Hebrews 13, Do not neglect to do good, or Hebrews 10, Do not neglect to gather together as some are in a habit of doing. He’s teaching us Deuteronomy 6, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and how difficult that can be for us. And so that pruning takes place. To be able to cause us then to reach out and to hunger after God.
We also see that grieving the Holy spirit can cause this feeling of spiritual desertion. Paul warns of it in Ephesians 4. He said, Do not grieve the Holy spirit of God. Sin and disobedience grieve the spirit. We see that in the great Psalm of Confession of Sin, David in Psalm 51, Cast me not away from your presence. Take not your Holy spirit from me. Recognizing that he needs God to cleanse him from his sin. There’s a stubbornness to listen, a hardness of heart when we grieve the spirit. In Acts 7, Stephen, the first martyr, is rebuking the Jews who are about to kill him. He said, You stiff-neck people, you always resist the Holy spirit. In Psalm 81, Hear, O my people, why I admonish you, Israel. If you would but listen to me, but my people do not listen to my voice. Israel would not submit to me. Then we see what happens next in Psalm 81. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsel. Sometimes when we want to go our own way and we feel that God has left us in our own vanity or our own stubbornness, we go where we want to go.
God says, Okay, I’ll let you do that for a season to see how that works for you. For David, in Psalm 1: 43, the feeling of God’s hiddenness, the feeling of desperation comes because of outward circumstances. Others are pressing in on him, other things outside of his control. But in it, he feels alone. I stretch up my hand you, verse 6, My soul thirst for you like a parched land. Answer me quickly, O God. My spirit fails. Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. And He’s asking that question we all ask, God, why don’t you act? Why don’t you show yourself to me? Where have you gone? But we know that God has not abandoned his people. He’s not forgotten us. He has been with us the entire time. But that’s not what it feels like at times. And notice, though, that David doesn’t stay there. The circumstances do not drive him away from the Lord, but actually to him. That’s the key point. What we’re experiencing, what we are feeling, these things, as bitter as they are, must be resisted. We do not yield to them.
Rather, we take them and we shape our prayers to the Lord in light of them. Psalm 63, Oh God, you are my God. Ernstly, I seek you. My soul thirst for you. My flesh fains for you as in a dry and wearily land where there’s no water. David takes his worst moments directly to the Lord, and by seeing through them together, the church is shaped in her responses and strengthened along the way. He’s coming to God in worship. It is here that we see the cure For the care of our deserded soul takes shape. First, we see that this psalm is a prayer. He draws near to God in his hardship. Verse 8, he says, Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. ‘ ‘Make known the way I should go, for to you I lift my soul. Notice he’s not trying to blackmail God here, how easy that is for us to do. Lord, answer me or I’m just going to give up. Take my bat and ball and go home. I’ve tried it. It didn’t work. Where are you, God? If you don’t answer me now, then I will…
Or subtly we can say to the Lord, Just give me what I want, and nobody gets hurt. No, God will not be blackmailed by us. David declares his faith and his trust in the Lord. Because of this, he cries out to God, Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord. I have fled to you for my refuge. ‘ And knowing his own heart, he then prays that the Lord would instruct him, that the Lord would enable him to hear with humility. And it goes into verse 10. He says, Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on level ground. ‘ And then in verse 11, it’s not a manipulation, rather it’s David’s desire for the Lord’s great name and honor not to suffer because of him. He understands his constant need of God’s grace. He says, For your namesake, O Lord, preserve my life. In your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble. And in your steadfast love, you will cut off my enemies. You will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant. David, he brings his heart to the Lord in worship.
Now, of course, someone might say, Well, yeah, but I don’t feel like this. Or anything. My heart is struggling to get into this. Or maybe I feel like a phony. I’m coming in, I’m trying to praise God, and my heart’s not there. I can be a phony. Well, know that your emotional state is not to direct your theology, your beliefs. Your theology is to help shape and direct your emotions. We come to worship God because he is worthy of our worship, not because we necessarily feel like it. I hope that you feel like it, but there are times when you don’t. God is worthy of our worship, and so we come and are gathered for him, for for his namesake. And so often we find the grace comes in the doing. The change comes in the obedience. I appreciate one commentator. He reminds us, he said, The congregation does not yield its faith to its experience, but instead shapes its bitter experience by faith into urgent prayer. We are not yielding our faith to bitter experience, but rather we are shaping bitter experience by faith in prayer. It’s complete reversal. The exercise of our faith is best done when we feel like it’s the least.
We want to talk about growth in grace. It’s not hard to worship when everything is going well. To sing, to pray when we’re joyful and excited. Communion with the Lord in those times really is of no effort. Where that is taxed is when it’s the last thing we want to do. And notice that David does not appeal, again, to his efforts, to his labors. He appeals to the Lord’s righteousness, verse 11. He appeals to the Lord’s steadfast love, verse 12. How much greater do we see the wonder of God when he’s manifest to us in our weakness? The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, For God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness, ‘ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. That is a sentence. That is a bullion cube. You need to put that in hot water and let it soak and permeate. It’s hard to take all at once. He made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ Jesus.
But Paul goes on. That glorious truth He then says, But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed. See, at times this is the very experience of God’s people. Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Now, this is one of the downsides of our culture and how it influences us. We have a culture of abundance and well-being and wholeness is what everyone expects. And it has worked its way into the church, where we actually think that the life of a believer should be just one, continue escalating life of glory and wonder and God’s overflowing gifts to us. That’s not the experience in the Bible nor in the life of God’s people through history. Certainly moments like that, but also moments where we feel Well, again, as if God’s presence has left us. The other hard part in that cultural moment, too, is that if you see both in this idea that when we have struggles and difficulties, the counselors of Job surround us like dandelions popping up in spring rain, telling us that, well, we’re probably experiencing this bad thing because there’s sin in our life.
