"Rising from Discouragement" (Middlebrooks) | Psalm 85

Sanctuary
07.12.2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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SPEAKER_01 3:40

My name is Chad Middlebrooks. I'm one of the pastors here on staff, and I add my welcome to Keith's. I hope you are enjoying our summer series in the Psalms as much as I have myself. And we continue that this morning as we've just sung Psalm 85 that we'll look at together. And so before we do, let's go before the Lord and ask his blessing on our time and his word. Would you pray with me? Oh, Father, we ask now that you would quiet our noisy hearts, that you would open our ears to your word this morning. And Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations and attitudes of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Lord, may this time be less about us and more about you. Lord, we ask this in the name of the one who crushed the serpent's head, our risen and reigning King, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, not long ago I drove past 213 Marion Drive in Athens, Georgia. The rental house that me and three of my good friends lived in during college. The shutters are painted a different color. The brick itself is painted a different color. Still standing, someone else's home, not longer ours anymore. But driving by that house stirred something in me I wasn't expecting. That house holds some of the best memories of my life. Many late nights spent with my roommates and other friends within the house. Hard conversations that were had there, inside jokes that were made, rich friendships and experiences that shaped a lot of who I am today. But that stage of life is gone. No matter how much I may at times want it to come back. Something in me still deflates, I think, a little though, as I look back and I drove by that house. A version of me that is gone, a version of rich friendship that I experience, a version of even my own naivety that, if I'm honest, don't have and exist anymore in the same way it did. And that ache that I experienced as I drove by that house is not only about the past. It left me wondering whether seasons like that would ever happen again. Or whether life from now on is just kind of managing what's left to come. Maybe you felt something similar as you drove by your childhood home. Or maybe you walked back into a school that you attended for many years. Or maybe you went by the restaurant that you and your family celebrated birthdays, only to find out that it's no longer there. It's something different now. Nothing tragic happened in any of those places. The world just moved on. But something in you sinks a little, does it not? Because that place held a version of your life that does not exist anymore. See, that quiet ache that I think we can often experience is closer to our discouragement than we might want to admit. It's rarely one catastrophic event that happens. More often it's the same feeling that's spread across a season of life. Maybe it's a marriage that's grown cold over time. A diagnosis that rewrote your future. A job that ended prematurely before you wanted it to end. Children leaving the nest for good. Or joy that you once had had that is quietly drained away, and you can't decide exactly when it happened. See, the discouragement that we can often experience, I think, is caused by, at the root, loss. The loss of something that used to be true but is no longer true. Maybe that's true of you personally, or your family, or your faith, or your health, or even our community, or our country. You remember better days from back then. And the eighth that we experience is not just that things are harder, it's that things used to be different, even in some ways better, and we want those days back. That's exactly where the psalmist stands here in Psalm 85. Looking back at a nation that was once restored, once forgiven, once favored, and then asking in the middle of present hardship, will God do it again? Will he show up? One writer describing discouragement, I think captures it in a very beautiful way. He says it this way: discouragement is dissatisfaction with the past, distaste of the present, and distrust of the future. It's an ingratitude for the blessings of yesterday, indifference to the opportunities of today, and insecurity regarding strength for tomorrow. That ache that we often feel itself is not a flaw in our faith. It's just what it feels like to have loss in our lives. The danger is not having that feeling and that ache of discouragement. The danger is what we do with the memory afterwards. See, we're gonna see in Psalm 85, it actually answers our dissatisfaction with the past, our distaste for the present, and our distrust of the future. So, just brief context: this Psalm's likely written when Israel is returning back from exile in Babylon. And so, yes, they are back home, but home was not what it used to be. The walls are still down, the temple is still in ruins, and the glory of Solomon's day has long been gone. It's a distant memory. And so, into that gap between what God has already done and what they're still longing for, the psalmist writes a pattern of how God's people move from discouragement to spiritual renewal and vitality. So we're going to learn from our text, as you see in our outline, that renewal of God's people happens and comes in three ways. When we look back with humble gratitude to God's past mercies, when we look up with desperate longing for God's spiritual renewal to come, and then when we look forward with confident hope in God's sure promises. So let's walk through each one of those. First, we have to look back. So the Psalm opens, he says, Lord, you were favorable to your land. You restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people, you covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath, and you turned from your hot anger. Did you notice each of those verbs there? This isn't a wish list, this is a memory. Every verb in those three verses is completed, it's in the past tense. And so the psalmist isn't guessing whether God is gracious or not. He is rehearsing specific, remembered acts of mercy of God. The restoration that God brought, the forgiveness that he extended to his people, the covering of their sin, and even the turning away of his wrath. One commentator points out, he says, Israel here is not pining for past glories, which are often an optical illusion, but remembering past mercies. That distinction matters