Prayer Night Sermon (Psalm 6 And Penitent Prayers)

Thank you for listening to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Wednesday night service that is focused on prayer and walking through the

Psalms together. We hope that you are blessed and we hope that you will join us as we pray for revival.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another prayer night service. I want to begin tonight by just simply asking a couple questions.

Can you think of a time when fear or grief or guilt kept you from being able to sleep?

Like it kept you awake on your bed? Or can you think of a time when troubles of life or problems that you were facing so deeply sapped your emotional, spiritual, and physical strength that you felt like you were paralyzed?

How did you respond when that type of event happened to you or when those emotions overtook you?

How did you respond? Well, today we're going to be looking at how David responds to these kinds of emotions.

We've been in Psalm 1 -5 for the last several weeks and we've talked about the wicked, we talked about the righteous, we talked about how do we pray in the midst of troubles and travails and trials.

Well, today we're going to be talking about a time in David's life where he is praying through maybe even his own sin.

Scholars are divided on this topic. Some say that Psalm 6 is about David's prayer over his sin.

It's a penitent psalm, which would make it the very first penitent psalm in the book so far.

And then some other scholars believe that this is a prayer of anguish and a prayer of deliverance because David is being assailed once more by his enemies.

No matter the case, David is in very deep emotional distress in Psalm 6 and he's crying out to God and he's hoping and praying that the

Lord will hear his prayer. By the end of the psalm, he's confident that God really will hear his prayer.

This is an important psalm because it gives us who struggle with real emotions. Sometimes we're up and sometimes we're down and we're all over the place and maybe we're joyful one moment and we're in anguish or frustration the next.

This psalm gives us words to be able to use or it gives us a voice to be able to express the struggles that we are having to God.

It gives us a way to pray when we are suffering. It gives us thoughts and ideas on how we can come to the throne of grace in prayer.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to actually walk through the psalm and we're going to pray the same kinds of prayers that David prayed.

Now I just want to share a couple quotes with you real quick because I found these very interesting. Some godly scholars who were talking about this psalm,

Derek Kidner is a great scholar of the psalms. This is what he said about psalm six.

He says, this psalm gives words to those who scarcely have the heart to pray. Have you ever felt like that?

Where you were in such pain and frustration and bitterness and anxiety, you were so dejected and fearful or frustrated that you didn't even feel like praying, that you almost felt like that you couldn't pray, that you couldn't find the words.

He's saying that this psalm gives words to those who scarcely have the heart to pray and it brings them within sight of victory.

And I love what Derek Kidner says there, it brings us within sight of victory. He doesn't say that when you pray according to the format that is in psalm six, that by the end of it, that you're going to have victory.

You might actually still be in anguish while you're praying. You might be praying that prayer right now in the middle of a very difficult season, a very difficult decision, a very difficult disease or frustration or whatever it is that may be afflicting you right now.

And if it's not afflicting you right now, maybe it will be afflicting you very soon because all of us experience all kinds of different pain and trouble and trials in this life.

So you may be praying this prayer and thinking, well, I don't feel any better at the end of it.

Or maybe you've experienced that before in your past where you've prayed with earnestness and anxiousness and by the end of it, you still didn't feel any better.

You didn't feel any closer to God, you didn't feel any relief from your sorrows. Derek Kidner's pointing out that this psalm doesn't promise that every time we pray that we will end up victorious.

This psalm promises that God will bring us within sight of victory, that God will show us where to find our victory, that God will show us where victory can be had.

And if you've lived this life long enough, you know that the Lord intentionally allows these seasons into our life to make us rely on Him, to trust

Him, to pray to Him, to yearn for Him, to cry out to Him. And often God doesn't relieve us of these types of situations very quickly.

Sometimes He'll allow us to struggle for weeks, maybe sometimes months. There's been some of us who've struggled with a particular thing for years.

But the Lord does not allow these things into our life precariously and for no purpose. He does it because He loves us and He wants us to rely on Him.

And that's what Kidner's quote is pointing out. The second quote I would share with you is by C. Hasselbullock, who wrote a great commentary on the psalms that I use almost every week.

And this is what he said, Psalm 6 provides both a connection to our pain and the confidence that the

Lord hears us when we pray. So what he's saying is that God hears our prayer, He understands our prayer.

