Jan. 29, 2017 Afternoon Service: God Hears Our Groaning by Pastor Josh Sheldon

God Hears Our Groaning in Psalm 5

Psalm five, give ear to my words, O Lord.

Consider my groaning. Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice. In the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.

You destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you.

Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies. Make your way straight before me. For there is no truth in their mouth. Their inmost self is destruction. Their throat is an open grave. They flatter with their tongue.

Make them bear their guilt, O God. Let them fall by their own counsels. Because of the abundance of their transgressions, cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice.

Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exalt in you. For you bless the righteous, O Lord. You cover him with favor as with a shield. Now here is a sweet psalm, one that teaches us to pray to our God from the deepest recesses of our spirit, from a place that even the worshiper sometimes dares not look, yet is so often unable to quell its rumblings.

It's like a volcano whose eruptions begin far below the visible part, the prominence that we can see, and so also our prayers must sometimes issue forth like that, from just deep down. Give ourselves room to vent the emotions that sometimes lead to them.

And sometimes these rumblings, this part of ourselves that is so deep down that we so rarely really get to, sometimes we find that when we are there, the language fails us. Yet all the while the pressure builds and seeks what eventually it will find, which it must find, which is a fissure that will release what has been pent up for so long, so often for too long.

And because if the pressure is not relieved, if it's not given an escape, the vessel holding it, which is us, will come apart, succumbing to forces greater than it was designed to withstand. There's another Psalm that says that God does not treat us according to our sins, but according to our frailty, according to his mercy.

He's woven us together in this way as emotional beings, and as fallen humanity, as sinful humanity. We often cannot look in those places, those deep down dark places, and God gives us here reason to do so, and the way to do so, within the safety of the Lord, and in the way that the Psalm, by the Holy Spirit of God, would have us to do it.

This short, this beautiful Psalm is a help in this, when we have those stirrings deep down within that we just can't verbalize. And as I was saying, possibly don't even want to look down, and don't even want to recognize, much less bring out and resolve.

The Psalm is a help to us when we're grieved beyond comprehension by anything, by a loss of perhaps a loved one, perhaps of health. When God in his providence knocks our pillars and shakes up our comfortable way of life, sometimes our agony does exceed our ability to cope if we cope on our own.

The Psalm is a haven, a shelter, if you will, in times of storm. The Psalmist, which is King David, he gives us no direct cause for this meditative poem that sends us again to the rock that is higher than I.

He seems to be musing on the sheer wickedness of man in a general sense, and it has somehow come to him just how deep evil runs, how awful it is to see manifested the awful dread one should have of God's judgment.

And then he revels in the grace of God that has drawn him away from all such. The Psalm is a comfort that no matter what has brought disturbance to us, no matter what has dredged up from within long forgotten memories of the old man and the fate that awaited him, no matter our inability to make a clear expression of it, we serve a God who hears us, who understands us, a God who knows us better than we would ever know ourselves, and he knows our concerns better than we know our own concerns.

And as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, your Father knows you have need of them before you even ask. The first three verses begin where we always must begin, no matter the issue, and that is by going to God.

Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my groaning, give attention to the sound of my cry, my King, my God, to you I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice, in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.

As obvious as it may sound, it is of first importance that God is not just our first resort, he's our only resort, he's our only recourse. We go to God. Give ear, he says give ear, it translates a word that means give a special attention to what I say.

You hear the one in prayer is still able to verbalize what is on their heart. I will speak to God in the language common to all. If you or I heard him at this point, what he was saying would be intelligible to us.

But see how soon the psalmist abandons language. He says give ear to my words, and then he immediately says, O Lord, consider my groanings. It's almost as if he's saying, what if he was able to start out like we do so often, our Father in heaven, and then words are done.

And he goes to consider my groaning. So consider, when he says consider here, it's a word that means to discern, to look beneath the surface. To dig down in a sense. Psalm 11 four uses this. Speaking of God says, his eyes see, his eyelids test.

This is our word, discern. His eyelids test the sons of man. He looks down deeper. He looks behind, beyond the surface. Past the subterfuge, past the defenses. What we have here really is spiritual courage.

Search me, O Lord, see if there's any wicked way in me. He's not confessing sin in that sense here, but he is leaving himself open and vulnerable to God's searching eye by his spirit. He's bearing his soul to his king, to his God.

The groaning here, that's what it means to consider, but the groaning. Groaning is a murmuring of the spirit. It comes from the soft, a word that means the soft cooing of a dove, a gentle bird that does no one any harm.

It is without natural defense. It must fear almost any animal that it encounters. It's a vulnerable creature. As are we when we come rightly before our God. And this is what the groanings are. It's this cooing of this defenseless bird, this gentle animal that couldn't defend itself against hardly anything.

It's vulnerability that Psalm 5 is leading us to where he says, the groanings, hear my groanings. Hear this part that I can't even put into words before you, O Lord, but you hear me. Listen to the sound of my cry, he says.

