The Trial of a Long Wait

(Psalm 13)

NOTE: The French numeration of verses—mostly in the wisdom literature and the prophets of the Old Testament—is slightly different in most English translations, including the Christian Standard Bible, which I’ve used here. The French Segond 21 counts the “title” of the psalm (“For the choir director, a psalm of David”) as verse 1, whereas the CSB begins verse 1 immediately following the title. In addition, just to keep things interesting, verses 5-6 in the CSB are treated as one verse (v. 6) in the French.

Consequently, if you are following along with what we project on the screen at the front of the room, always look for the verse number that is one lower than the one you see up front: verse 2 in French will be verse 1 in English, and so on.

I didn’t discover the word “Advent”, in the religious sense, until I was an adult. I grew up in America in the 80s and 90s, so we didn’t celebrate Advent—we celebrated Christmas. The decorations at the church were insane, there was a play every year in which we kids played shepherds or wise men with itchy, fake beards, and we made jokes about the kids playing Mary and Joseph being in love and having a baby. We sang traditional Christmas carols (like “Silent Night”) and not-so-traditional Christmas songs (like “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”).

This was a lot of fun, and there were definitely some things that stuck with me later in life. It’s made me very sentimental about Christmas; the minute I see Christmas decorations or hear a Christmas carol, I’m happy. (I was having a rough day a few weeks ago and Loanne was picking the music in the car, and even though she despises Christmas music when it’s not the month of December, to make me feel better she put on a Christmas album. I’ve rarely felt so loved.)

But for as good as a lot of that was, for all the legitimately good memories it gave me, we were missing something.

What we were missing was the feeling that we were missing something.

Advent, contrary to Christmas, is a holiday seasons that is specifically designed to make us impatient. Its main goal is to put us back into the story of our people—how the people of Israel waited, literally for centuries, for God to send the Messiah, the King he had promised to them. We do this to help us remember God’s faithfulness in the past, so that we can trust in God’s faithfulness in the future. This is a vital exercise for our faith, because very often we pray that God might act…and then we wait. And the wait for God to act can feel incredibly long. If we don’t have the spiritual muscles we need, then we will definitely lose heart in those times.

Advent helps us strengthen those spiritual muscles.

We’re going to be in Psalm 13 today. It’s kind of a strange Advent text (when I told Joe I wanted to preach on it for this Sunday, he said, “This is for Advent, right?”). But at least in my opinion, this psalm gives us the tonality, the flavor, of the season of Advent, in a beautiful way.

In this psalm, David gives us a model to follow by doing three things: first, we see him lament; next we see him pray; and lastly, we see him worship.

Lamentation (v. 1-2)

We don’t know exactly which circumstances led David to write this psalm, nor exactly when he wrote it. We know only that he has been unjustly pursued by his “enemy” for a long time. We don’t really need to know more. We find David in a situation which has led him to the brink of despair. He has persevered for so long that now he feels he can’t go on any longer. And his main refrain at the beginning of this psalm is simple: “How long?”

David repeats this four times in the first two verses.

V. 1-2:

1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me

forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long will I store up anxious concerns within me,

agony in my mind every day?

How long will my enemy dominate me?

David’s an intelligent guy. He knows God well enough to know that God hasn’t literally forgotten him.

But that’s definitely what it feels like.

And we know the feeling, don’t we? We live in a society that has conditioned us to be allergic to suffering. It’s one of my big problems, and it comes in large part from my upbringing (my dad would say as much): the moment I see suffering even on the horizon, I start to lose it. I reach for the Doliprane before the headache comes, because I’m anticipating it. I know I’ve got a difficult conversation coming, so I start running through all the worst-case scenarios in my head: I want to be ready.

We self-medicate, we seek to distract ourselves through entertainment… Anything to feel what we’re feeling just a little less.

And most of the time, it works. Most of the time we find means to cope, and we’re able to tough it out and work through it.

But sometimes, it doesn’t work as well. Sometimes our efforts to self-anesthetize are ineffective. Sometimes we feel it, and we keep feeling it, until there seems to be no end in sight.

It’s shocking how long suffering can last without respite.

A couple years ago I was in a bike accident, during which I suffered a ruptured spleen. I was in the hospital for nearly three weeks. They operated on me and thankfully, they were able to save the spleen. (I say “thankfully,” but I’m still not 100% sure what the spleen does.)

