Is God Listening?

And today we're starting a brand new message series called Soul Food, feasting on the wisdom of the Psalms. And like I said, we've been focusing through this one month to live series on how to live each day to the max, right? To live with purpose and intention. And that's great. But have you ever had one of those days where, you know, you were so busy, so focused on your to-do list that, you know, maybe you skipped breakfast or lunch and then all of a sudden, you know, your blood sugar, it just tanks, right? And you're just, and there's only one thing you can think about. Must eat now. I mean, I go from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde when that happens to me. I'm just grouchy, no fun to be around.

It also happens sometimes to people in this service at about quarter to noon. We see you, come on, René, land the plane. Your laughter gives you away. You know, the spirit is willing, but the body must eat, right? And what about, though, when the spirit isn't willing either? Because it's starved, malnourished. How do you feed your soul? Maybe you're here today and, you know, you want to have God fill you. You have a hunger in your soul, but you're overwhelmed by your circumstances, your finances, your health, relationship, deep, abiding grief. Ever wonder what faith looks like when your dreams are shattered or your heart is broken?

The beauty of the Psalms is that they are emotionally raw. There is an in-your-face honesty to them. No Pollyanna spirituality, you know, no, just, you know, put on a happy face. There's real people struggling through real issues of life and faith and how the two come together. Now the Psalms are the worship songs of ancient Israel, and they were put into a collection like a hymnal. There's 150 of them in all. You can find them right in the middle of your Bible. And a little over a third of them were written by King David. They were intended to be sung in worship or their poems or prayers.

And just like our worship songs, they're written not only for the head, but for the heart. And that's why for 3,000 years, people have been going to the Psalms for spiritual soul food. The Psalm we're going to linger on a little bit today is Psalm 6. And it's a Psalm that essentially asks the question, "Is God listening? Is God listening?" Now it might be surprising to you that the Bible would raise such a question, but in fact that question gets raised often in the Psalms. And today's Psalm has the audacity to ask, "God, are you really there? I mean, can you hear me now, God? Really?"

Because for instance, this prayer thing really isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe you've had that same feeling where you think, "Man, I've been praying, but I just don't know if God is listening or if it's making any difference." There's a scene in the movie, "Bruce Almighty," where Jim Carrey has had a horrible day. He's lost his job. He's just had a series of mishaps. He's miserable. And well, let's see what happens next. Okay, God. You want me to talk to you? Tell them back. Tell them what's going on. What should I do? Give me a signal. I need your guidance, Lord. Please send me a sign. What's this Joker doing now? Okay. All right. I'll try your way. All right, Lord? I need a miracle. I'm desperate. I need your help, Lord. Please reach into my life. Ah! What the... Hurry up. Got you! Ah! Hey! Hmm. Ah! Fine! The gloves are off, pal! Come on. Let me see a little rat. Smite me! Oh, mighty smiter! You're the one who should be fired! The only one around here not doing his job is you! Answer me!

Now, if that seems a little bit sacrilegious to you, wait till you see what David writes in Psalm 6. Now, bear in mind this is a song. So, again, we don't want to just dissect this with our brains. We want to feel it in our hearts. It's a sad song, in fact. It's a lament. And maybe you walk in here, everything's great, and you're just skipping along, and you're not really in a lament frame of mind. That's okay. I'm glad things are going well. But the reality is, is that we are all going to have tough times. We're all going to hit bottom at some point. And this Psalm shows us how to wade through it.

Psalm 6. Follow along in your notes if you like, or even better yet, just listen to the words. Listen to the song. And watch the words as they come up on the screen. "Oh Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint. Oh Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, oh Lord? How long? Turn, oh Lord, and deliver me. Save me because of your unfailing love. No one remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from the grave? I am worn out from groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow. They fail because of all my foes. Away from me, all you who do evil. For the Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy. The Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed. They will turn back in sudden disgrace."

Would you pray with me, Heavenly Father? We pray that these words, your words, would find their way into our hearts and our minds, that they would make a difference in our lives. They would minister to us, Lord, this morning. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen. My brother tells a story of when he was in seminary of all places when he went through a very dry time spiritually. And the irony was that he was, you know, reading about God every day, studying about God, writing papers about God. But in the midst of all of the theology, he lost touch with God, and it was a terrible frustration for him.

