Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Just say a special thank you to Katie for the good job she did last Sunday.
[00:00:10] I also want to thank the good team that did our awaken this week. It was an awesome.
[00:00:23] And any mechanical man out there who would help me, this pulpit is not even. And I won't be able to work with this thing rocking the whole time.
[00:00:43] Sorry.
[00:00:46] When I get distracted, I can't talk to you people.
[00:00:56] That's better. All right.
[00:01:05] Just good volunteers in this church. Good volunteers.
[00:01:13] Our Lord teaches us that we should weep with those who weep.
[00:01:21] And this morning I'd like you to join me in prayer for the families in Texas who lost loved ones and especially for the ones, the families that they still haven't found their loved ones.
[00:01:40] I can't imagine what it would be like to have an elementary school daughter at camp and a flood come and now you have no idea where she is.
[00:01:55] And so let's whisper a prayer to our Heavenly Father that he could be show special loving kindness to those families this morning.
[00:02:08] Our dear Heavenly Father, you are a loving father.
[00:02:14] You are a perfect father.
[00:02:18] And only you can understand fully what these families are going through.
[00:02:24] And so I pray this morning out of the riches of your grace, out of the abundance of your steadfast love, out of your gentleness and beauty of soul, that you would comfort these families this morning, that they could sense your presence, they could have a sense of your fatherly care and comfort them as only you can comfort them.
[00:02:58] I pray for us today that we might open our hearts to the reality of God and become better people.
[00:03:07] In Christ's name. Amen.
[00:03:12] The Bible has a lot to say about life experiences. When we are at the end of ourself, life experiences that are challenging and hard and really in some ways unbearable.
[00:03:33] In fact, if you look at the life of Jesus Christ, he had a day like that himself.
[00:03:40] If you were to read the Gospels, you would read that the night that Jesus was betrayed, he went to the garden of Gethsemane and he prayed.
[00:03:53] This is what Mark said.
[00:03:58] And Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him and began to be astounded by distress and full of anxious dismay.
[00:04:13] And he said to them, my soul is surrounded by sorrow unto death.
[00:04:19] Remain here and watch.
[00:04:23] This is our Lord Jesus Christ himself.
[00:04:27] He had a day in his life where it's hard to find the vocabulary to describe what he was actually experiencing.
[00:04:39] And so in your Bibles it says troubled and things. But these words are very unique vocabulary words.
[00:04:49] And the first one literally means astounded by distress.
[00:04:57] You are distressed to the point of confusion.
[00:05:05] The second word has the feeling of restless anxiety, or it has the feeling of restless dismay.
[00:05:20] These experiences are hard to talk about, but everybody in this room has been at a point in your life where you're at the end of yourself.
[00:05:34] Life just overwhelmed you, and you weren't sure what to do next.
[00:05:45] There have been times in my life where it took every drop of energy I had just to take the next breath.
[00:05:54] And sometimes we say to ourselves, where is God in my life that he lets me reach a point like this?
[00:06:06] We say to ourself, where are you, God, and what can you do for me in this moment?
[00:06:15] Or we say, where are you, God?
[00:06:20] I'm not sensing your fatherly care at all.
[00:06:27] We've had moments that things aren't going the way we want for people around us.
[00:06:35] A couple of years ago, when my wife had a stroke and I watched them put her on the Life flight to fly her to the Cleveland clinics, I was dismayed.
[00:06:50] All I could articulate to God is, help, please help.
[00:06:55] But it turns out that the Bible has stuff to say about these kind of moments in our life.
[00:07:04] And this week and over the next coming weeks, we're gonna study Psalm 130th, the 130th Psalm. And I recommend to you that while we study this, it's a very short psalm. Try to read it through once a day through this whole series, and it will prepare you for the sermons, and it will help you remember it in the future when you really, really need it.
[00:07:34] So this is how the psalm starts.
[00:07:37] Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, O Lord, hear my voice.
[00:07:46] Let your ear be attentive to the voice, to the voice of my pleas for mercy.
[00:07:56] I believe that sometimes life is absurd.
