Rise 1: HOPE—Psalm 130
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Psalm 130
N:
Opening
Opening
Good morning, and welcome to September and to Family Worship here at Eastern Hills. I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor, and I’d like to welcome you who are here in the room as well as those of you who are joining us online today. If you’re visiting today, thanks for coming to worship the Lord with the Eastern Hills family, and we pray that you’ve already been blessed by being with us this morning.
I have a few announcements to make today before we get into our text:
I would like the church family to know that Mary Gleason passed away on Friday morning from complications related to COVID, and many of us knew and loved Mary, so I know that there is some grieving in this room today. But we grieve in hope because of Mary’s faith in Christ—she has been glorified with Him and is receiving her heavenly reward. There is no service planned at this point, and a celebration of Mary’s life will be scheduled at a later date, given that her daughter Karen is still in the hospital with her own battle with COVID. Please be in prayer for the Gleason family, and especially for Karen at this time. We will pray for them in just a moment.
Last week, I announced that author and speaker Jonathan McKee would be with us on September 19, preaching here in our Family Worship service that morning, and then giving a workshop called “Parenting Generation Screen” that evening. Last week I said that workshop would be at 5:30, but I was mistaken: it will be at 5 pm here in the sanctuary. It’s a great opportunity for you to invite people who are children, who were children, who have children, who are going to have children, and who are connected to the life of children to come and learn about kids’ current screen-driven culture and how to navigate it, and how loving adults can help them navigate it. The workshop is free, and is sponsored by our Children’s and Student Ministries.
During the months of September and October each year, we take up our special offering for Mission New Mexico, part of our working together with other Southern Baptist churches in the State to reach and serve the lost. You saw the video earlier from Steve Ballew, Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico, where he outlined the many things that the Mission New Mexico offering will fund in the coming year right here in our State. Our goal as a church has been set at $8,000 for this offering time. Would you please prayerfully consider how God might lead you to give to Mission New Mexico over the next two months? Let’s work together to impact this State with the Gospel.
This morning, we are starting a new sermon series called “Rise: The Psalms of Ascent.” The psalms are the book of worship for the Hebrew people, a collection that includes many different writers, different themes, different styles, written at different times in the life of the nation of Israel. Within the book of Psalms, which is also sometimes referred to as the psalter, there is a collection of 15 psalms that all bear the superscription “A song of ascents.” Each of these 15 psalms is fairly short: each no more than 9 verses with the exception of Psalm 132. Three of them are only 3 verses each. We will not look at all 15 of these psalms during this series, choosing instead to look closely at five of them. We begin our study of the Psalms of Ascent this morning with Psalm 130. Let’s stand in honor of God’s Holy Word as we read this psalm together:
1 Out of the depths I call to you, Lord! 2 Lord, listen to my voice; let your ears be attentive to my cry for help. 3 Lord, if you kept an account of iniquities, Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, so that you may be revered. 5 I wait for the Lord; I wait and put my hope in his word. 6 I wait for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning— more than watchmen for the morning. 7 Israel, put your hope in the Lord. For there is faithful love with the Lord, and with him is redemption in abundance. 8 And he will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
PRAYER, remembering Lisa Francis and family, as well as the Gleason family and Karen especially.
Series Opening: The Psalms of Ascent
Series Opening: The Psalms of Ascent
“So what exactly ARE the Psalms of Ascent?” you may be asking. If you aren’t asking that, I’m going to answer everyone else who is. Well, the truth is that we aren’t exactly sure. It appears that they were composed at different times by different people, since four of them (122, 134, 131, and 133) are attributed to David, and one of them (127) is attributed to Solomon. The other 10, including our focal song today, are not attributed directly to anyone. They also include a fairly broad variety of poetic style: lament, celebration, wisdom, thanksgiving, and others.
