PSALM 13 JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS

Transcription

1 Perhaps some of you heard the news about Elie Wiesel who recently passed away. He was the one who wrote the famed book, Nights, among many others. Wiesel, at the age of 15, would be taken into Auschwitz with his family. And by the time he got out, he would have lost his mom and his dad as well as his sister. He suffered a horrific experience no doubt. He went in as a strong Jewish believer, and he came out with more questions than he could ever have answered. During his time there he saw a child dying on the gallows. And in the book, Nights, he writes about the experience. Here is what he wrote: I heard someone saying, Where is God? Where is He? For more than half an hour the child in the noose stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red; his eyes were not yet glazed, and behind me I heard this same man asking, Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him, Where is he? He is hanging here on this gallows. What was Wiesel saying in that statement? He was saying that just as this boy is dying on the gallows, so too God has died to him. He is not present; He is not active. If He was, He would obviously do something about the atrocities that they were experiencing. Where is God? I think that that is a question, if we are honest, if we have walked with God long enough, we have probably all been to that place where we have asked, Where are you, God? These moments where we struggle with angst, where we stepped out in faith and we feel as though we followed God in a certain direction only to come to a dead end road. God, I thought you told me to go this direction, and now it seems as though you have led me into quicksand. I m dying here. Maybe some of you have asked that question at other times, as you have watched the news at night. One of the things that I loved about the Olympics is it allowed us to see some good news. But in a world with so much bad news you go and you watch it and you think, God, where are you? Why is there so much suffering? Why all the atrocities? Perhaps you are the person who knew early on in your Christian walk you had these wonderful divine encounters where you sensed God s ineffable love and His sovereign presence permeating your very soul, only now to feel abandoned, hopeless and confused with no sense of a divine touch, no sense of God at work in your life, no sense of His presence permeating you any longer. And what is left with life is a big, gigantic question mark. And when the scroll is unrolled, it leaves you stuck in agonizing consternation. God meet me, is our plea. Page 1 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

2 Well, today I want to invite you to Psalm 13, as we continue in this tour through different Psalms. And I want you to know that we are coming across a Psalm today that we are not really sure about the particular setting that the Psalmist is in. Many of the people that are scholars would say the Psalmist here is David while others would say they are not sure. So I am not sure what the setting is, or who the author is, but here is what I can say - this is a Psalm about one guy who sought God in the midst of despair and finds his hope again. One commentator put it this way: This is a Psalm that starts with sorrow and it ends with song. If you are wondering this morning how to take your despair and find the light, if you are wondering this morning how to take your sorrow and find a song, if you are wondering this morning how to take your angst and get to a place of awe, this is a Psalm for you. Psalm 13 is six verses packed with perspective. And we see one person going from a skewed perspective to a sovereign perspective, to a perspective of being plagued by his trials to praising his way in trust for God. This is the kind of Psalm that the sufferer should turn to in the midst of despair. And so as we come to Psalm 13, we read in the first two verses where four times the Psalmist will utter, How long. He says, How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Can you hear the Psalmist s despair? How long, how long, how long, how long, that is the cry of the impatient, of the person burning with the desire to get out of that difficulty. I don t know about you, but when difficulties come my way, I resonate with those two words, how long, or better yet, get me out of here. I am not one of those masochists that when I go into suffering and struggles that I think, This is wonderful, God. Keep me here for a long time so that I can just juice this for all it is worth. No, I don t like physical pain. I don t like spiritual pain. I don t like mental pain. That is why in the past, in my pre-jesus days, and in the early Jesus days, I was into anesthetizing myself, folks. I don t understand ladies who want to do an all-natural birth. I don t care how long that needle is, if I was a female, I would want it stuck in my back because I would want to be numb for that experience of giving birth. So pain, the Psalmist is wanting out of this pain. He wants out of this struggle. I don t relate to Paul the Apostle when he says, I want to know you in my suffering and share with you in my death. He was saying he wanted to become like Jesus in his death. I am thinking, You must be single, because if you had a wife and you had children to care for, why in the world would you be such a masochist, Paul? Page 2 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