because there's a way that we can look back on our past that's just nostalgia, dressed up as faith. As we romanticize a past that was not as good as we remember it. That's not what's happening here. This psalmist is remembering real, factual, covenantal mercy. God did this. God forgave that sin. God turned his anger on that specific occasion. And this is where I think our fleshly response to discouragement in our lives can actually rear its ugly head as we have dissatisfaction as we look back to our past. Instead of gratitude, what happens is we can rehearse grievance and we can grumble. Dissatisfaction when the past, what it does is it turns a memory into a weapon that we use against ourselves and even against God, instead of a well from which we draw gratitude and thankfulness. For example, two siblings can grow up in the very same home under the very same hardships, and one can become very bitter at everything that went wrong, while the other can become grateful for the things that actually still went right. Same home, same facts, different posture towards the past. That's the fork in the road at the very beginning here of Psalm 85. And think about how this can actually play out in our lives. A spouse can recount 30 years of marriage down to the three worst arguments in the marriage, and yet forget the mundane Tuesday or Thursday evening when their spouse loved them and served them well. Or someone can describe a friend group that fell apart senior year in painful detail, and yet forget all the laughter and all the memories that came before it. Or someone who grew up in a very hard home can list their father's failures with great precision and yet neglect to thank God for the grandmother, for the aunt, for the coach, or the teacher, or the neighbor that God graciously put in their lives to love them when their father failed to do so. None of these griefs are imaginary. The arguments, the falling out, the father's failures, those really happened. But dissatisfaction with the past was never about whether those wounds were real. It's about what aspect of our story are we going to be fixated upon and dwell upon. And if we recognize this instinct in ourselves that have dissatisfaction and grumble about our past, the answer is not to pretend the wounds didn't happen, nor is it to pretend and muster up a feeling of gratitude that we don't feel. The answer is to acknowledge our ingratitude and see it as a sin before the Lord and repent of it. Because our ingratitude is not a personality quirk or a phase of life. Scripture calls it sin. Remember what the apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5, he says, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Notice he doesn't say, be thankful for all circumstances. No, only give thanks in the middle of every circumstance. That's the difference. God isn't asking us to pretend that the wounds that we have in our story were good. He's asking us to stop letting the wound be the only part of the story that we tell. And just like any sin, and gratitude has to be named honestly and specifically before it can be put to death. And so that means we need to go before the Lord and say very specifically, not just Lord, would you change my attitude, but Lord, I rehearsed my wounds and I've buried every one of your mercies. I've rehearsed how that person said or did that to me, and I've let that eclipse what you've done for me through your Son Jesus Christ. Lord, forgive me. Because a vague prayer is going to produce vague change. We have to name our sin specifically so that it can begin to be put to death in our hearts. And then once we acknowledge and confess that in gratitude, the same practice that Israel practiced must become ours too. Remember when Israel crossed the Jordan River and Joshua called twelve men to take twelve stones and to stack them on the riverbank. He said that this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come, what do those stones mean? They built a monument solely for the purpose of forcing future generations to rehearse God's past mercies on purpose. Because left to itself, the human heart is going to default to grievance and grumbling and forgetfulness. Remembering rightly does not happen automatically. It has to be practiced. It has to be built on purpose, just like those stones on the riverbank. And so for us, practically, one exercise that I think could be helpful, whether that's later today or this week, is that we take pen to paper and we sit in silence for a moment and think back and reflect on God's past mercies in our lives. Whether it's the person that he sent on that week that we needed to be encouraged, and they prayed for us. Whether it's the marriage that he kept together through a season that neither one of them thought that they would survive, or maybe the specific ways that he's provided for you physically or emotionally or financially, or just his continued presence through each and every trial that you have faced in your life. Thank him specifically for those things. Then tell someone else about those specific mercies, just as Israel told their children the meaning of those stones. That's how dissatisfaction gets starved in our hearts, and gratitude grows and is fed, not by ignoring the wounds, but by refusing to let the wounds be the only part of the story that are told. We have to look back with gratitude for God's continued faithfulness. He has forgiven us of all of our sins. He's rescued us from the pit of hell. We have much to be grateful for. But not only do we look back, we have to look up. Renewal happens as we look up with desperate longing for God's gracious renewal in our lives. So the Psalm turns almost abruptly to this raw, present tense, pleading before God in verses 5 through 7. Look back there, those questions that the psalmist asked. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your sadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation. Look at how the Lord, I mean, excuse me, the psalmist asks these questions here. He doesn't just ask once and move on. No, he badgers and repeats these questions, circling the same wound from three different angles. Look back there. Will you be angry with us forever? That's a question of duration. Lord, how long? How long is this gonna last? Then he asks again, will you prolong your anger to all generations? That's a question about legacy. Is what I'm experiencing going to just affect me? Or is it gonna affect my children and my grandchildren? Then he comes again. Will you not revive us again? It's a question about possibility. Can you even fix the problem, God, that we're experiencing right now? Or is it just broken for good? Duration, legacy, possibility. Those are the same three questions that are underneath our honest prayer when we find ourselves in hardship, is it not? Lord, how long are you gonna let this last? Is this gonna be my lot for the rest of my life? Is this gonna affect even those around me? Can you even do something about this? And are you going to? The psalmist doesn't hide those questions from God. Nor does he answer them prematurely with some platitude or tidy response. He asks those questions one after the other, and then he just lets them sit in the open. And then right in the middle of all that questioning, he doesn't just ask for relief from his circumstances. He asks for something very specific. Look back at verse 7. Show us your steadfast love, O Lord. That's the Hebrew word, Hesed. The Hebrew word that means God's covenant love. He could have asked for anything. Could have asked for power, for justice, for relief from the hardship. But instead, he asked for God to show his covenant loyalty. His love that bound himself to his people through the promises that he made to them. His Hesed love, it's more than just a feeling, it is a commitment that God has made to his people. And when the psalmist asks God to show his Hesed love, he's not asking God to feel differently about Israel than He did before. No, he's asking God to act consistently with who He said He is. And I think that raises a question for us this morning. Is it presumptuous to go to God this boldly and ask these kind of questions? To stack up three, will you, God, will you, will you? And then demand, in effect, to show me your love, Lord. Will it be presumptuous if the psalmist was inventing a version of God that he liked to believe in and then hold God to that standard? But that's not what he's doing. Remember, go back to verses one through three. He's already rehearsed exactly who God has proven himself to be the forgiver of sins. The one who turns away his wrath and anger. The one who restores them. So the boldness of verses five through seven are only possible because of the remembering that he's already done. This isn't a stranger banging on the door for a favor. This is a child coming before his father, knowing the promises that his father's made and the character of his father, and so he knows he can come unhindered and ask boldly. Confidence to plead like this is not presumptions, it's attentiveness. It's what happens when you've paid close attention to who God actually is, so that you can bring your most raw questions before him without fear. Because you already trust the character of the one that you're petitioning and pleading before. And this is, I think, where the second fleshly response of discouragement can show itself as we have a distaste for our present circumstances. We plead with God, do we not? And I think we honestly do. We ask God repeatedly and honestly to change our circumstances at times. Lord, would you heal this marriage? Would you save this job? Would you turn this diagnosis around? Would you heal this person that I love so dearly? Will you bring my child back to the faith? And there's nothing wrong with pleading. That's what the psalmist is doing here. But notice what the psalmist does next in verse 8 that I think we can often skip at times. Let me hear what God the Lord will speak. He stops. He stops pleading and he listens and he waits for the Lord to respond. Most of us are far more comfortable asking God to change our circumstances than we are to sit still long enough, whether that's in prayer, whether that's studying of God's Word, whether that's living in community with one another, to hear what he might actually be saying to us in those very circumstances. Again, think about how this can play out. Almost every one of us knows the feeling of waiting for the phone call or for the text message, for the news that we're sitting on pens and needles for. Whether it's someone who's waiting to hear back from the doctor, the test results of the test that they took before. Or whether it's the teenager that's waiting to hear back from their friend from the hard conversation that they knew they had to have. Or whether it's a parent that's waiting to hear the good news that their child arrived home safely. See, in waiting, every one of those versions of prayer has something very similar that says, Lord, let this be good news that I'm about to hear. But it's much harder to pray, Lord, teach me something as I wait and cannot control the circumstances that I'm sitting in. Or a wife, maybe who prays for her husband's heart to soften and for the coldness in their marriage to fall. That pleading, that prayer is right and it is good. But is she willing to sit still long enough to ask God what he might be doing in her own heart during the waiting? The patience, the humility, the dependence he might be forming in her through those circumstances that might not get formed any other way. See, we're quick to plead for the storms in our lives to pass. We're slow to sit in the boat and listen to the Lord long enough to hear what he's saying to us while the storms are raging around us. That's what's the real test of verses five through seven. It's not only are we honest enough to ask God our hardest questions, but are we patient enough to sit quietly long enough to hear him answer us? Pleading with God to revive us is right. But refusing to sit still afterwards and listen to how he actually responds and what he might be teaching us through our circumstances, that's its own quiet version of unbelief. It treats God as someone that we only petition, almost as a genie, rather than in a relationship of intimacy that walks with us through our seasons of trial. So, where right now have you been pleading with God to change your circumstances without maybe sitting in the midst of those long enough to see what he might be doing through them? Is there something he's forming in you through this season that you might miss if all you do is pray, Lord, get me out of this, get me out of this as quick as you can. Look up with desperate longing to hear the God who has orchestrated those specific circumstances that he's given to you. We look back, we look up, and we need to look forward as well. Renewal for God's people happens as we look forward with confident hope and his sure promises. Verse 10, the psalmist stops asking and he starts declaring. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet. Righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky. Yes, the Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. So here we have a turning from petition to prophecy. His circumstances, notice, have not changed yet. But what's changed is that he's no longer fixated on his own need, and now he's actually listening to what God has said to him. Faithfulness sprouting up out of the ground, righteousness leaning down from the heavens to meet. This is picture language of a reunion that's taking place. Those things that were once torn apart are now being brought back together. God's people and his holiness, heaven and earth, mercy and truth joined again. And herein lies the third response to discouragement that we can often have, and that is distrust for what lies ahead in our future. See, when you've been disappointed by God and by others, it's easy to refuse to hope again, isn't it? You almost want to guard yourself from the next failure and disappointment instead of resting on God's sure promises. But the psalmist chooses the latter. He lands the entire psalm on the confident hope, not because his circumstances have changed, but because he trusts the character of the one who's made promises to him. And here's where this psalm actually reaches much further than the psalmist ever could have imagined or even dreamed. Commentators have long noted that mercy, truth, righteousness, and peace, those things parted ways on earth at the fall of mankind in the garden with Adam and Eve. But they have reunited and met in the person of Jesus Christ. Preaching on verse 10, Charles Spurgeon locates exactly where that reconciliation was completed. He says this at the cross, mercy and truth embrace each other over the great sacrifice of Christ. At Calvary, righteousness and peace kiss each other. We see this in the scriptures. John's gospel, John's gospel points to the first half of that reunion of mercy and truth when he writes, The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. The very steadfast love and faithfulness of verse 10 here came walking in bodily form in the person of Christ who came and dwelt among us. And then Paul in Romans 3 speaks of the second reunion of righteousness and peace when he writes in Romans 3, we are justified by his grace as a gift, through redemption that is in Christ Jesus, to whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith, so that he might be the just, righteousness, and the justifier, peace to the one who is faith in Christ. At the cross, God didn't compromise his righteousness in order to give us peace, nor did he withhold his peace to preserve and protect his righteousness. They both met. They kissed, as it were, at the cross of Calvary. So for those of us in Christ, this is why we don't have to live with distrust of what lies ahead for our future. The ultimate revival that this psalm begs has already happened at the cross. The final restoration that it pictures, faithfulness springing up, the yielding of its land in full increase, is guaranteed by the same God who kept every promise that got Jesus to Calvary in the first place. Missionary Adniram Judson, he knew discouragement all too well as he spent nearly two decades in Burma. His wife and his children all died while he was there. He was put in prison and almost threatened to be executed while translating the scriptures into Burmese. And a year's end, he wrote to a friend, he said, My labors have been a failure. Rarely to no converts, no visible fruit that he saw. He never saw that change in his lifetime either. Yet he kept translating the scriptures, trusting God's promises over visible results. Today, Myanmar has one of the largest Christian populations in Southeast Asia, due in large part to God's work through Judson, and though he never saw the fruit of it. Those scriptures that he tirelessly translated are still to this day being used to convert those with the gospel of Jesus Christ. His trust never depended upon his circumstances changing. It depended upon the promises of the God who sent him. Do you trust God's character enough to submit to his plans and to his promises for your life? Is your hope for tomorrow resting on your own strength to keep things together from falling apart? Or is it resting on the finished work of Christ where mercy and truth, righteousness and peace have already and permanently met? Still think about that house on Marion Drive sometimes, even though that stage of life is gone. But Psalm 85 won't let me stop there and just grieve what is in the past. I don't know what discouragement you're dealing with this morning or what you will deal with in the coming days. But no matter what form it takes in your life, this Psalm tells us that we can't wait for our circumstances to change before we trust the God who is over them. The way that we're encouraged by God's grace in the future is to look back and trace his providence and see his faithfulness in the past. And so learn to look back with gratitude instead of bitterness, naming his mercies out loud. And learn to look up, asking your hardest questions to him, and then listening through the living and active word that he has given to us for him to answer. And then learning to look forward today. Not because you know how your story ends, but because you know how his story ended with an empty tomb. Our God will revive us. He already has. Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, our great Savior. And thanks be to God, He's coming again. And so every circumstance that we experience this day is proving toward the holiness that he is working in us to prepare us for that glorious day that we see him face to face. Run with perseverance, for your God runs with you. Let's pray. Lord, this morning we do look back and we thank you for your faithfulness to cover the multitude of our sins and to redeem us at great cost to your Son, the Lord Jesus. And Father, we look up, asking you for continued mercy and your face to shine upon us again even this day. And Lord, we look forward in great hope, trusting your righteousness and peace to go before us this week in all that you will bring into our lives. Lord, let this psalm be a promise that we live out, not just words that we study. And we ask this for your greater glory and for our good as your people, loved and cared for by your Son. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.