How Long, O Lord (Psalm 13)

Spring 2026 - 4/1/26

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's a psalm that's important for some people right now, and that for some of you tonight, maybe, honestly, is one of those like parts of scripture that you're just gonna have to pin, that it absolutely will be necessary for you soon, at some point in life soon. But because in the Psalms, what we see is that God is instructing us in how to come to Him personally and individually, though also together, in prayer through all seasons of life, through all sorts of moments and experiences. And tonight we're going to talk about spiritual depression through Psalm 13. So I'm gonna just go ahead and read that one tonight for us. You can open your Bibles if you have them. The verses are also on the screen. Let's give our attention to God's word and then I'll pray, and then we'll unpack it together. So, 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 enemy 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. Amen. Friends, that's God's word. Let's give him thanks for it, and then we'll unpack it together. Father, thank you for your word, your gracious revelation to us. I pray tonight that as we come in need of hearing from you, that you would speak, Lord, for your servants are listening. Amen. So can Christians be depressed? I'm confident from my social media feed that there are a lot of people who would say no to that question. And honestly, when I was younger, I think maybe I wouldn't have vocalized this, but I think that instinctively I might have said no. But I remember a time when I was in college looking back on a season of what felt like spiritual energy, a spiritual high point later in like late high school. I remember looking back on that time with a ton of nostalgia and longing, thinking, how have I like stooped so low? How have I like come so far from that awesome time? Of feeling on fire for God. That was how we put it back then. And I remember being in this season of struggling to pray and wondering how in the world those better times had slipped away, wondering what I had done wrong or what God was doing and why he had brought me to this place. And then I remember realizing slowly over time that there were so many reasons that I thought that that season was a spiritual high when it was actually not as great as I thought it was. There were a lot of reasons that life was good. And so often that's how it works when we think that we are standing firm and doing so well with the Lord. I can remember having started dating a cute girl at that point in time. I can remember starting the baseball team like in high school. I can remember like feeling really good about life for so many other reasons and slowly starting to realize while I was in college that maybe I wasn't actually as faithful in that season as I thought I was. Maybe life just felt really good for a lot of reasons, and it felt like I had a lot of things going on at the moment. And then fast forward a few years, and some of those things aren't there anymore. And what so often happens is we experience a spiritual depression. But I want to convince you that whatever you think, intuitively, or what if even if you're actually convinced, even more if you're actually convinced that Christians can't experience real like depression, that you may not be as far from it as you think. And I know that's hard, but the psalms so often take us into these darker places. Christians who are like professional Christians in the Psalms take us into these dark places in their own spiritual journeys. David, the king of Israel. The sons of Korah are another group of people who write Psalms, they're like the worship leaders in Israel. They take us to those places. The spiritual professionals experience these things. And so I think the words that Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10 are important. If you think you're standing firm, be careful. Just be careful. But also take comfort, knowing that the Bible can take you to these places and show us what to do there. What do you do when you feel spiritually empty or depressed? And also realize that many of you tonight are there. I don't need to convince everyone in the room that this is a reality or will be a reality. So what do you do? And there's three things tonight I want to unpack. First, that what we need to do in experiencing spiritual depression, and even just the reality of it, whether you feel like you're in it or not, is that we must acknowledge the difficulty. This is the longest point. This is what I want to spend the most time on tonight. Look at the first two verses. This powerful question, repeated four times. How long, O Lord, how long? David, Israel's king, is showing us this intense spiritual honesty. He's saying that he is struggling with difficulties in his life that have gone on for a painfully long time. Friends, it is usually not the intensity. This is just an observation, though I think the Bible bears this out, and Psalm 13 is suggesting it. It is usually not the intensity of hardships and difficulties, but the length of them that tempts Christians to despair. In Psalm 13, David is experiencing a spiritual drought and a spiritual depression that's starting to make him wonder, will this go on forever? And it's important to note the particular difficulties he names and the order in which he names them. The first difficulty and the hardest is the theological or the spiritual one, where he says, Will you, God, forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? God feels distant to David and unconcerned about him. And so Martin Luther said this: the hiddenness of God is the beating pulse of David's misery. He feels overlooked by God. He feels like his father isn't engaging with him. That's the first and the deepest difficulty. Do any of you have stuff going on in your life that's making you feel overlooked by God? Or like God is far away from you? That's the first thing. The second is, I would say, a psychological difficulty. He says, How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? He's stuck, in other words, on the mental hamster wheel, trying to just think his way out of all his problems. What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? And this is leading to an intense sadness and frustration and exhaustion in his heart all day long. Have you ever been stuck? Are you, are any of you stuck on