Psalm 13
Date: April 7th, 2024
Speaker: Sam Crites
Scripture: Psalm 13
Exegetical Outline
MIT: David resolutely trusts the Lord in the midst of begging for relief from his enemies.
1-2: David pleads to the Lord for relief.
How long will you forget?
How long will you hide your face?
How long must I be isolated in sorrow?
How long shall my enemy prevail?
3-4: David makes reasonable requests of the Lord.
Requests
Consider me.
Answer me.
Lift me up
Reasons
Lest David die.
Lest his enemies prevail.
Lest his foes rejoice.
5-6: David makes resolutions.
David has resolved to trust in God’s steadfast love.
David has resolved to rejoice in the God’s salvation.
David has resolved to sing to Lord.
Homiletical Outline
MIS: The Christian response to suffering is prayer for relief and a resolve to persevere.
The Christian response to suffering is to pray for relief.
We pray for relief because God has already promised us an end to suffering.
We pray for relief to demonstrate the glory of God.
The Christian response to suffering is a resolve to persevere.
We resolve to trust in God’s steadfast love for us.
We resolve to have joy because salvation means our suffering is temporary.
We resolve to sing in the midst of our tears because God has given us an inheritance in Christ.
Introduction:
As we have been studying the Psalms this year, it has been important to understand what section of the Psalter we are in. The psalms are divided into five books and we have been studying the third major section of book one. The first section was the introduction of Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 that not only introduce the first book of the Psalms, they really introduce the entire Psalter because they introduce us to the main character of the Psalms: the blessed man of Psalm 1 and the only begotten Son of Psalm 2. He is the future king that was promised to David in 2 Samuel 7 and he is the only one that can bring a unity to all the psalms in the book.
The second section, Psalms 3-9, followed David’s crisis with Absalom, his son, who was attempting to usurp his father and steal the throne of Israel for himself. This horrific episode of David’s life is proof that he is not the blessed man of Psalm 1 or the only begotten Son in Psalm 2. Everything that took place during this period of David’s life was a direct result of David’s own sin and deceitfulness. God used Absalom to punish David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah. We saw that when God saved David, it was not because David deserved it, but because God was gracious to David.
The last three weeks, we have been in the third section, Psalms 10-14, in which David considers the depravity of man and the need for God’s salvation. Psalms 10 and 14 especially expound the doctrine of the depravity of man. They are two of the most clear passages in all the Old Testament that explain the nature of man’s fallen state. Psalms 11 and 13 describe the relationship between the righteous and the wicked, particularly how the wicked oppress the righteous and make them suffer and how the righteous respond to suffering. Finally, as we saw last week, Psalm 12 sits at the poetic center of these psalms with verse 5 of Psalm 12 sitting at the center of the entire unit.
In the midst of all this suffering and pain, a silent God finally speaks, and when he does, he arises from his throne and rescues the future, promised king that from our perspective has already come. God’s answer to the suffering of the righteous at the hands of the wicked was to send his only begotten Son to die a death he did not deserve in order to preserve a remnant of a people for himself and guard them from the evil into which they were born.
Psalms 10-14 are dark psalms that deal with the weighty issues of pain, suffering, and depravity, but against the blackness of that night, the pinpricks of grace shine brightly across that sky. We see in these psalms the sovereign plan of God’s salvation laid down before time began.
Which brings us back to Psalm 13. Poetically, Psalm 13 is coming on the back half of the entire unit. We have already seen in Psalm 12 God’s response to David’s pleas in Psalm 11. He will arise and save, but in Psalm 13 David is still suffering. God has promised salvation, but the pain of this life still lingers. Let’s read Psalm 13 and see how David responds to God’s promise in Psalm 12.
Psalm 13
13 To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
4 lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
5 But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
David’s response to God’s promise in Psalm 12 is so relatable to me. The false David that we have in our head, the super holy youth that slew giants and conquered the Philistines with 37 demi-god-like mighty men, would not have written Psalm 13. He was tough and durable and bullet-proof. Pain doesn’t faze that guy. But David is not that guy. He knew pain and suffering. He knew what it was like to cry out to the Lord and beg for relief. In Psalm 13, he gives us an example of how a Christian is supposed to respond to suffering in their life. The beauty of this Psalm is that it is balanced. It tells us to both cry out for relief and to be resolute in our faith to persevere. The main idea of our sermon is this: The Christian response to suffering is to pray for relief and to resolve to persevere.
