Theology for the Weary

how long will you hide your face from me? Will you forget me forever?

This is a psalmist who's frustrated with the Lord. And think, I think about this and I think God could have included anything he wanted in his holy scriptures. Why would he allow people to question him and put that in the Bible? Why? Because he knows that's what we feel. He knows we have those questions, we wrestle that way, we get frustrated. And he wants to say to you and I in our heartache and sorrow, I understand, I see you, I know. Even more compassionately, he wants to say, let me help you find the words to express your confusion about me. The compassion of the Lord. Think about in your sorrow, in your weariness, how do you experience the Lord? Talk to him, talk to him about it. What confuses you about what he does? What frustrates you? What do you wish was different? God cares about that and invites you like the psalmist to come and to give your weariness to him, express it, talk to him about it. Crying out to the Lord in our confusion is a way to turn towards him. Of course, David here in Psalm 27, he turns away from the Lord. And that's the second way weariness impacts us. Weariness tempts us to be self-reliant. So in this passage, David takes matters into his own hands. He's going to escape. And he's going to escape to the Philistines, his enemies, God's enemies. Now, God had repeatedly throughout 1 Samuel, God had repeatedly squelched Saul's attempts to get David, to kill him. He had shown his faithfulness to Saul. So in the latter episode, in chapter 26, the entire army falls asleep and David can sneak into the camp and get right next to Saul. He has every possibility to kill the king. He gets in that deep undetected. And why? Why does he do that? Well, the text tells us in chapter 26, verse 12, it says,

because a deep sleep from the Lord had fallen on him.

See, David had every reason to trust the Lord. But this has been a long trial for him. It has gone on and on and on. And the longer it goes on, the harder it feels to trust the Lord. Listen, if you are here this morning, and by God's grace, you would say, I just have no category for that. I have never struggled with trusting the Lord in hardship. That is a wonderful experience for you. It is not the norm. And if that's your experience, what I would say is the people around you who are suffering, they need your patience. Be gentle with people whose faith is fragile. Be gentle. It sometimes takes a lot of energy to trust the Lord when you're in suffering. And when you're weary, when your soul is weary, It sometimes feels like an energy you just don't have. The reason we tend towards self-reliance and suffering is because we can see the product of our own efforts. Even if it doesn't work, I can see how my striving, my manipulating, my controlling, my effort does something that I can tangibly see. But often God works behind the scenes, right? His hand is invisible and it requires me to trust, to have faith that he's doing something even when I don't see it. I like the comfort of the visible results. And God asks us to trust him. Suffering tempts David to self-reliance. But where do you see that in your life? Where are you more inclined to trust yourself, your wisdom, your efforts, your plans, than to wait on the Lord? And then how does that work out for us? Now, on the one hand, we can clearly point to ways in which trusting ourselves fails miserably, right? I'll spare you the list from my own life. But the truth is, in this case, it works for David, doesn't it? Verse 4 of chapter 27 says,

Saul no longer sought him.

It worked. Justification. He was right to flee to the Philistines. It resolved his problems, right? The problem with that, of course, is that David is primarily thinking about resolving his weariness, and God has something bigger and better in mind for David. So the ends, we say, right, the ends don't justify the means. And just because self-reliance resolves a problem doesn't mean that it's what God wants for us. So be careful. Think about how you justify your actions, your thoughts, your attitudes. Be careful about how you validate those things that work for you. We talk about this in our counseling program sometimes. Scripture clearly teaches that

