Morning Church. My name is Michael. I'm the lead pastor here at Christ the King Church and welcome to family Sunday which means it's a little noisier in here than usual because the kids are not and there's no kids classes or anything like that and Alex may have mentioned this I stepped out for a moment he may have mentioned this already, but if you have a fussy baby or just if you have You needed to step out for a moment in the cafe, there's a speaker that's on, there's a nursing mother's room that is up the stairs that you can nurse your child and there's a speaker on up there.

And there also is an overflow room downstairs and there's space for kids to run around with a video. Hello Cartwright and Elizabeth. I know they're down there with their kids, but you could go downstairs. So, if you need to step out for whatever reason, know that those are available to you, especially when it's super crowded in here.

And I'll go ahead and mention, speaking of super crowded we had an elder retreat this past week. And it was a wonderful time. Just such a delight to spend a couple of days with these the other men that are serving the church as elders. And we had a chance of fellowship and prayer. By the way, like every member of Christ, the King was mentioned you and your family by name in prayer.

We just went through the entire member list as well as a number of you had texted, responded to our texts, asking for prayer We prayed for all of those prayer requests together on our elder retreat. But in addition to that we were just talked about where we're headed as a church.

And one of the things that was just a, another reassurance for me was to revisit and just get on the same page, make sure that we're all thinking the same way about relocation. And that was, it was a resounding, yes, clearly God is blessing our church and leading us to. pursue some place to move to where we have more space, and the prime target is northern Kentucky.

And so, we've, we're doubling down on that. We, it seems all signs confirm that is a good thing for us to do and that the Lord is leading us to do that. We're looking and we're praying, trusting. I plan on taking a couple of days to fast and pray specifically about that later this month.

So, I just want to give you the heads up about that because it is crowded in here. Okay. Today we're going to be in Psalm 13, and the topic is praying through trials. Psalm 13 was written by David during a trial that he was going through that shook him deeply.

And it's instructive for us because as we know, trials are inevitable. Nobody's going to be able to escape this life without experiencing from time to time some degree of trial, maybe a great degree of trial, but we all go through it. They're inevitable. Amen. And one of the things that trials do if we're unprepared is it can cause us to question God to question our faith, to doubt God's love, doubt God's goodness.

It can cause us to think God has abandoned us, God is ignoring us, God doesn't care for us. And whenever those times come, we need to have our minds and our hearts conditioned with truth so that we're not derailed spiritually. So that we can endure it, we can press through it with a heart of hope and confidence and our faith can even grow, our trust in God can even grow through the trial because we've been prepared for it.

And so that's what we're going to look at today. So, Psalm 13, it's pretty short. It's six verses. There's three stanzas and the three stanzas, each stanza takes us through a movement. And so, we have David's questions, David's petitions, and David's resolve. So very simple outline. Let me read the Psalm and then we'll go through it a verse at a time.

Psalm 13.

How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 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? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemies say, I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken, but I have trusted in your steadfast love.

My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. This is God's word. So, we begin with David's questions. David's questions. And verses one and two, we see the questions. I'll read them again. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

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? So, this question, how long, we see this four times. How long? And it's the second most common question that people ask when they're going through a trial. So, whenever somebody first goes through the trial, what's the first question they ask?

You may have an idea. Why is this happening to me? And then perhaps the second most common question is how long is this going to last? How long will this go on? How long am I going to be suffering and going through this problem? Will it go on forever? Will it ever end? And so, some trials do hit you all at once, and you absorb the news, and it's a shock, and then you deal with the fallout immediately, and you have to figure out what's next.

But then other trials are like a slow train. It just moves slowly. You can tell something bad is on the way. It's like watching a storm cloud move in. Something bad's coming. You know something bad's coming and the pain of it unfolds in slow motion day after day, week after week, it drags on and you're in this prolonged state of suffering.

That's what David is dealing with here. He's dealing with something that is protracted. It's stretched out. It goes for a long time. And his prayer gives us insight into his inner term turmoil as it plays out. So, we'll look at some of the specific the specific things. So how long these, this question, and then how long will you forget me forever?

In this context, forget is not a cognitive thing. It's oh duh. Forgot about that guy. It's not like God forgot he existed or forgot something. It's to forget means to with, to, to it's to act with abandonment or something like that. So, to remember someone, remember me, oh Lord, that is to act positively towards them.