[00:08:01] The word absurd means it doesn't yield to reason.
[00:08:05] We all have this idea that life is reasonable and that if we just do the right things, everything will work out right. Or if we just knew how to think right, we could understand everything. Not true.
[00:08:20] Life is sometimes absurd. It doesn't yield to reason.
[00:08:26] Things happen that aren't reasonable.
[00:08:29] In my way of thinking, what's happening in Texas is not reasonable. It doesn't. I can't fit it into a nice, logical argument.
[00:08:46] Look, if a bunch of people my age die in a flood, that's one thing. If a bunch of children die in a flood, that's unreasonable. It's absurd.
[00:08:55] And so the psalmist is saying, I've had absurd moments in my life, and in those moments, I've learned the most important and the most valuable thing I can do is pray.
[00:09:12] Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
[00:09:18] When you don't understand life, the very first thing you ought to do is pray.
[00:09:24] Often it's not the first thing we do. We start overreacting in bad ways and we make a problem worse. But when you don't understand life, when you're in over your head, the very first thing you ought to do is pray.
[00:09:42] And if your prayer is as simple as dear God, help, you're moving in the right direction.
[00:09:52] When God doesn't do what you expect or desire him to do, the first thing you should do is pray.
[00:10:01] Christians, I don't know if you are spiritually aware enough, but God doesn't always do what you want him to do.
[00:10:12] It might come as a surprise to you. God doesn't always do what you expect.
[00:10:17] He's God and we're not.
[00:10:22] And sometimes when we pray diligently and God doesn't do what we thought he would do or what we wanted him to do, it leaves us a bit confused. And the first thing we should do is pray.
[00:10:36] The very first thing we should do is pray.
[00:10:40] When you don't understand people around you, you should pray.
[00:10:45] This is another absolute truism.
[00:10:50] People aren't always what you think they are.
[00:10:53] People won't always do what you hope they will do.
[00:10:58] People will disappoint you. All right, when that happens, it's easy for us to react in negative ways, but the very first thing we should do is pray. Do you understand this? We begin to confront the absurdity of life with prayer.
[00:11:17] When you are discouraged, you should pray.
[00:11:22] Life can be discouraging. Huh?
[00:11:26] Life can disappoint us.
[00:11:28] The very first thing I should do when I feel discouraged in life is pray.
[00:11:37] When you have gone astray spiritually, the very first thing you should do is pray.
[00:11:44] Now, many of you this morning, you can remember a time when you were a lot closer to God than you are right now.
[00:11:53] You can remember a time when God had more say in your life than he has right now.
[00:12:00] You can remember a time when you.
[00:12:02] When you consciously loved him more than you consciously love him right now.
[00:12:09] When we go astray spiritually, the very first thing we should do is pray.
[00:12:16] Do you hear this?
[00:12:18] Ah.
[00:12:19] If.
[00:12:20] If you have.
[00:12:22] If sin has overwhelmed you in some way, the very first thing you should do is pray.
[00:12:30] If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
[00:12:38] All right, now, I didn't Tell you anything new there, you know that you ought to always pray.
[00:12:46] So the issue is, why, when life is absurd, is it so challenging for us to pray when life doesn't work the way you want it to work? Why is it so much easier to complain to someone than to pray church when life isn't going the way you want it to? Why is it so much easy?
[00:13:17] Why is it so easy to be angry instead of pray when life is absurd? Why is it so easy to give into resentment instead of prayer?
[00:13:29] All right, I want to look at my life.
[00:13:35] I want to look at my life as a man who is a follower of Jesus Christ.
[00:13:40] And I want to say that in my life there have been times that life was absurd and I didn't respond good to that moment.
[00:13:52] And I want to learn from that. And I want to say the next time I am aware that life is not doing what I had hoped it would do, the very first thing I'm going to do is pray.
[00:14:05] I'm going to preset myself to pray.
[00:14:09] The next time I'm discouraged, I'm going to preset myself and say, the minute I feel discouraged, I'm going to begin praying.
[00:14:17] The next time somebody disappoints me, I'm going to preset myself. And instead of complaining about them or talking bad about them behind their back, I'm going to preset myself. And. And I'm gonna say, this is a trigger to pray.
