Psalm 77
Let’s give our attention to God’s
word. This is Psalm 77. It says to
the choir master, according to a Jedithan, that would be the
tune. And then it says a Psalm of Asaph.
It says, I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear
me. In the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord. In the night,
my hand is stretched out without wearying. My soul refuses to
be comforted. When I remember God, I moan. When I meditate, my spirit faints.
You hold my eyelids open. I am so troubled that I cannot
speak. I consider the days of old. The
years long ago, I said, let me remember my song in the night.
Let me meditate in my heart. Then my spirit made a diligent
search. Will the Lord spurn forever? Will the Lord never again be
favorable? Has His steadfast love forever ceased? Are His
promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has God in His anger shut up His compassion? Then I said,
I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the
Most High. I will remember the deeds of
the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder
all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. Your way,
O God, is holy. What God is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders. You have made known your might
among the peoples. You, with your arm, redeemed
your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. When the waters
saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid. Indeed,
the deep trembled. The cloud poured out water. The
skies gave forth thunder. Your arrows flashed on every
side. The crash of your thunder was
in the whirlwind. Your lightnings lighted up the
world. The earth trembled and shook. Your way was through the
sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were
unseen. You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron. Isn’t it amazing how when you
read a certain verse, it thunders outside? We had that all worked out. So Psalm
77, this is Asaph who has given us a mouthful of his emotions,
his experiences, and his difficulties in life, you might
say. We’ve got a title for this Psalm,
When in Doubt, Remember God. We have this cartoon in our house,
and it’s a cartoon of a dog. It’s a dog staring at the door
and it’s a dog staring at the door and the caption says what
your dog is thinking when you’re not at home and our dog perfectly
portrays what’s going on in this cartoon. Staring at the door.
They’ve left me. They’ve forgotten me. They’re
never ever coming back. That’s I think what the dog thinks
about and sometimes we fear that same rejection. We think Everybody
has forgotten me. Everybody has left me and they
are never ever coming back. But rejection is a huge, it’s
a huge fear for most of us. We don’t want to be left alone.
We don’t want to be a widow or a widower. We don’t want to be
friendless in the cafeteria when in middle school. We don’t want
to be left out of the game or the party or the club or whatever. But here we have ASAPH. And in
Asaph’s mind, he thinks, and the key to this is he thinks,
he’s got it in his head, that he has gone a pretty long stretch
and God has not shown him one lick of mercy. Now stop there
for just a moment. There’s a comedian I listen to.
He was on an airplane in the last year or two and he says,
he’s on the airplane and there’s a young person beside him and
the young person is just furious. He is fuming because the internet
is not working on the plane. And he says he takes a look at
this young man and watches him while the internet’s not working,
this young fella. And finally, after a little while,
the older to the younger, and says, do you not know that you
are flying through the air? It used to take weeks, if not
months, to get where we’re going, and you’re fussing and fuming
about the internet. Sometimes we think, we acutely zero in
on a little problem, and we say, all is lost. And that’s a little
bit what the psalmist has done. He’s got a stretch. With no mercy
from God, at least so it seems that way. It’d be good for him
to be reminded, wouldn’t it, the psalmist, even ourselves.
We’re breathing. Our heart is beating. We had
food, shelter, clothing. We had all of God’s mercies.
God did not destroy us, probably as we deserve. but he feels there’s
a stretch. He thinks that God has not been
merciful for a time, or at least so it seems. You’ve probably
heard the story. I think we’ve mentioned it a
few times here. Hopefully you heard it last year when we studied
the Reformation and the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther
posting his 95 theses. But you remember the story maybe
of Martin Luther going through one of his particular bouts of
depression. Here’s the greatest theologian
of his day, maybe one of the greatest theologians of the entire
Christian era, And he’s depressed and he’s cast down. And so his
wife, his good wife, Katerina or Catherine Von Bora, his dear
Katie, as he called her, she dresses in her morning clothes,
not AM morning, but morning, like boo-hoo, crying, morning
clothes. She dresses in her morning clothes
and comes into his study where he is working and she’s weeping
and carrying on. And he says, oh, dear Katie,
what is wrong? And she says, I am in mourning. Well, who’s
died? She says, God is dead. Well, that’s absurd. Her theologian
husband says, God cannot die. And she says, well, you are acting
as if it is so. And you can imagine that snapped
him right out of his depression. Sometimes we are filled with
depression. We are filled with lies in our
head and reality and our thoughts are two different, two different
things. And we can get like Asaph where
we think God is not with us. God is not for us. He’s shown
us no mercy. All is lost. Maybe like my dog,
you think nobody likes you. You’re not gonna have friends
and masters and pack around again. We can fall into these traps
of false patterns. And what do we need? What do
we need to snap out of it? Well, we need a word from God. We need
his truth. And we need to have hope. There’s a proverb, I believe
it’s in chapter 23. It says something like this,
as you think, so you become. What does that say to us? Where
your brain goes, whatever you think, whatever you dwell on,
you become it. It may not be true in reality. It may not be
true according to the rules of the earth. It may not be true
in all reality, but you have made it so in your head. Well,
this Psalm takes us through a number of things that will help us to
think straight. This is one of those Psalms that I believe can
reorient us to what is good, right, and true. And we certainly
need it in this day. Well, verses one through two,
take us to the first point. Psalmist is in trouble. Trouble
is what we find in verses one through two of Psalm 77. He says,
I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. In
the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord. In the night, my hand
is stretched out without wearying, so my soul refuses to be comforted. He’s in trouble. We all know
Eeyore, the character from Pooh. Maybe some of you have gone to
see the recent Christopher Robin movie. You know about Eeyore.