So, if we ask God to remember me, it's asking God to act positively towards us, to come to our aid, to help and comfort us. To forget someone is to withhold those things, to act negatively towards, to abandon to not come to their aid, to not help or comfort them. So, David feels forgotten by God, and he's asking, how long will you forget me?

Will you, will this state of forgottenness last forever? So, David feels like God has abandoned him. I keep losing my and then the next one is, will you hide your face? So, forget is the first one, hide your face is the second one. Will you hide your face? So, David sought the Lord, but it seems as though the Lord has gone into hiding.

Now there's a related texture from the book of Job where Job says, why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy? So, this is the, this is not the only time we see this idea show up in scripture. As we might say in our day, why are you avoiding me? Why are you ghosting me, bro? It's what, where are you going?

Why are you not here where you're supposed to be? And then verse two, how long must I take counsel in my soul? So, since it seems like God has gone away and God is in hiding, David's got nobody that he can really trust. He feels abandoned and by God even, so he takes counsel with himself. He's the only one that he can talk to.

He's the only one he can trust. Nobody's got his back and it makes him feel increasingly isolated and alone. And then how long must I have sorrow in my heart all the day? Here's, there's another Jeremiah 8 verse 18. My joy is gone. Grief is upon me. My heart is sick within me. Jeremiah says, and then finally, how long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Now, we'll talk about enemies in a moment, but how long shall my enemy be exalted over me? There is an enemy, some kind of an enemy that is currently triumphing over David. He's got the upper hand, and this enemy is gloating and delighting in David's misery. So not only is David suffering, he's suffering at the hands of an enemy, and that enemy is relishing it, or reveling in it.

He's enjoying David's suffering. So, we can assume here because unless otherwise indicated, the general perspective, the general place from which the Psalms speak is of a faithful believer. So, the Psalms are written from the perspective of a faithful believer. So, if there's an enemy that is coming after him, we can safely assume that David is being persecuted unjustly.

We can assume he is writing as a faithful believer. He's not confessing a sin and he's being he's suffering as a result of his sin. He's suffering at the hands of an enemy and we can assume that the enemy is in the wrong. We might even assume that David's enemy is persecuting him because he is faithful.

And that's the reason. Now, what David is expressing here are feelings. These are honestly expressed feelings. These are not doctrinal statements. We're not reading the Apostle Paul. Where we look at this as some sort of treatise on the presence of God or not the presence of God. There's a, there's some anguish and he's writing from his state of anguish, his duress.

And this is a normal human experience, right? We feel things in our heart that we know not to be true in our minds. You ever feel that way? That's a common thing. This happens to me all the time. I'll feel something in my heart. God, where are you? Why are you hiding from me, God? Why have you abandoned me, God?

Why are you letting my enemies triumph over me, God? I might feel that way in my heart, but I already know in my mind that's not actually true. God has not actually abandoned me. He's not actually hiding from me. Nevertheless, it's the way I feel in that moment. And so, we will feel things in our heart that we know are not true in our minds.

Because our hearts will lie to us. So, we knit our minds to be able to distinguish between what's true and what's emotion, to distinguish between facts and feelings. So, there's four things that I see here in the psalm. There's, God has forgotten me, David says, which would mean God's indifferent to my suffering.

He doesn't care about me or love me. Second thing that he believes is God has abandoned me. God's hiding from me. He might be even avoiding me. He's like an absent father. The third thing that David is believing is this pain may go on forever. Like this pain may never end. God will abandon me and I'm just, it's never going to go away and things will never get better.

And hope is draining out of my body. The fourth one is it really doesn't do me much good at all to be faithful to God because even in my faithfulness, God is siding with my enemy and my persecutor. So, either God doesn't care, or God doesn't notice whenever I obey. If we were to take this and put it in modern language, we might just say David is depressed.

And there, this is a familiar theme in the scriptures and the Psalms especially, we just might say he's depressed. And the scriptures don't shy away from that. That's something that the scripture deals with honestly. And that's, that should be great comfort to us because God understands us and God relates to our normal human experience, right?

The Bible is very familiar with what we nowadays might call depression. And David seemed like he, there was a streak of melancholy in him. Like you, a lot of the Psalms and all the way he talks, there is this hint of melancholy that sort of pervades a lot of the, a lot of the Psalms. You might, Jeremiah, for example, is called the weeping prophet.

