Out of the Depths

6 · Argues that the modern Western church has lost the capacity for authentic lament due to materialistic expectations and shallow triumphalism, and that laments provide the God-given language for honest, non-hypocritical worship in brokenness

So we're gonna see this morning. We live in Kansas City, so to give you an illustration, these laments could maybe be kind of compared to the blues, an ancient Hebrew form of the blues. Now they don't have cellos and double basses and things like that, but that's the heart of what's going on here—songs and prayers that cry out from the dark, hard places of life. So being able to lament, being able to sing the blues, to approach God in a brokenhearted state, that's really important. It's really important because we want to avoid hypocrisy and shallowness in our worship, right? And if we're honest, we all have days when we need a lament. Listen to this quote by Karl Truman. It's in an article titled "What Can Miserable Christians Sing?" He doesn't mean that negatively about the miserable Christians. He said, "Perhaps the Western church has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as a little short of embarrassing." Talking about these lament psalms. A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one of long triumphalistic street party. It's always good! A theologically incorrect and pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is, or at least should be, all about health, wealth, and happiness corrupted the content of our worship? Well, in the Psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. That's really good news.

7 · Narrows the focus from lament in general to penitential lament specifically, establishing that Psalm 130 addresses how to worship when the source of sorrow is our own sin and rebellion

What God says in Psalm 130 and in the majority of the themes and types of Psalms in the Bible is that he understands and wants you to be able to cry out, to pray, to sing, to worship, even when your heart is sad. So Psalm 130 is that kind of song, but it's also a unique lament. We're given some background here on it. It's not just a lament about how we approach God in brokenness, it's about how we approach God in brokenness of a very particular source. How do we approach God when the brokenness and the darkness and the hurt comes from our own sin? Comes from our own mistakes and our own errors and our own rebellion? It's called a penitential psalm. Which means it's about repentance. It's about showing us how to appropriately express contrition and trust in God's mercy.

8 · Frames the central question the sermon will address and personalizes it for the congregation: how to worship authentically when burdened by awareness of personal sin

It's designed to help us as worshipers to see ourselves as forgiven people, not just to come into worship really happy all the time, assuming we've got every right to be here singing praises to God, but to remember that we have a right to be here because Christ purchased it. Because we've been forgiven. So that's what's going on in this psalm. So I want us to answer a question that I think is the purpose behind the psalm this morning. It's simply this: How do we worship? How do we worship? How do we pray? How do we sing when the knowledge of our own sin engulfs us? You ever felt that question personally? How do I worship today when the knowledge of what I did is just staring me in the face?

9 · Previews the sermon's structure and introduces the first major movement: approaching God in brokenness

Well, in answering that question, we're going to see 3 things from the psalm. First, how do we approach God when the knowledge of our sin just kind of surrounds us? Well, first, we approach God in brokenness. We see this in the first 2 verses.

10 · Expounds Psalm 130:1-2, emphasizing the psalm's opening tone of desperate brokenness and contrasting it with shallow triumphalism

