Psalm 143: Dealing with depression

SPEAKER_00: Good morning. We are in Psalm 143 today. And I love the Psalm. So I I'm really excited to actually get a chance to teach it. Uh a couple of years after I became a Christian, my grandfather died. And it was the first time that I had lost someone close to me. And I was since I was raised in an atheist home, I really had very little knowledge of the Bible or Christianity or religion in general. And so and I was a new Christian. I was about to losing my grandfather presented all kinds of new challenges. I didn't know how to view death as a believer, and I didn't know how to grieve, and I really didn't know how to express what was going on. Now, granted, I was a new believer, and so were a lot of my friends because I was in college and um for some reason at the church I was going to, everybody that helped out in the college group was about the same age. There was nobody with gray hair. So in many ways, we we kids were just kind of pulling our ignorance. You know, we didn't really have some we needed some older, wiser people to step in. So I remember struggling in that situation of how do I deal with this and feeling this pressure to be upbeat no matter what. Because it seemed that my Christian friends gave me permission to be courageous, you know, and to be brave and to be steadfast, but no one really seemed to think that it was all right to be afraid or to grieve or to be um hurt. So in my ignorance, I came to this conclusion that, well, real Christians don't hurt, and that they had some kind of maturity or magic in their faith that made it so they were cheerful and they knew the right thing to say, and they had it all together. And if you needed that shoulder to cry them, well then you you weren't really a a good Christian. But the worst thing about my conclusion, which was wrong, was that I was afraid to admit it to God because I was convinced that what I was feeling must be wrong, that I didn't know enough or I wasn't good enough, or um, you know, I was letting God down. So how could I pray to him about it? I wasn't being the kind of believer you were supposed to be, and how could I let him know, you know, that I was failing this Christianity thing. I mean, I knew enough to know that he'd saved me and he'd forgiven me and he'd called me, and now the first bump on the road, and I didn't get it right. You know, I was a mess. So what kind of a Christian is that? So I'd like to say, oh, I found Psalm 143, and all my wrong ideas were put to right, but that didn't happen. I didn't find this psalm until years later. But I find that I've always been drawn to lament psalms. I don't know why. Especially this kind of psalm, which is a penitential lament psalm or repentant lament psalm, because they're the kind of prayer that I think often we Christians are too put together to pray in public. You know, we don't really want to show people that we're in that kind of anguish, but they often accurately re reflect um how we're feeling. So it's I find it very comforting to know that you can see in the scriptures that not only did genuine true believers fall into the pits of depression and despair, but that when they do, they can go to God in that dark place. Um because my uh naive conclusions were wrong. The Christians do hurt, Christians do grieve, and it's appropriate and in fact necessary to take that hurt to God. So that's what Psalm 143 is about. It's about being in this deep black pit of despair and finding God there. It's about depression, and I think in particular, the kind of depression you feel when you're confronted with your sin. So the kind of depression when you do something or say something or don't do something you should have done, and it has consequences, and those consequences hurt. What do you do? Now let me give you a disclaimer here. There is, I'm not saying there are kinds of depression for which you ought to seek medical and professional help. I'm not discounting that. Um what this psalm is about is those times in our lives when we realize we're not the people we ought to be, when we realize kind of anew the depths of how sinful we are, um, and that we're broken, defeated sinners, and we've said and done things we shouldn't, and we have consequences, and that hurts. So, this is uh Psalm 143, it's a Psalm of David, it's a lament psalm, and it's one of what they call penitential psalms, which is the word penit penitentiary we get, or repentant, um, or remorse. There's the idea there are seven of them, and this is the last one. Uh, we don't know, most people most scholars think David actually wrote this, although we don't know for sure, and we don't know when he wrote it, but a lot of people think that he wrote it during the trials with his son Absalom. Now, I don't know if that's tr that's uh true or not, but it sure fits. So I want to tell you the story, and let me refresh your memory. Absalom was David's third son, and he was born to his third wife. So was the first son of his third wife, but he was the third son, and this wife uh was the daughter of a king, the king of Gesher. And the Bible tells us Absalom and his sister Tamar, who's the name you may remember, were quite beautiful. The Bible rarely describes people physically, but both these characters are described. And in 2 Samuel 14, it says that all Israel praised Absalom's beauty, and there was no