[00:14:31] I can create prayer triggers in my life that the minute I recognize this, the very first thing I'm gonna do is pray.
[00:14:40] But the psalmist didn't just pray. He prayed earnestly.
[00:14:46] Listen what he said, I cry out.
[00:14:53] If I were to translate this very, very literally, it means I shout.
[00:15:00] Not very comfortable shouting in prayer.
[00:15:03] But that's exactly what the psalmist is saying. The psalmist is saying, when I was overwhelmed, I began to shout out a prayer.
[00:15:17] It's a statement of earnestness.
[00:15:20] It's a statement of being zealous.
[00:15:24] Ah.
[00:15:25] Ah.
[00:15:27] The psalmist said, I recognized that I was in a bad spot.
[00:15:34] And the very first thing I did is I prayed as earnestly to God as I could.
[00:15:43] Ah.
[00:15:45] How earnest are you in your relationship to God?
[00:15:50] People get real earnest about stuff.
[00:15:55] I've seen some of you get real earnest about some opinion you have. You've gotten real earnest about it.
[00:16:03] What about being a little more earnest in your relationship to God?
[00:16:08] What about putting a little more effort and energy into your prayer?
[00:16:14] What about having the same spirit that Jacob had when he said to the angel of The Lord, I will not let you go until you bless me. You see, there is a form of prayer that is ambivalent. Take it or leave it. But this is not an ambivalent prayer. This is an earnest prayer. It is a prayer of necessity. It is a prayer of need. It is a prayer that grips the reality of God and says, I'm going to hold on to you until you do something in my life that makes sense.
[00:16:52] And then the psalmist said, I'm making this strong appeal to the Lord.
[00:17:00] Ah.
[00:17:02] He says, from the depths, O Lord, I cry out to you.
[00:17:09] Ah.
[00:17:12] Is it interesting that he appeals to him as the Lord?
[00:17:19] It's significant because if he is the Lord, then that means he gets the final say.
[00:17:26] Church when you call him Lord, you're saying you get the final say. When Jesus prayed in earnest agony, he also said, not my will, but your will be done right?
[00:17:43] This is important.
[00:17:45] When I pray earnestly to God out of my confusion, I have to remember that he's the Lord and he gets the final say. Church There have been times in my life when I prayed as earnestly as I possibly could.
[00:18:06] But the Lord whispered to me, ah, my grace is sufficient. For when you are weak, then you are strong.
[00:18:14] Church Sometimes the Lord doesn't wave a magic wand over us and make the difficulty go away.
[00:18:23] Sometimes the Lord doesn't do a miracle and make the darkness light.
[00:18:28] Sometimes he doesn't lift the burden. But what he says is, my grace is sufficient.
[00:18:36] You just keep trusting me.
[00:18:39] Some of you are experiencing difficult things. You're in a hard place in life. You've prayed as earnestly as you know how to pray, and you feel like God isn't listening. Can I tell you he is listening, but maybe he's whispering to you, My grace is sufficient.
[00:18:58] You just keep trusting me.
[00:19:02] You just keep drawing near to me. You just keep clinging to me. And this is gonna work out in a way that you'll never expect.
[00:19:12] And then the psalmist says, let your ears be attentive.
[00:19:18] This is an odd phrase.
[00:19:20] Why do we have to ask the Lord to pay attention to us?
[00:19:25] That's basically what he's doing. He's saying, hey, dear God, would you please pay attention to me? And it struck me as odd. Why do we have to ask the Lord to pay attention to us?
[00:19:36] Well, how about this?
[00:19:39] When you ask the Lord to pay attention to you, it clarifies your focus.
[00:19:45] Why exactly do you want the Almighty's attention?
[00:19:50] If you're gonna say, dear Lord, pay attention to me, you ought to Think seriously.
[00:19:58] Why do I desperately want the Lord to pay attention to me?
[00:20:04] What is it that's happening in my life that is worthy of his attention?
[00:20:09] What is it that I want him to do that only he can do?
