Psalm 130:1-8 (2)

Big Idea: We often struggle with an awareness of ongoing sin in our lives. The good news of grace means we can experience true forgiveness, and thus live with confidence as we look to the future.

Introduction: Years ago, I was working at a church in Arkansas that was across the street from a Kroger grocery store. A man who worked at that store often came to our church, and one day when it was very busy he stopped me in the store. He asked what he needed to do with his sin?

Psalm 130 is a ‘gospel saturated’ song. It begins in the depths of despair and ends in the depths of joy. In these 8 verses, we feel, along with the psalmist, the emotions that often accompany our own deepest thoughts.

Hidden thoughts, secret sins, and misdeeds in the dark seem to haunt the human condition. This psalm gives us a sense of foreboding in our own hearts - why do we struggle still, why the guilt, shame, and fear of being known?

This collection of psalms often evoke images of extreme separation, lamenting the condition in which they find themselves. The psalms as a whole often express the unseen fears and anxieties the characters of the stories we read about in the Old Testament.

Like you and I, they faced their own condemning thoughts and wondered: Can God really forgive me?

Transition: let’s read the text and divide it into two stanzas.

Stanza 1: Alone with My Thoughts: vs. 1-4

Psalm 130:1–4 “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”

EXEGESIS: The psalm begins with a bang - the cry of someone in the deep distress of their own soul. Unlike Psalm 120 likening this person being in Meshach, this song emphasizes what its like to be drowning in despair in one’s own soul.

The depths represent the distance one often feels within, and it always has an effect on without.