Psalm 62 - Emotionally Healthy Worship
Transcript
Well, good morning. My name's Chet. We are in a series on the Psalms. We've been spending some time just walking through and allowing the Psalms to train us in what it looks like to relate to God in the normal, everyday parts of life. To walk with Him when things are good, when things are bad, to be able to praise Him, and just kind of train us in what it looks like to live a life of worship. Today we're going to be in Psalm 62.
We'll start off there. We'll look at the first eight verses. We're going to talk a little bit today. Because we've been studying the Psalms, one of the things we're seeing is that this is the Bible's songbook, and there's poems, prayers, and songs. And one of the things you'll run into any time you begin to interact with poems, prayers, and songs is that you're going to face and get to see an inside look into real human emotion. That one of the things that happens for humanity in our songs, in our prayers, in our poems, is we pour something of ourselves into them.
And that's one of the things that we get to see in the book of Psalms, is that there's a lot of emotion. Now, many of us are unhealthy emotionally. We just are kind of emotionally unhealthy as Christians, and so today we're going to spend a little bit of time just talking about how the Psalms train us in our emotions, how they help us out to begin to have some healthy emotions. We're not, in the next 40 minutes, going to fix you, so don't get your hopes up. We are, though, going to try to learn a little bit from the Psalms in how to begin to take a step towards having healthy emotions. Next week we'll specifically spend our whole time talking about lament, which is being sorrowful, which I think is an area that we need to grow in America, and in American Christianity is learning how to lament.
But today we're going to talk about kind of a wide range of emotion, and we'll start in Psalm 62. I'm going to pray, and then we'll read the first eight verses to get us started this morning. God, we just ask for your help this morning. We are complex in so many ways that so much plays into our health, our mental state, our temperament, and we just ask that you'd give us wisdom and insight into our own hearts this morning, that you might begin to go to work on us, that we might look more like you. We love you, and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.
Psalm 62, it's on page 274. If you have one of these white Bibles, if you don't own a Bible, take this one with you. That's our gift to you. We'd love for you to have a Bible. We'd love for you to read it often. Verse 1.
For God alone my soul waits in silence. From him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I shall not be greatly shaken. How long will all of you attack a man to batter him like a leaning wall, a tottering fence? They only plan to thrust him down from his high position.
They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse. So the psalmist hears this David, and he's saying, I'm going to wait on God. I'm going to trust in him. He alone is my salvation. And he kind of turns and says, Everyone around me is just trying to tear me down, trying to destroy me.
Verse 5, he basically repeats what he said at the beginning. For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence. For my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I shall not be shaken. On God rests my salvation and my glory.
My mighty rock, my refuge is God. And verse 8 is where we'll end and where we'll spend most of our time focusing this morning. Trust in him at all times. O people, pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. So David's kind of talking about his own situation.
He's talking to his soul. He's talking to those who are attacking him. And then he turns and talks to the people. And he says, he kind of gives this call to trust in the Lord. Trust in him at all times, O people. Pour out your heart before him.
God is a refuge for us. So he says to trust in him. He says, pour out your heart to him. And then he says he's a refuge. Which means that in the middle of pain and trial and difficulty and fearfulness, we can run to him. It's like a storm shelter.
That if you had some sort of underground buried thing in the middle of a tornado coming, you leave your house. You run and you get in that thing. You close the door and you're okay. A storm shelter or a bomb shelter. Like that's the, what he's saying is like, he's the thing we ought to run to in the middle of everything being chaotic and difficult and painful. And right there in the middle, he says, pour out your heart before him.
So I just want to, I want you to think for just a second this morning. If you could accurately do that, actually take your heart, all your hopes, all your dreams, all your fears, all your desires, all your sadness, all your anger. If you could accurately go to God and just pour that out, what would come out? What would happen if you were actually able to do that? If you were actually able to take everything that's in the deepest, most real part of you and pour it out before God, what would be poured out? Now, some of you, maybe you have a pretty good answer for that.
