PSALM 88 - When The Darkness Will Not Lift

Introduction

We’ve been working our way through the Psalms for about eleven years now—about six years ago we began our “Summer Psalms” series as a regular part of our sermon series. But in all of those years—in every psalm that we have studied to this point—none of them go where this psalm goes; this may be our “Summer Psalms” series, but this is not a psalm to associate with sunshine and warmth and recreation and life: If anything, this is a winter psalm of cold, darkness, despair and despondency. Every other psalm we have studied that begins with a lament (the way this one does) ends on a note of light and hope and confidence. But not this psalm—if anything, it begins with the slightest glimmer of hope:

Psalm 88:1 (LSB)

O Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and throughout the night before You.

and ends in crushing isolation and despondency:

Psalm 88:18 (LSB)

You have removed lover and friend far from me; My acquaintances are in darkness.

(Literally, “darkness is my only friend”).

This psalm is found in Book III of the Psalter, which is the most mournful movement of the five divisions of the book. It is a collection of psalms that mourn over the apparent failure of God’s covenant to His people; the defeat of His anointed and the ruin of His city Jerusalem. And so this psalm is the darkest psalm in the darkest movement of the entire book. Not only has God’s covenant appeared to fail for His Anointed one, not only has His covenant appeared to collapse for His people and His city and His Land, His promises have failed concerning me.

This is a psalm of a faithful believer (note that he uses the name YHWH, God’s covenant Name with His people) who has entered into a spiritual darkness and despair so deep that he cannot see his way out of it. This is a psalm that says, “God does not hear me, He does not care about me, He has turned away from me and left me for dead. I am stranded in a darkness and despair so deep that I feel as though I am already in the grave. God has abandoned me.”

This psalm is a description of what medieval writers would call “the dark night of the soul”—a state of intense spiritual anguish in which the struggling, despairing believer feels he is abandoned by God (Boice, J. M. (2005). Psalms 42–106: An Expositional Commentary (p. 716). Baker Books.) In many ways, Psalm 88 is a rather inconvenient psalm, particularly in an age that wants everything to be tied up in a neat, satisfying package—our stories all have to have happy endings, our songs all need to be in a major key, our movies are all about comic-book heroes who save the day, save the planet, save the multiverse. This song doesn’t fit that mold—it ends just as bleakly as it began. There is no happy resolution, no last-minute rescue, no breaking of the clouds to let the sunlight through. “Darkness is my only friend”.

But God the Holy Spirit inspired this psalm and placed it in Holy Scripture because this is a darkness that many of His children know all too well. For some Christians, Psalm 88 is a lifeline of reassurance to them that the despondency and heaviness of spirit that seem to be their regular companions does not disqualify them as believers. There are many, as Charles Spurgeon once noted, who “seem to make their pilgrimage to Heaven mostly by night”.

In fact, Spurgeon himself was all too-well acquainted with the Dark Night of the Soul described in this psalm. He said of his own life that “I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to.” When he was 24, he suffered his first bout of despondency, saying “My spirits were sunken so low that I could weep by the hour like a child, and yet I knew not what I wept for” (“The Anguish and Agonies of Charles Spurgeon,” 24).

In his book Lectures to My Students, he said

Causeless depression cannot be reasoned with, nor can David’s harp charm it away by sweet discoursings. As well fight with the mist as with this shapeless, undefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness. . . . The iron bolt which so mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in gloomy prison, needs a heavenly hand to push it back. (Lectures to My Students, 163)

Psalm 88 is a description of that “shapeless, undefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness”. And so to you who know that despondency in your own life; for you who love someone who is laid low by it; for you who have never experienced it but someday will, let us fly to the refuge of God’s sure and living Word here this morning for hope in those times when no matter how we plead in prayer, no matter how we cry out to God, no matter how we strive or struggle, the darkness will not lift.

