I recently had a very unique opportunity to spend some time in upstate New York with the Trappist Monks. One of our supporting churches invited me to join them on a contemplative retreat there. You may not realize that monks are still a thing. They are! These men sing the Psalms, all 150 of them, every week. They have them all memorized.
Now I was kind of stressed out coming in, we had been pushing hard for months. But in just in a short few days singing the Psalms, I got reacquainted with them. And they just washed over me and reminded me that God is with me where I am. He meets us right in the middle of whatever experience we’re going through. It was a powerful reminder for me. I hope this series will be that for you. He sees you. He knows what you’re going through, so much that thousands of years ago he inspired song writers to put these words down, and organized history so that they’d be preserved in his word – for you. So you’d know he sees you and is ready to meet you where you are.
Psalm 30 was written by King David, about a recent rollercoaster he’s been on. He was high, then the Lord brought him low, and then restored him. In this short Psalm, he gives us tools to navigate life’s ups and the downs.
Both prosperity and difficulty have their challenges. You say, I’ll take prosperity, but don’t we all know this — too much prosperity can make you proud and self-absorbed, but on the other hand, prolonged difficulty can make you bitter and jaded. How do we have a good relationship with blessing and hardship? How can we prosper, without growing proud, and suffer without growing bitter? Psalm 30 answers this for us by calling us to praise the Lord. It’s clearly the theme of the Psalm – The very beginning: I will extol you, that is praise enthusiastically. The very end: I will give thanks to you forever! The middle: Sing praises to the Lord, you his saints. If you want to navigate the ups and downs, learn how to praise God. Praise is powerful. It orients us away from our circumstance to God who is working in our circumstances.
So the big idea is this: Praise God in the ups and the downs. Why? Praise helps us see God in our highs and lows, in three ways. First, how he humbles the proud. Second, how he saves the desperate, and third, how he turns our sorrow to joy.
First, he humbles the proud
The first thing you notice in our Psalm is that the author King David got himself in a jam. He was cooked, but God got him out.
Verses 1-3
I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up
and have not let my foes rejoice over me.
O LORD my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
O LORD, you have brought up my soul from Sheol;
you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.
He describes being physically ill, on the verge of death. In fact, he’s so sick he says his soul went ahead of him to Sheol, which for saints in the Old Testament was a primitive way of talking about the afterlife, the place of the dead. He’s so sick, his soul has already died!
I’ve only been sick like that once. I had a parasite, and I laid in bed for three weeks straight. When you’re sick that long, you start making peace with God.
Later in the Psalm we learn that David’s sickness was his own fault. God made him sick to discipline him for his pride. He confesses this in some detail for us. Look at verse 6
As for me, I said in my prosperity,
“I shall never be moved.”
Doesn’t this sound a little like that classic quote supposedly uttered by a Titanic ship employee. “Not even God himself could sink this ship.”
David’s on a winning streak, and he does something we can all relate to. He opens his mouth and says something incredibly self-absorbed and ignorant. “I shall never be moved.”
I did this once when I was starting out in ministry, I was a part time youth pastor, and things in the ministry were off to a great start, and I recall saying something to a full-time youth pastor friend of mine like “What do you do with all your time? I’m able to get all my work done in 15 hours!” I look back on that now like “wow, how was I so arrogant.” But I’m not lying to you when I say that God took me on a 5-year journey with failure and anxiety to teach me humility.
Prosperity is like a Ferris Wheel. Some may be on top now, but they’ll one day soon be on the bottom. And those in the dust today, may be exalted tomorrow. One day the ride’s going to come to an end. One day not too long from now, all of us will be removed from the world entirely.
Now David has a proper perspective on his prosperity. Look at verse 7
By your favor, O LORD,
you made my mountain stand strong;
you hid your face;
I was dismayed.
Now he can see that he rises and falls only by the hand of the Lord. When he forgot where his prosperity came from, he thought he was unstoppable. God made him physically ill to wake him up. You might think that’s a little severe. Why the big deal God! What’s the problem with a little self-confidence?
It’s a big deal because God wants us to live in reality. When we chase the fantasy of self-sufficiency, there’s no end to the harm we’ll cause ourselves and others. Charles Spurgeon puts it this way: we tie ourselves to our prosperity and we believe a delusion. We construct dungeons for our hopes, we build ourselves chains, we think we’ll never be moved. But fumes of intoxicating success seep into our soul and make us fools. We never see the Devil coming.
Reality looks like this: there’s no resource I have that wasn’t in some way provided by God. No physical resource that isn’t ultimately a byproduct of his creation, and no work of my hands that I don’t owe ultimately to the gifts, energy, and intellect he has given to me. All of it is a gift of God.