the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

But anger works, right? If I yell at my kids, if I scream and holler, they will stop whatever they're doing. It works. It produces something. That's why we go back to those sorts of things. Right? Because we find ways to make effective, to get effective results. But it's not the results that God wants for us. It's not what God wanted for David. Which leads us to the final point here, the impact of weariness. Weariness tempts us to be unethical. If the ends justify the means, if the goal is to put a stop to our weariness, then really anything goes. And it's amazing how weariness can incline us to do things that we would never dream of doing otherwise. I mean, David's actions here are difficult to interpret. And there are some scholars who believe that he's thoroughly justified in what he does. I mean, after all, he's just trying to survive and he's killing Israel's enemies, right? I mean, the Amalekites mentioned in verse eight, we know these are bad dudes. But you know, when the king of Gath asks David, what's he up to? What are you doing? David lies. He says, well, I'm attacking my own people. I'm raiding the people of Judah, my kinsmen. And what is David doing there? Well, he's lying in order to earn this pagan king's favor. And then, of course, he goes on these raids and he has to kill everybody. Because if anybody lives, they're going to tell the king of Gath exactly what's going on. And David does not want that. So they all have to die. I mean, it's a calculated cruelty for the sake of self-preservation. I would be really interested in studying the theology of deception in the book of 1 Samuel. There are a lot of liars in this book. So Samuel lies, David lies, Jonathan lies, Saul definitely lies, Abigail deceives. And in some of the instances, God actually approves of the deception. In other cases, he's silent, And in other cases, he clearly disapproves. Now, I won't attempt to sort all that out. Keith promised he would have the answer for you after service, so you can ask him all those hard questions. But it's interesting to me the amount of deception that plays out here. And while God is silent in this case with David's deception, I think the contrast between chapter 6 and 27 tells us clearly David is not doing well. David's deception here is wrong. And it's weariness that has tempted him to do this, tempted him towards unethical behavior. And think about it, when you find yourself at the breaking point in your life, don't many things seem more excusable than they would have otherwise, more palatable, more accessible? And it's not an indictment that we want relief. I mean, we're trying to find some way to navigate hardship, and hardship is hard. And it's not an indictment that we're trying to find some relief, some escape. We want help. But listen, be careful about pursuing sin when you're weary. Because sin, while it always promises relief, right, and sometimes temporarily gives it, it always takes way more than it gives. And you'll see this in the very next chapter, in chapter 28, the king of Gath trusts David and he says, listen, I'm going to war against Israel. I want you to come with me. That is not what David had planned, right? And now he's in more trouble. Now he's got more stress. And that's the reality of sin. It creates more stress for us. What sins look tempting to you when you're worn down? What things do you find excusable? Things you can justify? Well, the text gives us a strong picture of how weariness impacts a soul, but it doesn't really give us a constructive approach about how to navigate it. I mean, David is a mess in this chapter. And telling us what not to do is not the same as providing a framework for navigating weariness. And thankfully, we have not just the rest of David's life, but the rest of scripture, which really unpacks for us a constructive framework for handling these sorts of moments of weariness in our soul. So let's do just a little bit of theological work and consider what can we do when we are weary. If we've talked about the impact of weariness, let's talk about the response to weariness. And what I would encourage is when you feel weary, here's the first thing I would do, be weary. It's okay to admit that you are worn out. It's okay to admit that you're disappointed. It's okay to admit that you have doubts. It's okay even to admit that you're angry. These are all responses of grief which are right and natural when we go through suffering. Anger in particular is a confusing one for Christians because we sometimes paint it as though all anger in the Bible is bad, but it's not. There are some things over which God wants you to be angry, right? Things for which if you were not angry, it would be wrong. And grief-based anger, this is important because it actually agrees with God that what's happening is wrong or what has happened is wrong and it matters. So rather than condemning you for feeling angry about suffering, God agrees with you about it. Express your hurt. Talk to the Lord about it. That's what Psalm 13 is. You don't have to pretend that you're not feeling what you're feeling. Feel it. Talk to the Lord about it. But then secondly, when you're weary, don't try to solve weariness. That seems counterintuitive to us. We want escape. We want better emotions. I don't like negative emotions. I don't like feeling them in me. I don't like them directed at me. I want to avoid those experiences. But our tendency is to think that all suffering is a puzzle to solve, or it's a riddle that I just need to find the answer to. We think of suffering as this, oh, God's teaching me something, and if I just figure out what the thing God's teaching me is, then my suffering will end. And that's an unhelpful way to frame suffering. A friend of mine says this. He says,

when we approach pain like a riddle, we keep waiting for the answer that will disempower our pain.

Think about that. When you think of pain as a riddle, you're waiting for some sort of explanation that makes it feel better, that makes it go away. Listen, I remember when my dad died. I remember wrestling with, why would you allow this, Lord? What's the purpose behind this? Why did you do this? And I came to this point in wrestling where I thought, you know, I think even if the Lord gave me an answer, even if he said, this is why, I don't know that I would be satisfied with that. I don't know that I would feel like, ah, yes, if thousands of people came to Christ because of my dad's death, if that was the explanation, that I would somehow feel like, yes, so glad he died. I think I would just wrestle differently. Why was that the way that that had to happen, Lord? I don't know that there's an emotionally satisfying answer to our hurts. And sometimes that's what we're looking for. Something that just takes the pain out of our hurt. And that doesn't exist. Pain hurts. It's part of the brokenness of our world. It ought to hurt because it's not the way that God designed it to be. Suffering isn't a puzzle to solve. It's an experience that we must walk through, we must process it, we must assimilate it, we must accept it. Now think about the significant questions David asks in Psalm 13.