blemish on him from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. So this guy was gorgeous, is the idea. And his sister was equally beautiful, and her beauty attracted the attention of David's firstborn son, Amnon. And you may have remember that story, Amnon lusts after Tamar and ends up in a very tragic um story, he ends up raping her and then hating her afterwards. So Absalom, as Tamar's brother, is waiting for their father David to punish Amnon for his disobedience, for dishonoring his sister, and David doesn't act. So after two years of waiting, Absalom decides to take his own revenge and he plans this event, feast party kind of thing, and he kills Amnon in full view of all of David's other sons, which in a sense makes them complicit. So he kills his his brother and then flees to his grandfather, the king of Gesher, for um for exile, basically. So he's in exile for three years, and there's all these political maneuverings that finally get him back into Jerusalem, but he's not allowed into David's presence. So for two more years he's not allowed to to see his father. And when he finally is restored to David's good graces, and there's a whole lot of political maneuvering again there, he immediately begins plotting to take David's throne. So with all this kind of innuendo and insinuation, the Bible says he steals the hearts of the people. So what he does is he'll stand outside the gates, uh, and as people go in to have their cases heard and their um their disputes settled, he kind of says, Well, you know, if I were king, it would be much better for you. And he kind of, well, I would do this for you and I would do that. So he weaves these tales of how good life would be if he, the young, beautiful, charismatic son, were king rather than this aging, decrepit old man. So eventually he gathers two hundred men who are loyal to him and he rebels against David, and uh David is forced to flee to Jerusalem, and Absalom proclaims himself king and immediately begins to violate the women of the harem that David left behind, which was a reprehensible thing for him to do, but also a way to say, I am now king, these women are mine. However, I won't go into all the details, God was faithful to his promises to David, and he delivers David and his throne, but Absalom is killed in the battle. And David uh does not rejoice over the victory and the death of his son, but he publicly mourns to the point where his generals rebuke him to say, Look, people died to get you back on the throne, and you're mourning the death of the traitor, and this doesn't look good for the country. Now, I've left out a lot of details of the story, and it's a it's interesting to read because the Bible gives us quite a bit of the political intrigue that goes on in there in the stories. But in terms of this psalm, one of the most interesting of the details is found in 2 Samuel 16. And in this section, David is traveling along a road, and there's a man on the side of the road who's throwing stones at him and hurling curses at him. And the men with David say, you know, let us let us go kill this man. He's he's dishonoring the king, he's cursing the king. And David refuses and says, basically, let him be, because I'm cursed. And the passage implies in this little speech he gives that he realizes my sin is coming back to haunt me. That, you know, my children are rebelling. Amnon basically repeated David's sin with Bathsheba. How could he judge his oldest son when he had also slept with the a woman who was not his wife? Um Absalom killed Amnon, but David killed Uriah, Bathsheba's wife, or Bathsheba's husband. And they're, in a sense, they're repeating what he did, and both these sons were the result of marriage to foreign wives, which he had been counseled not to do. So here is David. I mean, this life cannot get much lower than this. One of his children has killed another of his children and is now trying to kill him. I mean, how that that's gotta be the lowest you can go. There can be no rainbow at the end of this. When all this situation ends, one of them is gonna be dead. Either David's gonna be dead or or Absalom's gonna be dead. And he knows it. And he's like, there is no way out of this. And there's this suggestion in 2 Samuel 16 that he knows my sinfulness brought me to this place. And I think that's what the psalm is about. Here I am, I've made horrible mistakes, I'm at the low point of life, what do I do? Um, and I don't know if that's the exact occasion when David wrote this, but it sure fits because I don't know that life can get much lower than that. So let's look at the Psalm. It falls into three sections. Verses one and two. Well, actually, there's a couple ways to organize it, but this is the way I like. Verses one and two introduce our defender. So one and two are our defender, three and four are our enemy, which I think ultimately is sin in this case, even though he's using military language. So one and two are our defender, three and four are our enemy, and then five through twelve are the process David goes through to defeat the enemy. So one and two are our defender, three and four are our enemy, which is sin, and then five through twelve is the process to defeat that enemy. So the question we're going to look at is if you're in this pit of despair, if you've seen your sin and it's black, how do you recover? So let's read verses one and two. Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my pleas for mercy. In your faithfulness, answer me. In your righteousness, enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. So the first place to realize is we appeal to God, unlike my wrong 20-year-old conclusions. When you're in that pit of despair, go to God. But we appeal to Him on the basis that He is merciful and we are guilty. So I think the first point is we must first call to God for help because He is our defender, He is our Savior, but this is not the kind of call we give to one of our peers. So this is not a, you know, I'm standing shoulder to shoulder, uh, help me, you know, just get me through this uh situation. So it's not the kind of appeal I might make to say, my good friend, Libby here, you know, help me, give me a hand through this. Or, you know, well, God, I've done so much for you in the past, now it's time for you to do something to me. That's not the kind of appeal he's making. The appeal is I am completely, totally lost. And if you don't help me, I am not going to survive. So the appeal is God is merciful and I am guilty, and that's the recognition. So we call out to God to fight for us because if he doesn't, there's no hope. We're lost. So this is not a kind of a appealing to one of your peers standing shoulder to shoulder. It's a very much a savior to someone who needs saving. And I think that's critical because it we need to realize we don't appeal to God based on rights that we have before him. He's not in our debt. We don't say, you know, oh God, look how much I've done for you, look how many um Bible studies I've taught, or how many good deeds I've done. Now it's your turn to come and act for me. His appeal is do not bring judgment on your servant. No one living is righteous before you. He recognizes that if the God's going to stand against him, he's guilty. And that he has no basis to complain. If you were to judge me, I would be condemned, is the idea in all of this. Um, and that's the first recognition. Now I expect to a lot of you that sounds trite. You say, Oh yeah, I've been there, done that. That's I'm a sinner in need of a savior. What else is new? But think how easily we confront we excuse ourselves. You know, my husband comes to me and says, confronts me about something I've done, and my first reaction is, Well, I was tired. It's not my fault. Um, or you know, I wasn't really thinking, or it was just a joke. I I didn't really mean it. Or my personal favorite, well, if you hadn't fill in the blank, then I would never have done whatever, because of course it's all his fault, right? And ultimately. So we immediately, when confronted with our sin, we say, no, no, no, I have a reason for that. I I was tired, I was I was confused, I didn't know what I know now, I wasn't thinking, or really it's all your fault because you provoked me. You know. So the recognition of verse one and two is this is my fault. Um, this is the recognition of David on when the man by the road is hurling curses at him, saying, Yes, I'm a sinner, I'm guilty. It's my fault. I'm going to God as one who is guilty. I have no basis to appeal to him except that he is a merciful and loving God. So that's the starting point. So he's appealing to his defender. Now let's look at verses three and four, the devastation that this sin has caused. For the enemy has pursued my soul, he has crushed my life to the ground, he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore, my spirit faints within me, and my heart within me is appalled. That term appalled is a very strong word. It's often translated overwhelmed, but neither of those English words I think do justice. It's a it's a about as vivid description as you find in the Bible of what it means to be depressed. He is just crushed, overwhelmed, sitting in darkness. And he gives this vivid picture of being in a grave or a tomb. And if you think about that, the tomb is utter darkness. There is no light at all. You're sealed, you're shut, you're trapped in there, there's no way out. And he's saying, I feel like a dead body, not just a recently dead body, a long dead body. You know, the one that would be decaying and putrefying and is awful to look at and awful to smell and awful to be around. And he says, This is how I feel. This is how my heart and spirit have descended to the point that I feel like I'm rotting in a grave. And it's this awful image, I think, of the terrible kind of depression that has overwhelmed him. And notice genuine and true believers can feel that way and do feel that way. I think the enemy he's describing here is sin, basically, because he starts with none is righteous before you, and that the battle is going on inside him. And he's saying, I've seen my sin and it is black. I have I've done things and I've had horrible consequences. People are going to die if the Absalom story is the context for this, because of what I'd done. Now, as awful as it is to experience things like, you know, sickness, poverty, loss, tragedy, and other difficult circumstances, I think the most serious battles we face are the one inside our own heart, where we learn to start kind of hating ourselves and where temptations overwhelm us and we we are tempted to patterns that are self-destructive or what society calls dysfunctional behavior. I mean, really, all of us are dysfunctional. It's kind of