Sermon Transcript
Psalm 13:1-2. 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 enemy triumph over me? Psalm 30:4-5. Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people. Praise his holy name, for his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.
Psalm 39:12-13. Hear my prayer, Lord. Listen to my cry for help. Do not be deaf to my weeping. I dwell with you as a foreigner, a stranger as all my ancestors were.
Look away from me that I may enjoy life again before I depart and am no more. Psalm 126:4-6. Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping carry seed to sow will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.
Thank you, Rachel. I have a discussion question for you all. I’m not going to give you a long time to discuss it, but about 15 years ago, Larry Osborne, who’s the— one of the teaching pastors at North Coast Church in Vista, and they have multiple campuses, and some of our staff have been to some of their conferences in the past. He wrote a provocative-sounding book that I really like. It’s called 10 Dumb Things That Smart Christians Believe.
And some of you are like, there’s only 10 of them? I want you to turn to the person next to you, and I want to see if you can name the number one thing, the first dumb thing that smart Christians believe. Just— I’ll give you just a few seconds here.
All right, not as much discussion as normal, maybe because you’re not sitting next to somebody you want to talk about this with. You could have talked about the Niners. And how they pulled out a great victory last night. Never in doubt. Never in doubt.
They had it the whole way, right? Sheesh. I’ll tell you though, the number one thing that is in this book, and I would agree with this, is being— listen, we’re in a room full of smart, rational people, logical people here. But many, many Christians, myself included, in many seasons of my life, have believed a particular false assumption, if you will, a spiritual urban legend, a complete myth, and it is this. The number one thing is that if we are really trusting in God, if we’re really walking closely with him and seek to obey him, then we won’t ever weep, we won’t ever feel anger, we won’t ever feel hopeless, and God won’t let too many bad things happen to us.
That’s the number one dumb thing that many smart Christians, myself included, have believed or still believe. I’ve heard it preached from pulpits in the form of health and wellness, kind of a, you know, prosperity gospel. Some of you have heard it. You’ll hear it on podcasts. You’ll read it in books and all of these things.
But the point is, is this idea that many of us buy into the idea that if you are doing all the things that God wants you to do, then you won’t ever feel sorrow. And if you do feel any of those things that I mentioned earlier, then you need to stop for goodness’ sake, because it’s wrong to feel those things, and then you need to pull yourself together. What’s wrong with you? When you’re faced with the realities of living in a broken world, God really isn’t all that interested in your feelings or your emotions. So just have more faith, become an overcomer, and just get over your tribulations and start rejoicing in them instead.
That’s typically the kind of self-narrative that we hear, or we hear from other people. Now, a couple dangers that I think we could probably point out here related to buying into this myth. The first thing is, if you and I try to avoid feelings and grief and sorrow altogether— you can try to do that, you can try to put things out of your mind, you can try to force yourself to think more positively positively. That’s what many of us try to do. Again, logical, rational people here.
Many of us are frankly uncomfortable with feelings. We want to deny the depth and darkness of our emotions, or we think that God will punish us for not having enough faith, and so we tend to stuff our emotions.
But doing so— I think that this is the danger here— can turn you into a legalist and into a Pharisee who is an awful comforter to other people who are walking through sorrow, will make you judgmental of others and make you feel superior to them who are wrestling with tough feelings, or it will make you hard and inhuman, and it will erupt later on because it just gets stored up in you, and then it just, you know, just spills out on you and on other people later on. It just— it bites you and it devastates you to have that kind of thought because it’s not realistic. It’s just not realistic. We’re human beings made in God’s image. God has emotion.
God has feelings, and so do we. It’s a good gift from God. The other danger, though, is to see the expression of your feelings, like many of us in the Western world do, to see our feelings almost as a good end in themselves, and we end up bowing to our feelings, almost as if to say, well, those are my honest feelings, and so I just have to, you know, go with my feelings. To do that, though, is also unhealthy and harmful. Here’s what we know, and I think you all know this intuitively, but we still buy into this, again, dumb thing that many of us believe.
