From Death to Dancing

Sermon Transcript

I still remember the first movie I saw that didn’t have a happy ending. It was called In Love and War, and upon looking it up in preparation for this sermon I learned that it got a whopping 11% on Rotten Tomatoes—I wasn’t much of a movie critic as a kid, I suppose. In any case, I remember getting to the end and the guy and the girl didn’t get together! I couldn’t believe it. But I’ve since learned that’s sometimes how it goes in life, and so more and more movies now end without happiness, and many take this as an indication of authenticity. And if your beliefs about ultimate reality are that we are all here as a product of chance, and are all heading for death with nothing certain beyond it, it’s easy to see why happy endings feel cheap. But how do you know the story of our world doesn’t have a happy ending? The Psalm we’re looking at today was written by a real man living in the real world, a man named David, who knew the God of Israel, and in our real world, he found reason to praise that God, and to call us to do likewise, because he had experienced a happy ending. Do you find reasons to praise that same God this morning? You may have a sense that you are supposed to, but what about when hardship comes into your life? Will there be a happy ending to it? In this Psalm we see that there really will be for those who are in Christ Jesus. So praise the Lord who brings us from death to dancing, and we’ll see in this psalm a choice to praise, a call to praise, and a path to praise.

 

A Choice to Praise

 

Our Psalm begins with an introduction to what David will be doing in this Psalm: I will extol you, O LORD. To extol the LORD is to lift him up in our words. With our words we instinctively extol those we admire: Basketball fans extol Michael Jordan when they call him the greatest player ever, when they point out the season he averaged 37 points per game, or the season he averaged eight rebounds per game as a shooting guard, or the six championships he won. Alfred North Whitehead extoled Plato when he said that the history of western philosophy was just a footnote to Plato. Today many extol Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leader of the civil rights movement, and you could think of many more examples.

 

Do you extol the Lord with your words? Do you speak of him at all? When you speak of him, do you speak of him as one infinite in glory? One of the key ways we extol God is when we sing to him in these worship gatherings; it’s a big part of why we gather at all as a church. You perhaps noticed in the superscription of the Psalm that it says this Psalm was intended for use at the dedication of the temple. Before the coming of Christ, the temple was the place God’s people gathered to worship him, and so this Psalm was written to be sung in the gathering of God’s people. When we gather, then, we want to sing songs that extol God, that sing aloud how great he is, more than we want to sing songs that simply produce a certain emotional response in us. Of course, the more spiritually healthy we are, the more extolling God will express the joy we have in believing, but if we simply aim at what songs produce a certain feeling in us, we may miss extolling God altogether. When you come to church and sing, is it your aim to extol God, or are you simply chasing a feeling? When you come to a church and sing, does it sound like you are extolling God, or mumbling about God?

 

We extol the LORD also in prayer, which is another way the Psalms were written. The Psalm was written to be sung by God’s people, but when David was writing it, the Psalm functioned as a prayer for David. No doubt asking God for things agreeable to his will is central to prayer, but there’s a reason that when Jesus taught us to pray, he didn’t begin with, “Give us this day our daily bread.” He began with, “Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” What’s that? It’s a prayer for the extolling of God’s name. How much of your time praying is taken up with simply extoling God, saying to him what is great about him, thanking him for all he’s done? Personally I find it comes more naturally to me to spend the bulk of my prayer time requesting things—I seem to be more aware of the things I lack, which I therefore ask God for, than I am of what is great about God and what he has already done for me or promises me in the future. And that’s some of the beauty of verse 1 of this psalm: It reflects a choice to extol God. It is something you can choose to do. You can even set a timer, say a 5 minute timer, and resolve that for those 5 minutes, you will only extol God before confessing your sins to him or requesting anything of him. You may find when you get started that you have a pretty hard time filling those 5 minutes, but that can and should drive you to a deeper study of scripture! “Man, I gotta search out more of God’s glory so I can extol him. Let me study his attributes or review his great works or study the names used to refer to him or his promises so I can extol him for those things. Let me read Packer or Bavinck on the attributes of God so I’m better prepared to extol him.” You may have noticed that in our service we have a prayer at the beginning of the service devoted entirely to extolling God, before our prayer of confession or our prayer of intercession.

 

We extol him when we sing of his greatness together, we extol him in prayer, and we can extol him simply in how we speak of him in conversation with one another and with our neighbors. “I’ve been comforted this week by God’s wisdom. I’m not sure what he’s doing in my life, but I know he’s got it figured out, and that gives me such peace.” “So much is changing in my life right now. But God and his love for me never change.” “The Lord continues to provide my every need, even when things get tight.” “God has been so gracious to me lately to reveal more of my sin and assure me of his forgiveness.” We can even help one another in this by the questions we ask one another: “What are some ways you’ve seen God answer prayer lately?” “What have you been hearing about God in the sermons you’ve heard recently?” “What are you seeing about God in your personal time of Bible reading?” “What are you thanking God for lately?” As we speak to one another in this way, just don’t turn it off when with unbelieving friends.