Let's face it, not every Sunday is a Sunday where you come in just sort of skipping and on a high, right? It's not always euphoria when you step through those doors. The week hasn't always been great. Sometimes the week has been great, and then Saturday afternoon and Saturday night something happened, and you can't even remember an awesome week because what happened was so bad and so difficult. Well, this psalm is for those times, and we see it in the opening verses. Out of the depths, out of the depths I cry to you, O Yahweh Lord. O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy. You hear how he says it? Let your ears be attentive to my voice. It's like he's saying, don't just hear what I'm saying, hear my voice, Lord. Hear how I'm saying it. It begins with this low, Sober sound. If you think of the blues, it's like the double bass does the intro. Out of the depths. The opening notes, the opening lines show a heart that's teetering on the brink of despair. This is not a mountaintop song. This isn't the song they sing at summer camp, right? None of your kids will memorize this one when they come home from summer camp. It doesn't start out as a praise song. It's a reality song. It's a life-in-the-muck song. It's written in flat chords in the bass clef. And so it starts in a very dark place. But these blues have no one to blame but me. And even in that, right off the bat, we see and hear the good news. Out of the depths he cries for help, and he expects that God can and will hear his voice. He says, O Lord, hear my voice in verse 2. Let your ears be attentive. Repentant worship, the way to approach God in this state, starts with brokenness. If you have a brutal fight with your spouse, just a war of words in the car on the way to church, if you have one of those Sunday morning experiences where you just can't seem to get along with one of your children and there's infighting, or maybe it's the kids and you're a kid sitting here this morning and you're thinking, yeah, I'm constantly fighting with my sister or my brother over that on a Sunday morning. God doesn't want you to ignore all that experience when you hit the parking lot. So the vision of the Christian life isn't fighting and bickering and backtalk all the way to church, and you're coming up Flom and you take the right on Lenexa Drive, and then all of a sudden it's like you put the blinker on and you turn right into the parking lot and it's just— oh, put on the smiles! We're happy! We're at church! Nothing bad has happened with us today! That's not what God wants. The reality of fresh, ongoing despair, of fresh sin, Psalm 130 tells us that should affect the way we worship. Listen to how another penitent psalm, another psalm of repentance puts it. In Psalm 62 it says, "Be gracious to me, O Yahweh Lord." For I am languishing. Heal me, O Yahweh Lord, for my bones are troubled. My soul is greatly troubled. That's really powerful when they say, my bones are troubled. I feel this like an ache in my inner being. He comes before God and doesn't pretend like everything's just peachy. And that means it's spiritually healthy— listen to this— it's spiritually healthy to feel the weight of our sins. It doesn't mean it's healthy to sin, but it's spiritually healthy to feel the weight of that, to feel heavy when you're reminded and you know, "I've done wrong. I've hurt someone." And in my hurting them, I hurt an image bearer and I hurt God. I love how Charles Simeon explains the appropriateness of brokenness before God. Simeon is one of my favorite men of church history. Just a champion of the faith. Listen to how he talks about the appropriate place for brokenness. He says, it is doubtless a most joyful thought that we have redemption through the blood of our adorable Savior. But I have no less comfort in the thought that he is exalted to give repentance and remission of sin. Repentance is in every view so desirable, so necessary, so suited to honor God that I seek that above all. Repentance is central to how I worship, Simeon is saying. The tender heart, the broken and contrite spirit are to me far above all the joys that I could ever hope for in this vale of tears. I long to be in my proper place, my hand on my mouth and my mouth in the dust. I feel this to be safe ground. Here I cannot err. That sounds a lot different than than how we probably think of Sunday morning worship, right?

11 · Brief biographical note on Simeon's suffering establishing his credibility on the subject of brokenness and lament

He's a man who understood suffering, who understood years and decades of suffering, if you know his story. And for him, he knew it was a safe place to be prostrate before God in repentance, hand over his mouth, fearful for what his lips might say and clinging to the hope of Christ.

12 · Asserts the pastoral necessity of lament: it prevents both hypocrisy (phony joy) and isolation (lonely despair) by providing honest language for corporate worship in brokenness

Repentant laments are the antidote to phony joy and lonely despair. When you come stumbling into church, and not just because you're a klutz, like stumbling because you've just gotten sucker punched by something in life, And even worse, you can even recognize that part of this sucker punch is owing to something you did. On those mornings when it's agony just to get out of bed, because you're so aware of the hurt and the difficulty, the solution is not to pretend everything's okay. It's not to pretend that to be here with this people, to be accepted with this people in God's body, means you have to act like everything's going well.

13 · Applies the lament principle to the congregation's responsibility to bear one another's burdens, calling for empathy and presence with those who are suffering or broken

And that's a call for us too, isn't it? Sometimes it's hard to talk to someone who you know is in that place because you're not there with them. That is one of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to bear a burden. Another's burden. To come along a brother or sister and say, "I just want to stand with you. I just want to hear. I just want to assist you as you make your way to Jesus."