A cry, as Spurgeon tells us, is a language all its own. When we cry out, words have failed. Again, words have failed. He simply has this ejaculatory petition before God. Just hear my cry. Hear the sound of it.

Hear what is behind the emotion that's invested just in the noise of it that I make. And that's all I can manage right now. You know, as I was looking at this psalm and preparing to present it to you this afternoon, I thought of myself back in the middle of last month, last December, because I made a sound like that when my brother-in-law called me here at the office December 15th and told me my sister had died.

And I couldn't say anything. I don't know, what would you say to that? You'd say, really? When? I mean, words fail you. And I can't describe to you, and I won't try right now, to imitate the actual response I made, but I think it was a lot like this.

It was a groaning, it was a cry. It wasn't words, it wasn't intelligible, though the meaning behind it certainly was. I called my wife, and I don't know if I was even coherent yet. The shock of it was still upon me, but just by the sound, the voice of that cry and the word, what was behind it, she knew that something awful had happened.

And it finally calmed me down, I was able to tell her. And I think that's what the psalmist is after here. And I think Spurgeon hits the nail on the head where he says a cry has its own voice, it has its own language.

It is intelligible. If my wife could understand something tragic had happened just by the sound of that cry, how much more God when we can offer him no more than that? Just this noise that bursts out of us, and in that noise is vested all of the issue that has brought us before him in this way.

He says, oh Lord, in the morning you hear my voice. In the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch. You see, we mustn't remain in a confusion of spirit. We mustn't remain defensive against God where we have this deep down rumbling, looking for a way out.

And that's the way God made us, is it needs a way out. As if we should protect ourselves from God's help. No, we can't remain there. Not as children of God, not as the blood-bought children of Jesus Christ who God loves the same way he loves his son.

Remember John 17 in Jesus' prayer that the love that God the Father has for God the Son is the same as he has for those who love God the Son. That's us, if we're in Jesus Christ. No, there's not a God to protect ourselves from.

There's not a God to hold back from. David goes from words to this groaning, to this ejaculatory cry before God, leaving himself bare and open, and also available to the great physician's healing touch.

No, we can't stay there. To the Lord we must repair, and we must repair to him with all diligence. In the morning he will hear, when he says I will prepare a sacrifice, prepare means just what it says.

It's preparation, it's planning. It speaks of formal preparation for service. In the sacrifice, you read back in the book of Exodus or the book of Leviticus, and all that went through to prepare the sacrifice and what to do once the animal is slaughtered for whatever purpose.

It was a burnt offering, a peace offering, a goodwill offering, a sin offering. There was preparation involved, there was planning, there was effort. And this is what David speaks of here. I will prepare to come before you.

Today, on our side of the cross, we don't bind up a sacrifice because a sacrifice has been bound already. Because we don't want to be the once-for-all-time sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus. But we can follow David's example of being deliberate, being thoughtful in our preparations of coming to God, coming to his very presence.

One of the ways he does this just follows very sequentially in the psalm, the next few verses, beginning at verse four, reminding himself of God's nature. I'll read these verses again. But as I do this, think of the good it does us as we prepare ourselves to go to God in prayer or as we're praying to God, to remind ourselves of the nature of the God to whom we pray.

He's a loving God, he's a kind God. He sends rain and it accomplishes his purpose, gives grass to us and grain and makes bread for us. Pardon me, he sent us his word. He didn't withhold to send us his son.

Think of the nature of this God who's perfectly just, perfectly holy, perfectly righteous, perfectly all that he is and is always and only constantly what he is. He can never be different. Good to remind ourselves as we prepare ourselves to go to God of the nature of the God we go to.

And in verse four, not a God who delights in wickedness, which of course means he delights in righteousness. Evil may not dwell with you, which means of course that goodness dwells with God. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes.

You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. And what is meant of course in all of these negative affirmations is that God loves the opposite.

In Jeremiah chapter nine, verse 23, 24 speaks to this. Thus says the Lord, let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, declares the Lord.

Good preparation for prayer. We need to remind ourselves to pray these sorts of things. Remember that we go to God who practices steadfast love. Other versions of our Bible call that mercy. His covenant mercy to keep his word.

Justice, righteousness, in these things he delights. The evil don't dwell with God, the boastful shall not stand in the same way. A few weeks ago, maybe it was a couple of months ago, our brother Conley preached on Psalm 15 and lists out for us the attributes of those who will dwell with God on his holy hill.

You can read those. Verses nine and 10 say much the same about the ungodly. No truth in their mouth, their inmost self is destruction, their throat is an open grave. Make them bear their guilt, O God.

Let them fall by their own counsels because of the abundance of their transgressions. Cast them out, and the rest. It's an interesting pattern that we have in these verses. Verse four speaks of God's dislikes in sort of a conceptual form.