The sky is always falling. There’s always doom. There’s
always gloom. Death is imminent. Trouble is all around. But we
know people like that. They’re people that the glass
is half empty. All is lost. We know that there
are people who are, how should we say it, chemically imbalanced.
We know that there are problems with depression, even severe
depression. Our medical world has shown us that there are severe
problems in fallen and cursed humanity. We also know that some
are chronically ill or always in great pain. We understand
that, right? But we also understand that God
has come to make his blessings known as far as the curse is
found. And yes, there are effects of sin. Yes, there are effects
of the curse and the fall. And yes, they do affect us deeply
and painfully and really. But dear brothers and sisters,
we need to understand that God is big, God is huge. And our
minds, the way we think, lead to the way we act. One thing
you’ll notice as you walk through this psalm is the pronouns. This
is a very self-centered psalm. In fact, in this first stanza,
just about trouble in verses one and two, the word I is used
five times and me and my also appear. This is a navel gazing,
stanza. You know what I mean by that?
Staring at your own belly button, all its perfections, or in this
case, imperfections. And all we can see is down, all
this tragic. Everybody’s out to get us. It
never ends. And no one, including God, cares.
That’s a real place you can get in your mind and in your heart.
Depression, being paralyzed by your fears, being affected in
this way. It’s a real situation. It’s probably
more real than we would want to admit about our own lives,
but also about others. Now, there’s a school of thought
in the Christian world where we just tell people to snap out
of it. And there’s some truth to that.
We understand people are sick. issues and hardships in their
lives. But there’s something in the Bible, isn’t there, about
how we are to encourage one another. We are to exhort one another.
We are even to rebuke one another. Much like Martin Luther’s dear
wife, Katie, did. God must be dead, honey. Well,
that sure snapped that theologian out of it. She took a creative
tack when she did that. But we need to look for when
our brothers and sisters are in trouble and give them a word
from God. Now, we’re living in a time where,
maybe in my lifetime, since the late 70s, the medical book on
sickness has gone from a little bitty book to a multi-volume
and ever-growing set. You could be diagnosed for anything.
And you can literally be medicated for anything. And dear friends,
I don’t want to ignore real problems. I don’t want to go outside of
my expertise, but you know, I think a good bit of the time, we just
need to hear the word of God and have a dose of eternal and
spiritual reality for we can infect others. We can spoil the
joy that is around us. But on the other hand, isn’t
it true And you have to say yes when you see it in the Psalms.
Isn’t it true that we should be honest before God? Well, Asaph
here in verses one and two is when he expresses his trouble.
Well, the next thing we find is a little progression. It’s
a little less I, I, I, and me, me, me, and my, my, my. As he
remembers God, verses three through six tell us, that he begins to
remember some things about God. He says in verse three, when
I remember God, I moan. When I meditate, my spirit faints.
You hold my eyelids open. I am so troubled that I cannot
speak. I consider the days of old, the years of long ago. I
said, let me remember my song in the night. Let me meditate
in my heart. Then my spirit made a diligent search. Goes on to
ask questions. But in verses three through six,
he begins to get off of himself, so to speak, and he moves toward
God. It’s still a me-centered, a I-centered,
a woe to me little stanza. But he begins to think outside
himself and say, yes, there is a God and God has been good to
me. It’s been a really, really, really
long time. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but at least to his cast down
spirit, that’s the way it seems to him. He feels sorry for himself. Six times he says, I, I, I. My, he says, four times. But there’s one thing you can
say for the psalmist. And if you’ve ever been around someone
who’s depressed, a little movement is huge. If they can see a little
light at the end of the tunnel, see a little brightness, it’s
a wonderful thing. He moves on to ask some questions.