Because a lot of what Jeremiah writes is it's there's a whole book of lamentations written about the fall of Jerusalem, but there's a lot of this anguish and weeping of Jeremiah. In church history very famously, Charles Spurgeon had he would have what we would call depression. The minister's fainting fits is one of the, one of the things that he wrote about this.

And so, it was a constant struggle for somebody as great as Charles Spurgeon and he actively battled it. He fought against it, prayed about it and it was it consumed a lot of his time, his mental energy dealing with his, what we would call depression. I've experienced this in my own life. I'm sure many of you have had, times in your life where you're just like, I feel depressed

Maybe it's now. And we can just stop and say, okay God gives us words to put to that. And the words that we see in the psalm there's words to express what we feel. And the psalms are a great place to find language, to be able to describe things that we might otherwise not be able to put into words.

Depression would be the feeling that you just can't get out of bed. You don't have the strength to face your day. You don't want to go on. And this is not limited to a certain personality. We might think so and so that's their personality type. They're just depressed. And it’s no anybody of any personality type can go through bouts of depression.

Now it may be more, more frequent in some or may go deeper with some, but anybody can experience a time of depression. And so, it's as good as it is to understand our hearts. We, it's good to have self-awareness. It's good to have a sense of what makes me tick. What is motivating me deep down?

It's good to know that. But I would say that there in our modern times there's a tendency to feed that beast too much to where we become not so much reflective or healthy self-examination, and it turns into unhealthy self-absorption. Where we're so self-focused that everything is just this navel gazing, introspection, morbidly always picking ourselves apart.

And so, we can take it to an extreme that isn't good because we're thinking about ourselves too much. And we're not, God did not make us, we're not created to be self-obsessed, we're made to be others oriented, to be loving. That's aware of ourselves, but not obsessed with ourselves. But God made us to thrive and to be at most who we are when we are thinking of others.

And in heaven, everybody will think of others as much as they'll think of themselves. And everybody's needs will be met because they are met as we are in community with one another without the presence of sin. And so, we're, as Christians, we want to approximate this as best we can in this earthly life by not being so self-focused, but we can be self-aware.

And that self-awareness is good, but it can be overdone. And a lot of times what we do in modern times at least is we're quick to come up with clinical diagnoses. We want to give it a label, give it a name. And that's what that does is that robs the legitimacy of when there actually is a condition that actually needs a name.

But if everybody's always self-diagnosing any old thing, then those who legitimately have a condition that needs to be diagnosed and treated properly, then there's, it's what about them? It's if everybody has this thing, then what about the person that really has it? And so, we're quick to want to self-diagnose and also medicate.

And there, there may be legitimate times when people need to, there's some range of medication that could be good and appropriate, but it seems like that's the first thing we do. And it's often we do it too fast and for too long and it, we can rob ourselves of the opportunities that God would present to us because the pain tells us something isn't right.

The pain tells us there's something here you need to deal with and a lot of times we need to deal with things on its own terms and let the pain sit to, to not just immediately say, I need to whatever the pain is, I need something to take the pain away and let that just be the way we operate in life.

Yeah. And sometimes pain is a good instrument. C. S. Lewis's pain is God's megaphone. God can use even the emotional pain or the depression to, to force things into the open that we might rather not deal with. So, the feeling of depression is a feeling and it's not necessarily, it's not in and of itself, in my opinion, it's not necessarily wrong in a fallen world, we can suffer greatly because we.

And that suffering can lead to just great despair and that in itself is not necessarily wrong. The feelings are human, and the feelings are not easy to control. Some people may have this low-grade depression all their life. And just maybe something they have to cope with. But even though it may not necessarily be sinful in itself, we are responsible for what we believe and how we act and what we believe and what we act may sometimes be at odds with what we feel because our hearts will lie to us, our emotions will lie to us.

And so, we're responsible for what we do with our feelings and we're responsible to not be controlled by our feelings into the fruit of the spirit is self-control.

And that means what is self-control? Self-control is there are impulses, feelings, urges that we might have in our flesh, or in our heart, in our emotions. And our mind, being surrendered to the Spirit of God and to the Word of God, tells Our emotions, I'm not going to act the way I feel. I'm not going to believe what my feelings tell me to believe.

I'm going to act and believe what is true and trust God to change my emotions to bring them in line with the truth. But that's a discipline and that's why we're doing a Saturday seminar this Saturday. This is already in my notes. No, it's because Alex mentioned it, but that's what we'll talk about.

