Sermon Tone Analysis
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Anger
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What are some things that can give you a sleepless night?
I have a short list of those, and near the top is when I’m facing the painful consequences of my own mistakes.
What do you do when you’re confronted with your own sin, brokenness, and failure, and you realize that your own selfish choices have separated you from those that you love — separated you from God?
We said when we began looking at these psalms that there is a psalm for every human experience.
These psalms offer us way-points to stop and ponder our relationship with God in each of these experiences.
And that we would meet Jesus in all of these way-points.
Today we come to the first of what are sometimes called the Penitential Psalms.
These are prayers of confession.
They are a cry of the heart to God for help, salvation, and restoration.
You need this psalm in your prayer book, and you will meet Jesus in all His justice and mercy here.
The Pain
We all from time to time, if we are children of God, feel the pain of our sin and failures.
Pain gets our attention to stop us long enough to assess what might be wrong.
We should begin by recognizing that God is a good and loving Father.
And good dads will not let their children choose a destructive life path without discipline.
We punish our children to help them feel the painful consequences of wrong choices.
God is no different.
God loves His children.
And sometimes that means we will experience His discipline.
But God does not discipline us like our human dad.
David is not asking the LORD to withhold punishment, but only that He not do it in anger.
Even the best dads here on earth will make the mistake of punishing their children in anger.
And for some children, this is all they’ve ever known.
David is appealing to God whom he has come to recognize as uniquely gracious toward the hurting.
And David is hurting.
David feels the weight of whatever wrong has caused this suffering.
He can feel it in his body and his soul.
"Languishing” is the feeling of being withered and dry, shriveling up.
He can feel his trouble in his bones.
But he can feel it in his soul too.
Psalm 6:3
We see in verse 5 that death seems like a real possibility.
David describes his misery in verses 6-7
This is the ultimate sleepless night.
Who hasn’t been here?
We experience the pain of our sin and failure, and it seems like everyone is against us.
On a night like this, you have two choices.
Choice number 1 is to indulge in self-pity.
Feel sorry for yourself.
Self-pity wallows in the pain of the consequences.
It leads us to blame others, justify ourselves, and strategize some way to gain control of the situation.
Maybe we even bargain with God.
We play the victim card and point to all the good things we’ve done for Him and ask, “why would you let this happen to me?” Self-pity leads to a dead end road of isolation.
Choice number 2 is repentance.
Repentance responds to the pain of being separated from God by our sins by crying to Him for help, forgiveness, and restoration.
Repentance frees us from all our strategizing, self-justification and bargaining, to believe that God loves us and will draw close to help us in our trouble.
We can see in this psalm that David has chosen repentance over self-pity.
The source of his pain is not his damaged pride, but his separation from the LORD.
He asks in verse 3, “But you, O LORD — how long?”
How long for what?
Verse 4, “Turn, O LORD, deliver my life; save me for the sake of your steadfast love.”
God has turned away, and David is asking Him to come back.
The word David uses for “save” is connected to imagery that Dave showed us last week.
The word for save means being brought out of the harsh, hard place, isolated and confined, out into a wide space of abundant life.
Some people would use this word to name their kids, like Hosea, one of God’s prophets, whose name means “Yahweh has saved”, or Yahweh has brought me into a wide space, and the name Joshua, which means “Yahweh is salvation”.
Our sins imprison us in a confining wilderness where God seems distant.
Repentance responds to the pain of that distance from God.
It leads us to cry to the Lord for salvation, who gives us freedom and abundant life.
Yahweh is the Ever-living One.
To know Him is to know life.
To be separated from Him is death.
So David asks God to turn back.
His circumstances could tempt him to think that God has abandoned him or hates him.
But he knows better.
The LORD is the one who has made a covenant of love with David, and David recalls that in his moment of misery.
We’ve all been in this place.
Our sins and mistakes bring consequences.
They can feel like being isolated in a prison of our own making.
They separate us from God and from others.
When you feel the pain of the consequences of your own sin, what are some of the thoughts that come to mind?
Do you strategize how to get yourself out of trouble?
Do you wallow in self-pity?
Do you blame others?
Our psalm offers us another option.
David confesses that his trouble is a rebuke or discipline from the LORD who loves him.
So he is sure God will save him for the sake of His steadfast love.
Are you this convinced of God’s love for you?
That when you feel the consequences of your sin, God is using this to teach you and not to harm you because of His steadfast love?
That same steadfast love will restore you to freedom.
The Pilers-On
We should not be too quick to judge someone who is suffering.
It’s possible they got themselves into this trouble.
It’s just as possible that it happened through no fault of their own.
In fact, it’s possible that God has brought trouble into someone’s life for His own purposes.
In any case, what kind of people would you want around you in your moment of misery?
David is surrounded by pilers-on.
Some people love to kick a guy when he’s down.
His enemies are making the most of his misery.
Even some of his friends have become foes.
He calls them “workers of evil.”
These words show up again in the Bible.
Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says that at the day of judgment, we will all appear before Him.
And He will judge us according to the fruit of our life, whether it was good or bad.
He says, Matthew 7:21 ““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
We will all be exposed for exactly who we are in the eyes of our righteous judge.
At that moment, many will dive into the fruit of self-pity.
They will bargain with Jesus, they will seek to justify themselves.
Jesus answers with David’s words from Psalm 6...
Anyone can call themselves a believer.
Jesus knows those who delight in doing the will of God.
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