The Bible doesn’t tell us to deny our feelings, nor does it endorse rashly or carelessly venting whatever your feelings are in the moment. And we need, therefore, a different approach approach, a different way of responding to the realities of the brokenness and the suffering and the sorrow in this world that happens to us and that happens to other people. And that different way is what the Bible calls lament. I’ve spoken about lament. I preached a sermon on this just almost 2 years ago whenever we were in our series on the book of Job.
You know, sometimes we find ourselves at a loss for words. You ever been like that? You see something, you sense something. Some of our team experienced this in Mexico where you see something in a new way and you just don’t really know how to process it. And that can happen in any number of circumstances.
When you hear about how wars are still going on in other places, or perhaps somebody has stabbed you in the back in some way and it’s so personal and you feel like, I don’t even know how to process this. But it’s a completely reasonable response to living in a world that is not our permanent home. We’re in the middle of this 6-week sermon series, as we’ve talked about. We’ve entitled Exiled: How to Live in a World, or How to Live in a Place That Isn’t Home. We’ve been talking about how as Christians, all of us are in a very real sense spiritual exiles, resident aliens who are living between 2 worlds.
Our current world, we know, is tainted by sin and suffering and selfishness and hostility and injustice and things that just make our blood boil— violence, oppression, poverty, persecution, all kinds of garbage that are the direct consequences of, as Genesis 3 tells us, us choosing to be our own bosses and masters and thereby losing the garden We lost the garden. We lost our home. The garden was our home, and it was the only place where every need we have was met and fulfilled. But now we are spiritual exiles, spiritually homeless, so to speak. And that’s why we live in a world that does not sustain and support the deepest needs of our hearts.
And it’s why we’re all longing for a better home. And so that’s why we’re going through this series, is to talk about how do I live in a home that is a world that is not really my home. And it’s in this context of living in a broken world that God gives us in the Bible the language of lament.
Simply put, this is what lament is. Lament is the language of exile.
It’s your native tongue. We just may not realize it or not. Some of us are like, lament? I don’t fully understand in Scripture when people are, like, lamenting before God. I don’t understand why more of them a third of the 150 Psalms are actually laments.
Are we allowed to pray like that?
It’s the language of exile, lament is, because lament freely acknowledges there’s something really wrong with the world. Biblical lament is not therapy. It’s about us being whole human beings. Whenever we go through times of stress and tragedy and hardness and loss, stuff happens inside of us we don’t understand, and again, we can’t put words to. Things get misaligned and distorted when we feel out of sorts and our shalom breaks down.
So the biblical language of lament that we see in Scripture is God’s way of inviting us to process with Him all that’s going on inside of us, including all of our feelings and our emotions and all of what is going on in the world today. Actually invites us to talk like this with him, to specifically name what is wrong and to give attention to it. It’s not angry wallowing prayer. It’s being honest with God about our feelings. It’s not a personal pity party.
Some of us think of lament as being grumbling, often because of first-world problems or things that are inconvenient to us in some way. That’s not what lament is. Lament is also complaining against God, complaining against His character, questioning Him, putting Him on trial, just like the Israelites did, remember, when they were in the wilderness and saying, God, You did this to us, and therefore You are not good. That’s not what lament is.
Biblical lament is instead complaining to God based on confidence in His character. Let me say that again. Lament is complaining to God based on confidence in his character, asking him to answer according to his character, according to his unfailing love. Why? Because he’s a God of justice.
Because we know he’s a God of righteousness and because we know he’s been faithful in the past. And so we come to him saying, God, I trust that you can handle this heavy stuff, what I’m feeling and processing right now. I don’t like it, and yet I trust you. That’s what lament is. So we’re not expected by God to ignore the fact that we’re exiles.