a funny term, but the idea he's looking at is the more clearly we think, the more we realize that we have this capacity for ruining ourselves and spreading that ruin to other people. I think the battle he's describing is the same one Paul wrote about in Romans that we studied last year in chapter 7 when he says, I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I d I hate. That's 715. And then he goes on, for I do not do the good I want, but the evil that I do not want to do, I keep on doing, and he concludes that section with wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death? That's the battle David's describing. I'm a sinful wretch. I don't want to be this way. Um and despite all my best intentions, I do harm to others. So I want to be the kind of person that encourages love and caring and nurturing, but instead I say hurtful things, I neglect to do things I ought to do, I repeatedly exalt myself over others, and then as this wretched man that I am, who will who will save me? Before we look at how, the who saves him, and I want to make one more point about three and four, and that is the enemy he's describing is overwhelming. It's this aggressive pursuing him. And I think we sometimes have the picture that, you know, the Christian life is kind of a life of just avoiding pitfalls. You know, it's like, oh, I missed that little side, that little trap over there, or oh, I avoided that little pitfall here, and if I just kind of tiptoe my way down the straight and narrow, I'll be successful. You know, I just kind of avoid that trap or this crevice. Um that's not the picture David's describing here. This is a roaring racing stampede that is crushing him to the ground. And do you remember the video of the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia a couple years ago? This immense wall of water that was crushing down on these old grass huts. That's the picture he's describing. This is an overwhelming enemy. This is an enemy that is chasing him, threatening him, to crush him and overwhelm him, and no amount of kind of careful, thoughtful organization is going to keep this enemy at bay. It's too big a problem, it's too deadly a war, and it's too awful an enemy. So he's saying, here I am confronted with this, what do I do now? So let's let's look at that. We'll get out of the pit now. In verses five through twelve, then he gives us these series of steps that I think we can learn from to, if you're in that pit, if you're in that feeling where you think I'm I'm it's so bad, I feel like I'm sitting in a grave, um, how do you get out? So let's look at five and six first. I remember the days of old, I meditate on all that you have done, I ponder the works of your hands, I stretch out my hands to you, my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. So I think the first step is he deliberately takes control of his mind and he says, I'm going to remember who God is and what he has done for me. And I think that's an act of will, that's a force myself out of the emotional havoc and out of the emotional blackness to think, what has God done for me? I remember the days of old, I meditate on all that you've done, I ponder the work of your hands. This is not nostalgia for the past, this is a decision to say, who is God and what do I know to be true about him? I think the days of old suggest the biblical history. So he's looking at what did God do for Noah? How did he call Abraham? Um, what happened in the Exodus, and and taking the people through the Red Sea and getting us through the the wilderness. Or he can look back in his own life, the 15 years or so he spent fleeing from Saul when Saul was still on the throne and trying to kill him. And he's forcing himself to think about who is God and what has he done for me. The phrase the work of your hands tends to mean the activity of God, the concrete actions, the thing that he has done. And that's what David's forcing himself to remember. And I think, you know, we can do that too. We can look back and see what has God done in in biblical history. And we have more history than David has, because we could say, look at the Babylonian cap captivity, the restoration from that captivity, and of course, the empty tomb of Jesus Christ, who was crucified on our behalf. And I encourage you to think about your own life, to keep a journal or keep a record somewhere of the times when you know God has concretely helped you. And when you're in that pit, go back and read it. Yes, he answered that prayer. Yes, this is how he took me through that dark time. And that's what the first step David does. So the first step is to remember, to make yourself remember who God is and what he's done for you. Now it's not the last step, and um it's not, I don't want to say this is a magic pill, but now you'll feel better all at once in an instant, because if we notice the memory of what God does, this is not where the psalm ends. Because we have a few more verses. Um and notice he says, I stretch out my hands to you, my soul thirsts for you like parched land. The metaphor has changed a little bit. He was in a grave. Now he's got some activity, he's stretching out like a desert. And I think that suggests there's A little bit of hope now. He's not healed yet, but at least with a desert, if it's this parched dry land, there's the hope that rain will fall. There's the hope that maybe