God has placed this psalm here in the Scriptures—and has placed it before you this morning—to give you hope and assurance that

You can be OVERWHELMED by DARKNESS yet still BELONG to Christ

It is possible to be so overwhelmed with darkness as to wonder whether you are a Christian--and yet be one. Look with me at the comfort offered you by this dark psalm. See here in the first five verses of our text that the psalmist begins with his certainty that YHWH is his salvation:

Psalm 88:1 (LSB)

O Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and throughout the night before You.

In the midst of the dark despondency that overwhelms the psalmist, he still holds on to the hope he has in God’s faithfulness, even though he has nothing left in himself—you are still a Christian

I. Though there is no STRENGTH left in your SOUL (Psalm 88:1-5)

An unbeliever would come before God to rail against Him over his plight; would seek to blame God for the calamities he has suffered. But the psalmist comes to plead with the God he knows can deliver him!

Psalm 88:2–5 (LSB)

Let my prayer come before You; Incline Your ear to my cry of lamentation! For my soul has been saturated with calamities, And my life has reached Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength, Released among the dead, Like the slain who lie in the grave, Whom You remember no more, And they are cut off from Your hand.

This is a darkness that feels like death—the psalmist's troubles have overflowed his heart until there is no room for anything but pain. He feels his life slipping away into darkness, as if he were fading away into a living death. He is “released among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave...” In his commentary on this passage, Spurgeon himself counseled,

It is all very well for those who are in robust health and full of spirits to blame those whose lives are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of melancholy, but the evil is as real as a gaping wound...” (Spurgeon, C. H. (n.d.). The treasury of David: Psalms 88-110 (Vol. 4, p. 3). Marshall Brothers.)

He goes on to counsel the readers of his commentary,

Reader, never ridicule the nervous and hypochondriacal, their pain is real: though much of the evil lies in the imagination, it is not imaginary. (ibid.)

As the psalmist cries out in the depths of his misery and desolation, do not miss the way he began his lament—with a prayer of hope in God!

Psalm 88:1–2 (LSB)

O Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and throughout the night before You. Let my prayer come before You; Incline Your ear to my cry of lamentation!

Beloved, when you have come to the absolute end of your strength and the darkness and heaviness of your soul is overwhelming you, it is there that you understand that

Your SALVATION can only be in GOD (vv. 1-2; cp. Rom. 4:4-5)

The title of this sermon is taken from the name of a small but helpful book by John Piper—in it, he describes the way to fight the darkness and despondency of the dark night of the soul with what he calls “gutsy guilt”:

Gutsy guilt means learning to live on the rock-solid truth of what happened for us when Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose again from the dead. It means realizing that in this life we will always be sinful and imperfect. Therefore in ourselves we will always be guilty… The biblical truth of justification says that... I am legally absolved of guilt and credited with a righteousness that I don’t have. (Piper, J. (2006). When the darkness will not lift: Doing What We Can While We Wait for God--And Joy. pp. 14-15)

In other words, Christian—when you are so overwhelmed by darkness that you cannot even believe that you are truly saved; when you are so despondent and so utterly despairing of life that you feel as though you were never even converted, your one solid patch of ground to stand on is that God’s declaration of your justification is utterly independent of how you feel!

You are not a Christian because of your great spiritual strength. You are not a Christian because you have done great Christian works. You are not a Christian because you feel like it. God’s Word says in Romans 4-

Romans 4:4–5 (LSB)

Now to the one who works, his wage is not counted according to grace, but according to what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes upon Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness,

As dark as the psalmist’s world became; as far into despair as he had fallen, he could not fall beyond the decree of God to save him. Beloved, you may feel as though you have reached the threshold of Sheol, but as David reminds us in Psalm 139, even if you make your bed in Sheol, your God is already there!

Psalm 139:11–12 (LSB)

If I say, “Surely the darkness will bruise me, And the light around me will be night,” Even the darkness is not too dark for You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.