Now, there could be, no doubt. We can do dumb things, we can sin, and we can certainly experience this. But Job tells us otherwise. There are moments that that takes place simply for the glory of God to be revealed, for us to grow in our Christ-likeness. Not this simple thing of bad things happen to bad people. Stop being bad. The Lord has chosen to use fragile earths and vessels for his good work. We all have feet of clay, every one of us. No one’s exempt. We all know what it means for these mighty passions, these great ambitions, these great aspirations to be mixed with such human frailties. That those two things come together, as Paul says, is treasures put into jars of clay. But oh, what glorious treasures they are. Sister Therese of Lassau, she died of tuberculosis at age 24. Young woman, 1897. She was made an official saint by the Catholic Church. She was called the Little Flower. This frail young woman, she wrote of one simple work, is an biography called The Story of a Soul. She had great physical limitations and was often plagued with doubts and spiritual struggles along with her physical problems.
And she wrote this. She I must appear to you as a soul filled with consolation and one for whom the veil of faith is almost torn aside. She knew she was near death. And yet it’s no longer a veil for me. It’s a wall. A wall which reaches right up to the heavens and covers the star affirmament. And this I put in your bulletin. When I sing of the happiness of heaven and of the eternal possession of God, I feel no joy in this, for I sing simply what I want to believe. It’s true that at times a very small ray of the sun comes to illuminate my darkness, and then the trial ceases for an instant. But afterwards, the memory of this ray, instead of causing me joy, make my darkness even more dense. You’ve experienced that where a moment of relief can make the returning darkness actually more intense. And she had about a year of such struggles. It wasn’t her only moments with the Lord. There was great and wonderful times she wrote of as well. But here’s someone who everyone recognizes a woman of great faith. Martin Luther, a man of great faith.
And dark nights of the soul that can crush in as part of the life of a believer. At the Mount of Olive, Jesus told his disciples of the suffering that was about to take place. And Peter in his great bravado, he said, Even though everyone else fall away, I will not. And then Luke records this, words of Jesus to him, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat, reminiscent of Job. And Peter, of course, Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and even to death. And of course, we know how far Peter went. We know his great denial. We know of his turning away in the night and weeping bitterly. But what does Jesus tell Peter along with this? He says, But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. In his greatest moment of need, Jesus has not left Peter. He is right there with him. We read Paul, and he says that Jesus is at where? The right-hand of the Father. What? Doing? Interceding for us. He’s not left us. He’s not forsaken us.
But we do know that Jesus experienced the true hiddenness of the Father so that we not. We know that when the cloud blocks out the sun, that the sun hasn’t moved. So too, when these dark moments come, these hard providences of God come and they obscure his goodness and his mercy, it’s still there. That’s not going to move. The cloud will move at some point. It does. But the Father doesn’t move. When Jesus departs, he tells his disciples, Surely I am with you always to the end of the age. His promise goes before him. You and I can experience seasons of winter in our faith, knowing that the Lord is preparing us for a spring in him. That there can be seasons of this deadness, of this feeling of abandonment, that the Lord is the one readying the soil for gospel fruit to be growing because of his spirit dwelling in us, because of the free grace of the gospel, because of the good news of Jesus. It’s not about us. It’s about what God is doing that he would glorify his son through our lives. And there are times then that he allows the weeds to grow to show us our utter dependence upon him.
There are times, there is a moment, as it were, of winter deadness as it prepares for a great harvest of the spring. God’s seeming hiddenness is not a removal of his love from us, but an act of his great love towards us. From Joseph Simon, he goes, That which I persuade is that men would labor to maintain a constant communion with God. When you have found the sweetness of God’s presence, it’ll be a bitter thing to lose it. That God would let know the sweetness of his presence. Sometimes that is through the bitterness of losing it, that we would stay in communion with God. Not not turning to the right or to the left. But even there, knowing that, again, the Lord brings these moments to our lives for our correction, for our good, sometimes for our discipline, sometimes just simply for the the growth that he wants to develop in us to make us more Christ-like. It doesn’t feel like that in those moments. We’re crying out, Oh, God, where are you at? By I encourage you, as David did, he’s not taking his bat and ball and going home. He’s coming to the Lord in worship.
He is bringing the people of God with him in worship. And we are together worshiping a good and a glorious God. Who else could we turn to? And even as we lay those moments of hardship before him, we know, too, that there are moments of wonder and joy ahead of us. And that is a part of the life of faith, that we move in and out of those, and how volatile it is for us in those difficulties, how we pitch up and down as it were on the storm. And then through all of that, He’s not left us. He’s not abandoned us. He’s not forsaken us. He is present. He is there. And we can call out to him as his children, knowing that all the way through, a loving and kind Father is bringing to us the very things that he knows that we need at the moment, that we would learn to walk by faith and not by sight. Pray with me. Father, glory, as we come before you now, we know here before us in our midst, there’s all the seasons. And Lord, that some are in deep winter and others are coming out into a joyful spring.
And Lord, we would pray and ask that together as the people of God, that we would be able to bring our worship before you because you are truly worthy of our worship. And Lord, we pray and ask that our faith in Christ would direct and shape our experiences, and not the other way around. Lord, that you would strengthen weak knees that you would strengthen feeble faith. And Father, that you would cause those who are glorying in the wonder and the joy of their salvation. Lord, that that too would flourish and grow and be contagious for everyone. We bless you, Almighty God, for the care of our souls that you attend to as the patient and careful gardener. We bless you, Father, Son, and spirit, one God forever. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.