 

Again, this is something you can choose to do: I will extol you, O LORD, David says. And why has David made this choice? Verse 1 goes on to say that it is because the LORD has drawn him up and has not let his foes rejoice over him. The situation revealed in verses 2-3 is a time when David was near death, but he prayed, and the LORD healed him. We don’t know why he was near death—it could have been from injuries sustained in battle, it could have been from a more garden-variety illness, it could have been from the time at the end of David’s life when God sent a plague on Israel in judgment for David’s choice to take a census of Israel in rebellion against the Lord. We don’t know the specific situation, and the Psalms often don’t tell us the specific situations, because the Psalms are meant to be used and sung by people who weren’t in that exact same situation. Perhaps some of you here today have been in life-threatening situations, have prayed to the LORD for help, and you’re still here today because he answered that prayer. I can think of at least a couple of your testimonies off the top of my head in which part of how the LORD drew you to faith was by answering prayers to deliver you from desperate situations.

 

I mentioned already how important it is that we extol God in prayer, rather than only presenting our requests, but don’t let that diminish the importance in your mind of presenting your requests to God. As David says in verse 2: “I cried to you for help.” When you need help, help of any kind, the LORD is the one to whom to cry. This is often difficult for many of us in the room who have so many other helps available to us. I remember a time one of my kids was sick with something we didn’t understand and that had us a bit anxious. That day I spoke on the phone to two different medical professionals, and by the end of the day, I felt better, until I realized the one thing I hadn’t done all day was pray. And since he did, when he was healed, doesn’t it make sense that David would then extol God? Of course, God often does work through medical professionals or other secondary helps, and when they are available to us, we should avail ourselves of them, but never to the exclusion of God. Has God answered any of your prayers lately? How many of you in the room today can say that you cried to God for help, and he healed you? Extol him for the prayers you’ve seen him answer. Some Christians find it helpful to write their prayers down, like David did here, and keep a prayer journal in which they can also record God’s answers to those prayers.

 

So far, though, David hasn’t called anyone else to extol God. In verses 1-3, he tells us what he is choosing to do, and what the LORD has done for him. Let’s look next, then, at the call to praise that begins in verse 4.

 

A Call to Praise

 

So in verse 4 David addresses God’s saints, and tells us to sing praises to the LORD, and give thanks to his holy name. I mentioned earlier that singing together is one way we extol God; here it is explicit. The “saints” addressed in verse 4 are not some secluded class of especially holy Christians; it is a reference, rather, to all God’s people. The word “saint” means “holy one,” someone set apart from the world for devotion to God and his glory. In its original context, it referred to the people of Israel, who God had taken out of the world to be his own people.

 

Now look at the reason for this call to praise to all God’s people in verse 5: His anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Though it is David who was on the brink of death, though it was David who cried for help, and though it was David who was healed, here we see that God’s way of dealing with David was not unique to David, but revealed rather the kind of God he is, and the way he typically deals with his people. David had a unique office; he was the king of Israel, but he wasn’t special, as though God heard his prayers, but doesn’t really listen to the prayers of his people otherwise. Do you ever feel that God is good, that he provides, that he hears the prayers of his people and responds to them, and that all that is true for some Christians, but not for you? It’s easy for me even to look at the lives of other pastors who appear more visibly successful than I and feel like God is working in their lives, whereas mine is just a failure.

 

Not only is such a line of thinking unbiblical; it’s irrational. Comparing the worst of your life to the best of someone else’s isn’t even factual. And if you could just feel what it felt like to be one of those people you think God really loves, unlike you, you’d quickly learn that their life has its hardships too, and the same God you need to trust now is the God they need to trust in the midst of those things. When I speak with members of this church, I’m almost always so encouraged to hear of how God is working in your lives, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a member who doesn’t have at least one hard thing in their lives. David was the king of Israel, but David also faced the brink of death. Later in the Psalm he describes it as God hiding his face from him. In verse 5 he suggests that this suffering in his life was a result of God’s anger toward him. Again, we don’t know the specific situation—maybe it was after David committed adultery and murder, maybe it was after David numbered the people, but it is clear that though God loved David, God also got angry with David. Parents understand this phenomenon. We love our children in ways it’s hard to explain, and there are probably very few people in the world as capable of evoking our anger as our children. In our case, of course, much of that is sinful anger, but at least some of it images God’s fatherly anger, in which he is angry with the sin that is hindering us, which is what David experienced, and what we too should expect to experience if and when we sin against our heavenly Father.

 

But that anger is not what will last in our relationship with God. It’s a parenthesis, an interruption, to God’s fundamental heart toward his children: Favor. And the proof is in the duration: His anger is but for a moment, while his favor is for a lifetime. We don’t know how long David was sick, or how long God hid his face from him, but God having now heard his prayer, and restoring to David a sense of his favor, David could look back and see that the anger was but for a moment in comparison. If you are repenting of your sins today and trusting in Jesus Christ for your salvation, God will still discipline you for sin. How could he not? He’s a father who loves you, and any father who loves his child will get angry at their remaining folly and want to discipline it out of them. But he will never condemn you and cast you off forever. We know from the narrative of David’s life that he sinned against God greatly in the ways I’ve already mentioned and in many more ways that scripture never mentions, but God restored to him a sense of his favor, and what David is saying here is that’s just the kind of God he is; that’s what he’ll do in your life too!