He is saying that when we pray like David does in Psalm 6, that we are admitting that God understands who we are and knows who we are and knows the things that we're going through.

But also, in the midst of that, that He hears our prayer. That's the point of victory that Kidner was talking about, is that God not only looks from afar and from a great distance and sees all the pain and the trial and the suffering that we are going through,

God comes near. He comes near to us in our pain. We don't serve a God who sits up in heaven aloof and who's distant from all of our interactions and all of our things.

He didn't create the world and then let it go off on its own with no interaction. No, we serve a God who draws near, and we know that in Jesus Christ.

He came from heaven to earth and drew near to the people that He was going to save. He experienced the same pains and trials that they experienced.

He felt physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, all in route to the cross where the cup of God's wrath was poured out on Him for you.

So we serve a Christ, and we serve a God who is not unfamiliar with our suffering and is not unfamiliar with our pain, but understands the things that we go through.

That's the kind of God that we serve. So Bullock, when he says that the

Psalm provides a connection point to our pain, it really ought to remind us that we don't serve a far -off

God who doesn't care for us. We serve a God who loves us and who knows what it feels like to be in pain, namely because He has in Jesus Christ.

He was wounded. He was beaten. He was abused. And if the physical brutality weren't bad enough,

God the Father turned His face from Jesus Christ so that Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin.

And the spiritual agony that He underwent is something we cannot even comprehend. What we can comprehend is that Jesus went through those things, and He is not unfamiliar with our struggles.

So He can sympathize with us in our weakness. That's the point. And also, you know, as we close today, we will talk about the second point.

There's two points in the Psalm that we pray prayers of agony knowing that God understands, and we pray prayers of confidence knowing that God hears.

That's the second point. So we will go through that. That's the way that we will approach this Psalm. So what

I want us to do right off the top is to read the Psalm, then we will pray, and we will approach this

Psalm in those two particular categories. So this is what the Psalm says. And then

He goes to say here on earth. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your servant David, who is our great, great grandfather in the faith.

We thank you that he rightly and accurately and faithfully described the ways that he felt so that we can understand that emotions are normal and that in our pain and sorrows that we can cry out to you.

And Lord, I just pray very simply that as we look through Psalm 6 tonight, that we will catch a glimpse of these two categories, and that we would understand them well, that we can express our anguish to you because you understand, and we can expect you to answer our prayers because of Jesus Christ.

Those two things, Lord, I pray that you would help us to understand tonight, and that's in Christ's name.

Amen. All right. So the first category is prayers of anguish, and that's

Psalm 6, verses 1 through 7. And several different things are happening here that lets us know that David is really in deep, deep distress.

The first thing that he does is he uses personal pronouns to describe the intensity of the pain that he's feeling.

He says, do not rebuke me. Do not chasten me. Be gracious to me.

He says, I am the one who's pining away. My bones are shaking. My soul is quaking.

I, me, my, do you hear the personal pronouns that David is using to describe the intensity of his pain?

He's saying, I'm not talking about somebody else who has felt this way once upon a time. I'm saying that I feel this way.

I am the one who's struggling right now. I am the one who is broken right now. I am the one that needs

God more now than I've ever needed God before. That's the kind of prayer that David is crying out, and we see that even in the pronouns that he uses, that there's an intensity that David is evoking here because he's in distress.

He's in anxiety and anguish, and he wants more than anything for God to hear his prayer.

That's his heart. He wants God to hear his prayer. The second thing that he does is he describes certain metaphors for his anguish.

He's not only using personal pronouns to describe that, hey, this really does apply to me. I'm not talking about anyone else here.

I'm bearing my heart here. This is my anguish, my sorrow, my pain, but he also uses metaphors for his anguish, metaphors for death, metaphors for his weariness, and metaphors for the tears that he is feeling.

So let's look at how he talks about death. It's very interesting. He says, there's no mention of you in death, and there's no thanks in Sheol.

What is he talking about here? Well, Sheol was an Old Testament concept, and it was sort of conceived as a kind of underworld.

The world, which is in the Septuagint, which is the Old Testament in Greek, it was described as Hades.

Sheol is where persons were believed to exist in a sort of semi -life state, where they were sort of alive, but also dead.

They were at rest, but they were also dead, kind of like the princess bride says, they were only mostly dead.

That's sort of the idea, I guess you could say. Now, they were not in a state of joy.