Maybe you already know kind of what's going on in there. I think for many of us, it's like, I don't know. I think it'd be a hot mess. If you're like me, it's like, honestly, I've learned how to stay up in this zone. I don't get down in that. Like, I don't mess with that heart level stuff.
Like, I'm up here. You know, it doesn't say take your logical thought process to God. No, it says pour out your heart before him. Take what's in you and real. And honestly, we need to learn how to do this. And that's what we're going to start talking about this morning is how to begin to do this.
Because for many of us, specifically maybe for those who've ever tried to stop smoking or for those who've ever tried to go on a diet, we learn something very quickly. Our brain can know things. But if our heart isn't in it, it ain't going to happen. They can put as many little pictures of gum cancer on a cigarette box as they want to. Your brain can know all you need to know about cancer. But if you don't have your emotions behind it, if you don't have the willpower behind it, it's not happening.
Like, that's just the way we work. And so some of us, we need to begin to learn what's going on in us and learn how to run to God in the middle of everything and learn how to pour our hearts out to him. So, before we get into this this morning, we're all over the place. Some of you, a lot of how we deal with emotion and think about emotion comes from where we grew up. I'm not going to, I don't have any kind of analysis for this. I'm just trying to help you see it.
So I don't feel like I'm about to, like, psychology this up. I just want you to know. It comes from, a lot of it comes from where you grew up. So, like, some of you came from households where emotion, feelings weren't talked about. They didn't exist. Maybe you had a dad when something happened and you started crying.
Maybe your dad or your mom looked at you and said, we can continue this conversation when you'd like to be reasonable. And you learned tears, tears ain't cutting it here. This isn't happening. Maybe you had, like, like a 30-second timer. It's like, okay, you can be sad until it's cutting on my nerves. You're going to have to cut it down.
Like, you just got to shut it. Like, maybe some of you came from households where emotions steered the ship. It wasn't odd for people to blow up, throw things, whole plans be changed based off of fear, lifestyle be changed based off of anger, sadness to shut everything down. Like, maybe you came from households where someone who was in charge was, like, just their emotions ruled the day. Some of us come from households where certain emotions are okay and other ones aren't. So maybe you grew up in a house where anger's fine.
We can handle anger. We know what to do with anger. Anger makes sense. Of course you'd be mad about that. Like, if this was inside out, that little red dude's just driving the thing. Everybody else is tied up in the corners.
Like, he's already putting them down. Like, he just is getting to do his thing. Some of you, maybe it was sadness. If somebody was sad, everything stopped. They're sad. They're feeling things.
But if you got mad, it was like, we don't do that here. You cannot act like that. It's completely unacceptable. Just to put my cards on the table a little bit, I want to tell you a family story. I grew up in a house. I have two brothers.
And my dad's a rather intense guy. And this actually happened with my younger brother when I was off at college. So he was in high school, middle of high school, sophomore year, junior year, somewhere around in there. And my dad was cutting his hair because my dad always cut our hair because it saves money. And that's why we still cut our hair sometimes. I got to cut my own hair.
So everyone's like, if you think, man, it's a terrible haircut, it's because I did it myself, you guys. And I remember actually the first time I ever got to go to a barber, I was surprised at how gentle they were. Because I'd only ever had him cut my hair. And he would just grab your head and move it. And your natural reaction is to push back. But if you did that, he would just hit you.
And so you learned real quick when his hand came up to just like go limp, let him do whatever he wanted to. And so he was cutting my younger brother's hair. And I don't know what they were talking about. And I don't know if it was about the haircut or about something else. But my dad called him a name that I am not allowed to repeat up here.
But he called him a name. And my brother said, he's like, Daddy, you shouldn't talk to your son like that. Like you should not call. He said, do you know how that makes me feel when you call me that name? And so my dad stopped, cut his clippers off, came around and he said, Vince, I never knew you had feelings. If I'd have known about your feelings, everything would be different.
