Not in Your Wrath, Lord! (Psalm 6)

Spring 2026 - 3/25/26

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath. Be grieve with me, O Lord, for I am languishing. Heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled. My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O Lord, how long? Earn, O Lord, deliver my life. For in death there is no remembrance of you, and you will give you praise. I am weary with my moaning. Every night I flood my bed with tears. I drenched my couch with my weeping. My eyes faded away because of grief. It grows weak because of all my foes. Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my plea. The Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled. They shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Amen. Friends, that's God's word. Let me pray and then we'll unpack it together. Heavenly Father, I simply pray tonight that the words of my mouth and the meditations in all our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable to you. For we ask it in Christ's name and for his sake. Amen. Last week we said that this section of the Psalms we're looking at, book one of the Psalms, which is divided, it's 150 poems or prayers divided up into five different books. Book one is a collection of particularly personal prayers of King David. And that they teach us, they show us how to not sink spiritually under sorrow. That's what he said. And tonight, in particular, we explore with David, we follow him in his faith journey at this moment of intense sorrow, and particularly of intense guilt and fear due to his own sin. Have any of you felt that? A sense of unworthiness before God or just for life? Psalm 6 tells us how to deal with it. And so three points tonight as we follow David's journey. First, let's talk about the troubled king, then the longing king, and then the confident king will follow him. So first, let's talk about the troubled king. Psalm 6, we don't know, as we do with some other Psalms of David, exactly what the circumstances were in David's life when he wrote this prayer, when he penned this poem. Many things seem to be factoring into his troubled state of being. But what we can see clearly here is that the trouble he's in is causing him an excruciating amount of spiritual pain and anguish. I want to look first at the description of the trouble that he gives us and then the cause of it here. Like first, he describes this trouble with vivid language, visceral imagery. In verses 2 through the first half of verse 3, he says that he is languishing, which means he is incredibly weak. Incredibly weak. And then he says, his bones are troubled, and his soul also is greatly troubled. And the word he uses for troubled with his bones literally means to shake, that he's trembling. We don't know if he means literally he's got physical tremors at this point. But most commentators agree that the pairing of bones and soul is a Hebrew way of saying that every fiber of his being is experiencing this weakness. His strength has gone out from him. And so, down in verse 6 and in verse 7, he describes an intense sadness, a sadness so intense that he can't stop crying. He says, I'm weary with my moaning. Every night I flood my bed with tears. The flow of his tears is as if his life and joy itself are being drained out of him. Which is why in verse 7 he says, My eye wastes away from grief. That which once glimmered, sparkled with hope and excitement is now dull and gray. His eyes. Because he has nothing to look forward to. And even more than that, what he is envisioning for himself, for his future here, is incredibly terrifying. That's the description of his trouble, and this leads into the cause of it. The cause of David's trouble, in short, in this psalm is this that what David sees for himself, for his future, is the prospect of death under God's wrath. Death inside of God's anger. Verse 1, he says, O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath. Some older translations say fury. These are intense words. One commentator says they are hot words, and they literally are. They describe a heat of anger. And so whatever David is experiencing in terms of his circumstances, because of he mentions enemies here, maybe his body is sick, things aren't looking great for King David here, that's for sure. But whatever his circumstances, David perceives through his circumstances, to a deeper truth, which is the deepest reason for his trouble. And the reason that his trouble is so deep within him. And that deeper truth is this David feels that God hates his sin and it terrifies him. He knows that the ultimate problem which all of our suffering points to is our sin and the punishment that it deserves. And so John Calvin, an older writer on Psalm 6, said that in this Psalm, David saw, as it were, hell opened to receive him. And the mental distress which this produces exceeds all other sorrows. The truth that God hates his sin and that he is deserving of God's anger and punishment is crushing him. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavanck says that guilt is the first and the heaviest punishment that God gives for sin. And we see that here. Friends, David is not necessarily denying his faith or completely doubting that he belongs to God. But he is feeling the crushing weight of his sin. He knows that his earthly troubles are just the signs of the righteous anger of God that he deserves. Beloved, in processing his troubles for us, in writing them down in Psalm 6, we need to understand that King David is pulling us into an experience that we so often hide from, that we far too frequently resist. And that is this: that we must face our sin as it truly is, for what it is. And he's showing us that if we saw our sin as it truly is, we too would be crushed by it. We too would be greatly troubled, we would be shaken, we would be weak. All our confidence, all our sense of self-worth would