If you want to come to that Saturday seminar this Saturday, we'll talk about some more practical ways that. What do you do when what you feel doesn't line up with what you know to be true? And this is something, because I'm, personally, I'm a feeler. I feel things deeply. And a lot of times I'll feel things I know aren't true.

And then I have to act according to what I know to be true. But it's a, it is a discipline. And I have to change my behavior and my thoughts. And hope and pray for my feelings to catch up. And that is self-control. It is the spiritual fruit of self-control applied to this particular phenomenon.

All right let's look at the next two verses three and four. Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Now that's really the only petition. It's one petition that is fleshed out, but here's, I'll read the rest of it. Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.

Lest my enemies say, I have prevailed over him. Lest my foes rejoice, because I am shaken. So, the first stanza was a series of questions. How long? How long? How long? How long? The second stanza is one great big petition. And if we were to just sum it up, the petition, it is basically, God, I need you to fix this.

God, this is awful. And I don't know what to do. I'm at the end of my rope. Lord, you've got to act. God, this is out, this is beyond anything I can cope with. I need you to do something Lord, cause I can't do it myself. Consider and answer me. That's what, you take those two words. Consider and answer me.

It's like God, hear what I'm saying and give me an answer. And the answer is for you to do something. Intervene. Act on my behalf. Get involved. And fix this thing. Cause it's out of my hands. Now, there's two different times that David mentions enemies. There's verse two enemies. There's the word enemy here again, and then a, a similar word, a foe.

Enemies figure prominently in this psalm. And so, it is likely that this whole trial is because of somebody persecuting him. The principles apply, beyond an individual persecution. But I do want to address this fact here in this section. Amen. But the thing is, in verse four, David can't stomach the thought that an enemy would prevail over him.

He can't stomach the thought that some foe would get the better of him and then rejoice over him. Rejoice that they've won, gloat, boast that they got the better of David and overcame David. And for whatever reason, God allowed this to happen. God allowed an enemy to get the upper hand on David, to oppose and persecute and attack him.

And so, in the first stanza, David's like, how long, God? How long are you going to let this go on? And now in the second stanza, don't let them win. Don't let them win, Lord. I'm being faithful. I'm trusting you. I'm trying to obey you. And this godless person that is attacking what is good and right and true, he's attacking that.

Don't let them win, Lord. Vindicate your name. So, it's not merely a personal prayer. There are times in your life when you might have somebody who's got a vendetta. They've got an ax to grind and you're in the crosshairs and they're coming after you. And it's a personal thing. All of Psalm 13 can be applicable.

You can apply Psalm 13. This particular case is a bit different. And so, there's, I want to address what it's specifically referring to. So, it's not merely a personal prayer regarding a personal enemy. Somebody's got a beef with David. There's a guy in my HOA, Homeowners Association.

Some of you have been around for a while, you know it's like he sued our Homeowners Association. He's at it again now. He was threatening a lawsuit at our HOA meeting this past Thursday and I'm like, how long Lord? Will this guy be after us forever? This dude is an enemy. He's an opponent, but he's not after me because I'm a Christian.

He's after the whole HOA and we're all dealing with the shrapnel of his, Buffoonery. But David is the king. He's the rightful king of the tribe of Judah. We talked about this last week, the Melchizedek stuff. David is the rightful king over God's people. He is the heir. God had made a covenant with David to establish his throne forever, right?

So, David is a proxy for God. There's an enemy that's attacking David because he is God's king. He's attacking David as a way to get to God, as a way to oppose God, because the enemy hates God. That's what's happening here. You can't attack God. You can't, throw, shoot your arrows at God. God is spirit.

And so, if you want to hurt God, you have to go after the things that you do have within you do have access to. And as you can attack truth, you can attack goodness. You can attack beauty. You can attack love. You can attack God's people. And so that's what God's enemies, spiritual enemies, for sure, like the demonic realm, for sure, this is what they do.

And sometimes they will employ human people that may or may not be even aware that they are instruments of Satan's work, but could even work through humans to, to oppose things that are good. And then that is us being attacked by an enemy because we are Christians, because we are faithfully walking with God.

And so, they, this they openly mock and blaspheme God's name. And David knows in this case, that's why he's being targeted. He's targeted because he's God's king. And so, whenever God's enemies are against us because of our faith, we should pray against them. It's okay to pray against your enemies. And there's two things you can pray.

