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September 12/13, 2015
Jason Meyer | Psalms 6:1-6
O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing;
heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled.
My soul also is greatly troubled.
But you, O LORD—how long?
Turn, O LORD, deliver my life;
save me for the sake of your steadfast love.
For in death there is no remembrance of you;
in Sheol who will give you praise?
I am weary with my moaning;
every night I flood my bed with tears;
I drench my couch with my weeping.
My eye wastes away because of grief;
it grows weak because of all my foes.
Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping.
The LORD has heard my plea;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled;
they shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment.—Psalm 6
Introduction
One of the saddest experiences that I have forever etched into my memory is the sight of orphans rocking themselves to sleep. It is so sad because God did not design babies to care for themselves. They need a caregiver, and yet in an orphanage, babies learn not to cry out because they have found that no one will answer. No one is there to rock them to sleep, so they learn to rock themselves. The only thing worse than crying is when you stop crying because you are convinced that no one cares.
So many of you come into this message feeling wounded and right on the verge of weeping, feeling like the smallest thing will set off a sea of tears because you have no emotional margin. It’s like your reserves have run out and you are emotionally bankrupt. The one thing that often sets people over the edge to despair—the thing that breaks the back of the burdened—is feeling like they are all alone and have to carry it all on their own because no one cares. Nothing is more crushing than feeling both overwhelmed and alone.
What do you do when you reach that point? You can try putting your trust in other people. Some people turn to their families. God designed the family to be a support system to help bear each other’s burdens. The problem is that no family can bear all the burdens. Furthermore, what if the family is part of the problem? Maybe you don’t feel like they just don’t get it, or maybe they can’t relate. Sometimes they are even the main problem, and what should be a haven of rest is a warzone with battle lines.
You can try looking outside your family circle to your friends, but friends can fail you as well. Some friends fail us because they are just plain fickle. They will be there and lean into the relationship when things are going great, but they lean out when times get tough. They don’t want to spend time with you in the dark valley of tears; they just want to find the next joyride.
Other friends do lean in when times are tough, but they are limited because they have problems too. When fallen people lean too heavily upon other fallen people, they are trying to get something out of a friendship that it was never designed to give. You put too much weight on the friendship and push it beyond maximum capacity, and both people break down.
Have you ever been in those situations? People in raw pain can be hard to care for because even though we try to care for their wounds, but we have our own as well. A friendship consists of two fallen people. We can try to give and give, but the other person’s needs will become more than we can handle, and we will find ourselves running dry.
Some people turn to other sources of refuge. Some try alcohol to numb the pain or drugs or sex to provide a momentary high. These things seem to ease our suffering because the alcohol helps us to temporarily forget about our problems. The drugs give us a high that we believe will save us from the lows. But these benefits are also temporary. The high can’t save us from the lows because the high is replaced by the crash. The bottle is a temporary fix because the drunken forgetfulness and relief gives way to the hangover and the headaches. The momentary affection and thrill of sex gives way to multiple partners, insecurity, and betrayal. You use people, and you are used, and there is a kind of crash that comes from giving yourself away so much that you don’t feel like you have anything left to give.
These things also tend to create more problems than they solve. You need more—stronger drugs or stronger drink—and some people turn to even darker porn. The quest for highs gets more and more brazen and more and more reckless.
Some people find relief by hurting themselves. More and more youth are turning to cutting. The hurt builds up and boils over inside them, and they need release or relief. They find that the physical cutting helps them find a temporary sense of release or relief. Because they are so torn up inside, they do outwardly what they feel inwardly. But it doesn’t really work. It just provides temporary relief, so they have to cut and cut and cut.
All of those options seem like answers because they provide temporary relief, but the very fact that they are temporary shows that they cannot be solutions.
But the picture gets even bleaker at this point. This world also has a dark side when it comes to people in pain. You can get two opposite impulses from the world. Some people are repulsed by weakness, and this makes people who are weak feel shunned and isolated. It even shows up in how we label someone. We say things like, “She is a Debbie Downer.” The world despises weakness and neediness.
But weakness can also draw out the predators. Sometimes strong people approach weakness like a shark that comes rushing in to find the source of the blood in the water. The world is often opportunistic—survival of the fittest or dog-eat-dog. Some people see weakness as an invitation to hurt the weak people and take advantage of them.
This is the world we live in, is it not? But we turn now from the shadows of this dark world to the Light of the World. It seems a little too good to be true, but David shows that God is attracted to weakness. He is not repulsed by it so that he will abandon you, and he is not attracted by it so that he can take advantage of you.