 

Think about this: Before God created anything else, was God angry? No. Was God good, kind, and even loving? Yes. God eternally exists as one being subsisting in three persons: God the Father, who eternally begets God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, who eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. God is an eternal act of love, kindness, favor. That’s his essence, not anger. When God created the first humans, God had no anger toward them until they sinned against him. God’s perfection is only revealed as anger when it encounters sin, and how could God not be angry with it? Do we really view it as evidence of a person’s goodness if they are not angry at things we know to be evil, like racism or human trafficking? No; God must be angry with sin, but anger is the interruption to God’s relationship with his saints, not the essence of it, and so it will not last.

 

Similarly, suffering will not last for God’s people. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. And don’t get it twisted—weeping may tarry for the night, and that night may even be a long night in the lives of God’s saints. There is discipline for sin that we already mentioned, but in this life the saints also endure the suffering of persecution, and the sufferings common to all humanity, that aren’t the consequence of some specific sin in their lives. Like all humans, the saints get sick, get laid off, get fired, face infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths, suffer violence, broken engagements, mental illness, housing instability, poverty, the death of ones they love, racism, injustice, family strife, abuse, and many more forms of suffering common to humans living in a fallen world. As Pastor John Piper has said, we spend our days living just on the surface of an ocean of suffering in our world. And so what do we do? We weep, and we should weep in the face of such suffering.

 

In fact, we are free to weep, because we know this: Joy comes with the morning. When you don’t have real, substantial reasons to believe that joy is coming on the other side of grief, grief becomes too much to bear. And if you are here today and you are not a Christian, it is hard to see what real, substantial reason you have to think that joy is coming on the other side of grief. So who wants to enter into a black hole of grief with no hope of light on the other side? And so what do many in our world do today? Avoid grief altogether. Dispense with funerals, don’t talk about pain, move on as quickly as possible to the next distraction so we can stay happy. Jesus gives us a better way. We weep, but we weep as those who have hope, and that’s why we can weep. We don’t know how long the night of weeping will last, but we know it won’t last forever. Joy comes in the morning for God’s saints, and joy never leaves. It gets the final word. As Pastor Ray Ortlund has put it, if you are in Christ today, your future is incredibly bright.

 

Perhaps you’ve come to this service and you’re in the middle of the night, weeping. Perhaps you’re experiencing the joy of the LORD. Whichever the case may be, the call to praise is the same: Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name, because however long the weeping lasts, it will not last forever.

 

But how do you break through to that kind of praise? In the remaining seven verses of our Psalm, David returns to his experience and breaks down for us his own path to praise. While verses 1-3 gave us a snapshot, verses 6-12 go into more detail and show us how he reached the point of, “I will extol you” with which he began the Psalm. So let’s look last at a path to praise.

 

A Path to Praise

 

In verse 6 David returns to himself with an “As for me”—as for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.” Whatever the sin was in David’s life that led to God’s anger, it began with presumption. We know from the narrative of David’s life not only his sins, but his prosperity. From a sheep herder among many brothers, God took him, anointed him king, gave him victory first over the Philistine giant Goliath, then over the prior Israelite king, Saul, then over more Philistines, until he finally reigned as king in Jerusalem, having been given victory over all his enemies. He ended up with great wealth and great authority over a large kingdom. Of course, that was all God’s doing, but just as God dealt with David like he deals with all his people, so David’s heart showed itself to be similar to the rest of God’s people: In our prosperity, we are prone to forget God. Spurgeon said, “No temptation is so bad as tranquility.” Listen to how God speaks to his saints in Hosea 13:4-6 – “But I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior. 5 It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought; 6 but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.”

 

So here, it was God who gave David his great wealth and power, but when he got it, he was filled, and he forgot the LORD. Instead, he reassured himself: “I shall never be moved.” We often talk about the fear of failure and how to find comfort when you face it, but are you aware of the temptation of success? We’ve talked about the sufferings of the saints, but sometimes the saints also prosper in this life. You land your dream job, you start making more money than you ever thought you would, you get married and have the children you’d dreamed of, you buy a bigger house than you could have imagined. “I shall never be moved.” We can even project a future like this for ourselves and start living in it—we imagine ourselves prosperous, and start assuming this good thing we anticipate is going to happen, and we feel like, “I shall never be moved.” This can happen in our churches and spiritual lives too: Now we’ve covenanted as a particular church, we have a hundred members, we’re more diverse, we’re still adding more new members—“I shall never be moved.” You realize you’ve finally made some progress in fighting certain sins in your life, and no longer feel the temptation quite as strong—“I shall never be moved.”

