Praying from the Depths | Psalm 130
Luke Potter | July 31, 2016

My dad wasn’t a Christian when he grew up. He came to faith when he was in high school, and he grew up under a British preacher in Wisconsin, so, it’s kind of strange. Sometime in the 90s, my dad and I were in the car listening to this preacher who was preaching a series from a conference or something. So I got to hear the guy who shaped my dad’s preaching, so it was great. And I’m going to shamelessly steal something from him.

This guy preached a sermon on Psalm 14—that’s not the text we’re reading this morning, so I’m not going to steal any of the content—but at the end of Psalm 14, the last verse, reads like this, “O that salvation would come for Israel out of Zion.” And this guy said, “Look, if you’re going to understand this psalm, you’ve got to understand this one word: O. “O that salvation would come out of Zion for Israel.” You’ve to understand that if you’re going to understand the psalm.

I’m going to steal that idea from him, that if we’re going to understand Psalm 130, which is our text, we’ve got to understand this one little word, “O.”

I don’t think y’all do this at Fulkerson Park, but you can humor me because I’m the guest, so I get some, I don’t know, privileges? So in honor of God and His Word, would you stand? You’re going to stand for the whole sermon . . . not really!

Psalm 130:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
2 O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
4 But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.
8 And he will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities.

This is God’s Word. You may be seated. While you’re being seated, I’m going to pray.

Father, we come to the Word bringing all kinds of baggage. I’m doing it, everyone that’s here is doing it. We bring sin, we bring cold hearts here, and so we ask that you would be gracious to us. Send the Holy Spirit to us. We come to this text, frankly, with low expectations, but just burn right through those low expectations. Send your Spirit. Fill me. Fill my brothers and sisters. Overcome all the weaknesses and the coldness and the low expectations, and do something mighty here. Do something profound. Show us your Son. It’s in His name that we pray, for His sake that we pray, it’s through the Spirit that we pray. Amen.

So my text is Psalm 130, but it’s really only the first word of verse 7, “O.” (Maybe I should have mentioned this, but I believe it’s page 518 in the pew Bible. At least that’s what it is in mine.) And I think in the ESV, it’s just one letter, “O.” How long could this sermon possibly be if that’s my text? We just have to get “O” right? How long could it possibly be? Just a few minutes?

This psalm is broken up very nicely for us into three sections. And even if it weren’t broken up nicely into three sections, I would break it up into three sections. In the first four verses, the psalmist is actually praying to God. You can see he’s talking to God. And then in verses 5 and 6, he stops praying, and he’s not addressing anyone. It seems like he’s just talking to himself. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” He’s speaking to himself. He’s reinforcing a truth to himself. And then in verses 7 and 8, he directs his attention outside of himself, and he starts speaking to the people. So, we’ve got what he says to God, what he says to himself, and what he says to others.

What we’re going to be exploring is, How does confession--what we just spent a few minutes doing, which Brian led us through earlier--how does confession, in verses 1-4, lead us to verses 7 and 8, where you’re proclaiming the good news of God’s redemption to other people? How do you get from verse 1 to verse 7? I’m saying that the only way we’re going to understand the answer to that question is if we understand the word, “O.” Because you can read it a lot of different ways, (and this is going to be the last thing I steal from the British preacher.) You could say it, “Ohhhhh,” or “Ahhhh,” but you’ve got to get it right. You’ve got to say it right, you’ve got to hear it correctly.

I. The Burden We Carry

So, let’s look at the prayer first, verses 1-4, and we’ll see the burden that we are to carry. Verses 1-4 is a great prayer, and one of the reasons is because of how great the imagery is. We’re immediately thrust in our imaginations out on the high seas. “Out of the depths I cry to you.” Depths. That’s a word referring to deep waters. You’ve got to remember that for ancient Israel the waters were a scary kind of thing. What happens in Genesis? God wipes out the world in judgment. And how does he do it? With a flood of mighty waters. Then in the next book of the Bible, the book of Exodus, God’s people are being oppressed by this nation. And they’re going to be set free from this group of people, and what is the one thing that is standing between them and freedom? A huge body of water that God splits up and allows them to walk through. And who is one of the most famous prophets of Israel? Jonah, who was thrown into the depths and swallowed by a fish, and from the depths offered his prayer to God.