drain away with our tears if we realize the damage our sin does, that it has done, that it is doing, and if we realize what punishment we deserve for it. Like I don't know about you, but I remember around the time when I turned 16 and started driving, all these moments in which my mom would tell me about how intensely worried she was about me. Maybe you still experience this. I remember in college too, she like I was in Chicago 18 hours from home, and she'd call me all the time and worry about what I was doing and if I was safe. But I remember also when I was 16 and she would see me off to school and she would check on ordinary things like, Do you have your phone, do you have your wallet, do you have your backpack, whatever? And then she would get really serious and say, be safe. Right? And I'm sure you've had that experience with your parents. And she would say very often in these moments that you have no idea what it's like to be a parent. And it was true. Well, in the way that our parents tell us for so much of our lives that we just don't know the intensity of their protective worry as they watch us venture out into the world, in the same way, we just don't know the intensity of God's protective anger as he watches his world and his creatures being ravaged by sin. And David's asking us, he's showing us how we would feel if we could understand, even a glimpse of how furious God is at sin. It cannot be minimized. That's the challenge that the gospel puts to us. To never minimize our sin as just a series of minor mistakes, but to see that it is nothing less than an assault on our heavenly Father and Creator. That's what the Bible teaches. Sin is that serious. We must never minimize it. And we must also never assume that it's no big deal for God to forgive it. Our sin is a weight that crushes, and so are you troubled by sin? Are you troubled by your sin? Have you learned to weep for sin? If you're gonna be a Christian, if you're gonna do the prayer thing, this is a key part of that life. It's hard to invite you into it tonight. It's hard for me too, but it is absolutely necessary if you're gonna persevere on the journey, not sink under sorrow. We must follow the troubled king. Which leads to the next point: the longing king. It's the next thing we see here. In verse 3, David asks a question that is asked throughout the Psalms, and in asking it, David assumes something profound about God. He asks, But you, O Lord, how long? Simple question. But this implies, think about it, that David believes, even as he feels crushed by his sin and deserving of punishment, that God will not be as angry as our sin deserves and will not give us the punishment that it deserves. And so, even feeling the crushing weight of his sin, he makes seven bold requests in this psalm to God. He says, Don't rebuke me in your anger, don't discipline me in your wrath, be gracious to me, heal me, turn, deliver my life, save me. And given the guilt that he feels these are astonishing requests. Friends, we must never lose amazement that according to the Bible, we can long for salvation from God. It's amazing. And in verse 4, David explains how in the world this can be. Like, on what basis can sinners long for help from God? He says, it is only for the sake of your steadfast love. That is a huge phrase. It means that David knows he has nothing in himself to bring before God with which he can plead his case. He has no gift to appease God's anger. He has no good deed that he can propose to God to say, I'll do this, and then I can redeem myself or make up for my sin. He knows he has nothing, and that all he has is what God has said about himself in his word, that he is a God of unfailing love who establishes and upholds a relationship with sinners. That's how David longs for salvation from God, and yet we wonder. How can that work? You cannot think that that is an easy thing. How can God be just and the punisher of sin as he should be, of our sin, of the things you've done today when no one was watching, or that you said to others? How can he be the avenger of sin rightfully, righteously, and yet and yet be the savior of the guilty? How can that be? How can someone, how can we simultaneously feel crushed by the weight of our sin and yet long for salvation? How can someone feel that? How can we long for that? And the answer is this only if we're able to expect that God will take the weight off of us. And in this we learn that David is only a shadow of a king who was far more troubled by sin. Right at the halfway point in the Gospel of John in the New Testament, John chapter 12, Jesus knows that he's entering the moment of his trial and his death. And do you know what Jesus says in John 12, 27? Hey, you got it, Liberty. Let it go. Jesus here, don't miss it, quotes the first half of Psalm 6.3. He says, Now is my soul troubled. He says, What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour or this moment. No, but for this purpose, I've come to this moment. He's quoting Psalm 6.3, and do you see what Jesus is saying here? He's saying that the very reason for which he came was to pick up the weight that was crushing David in Psalm 6, and that crushes us when we face our sin as it really is. Except that unlike David, he would actually and fully be crushed. And that's why on the night before Jesus' death, when he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray, Luke tells us, this is also up there, that he began to be in agony, and he prayed, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground. Friends, that where we and David should and do shed tears over our sin and our failure, Jesus shed his blood. That he felt in every fiber of his being, he felt sin for his people beyond what we ever will. Friends, what this is saying is that in God's unfailing love for his people, the weight of sin that we carry is actually like a feather compared to the full weight of