 

Well, the Lord has a way of shaking us out of that presumption. There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. He possessed 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east—That’s the words of Job 1:1-2. Then in a day, the LORD allowed Satan to kill his sheep, his camels, his oxen, his donkeys, and finally, his children. And what did Job say? “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return. The LORD has given, and the LORD has taken away; blessed by the name of the LORD.” And the LORD did something like this to David. He recognizes now looking back that it was the LORD’s favor that brought him his prosperity, and if it was the LORD who gave it, the LORD can also take it away. So he did. He hid his face, verse 7 says, and David was dismayed. You landed your dream job, but then you got laid off. You had more money than you ever dreamed of, but then the market tanked. You had your wedding with this person planned in your mind, but then they stop answering your texts. The church looks great, but then sin is exposed that had been hidden. You think you’re beyond some sin struggle, only to surprisingly fall into it again. I don’t give these examples to leave you in despair, as though something bad is always around the corner—remember, it’s always joy that gets the final word in the lives of God’s people, and we’re on our way to it again in this Psalm, but I do say it to warn you against presumption. 1 Cor 10:12 says, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”

 

If the Lord has prospered you in any way, praise him, so that you don’t forget him. Remember who gave you your prosperity, and who can take it away. Don’t get ahead of yourself and start boasting about tomorrow like it’s already yours—instead, say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). Let prosperity drive you closer to him. Kick sin when it’s down; don’t give up. If God has brought you into a sweet season, use it to build disciplines into your life that can sustain you if the Lord chooses to take it away. Tether your faith more to him than to your favorable circumstances. And if you find yourself in a situation in which the LORD has hidden his face, and you are dismayed, keep following the path to praise.

 

The next step on it is in verse 8: To you, O LORD, I cry. Isn’t that amazing? It’s this LORD who David says has hidden his face from him, and yet it’s to this LORD he still cries! Where else would he turn, after all? If the Lord is hiding his face from you, what good will it do you to turn your face from him? Creature comforts may distract you and provide a temporary feeling of relief, but they can’t provide the help you really need. When you feel like God isn’t coming after you, you keep going after him. In verse 8 David describes his prayer as a plea—you can almost picture a beggar going to one who seems to have no interest in hearing, and just persisting in pleading. He generates a new argument even in verse 9: What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Here David is now extolling God, and giving us a Psalm through which we can do likewise, that never would have been written if God had let David’s enemies triumph over him.

 

This is what it looks like to persist in prayer. Make an argument to God in your prayers; plead with him. And what is your plea? Notice David’s plea is about God and his glory. God, don’t let me die, for if I do, it’s one less voice extolling you on earth. That’s how you plead with God. God, give me strength to put this sin to death, because my engagement in it suggests it is greater than you, and I want to give you the glory you deserve. God, give us more elders so that the members of this church see and experience more of the shepherding heart of Jesus, their chief shepherd. God, lead my friend to faith in Christ because right now she doesn’t worship you and give you the glory you deserve. Arguing in this way with God is also a good check on your prayers. If you find yourself asking God for something that you can’t honestly argue will increase his glory, maybe you should stop asking for it.

 

Thus David prayed, and the LORD did answer. David testifies in verse 11 that not only did God hear his prayer and heal him, restoring him to a kind of baseline level of health, but God restored him from mourning to dancing, from a garment of grief (sackcloth) to a garment of gladness, all so that he might sing God’s praises and not be silent, and therefore, the Psalm concludes where it began, with the choice to praise, not only today, but forever: I will give thanks to you forever. From presumption to dismay to pleading to dancing—that’s a path to praise. And just as God took David on this path, so God deals with all his people in similar ways.

 

And yet, some of you may be wondering: What about the saints who pray to God for healing and don’t get it? How can you really say that joy comes in the morning to them, when they’re dead? Indeed, there came a time in David’s life when he was advanced in years, and began to fall ill, so that we are told, “though they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm” (1 Kings 1:1), and this time, he did indeed return to the dust in death (1 Kings 2:10). What happened to his joy? How can he really give thanks to the Lord forever if he did in fact go down to the pit, where he just said in this Psalm God is not praised? That would require an even greater deliverance than the one he celebrates here. In verse 3 of this Psalm, he says that God brought up his soul from Sheol, and restored him to life, but he’s speaking figuratively: He was on the brink of death; he hadn’t actually died.

 

There was, however, another king of Israel, who really died, who really descended to Sheol, the realm of the dead, but who God brought up from there. When Jesus Christ was on earth, he taught his disciples that he had to die. David and all God’s saints were guilty of sin, and God was not only their Father…He was their judge, and their sin deserve death. God is the righteous judge over all humanity—how then could he possibly show favor to his sinful children? You can imagine the scene: A judge presides over the case of a murderer, only the accused is his own child. He’d be an unjust judge to simply let the child go, but he’d be an unloving father to condemn him. This was God’s situation with his children, and so out of great love for them, he chose to take upon himself the demand of justice, that we could be forgiven. So God the Father sent God the Son to become human in Jesus Christ, and as a human, he lived a sinless life, so that on the cross he could bear the sins of David and all his saints. The condemning anger of a just judge fell on Christ so that the only anger left for us would be temporary, fatherly anger, that would always give way to favor.

 

Jesus knew this had to happen, and he told his disciples as much. When he did, they were grieved, but listen to what he told them: “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). Jesus did see them again, because though weeping lasted for two nights in his case, on the third day the Lord brought him up from Sheol and restored him to life when he raised him from the dead. And as God has dealt with him, so God will deal with all those who are united to him by faith. The day will come when, one way or another, you will go down to the pit as well, and your body will be laid in the ground. But if you turn from your sins and rest upon him alone for salvation, your weeping will give way to joy. Your soul will go to the presence of Jesus then, to rejoice with the saints gathered in heaven, and when Jesus returns, your body will rise from the dead, he will wipe away every tear from your eyes, and you will dance with gladness in a new body, on a new earth, and praise the Lord forever.