Oh, never be fooled into thinking you’re self-sufficient. Pride like that is deadly serious. Underneath the thin veneer, pride is idolatry of the self. It’s self-worship. It’s attributing my greatness to me. It’s extolling my own virtue. Praiseless living! There are limits to how much you can indulge any vice, but there are no limits to self-worship. And the more pride you have, the less of it you think you have. What a gift God gives to David. Better to be stricken by God and physically sick than infected with the spiritual poison of pride.
- S. Lewis called pride, “The essential vice, the utmost evil. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
When God humbles you, you’re snapped back to reality, oriented again to the real spiritual and physical world. The world where God exists and we are dependent on him. David memorializes his humbling story in this Psalm. Why? So we won’t fall into the same trap! So we’ll learn the way out. There are two ways to learn this lesson, the easy way and the hard way.
The hard way is to not take your pride seriously. To think you don’t have it. To continue living a self-dependent, self-exalting life. Live this way as followers of Jesus, and the Lord will oppose us at every turn. He’ll humble us again and again. Until we all learn, like David did, to humble ourselves.
If you’d rather avoid learning the hard way, then learn what David teaches us in this Psalm: praise. When you prosper, remember who is causing you to prosper, give praise to him. Praise is how you don’t overreach in your ambition. Praise is how you stay humble and loving. Praise is how you avoid lifestyle creep and stay sacrificially generous. Praise orients you to reality – everything you have is from him. True praise makes us less dependent on earthly comfort because it connects us to the one who is ultimately good, and ultimately beautiful, and who satisfies our very souls. When you praise God, he frees you from the crippling anxiety of chasing achievement and thinking it all depends on you.
When you’re up, learn to praise God, because He humbles the proud. But second, when you’re low, know this — he also,
Saves the desperate
Verse 2 “O Lord my God, I cried to you for help and you have healed me.” David responds to his low situation by crying out to God!
This is your lifeline if you’re struggling. If you’re weighed down with sin, or you’re facing opposition and difficulty. God in heaven, the one who made all things, listens to us when we’re desperate and we cry out to him. You know a parent can pick out the cry of their child in a playground full of other children. How much more does God know the cries of your heart.
And like before, he illustrates it more later in the Psalm. He gives us a model for praying the kind of desperate prayers God loves to answer.
To you, O LORD, I cry,
and to the Lord I plead for mercy:
“What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
Hear, O LORD, and be merciful to me!
O LORD, be my helper!”
First, notice the sense of urgency to his prayers – he cries out – he pleas for mercy. He is desperate for God to deliver him.
Notice also his focus on God’s glory. God loves to answer prayers like this. He says, “what good does it do you if I die?” “If you won’t save me Lord, who is going to praise you? Who will teach Israel of all your glory?” He’s not manipulating God, no the Lord won’t be mocked – he’d see right through that. David is earnestly concerned with God’s glory.
Now you know what amazes me? This absolutely astonishes me. That this prayer would persuade God. Like, if you’re God, couldn’t you just be like “yeah the dust can praise me, or maybe I’ll just make another you who will be a little less proud… or maybe I can handle telling the world about my own faithfulness without your help David..”
Oh but that’s not the heart of our God. He’s easily moved by our prayers. When Nora slips her hand in mind and says “I love you dad” I mean she can ask me for whatever she wants in that moment.
David says, “who is going to praise you God” and God says “I hear you son, don’t worry, I’ll save you. I was waiting for this moment.” He’s persuaded! That astounds me, what incredible purpose each person in this room has – there’s a reason for you to exist – God uniquely longs to be praised by you, and has made you for himself. If you weren’t here to praise him, something real would be missing from his world. It’s astounding.
Notice he goes on to make two simple requests. Spurgeon points out that these are the kinds of requests made by a busy believer, one who has responsibilities and little time. These are the kinds of prayers we can breathe out as we go through our day. That we can internalize and make part of our daily rhythm of crying out to God.
He says, “be merciful to me” – save me from my sinful pride. And this “help me.”
I’ll tell you, “Lord, help” has been one of the most powerful prayers in my life. Help! He loves to help. David takes it a little further here, and I love this – “be my helper” – like don’t just help me this once, but come alongside me, save me. Help me now and keep helping me.
See he’s in a pit. He can’t make himself well physically. He can’t make God turn his face back toward him. He’s desperate for help.
Tonight, how do you need his mercy? He’s full of mercy for you, if you simply ask. How do you need his help? He’s your helper, waiting to give you what you truly need.
He saves the desperate.
Third and finally, he turns our sorrow to joy
Now we come to the high point of the Psalm.
He says in verses 4-5
Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment,
and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
Through his ups and downs, David came to know the most profound thing about God. That he is fundamentally loving. Fundamentally merciful. Fundamentally bent toward joy and not sorrow.
It’s like a car when the alignment’s off – no matter what way you turn it just brings you back the other way. No matter what happens in this life, God is busy turning it into eternal joy for you.