that hamster wheel? Trying to figure out how to solve your problems but not really having an answer or feeling like you have a conversation partner. And then the last difficulty he names is I would say the social difficulty. He says, How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Meaning that his enemy is more successful than him. Applauded by the world while he is mocked. Do you ever look around and see sin celebrated? And do you see unconcerned sinners sinning it up with great success and happiness? These are the difficulties that David names, and the order is important too. That the fundamental problem he feels is that in all this, in the psychological and the social mess, it's really that God feels different. And the question tonight is, friends, can you acknowledge these things? Do you acknowledge them? And I would say that whether you feel right now like you're stuck in an unwelcome spiritual depression or not, the Bible invites us from cover to cover to acknowledge these things no matter where we're at. That I'm not suggesting it's optional to acknowledge your difficulties. I'm saying that it's essential for the Christian life. And the Psalms invite us into that. God wants us to do this. That's why He inspired this prayer and others like it. And in a really important sense, you can't actually be a Christian without acknowledging the difficulties. I really believe that. One church father, a guy with a cool name named John Chrysostom, or Chrysostom, I don't care how you say it, he said this: it's a tragedy that many suffer this feeling of desertion and neither know it nor lament it. God wants us to acknowledge the difficulty. Sadly, just from my read, much of the modern Western church has equated Christian salvation with ease and comfort. We've made too frequently an empty and unbiblical promise that those who put their faith in God will never have that faith put to any real serious sort of testing. Let me give you two examples of how I've seen this play out. One is a bit trite, but it actually captures this really well. When I was in college, I sprained my ankle really badly playing basketball. And I was on crutches for like two weeks. And I remember I went to a Christian Bible college. There were a lot of different, like sort of, I guess you'd say, sub-genres of Christian at this Christian Bible college. Different takes on things, of course. And I remember crutching my way out of the SDR, which is like central, one evening, and I saw uh like an acquaintance, a student that I knew, and she asked me what happened, and I said that I sprained my ankle, and she said, Did you pray about it? And I said, Yeah, like I prayed about it. Like I pray every day, you know, whatever. And she's like, like, you're still hurt though, right? And I was like, Yeah. She's like, Did you really mean it? And that was felt like crazy to me at the time. And your friends, like, what I see on my social media feed isn't all that different. Here's a more like immediate example that I think we all wrestle with all the time, and that I do too, and that is this leaders in ministry thinking that they can't ever be struggling spiritually or lacking in spiritual excitement and happiness and bubbly joy. I was talking to a campus minister friend of mine the other day, and he was telling me about a conversation he had with one of his small group leaders, our version of comm group leaders, so I'm only preaching to the com group leaders now. I'm just kidding. But if you're a Christian in the room, we all have a ministry to others, and sometimes we don't feel adequate for the task of sharing the gospel with other people, so this applies to all of us. But he was telling me about this conversation, and this student was essentially starting to open up to him about feeling like she wasn't feeling it, like with God. And my friend said, I think it would be really beautiful for you to share that with your group. I think you should be honest with them. And she said, But I'm the leader. Like maybe you, I'm not trying to call it musicians, maybe you're up here singing sometimes and you're like, what if I don't really mean it though? Friends, if I had to, like, I mean, I pray that I fully mean every word that comes out of my mouth when I preach to you. If I was on this spiritual level every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. or at 8.15 p.m., if I had to be on that level every time, then I could not do my job. Pastors are people too. The pastors who you listen to on Sunday morning are not on this spiritual level 10 minutes before they get up to preach every time. God's word is what is powerful and unchanging. His messengers and ministers are not. But so often we equate Christian salvation, the experiencing, the experience of knowing God with this spiritual highness. And we can't acknowledge the difficulties that we face. Y'all, an inability to acknowledge when God feels absent or distant in our lives is a symptom of a thin and sickly spirituality, according to the Psalms. Hear me, please. Do not equate your salvation with your present ease or success. In fact, it's only if we can be brutally and truly honest about our present difficulties, including the felt absence of God in times of our lives, that we can become able to understand how awesome and true and comforting the Christian gospel really is. In my experience, it's those who deny the difficulties who are the most likely to distort or to eventually deny the faith. I've seen that many times. We have to be honest about the difficulties that we face on the long journey of faith. We can't paint over them. And we can't just look for some sort of quick and easy silver lining in each and every situation. Only then can we learn to truly love and long for the eternal treasure that overcomes every difficulty, which is God Himself. Beloved, God can never be truly absent, but he can. And he does at times withdraw a sense of his presence from us, usually through specific losses or trials. Sometimes it's hard to identify exactly why, but that's usually why. But he does so to train us to rely on him and to shake us out of a complacency in which we care more for things of this world than for him. That is part of the life of faith in a broken world. And if you can't be honest about that, then you won't actually marvel and cherish the gospel. So we acknowledge the difficulties in our lives. Do you do that? Can you be honest with God and others with friends? Can you open up to your com group leader or your com group or to me or to your friends to other people here about that stuff? That leads to our second point, though. We don't only just acknowledge the suckiness of life, but we also look to God. Biblically, there is a distinction between depression and utter despair. Our acknowledgement of, our lament over difficulties is never meant to lead us to either self-reliance, where we say, I'll figure it out, I can handle this, nor to cynicism, where we say, just get used to it. But instead, our acknowledgement of our difficulties is meant to lead us to prayer. Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. That's what David says in verse 3 right away. Notice how David reminds himself of who God really is, who the creator of the universe really is, that he's his God. O Lord, my God, he is the God who's made a covenant with his people, who's in relationship with David. And so he says, consider and answer me. This is a prayer for God to take note of the difficulties of all those things, and of course, to intervene in some way. That while David knows and we know that God sees all things and knows all things, even before we bring them to his attention. Yet we also see here that the Christian is meant to plead for God to make that feel true. To be able to feel God's presence even when it isn't obvious. David is praying that the author of every moment of reality would change the direction that this chapter of the story seems to be going. That's shocking. But I'm certain that some of you want God to do that in some area in your life. Beloved, this is a great mystery. It's beyond our comprehension, but here it is in the Bible. God is in charge and in control of everything. Check. Got it. And yet, He has ordered the world in such a way that our prayers are heard and are part of that story. Our prayers matter, they change things. God interacts with us in prayer. That's shocking. It would be a separate sermon to try to unpack theologically exactly how to explain that, but this is the biblical pattern. Friends, the God to whom Christians pray is not the watchmaker who wound up the gears of the world and is sitting back letting it run. The Bible, from cover to cover, is showing us that he is the God who comes down and who interacts with us. In Isaiah, we read that he dwells in a high and lofty place, but also with those who are of a humble and lowly spirit. The Bible is saying that there is no difficulty or mess. There is no weakness that is too low for God to stoop, that is too far below for him to care. He is the one who took on flesh, who became a servant, in fact, to wash feet and to take sin, to take that mess upon himself. And so we pray. But the flip side is this without prayer, you cannot expect to truly experience God's work in your life as you're meant to. You really can't. One old theologian, a guy named John Calvin, said this by prayer we dig up the treasure that is ours in the gospel. And that by not going to God in prayer to ask of him whatever we need, to bring our difficulties before him, we are as foolish, we're as foolish as a man who has it on perfectly good authority that he has fifty million dollars buried somewhere in the backyard of his property, who doesn't go by an excavator and Start unearthing the whole place. That's us when we don't pray, because prayer is what God has given us in our difficulties to come to Him, to work through our spiritual depression that we do feel in this broken world. And so are you praying? Will you pray? Or are you just doing the self-reliance or cynicism thing? I know I've done both. I know I do both most days. Every day. And just briefly notice how David prays. There's so many models for us, like what do you say, what do you pray? But just notice quickly how David prays here, and let these help you be like a springboard for you to go to God even tonight. He says, Light up my eyes, Lord. Brighten my eyes that are just closing. People who've experienced real depression know that waking up and getting going is sometimes the greatest part of the difficulty. He feels a physical exhaustion and just being drained. So I believe he's praying for physical deliverance, for help. He's showing us that we can and should ask God to help us with our needs in life, our daily needs, our physical needs, to overcome the forces of decay and of death in the broken world. That we can ask him for those things. It's like what Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord's Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread and deliver us from evil. Lord, you make me see good. You make me know what's good. You give me energy in life. And then the other thing he says, he says, um, light up my eyes, lest I should sleep the sleep of death, and then lest my enemy should say I have prevailed over him, or my foes should rejoice because I'm shaken. He prays for the vindication of righteousness and godliness. That we can and should ask God to destroy the kingdom of Satan and to advance the kingdom of his son in real and practical ways in our lives. That's what Jesus meant when he taught us to pray, your kingdom come. We can and should pray for these things. There's more that could be said, but the broader point is this: you must pray. You have a sweet and simple remedy for spiritual depression in prayer. And I'm not saying that the cure comes equally fast in every moment of your life, or for each person equally fast in different seasons. Like 400 milligrams of ibuprofen does an awful lot for me. But for whatever reason, it doesn't do that much for my wife. But it helps. Maybe she needs 600, but but prayer is the remedy. That's how it works. And so will you pray? I love what the hymn says: ye who long pain and sorrow bear. Praise God and on him cast your care. So you pray. We look to God. We acknowledge our difficulty, and then we look to God. And then the shift in Psalm 13, which is our third point. We rejoice in a greater victory. David says, But I have trusted, this is verse five, but I have trusted in your steadfast love. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I'll sing to the Lord, because he's dealt bountifully with me. What in the world happened in between verse 4 and verse 5? The answer, on the one hand, is nothing. Nothing happened that we know of. I mean, things could have changed in David's life, but he's inviting us to follow this prayer, and the logic of what could have changed is not predicated on what might have changed in David's life. Getting to rejoicing in the greater victory that David takes confidence in here doesn't require that things got better in this life for him. Because look at what he says. He says, I'll trust in your unfailing love. Once again, we saw this last week. This is a very important Hebrew word that literally means covenant faithfulness or covenant love. It refers to God's promises to Abraham and to his people that he would be their God, that he would be as a father to them. David is clinging to the promises of love that God has made that override, that usurp whatever is going on in his life and causing him to doubt and pushing him towards despair. And friends, we know fully how this works with the full scope of Scripture, because we know that God's commitment, his covenant love for his people is so great that when his people have broken the requirements of that relationship, that he himself paid the penalty on their behalf. He's done that for us in Christ. And so that is why when we pray, even in difficulties that will weigh us down and wear us out, we still can have the resolve to rejoice. To rejoice in a greater salvation, a greater deliverance, a greater victory. It's really important, friends, to know that our salvation, according to the Bible, contains multiple benefits. And that not all of those benefits come to us in equal measure or all at once in the exact same way in this life. That's not how it works. They are all, all of the benefits that God gives us in salvation, they are all fully ours in Jesus, but that doesn't mean that they are all fully ours in the exact same way right now, today, in this life. And that means that there are always going to be things that you continue to lament and mourn in this life. There will always be more that you look for and long for. We know that our salvation involves our justification, which means being pardoned for our sins and accepted as righteous in God's sight. That is an act that we experience, that we get, it's a benefit that we get by faith in Christ's work that's irrevocable and final once for all. Full right now for you if your faith is in Jesus. That is one benefit of our salvation. Another is the benefit of sanctification. That is the ongoing work throughout this life, where God is making us holier, more like Jesus. That is something that you don't have in the same measure as you have justification right now. It's something that's ongoing, it's happening. Another element, though, another benefit of our salvation that the Bible talks about is our glorification. Wherein we have a pledge. It's unbreakable. It's a pledge that is ours right now, but it's a pledge of something that isn't right now fully in our possession. That we will, when Christ returns, be fully glorified. We'll see him as he is, that we will not even want to sin anymore. We'll not be able to sin anymore. That isn't fully ours right now. Our bodies will be new and unbreakable and undying. That isn't ours right now in the same way that our justification is, or in the same way that our sanctification is. I know that these big like theology words can feel like a lot. But friends, don't you see? It is so important to understand how God is working in us to save us. If you don't understand that, then you're gonna think that when life sucks, that your salvation might be lacking, that God might not love you as much. But we know that there are things to long for in this life. There are difficulties, and yet that God's covenant commitment, his unfailing love is still unfailing. It can't be anything else. The problem is that if we try to collapse salvation into one thing, then we are forced to have to explain how everything is always fine all the time when it isn't. Don't live your Christian life like that, friends. I want to free you tonight. In this life, you are fully justified. In this life, you are being sanctified. And right now you are promised to be glorified. But that means you'll long. You will long. You will experience times where you feel God's absence. How could you not, in this world, where sin continues to haunt, where Satan continues to creep around like a wounded lion? That's what scripture says. How could you not experience that? And so the Apostle Paul, we're closing with this. He says this. We are afflicted. 2 Corinthians 4, 8 through 10. I think it's in the slides. We are afflicted in every way. But not crushed. Perplexed. Which that's kind of like the whole David's thing of like, I'm taking counsel in my own soul, the hamster wheel, you know. But not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down but not destroyed. And here's the real thing that God's doing in us always carrying in the body the death of Jesus. We carry a cross, friends, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our bodies. Beloved, in this life, God will test your faith. He will. You'll feel the hiddenness of God in this broken world, the challenge in that, the test that he's giving you, the thing that he's trying to work in you is that you would look to him and to his love more than to what's going on in your life, to know that he is closer to you than you may often feel. That when other helpers fail and comforts flee, you still look to him and you still rejoice in the greatness of his salvation. You can sing, you will sing. When you think of that great salvation, you can't help but sing. You're caught up in it, as in a wind that's too strong for you to not get blown by. You'll be as unable when you think of that salvation to resist rejoicing as a starving man would be able to resist eating a hot meal that's set down before him. And so, friends, I know very well that there are many causes, even in this room tonight, for spiritual depression. There are many in my own life too. But I know that it's even God's goodness to work through these bad things for our good and for his glory. He's teaching you to trust him. He's teaching you to rely on him and to rejoice in a greater salvation. So seek your all in him and whatever you're going through tonight. And when when you go through this, and you will, I want to invite you into the true and deeper rejoicing in him and in his work for you that transcends whatever's going on in your life. That's what David's wanting to invite you into tonight. Amen. That's great.