 

Brothers and sisters, do you see what God has done in your life? We were dead in our trespasses and sins, but God has made us alive together with Christ. We weren’t even crying to him for help, but he saved us! Why wouldn’t you dance? I get that culturally that’s tough for many of us in this room, but why not push into it a bit? Why not at least extol God loudly with words of praise in the songs we sing? If there isn’t gladness in your praise of God, you’re missing something of what he has done for you. Do you realize how dead you were, how hopeless you were, how deserving of God’s anger you were? Do you realize what Jesus went through for you? Do you realize that he is now risen, alive, and coming again, to take us to be with him where he is, that we might be with him forever? God has done a greater work of deliverance in your life than the temporary healing of any disease or the temporary preservation of life. He’s rescued you from the death in your sins and given you eternal life. Your future really is incredibly bright. And God has done all this for you in Jesus Christ precisely so that you may sing his praise not be silent. So don’t be silent. Sing the praises of the God who has brought us from death to dancing, and who will do so again, so that we will, with David and all his saints, give thanks to him forever.

A Choice to Praise

Our Psalm begins with an introduction to what David will be doing in this Psalm: I will extol you, O LORD. To extol the LORD is to lift him up in our words. With our words we instinctively extol those we admire: Basketball fans extol Michael Jordan when they call him the greatest player ever, when they point out the season he averaged 37 points per game, or the season he averaged eight rebounds per game as a shooting guard, or the six championships he won. Alfred North Whitehead extoled Plato when he said that the history of western philosophy was just a footnote to Plato. Today many extol Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leader of the civil rights movement, and you could think of many more examples.

Do you extol the Lord with your words? Do you speak of him at all? When you speak of him, do you speak of him as one infinite in glory? One of the key ways we extol God is when we sing to him in these worship gatherings; it’s a big part of why we gather at all as a church. You perhaps noticed in the superscription of the Psalm that it says this Psalm was intended for use at the dedication of the temple. Before the coming of Christ, the temple was the place God’s people gathered to worship him, and so this Psalm was written to be sung in the gathering of God’s people. When we gather, then, we want to sing songs that extol God, that sing aloud how great he is, more than we want to sing songs that simply produce a certain emotional response in us. Of course, the more spiritually healthy we are, the more extolling God will also reinforce in us the joy that comes from believing, but if we simply aim at what songs produce a certain feeling in us, we may miss extolling God altogether. When you come to church and sing, is it your aim to extol God, or are you simply chasing a feeling? When you come to a church and sing, does it sound like you are extolling God, or mumbling about God?

We extol the LORD also in prayer, which is another way the Psalms were written. The Psalm was written to be sung by God’s people, but when David was writing it, the Psalm functioned as a prayer for David. No doubt asking God for things agreeable to his will is central to prayer, but there’s a reason that when Jesus taught us to pray, he didn’t begin with, “Give us this day our daily bread.” He began with, “Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” What’s that? It’s a prayer for the extolling of God’s name. How much of your time praying is taken up with simply extoling God, saying to him what is great about him, thanking him for all he’s done? Personally I do find it comes more naturally to me to spend the bulk of my prayer time requesting things—I seem to be more aware of the things I lack, which I therefore ask God for, than I am of what is great about God and what he has already done for me or promises me in the future. And that’s some of the beauty of verse 1 of this psalm: It reflects a choice to extol God. It is something you can choose to do. You can even set a timer, say a 5 minute timer, and resolve that for those 5 minutes, you will only extol God before confessing your sins to him or requesting anything of him. You may find when you get started that you have a pretty hard time filling those 5 minutes, but that can and should drive you to a deeper study of scripture! “Man, I gotta search out more of God’s glory so I can extol him. Let me study his attributes or review his great works or study the names used to refer to him or his promises so I can extol him for those things. Let me read Packer or Bavinck on the attributes of God so I’m better prepared to extol him.” You may have noticed that in our service we have a prayer at the beginning of the service devoted entirely to extolling God, before our prayer of confession or our prayer of intercession.

We extol him when we sing of his greatness together, we extol him in prayer, and we can extol him simply in how we speak of him in conversation with one another and with our neighbors. “I’ve been comforted this week by God’s wisdom. I’m not sure what he’s doing in my life, but I know he’s got it figured out, and that gives me such peace.” “So much is changing in my life right now. But God and his love for me never change.” “The Lord continues to provide my every need, even when things get tight.” “God has been so gracious to me lately to reveal more of my sin and assure me of his forgiveness.” We can even help one another in this by the questions we ask one another: “What are some ways you’ve seen God answer prayer lately?” “What have you been hearing about God in the recent sermons you’ve heard?” “What are you seeing about God in your personal time of Bible reading?” “What are you thanking God for lately?” As we speak to one another in this way, just don’t turn it off when with unbelieving friends. 

Again, this is something you can choose to do: I will extol you, O LORD, David says. And why has David made this choice? Verse 1 goes on to say that it is because the LORD has drawn him up and has not let his foes rejoice over him. The situation revealed in verses 2-3 is a time when David was near death, but he prayed, and the LORD healed him. We don’t know why he was near death—it could have been from injuries sustained in battle, it could have been from a more garden-variety illness, it could have been from the time at the end of David’s life when God sent a plague on Israel in judgment for David’s choice to take a census of Israel in rebellion against the Lord. We don’t know the specific situation, and the Psalms often don’t tell us the specific situations, because the Psalms are meant to be used and sung by people who weren’t in that exact same situation. Perhaps some of you here today have been in life-threatening situations, have prayed to the LORD for help, and you’re still here today because he answered that prayer. I can think of at least a couple of your testimonies off the top of my head in which part of how the LORD drew you to faith was by answering prayers to deliver you from desperate situations.

