Psalm 130
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
March 22, 2026
God is good; and life itself is – many of us swear! – way better if we walk through it with God. But life remains hard even then. God does not eliminate pain and difficulty. He just makes them serve our well-being – and expand our ability to help others.
Though today’s Psalm ends up on a high summit of hope, it begins in the pits. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” the psalm-writer laments in verse 1.
Many psalms express the near despair that grows in in the dark depths of discouragement, depression, and God’s seeming distance from it all. Typically this downward spiral into despair is occasioned by illness, loneliness, grief, personal defeat or physical danger. But here the pit into which psalm-writer has fallen is a hole of his own making. It’s a pit dug by his own sin, and he struggles with feelings of shame and guilt, and of regret and remorse.
Since he has only himself to blame, he’s lost faith in self-help. He’s lost as well any presumption about God’s availability and generosity. Acutely aware that, due to his iniquity, he has no right to stand before God and ask Him for a thing, he can only plead for God to listen to him.
But he also speaks against his dejection and despair. He reminds himself that “there is forgiveness” with God if only one repents and resumes one’s reverence for God.
Alas, however, believing in such grace does not always immediately relieve one of all the bad feelings and repercussions resulting from one’s bad choices. While the psalm-writer trusts he’s been delivered from the burden of having to pay for his sin, he still has not yet been fully delivered from the alienation his sin created between God and him, let alone the problems it created for him and others. That’s why, after celebrating God’s forgiveness, the psalm-writer repeats that he “waits for the Lord”. He waits for the complete restoration of the close relationship with the Lord he once had but lost by his sinful rebellion. The pardon has been given but the healing needs time to come into full effect.
I think of a man who got in financial trouble, made a dumb decision and embezzled money from work. Though he came to his senses, repented of his sinful crime and believed he was by God’s grace forgiven, he still had to serve years in prison, miss seeing his girls grow up during a key developmental period, and had to earn anew their trust and that of his wife. And, though he held on to the faith that he’d been washed clean by the blood of Christ, he still struggled in the depths of remorse and self-hatred for being so stupid.
Sometimes God loves us with what C.S. Lewis calls a severe mercy. Sometimes God keeps us in the pit of pain for our own good. We may need to linger in the depths of holy grief over our iniquity to remember what we’re capable of and to be convinced of the necessity to vigilantly watch against doing something like that again. We may also need to linger in the bad consequences of our sin to imprint upon our soul the reality of the damage sin can do to us and those we care about, and to come to hate sin as passionately as God does. Thus, God may bless us by keeping us in a curse.
In his book When Life Is Hard, James MacDonald shares a lesson he learned from when he played basketball on his school team. The coach told the players the way to heal a sprained ankle is to fill a wastebasket with ice, top it off with water, plunge one’s injured foot into its cold depths, and leave it there for as long as you can endure it. Within a minute, it gets crazy painful; but if you can put up with the increasing agony another minute, you can cut your recovery time in half. And if you can keep your foot in that brutal position a third minute, which James never could because the pain of the cure greatly exceeded that of the injury, you can walk on the basketball court the next day. Only someone who cares enough about the team to do whatever it takes to be on the floor for a coming game so as to make one’s contribution to it stands a chance of being able to endure the pain that long.
This psalm-writer cares enough about the Lord and His team Israel to endure the depths of his pain and to wait for the Lord until his healing and restoration are achieved. Once that happens, he can then make the contribution that is his to make.
His resolve to hold on and to hold out is sustained by God’s promises. “In his word I hope,” he says; and, because of that hope, he waits “more than those who watch for the morning” – that is, more than those who guard the walls of the city against its enemies throughout the night, in the confidence that, no matter how long it lasts, the sun will again rise to brighten the world. So too, the psalm-writer holds on and holds out, even if the night feels like it’ll never end, in the confidence that God will answer his prayer right on time and at the perfect moment lift him out of the depths and into the light.
The Psalm-writer not only believes that there is forgiveness with the Lord, but also that “with the Lord there is steadfast love and…great power to redeem”. Such faith brings about the death of despair and gives the hope deliverance from the dark depths is coming, with the bright sunshine of God’s redemption!
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