And finally, one day sitting at his kitchen table reading the Bible, no less, this frustration just overwhelms him, and he picks up the Bible, and he throws it across the room. And he clenches his fist, and he looks up at the heavens, and he says, "Where are you, God?" And then perhaps to provoke a response, he says, "I would rather have your anger than your silence." And right then and there, in that moment, a lightning bolt came right through the ceiling and hit him right on the head. It singed off every single hair. He was completely bald. In fact, he's had to wear toupee ever since. Many of you don't know that. It's a really good one. Give it a tug sometime. No, just... That last part didn't happen. But Paul's frustration, his desperation, his anger over God's silence was quite real.

Like we saw Jim Carrey in that clip. It was like, "All right, the gloves are off. You know, smite me if that's what it takes to hear from you." And I get the feeling that David is going through the exact same thing. He's desperate. He's frustrated. And he's come to that point where, you know, "I will taunt you, Lord, if that's what it takes." You're going to hear a little bit of that in this psalm. Because sometimes the only way we know how to get attention is to pick a fight, right? Sometimes that's all we know. But then perhaps, I don't know, David thinks the better of it. It begins in verse 1, "O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath." David doesn't really want to tick God off. He just wants to be heard.

And the rest of the psalm is about David laying out his prayer and his problems to God. Now, there's a couple of things that I want to point out so that we're able to kind of get into this psalm. We're able to feel it and appreciate it. And I hope you'll be able to do that not just this morning, but as you come back to it during the week. I laid out the verses. Look at the first page here. I laid them out so that we could perhaps get an appreciation for how this psalm is structured, at least how I think it's structured. All but one of the verses, verse 6, consists of two parallel phrases where the second phrase intensifies or adds something to the first.

So, for example, in verse 1, the word rebuke is parallel with the more comprehensive idea of discipline. And the word anger is intensified by the word wrath. The point is that the verse isn't about two different things, but don't rebuke me in your anger and please don't discipline me in your wrath. It's about saying one thing in two or more ways so that in the different ways of saying it, we're pulled into the intensity and the imagery of the moment. Now, does that make sense? Yeah, it's something like, why the mini-tutorial on Hebrew poetry? Well, it's important because if we chop a song or a poem into two-minute little bits, we run the risk, even if it's great, you know, great outline or great verse-by-verse or word-by-word analysis, we run the risk of losing the forest for the trees.

You know what I mean? I mean, take, for instance, just a classic pop song like The Beatles, "All You Need Is Love." Now, what's the song about? Well, let's analyze it, shall we? Point one, "All you need is love." Point two, "All you need is love, love." Ah, now we're getting somewhere, right? Point three, in conclusion, "Love is all you need." Now, that would be ridiculous and you'd end up ruining a perfectly good song. And what I'm suggesting with the songs of the Bible is that we need to approach it with that same kinds of sensitivity to see how the lyrics work together as a whole or think about how it impacts us.

Now, are you still with me? Are you still with me, balcony? Hey, there, wake up there. Come on downstairs. Flip over to page two and let's chop this song up into seconds, shall we? No, I'm just kidding. But I want to point out three things that run through this song and many others for that fact. Three things that God never tires of hearing and the psalmist never tires of saying. The first one is this, "Have mercy." You might want to write that down. "Be merciful to me," David says. "I'm faint. My bones are in agony and my soul or my life is in anguish." Maybe David wrote this psalm, this worship song, when he was on the run from King Saul, his predecessor and rival.

Many of you know that David spent many years, several years running from Saul where he was literally public enemy number one in Israel. He was on the top of Saul's ten most wanted list. You can imagine how old that got. Praying that God would deliver him. And he runs. And he prays some more. And he runs. And he prays. And he runs. And he gets more beaten down and more broken and more tired and more hungry and more desperate. It says essentially the same thing in another psalm, Psalm 27:7. "Hear my voice when I call, O Lord. Be merciful to me and answer me. Have mercy." Michael Kuias' book, "Prayers," includes a poem that reminds me of how David must have felt during this time of life. It's a poem that maybe you can identify with. I'll warn you, it's heavy. Sometimes that's the way life is.

It goes like this. "Lord, it is dark. Lord, are you here in my darkness? Your light has gone out. Everything seems gray and somber as when a fog blots out the sun. Everything is an effort. Everything is difficult. And I am heavy-footed and slow. Every morning I am overwhelmed at the thought of another day. I long for an answer. I go through the same motions each day, but I know they're meaningless. I walk, but I know I'm getting nowhere. I speak and my words seem empty. Ideas themselves escape me and I find it hard to think. It wouldn't matter except that I am alone. I am alone. You've taken me far, Lord. And I followed you. Now, in the middle of the desert, at night, suddenly you have disappeared. Lord, it is dark. Lord, are you here in my darkness? Do you still love me? Or have I wearied you? Lord, answer! Answer. It is dark." Heavy stuff.