God is attracted to weakness because his heart is set on helping the hurting. He wants you to come with your tears. He draws near. He is near to the broken hearted, and he comes in close to those who are crushed in spirit. It doesn’t scare him away. Imagine an Almighty Being whose heart is so full with such an abounding, overflowing supply of grace that he is actually attracted to weak people or people who are hurting. Weakness is like a magnet to God.
The main point of this message is that God’s love is our only hope against the twin terrors of guilt and pain. In this text, there are two terrors (guilt and pain) and two turning points. Watch for the use of the word turn. I will try to make them clear as we go.
O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;
heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled.
My soul also is greatly troubled.
But you, O Lord—how long?
David is going to talk about his foes in verse 7, but the most devastating thing right from the start is that David is languishing under God’s judgment. He is bearing the consequences of his sin, and these consequences are heavy. David’s body and soul are both greatly troubled. He asks the perennial question that humans always ask God: how long?
Our sense of timing is so different than God’s sense of timing. God has said that he will not give us more than we can handle, but sometimes it feels like God has forgotten that promise. Apparently he knows how to stretch us further than we think we can be stretched before the breaking point.
David doesn’t know how much longer he can hold up. He feels like he is going to break down. He is under discipline, and it is not pleasant. David is guilty and could be the just object of God’s righteous wrath and anger. It is a terrifying thing to face the justice of God. So David pleads for God to be gracious and to give a healing touch to both his body and soul. Then he makes a somewhat surprising plea in point two. He uses the word turn.
Turn, O Lord, deliver my life;
save me for the sake of your steadfast love.
For in death there is no remembrance of you;
in Sheol who will give you praise?
Turn is such a unique word because it is normally used for what humans do in repentance. The prophets most often use this word for “turning away” from sin. David is not asking God to turn away from sin. He is asking God to turn off the anger and turn on the loving kindness, to turn the tables. David is saying, “You have laid me low—now raise me up. Deliver me, spare me, save me.”
David has found a profound truth: the same hand that brings discipline also brings salvation. Both acts come from the same loving heart.
But David does not ask the same way. In the first point, David appealed for God’s grace and healing touch because David felt so broken and troubled. In the third point, David is going to confess again how weary and ragged he is. This second point is different. David appeals to two things that are right at the core of God’s own heart: God’s faithful love and God’s passion for his own praise.
Neither of these things have anything to do with David’s morality or his misery. They are both God-centered reasons. David knows that he doesn’t deserve this turning point, but he has learned who God is. He knows that God moves for the sake of His own love and His own glory. God is faithful to his promises, and He is passionate about his glory.
The word used for God’s steadfast love is hesed. It is the same word that David appealed to in Psalm 5:7 as to why he can enter God’s house: “through the abundance of your steadfast love.”
Hesed means a devoted love, a love that has been pledged from one person to another. This is a rock solid, unshakable love that pledges to never let go and never give up. It is not earned, and it is unalterable. God has made a promise to David, and David is taking him at his word. He is telling God, “You have pledged to deal with me in a loving way, and I am calling that to mind.” David has a promise—like a checkbook of faith that he’s bringing right to the bank where all the fulfillments are stored up.
David’s next argument is that if his enemies take him out, there will be one less worshipper on planet earth. Now David is not saying that he has no hope after the grave. We are going to see that very clearly when we get to Psalm 16. David is saying something quite different, which turns out to be very profound. He’s saying that the whole purpose of his existence is to praise God. If God keeps giving him breath, David is going to keep using that borrowed breath to make much of God. Why would God want that praise to stop here on earth? If David lives to praise God, why would God keep others from hearing David’s songs of praise?
Is that why you exist? Do you exist to make money or to make a name for yourself or to be a good family man or a moral example? Or is the whole point of your existence summed up in the word worshipper? That, my friends, is a searching statement. Do you exist to worship God?
Now that David has dealt with guilt, the first of the twin terrors, and asked for a turning, he turns his attention to the second terror: grief.
I am weary with my moaning;
every night I flood my bed with tears;
I drench my couch with my weeping.
My eye wastes away because of grief;
it grows weak because of all my foes.
David has reached the end of what he can handle. All he can do now is cry. I had a waterbed growing up, but this is a different kind of water bed. David has cried so much that he is going to drown in his bed. He changes the image and says that his tears are not just staining his couch; they are going to dissolve the couch.
David also says that his eyes are wasting away. The human eye can be one of the best places to see the effects of strain. It is hard to hide. Your eyes get red and watery and tired looking. You can tell when someone has been crying. David identifies the source this time not as God’s direct hand, but “all” of David’s “foes.”