3 But Paul knew that there was power in suffering. He knew something that I didn t know. My words are how long and get me out of here, and Paul was like, bring on more, God. So anytime that I need to feel better about myself when I am feeling convicted by Paul, I just say, Well, the dude wasn t married, and that explains it. We all have to have coping methods in our lives. And Paul was someone who wanted God to deepen him. And I think the reality is all of us if we have ever suffered and then come out, we can realize there really are some great benefits that can happen through our pain, when we will trust God, when we will lean into Him, when we will go with Him. And we will be thankful for the thorns after the thorn is removed. But we are not typically thankful for the thorn while we are experiencing its sting. And so what does the Psalmist say? He says, How long, because he feels forgotten. And he feels like it is the friend that is often late; that is what he is feeling about God. Do you have any of those friends in your life that they are always fifteen thirty an hour late? And they always seem to have a great excuse. The way my wife is wired is she always likes to be a few minutes early. The way I am wired is I like to plan it so that I arrive just right on time, not early and not late. So I am a timely person and I will try to walk in right on time, but sometimes that will bite me a little, and I will be just a hair late. But I am overall a pretty timely guy, and my wife is always ahead of time. I am one of those guys who doesn t do well with the friend that tells me they are running fifteen to thirty minutes late. And I am going to call them on that. If I am going to meet someone, and I feel like someone is going to be fifteen or twenty minutes late, and they are just not going to let me know, I am gone. Now my wife is much more of a harmonizer than me. She will sit around and wait and I will be like, We need to leave, Babe, for crying out loud. Time is important and this Psalmist is going, How long, how long, how long, and he feels like God is that friend that is always late. He hasn t shown up. God, where are you? God, I ve done my part. I rise up and pray early in the morning. So here I am God, but where are you? Do you ever feel like that? You go to pray and seek Him and you wonder where He is. So what does the Psalmist say? In his first how long utterance he says, How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? So he feels forgotten, forsaken, abandoned. God seems shy, detached, withdrawn, remote and not imminent, not with him. So he wonders what is going on. Have you ever had that cry in your heart? How long, God, are you going to allow my spouse to treat me this way? How long is my house going to sit on the market, God? How long is it going to take me to find a job? How long will this relationship be strained? How long, O God, will my bank account stay empty? And we start to Page 3 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

4 utter these how long questions. Will you forget me forever? And we have to be careful, because there is nothing like seasons of suffering to tweak our theology and to skew our view of God. We begin to suffer and we put our projections upon Him, and begin to believe lies about Him. When I was younger I loved Depeche Mode. And I don t know if any of you were Depeche fans, but I was a big Mode fan. I loved their music and there was a song that the Christians would like called, Personal Jesus. But I was listening to Blasphemous Rumours way before I was ever a Christian. And I don t know if you remember that song, but there are some lyrics in there where they sing, I don t want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God has a sick sense of humor. And when I die, I expect to find Him laughing. The theology is so tweaked in that moment, thinking about God laughing when you die, this careless, indifferent God, this Omnimalevolent God, and losing sight that He is good and great and wonderful. Sometimes prayer can feel like calling a number. Oh how I miss the days of a live conversation, of getting an active voice. These days you have to budget an hour and a half just to make a call to a number, and you need 30 minutes just to get through the automated system of Press 1 if you speak Vietnamese, Press 2 if you speak Japanese etc. I mean it can just go on and on and on. Press 6 if, and then they give you the glossary of all the problems the company has ever had. If you have ever stubbed your toe on our furniture, etc. It is unbelievable and I want to say, For crying out loud, where is an operator? I start getting desperate and think, Somebody help me. And this is a problem at the top. The leadership needs to figure out a way to break this process down and be able to get us to a live voice quicker. We get vexed, and what do we do? We just say, To heck with this. I have been waiting for 45 minutes. I will wait until I have another three hour window and call again. Sometimes that can be what it feels like with God. We go into prayer, we start praying, we think it is going to be good today, and we are really going to connect with God today. But then we may leave more discouraged than when we started. And then sometimes you have a nice quiet time with God, and things feel great, and then you go and get in an argument with one of your kids 15 minutes later. What is that all about? Where is the Word at work in my life? And we start thinking, How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? Then the Psalmist says, How long will you hide your face from me? Sometimes we begin to think that God has a favorite game too. It is called Hide and Seek. God just wants us to seek Him, but He is going to hide out. And we think, But God I wouldn t have to seek so much if you weren t hiding so much. Where are you? What is going on? And we begin to question. Page 4 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