So we can safely say that the collecting of the Psalms of Ascent into this grouping had to happen at a later time than when they were written, so we shouldn’t attempt to narrow them collectively down to a particular historical context. Likely, they were written and used in worship, and since they all share a common over-arching tone of confidence in the Lord, they were at some point brought together and given the moniker songs of ascents.
We also aren’t exactly sure how they were used. Some commentators believe that the ascent psalms were recited or sung, one per step, as the Levites climbed the 15 steps from the Court of Women to the Court of Israelites in the Temple. Because of this, these are sometimes called the “songs of the steps” or “songs of degrees.” However, there is no way to verify this, and it is further complicated by the fact that we know nothing of 15 steps until the Temple was rebuilt by Herod in about 20 or 19 BC, so that would be a pretty late date for the collecting of the Psalms as they are.
But I think that, while they MAY have been used that way at that later date, I think and most commentators think that they were collected at some point during or just after the Exile to Babylon, and were then used as songs of worship, praise, and preparation for the Israelites as they would “go up” to Jerusalem during the three annual festival pilgrimages. There is at least one textual connection that lends itself to this possibility.
The designation of these being the songs of ascents or psalms of ascent likely comes from Psalm 122, which we won’t be looking at in detail during this series:
1 I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let’s go to the house of the Lord.” 2 Our feet were standing within your gates, Jerusalem— 3 Jerusalem, built as a city should be, solidly united, 4 where the tribes, the Lord’s tribes, go up to give thanks to the name of the Lord. (This is an ordinance for Israel.)
The textual connection that I see in Scripture comes from 2 Chronicles. The Hebrew Scriptures are not collected in the same order that we use them today. Our Old Testament is collected according to topic, generally: The Law, History, Poetry/Wisdom, and then the Major then Minor Prophets. The Hebrew Scriptures actually end with Chronicles (they don’t separate them into 1 and 2 Chronicles). So in the Hebrew Scriptures, the very last verse is 2 Chronicles 36:23, which says:
23 This is what King Cyrus of Persia says: The Lord, the God of the heavens, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up, and may the Lord his God be with him.
The phrase the ended the Hebrew Exile was “go up.” And the psalm from which it appears that the Psalms of Ascent derive their name speaks of Jerusalem built, along with the house of the Lord, and that all of Israel’s tribes are to “go up.” So I think that the Psalms of Ascent reflect back to that proclamation, and the excitement that the Hebrew people had to be able to again “go up” after their exile in Babylon.
So through this series, we too will be on our own spiritual pilgrimage as we “go up” with the Psalms of Ascent. We will go up in hope, go up to look, go up for help, and go up to find rest as we consider these beautiful psalms and the Lord who inspired them. I pray that you’ll plan to be here each of the next 5 weeks, including today and Jonathan McKee’s visit on the 19th.
For this morning, our focal text is written to be the favorite Psalm of some heavy-hitters of the Christian faith: Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. This psalm was also the passage that John Wesley claims was what God used to bring him to saving faith in Christ. So it’s a good place for us to start this series.
Psalm 130 naturally breaks into four stanzas of two verses each, and each of those stanzas builds on the theme, and it is from these stanzas that our points will come from this morning. This psalm is considered by some to be a psalm of lament, but I think it is more accurate to see it specifically as a psalm of repentance, along with Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, and 143. As such, it begins at the right place: with confession of sin.
1: Confession of sin
1: Confession of sin
This isn’t something that we’re overly fond of talking about today. But we’ve just come off of our series on the Ten Commandments, and as we considered the Ten Words, I don’t know about you, but I was really convicted by just how easily and how often I violate the Lord’s instructions about how to relate to Him and how to relate to other divine image-bearers, my fellow humans. Given that I’m still smarting a little bit from that series, I imagine that you are as well. So, what is the right response to the conviction that God gives us through the application of His Word through the work of His Holy Spirit within us? It’s repentance. And repentance starts with confession.