But verses 6–7 also reveal a wonderful assumption. David is not giving God new information. God already knows everything about David’s situation. David is documenting how he is barely holding on by a thread because he assumes God really cares. God is also motivated by compassion and kindness.
And so now comes the second turn, and it is the most decisive turning point of all.
Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my plea;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled;
they shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment.
David has been “greatly troubled” (Psalm 6:3). Now the tables will turn, and his enemies will be “greatly troubled” (Psalm 6:10). God has heard his prayer for the Lord to turn (Psalm 6:4), and now David’s enemies will “turn back” (Psalm 6:10). What does this mean?
Have you ever seen the tables turn on a bully? I am thinking of a time when the class bully in fifth grade picks on a smaller kid in class. The bully runs into this kid in the hall and makes all of his books fall out of his hands. He trips the kid on the playground and humiliates him. But then it backfires because the smaller kid has a big brother, a senior in high school who is the captain of the football team.
What happens in that moment? Suddenly the tables turn, and the bully’s eyes are filled with terror. He feels small, and he panics and wants to run away.
David warns his foes about how big his God is. David has run to his God’s refuge and has reached a point of safety. Now he is confident that God has heard his plea and accepted his prayer. The good news that God is for David is bad news for David’s enemies because it means that God is against them.
Application
In application now, we will deal with three problems: grief, guilt, and godliness.
Where do we go with our guilt? For example, when the Bible tells us to turn from our sins, it means we should turn away from all our saviors—the things or people we have turned toward in trust, which has caused us to turn away from God.
We have all turned to other things. David did. He turned to an illicit love affair with Bathsheba, and it just spiraled down from there. In fact, God rebukes David for turning away from God after God had given him so much.
Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house.—2 Samuel 12:7–11
David knows his guilt. He is on the run from Absalom and his army. His foes are those of his own house. Many of the pains of your life—not all, but certainly some—are owing to the fact that you have despised God and his word and have turned to other places of refuge. All these other saviors—illicit sex, illegal drugs, cutting—and even good things like food, drink, friends, and family become bad things when they are treated and trusted like God.
All these things will let you down, and turning to them instead of God despises God. When we turn to these things, we prefer lesser things and exchange the greatest thing—which is God—for lesser things.
My people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.—Jeremiah 2:13
You think you can dig a hole in this earth and fill it with enough stuff to satisfy you, but you have a God-shaped hole in your heart. You can’t fill it with pitifully small pennies and trifles.
As David deals with these consequences for his sin, he gets a small taste for God’s anger and wrath against sin. Look how Psalm 6 relates back to Psalm 2. Psalm 6:1–3 is laced with language from Psalm 2.
. . .rebuke me not in your wrath . . .—Psalm 6:1
. . .he will terrify them in his wrath. . .—Psalm 2:5
. . . his wrath flares quickly. . .—Psalm 2:12
. . . nor correct me. . .—Psalm 6:1
. . . now O kings . . . receive correction. . .—Psalm 2:10
. . . my bones are terrified . . .—Psalm 6:2
. . . he will terrify them. . .—Psalm 2:5
. . . my soul is . . . terrified. . .—Psalm 6:3
. . .he will terrify them. . .—Psalm 2:5
What is going on? David is asking that God would not treat him like one of the rebellious kings of Psalm 2. But the turning point is when David appeals to God’s faithful love. I want everyone to get this point. The Pharisee national anthem would be, “Great is my faithfulness.” We join David is singing, “Great is Your faithfulness. Your steadfast love, your love for me—not my love for you—makes all the difference for me!”
David found a refuge.
How supremely happy are all those who take refuge in you.—Psalm 2:12
Without the King of Psalm 2 providing the refuge of Psalm 2, David would be treated like the rebel kings of Psalm 2. Even Israel’s greatest king sinned against God and deserved to be treated like a rebel king. He deserved God’s holy wrath. There is no one good, no one righteous, not even one (Romans 3:10).
This passage shows up in the New Testament in a surprising way. These words were on the lips of the Lord Jesus.
“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”—John 12:27
John goes on to talk about the death of Jesus that is coming. He talks about how Jesus will be lifted up in death but also in glory and exaltation and about how Jesus will draw people to himself there at the cross.
Jesus agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane. He said his soul was troubled, and we are told that he even sweat drops of blood. What was so terrifying for Jesus? Unlike David, Jesus was not going to get a small taste of God’s wrath. He was going to get the full taste. He was going to drink the whole cup down to the last drop.
This—the cross—is our only hope. We can’t be on the other side of this wrath. The cross will not be a treasure until hell is a terror. Either you will drink the cup and suffer agony forever, or you will trust that Jesus the cup in your place so that you live forever.