[00:20:13] I want to focus my attention. And. And I want to say, dear God, would you please pay attention to me for a minute? It matters. And this is the reason why the Bible teaches us that we can make please to God. We can appeal to Him. And here is an appeal to God. Dear God, could I please have your attention? Because this is an important thing in my life and I want to go through it with you.
[00:20:42] Dear God, would you please give me your attention? Because if you don't help me in this, I'm not gonna respond well, and I won't be living out my faith the way you want me to live out my faith. Do you see what it does when I ask for his attention? It focuses me.
[00:21:01] Why do we need to ask God for our attention, his attention?
[00:21:06] Because it intensifies our concentration.
[00:21:10] Have you ever daydreamed in prayer?
[00:21:13] You start praying, well, I guess you better preach a sermon then. Jody, have you ever been praying and then your mind was a million miles away?
[00:21:28] You're praying or you think you're praying, but your head is not in the game.
[00:21:42] I wonder how that would go in a conversation with someone else other than God.
[00:21:50] All right.
[00:21:51] When I ask for God's attention, it helps me concentrate because I'm saying, dear God, you give me your full attention. And. And I'm gonna give you my full attention because that's how important this is. That's how meaningful this is. That is what is necessary in this prayer.
[00:22:14] The third reason we ask for God's attention is because it reminds us of who we're talking to.
[00:22:22] When I ask God for His attention, what is the person like that? I'm asking for his attention.
[00:22:32] When I pray to God and I ask for his attention, I ought to remind myself that he is almighty.
[00:22:40] He's able to do exceedingly and abundantly above what I can ask or think anything I can ask. He's powerful enough to do anything I can imagine he's powerful enough to do. I'm not talking to somebody who. Who isn't competent to help me. I'm talking to somebody who is almighty and fully capable of helping me.
[00:23:04] I'm talking to someone who is eternal.
[00:23:07] My problems may be new to me, but they're never new to God.
[00:23:12] Do you get this? You don't have a single problem that somebody else who has lived on this blue planet hasn't had before.
[00:23:21] There is no problem that is unique to one individual. God has seen all these problems before.
[00:23:29] It's fresh and new to us, but he's seen it before. He is eternal, and he brings a wealth of experience to every single challenge we present to Him.
[00:23:42] He is all knowing. He knows the end from the beginning.
[00:23:48] He is the alpha and Omega, the first and the last.
[00:23:52] When you pray, you ask for God's attention because you're saying to him, I know that you know everything about this situation and that you're competent to help me, and I'm asking you to.
[00:24:09] We're also praying to him because he's righteous, gracious and sovereign. He is the sovereign Lord.
[00:24:21] And then the psalmist goes on and he says, let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy.
[00:24:31] Now we get to what I really want to talk to you about today. When I am in a difficult place and I pray, the very first expectation I should have is that the God I'm talking to is a merciful God and he wants to help.
[00:24:52] He is a God of mercy, and it is his desire to help.
[00:24:58] It is the longing of his heart to help.
[00:25:01] Let's remind ourselves what mercy means, because we get a little flaky when we use some Bible words and we don't remind ourselves really what they mean. All right?
[00:25:10] Mercy means being kind and forgiving to someone who deserves to be treated harshly.
[00:25:17] When you show mercy, you're being kind and forgiving to someone who deserves to be treated harshly.
[00:25:25] You don't give mercy to the innocent, you give mercy to the guilty. Right?
[00:25:32] When I pray and I'm in a bad spot in life and I call upon the name of the Lord, I am appealing to him to be kind and forgiving to me.
[00:25:47] I am acknowledging that God has every right to be harsh with me.
[00:25:53] But I'm also saying, oh, God, I need your mercy.
[00:26:00] I desire your mercy.
[00:26:02] Your mercy matters to me.
[00:26:05] Mercy also means being kind and helping to people who are in desperate conditions. If somebody is in a desperate condition and you help them, you show them mercy. All right, I've already admitted I'm in a bad place.
[00:26:21] Life is absurd. It's not working out the way I want it to be.