They didn't have the kind of fullness of life that other people have who are actually living on earth.

So death was a thing that in the Old Testament was actually dreaded. The psalmist fears death all throughout the

Psalms, because it's the state where he's going to be separated from God. In his view, there's neither memory of God, there's neither praise of God, there's no joy that he can have.

What David is talking about is, I don't want to die, because that is the time that I can no longer cry out to you,

I can no longer pray to you, I can no longer plead and ask for you to answer my prayers, that there's no memory, no mention of you in death, and there's no thanks in Sheol.

Now, again, the topic or the theological doctrine that you could say covers this idea of Sheol is very fascinating, it's very deep, but all you need to understand is that David is saying that it's sort of the realm of the dead for the

Old Testament before Jesus dies and raises up all the Old Testament saints. It is a time of rest.

It is not a time of praising. You can think of it almost as sleep or someone being in a coma where they're not responding to anything, they're literally laying in the ground, and it is an

Old Testament thing that when Christ raises from the dead, there is no more Sheol. There is heaven and hell, and that is it.

Sheol has been emptied because of Christ. Now, more could obviously be said on that, but I think that's enough to say that David, who comes hundreds of years before Jesus, is afraid to die because he's afraid to leave the world where he can relate to God, where he can pray to God, where he can spend time crying out to God and asking

Him to relieve him of his pain. David has just said that his bones are in agony.

David has said that he's pining away and that his soul is in this great amount of distress.

So he's saying, I think, that it's better that I'm in this sort of state of depression and anxiety and all of these things because at least now

I can cry out to you. At least now I can pray to you. At least now I can use the time that you've given me to cry out to you because in death, we sleep and there is no mention of you in Sheol.

That's what David is getting at. Now, of course, as Christians, that reality is not the same for us because when

Jesus died and purchased us, yes, our physical bodies are going to lay in the grave. But unlike David, who did not have the same reality that we have today, at least not at first, when

Christ died and resurrected and promised that when we die, we will be with Him, our soul goes to be with Jesus when we die.

Our body stays in the ground. So whatever that looks like, whatever reality or existence it is for us to be a disembodied spirit or a disembodied soul, that's the kind of relationship that we're going to have with Jesus right when we die.

When Jesus returns and when Jesus calls all of the bodies out of the grave and He calls them up into the heavens and our bodies, our newly created bodies that have no more sin, no more curse, no more pain, no more, they're brand new.

When that body collides with our soul, then we will be in the final stage of redemption, which is where we live in new

Jerusalem, the new heavens, the new earth with Jesus forever. So heaven, as we typically think about it, is not the final stop on our journey.

Heaven is a temporary place where our soul exists with Jesus until Jesus reunites our body and our soul together.

And that's where we live a physical existence with Him in the new heaven, in the new earth. It's glorious.

I go through all of that because David did not have that reality right in front of him. When David died, his body and his soul went down to Sheol.

His body was dead. His soul was in a sort of slumber or in a sort of sleepfulness or slothfulness, or it was just asleep,

I guess is the only way to say it. And there's some level of grace that we have to extend each other on the

Old Testament concept of Sheol, because it's not entirely clear what was happening. But David is fearful of whatever that is, because he's not going to have the same intimate walk and intimate relationship and closeness with God that he has even in the pains and the travails of life.

And there's some beautiful things that we can learn from that. David is saying that it's better to go through pain with God than to have rest and peace without God.

That's a really strong point that David is making here. It is better to go through the worst afflictions, the worst pain, the worst trial, the most excruciating seasons of our life.

That is better to go through those with God than to be separated from God and have peace and tranquility, which is what everybody wants.

Everybody wants peace in their life. Everybody wants calmness. Everybody wants tranquility and all of that.

But David is saying that that is a terror to his body and to his soul, because even in the pain, it's better because he can know

God, he can be with God. What a beautiful example for you and I who go through lots of pain.

We can know that those moments are better because we know God. We would rather have that.

We would rather go through cancer. We would rather go through Lou Gehrig's disease. We would rather be paralyzed.

We would rather, I mean, all of these things I'm mentioning are physical. We would rather go through all kinds of different pain and suffering in this life, mental, emotional, physical, whatever you want to call it.

We would rather go through those things with God than to have everything else without him, that is a true statement.

And that's sort of the metaphor that David, I think, is getting after when he's talking about Sheol and death. The second metaphor that he uses is a metaphor of weariness.