One, you can pray for their repentance because that's the one thing that's different between the Psalms and the New Testament era. It's like we know the full story, a descendant of David that came from the throne of David, the line of David, Jesus Christ came, and he died for not only his covenant people, but also the Gentiles and anybody that could be an enemy of God and died, that they could repent of their sin and find forgiveness and life in Jesus Christ.

So, we can pray for their repentance. Some of them don't want to repent, and we can pray that God will defeat them. So, we can pray for their repentance, and we can pray for their defeat, and it's okay to pray for those enemies to be defeated. So, in this final stanza, David puts feet to his prayers, and he chooses to act according to the truth of who God is.

So, let's look at the final two verses in this psalm. But I have trusted in your steadfast love. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. I have trusted. Trust is not an emotion. Trust is a choice. Now, you may not feel like trusting, but you can trust even when you don't feel like it.

And David is trusting based on who God is. So, I have trusted and he's saying this as though it was something that began in the past. It's not something that he's just now decided, oh, maybe I can trust God. So, he's always trusted God, but he's applying his previous trust to his present situation.

And he's trusting not merely in just God generically. He's trusting in something about God, which is steadfast love. And now I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago the Hebrew word for steadfast love. It's the word hesed. And the word hesed is a rich word that we have to explain it in English to really fully express what God is saying here through this word.

But hesed is God's loving kindness. It's an unceasing covenant love. And it's essential to who he is. Whenever God revealed the divine name, the Lord abounding and steadfast love is what he says. He's merciful and compassionate, abounding, and steadfast love. That steadfast love is hesed.

And that's the same word here. And so, David is saying, I'm trusting in God because of who I know God is. God is loyal to me as his son because he has made a covenant with his people. And I'm part of that covenant. And Christians, we are in that covenant through Jesus Christ, our faith in Jesus, who is the perfect son of David and the perfect son of God, our Messiah.

Our trust in God's covenant is because just as loyal as God is to his covenant with his, with the son, Jesus Christ, there's a, we are part of that covenant. So, God is loyal to us in the same way. So hesed is who God is, whether we feel it or not. We want to train our hearts feel according to what is true.

So, we want to feel it, but it's true even if we don't feel it because God's character never changes. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. God's character does not change based on how we feel about God's character. So, there's three things that David does, and these could be good applications for us.

David chooses to trust, he chooses to rejoice, and he chooses to sing. These are three things, three actions, steps that God take, er, that David takes, that can help line up his feelings with what is true, and he's, these are concrete actions that he has resolved to take. And so, this is David's resolve. So, the first one, he chooses to trust.

I've trusted in your steadfast love. He chooses to believe something that he may not feel all the time. And there's no shortcut for this. Our hearts will lie to us. Your heart will lie to you. Because our hearts are deceitful. Here's a Jeremiah 17, 9. The heart is deceitful above all things. Your heart, friends, your heart is desperately sick.

And so is mine. Our hearts will lie to us. We don't want to trust or follow our heart. Who can understand it?

Follow your heart is terrible advice. You know this, right? I hope you know this. Now, I know Disney will tell you differently, but follow your heart is terrible advice. There might be one tenth of one percent of the time when it's good advice, and that is when somebody has a heart who is so trained and in tune with the truth of God that their heart instinctively is inclined towards what is good and right and true.

And those people, that's a powerful thing to have. But for most of us, we need to check our hearts. We need to make sure that we're not just convincing ourselves with Bible verses that the thing that we feel we want to do is actually true, because a lot of times it's not.

We have to bring our emotions in subjection to God's truth of God's word and tell our hearts, okay, what you feel is not what is true. And so, I'm just going to absorb by faith that, that disconnect, that dissonance between what I believe to be true and what I feel in the moment. And I want to choose to act on what I know is true because that is more sure and more reliable than what I feel in the moment.

I ran across this quote online the other day. He says, follow your heart has ended more marriages, mutilated more bodies, destroyed more souls, and ended more lives than the devil could have ever imagined. It is hell's most effective slogan yet. That's good. I experienced this. I'll give you an example from my own life.

There, there've been a few times when I'll have this great feeling of anxiety, high level of anxiety. And I'll be, I won't be able to understand, like, why do I feel so anxious about this? Because I can't identify anything that I can't identify like a thing that I'm anxious about. I just feel anxious.