[00:26:26] When I appeal to God for mercy, I'm asking him to. To help me in this time of this difficult situation I'm in, this difficult condition I'm in.
[00:26:38] Finally, mercy is giving relief to the miserable.
[00:26:45] Can you remember a time in your life when you were miserable I mean absolutely miserable.
[00:26:52] No, Many years ago I had a bad accident and I was in intensive care and I was just miserable. It was the middle of the night. It's always worse at night, isn't was the middle of the night. I couldn't lay there one more minute. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was so miserable.
[00:27:20] I was dysfunctional.
[00:27:23] And I prayed and I said, dear God, if I had a son and he was as miserable as I am, I'd do everything I could to help him.
[00:27:37] And I know that you are a better father than I am.
[00:27:40] I'm miserable. I need your help.
[00:27:45] About three minutes later, a nurse walked in, said, what's going on? I said, I'm miserable. I can't. There's no place I can lay that's comfortable.
[00:27:57] I'm just done.
[00:27:59] God bless this nurse. She made the bed tight. You know when they make the sheets tight, made the bed real, real tight.
[00:28:08] I had tubes and stuff hanging out of me, propped pillows around me so I could lay down.
[00:28:14] And I took that as God showing me mercy when I was at my most miserable.
[00:28:24] I believe God whispered to that nurse's heart and said, this dude needs some help.
[00:28:31] And God bless her for doing it.
[00:28:35] God has transcendent ways to show us mercy when we are at our most miserable.
[00:28:44] What does the mercy of God look like?
[00:28:47] If I'm looking for mercy, what should I be expecting?
[00:28:53] Let's. Let's look at some scriptures. Psalm 119, 156. Great is your mercy, O Lord.
[00:29:01] Give me life according to your rules.
[00:29:05] First of all, God's mercy is great.
[00:29:09] What does that mean?
[00:29:10] God's mercy is greater than any of my miseries.
[00:29:15] God has a mercy that is greater than any misery you have or ever will have. His mercies are greater than your miseries.
[00:29:26] Lamentation 3.
[00:29:29] The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
[00:29:33] His mercies never come to an end.
[00:29:37] They are new every morning.
[00:29:40] Great is your faithfulness.
[00:29:42] You know why I like this passage?
[00:29:46] It's easy for me to ask God for mercy when I make a one off mistake, but when I have a habit of making that mistake, when I've already asked him to forgive me 10 times, when I've already asked him to forgive me for being an idiot 25 times.
[00:30:13] And then when it becomes 25 years and here I'm still saying to God, you probably should take my license. God Church, I need to hear this. That his mercy is never ending.
[00:30:35] You never exhaust the mercy of God, no matter how many times you have appealed to him for mercy. You never exhaust his mercy.
[00:30:47] His mercy never comes to an end. Listen to this.
[00:30:52] It's new every single morning.
[00:30:56] Every morning you get up, God has a fresh crop of mercy. You will never exhaust the mercy of the Lord.
[00:31:06] I like this one too. Psalm 103. 13.
[00:31:09] As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
[00:31:16] That word compassion is the same word that's translated mercy.
[00:31:20] As a father shows mercy to his children, so the Lord shows mercy to those who fear him.
[00:31:27] Here's what Paul said.
[00:31:30] 2nd Corinthians 1.
[00:31:32] Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Listen. The Father of mercies, the God of all comfort.
[00:31:42] Listen. He's not just the Father of a mercy. He is the Father of all mercy. Any mercy you need, he is. He has it.
[00:31:52] And he has a fatherly heart toward you. And it is his good desire to give you the kingdom.
[00:32:01] Ah. Isaiah 54, 8.
[00:32:06] In overflowing anger for a moment, I hid my face from you.
[00:32:13] But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer.
[00:32:24] In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you.
[00:32:30] But with everlasting love I will have mercy on you.
[00:32:36] Are there times when we have to have divine discipline? Yes.
[00:32:40] I want God to be a father who disciplines me. Because if you are without discipline, Paul says you're not a child.
[00:32:51] The children of God have to go through times where God disciplines us to make us better people. But listen, that's only for a moment.