something will happen. You're not healed yet, it's still parched and lifeless, but there's hope. If you're in the grave and you're long dead, it's sealed shut, it's utter darkness, it's a condition of hopelessness. So he switched his metaphor now to something that now there's hope. He's beginning to see that maybe there's a way out of this pit. There's a he's in a parched desert now instead of a tomb. So I think theology in and of itself is not going to make us well. So just remembering what God has done is not going to instantly change you into people who are, you know, emotionally whole and relationally secure. But it's the first step. So verses seven through twelve, then he goes on and he begins a series of prayers where he calls out for God to act, and he lays alongside that a statement about himself. So let's look at we're gonna look at seven through ten. Answer me quickly, O Lord, my spirit fails. Hide not your face from me, lest I be like one like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord. I have fled to you for refuge, refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on level ground. So if the first step is to remember who God is and what he's done for us, the second step is to insist on honesty and not pretend that things are better than they are. So I think at least in this, he pairs this cry for God to act with an honest statement about himself. He's not trying to beautify what isn't beautiful, or to lie about who he is and what he's done, or to say, well, it's really not that bad when it is that bad. And I think in prayer, at least, if nowhere else, we have to have this honesty of, Lord, I am really hurting, I'm uncertain, I'm fearful, and be honest with who we are in the process or in this in the situation. So look at how they pair up. He says, answer me quickly, my sp that's the request, my spirit fails, is a statement about himself. And he's saying, hurry up, this is not the kind of thing that can wait till next week. I'm dying here. I need intervention, I need an answer. Um hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Again, it's like I'm on this verge of something terrible happening, and he's calling on God to act. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love is the request, for in you I trust is the corresponding statement. Um so he's wrestling with this. He's beginning to connect with who is God and who is he. And you see this upward movement. Now we've got let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love. There's light in this story now. We've moved to the possibility that morning is coming. Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord, I fled to you from refuge. There's the acknowledgement that maybe his enemies are not going to succeed, that God can deliver him, that he has a hiding place and a safe place. So you see, there's a little more movement toward hope here. Teach me to do your will for you are my God, and then finally let your good spirit lead me to level ground. So you see, he's moved from the tomb to this uh and its darkness to this parched desert, and now he's imagining a place where he could be led on level ground in the morning, in the light. So he's moved to a place where there is hope, where the future makes sense, and where he could be go on with life and face it physically, and there's hope, and he's counting on God to get him there. So the question is, what happened? How did he get? I mean, the first time I read this, I thought, great, but how did he get from the grave to the level ground? What what took place? And I think what's going on here is in reviewing who God is and what he's done for him, he begins to kind of step out or exercise the faith that God is loving, God is gracious, God is willing, and God has promised to deliver him. And that's what enables him to see the see the hope. I think the best way I can illustrate this is to remind you of Romans 5 that we studied a couple years ago. Because I think Paul makes the same argument in that section. In that section, Paul's basically almost a tangent to his main point, he says, Look, if God loved us while we were his enemies, then don't you think now that we're his children, he loves us enough to save us, to get us the rest of the way to heaven? So um that's in Romans 5, 1 through 11, particularly verse 10, where he says, For if we will if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more certainly now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life? So his argument basically is which takes more love, to love your enemy or to love your child? So if it takes this huge amount of love to love your enemy, and it only takes this little amount of love to love your child, what has God done? He loved us while we were enemies. So he did the enormous, horrible, you know, the great act of love. Now that we're his children, don't you think he's gonna love you enough to get you through whatever you're going through now, to help you finish the race, to get to your inheritance? So we've seen the cross. That's historical fact. That happened. We know God did that. So now, whatever your situation, having died for you on the cross, is he gonna let you down now? And that's the argument I think Paul's making in Romans, and that's the argument David's remembering here. So, how many of you, if you were, you know, you say you're at a picnic and your toddler