And I kid you not, I've, I figured it out in the last couple of years. It's caffeine jitters from drinking too much coffee in the afternoon. Caffeine jitters. And these are things that I've taken before the Lord, what is with this anxiety that I feel? And the feeling is so real. It's like this powerful thing where it's just I'm not trusting God right now.

Something is wrong with me. What is, where is my faith? Oh Lord, how long? When really, it's stupid. This is your fifth cup of coffee today. You are hyped up on drugs and you're blaming it on your faith. It's not a lack of faith. It's a lack of good faith. Personal choices with how much caffeine you drink, but that was so instructive for me because I saw like my feelings were not true.

My feelings were lying to me, but they feel so real. And I thought that it was an indicator of something in my soul when really it was this physiological thing. And there's lots of things. I've heard people say sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap. Because you might, there might be a time when you're just tired, but the tired The more tired you get, you can feel more hopeless and it can become this cloud of despair when really it's just you know what, go to bed early, wake up, start your day with the word of God get outside, take a walk, get some exercise, and that will change your perspective.

There have been many times where I'd get up in the morning and maybe something's eating at me. I'm troubled by something, I have a routine where, most mornings, do a 30-minute workout or so pretty intense. And after that it's much more in proportion, but I just I needed to get active, and I needed my body to do something.

These are things that take, these are, our hearts will lie to us. We can't just trust what we feel in the moment and take that as gospel because a lot of times it ain't. A lot of times we're deceived. So don't trust your feelings, trust something that is stable and sure and solid, and that is the truth of God's word.

All right, second one, choose to rejoice. Choose to rejoice. I was, I never coordinate sermons with Wade's song selections, but I was thinking of this when we were all in here and of course we'll talk about singing in a moment, but we were singing that Martin Luther song. One of the benefits of the discomfort of being in a packed room, one of the benefits is that the voices just are so loud and it just hearing all of these people in this room singing out in a loud way, rejoice, rejoice.

So, sinner come rejoice or is it beloved? What changes that? It's like the center of the first-time beloved is it kind of changes but hearing all these voices singing out and it's like it. And it ministered to me just sitting here and singing along. It built me up because it's we're commanding each other.

We're exhorting each other. You know that the word rejoice, it's a command. It's like rejoice. Owen Tuff and Sam rejoice. It's a command. It's, we're telling each other. And so, when we're singing it loud in a room, we're exhorting one another rejoice, beloved come rejoice. We're telling each other what to do.

There's no, now, I want you to be authentic. So, if you don't feel like rejoicing, then feel free to sit this one out. That doesn't quite rhyme, and it doesn't fit the meter of the song. Besides, it's a lie. We're not told to rejoice only when it feels right. We're told to rejoice. Why? We rejoice in our salvation.

Rejoice in what is true. Rejoice in the good things that God has done for us. Rejoice in God's covenant love for us that transcends what we might feel in the moment because what we might feel in the moment could very well be a lie. So, rejoice in what is true. We see that here in the text. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I want to rejoice in what you've done. What something is objective and true that I can trust in because it is not something that is subject to my feelings of the moment. So, David is telling his heart what to do. My heart will rejoice in God's salvation. Now the therapeutic propaganda of our culture will tell you to only do that if it's authentic and only if you feel like it.

And that's because it's so pervasive. It's even for me to say it right now, I imagine some of you might like, wait a minute, follow your heart. Is it right? I've always heard that my whole life. And I'm like, yes, you have heard that your whole life and it's wrong. And that's what makes it so powerful.

If we're just so conditioned by it, it's re it's a reflex. We just assume it's right. Of course, I wouldn't want to not follow my heart because I want to be authentic. This obsession with being authentic is a modern Western postmodern phenomenon that in the centuries of church history before that, they would have thought we were totally stupid for thinking this way.

But we don't want to be, we don't want to lie. David isn't lying. He acknowledges this is how I feel. And then he tells his heart how to act and how he acts doesn't always have to line up with how he's feeling. And that's good for us. That's not being disingenuous. I was talking with my kids last night about customer service, and you walk into a store and I'm like, two of my kids work at Grater's ice cream.

It's hi, welcome to Grater's, where can I get you? It's it may be 10 50 at night and you're about to close. And the last thing you want to see right now is another customer that's going to slow you down and getting out and getting home. But you're not lying or being disingenuous by greeting them warmly and telling them, thanks for coming in.