Verses seven through nine show us six questions. These are big
questions. Starting at verse seven, he says,
will the Lord spurn forever? Will he never again be favorable
is the second question. Third one is, has his steadfast
love forever ceased? Fourth, are his promises at an
end for all time? Fifth, has God forgotten to be
gracious? Sixth, has he in anger shut up his compassion? You know
the answer to these questions. The answer is emphatically no. The steadfast love of the Lord
endures forever, we know. And on and on, we could walk
through those and debunk them or take the doubt out. But these are questions, real
questions a person is asking. It’s okay to ask questions. It’s
okay to be honest. But I’d be careful, because you’re
dealing with the Holy One of Israel. in this place. But God
is a God who knows. He knows our frame. He knows
that we are dust. And he knows that we are under
the curses of this world. We are in a world that is in
bondage to sin. So there’s trouble, there’s remembering,
there’s questions. The fourth thing, we find it
in verse 10. And this is the turning point. It’s the right frame of mind.
The right frame of mind. Look at verse 10. He says, then
after all his moaning, after all his crying, after all his
eoring, after all his questions, then I said, I will appeal to
this, to the years of the right hand of the most high. Where
else are you gonna go? Lord, who else is there in heaven
and earth that I can go to but to you? He’s having a change
of mind. He’s having a change of heart.
He’s getting his front end and his back end aligned, we might
say. There’s a good man in Presbyterian
and Reformed circles named David Murray, and David Murray speaks
of how we get out of the right frame of mind as human beings.
It’s because we live in a fallen world. It’s because we live in
a sin-filled world. It’s because we ourselves are under the curse.
It’s because we’re also listening to the wrong people. We think
this way, and David Murray, who is a Christian minister, he’s
a theological seminary teacher. He also speaks a lot into the
reality of depression in Christians. He gives these 10 things, these
10 false ways we think, and I wanna mention them to you because they’re
really real, and I would bet that each one of us is paralyzed
by at least four or five of these. We believe in the falsehood of
all or nothing. All must go well or nothing. If all is not going well, then
all is lost. We live in a sin-filled world.
Some will be lost, right? I mean, we’re gonna have our
losses, our crosses, our hardships, and we can’t think black and
white like that, all or nothing. A second falsehood is false generalization. We come to conclusions because
we think we have studied the whole matter, Because we think
we’ve studied the whole matter, we come to a false conclusion.
And you understand, we then live our lives by these falsities.
And that’s, as we understand, destructive. Third thing, we
have a false filter. We see everything negatively.
We see everything in light of maybe a Eeyore attitude. And we, in fact, see things so
negatively, we never see anything positively. So we’re never thankful.
We’re never grateful. We’re never on the upside, the
upswing, the positive. We have a false filter. There’s
false transformation. That’s the fourth thing that
he lists. False transformation, we think that we can disqualify everything.
Nothing good has happened. We think that We just think that something
positive is now negative, and so we deceive ourselves and we
throw away the good. Fifth thing is false mind reading.
Every one of us ought to raise our hands if I were to ask about
this one. False mind reading. Well, so-and-so doesn’t like
me. Well, how do you know that? Oh, I just know. We’re all guilty
of that, aren’t we? False mind reading. I just assume,
you know, and that starts in middle school, but we carry it
on through our old age, and these things paralyze us. How about
false fortune telling? I know things are gonna be bad,
we think, and so we live as if that is a fact. Or how about
a false lens? All our fears, all our mistakes,
all of the negative in our life is so blown out of proportion
that we can only see life through that lens. Nothing good is gonna
come. Nobody’s ever like me. Nobody’s
ever done anything good for me. Nothing positive has ever happened.
So we have this false set of lens, this of the eighth false. feelings-based reasoning. This
is something we could probably all raise our hands on. I feel,
therefore, it must be true, and therefore, since I feel it and
it must be true, then we start rationalizing, or reasoning,
and we start making decisions based on false feelings. We become convinced that whatever
we rationalize based on our feelings is true. Maybe the ninth one
is your cross to bear. a bunch of false should haves.
I should have done this. I should have been a better father,
a better mother, a better employee. I should have invested my money
while the market was good. I should have, I should have,
I should have. And we began to resent the reality that is ours
because We thought life should be something different because
we set ourselves up for failure with these expectations, these
false should haves. And so we resent our life. We
live a life full of unmet expectations. The 10th one is false responsibility. False responsibility that everything
is our fault. Maybe that’s the condition of
those we’ve been around. They blamed you for everything.