You can be overwhelmed by darkness and yet still belong to Christ—though there is no strength left in your soul, you have been justified by a God stronger than all your despair. And verses 6-9 of Psalm 88 remind you that you still belong to Him

II. Though God DECREES your DISTRESS (Psalm 88:6-9)

Over and over in these verses the psalmist makes it clear that God is the source of his suffering:

Psalm 88:6–9a (LSB)

You have put me in the pit far below, In dark places, in the depths. Your wrath lies upon me, And You afflict me with all Your breaking waves. Selah. You have removed my acquaintances far from me; You have set me as an abomination to them; I am shut up and cannot go out. My eye has wasted away because of affliction...

But once again, see that he is not coming to God to blame Him or accuse Him or question His goodness—otherwise it would make no sense for him to say at the end of verse 9

Psalm 88:9 (LSB)

...I have called upon You every day, O Yahweh; I have spread out my hands to You.

He is not recoiling from God in his despondency, he is reaching for Him. He is not embittered against God; He calls Him by the Covenant Name that He revealed to Moses to assure him of His love for His people: “You are the Great I AM, You are the One Who has promised your unfailing lovingkindness to the people you have redeemed by the blood of the sacrifice—You are the only One Who can rescue me out of the darkness You have laid on me!”

Christian, see here that you can trust God in the midst of your despair, because

He ultimately GOVERNS your DARKNESS

Charles Spurgeon, who knew this dark night of the soul more desperately than most, said of his times of despondency:

It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity. (Charles Spurgeon in Christian History, Issue 29, Vol. 10, No. 1, 25)

Would it really be any comfort, Christian, to believe that the darkness you suffocate under is merely random? That there is no reason for it, that it cannot be foreseen, that there is no hope that it will ever be controlled or end? That sometimes you just get caught in the Universe’s gears, chewed up and spit out?

No, Christian—you have a far sweeter comfort in the darkest, most crushing despair—that it has come from the nail-scarred hand of a Savior Who loves you more than you can comprehend! And if He has sent it, He has a purpose for good in it.

Romans 8:1 (LSB)

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:13 (LSB)

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us

Psalm 84:11 (LSB)

For Yahweh God is a sun and shield; Yahweh gives grace and glory; No good thing does He withhold from those who walk blamelessly.

Christian, see here from this darkest of all the psalms that you can be overwhelmed with darkness and still belong to Christ. It is possible to be so overwhelmed with despondency and despair as to wonder whether you are a Christian--and yet be one. You belong to Christ though there is no strength left in your soul to believe it; you belong to Him even though He decrees that distress that has buried you.

And as the psalmist continues in verses 10-12, we see him continuing to cry out to God in faith—these are not the railings of an unregenerate soul that is hostile to God; this is the heart-rending cry of one who delights in God’s glory, even though He has laid him low. When you are stranded in the dark night of the soul, Christian, you cry out in this way because you know that

III. God is still WORTHY of your WORSHIP (Psalm 88:10-12; cp. Isa. 48:11)

Psalm 88:10–12 (LSB)

Will You do wonders for the dead? Will the departed spirits rise and praise You? Selah. Will Your lovingkindness be recounted in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon? Will Your wonders be known in the darkness? And Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

These are not the concerns of a soul that is estranged from God; these are the prayers of someone who knows God is good and wants to see it! By asking these questions, the psalmist is taking for granted that God is worthy of worship: “Lord, You are the wonder-working God, You are full of lovingkindness and worthy of praise, You are faithful and righteous—but I can’t worship you for all those things if I am dead! I want to praise You for Your faithful love for me, I want to glorify You for delivering me, but I can’t do it if I die before You rescue me!”

Once again—see here that this is a prayer that can only come from a heart that belongs to God through faith! This is a cry of a soul that cannot see how it can ever be rescued from its darkness, yet cannot believe that God will allow His glory to be diminished by its death. For the psalmist (and all the Old Testament saints), death was an impenetrable mystery—they did not see life and death as a so-called “binary” choice—you were either alive or dead. For the psalmist, life and death were both on a sort of sliding scale; life left you little by little and death came to you little by little. So you could be more alive than dead, or more dead than alive, but there would come a point at which you did not possess enough life to sustain you and you would “fall through” the land of the living and drop into Sheol, the grave. And as life continued to leave you, like helium from a balloon, you would slowly sink lower and lower into Sheol, further and further away from “life” into death—from a living soul to a shade to a shadow and finally to an unknowable, irretrievable state from which there was no return.