Listen, David says it – he does get angry. Everyone who loves gets angry. As Tim Keller says, the opposite of love isn’t anger, it’s hate. You can’t love and not be angry at the things that are going to harm your beloved. Everyone who loves gets angry. But he doesn’t stay angry long. His anger is for a moment, but his favor for a lifetime.
If you know Christ, you will never experience the full fiery wrath of God, that fell on Jesus on the cross. But you’ll experience his fatherly discipline. It may be severe, but it won’t last long. It will be just long enough for you to cry out, and then he’ll fly to you to show you mercy. Jesus tells us the story of the prodigal son – the son who left his father, took his inheritance early, and for all intents and purposes disowned his family. Who upon the slightest repentance – before he even got home, when the father saw him at a distance he picked up his robe and RAN out to him. The son had a speech rehearsed – do you remember it? “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.. make me like one of your hired servants…” Before he could get out a word the father embraced him and kissed him. He put a robe on him, killed the fattened calf, and threw him a huge party. “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad” he said, “for this your brother was dead, and is alive, he was lost, and is found.”
Once more, David illustrates this final principle with a personal testimony: verses 11-12
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
you have loosed my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness,
that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!
This is the part that causes our hearts to soar, because it expresses the kind of lofty truths about God that have echoed through history, woven their way into our culture, our songs, our collective memories, have become the subject of the best of our art, the best stories we tell.
He’s talking about redemption and it’s more glorious than it even sounds. He’s calling on deep truths from the foundational story of God. The message of the Bible. It’s baked into rhythms of creation. Spring always follows winter. Life always follows death. The sun always rises the next morning. Mourning becomes dancing. Grief that feels like it covers your entire life with gloom and sadness, will be replaced with new garments of joy. All of history, everything in your life. He’s bending all of it toward joy for those who know him through Jesus. If you know Jesus, joy is the final word for you. Even your sorrow, even your grief, the worst of it, he’ll turn into joy for you one day.
One of my favorite things as a father is watching joy chase away sadness in my girls. So many times, I have this privilege as a dad. One of my girls, maybe it’s Nora, has a tough day, and she’s crying, and so I pick her up and hold her and she just cries for a little while. And then, especially when she was young, the simplest things could cheer her up. “I know what you need… you need to play the stinky feet game” and I see her smile through her tears.
As we get older, we need bigger stories. Our sorrows are bigger. I think of all the sorrows that have accumulated for my dad sometimes and I get very sad. We need bigger stories. Maybe this is what you need tonight. The biggest story of all. The story of all stories. The story of the mighty acts of God throughout history – bends toward joy.
How do we respond to this hope? We lay hold of it. We seer it deep into our souls through praise.
Specifically, David uses a phrase here: he says “praise God’s holy name.” This is a beautiful turn of phrase in Hebrew that means to “call to mind all the things that God has done in his name throughout history.”
God’s people in David’s day would have remembered how God sent Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt. How he executed justice on the Egyptians. How he provided for them. How he parted the red sea and led them through on dry land. How he fed them manna in the desert, led them to the mountain of God, gave them his righteous law, brought them into the promised land, defeated their enemies and made them a great nation.
What about us? We know more of the story than David did. We call to mind the hundreds of prophecies of the coming Messiah. We call to mind that more than 2,000 years ago Jesus was born in history, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. That he suffered, was crucified, died and was buried.
We were in the pit like David was. He descended into Sheol itself and then on the third day rose again, having robbed the grave and brought you from death to life.
What about you? I know I remember. He took my depression when he saved me at 15. He took my anxiety was I was 26. He delivered me from addiction in my 30’s. Time and time again, he’s saved me from myself. I know I don’t deserve him, but he’s only ever been good to me. He’s forgiven all our sins. He’s given us the Holy Spirit to unite us, to empower us, to fill us with his joy again. He’s established a church here in New York City. And he’s coming again soon to renew the whole world. It’s all bent toward joy.
I’m telling you, you will have trouble in this life. I heard the tragedy that happened over the weekend, that a flood swept through a girls camp in Texas and 27 girls are still missing. When you’re facing tragedy, trite truisms won’t do it. We need something tangible. Something tactile.
When we’re in the pit, God didn’t send us a memo. He sent his son into the pit. When you were under his wrath, he didn’t blog about it. He stepped into it. Jesus bore it for you. When you’re despairing about the state of our world, the state of our politics, the state of our city, the state of your finances, your romantic relationships, your health, when you’re facing sheol itself and you’re on your death bed, know that your hope is flesh and blood. He’s alive. And he’s actively bending all of history toward eternal joy.
Just a few Psalms later we read, “oh taste and see that the Lord is good. Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him!”
Today, what are you waiting for, let’s praise him. If you’re up, praise him and remember that every good gift comes from him. If you’re down, cry out to him tonight, for mercy and for help. Remember his mighty acts and know that your future is bent toward joy.
Let’s pray.