or your grandchild runs out in front of the street in an oncoming car? And if your odds of saving that child were a hundred to one, every one of you would try it. I mean, I I bet. You wouldn't even hesitate. You would immediately throw yourself into the path on on the c of the car because this is your child or your grandchild or your toddler. You'd gladly lay down your life for them. Now, what if the person in front of the car was your neighbor who drives you crazy, you know? Would you go, you know, this might be a decision. I don't know, hundred to one odds. Uh he's kind of a nuisance, you know. Maybe I shouldn't go. Or what if the person in front of the car was Hitler or Saddam Hussein or one of the nine-eleven terrorists? You know, I'd be rooting for the car. I'd just be going move faster there, you know? And Paul's argument is, what did God do? See, we were Hitler. We were the enemies. We were the people in front of the car who were like the terrorists to us or the 9-11 hijackers or um Hitler, and God saved us. And that's Paul's point. What takes more love to die for your enemy who hates you, or to die for your child? And that's what Jesus did for us. Now imagine, too, not only say you muster up the courage to go try to save that awful person whom you hate in front of the car, and he laughs at you, and he mocks you and he ridicules you. What a stupid sacrifice. Why are you even doing this? Because that's what happened at the cross, and that's what God did for us. And what David remembers is this is who God is. He died for me while I was my while I was his enemy. I was under his wrath. He had no I did not deserve to be saved. Um I did not deserve any more respect from God than say a Jew would give to Hitler. And right at that point when I was his enemy, and estranged from him, mocking him, laughing him, he died for me. So having done that, now that we're adopted as his children, we're part of his family, we have his name. Don't you think he loves us enough to get us the rest of the way? Um, because now we're in the position of the toddler in front of the car, and he's not gonna hesitate to scoop us up and save us. So I think the recognition of verses 7 through 10 is he's already shown how much he loves us, so he's gonna get us through. And as David begins to remember that and cling to that, it moves him from this feeling of I'm hopeless and lost into the grave into I can be saved. There is a level ground, God can lead me there. Now, I'm not suggesting that everything that takes place in verses 7 through 10 can happen in your life as quickly as it takes to read verses 7 to 10. It could be days or weeks or months or a process of God taking you from a dark place to a light place and and having help increase. Um so I don't want to say this is a magic, all you have to do is read the psalm and you'll never be depressed again. But it can help you to remember who God is and what he's done. And I think that's the beauty of it to me is the imagery that we see as he goes from this grave to this morning where there's there's light and hope in the morning to seeing God's face, doing where he says, Do not hide your face from me. Often that's the metaphor for the relation a relationship with God. So we saw in the hands of God in verse 2, which is the activity, the face of God is usually having a relationship with him. So it's it's this personal face-to-face kind of communication. You know, if you were to ask your neighbor to take out their her wallet and show you a picture of her loved ones, she's not going to show you pictures of, you know, their elbows or their knees or whatever. They they show pictures of people's faces because that's the intimate point of connection. So when he says, um, you know, I can't find it in my notes, hide not your face from me. It's don't turn your back on me, it's have this relationship with me. So you can see him moving from language that is dark and depressing to language where there's hope. All right, so how does he end it? This is the best part. 11 and 12. For your name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life. In your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble, and in your steadfast love, you will cut off my enemies. So he knows who's gonna win the battle. God will cut off his enemies. You will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant. So he's realized in this battle who's gonna win the war. God is gonna win, and he's on God's side. So no matter how hard this particular battle is, he's saying, I'm counting on you, Lord, to act, not because I'm great, not because I deserve it, but because you are merciful. And what I think he's realized through this process is something else is true. Not only is he guilty and in need of grace, but he can say with equal certainty at the end, I am your servant. He's realized I have this relationship with God, which I can be just as certain of as I am that I am a sinner. Yes, I am sinful, but yes, I am God's servant. He loves me and he's promised to care for me. Now, true, like you and me, David doesn't deserve this, but he's confident of it. So notice the claims of, for your name's sake, he's asking God to defend his own name, because in doing that, he will defend his children. He's saying he knows God loves him in your righteousness, in your unfailing love. Because of who God is, he knows he's going to win