The psalmist felt himself slipping away from life in his despair; he is crying out to God not to let him descend into “the realm of destruction” (Hebrew: Abaddon), because if he descended into that realm, there was no coming back—there was no way to know or praise or love God from there.

But Christian, see the immeasurably greater promise that you have on this side of the Cross--

You have HOPE in a LIFE to COME (Job 19:25-27)

Where the psalmist could only cry out in the anguish of uncertainty, “Will I even be able to praise You when I slip into Sheol?”, you have the assurance that death has been conquered by your Savior, and is the gateway to eternal worship! Yes, God is jealous for His glory:

Isaiah 48:11 (LSB)

“For My own sake, for My own sake, I will act; For how can My name be profaned? And My glory I will not give to another.

He will not allow His glory to be diminished by the grave—and so in Christ He has conquered the grave so that death will not prevent His wonders to be praise, His lovingkindness recounted, His righteousness magnified. Christian, you have this immoveable hope that, even if the darkness does not lift in this lifetime, it will someday be lifted from you when you see your Savior face to face!

In the midst of his sufferings, Job was given a glimpse of this hope when he sang

Job 19:25–27 (LSB)

“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will rise up over the dust of this world. “Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall behold God, Whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see and not another...

But you, Christian, have an even more sure hope in Christ:

1 Corinthians 15:51–57 (LSB)

Behold, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. For this corruptible must put on the incorruptible, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruptible puts on the incorruptible, and this mortal puts on immortality, then will come about the word that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!

Even here, so dimly seen by our Old Testament brother in the faith, the Scriptures remind you in your dark seasons that you have an unshakeable hope in Christ’s work for you!

You can be overwhelmed with darkness and still belong to Christ. It is possible to be so overwhelmed with despondency and despair as to wonder whether you are a Christian--and yet be one. You will cling to hope in God even when there is no strength left in you and you are in the twilight of a living death; you will continue to cry out to Him in the dark even though He is the one who has decreed that darkness; you will plead with Him because He is still worthy of your worship. And verses 13-18 show you that you will never stop pleading with Him for mercy

IV. Because God's REJECTION is UNBEARABLE to you (Psalm 88:13-18)

Psalm 88:13–14 (LSB)

But as for me, O Yahweh, I have cried out to You for help, And in the morning my prayer comes before You. O Yahweh, why do You reject my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me?

He goes on to describe his present experience of God in the next three verses:

Psalm 88:15–17 (LSB)

...I bear Your terrors; I am overcome. Your burning anger has passed over me; Your horrors have destroyed me. They have surrounded me like water all day long; They have encompassed me altogether.

The psalmist’s description of his experience of God in these verses is very much like the experience of the damned in Hell—God is absent in every way you wish He were present (reject your soul, turn His face), and present in every way you wish He was absent (His terrors, His horrors, His burning anger). For the psalmist to be apart from God’s presence was a taste of Hell itself.

Charles Spurgeon wrote of his experience of this despair:

“To be forsaken of God is the worst ill that the most melancholy saint ever dreams of.” (https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/spurgeon-can-help-your-depression/)

Again—see here that if this psalmist did not love God, he would not care if God forsook him. But for him (and for you who have walked this same dark path as children of God) there is no fate worse than the thought that God has turned away from you. It is the peculiar cry of a regenerated heart that

His FRIENDSHIP is all that MATTERS

The psalmist mourns over the isolation and abandonment that he feels from God, and how that isolation has also removed him from the rest of his friends:

Psalm 88:18 (LSB)

You have removed lover and friend far from me; My acquaintances are in darkness.

The desolation and darkness that this psalm describes is such that even your family members and friends and loved ones cannot draw near or understand. Even if they are in the same room with you, holding your hand, praying for you, you still feel a million miles away from them. Surely this is in part because no lover or friend or acquaintance can replace the relationship with God that you feel you have lost. There is no other friendship that can satisfy you. If you have all of the friends and popularity and adulation and respect and affection of the entire realm of humanity but do not have God’s acceptance, you live in inconsolable desolation.