He says that I am weary of sighing, that I'm literally growing tired of how tired

I am of this situation, and clearly that resonates with all of us. There's seasons of our life where we are tired of being tired of something, where we have grown so frustrated with how frustrated we are.

All of us can relate to this. David is saying that that is exactly the place that I'm at.

I am annoyed by how annoying the situation is, and I'm in pain, and I want it to end.

And Lord, where are you? Return, God, rescue my soul. That's what he says in verse four. Rescue me in your loving kindness.

That's the second metaphor. The third is he gives some interesting and beautiful metaphors for tears.

They're vivid in their description. He says he made, he's talking about he made his bed swim in tears.

I mean, just think about the kind of agony that David is describing here. I am laying on my bed and I'm crying so forcefully and so much, so much volume is streaming out of my eyes that my room is now filled with water.

My bed is floating. That's what David is saying. And obviously it's hyperbole, but he's trying to get us to understand that this is not a moment where I have all my stuff together.

This is a moment where I am broken and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do other than just cry my eyes out.

That's the way David is feeling. And I think it's important to recognize that David, although I think some unstable people who read the

Bible and just make assumptions about it without really thinking very carefully, David is not a depressed person.

David is not, I've heard even people call him bipolar, that he's all over the place emotionally, and it's almost like he's this unrestrained emotional person who's addicted to his feelings or he's just a train wreck and he's up and down.

David was a man who fought to worship God. He's a man who was more stable than any of us could have ever imagined.

He was joyful, he was passionate, he was vigorous. The one thing that we can say is that David wasn't lazy, and that may be what makes him look so inconsistent in the

Psalms at times is because you and I will sit in our suffering, we will sit in our grief.

We won't fight for holiness and we won't fight for worship. David, when he discerns pain in his own heart, he weeps over it.

And he runs after God and he says, rescue me, my bones are in agony.

David had no tolerance for most of his life. He had no tolerance for sitting down in disappointments and sin.

He fought against it. And often when you fight against your anxieties, they flame up even harder. You see, the only instability that we see in David is his persistence to fight his own pain and suffering and depression and anxiety.

He was a man who grabbed himself and shook himself and said, you listen to me, you are going to believe in God.

That's the kind of man that David was. So in this agony and in this fight that he's having with himself, he's saying, he's being honest, my room is filled up with tears, my bed's floating.

That's sort of what he says. My couch, or another word for bed, is dissolved in tears, meaning that it's so saturated with tears that it's no longer floating, it's sinking.

Then he says in verse seven, that my eyes have become washed away with grief. His eyes were aching and sore.

If you've ever cried long periods of time or very intense moments of weeping, you know what he means there, how sore your own eyes can be just by being washed out with tears.

David is saying that all of these things that are happening in my life have caused tremendous anxiety for me, and I'm afraid.

I don't want to die like this. I don't want to die so that I can lose this intimacy that I have with God.

And this, all of this, this is verse one through seven, has led David to make seven statements in these passages.

Seven, actually, they're called imperatives in Hebrew, and an imperative is sort of a command.

Like if I tell my son, go take the trash out, I'm not asking him, I'm telling him, that's an imperative, that's a command.

David is using the language of imperatives here, but he's doing it not to command God, he's doing it to plead with God.

He's doing it to say, Lord, please consider me. And he does this seven times in these passages. He pleads with God using seven different phrases that I want us to go through really quickly.

The first one is, do not rebuke me in your anger. That's verse one. David is saying,

I've sinned. Your anger is against me, God. There have been times where I've experienced suffering because of other people's sin, and we've talked about those in the previous weeks where people were attacking him, like Absalom, his son, who's rising up against him and trying to overthrow his government.

David was suffering for someone else's sin in that moment. And this is why earlier

I said that this is a penitent psalm, because David is not suffering because of someone else's evil.

David right now is suffering because of his sin. He's saying, do not rebuke me in your anger.

Don't throw me away. God, I know that my sin is offensive to you, and it inflames your holiness against me.

Your wrath is stored up for people like me who disobey your word. God, I know that.

But please, I'm begging you, do not rebuke me in your anger.

David is concerned. David is fearful that God, being as righteous and as holy as he is, could end up overlooking or turning his face away from David.