When circumstances turn against you, what if it is God’s way of getting you to turn toward him? What if the problem is that we are prone to make it alone?
The problem is not with our Father’s arms—it is with our hearts. Have you ever noticed the proud resistance we have? Adults don’t want to think of themselves as children.
The song we are going to sing in closing has a line that I find to be so true and so tragic: “surrender don’t come natural to me.” It takes a work of grace for anyone to admit defeat and surrender to God. So God brings the problem of pain into our lives so that we are forced to admit that we are not in control and that we cannot make it on our own.
Have you ever considered that maybe all the hurts and all the storms and all the disappointments are all making one very loud climactic point? C. S. Lewis stated the point really well. He said that pain is God’s megaphone. God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our suffering. Suffering is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world and get its attention.
We try everything we can to treat this world like it’s our home and like it should provide for us all that we need for fullness of life. Pain and brokenness and tears all testify that it is not. It cannot bear that weight. It cannot be the place where we find rest.
Sometimes poetry makes this point better than prose. Like the song “Blessings.” The bridge of the song builds to a point of climax:
“When friends betray us, when darkness seems to win, we know that pain reminds this heart, that this is not our home.”
Then the music dies down so that it does not drown out the message:
“What if my greatest disappointments, or the aching of this life, is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy. What if trials of this life, the rain, the storms, the hardest nights, are your mercies in disguise?”
Have you considered that? What if all that you want to call a curse is actually a blessing in disguise? What if it is something designed to get your attention because we are all prone to try to make it on our own? Are you able to be honest with yourself in this moment about your pride and all the defensive walls that you put around yourself so that you don’t feel vulnerable?
What if those walls are the problem? What if pain is a blessing because it tears down walls that need to come down so that God can come in? The painful blows of this life are like a battering ram. A battering ram is not supposed to be pretty; it has a rugged job to do.
There is another place this psalm shows up in the New Testament. Jesus himself has laid out what discipleship and surrender look like in his kingdom (Matthew 7:23). And then he points out what he will say to the fakers and pretenders. Notice the contrast between what someone says and what someone does.
”Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”—Matthew 7:21–23
What you say is not enough—what you do will show who you trust. The word of God is useful for training in righteousness. We care about Christlikeness. Our vision for children and youth includes them becoming more like Christ. If we don’t know Christ, we will not become like Christ, and Christ will say that he never knew us.
Knowing Jesus will produce a change in our life trajectory, or we do not really know him. Our taste buds will change. We will taste and see that the Lord is good. Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” No one can say, “Christ lives in me but does not change me.” Someone would think something was very wrong if a child did not grow physically from the time they were in Kindergarten to when they were a Senior in High School. The same is true spiritually. You can’t claim to know Jesus and then see no growth and no maturity.
Conclusion
So in our pride, some of us see the Almighty arms of God outstretched towards us, and we say, “I would rather be crushed by you than be held by you.” Will you respond to God with childlike faith and trust? Or will you respond with adult-like pride and independence? Will you have stubborn pride and say, “I would rather be damned than crawl”?
It takes the work of the Holy Spirit to overcome our cold, dead heart that does not want to come. We want to stay stuck, even when God is offering something staggeringly spectacular: a gospel that takes proud rebels who deserve to die and make them sons and daughters tenderly held in the nail-scarred hands of the King. And some people still say, “I would rather rock myself to sleep and die on my own than have to become childlike and have your arms hold me and your voice sing over me.”
Surrender don’t come natural to me.
I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want,
than to take what you give that I need;
and I’ve beat my head against so many walls,
now I’m falling down, I’m falling on my knees.
And the Salvation Army band
is playing this hymn.
And your grace rings out so deep.
It makes my resistance seem so thin . . .
sohold me Jesus.
May the grace of God ring out so deep and so clearly that your proud defenses would be so overwhelmed and your resistance would grow so thin that the mercy of God would come like a battering ram through your proud defenses—not to destroy you, but to hold you and carry you and save you and give you everlasting life!
Closing Song: “Hold Me Jesus”
Sermon Discussion Questions
The Outline
Main Point: God’s love is our only hope against the twin terrors of pain and guilt.
Discussion Questions
1.What options does the world give for how to handle guilt and pain? Why are these options all inadequate? Why are some destructive?
Application Questions
1. What worldly options concerning how to handle guilt and pain are you tempted most often to take? Can you testify to some of the ways that trusting in those people or things have failed you? What wounds do you still carry from them?
Prayer Focus
Pray for the grace of God to ring out so deep and so clearly that our proud defenses would be so overwhelmed and our resistance would grow so thin that God’s mercy would break through all of our barriers to hold us and carry us.