14 · Establishes that authentic worship requires emotional honesty before God, and that suppressing brokenness quenches the Spirit's work of conviction leading to confession

God wants honesty in our worship. He doesn't want people sitting in a room full of people feeling like they are 2 miles away from every other individual. He wants us to sense our unity together even as we are in different places emotionally. Psalm 130 is real. It is gritty. It's authentic Christian worship. This is as authentic as anything that happens at some stadium-packed concert. It reminds us that we aren't the first people to come before God with broken hearts. To camouflage the darkness, I think the psalmist is saying, is to quench the Spirit's conviction, to quench the Spirit's help, because godly sorrow, especially over our sin, if that's what's leading to the darkness, that leads to confession.

15 · Brief structural marker transitioning to exposition of the next section of the psalm

And we see that in the next verses, verses 3 and 4.

16 · Expounds Psalm 130:3-4, explaining the psalm's movement from the impossibility of standing before a holy God to the necessity of confession and assurance of forgiveness, illustrated by the structure of Reformed liturgy

If you 'Yahweh, O Lord, should mark iniquities. O Lord, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, that You may be feared.' Now, in more traditional Reformed liturgies— now, liturgy is just a really fancy word for the way you worship when you come together— in more traditional Reformed liturgies, there's actually a place every time they gather for some sort of act of confession on the part of the congregation. Sometimes it's a prayer of confession. Sometimes it's a song of confession. Sometimes they read together a section of Scripture as a form of corporate confession. Every time they gather, there's that sense, "We need it every week to come before God in His presence and to confess." Now, the beauty of Reformed liturgy is they don't just make sure there's always that place for confession, they also always make sure there's a place for assurance. And they follow it up with a song highlighting God's grace, another song highlighting the assurance of the gospel. But the point being, we need cleansing.

17 · Unpacks the theological weight of Psalm 130:3, emphasizing God's omniscience and the total impossibility of self-justification before a holy God who knows every secret sin

And we see this and sense this in Psalm 130. There's a sense of just the impossibility of justification. How can I stand? How can anybody stand before God? If He marks iniquities, if He keeps a record of wrongs, if He is God, and He is, and He's omniscient, and He is, and He knows everything that happened Saturday night, everything that happened last week, everything I've been doing for the last 2 years in secret, that no one knows about. If he knows that, how can I come?

18 · Defines the proper purpose of confession: not catharsis, self-pity, or spiritual performance, but reception of forgiveness that enables true worship characterized by reverent fear rather than servile terror

The reality of the psalmist's sin and its deserved penalty, they're not two separate things. He knows the evil of his heart. He knows the rebellion of his hands deserves punishment. But he also knows there's a way of escape, that repentance and confession lead to forgiveness. But here's the rub: real gospel confession, it's not meant to be just sort of some cathartic activity. The whole point of confession isn't just to do confession just to, "Oh, I'm glad I got that load off my back." Like, "I've kind of been feeling the burden, so I went through the motions of confessing and now I feel better." The purpose of confession isn't to come in thinking, "I just want to kind of wallow in self-pity for a while, and so I'm going to kind of put my self-pity under the banner of confession so I kind of have an excuse to wallow in front of everyone." The purpose of confession isn't to just look impressive. "Wow, that Jim, he always confesses a lot of stuff. He must be really holy." That's not the purpose. That's not the point. We confess to be forgiven. We confess to be cleansed. We confess, it says here, so that we can fear God appropriately. It's kind of a strange thing to think about, isn't it? I confess so that I can be cleansed of my sin and I don't have to worry about the guilt of my sins so that I can fear God appropriately. In other words, you confess so that you can have a heart that worships from loving reverence. It's not afraid of punishment. It's reverent of the true and living God.