And that thought scares David more than anything. That's entirely why he talks about Sheol and how there's no mention of God in death.

David is saying, I don't want to live a moment where you're not with me. That would be worse than death.

Do we have that kind of heart when we approach God in prayer, that it would be worse than death if I lost intimacy with you?

Do we cry out as the first thing that we pray, the very first line of our prayer, like David does here,

God, don't rebuke me in your anger. And before we begin to even say like, okay, well,

I don't really have anything that God is angry about. Well, you don't know yourself then because you've thought countless thoughts today that offend the holiness of God.

You've driven in ways on the road that were not charitable.

You've spoken to people in ungracious tones. You've been rigid when you needed to be patient and kind and loving.

You've thought things that you shouldn't have thought. You've made judgments about people that you shouldn't have made judgments about. You've looked at someone and thought, why are they this way?

And then you dismiss them as human beings. There is so much, if you could see your own heart, that you have inflamed the holy wrath of God against you today, yesterday, and forever.

So when we look at David and we say, this is again, this is why I say it's so foolish to say that David is an emotional basket case,

David is right and we are wrong. If we don't feel the weight of our sin like David did, it's not because he had bipolar, he was unstable, it's because he was more stable than us and he understood better than us and he saw the holiness of God was a terror to his sin.

All of us need to right now be praying to the Lord, God, don't rebuke me in your anger, forgive my sin, don't hold it against me.

And for those of us who are, who are in Jesus, we can say that David still is looking forward to the

Messiah. He's looking forward to Jesus and he can't quite say that like we can say that, but we can say that God has not rebuked us in his anger because of Jesus Christ.

But that's not an excuse for us to go on sinning. As Paul says in Romans 6, 1, shall I go on sinning that grace may abound?

Absolutely not. You see, the cross was not meant to inoculate us of our grief over sin.

Far too many people treat the cross as it's a get out of hell free card. I'll look at David in Psalm 6, he's crying out to the

Lord with passion and his tears are overwhelming him because of his sin and because of his failure and because of his brokenness.

But I don't need to do that because I have Jesus. Well, I don't think that the cross was

God telling you that sin is no longer important. I think that the cross actually was the opposite in saying that sin was so devastating that I have to send my one and only son.

The cross is more serious than even David understood is what the truth of the matter is.

The fact that you and I don't weep over our sin is not a badge of honor for us as Christians.

It's just not. Of course, we rest in the gospel. And I'll say it this way, our tears should be stronger than David's, but our joys should be infinitely more fierce than David's as well.

We know the answer to the question. That's obvious. Jesus came and he died for our sins.

Praise God. But when we examine David's joy in the

Psalms, we often don't have the kind of joy that he had, and yet we know the Savior. And we examine

David's sadness in the Psalms, we often don't have his kind of sadness because we say, well, the gospel takes care of that.

I don't think the gospel was meant to be an excuse for us to overlook our sin and to overlook repentance and overlook sanctification and overlook the seriousness of the matter.

I think it was actually meant to intensify it. It was meant to intensify our sorrow over our sin because our sin killed

Jesus. But it was also meant to intensify our joy because our

Christ loved us so much, they died for us even while we were enemies. So far from muting our emotions,

I think the cross actually magnifies our emotions. But that's the first thing that David pleads with God.

Don't rebuke me in your anger and praise God for you and I that we will never be forsaken because of Christ.

He says, and the second thing in verse 1, don't chasten me with divine fury.

He's saying, don't discipline me in your wrath. David is not saying that God should be fast and loose with justice.

David is not saying that God is an unjust judge that is going to overlook his sin and his wickedness.

Again, a judge who does that is a wicked, awful judge, and that is not who

God is. So, David is not asking for a special plea, and David's not asking for God to overlook his sin.

David is asking that God would not discipline him in his wrath, but he would discipline him in his covenantal love.

The only way that David can pray that, because all people deserve the wrath of God, all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, all of us deserve the stored up fury of God for our sin, and the day that you eat of the fruit,

God said in Genesis 1, you shall surely die. So, all of us deserve that.

David can pray with a hopefulness towards the gospel that one day God's one and only son will come and he will take the wrath of God so that David, even in his anguish and even in his deservedness, will not drink that same cup.

He's appealing to God's covenantal love that, God, please don't pour out on me the cup of wrath that I deserve.

David's even looking forward to the moment where Christ will take the cup that he did not deserve.