David was no happy camper, and sometimes neither are we. And in that dark place, David cries out, "How long, O Lord? How long?" Aren't you glad that the Bible gives voice to the feelings that we have, the ones that we don't even think that we can admit to, at least in church? And yet it gives voice. This idea that you've got to keep up appearances or keep up a stiff upper lip, that doesn't come from God. It comes from our culture. In fact, I came across a fascinating story in World War II, right when the bombs were starting to fall on London. The British Ministry of Information, trying to kind of lift morale, came out with these posters. There's one right here where it says, "Keep calm and carry on." Printed out two and a half million of them. Didn't manage to get too many people to hang them up, though. It was a total bust, total failure.

You can imagine, you know, "Carry on, tea time." It didn't go down that way. Not even among the, you know, the Brits. Now when they rallied them to be courageous, it worked. Because courage and calmness aren't necessarily the same thing. You can have fears, you can have pain, you can be shaken in your boots and still be courageous. But calm? Come on. You got a hole in your house? I mean, wasn't it Jesus Himself who said, in the darkness of an olive grove to His disciples, "My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death." And God cries out to God, "Take this cup away." So your God never tires of hearing you say, "Have mercy." But it's not just mercy that David is after. David wants deliverance. David wants to be rescued. David wants justice.

And so the second thing that David says is, "Save me. Save me because of your unfailing love." And I like the fact that even though David is pretty much flat on his back, he still has a little bit of fight in him. And you'll probably never hear anyone pray this honestly, at least not in public. But most of us don't pray like David prayed. I love what he says in verse 5. "No one remembers you when he is dead, Lord." Who praises you from the grave? That's classic because he's like, "Lord, if you let me slip away now, I won't be around to write any more songs for you." I'm only on number 6 right now. I've got a lot more left in me here. You know, by the way, I'm on your side. How am I supposed to praise you from the grave?

You might want to keep me around a little longer. He brings us right back into his reality in verses 6 and 7. "I am worn out from groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears." And notice he adds an extra phrase there. He upsets the rhythm and I think he's signaling this is the emotional core of this song. "David weeping on his bed, swimming in his tears. So much so that he says, 'My eyes grow weak with sorrow. They fail because of all my foes.'" And if you've ever been completely crushed in life, you know exactly what David is talking about here. And you know, your foes don't have to be, you know, people who are literally trying to kill you, as was the case with David.

Those of you who fought in war have been oppressed or threatened. You know that kind of fear directly, perhaps. That kind of foe. But sometimes the foe is your spouse in a broken marriage. Or your foe is a rebellious child or someone else you love and care for and yet you have grown weary and weak with sorrow. Other times that foe is the person looking back at us in the mirror in the morning. Our foe is ourselves. Our habits, our stubbornness, our anger, our addictions, our sins, diseases, limitations, all of these things can beat us down so much so that we flood our bed with tears and yet throughout it all God never tires of hearing us say, "Save me. Save me."

Other people get tired of hearing that. Other people get really worn out with too many appeals to help. You might get tired of saying, "Save me." Like, "Hey, you know, I've said it, I don't know how many times I've lost track." But there is never a time in your life so long as you're drawing breath whether it's the first time or the millionth time that God tires of hearing you or I say, "Save me because of your unfailing love." In fact, you might want to just circle that little phrase, "unfailing love" because that is after all why Jesus came, right? Not because we were doing so well here on our own, but because of our sickness and our lostness and our sins and diseases, our brokenness.

It was because of his failing love, in fact, that he seeks us out long before those words, "Save me," cross our lips. So ask for David. He doesn't have all the answers, but despite his misery, through it all and above it all, there's an awareness of God's unfailing love. And it's as if that unfailing love just kind of reaches into his heart, into his mind and helps lift him off his bed. Because somehow there's a shift in the tone. The last three verses of this psalm are different than the ones before. David has a different perspective. Now, nothing changes in his circumstances. Make sure that nothing changes. But perhaps David is reminded that if he has God's heart, he must also have God's ear.