I mentioned already how important it is that we extol God in prayer, rather than only presenting our requests, but don’t let that diminish the importance in your mind of presenting your requests to God. As David says in verse 2: “I cried to you for help.” When you need help, help of any kind, the LORD is the one to whom to cry. This is often difficult for many of us in the room who have so many other helps available to us. I remember a time one of my kids was sick with something we didn’t understand and that had us a bit anxious. That day I spoke on the phone to two different medical professionals, and by the end of the day, I felt better, until I realized the one thing I hadn’t done all day was pray. And since he did, when he was healed, doesn’t it make sense that David would then extol God? Of course, God often does work through medical professionals or other secondary helps, and when they are available to us, we should avail ourselves of them, but never to the exclusion of God. Has God answered any of your prayers lately? Again, it comes naturally to me to ask God for things, but not as naturally to thank him when he’s answered. Extol him for the prayers you’ve seen him answer. Some Christians find it helpful to write their prayers down, like David did here, and keep a prayer journal in which they can also record God’s answers to those prayers.

So far, though, David hasn’t called anyone else to extol God. In verses 1-3, he tells us what he is choosing to do, and what the LORD has done for him. Let’s look next, then, at the call to praise that begins in verse 4.

A Call to Praise

So in verse 4 David addresses God’s saints, and tells us to sing praises to the LORD, and give thanks to his holy name. I mentioned earlier that singing together is one way we extol God; here it is explicit. The “saints” addressed in verse 4 are not some secluded class of especially holy Christians; it is a reference, rather, to all God’s people. The word “saint” means “holy one,” someone set apart from the world for devotion to God and his glory. In its original context, it referred to the people of Israel, who God had taken out of the world to be his own people. 

Now look at the reason for this call to praise to all of God’s people in verse 5: His anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Though it is David who was on the brink of death, though it was David who cried for help, and though it was David who was healed, here we see that God’s way of dealing with David was not unique to David, but revealed rather the kind of God he is, and the way he typically deals with his people. David had a unique office; he was the king of Israel, but he wasn’t special, as though God heard his prayers, but doesn’t really listen to the prayers of his people otherwise. Do you ever feel that God is good, that he provides, that he hears the prayers of his people and responds to them, and that all that is true for some Christians, but not for you? It’s easy for me even to look at the lives of other pastors who appear more visibly successful than I and feel like God is working in their lives, whereas mine is just a failure. 

Not only is such a line of thinking unbiblical; it’s irrational. Comparing the worst of your life to the best of someone else’s isn’t even factual. And if you could just feel like what it felt like to be one of those people you think God is just all for, you’d quickly learn that their life has its hardships too, and the same God you need to trust now is the God they need to trust in the midst of those things. When I speak with members of this church, I’m almost always so encouraged to hear of how God is working in your lives, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a member who doesn’t have at least one hard thing in their lives. David was the king of Israel, but David also faced the brink of death. Later in the Psalm he describes it as God hiding his face from him. In verse 5 he suggests that this suffering in his life was a result of God’s anger toward him. Again, we don’t know the specific situation—maybe it was after David committed adultery and murder, maybe it was after David numbered the people, but it is clear that though God loved David, God also got angry with David. Parents understand this phenomenon. We love our children in ways it’s hard to explain, and there are probably very few people in the world as capable of evoking our anger as our children. In our case, of course, much of that is sinful anger, but at least some of it images God’s fatherly anger, in which he is angry with the sin that is hindering us, which is what David experienced, and what we too should expect to experience if and when we sin against our heavenly Father.

But that anger is not what will last in our relationship with God. It’s a parenthesis, an interruption, to God’s fundamental heart toward his children: Favor. And the proof is in the duration: His anger is but for a moment, while his favor is for a lifetime. We don’t know how long David was sick, or how long God hid his face from him, but God having now heard his prayer, and restoring to David a sense of his favor, David could look back and see that the anger was but for a moment in comparison. If you are repenting of your sins today and trusting in Jesus Christ for your salvation, God will still discipline you for sin. How could he not? He’s a father who loves you, and any father who loves his child will get angry at their remaining folly and want to discipline it out of them. But he will never condemn you and cast you off forever. We know from the narrative of David’s life that he sinned against God greatly in the ways I’ve already mentioned and in many more ways that scripture never mentions, but God restored to him a sense of his favor, and what David is saying here is that’s just the kind of God he is; that’s what he’ll do in your life too! 

Think about this: Before God created anything else, was God angry? No. Was God good, kind, and even loving? Yes. God eternally exists as one being subsisting in three persons: God the Father, who eternally begets God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, who eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. God is an eternal act of love and kindness; there is in God a pure eternal act of favor. That’s his essence, not anger. When God created the first humans, God had no anger toward them even until they sinned against him. God’s perfection is only revealed as anger when it encounters sin, and how could God not be angry with it? Do we really view it as evidence of a person’s goodness if they are not angry at things we know to be evil, like racism or human trafficking? No; God must be angry with sin, but anger is the interruption to God’s relationship with his saints, not the essence of it, and so it will not last.