Don’t— like, you are an exile. I’m an exile. Let’s not ignore that fact, or to ignore the very real problems of the world that we have real weight and consequences to them. And we’re not expected to just turn our frown upside down.
Christianity is not escapism, and not everything that happens in the world has a simple pat answer. Sometimes Christians want to have an answer for everything. Not everything has an answer, friends. It’s okay. So perhaps what we need more than ever is to recover the biblical tradition of lament.
Lament is what happens when spiritual exiles like you and me ask why, and we don’t necessarily get an answer.
It’s where we get to when we as exiles move beyond any self-centered worry about our own sins and our own— how we’ve been inconvenienced. And then we begin to look more broadly at the suffering of the world and say, why, God? Why is this happening to this person or that person? Lament gives us freedom to express how we really feel, like in the Psalms that Rachel just read a moment And here’s what these Psalms teach us. I just gave you a sampling of them.
I want to talk about those particular ones we read, but again, more than a third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. Here’s the first lesson that lament teaches us in Scripture. We should very much expect sorrows in this world. We should expect them. Look at Psalm 126 again.
There is some debate about what these verses are specifically describing, those 6 verses that Rachel didn’t read all of them. She just read 4 through 6 of chapter 126. But if you look at the first 3 verses, you see that there’s like— things are going well for the psalmist. And there are some, like John Calvin was insistent that this is referring to the return of the children of Israel from Babylon after having been in exile. And so they’re exulting.
But then verse 4, takes a really, really dark turn. We’re not really sure. It ultimately doesn’t matter, I guess, so much as mattering or noticing the mood of verse 4 and how it changes, where the psalmist talks about the Negev, N-E-G-E-V, the Negev. The Negev is the southernmost part of Israel. It’s the driest part of Israel.
There are several months where there is drought and there’s barrenness there. The name Negev literally means parched. It’s a desert. Wilderness. It’s bone dry, it’s dusty, and it’s lifeless.
So again, we don’t know precisely what the psalmist is referring to here in terms of circumstances. We just know that they’re saying that their lives were feeling like a desert. Excuse me. What is the point? What do we learn from Psalm 126 or from passages like Psalm 13 that Rachel read a little bit?
It says, how am I going to feel this way? How long am I going to feel this way, God? How long are you going to let injustice happen? How long are you going to let suffering take place, God? How long?
The point of all that is that we learn that even if God is in your life, and even if you are walking with him, you and I should expect sorrow and difficulty and grief in this world, lots of it. There doesn’t appear to be any indication in Psalm 126 here that the people had strayed from God’s ways. They’re not saying it was because of their sin that their lives felt like the Negev, like a desert. They’re not saying it was because they had done something wrong, they hadn’t been having their morning devotionals, they hadn’t been praying enough, they hadn’t been good enough. No, as exiles in this world— that’s what you and I are— we shouldn’t be surprised surprised when these types of seasons come our way, not just because we live in a world where things often go wrong.
If anything, we need to realize that the Bible indicates that when you become a person of faith, that may actually lead you and may actually lead me as exiles to weep and to feel the sting of the brokenness of this world even more.
Why? Because Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble. And that’s true not just because we’re exiles who live in a fallen world. It is true because of that, but it’s also because when you become a follower of Jesus, God replaces your heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Scripture says a heart of flesh is soft and it’s more vulnerable than a heart of stone.
And that’s what God does when you come to faith. In other words, you and I will more acutely feel feel the evil and the pain around us, and we will also acutely feel the pain of others around us who are the victims of evil and injustice. We’ll feel the things around us that frankly we just didn’t before. And if we don’t feel those things, I would ask the question, are you, are you sure that you’re a Christian?