That's the second thing that he says. The third is, be gracious to me in my distress. David is saying that it's an act of grace that God would comfort us in our sin.

When our soul is withering and pining away out of sorrow and grief and guilt over our sin,

God owes us nothing but justice. David is appealing to God for grace because he knows he doesn't deserve it.

And again, this can be something that we so easily, as modern -day Christians, take for granted that, yeah,

God shows me grace. God is gracious and I'm a sinner and we work really well together. I sin,

God gives me grace. It's transactional. Well, you've got a perverted view of God. David understood the right view of God, that God owes us nothing.

And if God is gracious, it is by grace alone. It is undeserved, unmerited favor that can only be given by the unadulterated kindness of a perfect, holy, and loving

God. That's it. That's the only way you get grace. When you are lying down in your bed weeping like David because of your sin, you get grace because God is that good, not because you deserve it.

That's the third thing. The fourth is he says, heal me. Heal me, O Lord, for my bones are shattering or shaking or terrified.

That's sort of the phrase that he uses there in verse 2. Heal me. We know that there's all kinds of things that we are praying that God would heal us from.

There's emotional pain. There's abandonment from fathers and mothers who treated us poorly.

There's actual physical things that we need to be delivered from, like addictions or physical abnormalities or diseases or things like that.

There's mental things that we need deliverance from. Maybe there's chemical imbalances that cause us to act in certain ways.

Maybe there's physical things, again, like blood pressure or different diseases that we're struggling with. Maybe there's spiritual afflictions where we feel like God is not with us or present with us because of our sin.

We've sinned, and we feel like that God has left us. And this really goes right to the heart of what this psalm is saying, that God has abandoned us, that God is not near us.

That's how David feels. David knows that it's not true, but he feels that way. He feels that God has left him, that he's chastened him in his wrath, that he's rebuked him in his anger, that David is left on his couch pining away, crying all night long as his soul and his bones are shaking.

And then he cries out, and he says, How long, O Lord? The question is rhetorical, it seems, but the question is answered by,

How long, O Lord, are you going to be far from me? How long are you going to leave me here pining away in my misery?

David knows that that's what he deserves. He knows that he doesn't deserve healing from God, but on the basis of God's character,

David can say, Please don't rebuke me, God. On the basis of God's character, he can say, Please don't chasten me in your wrath.

On the basis of God's character, he can say, Please be gracious to me even though I know I don't deserve it. By knowing

God's character, he can say, Heal me even though I know I deserve to wither away. The fifth thing that he says is,

Return to me. Let me experience your presence again. He says, Return, O Lord, and rescue my soul.

Save me because of your loving kindness. David wants more than anything to have his relationship with God reestablished, reinvigorated.

He wants new life blown back into his relationship with God. That's what the final three statements say,

Return to me, rescue my soul, and save me. That's what those things mean. The question we really need to ask ourselves is,

Do we approach God that way today? We who have Jesus Christ, we who have the

Savior, we who have been freed from our sin and our depravity and our failure, do we pursue

God that way? Like David, where we cry out to him and say, Return to me,

O Lord. I can't stand the distance that I feel in our relationship. I know that the distance

I feel in our relationship is because of me. It's because of my sin. It's not because of you. Look at the anxiety

David says, Return to me and rescue me and save me. Why?

Because of your loving kindness. David is appealing to the goodness of God that God will, in his grace and mercy and love and goodness, will restore

David again, even though David doesn't deserve it. David's appealing to that because that's all he can appeal to.

He says these seven things. Don't rebuke me. Don't chasten me. Be gracious to me. Heal me.

Return to me. Rescue my soul. Save me. And none of that is based off David.

None of that is based off his merit, his worth, or any of that. He says do these things because, verse 4, of your loving kindness.

That means that the only reason that David is not rebuked and thrown in the trash, the only reason that God doesn't pour out all of his righteous anger and fury on David, the only reason that God can be kind to David or heal

David or return to David or rescue David or save David, the only reason he can do any of that is because of his kindness and his goodness and his mercy.

That's who God is. And we know that the only way that all of these things work together is the cross because God is just and he's holy and he's righteous and he's angry and he's all these things, and he cannot overlook our sin.

And yet he does overlook our sin because someone else paid the price.

We know that if no one else stood up for us that we're going to have to face our sins and face the wrath of God, and David knows that that's true for him.