How long will you forget me forever?

But notice that God never answers those questions for him. He never tells him this is why, David. And by the end of the Psalm, as David turns in trust to the Lord, he doesn't have an answer to those questions. It's because I don't need those answers. You don't need those answers to continue to trust the Lord and grow with the Lord and lean into the Lord. Suffering doesn't have simple answers and weariness isn't something to be solved. It's something we have to live through. But thirdly, that doesn't leave us doing nothing because thirdly, how do we respond to weariness? We speak hope to our soul. In this text, David speaks to himself. In 1 Samuel 27, David speaks to himself, but what he says is utterly hopeless. David says in his heart. Now, that's an important phrase. It's soul talk that David is engaging in here. Listen, be careful what you say to yourself. Intense suffering causes us to have a lot of soul conversations. It causes us to say a lot of things to ourselves. But be careful what you emphasize in your self-talk. See, the Bible knows about hot lament. It knows about this sort of angry venting that we can engage in. That sort of frustrated, confused, hurt. It's like the child who in a moment in a fit says, I hate you to his parents, right? Good parents know the child is brokenhearted, sad, confused. They don't condemn the child, they comfort the child. They know he doesn't really mean it. I mean, think about Psalm 13. David says things that we would say are biblically untrue. God does not forget you, right? God doesn't hide his face from you. That's not true of God, but David says it, and God approved David saying it in this Psalm. Why? Because God knows about that sort of hot lament. He knows that we can say things we don't really mean. He knows we can say things in moments of anger. And again, his compassion is to give us latitude and grace and to draw us back to him. But all of that to say this, we want to be careful about the messages that we repeat to ourselves, even in hot lament. Because the things I say to myself the most will inevitably become soul convictions. The things I say to myself the most will inevitably become soul convictions. See, a hot lament can become a heart belief when what you emphasize to yourself is hopelessness. When I keep speaking hopelessness to myself again and again and again, it's not just a feeling I'm having of discouragement. It's now a genuine conviction, I feel. Paul encourages us to grieve, but to grieve as those who have hope. To grieve, to express our weariness, to express our hurt, to express our sorrow. but to speak hope to your soul. And David knows about this because in another Psalm, he does that. In Psalm 42, he gives us a model for how to grieve with hope. I would commend Psalm 42 to you this afternoon. He there talks about how to express hurt and weariness and grief and sorrow and confusion and anger, but to do so without despondency. He details his complaints to the Lord saying, I am sorrowful. I'm so sorrowful. He says,

my tears are my only food.

That's a broken hearted person. He's begging God for an audience. He says,

when will I come and appear before you Lord?

But then at multiple points throughout the Psalm, he repeats this phrase.

Why are you downcast soul? hope in the Lord.

He's saying, okay soul, all right, you've had your moments to express your grief, but let's not stay there. Let's remember the truth. He says, okay soul, let's go back to what we know is true about God. And he talks to himself and he tells himself the truth. And he repeats that refrain. He repeats it in the middle of the psalm and at the end of the psalm as a way of holding on to hope in the midst of expressing weariness. He doesn't do that in 1 Samuel 27. In fact, much to our surprise, God is utterly absent from this text. There's no mention of God, no reference to his ways, no confidence in his care, no focus on hope in the Lord, no God at all. In fact, one commentator calls this

a godless text through which God speaks to us.

I like that. God isn't mentioned in the text and that stands out as jarring because he's everywhere in 1st and 2nd Samuel, but he's not in this chapter. David has turned from the Lord and that ought to speak volumes to you and I about how we handle our weariness. So, speak hope to yourself. The messages you meditate on the most will become soul convictions. And that leads me finally to how do we respond to weariness? Well, we frame weariness as growth. One of the things that makes spiritual weariness so difficult is that the answers that once made sense to us, the answers that once comforted us, the answers that once encouraged us, they just don't seem to work. They don't satisfy us. I think about Before we moved to Detroit, we were working in a church that was full of young college students and men and women from drug and alcohol rehab. And what we saw were lots of people come to faith. And when young people come to faith, when people come to faith, they are excited and on fire for the Lord. And then what happens over time, right? That steam and fire and excitement starts to dwindle a little bit, right? It starts to wane. And I remember having a conversation with one of our young ladies who said, after several years of being a believer, she said,

I feel like I was a better believer three years ago than I am now, even though I study the Bible more, even though I go to service every week, even though I'm attending classes and I'm excited about the things of the Lord, I feel like I was a better believer then.