19 · Summarizes the first movement and transitions to the second: from brokenness and confession to waiting in hope

That's what it means to approach God in brokenness. To recognize it's okay to acknowledge the darkness. It's okay to acknowledge I'm in a bad place. And it's good and necessary to confess and to repent. And then the psalmist shows us it continues. What do we do when we're just engulfed by the knowledge of our sin? Well, we come before God. We approach Him in brokenness. We repent. We confess. And we approach God in hope.

20 · Expounds Psalm 130:5-6, using the watchman imagery to explain the nature of waiting in hope

Verses 5 and 6: I wait for Yahweh the Lord My soul waits, and in His word I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning. There's an undeniable sense if you read this and you meditate on the psalm, you can just sort of feel there's a longing there, isn't there? My soul waits for the Lord. I've expressed my brokenness. I've confessed my need for forgiveness. And now I wait for God to respond. He waits and there's a sense of eager expectation. There's even a recognition, I think, that even though God forgives immediately, sometimes the darkness doesn't just disappear. Sometimes it still lingers. Forgiveness of sins doesn't wipe out consequence of sins. Sometimes we're still dealing with the aftereffects, and so it means we're still in the cloud. But there's an eager expectation, waiting in a steadfast endurance that shows the essence of our faith. He uses the image of the watchman, right? And this idea of the watchman is men who would sit on the walls of a city. So you can picture the walls of Jerusalem. There's even watchmen they had designated for the temple itself. They would sit and guard the temple. Now, we don't have this image very well because, frankly, we don't have walls around our cities. We have strategic missile defense systems and lasers and satellites and all sorts of things like that, and big tanks, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans that keep our enemies at bay, right? We have this huge border with Canada, but it's just Canada, so we're not worried. We don't have that sense they had in the ancient Near East of danger. You need to build a wall, and it's got to be a big wall, and it's got to be a thick wall. And when nighttime comes, you got to be alert. You don't want the enemy to creep up to your walls in the middle of the night. And so these watchmen would sit on these walls and walk on the top of these walls. You ever worked the night shift? Robert knows what I'm talking about. John knows what I'm talking about. You work the night shift, And like 3:30 in the morning, your eyes kind of start going two different directions, three if that was even possible. And you get to that point where you're thinking, "When will the morning come? When is my watch over?" Well, make that 1,000 times more acute. Because you're sitting there and your watch means you're responsible for the safety of all the souls sleeping behind you. And that watchman longs for the morning. But there's this beautiful thing that the psalmist is saying in that. Watchmen know it doesn't matter how black the night is. It doesn't matter if there's no moon in the sky and there is thick cloud cover and you can't see a single star and you're sitting there on the wall thinking, "I can't even see the bottom of the wall. How am I going to warn anybody?" No matter how thick the darkness, no matter how deep the depths, The watchman knows like clockwork what's going to happen. The sun is going to rise. Morning is going to come. And so there's this sense in the psalm that there is hope. No matter how deep the depths, no matter how long you've been in the depths, no matter how thick the despair, the watchman knows and you should know morning will come. The sun will rise. And that's the point. As surely as the sun will rise and the dawn will break, God will forgive our sins. It's a sweet promise. I love where it places the hope. The psalmist says his soul waits and hopes where? In his word. That is a really foreign thing in our culture. To orient yourself and your hope and your perspective of reality around what God's word says and not what the culture says. Or not what my favorite TV shows say, or not what I want to say, but to orient my hope around what God's Word says, which is to say, to orient my hope of forgiveness not in that I'm a good person, not in that I prayed the prayers right, not that I've prayed enough prayers and they've stacked up high enough, but to place my hope and to cling to God's promises, specifically to God's steadfast love. To place our hope there that out of the depths of sin in brokenhearted confession, God is loyal to His love for us. It's this unwavering commitment He has to the covenant and its promises. This is sort of, you could say, when we see steadfast love in the Old Testament, that's sort of the Old Testament version of John saying, "God is love." God is steadfast in love. Not love as we define it. Not love as we kind of water it down. True, deep, biblical, send my Son to the cross to die for you and raise Him in glory kind of love. Love that stretches all the way back before the creation of the world and says, I know I'm going to create, I know they're going to rebel, and I'm going to create anyway that I can express my love and my steadfastness, that I can raise up a people for my name. That kind of love. And we hope in that. We treasure it. And that kind of love changes hearts.