Have a nice night. That's not disingenuous. That is acting in a way that is appropriate because of what you should feel, not in the way you do feel. So, we have to break this habit. God's hesed covenant love is for you. Christians, do you know this? Do you know this? You might be going through a horrible trial right now.

You might be on the run emotionally. You might be in a very dark place emotionally. That's okay. Acknowledge that. That's okay. Some of you, this is the way you're wired. You're like that a lot. Some of you, you're going through something that's so extraordinary that it's weighing you down at an unusual way.

That's okay. It's not necessarily wrong to feel that way. It is necessarily wrong to make life choices based on the fleeting feelings of the moment. Speak truth to your heart. I'm not going to act the way I feel because the way I feel is wrong or the way I feel is not true is a better way to say it. The way I feel right now is not true.

And I have to act on what's true. God is not going to abandon you. You know that, right? You may not feel it. Right now, you might be like, God, why are you hiding your face from me? God, where are you? God, how long is this crap gonna go on? I hate this. How long is this gonna continue? That might be how you feel but let me tell you what is true.

God's covenant love is for you. Your name is written in the Lamb's book of life, and this trial, even if it lasts the rest of your natural life, will not last forever. So how long? No longer than the moment of your death. Now that may be a long time, but it's nothing in comparison with eternity because this light momentary affliction is worth nothing when compared to the everlasting glory that awaits us.

So, we don't have to believe the thing that we feel in the moment. We can acknowledge it. Yeah, I hate this. This is horrible. This is a miserable feeling, but that doesn't have to dictate terms. And I think this is apostasy bait. This is something to where we're so conditioned and trained spiritually to think that God only wants us to be happy and fulfilled and, nothing bad happens.

We're so conditioned to think that the moment a trial hits somebody they're ready to throw in the towel spiritually and give up on the Lord altogether. Despite how much the scriptures tell us that we will face trial and we will suffer. So, believe what is true, God's hesed, covenant love, his steadfast love is for you.

He's not leaving you. He has demonstrated his love for you and that his dearest one, it cost him. We sang this. He gave up that which was most precious to him in order to rescue you.

Number three, choose to sing.

I will sing to the Lord because why? He has dealt bountifully with me. So, David is choosing to bring to mind the bountiful ways that God has dealt with him. God's favor that has been expressed in his life. So, I will sing to the Lord because he's been better to me than I deserve. He has dealt with me bountifully.

Even though I was once his enemy, I was once somebody who was, did not believe in God or did not believe in Jesus Christ, but he saved me and brought me into his family. Amen. Glory. And so, he's given us something worth singing about. Some of you aren't great singers. I've heard you. It doesn't matter.

Sing. Sing as an expression of your rejoicing. Sing because it's it hits your soul in a different way than teaching does. Music touches the soul through a different route. God gets to your soul one way through teaching, exhortation, logic, point A, point B, if, therefore, minor premise, major premise, conclusion, syllogism.

That's one way of thinking that is, that's pretty that's pretty natural to Western ways of thinking. That's the way that, and it's good. We see that in scripture. But there's a different way that also touches our soul and that's through music and it's more indirect. But there's a reason why scripture commands us to sing.

The psalms were originally written to be sung. You, the words in the psalms were meant to be put to melody and for us to sing them because truth burrows into our hearts through music. We're told in the New Testament to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs because music moves us. And there's so many resources that we have available to us. When this was originally written. The only music you had is if you know somebody has an instrument, they'll have to play it for you and sing it to you. But now we've got Spotify. We can listen to it whenever we want. So, we have so many resources. Give you an example, like Psalm 20, Psalm 37, it contains truths that I believe with all of my mind, but during times of trial, I struggled to believe them in my heart.

And, in trials, our hearts need to be ministered to in a unique way, right? And the music helped my heart to believe what my mind was, it was difficult getting into my heart and the music helped it to get, to burrow in. Because it was set to a melody. Somebody directed me to a song set to Psalm 37, I listened to it over and over again.

And the truth of it sink in and administered to me in ways that mere reading alone would not have accomplished. I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at memorizing scripture. I don't know why, but it just like to recall words. I just, I have a hard time memorizing scripture, but I'm like near autistic at remembering music.

Now I don't remember the words of music either. At least. But I remember sounds, melodies, instruments. There'll be a song that I haven't heard in 30 years, and I'll listen to it. I'm like, oh babe, listen to this. This is this baseline. And I, and it's I'll just remember because I'm a weird, I've got this weird thing about music to where it just.