[00:33:00] But his mercies. His mercies are everlasting.
[00:33:06] God's mercy for you is greater than than his judgment.
[00:33:15] The psalmist says that mercy triumphs over judgment. The mercy of God is incredibly good to you.
[00:33:26] One more. Ephesians 2, 4.
[00:33:29] But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace, you have been saved. The greatest mercy that God has for you is eternal salvation.
[00:33:48] Do you get this church now? Open your heart to me. You do not earn salvation.
[00:33:55] You do not earn acceptance with God.
[00:33:58] You don't do more good to offset the bad. That's not how it works.
[00:34:04] God's mercy cannot be replaced with anything you do.
[00:34:10] You are a recipient of the mercy of God, and it is his mercy that brings you to salvation.
[00:34:20] If you are a Christian this morning, it's because God has been merciful to you.
[00:34:26] If you love God at all, it's because he has been merciful to you.
[00:34:31] His mercy lead you to salvation.
[00:34:36] We are the children of God because God is merciful to us. Can you hear this? The greatest mercy you will ever receive is the mercy that our Lord Jesus Christ showed us when he died on the cross to forgive our sins.
[00:34:56] Now I want to ask you, are you aware of your need for mercy today?
[00:35:05] It's easy to get complacent in life.
[00:35:07] We kind of put life on autopilot, and then we just kind of cruise through life.
[00:35:13] The boat just kind of goes with the flow.
[00:35:17] I want you to examine your heart this morning.
[00:35:20] Are you aware of your need for mercy?
[00:35:26] Let me give you some hints.
[00:35:30] When you focus on the inside of you, do you feel troubled?
[00:35:35] If you do, you need mercy.
[00:35:40] When you quiet yourself and you sense your inner self, do you feel anxiety?
[00:35:48] If you do, you need mercy?
[00:35:52] Is something happening in life that has confused you and you just don't really know how to deal with it?
[00:36:01] You need mercy.
[00:36:05] Some of you came here today lonely.
[00:36:07] There is a lonely spot in your heart.
[00:36:11] Ah.
[00:36:12] You do your best to cover it up.
[00:36:15] You try not to make an issue of it, but if you had to admit to yourself, you would say, I. I am lonely. You need mercy.
[00:36:29] Some of you have a painful suspicion that you're not loved.
[00:36:39] You have a painful fear that you're not loved.
[00:36:44] If you sense that today, you need mercy.
[00:36:49] Some of you have just gotten numb on your inner self. You're numb.
[00:36:57] You're not happy. You're not sad.
[00:37:00] You're not energetic. You're not depressed. You're numb.
[00:37:05] If you feel that numbness today, you need mercy.
[00:37:12] Some of you are far from God.
[00:37:16] You're far from God.
[00:37:18] If you had to admit it, you would say, I've lost my sense of God in my life.
[00:37:25] Some of you would say, I don't know that I ever had a sense of God in my life.
[00:37:30] Church, you need mercy.
[00:37:33] If you sense that these things within yourself, it is your heart saying, I need mercy.
[00:37:44] I need kindness. I need forgiveness.
[00:37:48] I need kindness. I need help.
[00:37:51] I need relief.
[00:37:53] And the psalmist has given us this beautiful example. And he says, if you sense within yourself these things, the very first thing you should do is call on the name of the Lord, the God of all mercy, because he has a mercy that meets the need of every human heart.
[00:38:17] Our dear Heavenly Father, I call upon your name as the Lord of all mercies.
[00:38:23] I acknowledge that you have every mercy that the human heart needs.
[00:38:34] I thank you that your spirit prompts us to appeal to you for mercy.
[00:38:42] And now I ask you in the name of Jesus Christ, and I ask you by your promise to show mercy that you would be merciful to us.
[00:38:55] And then, Father, I pray that as you show us mercy, we'll show others mercy.
[00:39:02] I pray that we can hear Jesus say to us this morning, blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
[00:39:11] And as you are merciful to us, I pray that we would show great mercy to others.
[00:39:16] And I ask this all in Jesus name, amen.