First, we will see David’s plea for relief. The first thing we will see is in this psalm is that the Christian response to suffering is to pray for relief. Suffering and pain are an inevitable and necessary part of the Christian’s life. It is the means by which God refines us to be more like Christ and it comes in many forms: the generic sufferings of pain, self-denial, specific persecutions. But nowhere in Scripture does it say that we have to enjoy suffering or that we are prohibited from praying for it to end. In fact, here we see David say just that. How long oh Lord until the end you promised, the salvation from Psalm 12, will come to be? Make it all stop. In our first point, we will see that David models two reason to pray for an end to suffering, because God has already promised us an end to suffering and so that the glory of God will be seen by his enemies.
Second, we will see that there is a second Christian response to suffering. The second Christian response to suffering is to resolve to persevere. David models three practical things the Christian is to do in order to persevere and none of them have to do with personal grit or willpower. First, he resolves to trust God’s steadfast love because he has found it to be trustworthy. Second, he resolves to rejoice in God’s salvation because it is his only hope. And Finally, he has resolved to sing to the Lord because the Lord has dealt bountifully with him. David’s resolve is not dependent on David. He sees what God has already done and finds it reasonable in spite of his circumstances to stick it out.
This has been a rough week. I was sicker this week than I have been in a long time and now Molly is sick. Psalm 13 is an encouragement because it gives voice to both our desire for suffering to end and encourages us to persevere in spite of our suffering. Psalm 13 teaches Christians that the appropriate response to suffering is to both pray for it to end and to persevere in our confidence that God will bring it to an end.
The Christian response to suffering is to pray for relief.
Let’s consider the first Christian response to suffering that we see in Psalm 13, namely that we should pray for a relief to our suffering. Let’s reread verses 1-4:
Psalm 13:1-4
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
4 lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
David gives us two reasons why we should pray for an end to suffering. The first reason that we should pray for an end to suffering is because God has promised us an end to suffering. Look at verses 1 and 2. Verses 1 and 2 are really just a series of four questions that David asks God. The key to understanding these questions is the extraordinary promise that God made in the middle of Psalm 12.
The significance of Psalm 12:5 cannot be overstated. It is the poetic center of not only Psalm 12, but also Psalms 10-14. It is the only time in all five psalms where God himself speaks and when he does he promises to rescue. In a general sense, he rescues the poor and the needy, but in a very specific sense he rescues an individual. The Father rises from his throne to save the Son and through the Son he keeps and redeems a people for himself.
This is what we saw last week on Easter and this is what David is responding to at the beginning of Psalm 13. In the light of such a great promise of deliverance, David is crying out to God and asking how much longer until this promise is realized? This very specific promise from Psalm 12:5 in which the Lord has promised to save his people from the oppression of evil in this world. His prayer is raw, authentic and a prayer we have all prayed at some point in our lives. Father, please bring an end to the stress I am in at work? Would you end this sickness that afflicts me? Would you please save my child that has been so rebellious? David is showing us that it is ok to ask God to bring an end to the suffering that we experience in life because he has already promised that he would.
This should change the way that we read his questions. If you notice, David asks God four questions. (1) How long, O Lord, will you forget me? (2) How long will you hide your face from me? (3) How long must I sit in sorrowful isolation? And (4) how long will my enemies prevail over me? What is fascinating is that David has already answered every one of these questions in our study of the psalms.
To the first question, how long, O Lord, will you forget me? David says this in Psalm 9:12:
Psalm 9:12
12 For he who avenges blood is mindful of them;
he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.
To the second question, how long will you hide your face from me? David says in Psalm 10:11, 14:
Psalm 10:11, 14
11 [The wicked] says in his heart, “God has forgotten,
he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”
14 But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation,
that you may take it into your hands;
to you the helpless commits himself;
you have been the helper of the fatherless.