I'm so sorry I hurt your feelings. I was at college. He called to tell me. He called to tell me that my younger brother had feelings. But it's a real story.
It's how my family worked. And because I'm a part of this family, every year my mom at Christmas would get an ornament for the tree that kind of represented things that happened that year. Like if we had moved or we started school or somebody was playing a sport. And I was walking with my wife, Anna. She wasn't my wife then. But we were walking through a mall.
And they had a little cart where they would make ornaments, like special ornaments. And so I found a little pink cart with a little bow and some little ballerina shoes. And I had them write, Vince has feelings and the year. And every year we put that on our Christmas tree. And he's still known as the person in our family who has feelings. And every time you bring it up, he gets his feelings hurt.
And we're like, hmm. For real, if he ever comes to visit us, y'all should be like, oh, you're the one with feelings. And just watch his face. I don't know where you come from. I had to learn. You guys, I had to grow up and learn.
Some of that's not healthy. I didn't know that. It took me four years. Four years of being married to realize if my wife cried, I should hug her. Four years. It was way better after that, you guys.
She would cry. And I was just like, what? I don't even know what to do with this. And like one day I was like, it was something. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit helping me out. I was like, maybe you should hug her.
So I just hugged her. And it was like, whoa. This completely helped. So now I still don't like empathize, but it's like I see tears and I know what to do. She yawned the other day and a tear ran out. And I was like.
So I don't know where we're coming from. Some of us right now are like, yes, we're going to talk about feelings. Other ones of us are like, we've said the word feeling and emotion way too much already. Pour your heart out. No, thank you. So I don't know where we are, but I want us to see that for us to be emotionally healthy, the Bible actually equips us maybe in some ways that we hadn't seen and helps us out in some ways we hadn't seen.
And the Psalms interact with emotions maybe in some ways we hadn't noticed. And so what we're going to do for just a second is I'm just going to read some Psalms that move around in different emotions to help us hear it. And so I will put the Psalm, like the actual Psalm on the screen, not the words of the Psalm. I would rather you just, if you want to jot them down so you can refer to them later, but I'd rather you just listen. Just kind of like if you were listening to an album or, you know, this was an open mic night at like a poetry dram or something. Like, I don't know, the things they played a little.
I can get on that thing and just be like. So just listen to try to hear the emotions behind the Psalmist as they write this and the fact that this has been included in Scripture for us to see, for us to study, for us to learn from. And so I'm going to move around a little bit. I'm going to read these and try to help you see kind of the different emotions in some of these Psalms. So we'll start with Psalm 100.
And in a lot of ways, we're just going to hear joy and gladness and celebration. So make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord, he is God. It is he who made us and we are his.
We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him. Bless his name for the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness is to all generations. So it says enter his courts with singing, enter his courts with thanksgiving and praise.
Be joyful, rejoice. And there are so many Psalms that say this. For us to sing, for us to dance, for us to be glad, for us to celebrate. And I think for some of us, we believe that that is the appropriate way to approach God. Gladness, thanksgiving, joy, rejoicing. That's the way to approach God.
And that's the only way to approach God. So that when we're somewhere else, when we're in sadness and pain and frustration and anger, we've got to get it together because we've got to enter his courts with thanksgiving and with singing and with praise. I think some of us, even if we don't realize that's what we believe, we start doing that when we show up in the parking lot out here. You don't realize that's what you're doing, but that's what you believe. I know. Everything else, I just got to rise above.
Everything's got to be fine. We believe this is the only way to approach God. It's a good way. It is a way. We should celebrate. We should rejoice.
But it's not the only way. I'm going to read Psalm 13. In this Psalm, we're going to hear the psalmist basically pleading with God, trying to understand his situation and why things are working out the way they're working out. Psalm 13. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemies say I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. But I have trusted in your steadfast love.
My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. So the psalmist there is saying, how long am I going to be stuck here? How long is this how this is going to work? Some of you, maybe you feel like you're in that situation or you've been there before where it's like, God, I thought things were supposed to be better by now. I thought I was supposed to be better by now.