5 When my son was four years old, and you know how kids can talk sometimes when they get in a little chatty mood. This particular day Dawson was in a chatty mood, and I don t remember exactly what he was saying, because you just kind of half listen when the kids are talking, and say things like, Sure, or Whatever. But that wasn t working for him that day, so he says to me, Daddy, turn your head. And he took his little four year old hands and he turned my face toward him. And what was he meaning by that? He knew if he didn t have my eyes looking at him, that he didn t have my heart. And what the Psalmist is saying here is, Father, turn your face toward me. I want to know that we are connected. I want to know that you are with me. I want to know that we are jelling together. And one way to become disillusioned with God is to expect Him to operate with us the way that we are to operate with one another. If we had a friend that was always late, or if we had a friend that never turned their face toward us, we would eventually wonder if they were our real friend at all. We would wonder if they really cared. The problem with this Jesus is my buddy theology that is so out there today is it sets us up to be very discouraged with God. Because, yes, God is our friend, He does care about us, but God has a different plan for us than our friends do. God is in a relationship with us, but being in a relationship with Him will look different, it will feel different, and it will be different. And if we try to project a one-to-one correspondence in our relationship with God, as we would experience with another, we will be vexed. And then the Psalmist says in verse 2, How long must I take counsel in my soul? He is asking how long is he to be left to himself. And he doesn t want to be left to himself. Now I don t know if some of you will remember John Kavanaugh or not, but he was the late famed ethicist who early in his life took a trip to Calcutta, India to spend some time with Mother Teresa. When he got there he said, Sister Teresa, please pray for me. She replied, What would you like me to pray? He said, Pray that I will have clarity. She said, I will not pray that you have clarity. And John Kavanaugh said, My goodness, you won t pray that I will have clarity? What is it up with that? I mean I have always pictured you as a person who has such clarity. And Mother Teresa replied, I have never had clarity. What I have is trust. I am not going to pray that you have clarity, I am going to pray that you have trust. Folks, what God wants us to learn in the Christian life is to trust Him when life isn t clear. And that is very difficult for us in this particular part of the world, in this Lake Norman region where we work and make decisions after clarity. We get our data, we put together our projection plans, we think about all the scenarios that could go wrong, we force rank our strategy, and then we think this is the best place to execute. Page 5 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

6 And we make our decision at the most low risk possible. And that may be okay when it comes to making business decisions, but if we make that correspondent to God and how it is with Him, we again will end up disillusioned in our Christian walk. So there are these things that we do that set us up for frustrations with God, because we expect God to act relationally like others do. Or we expect God to give us clarity like we would find in the business world. But what ends up happening is God isn t interested in always making sense of things. Rather what God is often up to is turning our sense into nonsense and saying, Trust this. And that s tough. That is hard. Why are my circumstances so out of control? Why is this so wheels off? Why are you doing this? And if we do not understand this principle running throughout all 66 books where God is asking us to do things that are nonsensical, we will become disillusioned with God. Our faith will get watered down. We will collect resentments and frustrations and anger. We will get bitter. And we will not know how to sing our way out of our sorrows. So here we are. The Psalmist says, How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? He has a deep sense of pain and hurt. I read this week about author Philip Ryken describing a deep season of depression that he had gone through. He didn t want to take his own life, but on an emotional level he was able to say, So this is the place people get when they do that thing, when they take their life. This is what it feels like. And I can tell you that it is easy to think, I don t know how someone could do that. I don t know how anyone can get there, until life brings you to that spot. I have known that kind of pain, where I could know in my heart of hearts that this is exactly what is going on in people s lives when they want to end it all. This is that desperate feeling. And if you have never had to go there, blessed are you. And if you are in that spot right now, crying out, How long, how long, how long, here is what I can tell you about why I am thankful for that angst that I went through. I wanted out just as much as anybody else, but I am thankful that my life was brought to the point of such despair that I could not imagine life any longer so that I could look at you and say, I have been in a spot too where I didn t think there was hope. But guess what God can bring you out. He can take you from a place that seems unimaginable to the point where you think, I will never get out of here, and bring your joy streaming into your life, a fresh baptism of His triumphal shout springing from your bottomless soul. The triumphal God works in the midst of our trials. Page 6 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