Similarly, suffering will not last for God’s people. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Don’t get it twisted—weeping may tarry for the night, and that night may even be a long night in the lives of God’s saints. There is discipline for sin that we already mentioned, but in this life the saints also endure the suffering of persecution, and the sufferings common to all humanity, that aren’t the consequence of some specific sin in their lives. Like all humans, the saints get sick, get laid off, get fired, face infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths, suffer violence, broken engagements, mental illness, housing instability, poverty, the death of ones they love, racism, injustice, family strife, abuse, and many more forms of suffering common to humans living in a fallen world. As Pastor John Piper has said, we spend our days living just on the surface of an ocean of suffering. And so what do we do? We weep, and we should weep in the face of such suffering.

In fact, we are free to weep, because we know this: Joy comes with the morning. When you don’t have real, substantial reasons to believe that joy is coming on the other side of grief, grief becomes too much to bear. And if you are here today and you are not a Christian, it is hard to see what real, substantial reason you have to think that joy is coming on the other side of grief. So who wants to enter into a black hole of grief with no hope of light on the other side? And so what do many in our world do today? Avoid grief altogether. Dispense with funerals, don’t talk about pain, move on as quickly as possible on to the next distraction so we can stay happy. Or, dive so deep into the pain that it becomes your identity. Jesus gives us a better way. We weep, but we weep as those who have hope, and that’s why we can weep. We don’t know how long the night of weeping will last, but we know it won’t last forever. Joy comes in the morning for God’s saints, and joy never leaves. It gets the final world. As Pastor Ray Ortlund has put it, if you are in Christ today, your future is incredibly bright.

Perhaps you’ve come to this service and you’re in the middle of the night, weeping. Perhaps you’re experiencing the joy of the LORD. Whichever the case may be, the call to praise is the same: Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name, because however long the weeping lasts, it will not last forever. Joy will come, and so sing praises to the LORD now in certain hope of it. 

But how do you break through to that kind of praise? In the remaining seven verses of our Psalm, David returns to his experience and breaks down for us his own path to praise. While verses 1-3 gave us a snapshot, verses 6-12 go into more detail and show us how he reached the point of, “I will extol you” with which he began the Psalm. So let’s look last at a path to praise.

A Path to Praise

So in verse 6 David returns to himself with an “As for me”—as for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.” Whatever the sin was in David’s life that led to God’s anger, it began with presumption. We know from the narrative of David’s life not only his sins, but his prosperity. From a sheep herder among many brothers, God took him, anointed him king, gave him victory first over the Philistine giant Goliath, then over the prior Israelite king, Saul, then over more Philistines, until he finally reigned as king in Jerusalem, having been given victory over all his enemies. He ended up with great wealth and great authority over a large kingdom. Of course, that was all God’s doing, but just as God dealt with David like he deals with all his people, so David’s heart showed itself to be similar to the rest of God’s people: In our prosperity, we are prone to forget God. Spurgeon said, “No temptation is so bad as tranquility.” Listen to how God speaks to his saints in Hosea 13:4-6 – “But I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior. 5 It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought; 6 but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.”

So here, it was God who gave David his great wealth and power, but when he got it, he was filled, and he forgot the LORD. Instead, he reassured himself: “I shall never be moved.” We often talk about the fear of failure and how to find comfort when you face it, but are you aware of the temptation of success? We’ve talked about the sufferings of the saints, but sometimes the saints also prosper in this life. You land your dream job, you start making more money than you ever thought you would, you get married and have the children you’d dreamed of, you buy a bigger house than you could have imagined. What could go wrong? This can happen in our churches and spiritual lives too: Now we’ve covenanted as a particular church, we have a hundred members, we’re more diverse, we’re still adding more new members—what could go wrong? You realize you’ve finally made some progress in fighting certain sins in your life, and no longer feel the temptation quite as strong—what could go wrong?

Well, the Lord has a way of shaking us out of that presumption, and he did so to David. He recognizes now looking back that it was the LORD’s favor that brought him that prosperity, and if it was the LORD who gave it, the LORD can also take it away. So he did. He hid his face, verse 7 says, and David was dismayed. You landed your dream job, but then you got laid off. You had more money than you ever dreamed of, but then the market tanked. You bought a bigger house than you could have imagined, but then it needs significant repairs. The church looks great, but then sin is exposed that had been hidden. You think you’re beyond some sin struggle, only to surprisingly fall into it again. I don’t give these examples to leave you in despair, as though something bad is always around the corner—remember, it’s always joy that gets the final word in the lives of God’s people, and we’re on our way to it again in this Psalm, but I do say it to say warn you against presumption. 1 Cor 10:12 says, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”

If the Lord has prospered you in any way, praise him, but don’t forget him. Remember who gave you your prosperity, and who can take it away. Let it drive you closer to him. Kick sin when it’s down; don’t give up. If God has brought you into a sweet season, use it to build disciplines into your life that can sustain you if the Lord chooses to take it away. Tether your faith more to him than to your favorable circumstances. And if you find yourself in a situation in which the LORD has hidden his face, and you are dismayed, keep following the path to praise.