Deep water: terrifying, scary, threatening, but not always bad. Because, what is it that puts this guy [in Psalm 130] into the depths? You can imagine the psalmist saying, “Out of the depths I cry to you. I’ve lost a loved one.” Or, “Out of the depths I cry to you. I’ve lost my job,” or, “my friend has betrayed me,” or whatever. You can find things like this in the psalms. But that’s not what’s pushed this guy out into the depths. The reason this guy is out in deep water right now, verse 3? “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” And so, in his prayer to God, we see a choice that we’re faced with. When it comes to our sin, do we want to go out into the deep water, or do we want to stay where it’s shallow? In the shallow, you can deal with sin on the surface. It’s safe, it’s easy, it’s relatively comfortable.

But out in the depths, if you’re committed to going deep, relentlessly in your battle with sin, it’s scary, it’s threatening, it’s difficult, it is not pleasant. And so, lots of us are very content to splash around in the shallows where things are easy, where we can deal with things on the surface, and where things can look really great. The problem is that if you stay in the shallows of your sin, you’ll also have a really shallow understanding of God. You have to go out into the depths—facing your sin, facing your iniquities and the things that have broken you and twisted you—you’ve to go deep dealing with that if you’re going to experience the depths of God’s love.

Just imagine, you’ve got this psalmist who says, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” Maybe you can imagine or even flat-out relate what it is to look at your life and feel broken; to feel like, “God, I can’t stand before you. I’m such a screw-up. I’ve muffed it so seriously. My family is a wreck. A relationship just ended. I just really hurt a friend or spouse.” You can imagine what it must feel like to look at your life and say, “Ohhh,” [groaning] “I can’t stand.” Or you might say, “Look, I’ve been doing so well. There’s this habitual problem I’ve been dealing with, and then I screwed up! I thought I was walking, but I can’t even stand! I’m not making any progress.” Maybe you can relate? Maybe you can hear the psalmist saying, “Ohhh, if you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

But notice when he’s praying, what throws the psalmist out into the depths isn’t just his own sin. He doesn’t say, “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O LORD; O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, how can I stand?” He’s already starting to widen. What says is, “O Lord, who can stand?” He’s starting to think, “Oh my goodness! The brokenness that sin brings into the world is so broad!” And he’s not just thinking the world can’t stand before God, he’s thinking of someone specific. He’s thinking of a particular group of people that we’re introduced to in verse 7. God is already beginning to lay on him, not just the burden of his own sin, but the brokenness that sin brings to others with the people of Israel. He’s looking at Israel and starting to see. He says, “O Lord, they can’t stand! Ahh! My people! They can’t stand!” And that connection of feeling the burden of our sin and, as we discover that with God there is forgiveness, that he may be feared, then we start to feel a burden that broadens. God sometimes directs our gaze to some people that we then start to feel a burden for. If you go out into the depths, it will happen.

It happened, for example, to David Livingstone. Some of you will know this name. He’s kind of a famous missionary, so if you know many names of missionaries, chances are decent that this is one of the guys you will know. He came to Christ as a young man and met a man who did missions work in southern Africa, and he started to feel a burden for these people. So he went there and spent decades laboring for these people. And do you know what he used to say? He used to write to people (it’s in a lot of the biographies) that when he thought about Africa, he was haunted by the specter of the smoke of a thousand villages in the dawn of the morning sun. He was feeling the burden. He looked at them and said, “Ohhh, ohhh! They can’t stand!” And so he went and dedicated his life to reaching them. He felt the burden for himself, and then he felt the burden for these people.

Now maybe you hear that and think, “Ok, I don’t know who this Livingstone guy is, but that is the type of story of a famous, extreme, unrepeatable missionary who does something kind of crazy. It doesn’t feel like the kind of model that you would follow.” So let me give you another.