To the third question, how long must I sit in sorrowful isolation? David said in Psalm 4:7:
Psalm 4:7
7 You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
And to the final question, how long will my enemies prevail over me? In Psalm 1:4-6, David says:
Psalm 1:4-6
4 The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
These questions that David is asking are not challenges to God or complaining, they are the longing of a man that has heard the promise of God and aches for it to be actualized in his life. God has said that he will arise and bring an end to his suffering and David desperately wants God to do it. David can pray that bring an end to his suffering because God’s promises are the foundation of David’s prayer.
The second reason that David can pray for God to bring an end to his suffering is because only God can. He is seen as unique, set apart. If God brings an end to David’s suffering, David’s enemies will have to recognize the power and majesty of David’s God. Look at verses 3-4:
Psalm 13:3-4
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
4 lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
It is appropriate to pray for an end to suffering, because when God brings it to an end, he does it ways that only God can. If David took matters into his own hands and delivered himself, David would be the one that people thought was powerful and majestic. But if David is weak and clearly unable to deliver himself but he gets delivered anyway, then only someone as powerful as God could have done that.
So David show us two really good reasons why we should pray to God and ask him to bring an end to our sufferings; (1) he has already promised to do so, and (2) it brings him glory to do it. I hope this is comforting to some in this room who are going through difficult times of struggle or suffering. In the midst of your pain, you might be tempted to believe that God wants you to suffer or that in some way you deserve whatever is taking place in your life as a punishment. That could not be further from the truth. Romans 8:1-2 says:
Romans 8:1-2
8 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
Whatever is taking place in your life, if you are in Christ, it is not because God is angry at you or punishing you. Jesus Christ has sufficiently paid the penalty and satisfied the wrath of God against your sin. God is not punishing you and you do not deserve the sufferings that you experience in this life. Psalm 12 says you deserve rescue and protection not because of what you have done, but because of what Christ did.
What Psalm 13 is showing us is that you do not have to sit passively in your sufferings. You do not just have to take it. You can do the most powerful and proactive thing possible to put an end to your pain. You can take your suffering to God in prayer and ask him to bring them to an end, to demonstrate his faithfulness to the promises that he has already made and to bring glory to his name.
Who knows, he might just do something about it. He might deliver and put things right in this life, and if he did, how glorious that would be.
But he may not. Our God is a free God, beholden to no one. He does what he pleases when he pleases and he knows things we do not know. Isaiah 55:8, says his thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. They are better.
The promise of God to deliver and heal his people is an ultimate promise not and immediate promise. There are times when God’s healing and God’s deliverance break into this world; in fact, we would say every time anyone is healed or anyone is delivered, it is because God has caused it to happen. It is a gift from him and a foretaste of the glory that is yet to be revealed in the new heavens and the new earth. But healing and deliverance do not always come in this life.
The Christian response to suffering is a resolve to persevere.
The second way David teaches us to respond to suffering is to persevere. Lets read verses 5 and 6 again:
Psalm 12:5-6
5 But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
The most important word in all of this psalm comes at the beginning of verse 5, “but.” So many times in the Christian life we have prayed late at night for our children “God save them. Show them their sin and need for a savior.” Or, “Father, please help my friend to see that alcohol and weed are ruining his life.” Or, God, help me find a doctor that will be able to help my wife beat her cancer.” How many of those prayers end with those requests? How many of them continued in the way that David continued?
Psalm 12:5-6
5 But [if not] I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
But, if not, God, you are still good. You still have a good plan and I will trust you. I don’t understand. I don’t agree. But I know you love me. You have shown your faithfulness and I will trust you.
Job 13:15
15 Though he slay me, I will hope in him;
Job 13:15. So many of us have prayed the first prayer, how many of us have finished it the right way? The Christian response to suffering in life is to pray for relief, and if it does not come, they are to persevere. And David has shown us how to do both.
But before we look at what David tells us about persevering in the midst of suffering, I want to draw a distinction between surviving and persevering. To survive hardship and suffering is just to keep living. Surviving hardship is what lost people do. This life is full of suffering and hardship for both the righteous and the wicked. Many people that do not follow Jesus will go through more challenging things than Christians will; that they make it through those hardships is not the perseverance that David is talking about in Psalm 13. There is no purpose to their suffering and hardships other than the fact that God has subjected the world to futility because of sin, Romans 8:19. Making it through, surviving, suffering and hardship is not perseverance. That is merely what any lost person would be able to do.