The next step on it is in verse 8: To you, O LORD, I cry. Isn’t that amazing? It’s this LORD who David says has hidden his face from him, and yet it’s to this LORD he still cries! Where else would he turn, after all? If the Lord is hiding his face from you, what good will it do you to turn your face from him? Creature comforts may distract you and provide a temporary feeling of relief, but they can’t provide the help you really need. When you feel like God isn’t coming after you, you keep going after him. In verse 8 David describes his prayer as a plea—you can almost picture a beggar going to one who seems to have no interest in hearing, and just persisting in pleading. He generates a new argument even in verse 9: What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Here David is now extolling God, and giving us a Psalm through which we can do likewise, that never would have been written if God had let David’s enemies triumph over him. 

This is what it looks like to persist in prayer. Do you make an argument to God in your prayers? Do you plead with him? And what is your plea? Notice David’s plea is about God and his glory. God, don’t let me die, for if I do, it’s one less voice extolling you on earth. That’s how you plead with God. God, give me strength to put this sin to death, because my engagement in it suggests it is greater than you, and I want to give you the glory you deserve. God, give us more elders so that the members of this church see and experience more of the shepherding heart of Jesus, their chief shepherd. God, lead my friend to faith in Christ because right now she doesn’t worship you and give you the glory you deserve. Arguing in this way with God is also a good check on your prayers. If you find yourself asking God for something that you can’t honestly argue will increase his glory, maybe you should stop asking for it. 

Thus David prayed, and the LORD did answer. David testifies in verse 11 that not only did God hear his prayer and heal him, restoring him to a kind of baseline level of health, but God restored him from mourning to dancing, from a garment of grief (sackcloth) to a garment of gladness, all so that he might sing God’s praises and not be silent, and therefore, the Psalm concludes where it began, with the choice to praise, not only today, but forever: I will give thanks to you forever. From presumption to dismay to pleading to dancing—that’s a path to praise. And just as God took David on this path, so God deals with all his people in similar ways. 

And yet, I know what some of you are wondering: What about the saints who pray to God for healing and don’t get it? How can you really say that joy comes in the morning to them, when they’re dead? Indeed, there came a time in David’s life when he was advanced in years, and began to fall ill, so that we are told, “though they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm” (1 Kings 1:1), and this time, he did indeed return to the dust in death (1 Kings 2:10). What happened to his joy? How can he really give thanks to the Lord forever if he did in fact go down to the pit? That would require an even greater deliverance than the one he celebrates in this Psalm. In verse 3 of this Psalm he says that God brought up his soul from Sheol, and restored him to life, but he’s speaking figuratively: He was on the brink of death; he hadn’t actually died. 

There was, however, a son of David, who really died, who really descended to Sheol, the realm of the dead, but who God brought up from there. When Jesus Christ was on earth, he taught his disciples that he had to die. David and all God’s saints were guilty of sin, and God was not only their Father…He was their judge. God is the righteous judge over all humanity—how then could he possibly show favor to his sinful children? You can imagine the scene: A judge presides over the case of a murderer, only the accused is his own child. He’d be an unjust judge to simply let the child go, but he’d be an unloving father to condemn him. This was God’s situation with his children, and so out of great love for them, he chose to take upon himself the demand of justice, that we could be forgiven. So God the Father sent God the Son to become human in Jesus Christ, and as a human, he lived a sinless life, so that on the cross he could bear the sins of David and all his saints. The condemning anger of a just judge fell on Christ so that only temporary, fatherly anger would remain for us. 

Jesus knew this had to happen, and he told his disciples as much. When he did, they were grieved, but listen to what he told them: “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). And Jesus did see them again, because though weeping lasted for two nights in his case, on the third day the Lord brought him up from Sheol and restored him to life when he rose from the dead. And as God has dealt with him, so God will deal with all those who are united to him by faith. The day will come when, one way or another, you will go down to the pit as well, and your body will be laid in the ground. But if you turn from your sins and rest upon him alone for salvation, your weeping will give way to joy. Your soul will go to the presence of Jesus then, to rejoice with the saints gathered in heaven, and when Jesus returns, your body will rise from the dead, he will wipe away every tear from your eyes, and you will dance with gladness in a new body, on a new earth, and praise the Lord forever. 

Brothers and sisters, do you see what God has done in your life? We were dead in our trespasses and sins, but God has made us alive together with Christ. We weren’t even crying to him for help, but he saved us! Why wouldn’t you dance? I get that culturally that’s tough for many of us in this room, but why not push into it a bit? Why not at least extol God loudly with words of praise in the songs we sing? If there isn’t gladness in your praise of God, you’re missing something of what he has done for you. Do you realize how dead you were, how hopeless you were, how deserving of God’s anger you were? Do you realize what Jesus went through for you? Do you realize that he is now risen, alive, and coming again, to take us to be with him where he is, that we might be with him forever? Your future really is incredibly bright. And God has done all this for you in Jesus Christ precisely so that you may sing his praise not be silent. So don’t be silent. Sing the praises of the God who has brought us from death to dancing, and who will do so again, so that we will, with David and all his saints, give thanks to him forever.