My guess is that you haven’t heard of Ruth Jeffrey. Maybe some of you have heard of her, but she was just a woman. She came to faith as a young woman, and God put a burden on her heart in the 1950’s and '60’s for Vietnam. So she went over there for a while, but as far as we know, her time over there didn’t result in anything really visible. But she felt the burden for those people. So she came back as an older woman, she’s retired, and she hears this twenty-five-year-old preacher who isn’t even from North America. He’s from India. She hears him and something grabs her about the way he preaches. So she goes to him and says, “Have you ever thought about going to Vietnam?” And you know, this guy is a twenty-five-year-old punk, so he says, “Well how am I going to be able to afford it?” And she said, “Let me take care of it.” So she goes back to her prayer group, and they start praying, and they raise the money.

So this guy, in 1970, goes over to Vietnam in the height of the Vietnam War. There were missionaries being killed, not all the time, but regularly. They were easy targets. So it’s a very, very dangerous place when this guy gets there. He finds a seventeen-year-old translator, a Vietnamese high schooler who’s doing translating for him. So he goes around and starts going to “young people,” as the book says. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but think young adults. So, he’s speaking to this group of young adults, and all of a sudden his translator stops translating for him. Afterwards he found out that the translator had actually stopped translating a minute earlier and had just started speaking to them. He said, “Friends, what he’s saying is the truth. The problem is with us!” So he breaks down and starts weeping, and these people come forward and start comforting him, and they start weeping. This small group of people felt the burden of their own sin.

So the twenty-five-year-old spent about a year preaching in different villages. A couple of years later, he reads a message from a missions text and finds out that, from that one little meeting, thousands and thousands of people were reached! Not just because of his preaching, but because that one little group of people went out, because they began to feel the burden for their people. There was then this extended season of renewal in Vietnam because one small group of young people felt the burden of their people. They felt the burden of their people because they felt the burden of their own sin. They felt a burden for their sin because that twenty-five-year-old Indian missionary felt a burden for Vietnam. And he only felt that burden for Vietnam because this old, retired woman felt a burden for Vietnam that she carried for her whole Christian life. That’s what happens when we feel the burden of our sin, and then the burden for other people.

II. The Word In Which We Put Our Hope

So what do you do? Verses 5 and 6. Not only is there a burden that we are to carry, but secondly, there’s a word we’re to put our hope in. So you’ve got the psalmist who prays to God, and then he steps out, and he repeats himself. “I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. And in his word I hope. My soul waits for the Lord.”

He’s waiting for the Lord, but what I want to do is zoom in on one phrase, “In his word I hope.” It’s the one that’s probably right in the middle of those two verses for you. “In his word I hope.” Now, what does that mean? That’s all I want to talk about for a couple of minutes.

What does it mean to put your hope in God’s word? Well, I think the most natural thing might be to say, “Here’s a guy who trusts the Bible as a whole.” And that’s a good thing, and I hope that you all do trust the Bible. But I think what this guy’s got in mind is something more specific. In Ps. 107:20 we get a pretty helpful key to what’s going on at the end of verse 5. The Psalmist writes, “The Lord sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from destruction.” What’s “the word” that you’re putting your hope in? Not just the Bible in general, but this specific word of promise, of hope, healing, deliverance. It’s a word of promise, something that promises healing and deliverance. That’s what I want to suggest to you. It’s not just a general trust in the Bible, it’s loving the Bible, studying God’s Word, being committed to God’s Word. It’s looking for those places where he promises us things that we can put our hope in; things that we can rest our weight in, can bank our life on. That’s what we need, I think, to do.

And then, we hope in God’s word like a watchman waits for the morning. Let me give you just one place to start. I don’t want to leave you in the clouds. Ezekiel 36:25-27 is one place where God promises to send the Spirit. He promises to give people new hearts. And because they’ve got the Spirit, he promises that what will happen in their hearts is a desire to keep God’s law. The promise of the Spirit, the promise of the new heart, the promise that when the Spirit is present, it’s going to change what we want to do. Jeremiah 21 has a similar promise. It’s like God writing His law, not just on tablets out in the world, but writing it on our heart. You actually want to do what God wants you to do.

So, the promise of the Spirit. There’s one great promise!