They put everything on you. You took the blame. You understand
these 10 things, and this is really just a quick overview.
You realize these 10 things are a lot of the reasons, a lot of
the realities that people we know and love, maybe ourselves,
maybe some of us in the room, we are living out of these realities.
And do you see how paralyzing it is? And do you see how deadly
it is? Do you see how spiritually killing
it is. And what does God want for us?
He wants us to live out of the treasures of heaven, out of the
treasures of truth. And so verse 10, verse 10 is
the psalmist saying the right frame of mind, the right frame
of mind is this, I will appeal to the years of the right hand
of the most high. We’ll throw Eeyore out the door and say,
it’s been nice knowing your friend, but you’re dragging me down.
Or, or these false realities or these false expectations or
the false, whatever you fill in the blank and you say goodbye
to it. I’m gonna choose to know the
Lord and His truth and the theology and the riches of living for
Him. And I’m gonna align myself with
this right frame of mind. So 10 is a turning point. Well,
you get to chapter, or I’m sorry, verses 11 through 15, and then
even 16 through 20, and you see where the psalmist ends up. After
his turning point in verse 10, he says in 11, I remember the
deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders
of old. I will ponder your work. I will
meditate on your mighty deeds. You notice he’s quit staring
at his own belly button. Your way, O God, is holy. What
God is great like our God? Well, a minute ago, what was
he thinking about God? You’ve forgotten me and you’re never
coming back to me and your mercies have worn out. Now he thinks
a bit. differently. And then he gets
very specific. You are the God who works wonders.
You have made known your might among the peoples. You with your
arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. What does he remember? He remembers
the Exodus. He remembers that when Israel was in Egypt under
the tyranny of Pharaoh and under the slave masters and that misery,
they cried out to God and God heard their cries. And he raised
up a deliverer in Moses. And he recalls that. He remembers
not only the character of God, but the actions of God. That
he is a holy God. He is a great God. He is a caring
God. He is a redeeming God. And he goes on to speak of what
the seed is. When God redeemed his people,
when the water saw you, oh God, when the water saw you, they
were afraid. Indeed, the deep trembled, the clouds poured out
water. The skies gave forth thunder, your arrows flashed on every
side. The crash of your thunder was
in the whirlwind, the lightnings lighted up the world, the earth
trembled and shook. Your way was through the sea,
your path through the great waters, and yet your footprints unseen. He’s all of a sudden back to
where every Christian ought to be. Put away my feelings, put
away all the false economies this world has put upon me, and
think God’s thoughts after him. He’s seeing God as moving in
mysterious ways, his wonders to unfold. We can’t think about
it. We can interpret it. All we can do is wonder at it
afterwards. He’s looking again at his God.
Look at verse 20, how he ends. This is a tender way to speak
of God. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses. and Aaron, it’s a good reminder,
isn’t it? That God always shepherds his people. He always shepherds
his people through this sin filled and dark, cursed and weary world. He led them out of Egypt. He
took care of them in the wilderness. He planted them in the promised
land. He’s got you here. He’s got you
in Burlington. He’s got you in this congregation.
He has you under the shepherd of the Lord Jesus, under the
shepherding ministry of the session of this church. He’s shown you
salvation in Christ. You know, if you were to write
this Psalm, you might mention Egypt, but what would you really
mention if you were to speak of a work of redemption? Of the
cross. You would mention the cross and
what Christ has done for us there and how the spirit has applied
that redemption to us. God has given us a shepherd,
Jesus Christ. He’s given us salvation in that
shepherd. And though we live in a world, it’s under the bondage of sin.
It’s a fallen world, it’s a cursed world. We need to remember, and
notice the key, to remember. Because sometimes all you can
do is get it straight in your head. The facts have to overwhelm
the feelings. Oh, we live feelings, feelings,
feelings. Friends, that’ll get you nowhere. What are the facts?
Jesus says, I will come and I will make all things new. And if that won’t help your perspective,
friends, nothing will. Let’s pray together. Our Lord
and God, we thank you that from time to time in your word, we
read of one of your saints of old who, getting all twisted with the
world, full of lies and full of things that shouldn’t be believed,
comes into your house and sees things again, straight or rightly,
or we need the lens of your Holy Scripture, or cause we’ll mess
life up real bad, real fast, not only for ourselves, but for
others. So give us grace to think, to think about you and what is
true and to put outside our minds what is false. Lord, let the
devil flee from our minds. Let our flesh not be weary, but
trust and live by your spirit. And let the world have no place
in our lives, but only your holy word. Help us in this, we pray
in Christ’s name, amen.