The twenty-four hours after that operation ranks with the worst nights of my life. The pain was intense despite the medication, and it wouldn’t stop. Every minute felt like an hour. It was that feeling that time had crawled almost to a stop, and this would never be over.

That was one day of pain. Eventually, the pain dulled significantly, and I was still sore (I had four broken ribs), but the constant pain was over.

Some people suffer this kind of pain for years. How can you even think about anything else in such a situation?

It’s true for physical pain; it’s also true for relational pain. We’ve all had difficult relationships, but difficult relationships within the church are among the worst, because you can’t just bail. We are brothers and sisters in Christ; we’re members of God’s family together, called to bear with one another and forgive one another.

And yet it does happen that sometimes, the people you are called to bear with and forgive turn against you. You try to resolve it, you try to do the right thing, and it doesn’t work—the attacks keep coming. And there seems to be no end in sight.

This is also true—and even more frequent than the other two—of emotional or mental suffering. This is one area people are ashamed to talk about, and the modern church has typically done a bad job at responding to it.

But we should recognize that any time our emotions are engaged, something happens to us at a biological level.

I read a great book this summer called The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology by Matthew A. LaPine. It’s a difficult read, but well worth your time. In this book, LaPine argues that modern theology is strangely detached from what we know about the human body and how emotions function on a biological level, whereas many ancient saints (he goes into great detail on Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin) actually had a better grasp on these things, despite being centuries behind the science. The goal of the book is to show that what the Bible says about our spiritual lives, and what science tells us about the biological functions of our bodies, actually complement one another, although much of Christian thought today pits the two against one another.

Let me give you an example. Someone who was abused as a child struggles with significant social anxiety as an adult. Very often, what they will hear from the church is, You are free of your past. You are loved in Christ. So place your faith in him, let these things go, and dive into the body of Christ.

The problem is, it’s not always that simple. This person wants to be fully engaged in the church, but finds his body fighting against him: when he’s around large groups of people, he physically cannot function as he should. The result is that on top of his social anxiety, he deals with almost crippling guilt over the fact that he struggles with social anxiety, because clearly his faith isn’t strong enough to get over it.

LaPine’s argument is that the Bible recognizes these kinds of struggles, and provides grace for them. It not only has a lot to say about how this person might deal with his problem; it also has a lot to say about how the church should welcome this person, and help him through it.

To put it simply, our experiences shape us. Over time, experiences create neural pathways that cause the body to undergo changes at a biological level. These neural pathways create automatic reactions in the body in the face of certain stimuli. Through repetition, through habit, or through trauma, our brains learn to tell our bodies that something dangerous is happening (even when it’s not). This is the famous “fight or flight” reflex: the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and you feel anxiety, or you have a panic attack—over nothing. It’s not logical, but it’s not sinful either: it’s a bodily response over which we have very little control, as automatic as breathing.

When that happens once, it’s scary. When it happens over and over, over the course of years, it can become so heavy that all you want to do, ever, is to stay in bed with the covers pulled over your head.

This may sound like a stretch, but look at how David laments—this is what he is describing. How long will I store up anxious concerns within me, agony in my mind every day?

David is tormented by a situation that is not letting up, and he is at the brink of giving in: How long, Lord, is this going to last? I can’t take it anymore!

This is a depressing sermon, I know. But this is the reality of the world we’re living in. And if we don’t know what to do when suffering lasts, we won’t last through the suffering.

So the first lesson David teaches us is honesty with God. We mustn’t be afraid to tell God that we’re on the brink of collapse. We mustn’t be afraid to tell God that it feels like we’re losing our minds. We mustn’t be ashamed to be in pain. God knows what we’re feeling; he’s not afraid of hearing it from us.

Why is this kind of lament important? Because it places us in a position of humility. When we verbalize our own pain, we express to our God that we don’t have what we need to get through this. We cannot do this on our own.

We need his help.

Prayer (v. 3-4)

And that is the second thing David teaches us: he teaches us to pray.

3 Consider me and answer, Lord my God.

Restore brightness to my eyes;

otherwise, I will sleep in death.

4 My enemy will say, “I have triumphed over him,”

and my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

I love that David is so incredibly unspecific in his prayer. He tells God what will happen if God doesn’t intervene: “If you don’t do something, I’ll die. My enemies will have won, and they’ll rejoice.” But the only thing he actually asks for is that God “restore brightness to my eyes,” or as the ESV translate it, “light up my eyes.”