this war. And the ringing confidence that this psalm wins ends with is, I am your servant. This is as true of me as anything else. Just as certain as I am that my spirit fails, that my heart is appalled, that my life is crushed to the ground, he can claim, I am your servant, and that's his point of hope. Now, I found this psalm, I confess, I come back to it repeatedly because um I have a prodigal child. And, you know, when it when all that happened, it made me understand the kind of the biblical language of make my joy complete, because as Libby shared last week, when you have a prodigal, there's a sense in which no matter how joyous it is, there's a shadow. It's not complete. It's this constant ache that that all is not right and there's someone still lost, and no matter how the good times how good the good times are, there's this missing person. And when you hit those love points, as I seem to roll around every few months, um, the temptation is to slide into depression and say, you know, I know I'm not the mother I should have been, and I can get those dark points where I start picking myself apart, you know, if only I'd done this, or if only I had done that differently, or if I'd been stricter here, or been more forgiving there, or if I hadn't made that mistake. And in those darkest hours, you I lay all the blame for my prodigal at my own feet. And as certain as I am that I am to blame and I'm inadequate and I'm defeated, I can also say I am God's servant, and he knows what he's doing, and this is part of his plan. And I realize, you know, I couldn't save myself from my sinfulness, so I don't know why I expect that I can save my child. But part of me does, that, you know, if I just said the right things, of course I would have saved him from his sinfulness, but that's not the way it works. So the confidence of the psalm is yes, I'm sinful, yes, I've made stupid, thoughtless, selfish mistakes, which I deeply regret, but I am God's servant. He's promised to love me in spite of myself. He's promised to defeat this enemy that is overwhelming and aggressive, and he's promised to save me. And that's the place of where this psalm ends. Now, there is a catch to this, you'll notice, he does this if you're his child. If you're not yet a child of God, you can become one. All you have to do is ask. Um, all these promises that he lays forth in this psalm of saving and loving and caring are true if you have have um trusted God to save you. As Libby mentioned this last week, I'm going to repeat it again. There are four steps to that, to saving faith. First, recognizing that you are sinful, that you're not the person you should be. So if you've done that, recognize that you're sinful. The next step is to know that left to yourself, you can't change that. You can't make yourself better left to yourself. The third step is what started this psalm: recognize that God owes you nothing, that He doesn't He's not required to save you. It's an act of grace. And then finally, it's just trusting that because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God will forgive you and God will make you holy. And all you have to do is ask. All you have to do is ask him to save you. Confess you're sinful. You can't save yourself. God doesn't isn't required to save you, but he's promised to because of Jesus Christ. So, what do you do when you're in that black pit of of depression and you've seen the consequences of your sin? Turn to your father in prayer, turn to him, turn to God. Not because we have a right to, but because he we can count on him to be merciful. Then I think recognize that Christian life is not a life of sidestepping, a pitfall here and there. It's a full-blown war with a really awful enemy that is threatening to overwhelm us. Sin is a vicious enemy, and the battleground is often our hearts, our emotions, our thinking, and uh all the things that go on inside us. So having undergone this tremendous defeat and depression, Davis fights his way out of it by remembering who God is and what he's done. Concrete acts of how God acted in history and probably in his own life, and then going to God, admitting he needs his a Savior, and drawing alongside those honest admissions the power of God and knowing who God is and what he does. And it's a slow, kind of step-by-step walking out of the pit. Um, he doesn't pretend things are better than they are, he doesn't resign himself to defeat either. Instead, he realizes I am God's servant, I know who's fighting for me, and ultimately God will destroy sin, the adversary of my soul. So just to go back to Romans for a minute, Paul concludes that whole section with his battle over sin with these words, I'm sure, familiar to you. And this is Romans 8.38. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. There's nothing that God that will defeat Jesus at this point. There is nothing that will separate us from what he's done on the cross. And if you don't know him, I invite you to ask, to um seek him, and then all these promises are yours. Let me just pray to close us. I found these words from Jude that I like to use as a closing prayer. It's Jude 24. To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious present without fault and with great joy, to the only God our Savior, be glory, majesty, power, and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages, now and forevermore. Amen.