Because of God's unfailing love, you not only have his heart, you have his ear. David knows his prayer has been heard. And so he can say this third thing, "I trust you." If you're like me, that's something that you have to reaffirm every single day. "I trust you, Lord." And this is so important because if we don't get to this point where we can say, "I trust you and it's just about have mercy and save me, have mercy save me," then really all we have is the complaint side of the equation, you know? We're kind of making a lot of noise. But God says, "Now trust me. Walk with me. Cooperate with me." And in so many words, that's what David affirms in these next verses, picking up at the back of verse 8.

He says, "The Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy. The Lord accepts my prayer." Now that's all he has. The Lord has heard him. But it's enough. Notice earlier in the Psalm, verse 4, he says, "Turn, O Lord, and deliver me." But by verse 10, by the end, he says, "My enemies will be ashamed and dismayed. They will turn back suddenly in disgrace." David knows that when God turns to deliver him and bring justice, that's going to lead to an eventuality, a day of reckoning where his enemies will turn. And it will be, without mistake, it will be sudden with their tails between their legs. But it hasn't happened yet. It's way too early to go, and David lived happily ever after.

David just knows that he's been heard, and because of that, he has the strength to wait on God's verdict, on God's answer. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, that's great for David, but that is not enough. I need relief now. I need a miracle now. I need God to say yes to my prayer now." And I'll be honest with you. Sometimes we ask God for something, and he just gives it to us. And so, hey, by all means, ask. But often, I would venture to say most of the time, from my experience, God's answer isn't exactly what we envisioned. In fact, you might not even like God's answer, because often God's answer is to give us the strength we need to deal with the cards that we've been dealt, and to trust that he can bring us through.

But all the while, we're like, "Lord, give me another hand. Let's start this over." And he says, "Trust me." And perhaps you came in here today feeling alone, or you wonder if God still listens to your prayers, you wonder if he's still near to the brokenhearted, or if he still gives strength to the weak. He's still listening to you. He still has his ear, his heart, and yet even his power in your life. I was inspired this week to trust God more deeply in my own life by the story of a little boy, a little boy that I hope will inspire you as well. This is his story. Watch us scream. "You will be safe in His arms. You will be safe. You will be safe. When everything is falling apart, you will be safe in His arms."

It's beautiful, huh? You have to know, it's not all sunshine and light for Cody and his parents. The long nights, 20 surgeries, prayers, anxiety, all of that. And yet his story is one of God giving power, giving strength. Like the Apostle Paul writes, his power is perfected in our weakness. I would love it if it said his power is perfected in our greatness or in our sunny days, but it's in our weakness. Because of this, I wanna give you an opportunity to do just what David does in Psalm 6. I wanna give you an opportunity to simply bring your prayer, your petition to God, to call out to Him, and then just know that you've been heard.

You may not be able to say anything more than those three simple phrases. Have mercy, Lord. Have mercy. Or save me. Save me from my worries. Save me from my weakness. Save me from my sins. Save me from myself. Save me from my depression, whatever it is. He doesn't tire of hearing it. And then I trust you. I trust that you hear me. And as we sing this next song, if you would like to come up to the front and lay that prayer at the altar, so to speak, at God's feet, it's not that he hears you better up here than where you're sitting, but sometimes it helps us to say, I wanna go bring this to God and engage our body in the process.

If you would like to do that during this song, no one's gonna talk to you or bug you. It's just you, both here, over in venue. We're gonna do the same thing. And you don't even have to have some prepared prayer because here's the cool thing. God not only hears you, He will help you with your prayer. Look at this last verse, Romans 26 and 27. And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don't know what God wants us to pray for, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. God not only hears you, He prays with you. And the Father who knows all hearts, knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us as believers in harmony with God's own will.

So again, this will be your time to just cast your care, your anxiety upon the Lord and know that He's there to meet you, to bring that to the throne of heaven with you. Let's prepare our hearts in a moment of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you that you are listening. Thank you, Lord, that you have an unfailing love for us. And Lord, I know that sometimes we get so tired or weary that discouragement can set in and we feel like you're just on the other side of the universe. But I pray that in these moments to come, that Lord, you would give us an opportunity to draw near to you and sense that you are right there alongside us, that you're right here with us and that you will give strength, you will give encouragement, you will give power, you will give whatever we need according to how we need it, Lord, how you know according to your perfect will.

And so Father, I pray that you will minister to our hearts, that you'll give us the strength to trust you to carry on, Lord, in your strength, not ours, but in yours. Thanks for listening. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.