Is it possible that we love this world more than we love God, if we truly don’t feel that tension, and again, not like in a, God, this is inconvenient for me, like a first-world problem kind of a way, but actually feeling a brokenness over our suffering and really the suffering and injustice in the world. The more we grow in grace, the more that we grow in faith, the more that we are conformed more to the likeness of Jesus, the more we should expect not only these types of sorrows but to feel them in a very visceral way. And if we don’t, that’s not normal. As exiles, we should feel it. Jesus came to the earth.
Here’s why we know this. Jesus came to the earth. He had a perfect human heart, didn’t he? And one thing we know about him is that despite Jesus’ perfect heart is he was very well acquainted with grief.
He walked perfectly with God, but we surely wouldn’t say say nothing bad ever happened to him.
So it’s illogical for you and for me as exiles to want to become like Jesus and to think that as long as I’m good and as long as I’m walking with God, God will spare me from seasons of drought and from pain and sorrow and frustration and loneliness that comes with being in exile in this world. There’s actually some good news here I want to tell you. It’s not all wilderness. There is some gospel hope that allows us to see beyond this life and in this place to the next life where we will finally be home again. Look at what happens to the psalmist David at the end of Psalm 39 that was read for us a little bit ago.
There’s still pain. There’s still sorrow and lament. There’s still tears because even with solid gospel hope, sometimes life in this broken world hurts and it’s painful and it’s hard. But the pain and the suffering of this world are only temporary. For believers in Christ.
And David reminds himself that although the season of suffering seems unending, he is just a foreigner and a stranger in this world. He knew that this pain doesn’t last forever because we don’t belong here. And notice also at the end of Psalm 39 that David does not say that he was a foreigner or a stranger from God. That would be awful, to be a foreigner, a stranger, an exile from God. But what he says is, I dwell with you, God, as a foreigner and a stranger.
That’s a big difference. I dwell with you, God, as a foreigner and an exile and a stranger. Meaning, yes, he knew he was in exile in this world, but he was not alone, and he knew that neither are you, neither am am I? We will surely have trouble and sorrow in this life, but it is only temporary. And as we go through it, he is with us.
These laments also teach us not only should we expect sorrows, but too, that we should take our sorrows, we’re supposed to harvest them.
Let’s think about this. Look again at Psalm 126:5-6. It says this, those who sow with will reap tears? No, will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out with weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with more weeping?
No, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. I used to love hearing Tim Keller talk about this metaphor. In one of the last videos I remember that he recorded during COVID he and his wife Kathy are talking about this passage and this concept. Concept. His insights into the passage have really stayed with me.
What this metaphor is saying is that your tears, your sorrows, which again are the natural consequences of being in exile in this world, when sown properly, can bring you a harvest of joy. And one of the implications of this fact is that it is entirely possible for you and for me to actually wait our sorrows, to waste our tears, to waste our lament, to waste our grumbling, like a farmer going out into the field with a sack of seed and instead of sowing the seed all over, just dumping it in one spot. You’re not going to get a harvest from that. No harvest comes from just squandering it. And if the farmer just walks out with a big bag of seed and carelessly dumps it, there’s not going to be a harvest either.
So what does the farmer have to do? The farmer has to plant the seed, sowing it wisely. What this is saying, friends, to you and to me is that it is possible for us to grieve as exiles in this world in such a way that it doesn’t produce any fruit in your life at all, to squander our grief and our sorrow. Your tears and your sorrow, your laments before God as exiles, are actually opportunities for fruitfulness and growth. So don’t waste your sorrows.
And we’re like, what kind of advice is that? Don’t waste your sorrows. We spend all kind of energy trying to avoid sorrows. But are sorrows of any use? Can they be recycled or upcycled into something of value?
Apparently so. In Psalm 56:8, in the New Living Translation, David says this: You, keep track of all my sorrows. You’ve collected all my tears in your bottle. You’ve recorded each one in your book. So David is picturing God as recording every painful episode that you go through, even bending closely and collecting your tears in a bottle.