1 Out of the depths I call to you, Lord! 2 Lord, listen to my voice; let your ears be attentive to my cry for help.
Keep in mind that this stanza doesn’t exactly say what the “depths” are that the psalmist is referring to. How do we know that it’s sin we’re talking about here? Well, it comes from the next stanza, but for now I’d ask that you just trust me. The psalmist is confessing his sin.
With that in mind, what is the image that is produced for us as we read this stanza? The psalmist calls out to God, even though he knows that it’s his sin, his disobedience, that has him trapped in the depths. He knows that He deserves God’s wrath, much as the writers of Psalm 88: 6-7
6 You have put me in the lowest part of the Pit, in the darkest places, in the depths. 7 Your wrath weighs heavily on me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. Selah
We don’t like to think about God as a God of wrath, as if somehow for Him to be wrathful is to diminish His love. But this is simply not the case. If God were not a God of wrath, how would He ever execute His justice? Without His being a God of wrath, Jesus doesn’t have to go to the cross to prove His love as well, because it would be unnecessary for Christ to die if God did not have to punish sin because of His holiness. I think that sometimes our idea of God is just too nice, too tame, too small. He must judge sin, because every sin is an affront to His character, His image, His instruction, and His provision for us. Would it be loving for God to NOT judge sin? No. Would it be loving for Him to just ignore our sin and let us keep living in it? No. So judge it He must, both because of His justice and because of His love.
The psalmist understands that God must judge sin. He knows that his own sin is great—so great that he feels he is drowning in it. He knows that he cannot rescue himself. So what does he do? He cries out to God in faith, because he knows that God hears, he knows that God is merciful, and he knows that God loves him, and he knows that only God can rescue him. It brings to mind Jonah’s prayer from inside the belly of the fish in Jonah chapter 2:
2 I called to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me. I cried out for help from deep inside Sheol; you heard my voice. 3 When you threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, and the current overcame me. All your breakers and your billows swept over me. 4 And I said, “I have been banished from your sight, yet I will look once more toward your holy temple. 5 The water engulfed me up to the neck; the watery depths overcame me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. 6 I sank to the foundations of the mountains, the earth’s gates shut behind me forever! Then you raised my life from the Pit, Lord my God! 7 As my life was fading away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, to your holy temple. 8 Those who cherish worthless idols abandon their faithful love, 9 but as for me, I will sacrifice to you with a voice of thanksgiving. I will fulfill what I have vowed. Salvation belongs to the Lord.
Jonah was in literal depths, and God rescued him for His purposes. We may find ourselves in the depths of our own sin, wondering how we are ever going to escape. The answer is to repent! True repentance involves confessing our sin, which is agreeing with God that our sin is actually sin. It doesn’t matter what our world says about it. It doesn’t matter what culture says about it. It doesn’t matter what our lying hearts say about it. What does the Word of God say about our sin? That it’s sin! And God’s opinion is the opinion that matters. If we are going to walk in repentance, then we’re going to have to call our sin “sin,” and then go in a different direction as Jonah did in verse 9: He said that he would fulfill what he had vowed. He was running from God, and now he would be obedient to Him.
And then he ends with the statement, “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” Which takes us to our next point in Psalm 130—the confession of hope.
2: Confession of hope
2: Confession of hope
I said earlier that it is because of the second stanza of this psalm that we know that the psalmist is talking about his sin when he refers to being the depths. This is because of the context of what verses 3 and 4 are talking about:
3 Lord, if you kept an account of iniquities, Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, so that you may be revered.
He has cried out to the Lord from the depths in hope that God will hear his plea for mercy. He knows that no one could stand before the Lord in righteousness, and that forgiveness is only found with God. He knows that he cannot earn it or deserve it. He is like David, who wrote Psalm 51 after his adulterous, deceitful, murderous affair with Bathsheba. He wrote:
1 Be gracious to me, God, according to your faithful love; according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion. 2 Completely wash away my guilt and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me. 4 Against you—you alone—I have sinned and done this evil in your sight. So you are right when you pass sentence; you are blameless when you judge.