sin that Jesus Christ took upon himself for us. That's what this is saying. Because for God to be just and to be Savior, the punishment had to go somewhere. Someone had to be crushed by sin. Because sin crushes. It's woven into the fabric of creation if we turn away from God. Something or someone had to be ruined by sin, because sin ruins the world and the people which God created to reflect his glory. Someone had to be cut off from the joy of fellowship with God because sin cuts us off from it. And that's why, by the way, in verse 5 in this Psalm, David talks about Sheol, which is an Old Testament word for the grave, as a place of no praise. He's not denying an afterlife. He's simply saying that true death as we deserve it cuts us off from God. And friends, the punishment had to go somewhere. But in those three hours of darkness on the cross, Jesus was crushed. Jesus was ruined. Jesus was cut off from the joy of fellowship with his Father. As we confess, as Christians have confessed for centuries, he descended into hell for you. That's what the longing king David is picturing here. And beloved, that is how you get through the trouble in your own soul over your sin. The formula for troubled souls that David gives us here is this from Hebrews 2, true from Hebrews 12, verse 2. Look to Jesus. I put that on the slides too. The founder and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross. One old Puritan writer said, If you have felt anguish of spirit, under a sense of deserved wrath, let it cease when you find the man of sorrows presenting all his anguish as the atonement for your soul. It's beautiful. That's how the gospel works. It's why in John Bunyan's famous book, Pilgrim's Progress, at the beginning of that book, the main character, Christian, whose spiritual journey is just beginning, he has this heavy burden on his back that he carries and that he can't get rid of. And it weighs him down and it digs into his shoulders and it causes him pain until he arrives at this hill where there's a cross and perceives what happened there. And in that moment of seeing the cross, of seeing the king who was troubled for his sin, the burden rolls off his back. The burden of guilt, the burden of fear. Has it rolled off yours? Is it back on you today when it was off or felt like it was off recently? Look to Jesus. We can long for the experience of grace, of forgiveness, of salvation, because he went to the cross. And we could, in so many ways, end there. But that's not where the psalm ends. It's glorious to long for forgiveness and to know that you can have it through Christ and that you can experience it again and again and again by beholding the one who endured the cross for you. You can experience forgiveness. But we also move through the comfort of the cross to the confidence of the resurrection. So the last part of this psalm, let's talk about this the confident king. Let's follow him there. Friends, when we find our comfort, not in minimizing our sin, but in maximizing God's grace, we gain an ability to face the world and all of life and all its troubles and all its hardships with profound confidence. Look at verses 8 to 10. Does this unsettle you? Let's talk about it. David says, like a sudden shift, dramatic shift. He says, Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my plea. The Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled. They shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment. Why the sudden shift? Because, obviously, if you think about it, in prayer, David has experienced God's unfailing love. You can experience that too in prayer. Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit himself bears witness to our spirits that we're the children of God. If you don't pray, I can almost guarantee you're not going to get that experience. But when you do, you can, like David, and you can experience this shift towards confidence too. And what? I mean, an experience of God's unfailing love. But notice how he describes it. He has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my plea. This is like what we sing in that great song, Come ye sinners. All the fitness that God requires of you is to feel your need of him. That David has felt that, and now he knows that God has heard him. He's accepted his plea for help. And so he knows that God not only is with him and has heard him, but will show up for him. He will not face hell. God will not let him be put to shame. In a moment, the world, the flesh, his own sinful flesh, the spiritual enemies of God's people will all be put to shame and will be as nothing. He knows that God is forgiving, that he hears us, and that he's coming for us. A couple years ago, I read a sort of a memoir by a guy named Harrison Scott Key, awesome writer from Savannah, called The World's Largest Man about His Father. And Key, Harrison Scott Key, he grew up in Mississippi with a very like backwoods, manly man of a father, like hunter, fighter, just tough guy. And Harrison Scott Key is like a, he's an English professor. And he grew up always feeling out of step with his dad. And actually, he tells about how as he got older he kind of decided, I don't want anything to do with my dad. His dad, he said at one point in the book, they moved from Memphis to like a small town in Mississippi because he said the public schools were too clean, the hospitals were too well equipped. Sure, they had jobs there, but they also had sidewalks, and Pop didn't know what to think about sidewalks. That was his vibe with his father. And it's his father quest, this memoir, of his sense of distance from his father and yet his longing for his father. And this is uh what he writes at the end towards the end of the book. He tells this particular story. He says, if this story is a father quest, then it all started in kindergarten on one of those days where all the dads are invited to eat lunch with all their