It’s a powerful image, and what it tells us is this, friends: God sees every one of your tears, the ones that you physically cry and also the ones that you feel inside. God hears every groan. He says, I know you’re in exile and I know that it’s difficult. Just know that I feel what you’re feeling. That’s what God is saying.
You’re not forgotten. You’re not alone. And there is a day coming when there won’t be any more tears for me to wipe, to capture, and to catch. They’re all going to be wiped away. So don’t waste our sorrows.
Don’t be in such a rush to avoid them, but instead, how do we lean into the sorrows and use it as an opportunity to lean into God more? How many times has a person gone through a sorrow and pain in this world and is actually looking back and saying, I’m actually grateful because this happened in my life and it’s actually now have a testimony that I can share with other people. Some of you know exactly what that’s like.
What is the reward for doing this? What is the reward for harvesting our sorrows and our tears and investing them well? What are the sheaves? It’s not more tears, it’s joy. This is really a mind-boggling thing here.
This is going beyond what most of us would even hope that the Bible teaches. We hope that the Bible teaches that tears and sorrows will give way to joy. We hope that. And that is indeed the case, as we heard in Psalm 30, where it says that weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. But this is so much deeper here in Psalm 126.
This is saying if you harvest your sorrows well, you steward them, these sufferings that you’re going through, that the sorrows will actually produce We’ve all heard the phrase, you reap what you sow, right? Psalm 126 is saying the exact opposite. If you sow tears, you know what you’re going to get?
Joy. Here’s a worship song that came out about 25 years ago that was called Trading My Sorrows. Maybe you’ve heard it. The lyrics are, I’m trading my sorrow, I’m trading my shame, I’m laying it down for the joy of the Lord. And actually, like Philippians 4, song at this time.
It’s great. But I started thinking about that song more last week, and I thought, wait a minute, Psalm 126 isn’t actually telling us to trade in our sorrows so that we can have joy. Okay God, I don’t want this sorrow anymore, and so I just— I’m trading it here with you. It’s really saying something more profound. It’s not just saying that joy follows sorrow, It’s really saying that the joy is actually produced by the sorrow.
Do you see the difference? That’s what Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 4:17. He says, our light, our momentary troubles are achieving for us, what? An eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we’re not just waiting for sorrows to go away.
That would be nice. And we’re not really trading in our sorrow as if, okay, I’m trading this in for you. Why? Because our sorrows actually produce joy. Isn’t that crazy?
There, there is a kind of joy that comes from avoiding sorrow and tears, but it doesn’t really change you. It doesn’t change your heart. It doesn’t last. It’s not fruitful. What this is saying though is there is a kind of joy that is possible that comes through your sorrow and your pain and your lament and your tears.
That does change you and it does last. Do you believe that? It’s certainly possible. Okay, so how do we go about harvesting our tears, leveraging them, investing them, using them wisely? How do we harvest our sorrows?
Third, what these Psalms teach us is we do it by praying our sorrows, by praying our sorrows. As exiles, resident aliens in this world, we are to expect We’re to expect sorrows. We’re to leverage them, not squandering them, but we’re instead to harvest them and invest them well. And thirdly, we are to pray our sorrows. We’re to pray our weeping.
One interesting thing about each of the laments that are in Scripture is they’re actually prayers.
Just about all of the Psalms are filled with fears and heartache and groaning and wrestling and shaking the fist at heaven and saying, how long, O Lord. And sometimes they end like Psalm 39, which I don’t know if you noticed it, but kind of ends on a note of really incorrect theology. David says to God, look away from me, God. Turn your face away from me. Depart from me, God, so that I can have at least a little bit of peace before I die.
And we’re like, that’s an actual prayer? That’s in the Bible? And it ends with such overwhelming feelings that you’re telling God to do the opposite of what he should be asking God to do? We’re not supposed to pray like this. What is this even doing in the Bible?
Here’s what we should know. The very presence of these kinds of prayers in Scripture is telling us something. It’s a witness to God’s understanding and his grace.
