Summer of Psalms: Part 4 - From Mourning to Morning
PSALM 30
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
I am thrilled to be continuing on in our Summer of Psalms series. I hope you guys have enjoyed that. I always enjoy this time in the summer to just take different weeks and go through different psalms. We had Pastor Lori with us. Week one, she walked through, I think it was Psalm 73. And then we had Pastor Lauren and Pastor Andre last week. And we've just been going through. And this is kind of a little peek behind the curtain. We just let whoever is speaking choose whatever psalm they want to speak on. And it's kind of cool that. So I took time the last couple weeks and just been praying over psalms, going through them. And God led me down to like two different psalms. And this week I kind of went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And it just felt like God's saying, yes, this is where we're supposed to go.
So we're going to be in Psalm chapter 30 this morning. And I'd love to read that all the way through at the beginning. So you're able to see it on screens. If you brought your hard copy Bible with you this morning, awesome. Also look up on Bible YouVersion app. But just follow along here in Psalm 30. It says, I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. Lord, my God, I called to you for help and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead. You spared me from going down to the pit. Sing praises to 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. When I felt secure, I said, I will never be shaken, Lord. When you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm. But when you hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, Lord, I called. To the Lord, I cried for mercy. What is gain if I am silence? If I go down to the pit, will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. You turn my wailing into dancing. You remove my sackcloth and clothe me with joy. That my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever.
Pray with me. Lord, we proclaim Psalm 30 this morning God, as we dive into your word for the next few minutes God, I pray that you would reveal yourself to us God, that you would show us a little bit more of who you are and your character God, I pray for those who might be discouraged this morning God, I pray that you would encourage them even in this moment. For those of us who maybe came in this morning carrying some things, God, I pray that we would just set them down. Lord, may we hear from the heart of the psalmist this morning. God, may it refresh our soul. God, we love you. We praise you. Everybody said, amen.
So this psalm, Psalm 30, is actually a narrative or declarative praise psalm. And it's really cool. It's probably one of many you would find in the psalms that would be considered a classic psalm of thanksgiving. And here is a prayer of someone who has passed through a dark crisis in their life and is now standing in the bright light of glory. Deliberately then turning back on and seeing how God brought them through. And it is God's victory in their life. It is nothing that they did or any chance or luck that they stumbled upon. The verbiage here and the language in it is very personal. I am my. But this is actually written to be used for corporate worship. It's a worship song to be sung in the body of church. And it is of a rescued person who comes into church and stands and gives testimony to what God has done in their life and then invites the entire church to praise God along with them. The crisis, we don't know a whole lot specifically about it. There's debate among scholars of why this was actually written, but it's written so that you could put yourself into it. It's intentionally vague. Maybe an illness, a danger, a near-death experience. And it's for every generation to praise God and to give glory to his name. In other words, this is an ancient version of, let me tell you what almost took me out. And you better start singing with me. Kind of a psalm. Maybe you have been there before. The psalmist talks about the pit. Maybe you're in the pit right now. Maybe you just came out of the pit. Hopefully, the pit is in your rearview mirror. But the scars of the pit are still really fresh. Maybe it was a season of a strong illness or a health scare. Maybe it was a loss of a loved one, a family member, a spouse. Maybe it was a season when a long hoped for relationship had to end. Maybe you had a big move or transition and then you found yourself in the midst of it lost and confused. Maybe the weight of some new responsibilities hit you for the first time. Maybe a first job, the first time moving out on your own. Maybe it was when you held your first child in your arms. And this quiet realization that you have no clue what you're doing. Maybe it was a season of just loneliness and depression. Maybe it was a season of caring for aging parents. Or just a season when everything just seemed so overwhelming. me. Hold on to that memory. We're going to come back to it.