children and endure the humiliation of sitting in chairs that would ensure they could never again reproduce. He said, Pop said he'd be there. I was pretty excited because I'd been telling stories about him all year, how he was a big hunter and killed things and would soon allow me to kill things, how he fished the Red Man tournament trail and would soon allow me to put Red Man in my mouth too. How he was generally bigger and better than any dad anywhere and could probably beat up all the other dads. He says, I've never to this day been so excited to see another human. My heart grows aside every time I think about how much I wanted to see him on that day so everyone would know how great he was. And he said he says, other fathers and grandfathers arrived. I was not impressed. These men were small. None of them were carrying a knife, for example. But where's your dad? The others asked. Ha ha, he's not coming, they said. Could they tell I was worried? I was worried. Soon it was time to walk to lunch, and he was still not there, and I did what any boy would do. I cried. There was a knock on the door. It was him, I thought. It was not. And then he says, Often these days, when I'm sad and thinking of my father, I go back to that day in kindergarten when I longed for him. Back to a time when I was not trying to outrun him, to escape his habits. I was a tiny boy shuffling down the hall at the end of the line at lunchtime, and he hadn't come. And now I felt silly for crying, for letting everyone see my feelings. And then, when I rounded the last corner of the cafeteria before the cafeteria, I saw something I'll never forget. Him. He stood there in front of the cafeteria doors waiting, so tall, so big. I wiped my face back, I wiped my face and sucked back any evidence of feelings. And he says, but his greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud. The things a father should do, which is this: be there, always be there, and never stop being there until you can't be there anymore. Why the sudden shift in this song? Why does David go from so much sorrow and guilt and worry and shame, so much weakness, like Harrison Scott Key and Harry, to such confidence. It's because he knew in prayer. He experienced in prayer that God showed up, that God is there. Brothers and sisters, God has heard the sound of our weeping. If you're broken over your sin, and he's come for us, he's come for us. And we know that way better than David did. And this moves us with David as we see our King vindicated. He was troubled by sin, he was crushed by it, and yet God heard him, and God raised him up from the dead, and we are moved by that when God showed up for Jesus to know that God will always show up for us. And so we can face our enemies, like David does with confidence. What are the enemies? Well, in short, the Bible sums it up like this: the world, the flesh, and the devil. That yes, there is evil in the world. We're a part of it. We get sucked into cultural forces and the things going on around us that pull us away from God. There's the flesh, which means ourselves. We are sinful. We have enemies. Our own flesh is an enemy. David knows that. And the devil, there's a spiritual adversary who puts thoughts in your head and tempts you and puts things across your path. God allows him to do it. We don't understand that, but he does. And yet, we know that God will always show up for us. And even in our weakness, even in the fear we feel for all of our failures, time and time and time again. We know that God is still with us, that he'll always show up. And so we get to work. We get to the work of spiritual battle. We tell our enemies, our spiritual enemies, to depart, to get lost. We flee temptation. Because, friends, sin always makes its greatest promises amidst our greatest trouble. Don't you know that? Like, how often have you been felt, have you been anxious or insecure or even feeling guilty for something you did wrong? And in that mess of your own heart kind of stewing and all that stuff? Haven't you found yourself far more vulnerable to temptation, to sin? Because sin always tells you when you're feeling stressed out and troubled, this is going to be a quicker way to fix the problem. But friends, when you know that even despite your sin, God has borne it and he has taken it from you, and he is with you, then you can resist. And that's what David's showing us here how to do. You can know that sin is not the way. David's showing us here that just as he can't treat sin lightly in terms of how God forgives it, so he can't treat it lightly in terms of his call to fight it. Are you treating it lightly? It's the gospel of God's grace and forgiveness. That he's borne your sin in his son. That he carried it in his body on the tree. It's that that moves us to fight. To fight our enemies spiritual. The enemies of the world, the flesh and the devil. So are you fighting? That's the invitation that God has shown up, and you can be confident. Don't let that change your friends. Let the Psalms move you. This is an invitation to prayer. You won't experience that grace without it. And you won't be able to go out with that confidence without it either. So let's do that now. Let's pray and we'll sing another song. Heavenly Father, thank you so much. That your love is unfailing. That you haven't left us to carry the weight of our sin on our own. And yet I pray, Father, for those who are not looking to the cross of Christ and never have, that tonight you would open their eyes and turn them to the cross so that they would no longer have to carry their sin on their own. Father, knowing the love you've had for us, I pray for everyone in the room tonight that you would motivate and move us to a confidence to stop giving in to sin, to fight against it, to say no to it, to push back against the forces of evil in our own lives. And pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.