21 · Historical account of John Wesley's conversion, emphasizing how Psalm 130 prepared his heart to receive assurance of forgiveness and justification through faith

John Wesley. Everyone's heard of John Wesley, right? John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. He graduated, he's a super gifted individual, super gifted theologically, he's articulate, he's a winsome preacher, he's obviously a great leader of men. He creates an entire movement that spawns denominations. Well, he graduates from Oxford, so he's going to Oxford. He's obviously not a dummy, right? And he gets sent to Georgia. Now, you think Georgia's the sticks now. This is like you cross the Atlantic Ocean and you're going way to the sticks, Georgia. And he goes there as a missionary because Georgia is the wilderness. The few people that are there probably need the Gospel. And the Native Americans that are there need the Gospel. So he goes there in 1735. And at the end of 2 years, He comes back and he returns and he says a really interesting thing. He says he went there to convert the heathens and realized that he himself wasn't yet converted. He realizes in the midst of like this radical ministry that he's not even saved. And so he's just wrestling with, with what does it mean to have assurance? What does it mean to come to faith? And he has this famous conversion in 1738, 3 years after he left for Georgia. In London. And what's famous about the conversion is that he's with a group of people and they're studying Martin Luther's commentary on the book of Romans. And so they're reading the commentary, and actually they're reading the introduction, and he gets converted. And that's the famous part of the story. What people don't know is prior to that, in preparation of that evening, he goes out to essentially the version of a concert in that day and age. And he hears a production of this medley of songs, and the medley of songs is called "Out of the Depths," and it's all based on Psalm 130. And it's in sitting there listening to this medley of songs that he's caught. And this man who's gone across the ocean in a day and age when you don't only survive that journey to be a missionary, only to realize he's not converted, you can kind of come back and think, I mean, you might just be totally done with God at that point. He hears a song based on this psalm and the truth of this lament and the raw needy honesty, the nature of the prayer, it cuts Wesley to the core. And God prepares him, prepares him for the hope of justification he'll hear about later that night. Wesley describes the whole experience. Saying, "It was as though I physically felt my heart being warmed. I sensed for the first time the Spirit's testimony to me that there was a conscious knowledge of sins forgiven and acceptance with God." In part because of this psalm.

22 · Expounds Psalm 130:7-8, defining redemption as God's purchase and payment to remove guilt