I thought I was supposed to be like, how long am I going to be stuck here? Are you not going to help me? Or can you not hear me? Will you consider what I say? And then he gets to the end and he ends with, but I trust you and I'll sing. And so there is some appropriate amount of being in a painful place and saying, no, no, no, but I'm going to remind myself of what I believe and what's good.
And a lot of Psalms do that. They talk about bad stuff and the pain and the brokenness and then they'll end with, no, but I have faith and I have hope and I'm going to run to you. But not all of them. I'm going to read Psalm 88. And this is a little bit longer, but I think it's helpful. Listen for the desperation, the depression, the despair, and the bitterness that are included in this Psalm for our benefit.
Oh, Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you. Incline your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to Sheol. That's the place of the dead. I'm counted among those who go down to the pit.
I'm a man who has no strength, like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions of dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me and you overwhelm me with all your waves. You have caused my companions to shun me. You have made me a horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape.
My eye grows dim through sorrow. Every day I call upon you, O Lord. I spread out my hands to you. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry to you in the morning. My prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors.
I am helpless. Your wrath has swept over me. Your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me.
My companions have become darkness. And that's it. No hope. No, I'll trust you. He says, I pray every day. Why do you cast my soul away?
I come to you. I cry out to you. You have placed me in the deep and the dark. And you've made all my companions shun me. My friends are darkness. Psalm 137.
This is a Psalm for those who had been taken into captivity into Babylon. So they had been, the Babylonians had ridden in, had destroyed, burned down, killed, and then dragged off slaves to Babylon. By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our lyres. Those are instruments. They said, we're done.
We're done singing. We're done with joy. We're hanging them up. For there our captors required of us songs and our tormentors mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. So they're saying our captors, our tormentors, those who have enslaved us said, hey, sing us one of your happy songs that you used to sing in your childhood when you lived in Zion before we rode in and killed everybody and brought you here.
Sing us one of those. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites. That's a group of people.
The day of Jerusalem. How they said, lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed. Blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us. Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. So that's a Psalm included in the Bible that ends with, may God bless everyone who rides into Babylon, grabs a child, and smacks it on the ground.
May God bless whoever comes in and burns this place down. May God bless them forever. May they be lifted up. May they be glorified of those who would come in here and harm you and your children. May they be glorified of those who are Christians and learn things from Jesus like love your enemies and pray for those who hurt you. Maybe a question rises up with like, is that okay to say?
Can we actually pray for this? And that's a really good question. Psalm 42. I'm going to read just the first half of this. And I think it's helpful because we see that the psalmist is just kind of confused. It says, Why are you cast down, O my soul?
And why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him. My salvation and my God. And then he goes through and says it all again, basically, what's going on. And then he says, Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God. And so you almost see the psalmist wrestling with himself and saying, I believe that God is good and I trust in him. But why can't, why can't I actually make that stick? Why can't I undepress myself? Why is my soul cast down? Like trust God that he's good.
He knows what he's doing. But it's like it's not taking. It's not working its way in. It's not become real yet. He can't make it roll over into joy and to peace. See, in the Psalms we see grief and anger, guilt and fear, pain, confusion, frustration.
And even as we read those, I want to ask, do you feel like you are allowed to say some of the things that were said in these Psalms to God? Because there's something that we read and you're like, no, can't say that. No, he doesn't want to hear that. No, you can't end the prayer like that. You can't, you can't pray and end with, you made all my friends hate me. And then like slam the door like some sort of teenager.
Like you can't, you got, you got to, you got to end with like, but you're good still. Like, I mean, I'm asking. Are there some, like the prayer, like I, blessed be anyone who takes your children and dashes them on rocks. Like, are we allowed to? Are you saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't, you can't go to God and talk like that.