7 And then the Psalmist says, How long shall my enemy be exalted over me. See he is saying he has these relational issues. He has these enemies who want to see him fall, they want to see him blow it, they want to bring him down. Maybe we don t have death threats on our lives today, but maybe you know what it is like to see people in your life that always want you to fail, that always want you to blow it, that always want you to be on the bottom. And that was the angst of the Psalmist. So we saw the Psalmist s complaints in the first two verses, but now we are going to shift to his challenge. Verse 3 says, Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Wait a second, I thought he had given up and didn t think he was going to answer. I love that. He says, Consider and answer me. What is he doing? He is not giving up. He is persevering. He is continuing to pray, even though God seems remote. Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. What is he saying there? Honestly I am not really sure. Perhaps he is getting to this whole idea of asking God to give him hope again. Lest I sleep the sleep of death, whether his enemies kill him or whether he just falls into absolute despair, I am not really sure. Sometimes you think about a verse, you look at the commentaries, and guess what? Teachers don t always have to have the answer. Sometimes I read a verse and I scratch my head but I don t have to know the answer. When we come to a place like that, do you know what we do? We go to the next verse where it is a little clearer. So go with me on to verse 4 where it says, Lest me enemy say, I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. By the way be nervous of the person who always thinks that they can understand every little verse of the Bible. Be nervous of people who think they know all the verses in the Bible and how to properly handle them. Look, there have been verses that I thought I had a handle on and then two weeks later I had a different sense of how to work that verse out in my own life. So enjoy the journey of learning. And know that just because you have committed to one view doesn t mean that you might not think about another view someday. From God s perspective, there is one interpretation, but from ours because we don t have His vantage point all the time, we will go in and out of the way we understand things. So we do the best that we can to interpret Scripture in light of Scripture. Lest my enemy say, I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. He is asking God to deal with his enemies and to help him. We saw his complaints in verses 1 and 2, then his challenge in verses 3 and 4, and now we will see his confidence in verses 5 and 6. But I have trusted in your steadfast love. I really like that. I thought that he didn t think God cared after reading the first two verses when he said, How long will you forget me? But now he is trusting in His steadfast love. Page 7 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

8 You see there is something about our walk with God. We have to learn what it means to live above our feelings, and to walk in the truth. If we live according to our feelings and do everything we feel, we will get addicted to things in life, we will be impulsive and we will make bad decisions. See, the way that we mature is through resistance. And we have to resist doing things that we might feel like doing for the greater truth of developing a character fruit in our life by doing what is right in spite of how we feel. So we forgive when we feel like being bitter. We resist taking a drink when we feel like getting drunk. We exercise self-control. And we realize that we could keep caving into all this stuff and then we could lose absolute control of our lives. Or we realize that we have learned self-control and forgiveness and virtue through resistance. We have to learn to trust God. So what is the Psalmist doing? He is saying he doesn t feel like God is with him; he feels forsaken, yet he trusts in His steadfast love. See the beauty of that. What do we do when we don t feel loved by God? When we don t feel like He is with us? We trust that He does love us. And we trust that He is with us. And that is where faith begins to come and meet us as a great resource. So he says, I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. Now we have to be careful because I don t think he is talking about spiritual salvation here in light of the context. He is saying God will deliver him, so that is physical salvation. God will physically deliver him. We need to be careful that we properly interpret Scripture as best as we can in light of Scripture. And it is not always easy to do. We can get stuck sometimes. I love that the Psalmist was still able to look to God to protect him, to deliver him, and to love him. Because what can happen when we go through a lot of trials in life? Life has a way of causing us to become members of the jaded club over time. We get cynical. We lose hope. And I want to encourage you to see this Psalmist finding hope in God. And then look at verse 6, which I really love. I will sing to the Lord. He makes the decision to sing, and there is therapy in singing. You can sing to the Lord, you can go out and maybe drive down a road at night where no one can hear you or see you and play some worship music and sing. Maybe you are thinking you are not really that way, that is not you, but we are missing out on something very therapeutic if we will just lose our dignity and go to that place of learning to sing to God. Some people may think, Oh, it is not me to be able to pray. Oh, it is not me to witness, man. Oh, it is not me to give. Oh, it is not me to read the Bible. But if it is not us, we need to figure out a way for it to become us. It is called growth. We need to get out of our comfort zone and grow. I wonder how many people have gone through the Page 8 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