Why? She said,

I feel so discouraged.

I said, well, what happens is when you're a new believer, your faith is like bathtub deep. You don't know very much and everything you know, you feel super excited about. And there are times where you look at your life and you say, wow, what a big difference coming to know Jesus has made. I feel on top of the world and I'm doing amazing, right? Then somebody starts to fill up the tub and you start seeing, oh boy, there's a lot more that I didn't know, and you start seeing a lot more about yourself, and you start going, wow, I have a lot of things that I need to work on, and there are a lot of things I don't know about God, and there are a lot of things I don't understand about scripture. Suddenly, you realize my faith isn't as strong as it was, but not because my faith is weak, but because there's so much more for me to grow into. weariness has a way of accelerating that process. David had trusted God, but the longer the trial endured, the less that past promises, the less that past protection felt secure to him. The constant pressure meant that his faith was not easily satisfied. And in during trials, spiritual weariness often means that our faith is less innocent than it was. We're like little children, and as children grow, the simple answers that we give them as parents don't work. I have a 16-year-old. When she was little, I could explain the world to her. It was easy, right? It all boiled down to trust your mom and I. We'll take care of you. And then she found out that, well, I mean, she saw other people who were actually strong, and she said, my dad's not that strong. She realized that there were things that we couldn't protect her from. It caused anxiety. It caused fear. It caused panic. There were things that, in her emotions, I couldn't fix for her. I couldn't solve all her relationships with her friends. The simple answer, trust mom and dad, it didn't work anymore. We had to give more robust theology to her. That's true for you and I. We go through suffering and the simple answers don't work anymore. Our faith is not naive anymore. It's mature. God's word has robust answers for us as we mature. You don't have to settle for the simple answers that once satisfied you, but suffering means that you have to be willing to grow. You have to go to those places, do that hard work, dig deep, ask hard questions, settle with some mystery, accept that you might not know everything. Your faith in suffering, your faith has the opportunity to massively grow. to mature in ways that you will treasure for a lifetime. So in my own life, I think particularly, I think particularly about our daughter was two years old and she had to have spinal surgery. And I remember the feeling of handing her over to nurses and doctors and watching them walk away as she screamed and hollered for her parents, because she didn't understand. and feeling just intense anguish and sorrow and pain and confusion about why the Lord had allowed this to happen in our life. And I remembered God calling to my mind Romans chapter five, verses three through five. which says,

we rejoice in this. We rejoice also in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.

And that verse stuck in my head, and it was so helpful and so comforting. And it was just a few years later that my dad died. And I remember that experience of suffering, with my daughter so acutely in the moment that I heard my dad was gone. And it was like God had taken me through that trial and that hardship to prepare me to face a different one. And that experience of losing my dad, that's taken me through to other experiences of suffering that have helped me, that have strengthened my character and strengthened my faith. And if I had tried to settle for simple answers, my faith would not have grown and I would have been disappointed with the Lord and maybe embittered. But by God's grace, because of good people in my life, because of a good patient wife, my faith grew through trials, through suffering, through hardship. Your faith can mature. If you view suffering, if you view weariness as growth, as a potential place to grow and change, you will encounter the Lord in amazing ways. Faith in the midst of weariness is difficult, but it is worth it. So, if you are weary, listen, let me encourage you to do a couple of things, and then I'll pray for us. If you are weary, let me encourage you first, reach out for help. In the short time that we have been here, I have encountered many kind and gracious and godly people who I am confident would love to walk with you through weariness. Let me encourage you to write out, write what you feel, talk to the Lord, express it in prayers. I like the writing process because it causes my brain to slow down. All right. Think a little bit carefully. Talk to the Lord about your weariness. Lean into him when you doubt and struggle and sorrow. Lean into him. David turns away and it costs him. Lean into the Lord. And then lastly, let me encourage you, be open to hope. God is at work in suffering and hardship. Be open to see what he can do. Let me pray for us. Oh Lord, thank you for hard texts like 1 Samuel 27. Thank you that you used this trial in David's life both to shape him and to teach us. And as we sorrow, and as we grieve, and as we struggle, and as we doubt, Lord, would you help us to turn towards you? And in so doing, would you strengthen our faith? Because we know even to believe well, we need your help. And so we ask this now in Jesus' name, and amen.