We’ve all seen someone who is exhausted. Think about their eyes. You look at someone who is exhausted, you look them in the eyes…and there’s just nothing there. They’re gone. It’s only with great effort that they can actually focus on anything.

What happens after that person gets a really good night’s sleep? Their eyes are bright.

David is asking that God renew his strength. He has already lamented that he is mentally and emotionally exhausted, to the point where he doesn’t even know what to ask for, except to say, “make me strong again”.

The lack of specificity in this prayer is a huge encouragement for me. Because very often, I have no idea what to pray for. It’s sometimes difficult to even articulate what’s wrong, much less know how to fix it.

All David can say is, “God, help me. Give me what I need.” This is a posture of deep humility. He is recognizing his weakness in his current situation, his utter lack of resources, and he is turning to God because he knows that God is not weak, that God has all the resources David needs.

Up to this point, most of us can probably identify with David, because we’ve been there. We’ve been forlorn, we’ve been exhausted, we’ve felt helpless, so we’ve asked God for help. And sometimes, God answers our prayers when we pray them.

But there is often a period after our prayer, while we’re waiting for the answer to come. And sometimes this period of waiting can feel just as long as the period of suffering that led us to pray in the first place. Sometimes, our reflex after we pray is to return to lament, and go back to saying, How long, o Lord, how long?

But something keeps us from doing that: our knowledge that God will always do what he says. John Piper writes: “For the mind of faith, a promised act of God is as good as done.” His promises are so sure, so solid, that we always have a very good reason to not simply return to our heartache, but to lift our eyes toward him, and to tell the truth.

Worship (v. 5-6)

That is what David does. Rather than going back to his lament, rather than turning back to his suffering…he worships.

5 But I have trusted in your faithful love;

my heart will rejoice in your deliverance.

6 I will sing to the Lord

because he has treated me generously.

“But” is one of the most useful words in the Christian’s vocabulary. It can be unhelpful (“I know you tell me to do this, God, but…), but it is also the key to suffering without sinking.

After David is honest about his despair and prays for God’s help, he makes a conscious decision to turn away from the legitimate reasons he has to despair, and to turn toward the legitimate reasons he has to trust.

The things he says in his worship seems totally incongruous with what has come before.

He says that he has trusted in God’s faithful love—although he’s just asked God how long he’ll forget him. David knows, even if he doesn’t feel, that God still loves him, and that God will remain faithful.

His heart rejoices in God’s deliverance—even though he’s just expressed his anxious concerns and his agony. David forces himself to remember that he has reasons to rejoice, because God’s salvation is sure, despite all evidence to the contrary.

And on the basis of that reminder, he sings.

V. 6 is particularly telling. David makes the decision to sing to the Lord. Singing is not what you do when you’re in despair. You sing when you’re celebrating—when it’s someone’s birthday, or at the New Year, or at a football game. We’ve all heard people sing to themselves. They do it when they’re happy—it’s unlikely any of us have heard someone singing to themselves while they’re depressed. David makes the decision to do this, even though he’s not feeling it: he forces himself to do what he would do if he was filled with joy.

Why does he do this? Why does he persist in acting joyful when he’s not feeling joyful? Because God has treated him generously.

Despite the situation in which David currently finds himself, he remembers God’s kindness to him in the past. He remembers God taking him as a shepherd boy, and empowering him to kill the giant for the armies of Israel. He remembers God giving him strength as a warrior, and choosing him as king. Most of all, he remembers that despite the obvious flaws in his own character, God has still shown him grace.

What David does here is incredibly hard to do. But it is essential.

There are three reasons why it is essential.

The first reason is very simply that God deserves it. No matter what we’re going through, no matter how we feel, God is still deserving of our praise. That’s why David mentions aspects of God’s character that have not changed despite David’s current circumstances: his faithful love, his deliverance, his generosity toward his people.

The second reason is because God does a spiritual work in us when we worship. Many pastors have spoken of the spiritual benefits of worship. They’ll quote passages like Ephesians 5.19, saying that the Spirit fills us as we speak to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Or they’ll quote David himself, in Psalm 22.3: “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.”