You can't ask for that. There's Psalms where, where the psalmist says, thank you, God, that you break the teeth of the wicked. He doesn't mean cavities. He means you hit them in the face. And it's like, are we, are you, can you say that? And so I want us to read, if you're still in Psalm 62, if you're not, I want us to look back at verse eight.
Trust in him at all times. Oh, people pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. Trust in him at all times. Oh, people pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us.
So, do we trust God enough to honestly and accurately tell him what's going on inside of us? Do we believe he's a refuge enough that we can be real with him about our sorrow and our depression and our pain and our anger? Or is he not trustworthy enough? Is there a chance that we'll tip our hand and he'll get rid of us? Is there a chance that he's only a refuge for those whose hearts have good things to talk about? Is there a chance that when we come to him, he's not, he's not going to accept what we have to say?
He says, trust in him at all times. Pour out your heart before him that he is a refuge for us. That we can run to him with everything we have. And so I want to make a few real basic kind of quick observations from what we just read and from what Psalm 62 is telling us. Emotions are real and they matter. Emotions are real and they matter.
We were intentionally designed to be emotional beings and they're real. Sadness is real. Anger is real. And it matters. See, if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have all of this real raw emotion shown for us so clearly in the scriptures. We wouldn't have them.
This would be teaching us. No, no, no, no, no, no. Put your emotions on lock. But it doesn't. It talks about taking them to God. It talks about talking about him like it shows us how they lay it all out before him.
David says, pour your heart out. Christianity does not call you to be perfectly stoic. And perfectly unfazed by anything. That's not Christianity. That's ancient Greek stoicism. That's the enlightenment.
That says that you should never be in some sort of Zen. I'm a Christian. So nothing ever bothers me. That's that's not the God we meet in the Bible. We don't see that in Jesus. That you've not been called to be perfectly unflappable.
That you have real feelings and you should investigate them. In some ways, our emotions are like if you were sitting in your house or maybe in your office and you heard a beep. It doesn't really even matter how loud. Maybe you're just sitting in your office and you hear boop, boop. You look at your computer like, what? You go back to work 30 seconds later.
Boop, boop. Eventually, if this keeps happening, you're going to get up and figure out what's beeping. Or you're going to lose your mind. They actually make a thing that beeps at random intervals with different noises that you can hide in someone's magnetic. You can hide somewhere to make someone go insane. Like if you did that to your roommate, my only hope is that they take it out on you.
That's a real thing. When you hear a noise, if it's a loud beep, if it's a my son was it was early in the morning. Something beeped in our kitchen. He was in his room. It was like nine o'clock in the morning. It beeped.
He looked at me when my pizza is ready. I was like, no, but maybe we should change up your diet choices. If you hear a beep and you think pizza, we maybe need to step up our parenting game. But that's a real thing. And for some of us, we're sitting and our anger is going boop, boop, boop. And we're just ignoring it.
And here's the thing. That keeps beeping and you don't deal with it. You're going to go crazy. That's not going anywhere. Some of us, our fear is doing that. Some of us, our sadness is doing that.
And we're just saying, nope, can't hear it. La, la, la, la, la. And the people around us in our house are like, hey, what's that beeping? What's that noise? And you're like, I don't know what you're talking about. And they're like, you need some help.
Well, so I'm going on with you if you can't hear that beeping. Like if you can't tell how you just responded in that situation, no, no, I'm fine. Like some of us need to realize that you have real emotions that need to be investigated. They need to be checked out. You've got to figure out what's going on. That if you're angry, you're angry for a reason about something.
If you're fearful, it's about something. These are worthy things to begin to investigate your heart so that you can pour them out to God. But acting like it's no, no, it's fine is not biblical. It is not faithful. And you are not trusting in God at all times and believing that he's a refuge. That we ought to, our emotions matter and they're real and they ought to be investigated.
Secondly, your emotions are not in charge. They're real. They're not necessarily valid. So when you're angry, you're actually angry. It's a real emotion. But maybe you shouldn't be angry.