But this psalm is divided up into five different stanzas. And so I want to kind of walk through each section together and tell you the story that is being proclaimed. The first of which is verses one through three. And it says this, I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me up out from the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. Lord, my God, I called you for help and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the This first section, there is an introductory praise over telling the greater story of what has happened in this person's life. And the individual is sharing and immediately praising God, erupting in a staccato praise saying, this is what God did. And I will exalt you, God. I will lift you up. You healed me. You brought me from the realm of the dead. This is an interesting word here because in the Hebrew Jewish context, they would call this Sheol. And Sheol was this dark, dark place, what they would call the shadowy realm of the dead. Not a place you wanna go hang out. And there's this imagery here of being drawn up like a bucket raising water from deep down in a well. The psalmist here is saying, you raised me up from this dark pit. And every line here is a line of introductory praise to this entire psalm. There's some interesting wordplay going on here where the psalmist raises up God in praise similar to the way that they were raised up from the pit. And it is God, solely God, that has raised them up. I've seen this a handful of times since I've been pastoring here at Spring Valley. Moments in your life where you were in the pit. You were struggling. Life was hard. You were confused. You were lost. You were frustrated. You were angry. All right emotions to have. And you came in here week after week, just showing up, going, okay, God. And God raised you out of the pit. He lifted you up. And praise came out from your soul. And you gave witness. You told me, hey, pastor, man, I thought it was over. I thought it was over. But God raised me up. He pulled me back. And in that, you discovered God's restoring purpose in your life in a new, unexpected direction. And that time when you found yourself at the end of the rope, nothing to grab or hold onto, God held onto you. God lifted you up. God raised you up. And this is correct praise. You notice that line in there where it said the enemies tried to gloat over me? That's the wrong praise. The praise of the enemy is not the praise of God. The praise of God is the one in which we rejoice in God's salvation. That's the praise.
Then they go on to stanza two. It says this, it says, Sing the praises to 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. This is when the psalmist says, hey, I gave you my introductory praise. This is what happened. And now the psalmist is saying, join me, a call for the community to praise God with the psalmist in their story. And this individual turns almost to like an outwardly creed-like style of proclamation and invites in the church to praise God with them. Sing to the Lord, you his faithful people, give thanks. And this is so awesome because there's this juxtaposition or polarities that we see in this psalm where there's anger, but there's favor. There's moment, but there's a lifetime. There's evening, but there's mourning. There's weeping and there's rejoicing. This dual polarity here. The psalmist is painting this picture of, yeah, it might've been like this, but then it turned out like this. Just when I thought this was how it was gonna end, plot twist, God shows up and then he gets this. And he's proclaiming this and he's saying, guys, join me in this worship of what God has done. his anger lasts only a moment but his favor lasts a lifetime weeping may spend the night but in the morning there's rejoicing i think of the great theologian Donkey from Shrek that says in the morning i'm making waffles that's what the psalmist here is saying he says weeping is pictured as this horrific overnight guests who packs up and leaves at sunrise and joy moves in permanently. Waffles in the morning just brings joy, right? Does anybody love waffles in the morning? Theologically, okay, here we'll get back to this. This is more of a celebratory of one's person praise by joining with the praise of the community. It's an overflow of one person's celebration that just goes out into the community. It's like this person's bucket of joy is overflowing and it's just flooding the whole church. This is a public acknowledgement of that, how God does things differently. Think of this in contrast maybe to Job's friends in the book of Job in the Bible, when he's going through his stuff, his friends or counselors are saying, you've sinned, you've done all this stuff, this is why it's all bad. No, no, no, no, that's not what it is. It's God who has done this. He has brought this. And it's a welcoming of the one who might have been marginalized or outcast, welcomed back into the community, the church family. I heard it said like this, weeping is like that relative that shows up uninvited. Oh, eats all the leftovers, finally leaves at dawn. Thank you, Jesus. but joy on the other hand is that friend who comes in and unpacks and helps doing the dirty dishes in the sink and starts folding laundry there have been seasons when i've seen people step away from the church when they have gone through something horrific and it breaks my heart and we continue to pray for them and check in on them and love them and and pray for god to bring them back. And when they do come back, it's a celebration. It's the morning, the happy sunrise after the dark morning night.