The difference is in what David teaches us at the end of Psalm 13. To persevere implies not just making it through to the other side, but working through to the other side. Driving through the suffering by being active, not passive. To keep walking through the storm, not hunkering down until it passes, and David gives us three ways to do that in these last two verses of Psalm 13. Let’s look at them together.
First, persevering in suffering means trusting in God’s steadfast love. One of the biggest differences between the wicked surviving suffering and the righteous persevering in suffering is that the righteous are loved by God. They are loved by an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present being that sees all of time from beginning to end present to him in one moment. He is bound by nothing but his own nature. He has no beginning and no end. He is absolutely sovereign. He is absolutely good. Which means that nothing that takes place that he has not ordained to take place and all that does take place ultimately works out for the good of those that love him and have been called according to his purposes. (Romans 8:28) David is saying, “I believe that. I believe that you love me and whatever is taking place, thought I do not understand it, I will trust that you love me and are working it out for my good.” Faith in God’s steadfast love is one of the ways that David shows us that we can take control of our suffering.
But we might ask ourselves, how does David have such trust in God’s steadfast love? What gives him the confidence in this God? He can’t see him and he doesn’t seem to be doing anything for David in this particular moment of pain and struggle? David’s confidence in God’s steadfast love today is built on God’s steadfast love in the past. To be steadfast it to be time tested.
Here is a lesson for the young adults and teenagers in the room. Infatuation can be established in an instant, steadfast love takes time. It take years, even decades, to establish a love that lasts, for the easy and exciting emotion of infatuation to develop and mature into unwavering love and affection. I don’t mean that to discourage you, but to encourage you. For all my young couples or those that hope to be married one day, there is something so much better available to you than merely infatuation. There is a kind of affection that transcends appearances, that gives when it does not receive, that keeps caring in spite of being injured, a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. You know it is real because it is the love you have experienced in Christ and through Christ it is the kind of love you can have in a healthy, God honoring marriage. It just takes time. It takes intimacy and openness, and it takes work.
That the kind of love that David has experienced from God. A love that has never wavered. From the moment that Samuel anointed his head with oil, God has called David, protected David, shown him favor and raised him up above all of his brothers. When he was chased by Saul, when he was chased by Absalom, when he lived among his enemies, the Philistines, God has been so steadfastly loving toward David. He has demonstrated a thousand times over that he is worthy of David’s trust, because he loves David.
And the truth this morning is that if we really sat down and thought about it, God has been just as steadfast and trustworthy in all of our lives. For everyone that is a follower of Jesus, you can look back on your life, even the part of your life when you were not a Christian, and now you can see God’s faithfulness. He moved you from the State you did live in, when you didn’t want to move, to a new State and there finally met someone who told you about Christ. He rescued from an abusive relationship in spite of the poor life choices that led you into it and gave you a new spouse and a new life of joy and happiness. When you didn’t know how you were going to pay your tuition or when you didn’t know where you were going to live after you lease was up, someone took you in and offered you a place to live. They got you back on your feet. They gave you a profession and taught you to be a man in a way that your father never did. In all these ways and a million more, God has been so kind to all of us. He has been gracious and slow to punish. He has been longsuffering and has demonstrated a trustworthiness in the past that, like David, should be the foundation for our ability to trust him in the midst of our suffering.
The second, perseverance in suffering means having joy because salvation means that our suffering is temporary. The amazing thing about this second lesson is that David chooses the joy. He chooses it. My heart shall rejoice. He doesn’t give it a choice. He forces his heart to feel joyful in spite of his suffering. How is that possible? Who could choose to be happy? Isn’t joy an emotion?
Joy is something far deeper than a mere emotion. Some pastors might say that joy is not an emotion, but I think that is not true. If joy doesn’t make you want to dance and leap then you have to wonder if it is actually joy. It is not that joy is not an emotion or emotional, but that it is not merely an emotion. Happiness, sadness, anger, these are things that come upon us by external circumstance. They are reactions to external stimuli. They come and they go. They do not last.