They're not in charge. That's why they have to be investigated. And secondly, they have to be submitted to God. That's why he says, pour out your heart before God. He didn't say pour out your heart on everybody that lives near you. He says, pour out your heart before God.
Bring it to him. He's a refuge. He's like, take him and let him. It's submitting it to him. That you're bringing it to him and saying, you're trustworthy. And I can run to you in the midst of everything.
And I can trust you to make this good, to make it safe, to work here. That's actually what happens in every single one of these Psalms. Even in Psalm 88, where he just ends with, all my companions are darkness. Do you know who he was talking to the whole time? God. Even in the midst of that, he's still bringing it and submitting it to God.
He's still acknowledging that God's the authority over this. That God's reigning over this. That he can come talk to him about whatever. And he can bring it to him and say, like, this is a real thing. It's all in submission to God the whole time. That your emotions are real, but they're not in charge.
And they're real, but they're not necessarily valid. Some of you have some things that are beeping. And really, the batteries just need to be changed. You just got to fix the, you shouldn't actually be angry about that. You should have communicated better on the front end. You shouldn't actually be fearful about that like we're supposed to.
But the only way that happens is as we begin to investigate that and submit it to God. And he begins to work on our souls. He begins to train us. So there are some of us in this room who our goal has been to be perfectly stoic. I feel nothing. I'm fine.
And we need to begin to learn to sit long enough and to listen well to figure out what's going on with us so that we can talk to God about it. To investigate our hearts so that we can present it to him so that we can pour it out to him. And some of us in this room, you're like a ship without a rudder. And it just depends on how the wind's blowing, what the waves are doing that day as to where you're going to be. And those emotions have got to be brought to God and submitted to him before they're acted on and before they begin to run everything. That we would be slow to anger.
That we would be slow to respond in so many ways. That we would learn that our first step is to investigate and take it to God. Say, this is what I'm feeling. This is what I'm... Help me know where your truth lines up with this. Help me know if I'm right.
Should I be mad about this? Should I be happy about this? Like, work in me. That that's the response. That's it. When I said we're just going to learn kind of a first step in this, that's it.
That we would begin to investigate our emotions and bring them to God. Now, I think some of us maybe just heard, okay, go somewhere towards the middle. If you're not really emotion-y, start having some emotions. Maybe cry at something really magical like the end of Sandlot. And if you're too emotion-y, maybe tone it down. Got it.
That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I think the Bible says. I honestly think that Christians should have very powerful, potent, real, and raw emotions. That there are times in your life where wrath needs to be the best description. That there are times in your life as a Christian where sorrow needs to be the best description. Where fullness of joy needs to be the best description.
Not moderate, temperate. No. Such a good humor. Such a rich laugh. Such a joy that you make everybody else around you more joyous. Such sorrow that it infiltrates a room.
You see, that's the example we have in Jesus. We have God becoming a human who sits down and weeps. Who at other times, because he's slow to anger, makes a whip before using it. And then walks into a temple with a whip and flips everything over and drives everybody out and stands there and preaches. With zeal and anger that was terrifying. And I know it was terrifying.
Because if you went and did that at the flea market, you would have to be insanely terrifying for them to let you stand and keep preaching. Nobody came walking back towards him. He got to say what he wanted to say. Because wrath was the best word to describe it. Who's weeps and is sorrowful. Who's joyous.
The Bible doesn't recount this, so I'm making this up. But it seems so fitting because of how we're designed. I think Jesus had the best sense of humor. I think he laughed at exactly the right time and made jokes at exactly the right time. There's something very human about when your brain trips over itself that you just laugh. Have you ever thought about how weird that is?
It's like your brain, like it just like, it's like that shouldn't have happened that way. And you're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, like it's a weird thing to just shoot noise out of your mouth, you guys. But God designed that in us. And there's something about it that's good and joyful. That wells up in us. And you say, oh, I laugh a lot.