The psalmist moves on in verse six in the stanza three. It says, when I felt secure, I said, I will never be shaken. Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm. But when you hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, Lord, I called. To the Lord, I cried for mercy. The psalmist now looks back and recalls this moment of crisis in their life. They're going back, they're remembering, they're putting themselves back in that place and recollecting this crisis of thinking, oh my goodness, what happened? And there's some words in there that we can kind of get twisted up on and we would think that he said, in my complacency, I will never be shaken. Maybe this phrase understood in other Psalms as godly trust, actually here in this Psalm, this is meaning this idea of complacency is a mark of self-reliant arrogance. And it was only in God's favor, only God, that there was any level of being established, which it says as a strong royal mountain. And so when the psalmist didn't have that anymore, yet when God hid his face, the psalmist was dismayed and had no leg left to stand on. The crisis here was not divine oversight. It was God's intentional withdrawal for protective favor. A later type of theology that Martin Luther himself would call God's alien work, a work that is strange, that is unknown, as mysterious. It's outside of our usual realm of understanding God. But God here was seeing the way out of the pit, not as silence or bitterness, but crying out again to my Lord. See, this is a moment of lament. And lament is not the absence of faith, but it is a faith speaking from the pit of pain. Let me say that again. It's not an absence of faith. It is a faith speaking from the pit of the pain. I don't know how many times that I found myself in this place as pastoral leadership to look around and say, ah, look at this church. We're good. We're going. We're grooving. only to quickly realize how little that I knew. How quickly my failures came around. My faults shined brighter than the sun. And did God go, hey, Chris, whose church is that there at the corner of Sunset and Fairway? Your church, God. Not my church, not Chris's church, not Andre's church, not Lauren's church. God's church. And maybe you felt yourself there sometime too in life. When you think, I got this. And then all your groceries just ripped out the bottom of the bag. Right? Maybe it was a moment of health scare or finances or family crisis that hit in a moment and change us forever. I remember when Lauren and I first got married, we had packed up all of our stuff, drove across the country, moved to Indiana months before school started. And I thought I had a job lined up. We thought we had work settled. And I got there and I walked into Starbucks where I talked to the manager and they looked at me square in the face and said, who are you? And I was like, okay. So I went home and started trying to find a job. I worked a warehouse repacking fireworks after the Fourth of July. You think that hot box out there is hot? Try walking through a warehouse in the middle of Midwest humidity for eight hours on your feet a day. See, these guys know. It's brutal. Then my wife got a job and we thought things were set. two weeks later she found out the manager was pitting her against another newly hired employee and they fired her so there we were young married slowly spending all that wedding money living on an air mattress in a one-bedroom house that was probably 300 square feet air conditioning was just a window unit so we lived in the bedroom going, what's going on, God? How's the pit? We thought we had it figured out. But these seasons of when we thought the world would call a setback, God is actually growing a deeper dependence upon him.
In stanza four, the psalmist actually quotes a prayer from that moment in the pit. It said, what is gained if I am silenced? If I go down to the pit, will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Dear Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. The psalmist is a direct quote of their prayer that they prayed while in the pit of distress. What is gained if I'm silenced? It's not bargaining. It's an appeal to God's character. The psalmist is saying, I know who you are, God, and this isn't lining up. Rescue me. The psalmist here is arguing that God's faithfulness needs living voices to proclaim it and the dead dust cannot sing. The prayer from the pit was one of heartache and hurt. James Mays, an Old Testament scholar and professor, had this quote I thought was interesting. It says, The psalmist dared to make one of the most important statements in the Bible about the theological value of praise. Praise is the way the faithfulness of the Lord becomes word and is heard in the Lord's world. Praise is the way the faithfulness of the Lord becomes word. Sometimes we don't hear about the faithfulness of God. It's only when people proclaim it are remembered of who he is. and apparently even ancient people in the world knew that dead people didn't make good worship leaders there has to be someone alive to proclaim the praise.