This is how the psalm ends—with one last abrupt, desperate cry of despair—I am alone in the darkness, and not even God will hear me crying. What hope can be gleaned from such a heart-rending cry of hopelessness in that verse? For you, Christian, great hope indeed, because you serve a Savior who cried that very cry:

Matthew 27:46 (LSB)

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Christian, the reason you have hope in the midst of this kind of crushing despair, the reason you can endure in the midst of a darkness that feels like it will never lift is because Jesus Christ suffered the agony of separation from God on the Cross so that it will not finally defeat you!

Does reading this dark psalm seem to you like the desperate cries of your own heart? Then read it over again a second time as the cries of Jesus Christ on the Cross. Was a soul ever saturated with calamities (not His own) like Christ’s? Was anyone ever cut off from God like Christ on the Cross? Did God’s wrath ever lie on anyone as it was laid on Him? Was anyone ever forsaken by friends the way He was? Did anyone ever mourn over God’s face being turned away from Him the way Christ did? Then dear, hopeless, despondent Christian—no one understands your darkness the way He does!

When you are so compassed about with that shapeless, undefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness, you can cling to the hope—even if you cannot feel it; even if you can muster no confidence it it—that that despondency and hopelessness and despair cannot claim you because Christ battled it and won! And that darkness will never snatch you out of His hand!

And so this is why you can do as the psalmist does throughout his battle with the darkness—even when he felt it was a losing battle—he never stopped crying out to God!

Psalm 88:1 (LSB)

O Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and throughout the night before You.

Psalm 88:9 (LSB)

My eye has wasted away because of affliction; I have called upon You every day, O Yahweh; I have spread out my hands to You.

Psalm 88:13 (LSB)

But as for me, O Yahweh, I have cried out to You for help, And in the morning my prayer comes before You.

So no matter how hopeless, no matter how useless you feel it to be, Christian, no matter if the darkness does not lift, never give up crying out to God. Reckon not on how you feel about whether you are a Christian, but pin all your hope on what God says in His Word about it: That

Titus 3:5–6 (LSB)

He saved [you], not by works which [you] did in righteousness, but according to His mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon [you] richly through Jesus Christ [your] Savior,

Poor brother Spurgeon knew this kind of hope better than most when he said “Praise God that it is not your hold of Christ that saves you, but His hold of you”—that is your hope, despondent Christian, cling to His grasp of you, even when the darkness does not lift.

And what does that hope in the darkness look like? What does a despondent Christian do on the basis of that hope of your justification by faith alone through Christ alone?

First of all, it frees you to confess your despondency as sin. The Scripture commands you

Psalm 70:4 (LSB)

Let those be joyful and glad in You All who seek You And let them say continually, “Let God be magnified,” Those who love Your salvation.

And so despondency and despair is disobedience. God’s Word directs you to

Philippians 4:6 (LSB)

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

And so your anxiety and faithlessness is a sin.

Charles Spurgeon said this clearly and plainly about his own battles with spiritual darkness:

“Despondency,” he said, “is not a virtue; I believe it is a vice. I am heartily ashamed of myself for falling into it, but I am sure there is no remedy for it like a holy faith in God” (“The Anguish and Agonies of Charles Spurgeon,” 24).

And so, Christian, your holy faith in God means that if despondency is a sin like any other it can be repented of and forgiven like any other! Do not fall into the trap of making your darkness and despair and depression some kind of “force of nature” that you are a mere victim of—because you are justified in Christ Jesus you are free to own it as a part of your remaining corruption. Search your heart—is it possible that there is some sinful attitude, some unrepentant wickedness, some hidden knot of rebellion in your soul that is driving you into this darkness? Depression itself may or not be sinful, but sin can certainly cause you to be depressed. And the Good News of the Gospel is that there is no sin that cannot be repented of, there is no sin that cannot be forsaken and cleansed in Christ!