9 Christian life cutting off certain disciplines in the name of Oh, that s not me? Well, if there is something going on in the Bible that we are called to do, we don t have a right to say, Oh, that s not me. So what does the Psalmist say, I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me. What? Did we read that correctly? Because I thought the Psalmist had been issuing complaints How long will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Doesn t that sound like big complaints? And now he is saying He has dealt bountifully with me? What is he doing? In order to move forward, he remembers how God operated in the past, because he has dealt bountifully with him. Though God has seemed absence in the moment he will still trust that He is present. The Psalmist remembers that God has dealt bountifully with him in the past. So the Psalm begins with a sorrow and it ends with a song. It begins in agony and it ends in assurance. So what can we consider by means of an application from this Psalm? What should we do the next time we are waiting on God to respond in the midst of a trial? How can Psalm 13 be a resource to you and to me? Well first I would say - honestly and humbly present your confusion, struggles and questions to Him. That is what the Psalmist is doing. Sometimes we are trying to get our way out of trials without praying, and God is allowing us to stay in trials in order to give us a prayer life. We are in trials because He wants to give us a prayer life, a life of dependency, a life of seeking Him. And we will look for all the ways out of the trial except going to Him. And what does the Psalmist do? He presents his confusion, struggles and questions. Folks, the Christian life is woefully confusing at times. And if we don t understand the different ways that God operates, we will be utterly disillusioned. Even taking a Psalm like this, we need to realize that this is just a snapshot of a particular Psalmist s day, or season. Like, if the news was coming on, you would have the anchor person going, Well, straight from the Judean wilderness we have David s Psalm, his six verses in his devotional today. And it went like this. It looks like he found encouragement by the end of the day but when he woke up he wasn t feeling the best. And so what we do if we don t read God s word and get a sense of the whole, we read this particular Psalm and then we beat ourselves up, because we go into prayer one day and we don t come out of our sorrow with a song. And guess what, I am sure he didn t either sometimes, but that particular day he did. And what we do is we find hope in these moments of individual s lives. Aren t you so thankful that our lives are bigger than just one decision? Some of us have made horrific decisions at certain points in our Page 9 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