These things are absolutely true. We worship every time we gather—that is, we stand up together and we sing songs together—because worship is one of the ways God shapes our hearts through his Holy Spirit. It’s one of the ways that he consoles us when we need consoling, that he strengthens us when we need strength, that he teaches us who he is and how he works within us. When we worship, God works mysteriously in our hearts to draw us closer to himself.

If you’ve spent any time in church, you’ve probably given a good bit of thought to these first two reasons. But the third reason, while the least important, is also the most neglected.

The third reason worship is essential in times of suffering is because God has created us in such a way that repeated exercises, like worship, train our bodies to react differently.

We talked before about the sympathetic nervous system; God created this system in us. He created us in such a way that experiences cause neural pathways to form, so that faced with certain stimuli, the brain tells the body that something dangerous is coming, and the body reacts. But our bodies are under the curse of sin, so now this reaction doesn’t always happen the way it should. One of the goals of therapy for anxiety is to retrain our bodies to react appropriately.

I’m taking a calculated risk in saying this: worship is much more than therapy, but it’s not less. When we worship, God does a mysterious work in us to model us after Christ. But when we worship, God also does a work in us that is perfectly ordinary and scientific: he retrains our minds and our bodies to react appropriately—not according to what we perceive, but according to what is true.  Worship, over time, teaches us to react differently to problems.

It does this by pushing us to persevere in celebration, to persevere in joy, despite everything in us that says it’s ridiculous to celebrate in such a situation.

God is the one who created our bodies this way. He knows how he made us, so he knows the result he hopes to bring about in us when he commands us to pray and celebrate and worship him. Matthew LaPine says it this way: “It may not be the case that prayer and thanksgiving will immediately banish every anxiety, but that the practice of prayer and thanksgiving is like watering the garden of our [bodies and spirits] toward the sort of maturity that enables Paul to say, ‘to live is Christ and to die is gain’ (Phil. 1.21)”.

What does this have to do with Advent?

Now it might be easy to wonder, once again, why I’m even talking about this for Advent—Psalm 13 is great as far as it goes, but what does it have to do with Advent?

Psalm 13 is a perfect Advent passage because the season of Advent is a reminder of the unbelievably long wait of the people of Israel, between the time that God brought them into exile, and the time when Jesus came. That’s about six hundred years.
All this time, they were waiting. Waiting for the King that God had promised, who would save them and deliver them. Six hundred years, waiting for a Messiah who hadn’t yet come.

All this time, the people of Israel are waiting, with no end in sight. All this time—for six hundred years—they are praying, How long, Lord? How long will you forget us? How long will you hide your face from us?

But through this wait, the faithful among God’s people had developed the habit of practicing what David models for them in Psalm 13.

So it’s no surprise, then, that Simeon and Anna rejoice when Jesus’s parents bring him to the temple in Luke 2—they have been waiting so long, but they have been waiting faithfully: they have not become stuck in despair, but have prayed and worshipped. So when their deliverance finally came in the form of this little baby, they were able to recognize him for who he was.

God calls us to develop this same readiness in ourselves, and he shows us how.

I know for a fact that some of you are desperately tired. Some of you read David’s words in v. 1-2 and you are there. That is what you’re feeling. That is what’s going on in your heart right now. And if you’re not feeling that now, you will.

And that’s okay. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed; it’s okay to feel like you’ve been waiting forever.

So what do we do if that’s the case?

We lament—we are honest with God about our struggles and what we’re feeling.

We pray—we humble ourselves and recognize that we do not have what we need, and ask him to provide for us.

We worship—we lift our eyes toward God, and remind ourselves of why he is worthy of being joyfully celebrated.

Let’s be clear: doing this won’t solve all our problems, and it may not even make us feel better. Sometimes it will, but often it won’t. It’s likely that sometimes we’ll go through this cycle of lamentation, prayer and worship several times in the same day.

But that’s okay, because we don’t do it in order to feel better. We don’t do it to get relief.

We’re playing the long game, like God’s people as they waited for his deliverance. We’re doing the work we can do, counting on God to work in our hearts and change us over time—to make us ready to recognize and rejoice in his help when it finally comes.

Advent is the season that is specifically intended to help us learn to do this work.

In light of God’s promises, sent to us in the brokenness of a sinful world, we lament when we must; we pray without ceasing; and we rejoice in his deliverance, because his deliverance has come, and it will come again.