Joy, however, is something far deeper. It is an abiding state of being that transcends external factors and the situations that we find ourselves in, and David makes that profoundly clear in Psalm 13:5. Look at it. He says, my heart shall rejoice in what? Not in his circumstances, his emotions are probably all over the place because the situation he is in when he wrote this psalm is pretty clearly not a good one. No, he says he will rejoice, in spite of his circumstances, in God’s salvation. What salvation? He clearly hasn’t experienced it yet. He is still in great need of salvation. He is choosing to rejoice in a salvation that is yet to come in the future that gives him the joy to persevere today. It gives him the joy to drive through the pain of his current circumstance through to the other side. A stability that, in spite of how the storms rock his ship, it will not tip over because there is a ballast deep down in his soul. He has a promise of future salvation that is inviable. No one can touch it or change it. It will happen because God has promised in Psalm 12 that it would.
We can all have this same joy. You have been promised a salvation that has yet to be realized. None of us have stood before God to give an account for our actions. Salvation implies being saved from something. We should be the most joyful people because we know that when we stand before the just judgment of God, we will not find wrath but peace because we will be saved with a salvation that is so certain it should put a smile on our soul today.
Finally, the last lesson in perseverance that David teaches us in Psalm 13 is this: perseverance through suffering means singing through our tears because God has given us an inheritance in Christ. I am so excited to briefly talk about this last one because I love to sing. If you are guest today, I hope you have notice that our Church sings differently. Singing is an essential part of Christian devotion. It is one of the five ways that we worship in our Sunday morning worship gatherings. In our services, we worship as we read the Word, pray the Word, preach the Word, see the Word in the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and we worship as we sing the Word.
There are so many Christians, and I am particularly picking on the men here, that do not sing. Even though Scripture explicitly commands Christians to sing. Turn with me very quickly to Colossians 3:16. I want to show you something. Paul says:
Colossians 3:16
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Paul says to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, and if he would have stopped there most of us would have thought that he would have finished that sentence by saying through preaching. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say that. How is this magnificent ministry of teaching and admonishing the brothers and the sisters in the Church accomplished? It is accomplished through singing God word to each other. Singing the psalms, singing hymns that are written from Scripture and songs that have spiritual value and content.
This means a couple things. Singing is an essential part of the teaching ministry of the Church and falls directly under the supervision of the elders. So every song we sing at Mosaic is vetted by the elders and every service is put together with purpose to highlight the sermon text. It also that the songs are meant to teach and train you for the day when you need to sing through your tears. We sing a variety of songs in our hymn book so that you have a bank of songs to draw upon in the various seasons of life that you will go through. We need songs for the major and minor keys of life.
The last thing that we can learn from Colossians 3 is that when we gather to sing, we are not only singing to God, we are singing to each other. We both adore and appreciate and sing true things about God and we encourage, teach, and admonish each other. We look across the room and see our brothers and sisters, and the more intimately they are a part of our lives, the more encouraging it is when we hear them singing. When we know the pains and heartaches in their lives and we see them singing anyway, it is an encouragement that we also should continue to sing praises to God.
It reminds us that we have a good reason to sing. Not because of what is taking place in our life at that instant, but because, like David, God has dealt bountifully with us. He has given us his own Son as a sacrifice for our sins, he has given us a home and a family, and he has given us an inheritance that is imperishable and unfading. We have such a greater glory awaiting us that has not yet been revealed that the momentary afflictions of this life should never distract us. One of the ways that God has given the Church to drive through those afflictions is to sing to one another both to teach and train each other toward heaven and to encourage each other to keep going.
Conclusion
As we conclude, think about how kind our God is. In this life of suffering and pain, he does not leave us in our suffering. He has promised to rescue us from this world of pain and hardship. Revelation 21:4 says:
Revelation 21:4
4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
That promise is true. It is certain because it has been secured by the blood of his only begotten Son.
But he is also good because until that day comes, he has not left us without hope. He has given us the ability to approach the throne of grace through prayer and find help. We can go to him and petition him for relief from our sufferings. But he has also given us the strength through the power of the Holy Spirit to persevere through our pains and sufferings.
Psalm 13 shows us that Christians are not passive in this world. When we face trials and sufferings, we have been given the ability to go to the one that can end our sufferings and trust the same one that will give us the power to persevere through them.
Let’s pray.