10 lives, but we are not defined by a decision. If anyone defines us by a decision, they are missing the bigger picture of our life s story. So take your confusion to God. I will tell you that ever since I was a little kid I loved the Van s Shoe brand. And yesterday I was at the Mall, and I went to Van s and I picked myself up a pair of shoes. That is one of the greatest days of the year when I get to go into the Van s Store and get myself a new pair of Kicks. And the phrase for Van s is Off the Wall. That is their motto. And I wish I would have taken a picture when I was at Van s yesterday because they had this great description of Off the Wall. The first pair of Van s came out on March 18 th, 1976, so I would have been three years and two weeks old when the first pair of Van s came out. But I was sporting these shoes as a youngster. I had my different skateboards, and they were great for that, and for BMXing. And yesterday I came home and I was all excited because I got these ultralight and ultra-cushioned Van s. And it is unbelievable how light they are. And I was telling Dawson and Haley to pick up these shoes and see how light they are. I wanted them to feel how amazing they were. And Van s Shoes have come such a long way. So here is a picture of me up on the screen, where I am probably 8 or 9 years old, BMXing when I was a kid. This was taken in South Orange County. And notice my Kicks right there, my low top slip on Kicks. And these BMX nights were the best. My parents would take me out, I would struggle being all nervous, and sometimes I felt like I needed to be re-potty trained on these BMX nights because this was crazy. We would get up on this bike track, the starter would yell, Rider s ready. Pedals set, and then boom the gates would drop, and we would be off. It was such a blast. I loved my BMXing. This was my Torker Bike right here, and I would clean this thing, and take it apart. I would get the WD40 out and get that chain just right. I loved my bike, it was the pride and joy of my life. So we would go out to these races and I started winning these different competitions. Now my parents did not like this setting a whole lot, this BMX setting, and they didn t like the late nights. But they would take me out there, and I would be winning, and they would just cheer me on. But on their insides they were wishing I would lose or something so they could go home. And I don t know about you but I have been in that situation where my kids are winning and winning, and you know if they win this one they have three more, and you are going, Go, go, go, but inside you are thinking, Oh Lord, this is a long weekend and I am tired. But listen, the theme of Van s is Off the Wall, and Off the Wall now has become this phrase of just radical living, just being out there, just wheels off, just bizarre. And this whole idea behind Van s Off the Wall is the skaters were skating in empty concrete swimming pools, and they would ride their skateboards off the wall. And it just Page 10 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

11 seemed crazy that they would do that. And guess what? Walking with Jesus you are either going to go off the wall or AWOL. So the quicker we understand that He leads us in off the wall living in taking our prayers to Him and helping us understand we will be better served. Next I would say as it relates to our lives don t allow trials to turn you into a cynic. Pray your way into an optimistic outlook by considering God s past faithfulness, and His ability to lead you out of your current trial. That is what the Psalmist was doing. He starts off with the confusion and the struggles, but then he is coming to this place where he is finding an optimistic outlook. One of the things that I have become convinced of is that constant negative thinking will absolutely warp our emotions. We have to choose how to have better perspectives in our lives. And we have to realize when we get into difficult situations that we need to have a sovereign perspective and remember that God is in control. He is obviously wanting for us is to learn something. We need to trust the good that is going to come out of this. And if we can begin to remember all the good that He has done for us in the past it will help us. And here is what I want to say. I am not saying for us to walk through life and just be cheesy and act like we never feel discouraged or confused, but what you see here from the Psalmist is authenticity. He is real, but at the same token he doesn t use being real to become a cynic; he uses being real to become optimistic. And there is a big difference. One will send you into depression and keep you there. The other will lead you out of depression and give you hope. Next I would want to say remember, just because God seems absent doesn t mean He is not present. Martin Luther, the Reformer of the 16 th Century, sunk into a deep state of depression, wondering where God was at. He didn t come out of his study for a few weeks and finally his wife, Katie, put on a black dress and went down to see him. When Martin Luther saw her he said, Where are you going to a funeral? Who died? And she said, God did. Shocked by the statement, he said, Don t say that. How can you even think that? And Katie said, Well, you are acting as if He did. There was a wife who knew the power of metaphor. She puts a black dress on, goes down and becomes the metaphor of death, and tells him he was acting as if God was not powerful, not alive. He was acting as if God was dead. And she was telling him to live like God was alive. So remember just because God seems absent doesn t mean that He is not present. When Haley was a baby and my wife would need to go somewhere, I would stay home with her. I remember we lived in a little country house so it would be just me and Haley. She would have been less than a year old and she would kind of pull herself up in Page 11 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