And we should put our hope in this word, in this promise, like a watchman waits for the morning. I used to work in a warehouse, and I worked the night shift, the third shift. I’d go in at 8pm and I’d work until 8am. If any of you have ever worked third shift, you can really relate to verse 6. You can really understand a little bit better than a lot of other people what it is to long for the morning. Here’s what would happen. Almost every night, there comes a point when you start feeling like, “This night’s got to end! I need the morning to come. I need the shift to end. I need to be in my bed. I need to see sunlight.” You feel like you’re going to start going crazy. The mental things that go on when everyone else is asleep and you’re awake are real, and you long for the coming of the morning.

Brothers and sisters, when you’re out in the depths—you might not feel this if you’re in the shallows—but when you’re in the depths and you’re facing your sin, you’re going to start to feel the need, the longing, to hope in God’s Word. Maybe even specifically in this promise. You’re going to see the habitual sin, and you’re going to say, “God, you promised that I’m going to have a new heart, that you will send the Spirit, that I’d start to long to do different things. I need you to come and to be good to your word. I need it right now.” You’re going to feel that intense need. You’re going to say, “Ohhh, I need it.” You’re going to start to hope in God’s word, to long for God’s word to be true.

And you start to feel a burden for friends, family members, neighbors, co-workers, colleagues, or a people group. You’re going to start to feel this burden if you’re out in the depths, dealing with sin, looking around at people who you find God has directed your heart toward. You’re going to look at them and say, “Oh, God, they can’t stand!” Then you’re going to need this promise. “God, I need you to send your Spirit. I know that this is the business that your Spirit is in, to go and work with people’s hearts, and I need you to do it. I’m pleading for you to do it.”

That’s not the only way that a watchman waits for the morning. It might feel like the night will never end. This night is an unending night. But you know morning is coming. You can bank on it. You are sure the morning will come. It might feel like forever, but the dawn is going to come. So there’s a certainty, a confidence, and an assurance that we’re going to need.

You remember what Livingstone said to other people? He was haunted by the specter of the smoke of a thousand villages in the dawn of the morning sun. Brothers and sisters, we don’t need to be haunted by the coming dawn. When you’re out in the depths, when you’re feeling the burden and putting your hope in God’s Word, you can be comforted by the dawn of the morning, because here’s something that’s true, certain, that you can take to the bank: Revelation 22:5. There will one day dawn a morning and it will be the last dawn. It’ll be the dawn of eternal summer. Revelation 22:5 says there will be no more night. No more need for lamps or light, because God himself is our light.

Brothers and sisters, we will feel the weight and the burden of sin in this world until the dawn of that day. And then our devilish darkness will be washed away in the flood of God’s grace. And not God’s grace as this magical, mystical stuff. Our devilish darkness will be washed away by the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Bank on that! It is certain. It is sure.

So, this one promise from Ezekiel 36, the promise of the Spirit, is a big one. The first-century Christians were the first ones to really experience what this would mean when the Spirit is poured out. Guys like John or Paul—their writings are packed full of just how potent the promise of the Spirit is. Let me read you my favorite summary of what that promise, anchored in Ezekiel, in 36:6, is, and of what we get in the Spirit. The guy who wrote this is Herman. If you’re looking for a son’s name, or a daughter, let me commend to you Herman, or Hermie. Herman Bavinck was his name, but you can call him Herman. He says this,

“The Spirit justifies us in our consciousness, testifies of our adoption; he gives us peace, he gives us joy. He delivers us from the law, the flesh, sin, death. He is our comforter, the advocate who defends our cause. He protects us, supports us; he does not leave us. He remains with us always. He comforts us, praying for us. The whole life of the Christian is walking in the Spirit. He binds all believers into one body. He builds them up into a dwelling place for God. He guarantees our heavenly inheritance and will one day affect the resurrection and glorification. In short, Christ and all his benefits—the love of the Father and the grace of the Son—become our portion only in fellowship with the Spirit.”

Brothers and sisters, in Luke 11:13 Jesus says the Spirit is yours for the asking. Oh! Israel, why settle for anything less or anything different? Hope in the Lord! Put your hope here.