God knows how we speak when we are hurting, when we are desperate. When our status as exiles brings some type of just really strong feeling and emotion. God understands when we feel so overwhelmed that we say difficult things and sometimes even incorrect things. And he understands so much that God puts countless examples of laments in scripture as a way to say to you and to me, you know, it’s actually okay to pray like this.
You don’t have to wear a mask You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to stuff your feelings. It is safe to pour out your anger and your frustration and your deepest hurts to me in trust. And so, we should ask, well, why is God so understanding of our pain and our weakness? I think you know the answer.
It’s because we have the only God who even claims, and the only Scripture that claims, that our God Himself came down into this world world, and he became what? A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, the man of sorrow, said, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Jesus knows what it’s like to look to God and to feel like God isn’t even listening. Jesus knows what it’s like to look to heaven and to not really hear anything.
Jesus knows what it’s like to be forsaken. He knows what it’s like to be stabbed in the He knows what it’s like to be persecuted. He knows what it’s like to be in exile, a stranger in this world. And moreover, Jesus is the ultimate example— don’t miss this— of someone who literally brought joy out of sorrow. Not just kind of, he literally brought joy out of sorrow.
His agony and his weeping on the cross for you and for me was substitutionary. As he stood in our place, took our sin upon himself, our condemnation upon Himself. And therefore, when He took our punishment, His sorrow and His pain was the ultimate sowing in tears, was it not? And it brought about the greatest harvest of joy we could possibly imagine in our lives. So when we fix our eyes on Him— in Mexico, we had different devotionals every morning as a team, and on the 3rd day, Nikolai Abkarov led us in a devotional.
About Hebrews 12 and fixing our eyes on Jesus, and we had a time of communion together, and that’s just stayed with me. When we fix our eyes on Jesus and we remember him dying so that we might live and be reconciled to God the Father again, when we see him go through this incredible grief and sorrow, that enables us to experience an abundance of life that gives us hope in this world. While we look forward to one day returning returning to our eternal home. Listen, our Father is neither embarrassed nor irritated with your laments. He acknowledges and he validates your sorrows, the pain right now that you’re experiencing, the losses, betrayals, confusion, pain, heartbreaks, injustice in this world.
He understands it like no one else. God actually welcomes those prayers of pain. Don’t just grumble about it internally. Pray those things in honesty with God. And really, nothing is more freeing than knowing that God cares, that he understands, that knowing that when we are hurting, God feels the sting in his chest.
Our frustrations and our questions don’t fluster him. He knows all of them. He actually wrote the book on them. And more astoundingly, He invites us to come and to bring every single one of our cares and concerns and sorrows to Him. Yes, we are exiles in this world.
And no, you’re not just supposed to grit your teeth and get through it by your own strength and pretend that you’re not hurting. We’re to be real with God and allow Him to transform our heart and not squander those sorrows so that God can bring fruit from it in our lives and we can connect in a deeper way with him. In this world, we will have trouble, but God is worthy of our lament. He is worthy of our song. He’s worthy of us coming to him and saying, God, I trust you.
So let’s do that now. Let’s bow our heads. I just want to give you a moment to just say a prayer or two of confession of trust in Maybe you’re not really totally feeling it, but just go through this process if you don’t mind and just be honest with God. Take a moment, and I’ll be silent here in a second. Just take a moment to say, God, I trust you.
Tell God that he is worthy of your song.
Tell God that you give him your worship.
Tell him, God, you are worthy of my lament.
Friends, whatever you’re going through Whatever heaviness is on your heart, God feels it. He knows it.
Turn to him in trust, humility. Ask him to be with you in the midst of these sufferings.
And trust that He will and is able to turn your sorrow into joy, even in the midst of that sorrow. Father, thank You for Your Word today. It encourages us. It challenges us. Thank You that You are the only God who is like this.
We bring our prayers to You. Change us, we pray, in Your name. Amen.