It's why if we lose our ability to lament in prayer and worship, We lose something fundamental to what it means to be a Christian. These laments show us the gospel when our souls are most desperately in need of it. They communicate hope to the unbeliever and hope to faltering Christians. They show us that God hears and even makes himself known in the depths. But the best part of the psalm is its conclusion. The best part is how the psalm ends. It's not that we must only wait and hope. It's not that we have to approach in brokenness if we're approaching mindful of our sin. It's that we approach God with assurance. And assurance is one of the sweetest gifts God gives His people. Look at verses 7-8. O Israel, hope in Yahweh the Lord, for with Yahweh the Lord there is steadfast love, and with Him— I love this phrase— is plentiful redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. So it's not just that there's steadfast love, right? It's not just that there's this million miles deep love of God that remains faithful to His promises. It's not just that. It's that there's redemption. And that's so important. What does redemption mean? It means there's a purchase made to buy someone back. If the Lord would mark iniquities, who could stand, right? That's the question he starts out with. If God knows, and He does know, everything I've done wrong, there's no way I can ever pray. I can never worship. I can never come before Him. There's no hope. There's only hope for the one whose assurance of forgiveness is grounded in a God who redeems. In other words, God promises to pay the price. He promises to remove the guilt. He promises to clean the slate. One of my favorite lines in the Psalms: to wash us whiter than snow. That's a sweet image, right? If you're really in the place of brokenness, you can just think of yourself, and you probably can't help but think of yourself as just broken and dingy and defiled. This plentiful redemption promises that when God's done with you, you will be spotless. You will be perfect. I love how Psalm 25 puts this assurance. It puts it this way: Remember your mercy, Yahweh, O Lord, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. In other words, you've always been this way. Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions. According to Your steadfast love, remember me for the sake of Your goodness, Yahweh, O Lord. Then in verse 11, for Your name's sake, Yahweh, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great. Redeem me, cleanse me, don't remember anymore all the wrongs. Why? Do it for Your namesake. Do it because You are a God who is thick and rich in steadfast love, whose mercy knows no bounds. What's awesome about this psalm is there's a sense of proportion, right? Look at Psalm 130. How does it start out? There's this sense of just the enormity of sins. Out of the depths. I think of all my sins and I'm just like, I don't have any hope. I'm toast. But the enormity of those sins in this sense of proportion is overcome by the plentiful, abundant redemption of God. Here's what the psalmist is saying: I don't care how great your sins are, there is a greater Redeemer. I don't care how deep the defilement goes. God cleanses deeper.

23 · Personal story of a friend's inability to receive communion due to lack of assurance, followed by theological explanation of communion's purpose and a biblical-theological connection between the feeding of the 5,000 and Christ's sacrifice as plentiful provision

I had a good friend from college. He came and visited one Sunday up in Minnesota to our church. And it was before I was serving as a pastor. I was just in seminary at the time. And he sat with us that Sunday. And it was actually a communion Sunday. And I loved Scotty. He was a good guy. Really funny, kind of happy-go-lucky guy. Like everyone who knew him just kind of knew him as like this bubbly, kind of goofy guy. And they passed out communion, and I knew Scotty was a believer, and the communion plate came to him and he just passed it by. Did it for the bread. The juice comes by, he passes it by again. I'm trying not to pry, you know, but I can't help but notice like when I pass it to him, he just passes it on. And so on So on the ride home, I just asked him, I said, "You know, Scott, I just noticed you didn't take any communion today. Is there a reason for that? Is there something I can pray for you about? What's going on?" And he just kind of looked at me and we're driving so it's kind of this awkward, you know, we're guys anyway so it's awkward, but now we're driving and so we kind of got the excuse not to make eye contact. And I'm just sort of irresponsibly trying to look over at him And his eyes just sort of tear up. Not sort of, I mean they tear up. And he just says, "I just don't know. I believe, but I just don't know that He's forgiven me. I just feel like I couldn't take it. I just don't feel like I have any assurance." And I'm not doing justice to just the palpable sense of of despair that was in that car for Scotty. And I don't know what I said, I probably didn't do justice to what I should have said. But you know what the purpose of the communion table is for? It's to renew that sense of assurance. It's not that you come flippantly. You come committing flagrant sins and then just flippantly take the communion. It's to come in brokenness and repentance and to receive the assurance of the table. To receive the assurance of the table with a congregation of people who are just like you. I don't care how much despair you're in, this is a room full of people just like you. They might not admit it as honestly as you do, but they are broken and they are in need of cleansing. Cleansing. They are broken and they are limping and they need healing. And that's what this table is for, to remind us. There's a foreshadowing of Christ's provision when He feeds the 5,000. This isn't like a stretch of just, "Oh, He kind of stretched that text." I think they're foreshadowing for us. He sits there with 5,000 people. We know the miracle, right? All these people, they can't send them home. They need food. The disciples say, "We went out and all we found was 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. What are we going to do?" Jesus says, "No problem." Multiplies the loaves, they feed 5,000. And there's leftover baskets. There's more food than they need. It's not just a miracle saying, "Wow, Jesus must be the Messiah. He must be God because He can take a loaf of bread and multiply it a bunch of times over." I think it's a foreshadowing to what He's going to do when His body is broken. That this one body because He's, yes, fully man, but also fully God. When this one body is broken, it makes plentiful redemption. It's enough to cover the depths of your sin. It's enough to cover the depths of sin of everyone. It's plentiful. It's great. You can't plumb the depths of how much is provided. The cross gives the greatest provision possible. If God can ensure that a little loaf of bread meets the needs of thousands, surely we can trust that the breaking of His Son, the tearing and the ripping and the crushing of the Word of God meets the needs of anyone who cries out for help. Christ's sacrifice is the guarantee of what Psalm 130 hopes in. There is plentiful, limitless, abundant redemption. Jesus saves to the uttermost.