III. The Hope We Have

So, the burden that we carry, the word in which we put our hope, and lastly, that one verse, verse 7: O Israel, hope in the Lord.

For in the Lord, the steadfast love is a love that will never let you go. Once he’s got ahold of you, it’ll never let you go. And with him is plentiful redemption. The dawn of an eternal summer day. All of the devilish darkness in this world is washed away in the flood of his glorious light. Livingstone felt this. Livingstone spent three decades in Africa. It was a brutal continent in the 19th century, more brutal even than today. In those 30 years, he was mauled by lions--and in Africa at this point, not being able to raise your gun because your shoulder doesn’t work is a pretty serious thing! So—more than three decades down in Africa, he was blinded in one eye, and eventually he contracts a sickness that will one day kill him. He’s dying here of this tragic disease, but every day he would get up and pray for these people that he felt a burden for. He’d get up every day and pray. So one morning, he gets up and kneels down at the chair to pray for these people that he’s so burdened for, and a couple hours later, his friend and partner comes in to check on him. He’s still praying, so he leaves. He comes back a couple hours later, and he’s still there. And it turns out that he’s dead. But Livingstone died the way he lived: out in the depths, feeling that burden, putting his hope in God’s word as he prays for these people.

And Ruth Jeffrey’s story is almost the same. Decades after this 25-year-old guy leaves Vietnam and goes to other places, he kept in contact with this woman. She gets sick and is in the hospital on her deathbed, and she calls for this preacher to come to her. She says to him, “Do you know this book called Pilgrim’s Progress?” Which is a really old story that tells about this guy who had this incredibly huge burden of sin, and how he figures out and comes to the realization that the psalmist talks about in verse 4, “But with you there’s forgiveness, that you may be feared.” It’s a book about this guy with this burden. She says, “Do you know this book?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“Make sure that it gets translated into Vietnamese.” And she was gone. She died the way she lived. Out in the depths, hoping in God’s Word, bearing the burden for this people.

You look at that and see this deep faith in these people who are bearing these burdens, clinging to hope. Doesn’t it make you feel a little discouraged to see such gripping . . . what? What’s missing? What do they have that we lack? We lack passion. “Ohh! Israel, hope in the Lord!” Ohh, neighbors, hope in the Lord. When we come to grips with the gospel, it inevitably, very naturally, is God-ordained; it is connected to our feeling of this burden and speaking to other people. We lack passion!

But what we need isn’t Livingstone’s passion; what we need isn’t Ruth Jeffrey’s passion. We don’t need a room full of Livingstones and Jeffreys. We need something much more than that. We need a local church who draws their passion from Christ’s own. Did he not go out into the depths? Did he not face and feel the full weight of the burden of the sin of the whole world? And did he not, on the cross cling to and base his whole life and ministry on God’s word? He goes to his death quoting scripture to God. He couldn’t help it. That was how tightly he clings to God’s Word. That’s how tightly he hopes, how strong his hope was in God’s Word.

What we see in Jesus is even better, because, like Jeffrey, like Livingstone, Jesus shows us that if you go out into the depths, if you go out into the deep, if you feel the burden and cling to hope, it might cost you your life. But what we see with Jesus is not just passion, but passion, though dying, that is unkillable. Because it’s a resurrection passion. Brothers and sisters, let’s go to him. Let’s ask for his passion. Let’s plead with him for the Spirit, and let’s be a church that is deep, that clings to hope, and is radically, deeply passionate. Let’s pray.

Our God in heaven, we thank you for your goodness to us in Jesus. We thank you for his passion, his suffering for us. We thank you that because he rose again, there will one day dawn a day that will never end. Our dark sin and this world marred by the darkness of sin will one day be washed clean and bright. Give us a taste of it now. Father, I pray that you would give us boldness and courage as a people. I pray that you would give that to me. You know the ways that I lack this. I pray that you would give it to my brothers and sisters here. I pray that we would be so drawn into the depths that that weight would feel ultimately freeing and liberating, and that because the Spirit is with us and filling us and directing us, we would feel passion. Make us a passionate Body--compassionate with each other, passionate for the lost, passionate most of all for your glory. It is for your glory and the honor of Christ that we ask. Amen.