Well, maybe there are times where you're laughing when you shouldn't be and it's inappropriate. See, I don't think Jesus was flippant. I think he had a good sense of humor. And I think as Christians, we're designed to follow Jesus with a real, raw, deep emotion that's acknowledged, that's walked in, but always under the authority of God, submitted to him and his truth and his wisdom and the fittingness of the occasion. Some of you are saying, okay, what if I'm naturally, like I just naturally calmer? That's okay.
What if I'm naturally more emotional? That's okay. Like some of that, like, you're good. But all of us need to begin this process of engaging our heart, investigating our hearts and submitting it to God. If you're naturally more fiery, naturally more excitable, yeah, start there. But maybe some of that needs to go away.
Maybe you need to grow out of some of that. And some of that's okay. Like we've got some people here that are a blessing to our church because if you're sad, they will immediately get sad and it's not fake. There's some people in our church family who when you aren't doing well, they'll walk up to you. You have told no one that you're not doing well. They'll walk up to you.
They'll look at you. You will start crying and be like, I need to tell you everything that's ever happened. That's beautiful. And we need that. We have some other people that in the middle of situations will sit like a rock in the middle of it and go, no, no, no, no, no, guys. Come on.
Come on back. No, no, no. You can't drift over there. Come on back. We've got to remember what's true. And that's beautiful and good.
But all of us have to begin. We can't keep ignoring the beeping. We can't keep ignoring the emotions and we can't keep letting it just toss us about. We've got to begin to investigate our hearts and take it to God. And here's what happens when we do that. Here's what happens for us as a church and as people who follow Jesus when we do that.
When we are emotionally healthy as Christians, we then accurately and beautifully reflect the tone of the gospel. And when we're emotionally healthy Christians, we can accurately and beautifully reflect the heart of our God. You see, we're people of the cross. The Christians are people of the cross, which means that we ought to have great sorrow, great bitterness and anger towards sin and its effects. There should be times that we weep. There should be times that we fall before God unconsolable over the brokenness that's going on in the world.
There should be times when we are angry, when we are wrathful because we're people of the cross. There should be times that we do sit down with those who are hurting and mourn with them over death and loss and pain, all of which have been led by the enemy into a good world and have infiltrated and caused destruction and difficulty that would not have happened outside of sin. And we ought to be people of the cross who can engage in that. But we're also people of an empty tomb who have an untouchable hope, an overwhelming joy that rides underneath everything because our our certainty of a future and inheritance with Christ has been made sure by an empty tomb.
Like so we we ought to be the people who are the most fun at parties. And the most consoling at funerals who are leading in the midst of injustice and brokenness and hurt along those who are hurting and who are celebrating everything that's worth celebrating. You see, some of us are so afraid of emotions when things are good. We don't even celebrate well. We're just like, well, I don't want to get too cocky. Just kind of quietly enjoy it.
I had a football coach who used to say when we'd win, he'd right before we win, he'd say, act like you won before. Which means like don't pour everything out and set everything on fire and act like crazy people. Pretend like you've done this. And some of us in the middle of really good seasons in life are like, I'm just going to keep it cool. Not really going to be excited. And it's like, no.
Celebrate. Play some music. Start dancing. I don't know how good you dance. Stop when other people get around. But, you know, celebrate.
That we're a people of the cross and we're a people of the empty tomb. And so we get to walk in real deep, genuine emotion without having it rule us. And we get to see that in the Psalms. And we get to begin to engage in that and grow in that as we walk with each other in life. I'm going to pray. And then the band's going to come back up.
But I'm going to pray first. God, we ask. We ask that through the power of your Holy Spirit, you would begin to help us see what's in our hearts. That we might learn to begin to pour that out to you. For those of us who have grown in a pattern of shielding ourselves from emotion and feeling, I pray that you'd help us to learn the joy and the depth and the reality of them that you've given us. That we would look more like Christ.
And for those of us in this room who have been tossed about and ruled over by our emotions. I pray that we would begin to rest in the hope and the surety and the truth of your gospel and of your rule, submitting those to you, and that we would begin to look more like Christ. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.