24 · Direct evangelistic and pastoral appeal to both struggling believers lacking assurance and religious but unconverted individuals, calling them to trust in Christ's sufficient redemption

If you come in here this morning and you're like Scotty, you know, you're saved, but you're just doubting and you're limping, entrust yourself to Jesus. If you're sitting here this morning, maybe you've come a couple times, maybe you've grown up in the church, maybe you've been to church a bunch of times, but you know in your heart you've never truly— you're like Wesley, right? You're maybe like— maybe you're a care group leader. Maybe you're like the picture-perfect church kid. You're the missionary to Georgia. And you know, you might say all the right things, but you don't know Jesus. There is plentiful redemption. Come before Him in brokenness. Repent. Confess. And believe the hope of the gospel, that Jesus dying is more than enough for God to forgive you and for God to cleanse you.

25 · Imaginative meditation on Jesus praying Psalm 130 both as a 12-year-old and as an adult heading to crucifixion, emphasizing that though He was sinless, He would soon bear our sin and experience the depths of judgment in our place

Here's an awesome thought. I thought of this towards the end of preparation. These are Ascent Psalms, right? So these are psalms that are sung and prayed on the way to Jerusalem for festivals. It's written and put in a place in this altar, which means it's probably post-exilic, which is just a fancy way of saying it's probably written after they returned from exile. So Judah gets sent off, they finally get sent back, but they're living under foreign rule. So it's a psalm that's written in the hope that everything's going to be restored one day. So you know what that means? You know who got to experience praying the Ascent Psalm? 12-year-old Jesus going to the temple for the first time with Mary and Joseph. He prayed these Psalms. What's that like? Imagine this. He's going, he's praying the Psalm that's all about confessing sin, and he's never committed it. He doesn't even know, like, I don't know what this depth is like. I've never been there. I've never known any diminishment of fellowship with the Father. It's only been perfect because I've only been perfect. And this guy, he's not your typical 12-year-old, but he goes to the temple and what happens? The scribes are like, man, this guy's got game. He's reciting stuff backwards to us. There's a growing sense for Jesus of who He is. But it's not just then that he says it, because that's not the only time Jesus goes to Jerusalem. He goes there as an adult. He goes with his disciples. He goes to celebrate Passover. He goes praying these songs. And this time he knows he's on his way to crucifixion. So He prays a prayer of repentant lament about sin He's never committed. But He knows in a few days He's going to taste the depths in a different way. Because He's going to be made sin in our place.

26 · Continues the Christological meditation, emphasizing Christ's confidence in the Father's steadfast love and the sufficiency of His redemptive work