Not all despondency though, is caused by cherished secret sin. There are certainly physiological contributors. The psalmist describes being “afflicted and about to breathe his last from his youth onwards” (v. 15). Charles Spurgeon suffered for decades with painful inflammation of the kidneys, gout, rheumatism, and neuritis. Constant physical pain was undoubtedly part of the reason for his bouts with spiritual despair—and here too, we can pray for relief while waiting for the hope that we have in Christ. Physical and spiritual pain both are in His hand, and we can rest, as our dear brother Spurgeon did, in the truth that you will never have an affliction which God has not sent you, no bitter cup not filled by His hand, no trials not measured by Him or sent to you by His arrangement.

If it is true that our physical bodies can affect our emotional and spiritual state, then it follows that caring for our physical condition can have a helpful impact on our spiritual condition. Spurgeon himself knew this and recommended acting accordingly. In his book, Lectures to My Students, he says,

Sedentary habits have tendency to create despondency . . . A day’s breathing of fresh air upon the hills, or a few hours’ ramble in the beech woods’ umbrageous calm, would sweep the cobwebs out of the brain of scores of our toiling ministers who are now but half alive. A mouthful of sea air, or a stiff walk in the wind’s face, would not give grace to the soul, but it would yield oxygen to the body, which is the next best. (CHS Lectures To My Students, p. 160).

So what does this mean? It means get up. Do something. Take a shower. Go outside and get the mail. Fold one basket of laundry. Change the oil in the car. Organize one desk drawer. Take one walk around the block at lunchtime. It does not impart grace to the soul, but if it imparts oxygen to the body, that’s a good thing!

Christian, God’s Word says here in Psalm 88 that you can be overwhelmed by darkness yet still belong to Christ. It is possible to be so overwhelmed with darkness as to wonder whether you are a Christian--and yet be one. And because Christ has already conquered that darkness, you have the hope—though you cannot see it now—that He has a good purpose in it for you, to conform you more fully into His own image.

Spurgeon tells a story of a Sunday morning when he had to preach a sermon on Christ’s cry from the cross in Matthew 27:46— “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He said, “Though I did not say so, yet I preached my own experience. I heard my own chains clank while I tried to preach to my fellow-prisoners in the dark; but I could not tell why I was brought into such an awful horror of darkness, for which I condemned myself.” The next day, he writes, a man came to his study to see him “who bore all the marks of despair upon his countenance”. He told Charles that he had attended his sermon the day before, and said “I never before, in my life, heard any man speak who seemed to know my heart. Mine is a terrible case; but on Sunday morning you painted me to the life, and preached as if you had been inside my soul.”

Spurgeon writes, “By God’s grace I saved that man from suicide, and led him into gospel light and liberty; but I know I could not have done it if I had not myself been confined in the dungeon in which he lay.” (From https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/no-blessing-like-health-with-the-exception-of-sickness, accessed 08/08/2024)

Christian, you do not understand now why you are confined now to the dungeon of hopeless despair and estrangement from God; but it may be that God is preparing you through this darkness to be a light someday for someone else who is groaning under the same despondent hopelessness. So entrust your soul in the midst of that darkness to the God who sees the end from the beginning, the God Who will certainly not forsake you finally, the God Who has provided for the forgiveness of your sin and union with Him, the God Who has promised that a Day is coming when

Revelation 21:3–4 (LSB)

...the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain.”

Hold fast; keep praying, keep fighting for joy until the Day when the darkness will lift forever when you look on that Face which will never turn away from you again—the face of your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Jude 24–25 (LSB)

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION: Write down something you learned from this morning’s message that is new to you, or an insight that you had for the first time about the text? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down a question that you have about the passage that you want to study further or ask for help with: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down something that you need to do in your life this week in response to what God has shown you from His Word today: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________

(Two related resources from today’s sermon, When the Darkness Will Not Lift by John Piper, and Encouragement for the Depressed by Charles Spurgeon, are available in the church library. Both are also available on Amazon.com)