For you are not a God who delights in weakness. Evil may not dwell with you. Just as verse nine then speaks of the nature of evil men. And then verse five and the first part of verse 10 brings out the consequence of the idea that came just before if God in his nature cannot abide any proximity to evil, verse five tells us the consequence, that those who do these things will not stand before him.

They will not last in his presence. Verse 10 says that their denial of what is true, their bent towards wanton destruction from the previous verse brings them guilt, and by consequence they will fall under their own counsels.

We might say that God gives them what they wanted, the repercussions of their own choices. And then verses 11 and 12. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice. Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them that those who love your name may exalt in you.

For you bless the righteous, O Lord, you cover him with favor as with a shield. You see, when we begin with confidence in the Lord as the first three verses do, we end with David taking our joy in him.

He spreads protection over us and he is a shield to us. He lets us exalt in him, and in all this he blesses his people. The two verses in the middle were kept for last. I didn't go through this sequentially this afternoon.

Because in the two verses, verses seven and eight in the middle of this is the main point of the psalm. But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down towards your holy temple in the fear of you.

Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies. Make your way straight before me. Notice he says, but I. But I, after considering the wicked, he says, but I. I, as opposed to those wicked ones who cause such angst for our psalmist, he, the psalmist, he will enter God's house.

He will bow down towards the temple, and there he will show forth his awe and his reverence for God. It is during worship like this that he asks to be led by God onto a straight and a safe path. The path of what?

The path of obedience. The path of love. The path laid out in scripture and followed by faith, for without faith it is impossible to please God. He says, but I. This must put us in mind of Paul's famous verse in 1 Corinthians 6 .11.

After that long list that would fit well into Psalm five as he considers the wicked, he reminds us, and such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.

Doesn't David agree with this when he confesses that his entrance to God's presence is through the abundance of your steadfast love? If Paul could say, but you, you were washed, you were sanctified, on what basis does David come into the house of the Lord?

Through his steadfast love, because of the mercy and goodness of God. That's how he enters God's house, because God's love makes it possible. There must be times when the grace that allows us access to the throne of grace simply overwhelms us.

And when we consider that in light of those who are denied the same, we must again be overwhelmed that God's grace was made known to me, to me who rebelled no less than they had, to me who given the chance would have done whatever they did and maybe more.

To me for whom the way to God was made clear by the Holy Spirit of God. Jesus said, the wind blows where it wishes and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.

By God's sovereign design, we're able to come to the house of the Lord. By God's sovereignty, his mercy, his goodness, his unfettered election of whom he will, we're able to know Christ and worship him and come to him in times like what brought this psalm into being.

The psalm has no setting that we can use as a guide to say that this or that or the other incident was stirring up David's spirit in this way. We just don't know. But the psalm does speak to us. Of this language, if you will, of speaking to God, this groaning, these incomprehensible cries that God accepts, that God hears, that God cares about.

But I said incomprehensible, not borrowing from this morning's Sunday school about the incomprehensibility of God. Incomprehensible only to us, not to God, to us. Paul writes in the book of Romans, likewise the spirit helps us in our weaknesses.

For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the spirit because the spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

When we have a groaning like what David speaks of, this murmuring that comes out, this defenselessness we need to have before God where we just bear our soul before him. Remember, we come to a God who knows what is on our heart before we come to him.

Remember also that the Holy Spirit, and we're speaking of God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three persons, one God, each person as much God as the other person, God himself, as it were, interprets our groaning, this deep down muttering that we can't put in words, and as it were, again brings it to God, not to separate God, but you take my point, there's a spirit of God as we're bringing our prayers to God the Father.

One use of this psalm might be to remember that we once ran in such crowds as he describes in verses four through six and nine and 10. And wouldn't that be a good use of the psalm to remember and such were some of you to remember with David, but I, but I because I decided to follow Jesus?

No, but I because of God's steadfast love was brought into the presence of Christ. Would it not be good to recall that only by God's loving grace, which he has in such abundance, that only by grace may we enter?

Psalm five speaks of the protection we have in God as much as it does the harm that we take from the evil that surrounds and abounds. Psalm five is also a prayer of self-examination. It reminds us that we're forgiven sins no less sinful than all that the wicked embrace.

And with all this, psalm five is a prayer of thanks for the forgiveness and salvation that we have in Jesus Christ. When we are in a situation in God's providence, we just don't know what to pray. Whatever the issue that has come upon us, and we just cannot see our way out of it, and it is building and building the tension within us and the harm it's doing us, and we just can't express it to our closest friend, perhaps even a husband or wife, we just can't get the words out.

Know this, know that God hears our groaning, he hears our cry, and the very spirit of God comes and interprets it, translates it if you will, makes sense of it for us, and brings it with us to the throne of grace.

We go to a God who cares quite deeply about all these things, amen?