It's really, it's uncanny. Just, I can hear notes. I don't think it's perfect pitch, but it's somewhere along those lines. I just hear music and it sticks with me. And even though I don't remember the words as well I remember the words of songs better than I do words without music set to them because the melody of a song that I do remember it, it gives a track, it's a train on a track, it gives a track.

And I'm like, what was that? There, there's a word. It's da. Do y'all know what that is? I bet Bill and Maureen know that. As the deer, I sang that as a kid. I never sat down to actually try to memorize. I don't even know what song that is, but is it 42?

I don't know. Okay. I do remember the song, but the melody. gives my brain a track to attach. And so, my mind remembers the words because of the melody, and we're commanded to sing. And I've already said this but let me just say it again. It's like when we come together, the singing ministers, not just to your heart, it ministers to other people.

So maybe you all showed up here this morning. Thinking more and maybe you weren't really all that into it. Maybe you weren't really feeling it and maybe you're just going through it, but you like to sing. So, you sang along, and you didn't know this, but I can tell you it ministered to me because we don't sing merely for our own benefit, but whenever we gather together corporately, we minister to one another, and we help sing truth into one another's hearts.

And that's a powerful thing. Think about where else in the world can you go in this day and age where you can hear. A couple of hundred people singing together, baseball game, seventh inning stretch, maybe a concert. I don't know. Do people go clubbing and sing along? Probably not. Maybe, but you just don't hear that very often, but you come here and it's like we sing, and it is powerful and what we are singing to one another, especially the songs that we very carefully select here, we're singing truth and helping that truth to burrow in.

And that does help to calibrate your heart through music to feel the A certain way and to feel a certain way about truth that you might otherwise have difficulty accepting music can do that. And that's why it's a very powerful tool of the devil because the devil will use music also to make ugly things sound pretty.

But God also can use music to make true things that we might otherwise reject beautiful in our hearts and help us to sing in that way. So, point being, make sure your musical diet includes a good blend of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, even on your car, your commute, whatever, listen to good music.

All right. And all these things we'll wrap up here. And all these things, just remember that, yes. Many of us go through trials, but none of us have ever endured a trial worse than what Christ went through. And that is our Lord, and it is Him that is our Savior. We are saved not only by Him who went through a trial, we are saved by Him because of His trial.

Because His trial was the very means of our salvation. He was the dearest one of the Father. Jesus even experienced some form of abandonment by God, when He cried out, My God, why have you forsaken me? And that was a quotation of Psalm 22. But he suffered this abandonment also by his close friends, where pretty much everybody abandoned him.

Only the Apostle John was hanging around, to the end of his crucifixion. Everybody else abandoned him. So, Jesus went through a trial, and he suffered these things. But Jesus prayed, and Jesus, of course, his heart was fixed on the steadfast love of God. And on the night of his betrayal, he sang a hymn.

Remember that? He sang a hymn with his disciples. So even he acted out the very things in this psalm. Amen. His trials and suffering for our benefit, and He suffered to spare us from suffering, ultimate suffering. Steadfast love of God, hesed, God's hesed love is for you. We can rejoice in that, believe that, even though we may go through trials, because we will.

Anchor your heart in what is true. All right, let's pray. Thank you, our Lord. Thank you, our father, for teaching us and modeling for us in scripture how to deal with our feelings, how to act according to what is true, even when we don't feel it. And how to express our feelings and our frustrations to you.

And Lord, I pray for anyone here that is going through a great trial right now. Or there's, I'm sure there are many that are suffering in ways that I just have no clue. And Lord, I pray by your Holy Spirit, you will apply the words of Psalm 13 and minister to their hearts and call to mind words of scripture in their hearts this week to give them an anchor.

And to help them to be anchored in what is true and that they can trust in your covenant love for them. They can rejoice because of your great salvation. They can sing in their hearts and just have a resolve Lord that they will persevere. But Lord, for those that are in that trial, I do pray that you'll end it, get involved and save your people.

Save them from the trials they go through, but for as long as it does last, Lord, I pray that you'll strengthen them to persevere through it and that they will emerge on the other side with hearts deepened in faith and deepened in trust for you. Thank you, Jesus. Now, as we come to the table and we feed on your suffering, your body, and your blood, feed us, nourish us, remind us again of what is true.

And also, minister to us as we sing. We pray in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.