Forgiveness is only found in the Lord, because ultimately every sin is against Him. Do we sin against our brothers and sisters? Certainly. Had David sinned against Bathsheba, against Uriah, and even against Joab? Yep. But every offense is ultimately an offense against God. As I said earlier, every sin is an affront to His character, His image, His instruction, and His provision for us. So God is the one with the right to condemn. But that also means that God, as the party chiefly offended by our sin, is the only one who can truly forgive it. This should inspire in us a sense of awe, of fear, of reverence.
The psalmist reveals a hope that flows out of his confession of his sin to God, knowing that forgiveness is only possible because God chooses to make it possible as a mercy.
Stephen J. Yuille, in his book Longing for Home: A Journey through the Psalms of Ascent, gives a great explanation between grace and mercy:
“God’s grace is His goodness bestowed apart from merit, but His mercy is His goodness bestowed contrary to merit.” As sinners, the only thing we deserve from God is punishment… The psalmist wants God to deal with him on the basis of mercy—contrary to what he deserves.” (ch. 11)
Because of God’s mercy then, we like the psalmist can confess our hope in God’s forgiveness, because we cannot stand on our own merit, but instead we can stand because God looks not at our merit, but at Christ’s merit. He doesn’t give us what we deserve: He gives us what Jesus deserves instead, and He stands in our place, so we can have this hope:
19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus—20 he has inaugurated for us a new and living way through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)—21 and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. 23 Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful.
Are you in the depth of sin? Confess it and cry out to God, knowing that He will forgive you. And then boldly go up and walk in hope, drawing near to Him with that true heart in full assurance! And cling to that promise in confident trust, which is our third point:
3: Confession of trust
3: Confession of trust
You know how they say that the night is always darkest just before dawn? I think a youth pastor must have written that while hosting a lock-in. Have you ever been to a student ministry lock-in? I have… more than I can remember. Lock-ins always sounded like so much fun and excitement… a great opportunity to connect with students, staying up all night, playing fun games, and then talking about serious things in the wee hours. But I’d always hit a wall at like 5 am. Exhausted. It was then that the waiting would begin: waiting for morning, waiting for the sun to rise, and with it, the parents to arrive. The great thing was that it always happened. The sun always came up. We could wait with anticipation, with hope, with confidence even in our exhaustion, because the morning was coming.
After confessing his sin and his hope in the forgiveness of God, the psalmist says that he will wait for the Lord:
5 I wait for the Lord; I wait and put my hope in his word. 6 I wait for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning— more than watchmen for the morning.
This seems kind of strange to us. Why is he waiting for the Lord? Doesn’t he have forgiveness just when he asks for it? Certainly. So why does he say that he waits for the Lord?
In several places in Scripture, morning and light are used to refer to the newness of the one who belongs to God, the one who has had their sins forgiven:
5 For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor, a lifetime. Weeping may stay overnight, but there is joy in the morning.
12 The night is nearly over, and the day is near; so let us discard the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.
5 For you are all children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or the darkness.
22 Because of the Lord’s faithful love we do not perish, for his mercies never end. 23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness!
So when the psalmist in Psalm 130 says that he waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, he is making a confession of trust: the watchmen know that the morning is coming, and they wait for it with anticipation. The psalmist knows that he is forgiven because of God’s faithfulness, and that the morning is about to arrive. He is confident that he will experience the newness in His relationship with God.
When we come to the Lord with our sin, confessing our need for His forgiveness, we come with hope, but we also can come in confident assurance that He will forgive and that we go up from our confession cleansed from our sin and right with God, like the tax collector did:
13 “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even raise his eyes to heaven but kept striking his chest and saying, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this one went down to his house justified rather than the other, because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
But our response to God doesn’t stop here. It’s not just about us. There is a response that we are to give, and that response should overflow to others.