But he appeals to the loving kindness of God, and he says, God, I don't know exactly how you're going to work this out. I don't know exactly what you're going to do, but I am trusting that you are good and that you are kind and that you are loving and you are all of these things.

And David is assuming that even though it breaks his mind and he cannot possibly understand how

God is going to do this, he knows that one day that God is going to do this, and he's looking down the corridors of time and saying that one day

I know that Christ, and maybe he doesn't even know that it's Christ, but one day I know that,

God, you're going to provide a lamb for the sacrifice. You're going to provide a way. You're going to provide something to bring me back into right standing with you.

I know that because I know you. That's what David is saying. I know that you're going to make a way because I know you, and I know your character, and I know that even though I deserve nothing, that you are so unimaginably good that you will save even a wretch like me, not because of me, because of your kindness and your mercy.

You're doing it for you. You're doing it for your glory. You're doing it for your mercy. You're doing it for you, not because of me.

That's what David is saying. Those seven phrases that he's pleading with God are all on the basis of God's goodness.

The final part of this psalm, verses 8 through 10, are four different prayers of confidence that he prays, even in the midst of his hurting, but they bring him closer to that victory that Kidner was talking about in the beginning.

He says in verse 8, David knows in this particular psalm that he's not a victim.

In other psalms, he says, But not here.

And I think the reason that he does that is because David has been dealt a dose of humility because he's suffering because of his sin.

So he doesn't say God crushed the wicked in this passage like he does in others. He's saying that they will depart from him, everyone who does iniquity, because God is going to hear his prayer.

That's a far different prayer than God destroy the wicked. So I think we hear a little bit of humility here from David, and we hear that he's not suffering because of someone else's sin.

He's suffering for his sin. So he's saying, depart from me. And the

Lord's going to answer my prayer because of his loving kindness. He's going to hear my weeping, and he's going to make my enemies depart from me, even though they know and I know and everyone else knows that I'm in this situation because of my sin.

So David is saying that the Lord has heard the voice, heard the voice of his weeping. That's the second thing.

God hears us in our supplication, but he also hears the voice of our weeping. I think that's such a beautiful phrase that God hears the voice of our weeping, the personification that our tears actually have a voice, that our pain actually has a voice, that God is not distant and aloof and removed from us.

Our tears cry out to God. Our pain cries out to God, and God hears us, and God knows us.

Do you see how these are prayers of confidence, even in the midst of his anxiety and in the midst of his anguish? He has confidence that God hears him because his tears even testify.

When he's so pain and so ridden with pain and anxiety and emotions that his mouth won't even cry out words, his tears cry out words to the

God who loves him. His tears testify to the Lord, and the

Lord hears them. He says, hear my supplications. Lord, hear my request. Hear my prayer request.

I know that you do. He says the Lord has heard them. He says the Lord has received his prayer.

David is speaking confidence to himself, and he's speaking confidence about God, that his enemies are going to depart, that his tearful voice has been heard, that his supplications have been heard, that his prayer requests have been heard, that his enemies are going to be ashamed and greatly dismayed, and that every one of them are going to turn back in shame.

Why? Because they're celebrating that David's sin is going to end in his downfall, and David is saying, you are wrong.

My sin is going to end up in my redemption. That's how David ends this psalm.

He spent the entire psalm talking about how I deserve God's wrath, and I'm pleading with God that I would get his grace, and I will get

God's grace because of his loving kindness, and my enemies will be put to shame, and all the struggles and trials that I'm afflicted with will be put ashamed.

David has this beautiful confidence in God that even though I suffer, you're my

Savior and you're my Redeemer, and I will yet find healing and hope and joy.

As we conclude this psalm, I want us to remember that we all are going to face many kinds of trials and sufferings like James says in chapter 1.

He says, that counted all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter trials of various kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, maturity, and eventually hope.

What I want us to understand is David prays through his anguish. He pleads

God through his anguish. He acknowledges his part in his sin, in his failure, in his brokenness, and at the end of the day, he stands up in his confidence in God with joy.

That's my prayer for each and every single one of you as you read this psalm, as you pray through this psalm, and as you lean into what the

Word of God says. We come with all kinds of brokenness and pain, but we stand up after our prayers and confidence that God loves us, that He cares for us, and in Jesus Christ we are known.