12 her crib and just rock back and forth to the cartoons on TV. She loved Bob the Tomato and Winnie the Pooh and as she got older we would sing those songs together. When Haley was really young, Heather took her to the grocery store and they were in the produce section and Haley saw a tomato and she said, Bob. Well, this one time when I am taking care of Haley while her mom was gone, she was in her crib, and she liked for me to be in her presence. I was sitting in the same room with her and she was doing fine, but then I got up and walked out of the room to kind of test her. So I went around the corner and I was peeking at her and she hadn t realized that I had left the room yet. And after a minute or so she started looking around and realizing I was gone and then she got very anxious. But then she saw me peeking around the corner and she threw a fit wanting me to come back in the room. And as soon as I came back in the room with her everything was okay again. But here is the deal. Even though I seemed absent from Haley, I was present all the time. I just wanted to see how she would react with me removing myself. And in the same way our Heavenly Father may seem absent, but He is always present. So when we sit and whine in our worldly cribs, just remember He is always there looking at us. Next I would say ask yourself what could God possibly be trying to teach me through this season of trial and waiting? See, we want to get to the deeper idea. Instead of saying, God, get me out of this, we need to be asking God, What can I get out of this? And so we need to ask God what it is He is trying to teach us in the midst of our suffering. And sometimes we can consider that we need to learn more about patience. We may need to learn how to live above our feelings. We may need to learn to live in greater dependence. We may need to learn how to go through certain trials so that we can have a greater testimony in the future, so that we can comfort others. See, some of you are going through trials today that maybe someone out in 2035 may need your story. And God is giving us stories today in the midst of our suffering that will help people in the future work through their own difficult narratives. Next I would say refuse to believe God doesn t love you; trust that He does. We can count on that. That is what helped shift the Psalmist out of that perspective. He said, But I have trusted in your steadfast love. And he remembered that God had dealt bountifully with him. I think if we are honest and we look back over our lives, even when we struggle and are confused, we can realize we have all been well fed. We have all been able to have clothing and housing. Think about how many wasted emotions that we have felt by wondering if God is going to take care of us, yet we are still here. Even though it seemed like at times He wasn t there, He always is. Page 12 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

13 We all have had emotional damage that we have done to ourselves in the name of worry, fear, not trusting, and anxiety, when all along He tells us not to worry about tomorrow; tomorrow has enough troubles of its own. We just need to focus on today. Lastly, from this passage I think this will suffice for today resist thinking that just because the trial is long that it will last forever. It won t. For those who are believers in Jesus, there is coming a day where there will be no more tears and no more sorrows, where we are going to be with Him forever and ever. And maybe you think that doesn t comfort me all that much if I live 40 more years here on earth. But here is the deal. Even if it is a physical trial that feels like it will never end, and maybe it won t, God can change our perspective so that we can be okay with the most difficult physical trials. See, that is what God does. He transforms our perspective. He places hope in us. He drenches us in His love. He lets us know that neither height, nor depth, nothing can separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. We are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. No eye has seen, no ear has heard what God has prepared for those who love Him. So we can know that we are more than conquerors in Christ, folks. So resist the thinking that just because the trial is long that it will last forever. Listen, if we are in the midst of a trial, we might as well take on the perspective that will be most suitable to our growth and emotions, than to take on the posture that will lead us into hopelessness. So let s trust in Him. Let s love Him. Let s turn our sorrow into a song, our agony into a sense of awe. I close with how I began, with the question, God, where are you? Elie Wiesel saw a boy hanging on the gallows and said, There is God, as if to say that God was dead. His faith in Him was dying. And he had part of the truth because as Christians we would say God was there. He was hanging on a cross dying, not because He would never come back to life again, and not because He is abandoning us, but because Immanuel became God with us to meet us. And on the cross it was the forever picture of saying I am right here. I am sharing in your suffering. I am sharing in your difficulty. And by the way He knows what it feels like to feel forsaken. He said from the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? At the same token what did He say after He died for our sins and rose from the grave? I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Where is He? He is hanging on a cross. Where is He? He has risen from the dead. Where is He? He is here right now and forever. Let s pray. Lord, thank you for your word. I pray that it is a comfort to the hurting and a hope for those who may go into a trial at some point. I thank you for the opportunity to have these six verses to teach the flock today. Page 13 of 14 pages 8/21/2016

14 If anyone does not know you as their personal Savior, I pray that in the quietness of their heart may they just say this: Jesus, I want a personal relationship with you. I believe that you died on a cross for my sins, and rose from the grave. And I trust that you are here. I trust that you love me and care about me, and I surrender my life to you right here and right now. In Jesus name. Amen. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 14 of 14 pages 8/21/2016