Then the psalmist finishes verse 11 and 12 you turn my wailing into dancing you remove my sackcloth and clothe me with joy that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever. The psalmist turns back to the present and reveals three rapid things. You turn mourning into dancing. Sound familiar? We sang that this morning, right? You turn sackcloth and replace them with joy. You took silence and you replace them with lifelong singing. The Hebrew word here for mourning is actually misped. And it actually kind of sounds like to me to dismayed, right? Misped, dismayed. And it's just this outward, public, strong expression of grief. This weeping and wailing, this physical, outward, screaming, mourning, sobbing, weeping, sackcloth, tearing of clothes, sorrow. You might find somebody in this place, maybe at a funeral, grieving the loss of a loved one, crying out in pain. And the psalmist here says that you've taken this misped of pain and replaced it with this joy. This word here of dance, this joy word is like celebratory dancing. I think of like dancing at a wedding, right? There's something extra with the dancing that happens at a wedding, right? Everybody brings out their extra best moves. I've been known to rip up a dance floor a little bit at a couple weddings in my life, but there's something like extra, right, that comes out of you at a wedding on a dance floor because there's celebration. And the psalmist here is you take in my mishwed and you've placed it with mehol. Celebration. It's my best Jewish celebration there. Mehol. There's no Jewish or Hebrew scholars in here, so you guys have no idea if it's right or not. But that's what I think about. You've taken this sorrow, this pain, this anguish, and you've turned it into wedding, dancing, Cha-Cha Slide. Smooth, right? The psalmist here wants you to know that what was sorrow is now replaced with joy. And calls out and says, my heart will sing praises and I will not be silent. There are times when I've been up here leading worship, and I've known someone going through the pit. And when they've come out of the pit that first Sunday when they come in, and they raise their hands to God and worship, it's brought me to tears. Because they're in here worshiping the God who rescued them from what they went through. And their reaction is what the psalmist said. It's just mahal, praise to God, joyful praise.
There are two main building blocks of this psalm. The first of which is these poetic polarities. Distress, deliverance, go down, rise up, anger, favor, moment, lifetime, night, mourning, weeping, rejoicing, mourning, sadness, dancing, joy, sackcloth, gladness, silence, and song. And these words from the psalmist allow us to feel the pain and the sorrow that they have gone through, but also to feel the celebration that they are now rejoicing in. And this dramatic reversal that God has brought about, that he has performed. And then thriving praise. I searched for a long time to try to figure out a word to put on the front of this term of praise because this is a full fulfillment praise. Maybe you might say like a mature or a grown-up praise. Because I think sometimes in our life, we have praise to God. Hey, God, thank you so much for that. But that's not grown-up praise. That's baby praise. That's infant praise. The psalmist here has this praise that has grown up from just not saying, thank you, God, themselves, between them and God, but it's a personal declaration becoming a fuller communal moment of praise and fulfilled in a lifelong calling themselves, as they said, a praise that refuses to be silent, but that will echo throughout all of eternity.
So I told you at the beginning to think of that time of the pit. And so when was that time of the pit in your life? Maybe it was recent. Maybe it was a long time ago. Maybe you've kind of tried to push it out of your mind because you don't want to go back there. But I think there's something about going back there to remember what God has done. So what was that time in the pit? And then thinking of that, how now will you thank God for the morning? How will you thank God for the moment of how he brought you out of that pit? He turned the darkness into morning. How will you thank God for that? And then how or who, more importantly, who can you tell about the God who turned your mourning into dancing? Who needs to know your story of the pit? I wrote on the card for today, the tear-off card, the challenges for you this week to take every day and to read through Psalm 30 and to think about your time in the pit. Maybe you're in the pit and this is a moment for you to just think on God to go, hey God, I need you to pull me out of this. But then also too, to go tell somebody. If you've made it out of the pit, you need to give praise to God and you need to bring people into it with you. Just like the psalmist said, hey, let me tell you about a time I almost got taken out, but now it's time to sing together to the God who rescues. what does that look like for you in your life who can you tell about the God who turned your morning into dancing.
I want to close our time today not in a traditional just pray out but I want us to communally together proclaim the praise of God so this is what I would call maybe an old school if you've been in church a call and response. I'm going to have a portion on the screen that I'm going to read. And then there's a portion that I want you guys to close our worship out together today. So if you would, if you're able, please stand with me. I want to close out our time together with this from Psalm chapter 30, the final verse. It says this, Lord, you turned my wailing into dancing. You removed my sackcloth and clothe me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Let's say this all together next here. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever. Amen. Amen. Go with God today. We love you. Have a great Sunday.