4: Charge to the people
4: Charge to the people
Instead of just receiving his own forgiveness, the psalmist sees that there are others who are in the same boat as he is, and he challenges them to respond to the Lord in the same way that he has. And in this charge to the people, we can see hope and trust displayed again, as he calls the rest of Israel to “go up” and put their hope in the Lord as well:
7 Israel, put your hope in the Lord. For there is faithful love with the Lord, and with him is redemption in abundance. 8 And he will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
The psalmist is set free! The one who started this psalm in the depths of despair has confessed his sin, and now the hope and trust that He has overflows to the rest of the nation as he calls them to repent, because he knows that faithful love and redemption belong to the Lord, and that He will act to redeem His people from their sin. In this way, this psalmist is living out what David had written in Psalm 51, verses 12-13:
12 Restore the joy of your salvation to me, and sustain me by giving me a willing spirit. 13 Then I will teach the rebellious your ways, and sinners will return to you.
David will not keep it to himself. He must tell others about what God has done for him.
The question that we have to address, church family, is this: do we have this kind of hope? Do we look at each other and call our brothers and sisters to go up to the Lord in hope and trust? Do we teach the rebellious the ways of God because we have experienced those ways, so that they will turn to God and be saved? Are we like the psalmist in Psalm 130, calling those around us in our nation to put their hope in God?
We have the message of hope! We have the message of salvation! We have the Gospel! We must take the blessing that we have received and share it with others faithfully, so that God would be most glorified in our lives because we are making much of Him.
Contrasting Application:
Contrasting Application:
But this brings us to one last point of application. We have a message to share: the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But just as we who believe are called to “go up” in hope for forgiveness and restoration of our relationship with the Lord, when we turn this psalm and see it from a different vantage point, we can also see it as John Wesley did: a call to the lost to “go up” and trust in Christ.
God created us to be in relationship with Him, but that relationship has been damaged, and because of that, humanity finds themselves in the depths, separated from God and without hope because of our sin. We have done that which God would not have us do, and not done the things that God would have us do. This is what sin is. And the Bible tells us in Romans 6:23 that because of our sin, we deserve death, eternal separation from God, with no chance of escape. Understand the depth of your sin, agree with God about your sin, and cry out to Him for mercy.
That mercy, the forgiveness that we so desperately need, is found only in Christ. Nothing else can wash our sins away. Remember earlier I said that Christ went to the cross and took the punishment that we deserve on Himself? Jesus is the Son of God and lived a perfect life, and didn’t deserve what we deserve. So when He took our place in death, He made a way to be made right with God again. If we trust in what He has done, and not anything else, to make us right with God again, then we are made right with God through faith in Jesus.
And then in the psalm we see the confession of trust. If we have trusted in Jesus’s sacrifice to save us, then we can also trust the fact that He beat death and rose from the grave for us, so we can live forever. The Bible also says in Romans 6 that if we die with Him (meaning if we surrender to His death, dying to ourselves), then we will also live with Him, because Jesus can never die again. If we have surrendered our lives to Him in faith in His death, we will also receive eternal life with Him, and live forever in paradise with God.
And then we see that once we have received this incredible gift by faith, then we have a mission: to tell others to go up and place their trust in the Lord: to confess their sins, to confess their hope and their trust, and to be set free.
Closing
Closing
If you are lost this morning, would you “go up?” Would you cry out to God from the depths of your sin and be saved? Come and let us know.
Sheryl Lawson joining this morning?
Give during invitation as well.
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Route 66 God Loves You Tour with Franklin Graham is an eight-stop revival tour along Route 66, starting in my birthplace, Joliet, Illinois on September 19, and traveling through Albuquerque on September 28 at 7pm at Expo NM. We have a quick promo video for this event to share with you VIDEO This even is free, and it will be a great opportunity for you to invite your lost friends and share the message of hope in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Bible reading: Isaiah 25 today
Instructions: Guests come and see me down front, I have a gift for you, and I’d love to meet you for just a minute.
Benediction:
5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him. 6 If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth. 7 If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Praise the Lord for His grace and mercy! Have a blessed week!