But He also knows the assurance of hope. That His Father has steadfast love. His Father has steadfast love for a broken, rebellious people. So of course His Father has steadfast love for Him, the perfect Son, the true Heir of David, the true Son of Abraham, the true Israel. So He knows with assurance there will be plenty of love plentiful redemption. They might spit on Him, they might beat Him, they might whip Him, they might hang Him from a tree, they might mock Him, they might throw His dead body in a grave, but there will be plentiful redemption because He will make it and the Father will be satisfied with it. You know what Scott's problem was, my friend, who couldn't take communion? I don't think he ever looked beyond himself. I think he felt incapable of communion because he was paralyzed with introspection, just in the swirling vortex of his own brokenness. But notice how the psalm ends. It's totally external. What begins with an internal agony and brokenness ends with external assurance, not because the psalmist is strong enough, not because his prayer was perfect enough, not because of his own moral purity, but because of something totally external: God's steadfast love. Owen is the famous Puritan theologian. He took this Psalm, Psalm 130, and he wrote over 100 pages of commentary on it, on 8 verses. Now, you've got to have some serious intellect to do that. It's in volume 6 of his work. Sin and Temptation is the famous name of it. It's one of his most famous works out there. Well, he does that, and he writes on it because he knows we need to grasp the nature and importance of this psalm. And he's got a buddy who's burdened by his sins, similar to probably how Wesley was or my buddy Scott was, and he says, "I just don't know how I can be assured of forgiveness. I don't know how to personally experience Christ." This is what Owen wrote. Another one of his works. This is faith's great and bold venture upon the grace, faithfulness, the steadfast loving kindness and truth of God to stand by the cross and say, ah, he is bruised for my sins. He's wounded for my transgressions and the chastisement of my peace is upon him. He is thus made sin for me. Here I give up my sins to Him that is able to bear them, to undergo them. He requires it of my hands that I should be content that He should undertake for them, and that I heartily consent to it. This is every day's work. I don't know how to have any peace and how it can be maintained with God without it. If it be the work of souls to receive Christ as made sin for us, we may, we must, Receive Him as one who takes our sins upon Him. You sense how totally external it is? Not as though He died anymore or suffered anymore, but as the faith of the saints of old made that present and done before their eyes which had not yet come to pass. We'll go back to that phrase. Hebrews 11:1, so faith now makes that present which was accomplished and passed many generations ago. This is to know, to experience Christ crucified. To entrust yourself that God takes your sins and puts them on another. He says in that kind of complicated line, this is what the psalmist did. He didn't know what it was going to look like, but he entrusted himself by faith that God would do it. And we do the same thing by faith. The psalmist looked forward and said, I know somehow God is going to make a way. And somehow He's going to take away all the brokenness, and somehow He's going to do it through His anointed and through His Messiah. And we look back and we say, we see how God did it, how He accomplished it in Jesus. And we have assurance that because He did that with Jesus and because He raised Him from the grave, Jesus will one day return. It's a promise for old, ancient Hebrew proto-Christians, and it's a promise for new modern, remade Christians. And it's great hope.

27 · Closing doxological movement, calling the congregation to love and practice lament because it leads to Christ, the only source of hope

This Psalm is all over church history. Beza, Theodore Beza, Calvin's apprentice, he died with the words of Psalm 130 on his lips. He wanted to be praying it when he breathed his last. We have to learn to love psalms of lament and repentance. We have to learn to worship in their truth, because they point us to our only source of hope in this world. In the face of our sins is the truth that Jesus shed his blood for us. Conclude with the words of a hymn. I think it's appropriate. It's written by Charles Wesley. John's brother. He might have been there when the conversion happened. No doubt John shared with him what happened. This is what Charles wrote: Let the world their virtue boast and works of righteousness. I, a wretch undone and lost, am freely saved by grace. Take me, Savior, as I am. Let me lose my sins in thee. Friend of sinners, spotless Lamb, Thy blood was shed for me. Full of truth and grace Thou art, and here is all my hope. False and foul as hell my heart, to Thee I offer up. You hear the brokenness of Psalm 130? Thou wast given to redeem my soul from iniquity. Friend of sinners. "Spotless Lamb, Thy blood was shed for me. Nothing have I, Lord, to pay, nor can Thy grace procure. Empty send me not away, for Thou knowest I am poor. Dust and ashes is my name. My all is sin and misery." Ah, Friend of sinners! Spotless Lamb, thy blood was shed for me.