Our scripture reading tonight is Psalm 130, Psalm 130, one of the songs of ascents that pilgrims to Jerusalem sang in their three trips annually to Jerusalem. And this is one of the psalms that has been called in the history of the church a penitential psalm, a song of repentance, a song of confession, a psalm seeking the mercy of the Lord. So let us give our attention to Psalm 130. This is God's own word. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchman for the morning, more than watchman for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. So far the reading of God's Word. Psalm 96, which we used as our call to worship, was a call to sing to the Lord. And that command has resonated with God's people in many ages, and it has been not only a duty, but most of the time a joy for God's people to lift their voices in praise and in thanks and in song to the Lord. It has not always been so. There have been periods in the history of the church when God's people didn't sing, were not able to sing. For centuries in the Middle Ages, when most Christians could not read, when books were not easily attainable, and when most people lived on farms and far from big cities that might have had choirs or organs, the music in most local churches was very minimal if existed at all. And Christians were not able to sing, not urged to sing. And one of the great benefits of the Reformation was the restoration of congregational singing in the life of the church. And all of the major reformers, well, with one notable exception, all of the major reformers except Zwingli and Zurich urged Christians to sing and urged Christians particularly to sing psalms. That was part of the joy of the restoration of music in the life of the church. And while Reformed Christians for the early centuries after the Reformation mainly sang psalms in the 18th, 19th, 20th century, there was the introduction of many hymns as well. And in our own lifetimes, at least the lifetime of the older among us, in the last 50 years or so, there has been a significant shift in the music of many Protestant churches, where increasingly churches have made use of contemporary Christian music that has been labeled by many praise and worship songs. These songs are usually rather upbeat in character. Their critics sometimes accuse them of being superficial, and my purpose is not to get into all of that tonight, but my purpose is to encourage us to ask the question, if God gave us songs in the Psalter, what kind of model for our worship songs do the Psalms provide for us? What do the Psalms teach us? Nicholas in the consistory room asked me, why do you like the Psalms so much? And I was so pleased to be asked that. I said, that's kind of what I'm preaching on tonight. But the Reformers early on, and this is Luther as well as Calvin, sent something special in the Psalms. And my fear is that too many Christians, not us, I think, but too many Christians have kind of lost connection with the Psalter and lost connection with the way in which the Psalms model for us the worship songs that God would have us sing to Him. And so I'd like to cause us to pause tonight and think about that. And I've turned to Psalm 130 for this purpose. It's, of course, a magnificent psalm in its own right. It's beautiful. It's fairly well known. And we are going to look at it, but we're going to look at it also to ask, what is it teaching us more broadly about what our worship songs ought to look like? And you'll be amazed, here I have three points. And the first is that this psalm and all the psalms tell us that our songs should be passionate. There should be profound passion in the songs that we sing. And this is important because it is easy to fall into bad habits when it comes to songs. If the songs are too familiar, we don't really think about them. That's a temptation. If they're not familiar, we just think how annoyed we are that they're not familiar. And so it's hard to really enter in to the song that we're singing. But the Psalms call us to enter in. The songs call us to recognize that this is not just a duty and an obligation and a superficial activity, but this ought to be an activity that expresses something of the passion, the emotions, the commitments of our hearts. And this is one of the things that I think contemporary music has sort of gotten right, that we needed to be renewed in a recognition that our music should express our heart, our commitment, our passion before the Lord. The problem is, I think, that too much contemporary music expresses a limited range of emotions, primarily the emotions of praise and joy and gratitude. Those are critical emotions. Those are essential emotions, but they're not the only emotions. And one of the great advantages of the Psalter is that it expresses a much wider range of emotions. Praise and joy and thanksgiving, to be sure, but also lament and sorrow and repentance and grief. These emotions are expressed in the Psalter as well. Also, the Psalms just call us sometimes to reflection, but hearty reflection, profound reflection as we think about the Lord and about His ways. And so I picked one of the Psalms tonight that has real emotion in it, but here it's an emotion of repentance, an emotion of struggle with sin. And it begins with those very emotional words, Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Out of the depths, I cry. In the scripture, the depths almost always mean, almost always picture someone who's in water and is in danger of drowning. That's the depths that are here. It's not the depths of emotion. The poetic image is of someone who's cast into the ocean, perhaps, or into a river or a lake and is not able to stand, is not able to swim. And so the emotion here is an emotion, we might say, near to panic, an emotion of desperation, crying out to the Lord, out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice. And here too we see emotion, the repeated appeal to the Lord to hear him. Three times, in three different ways, the psalmist begs the Lord to hear him. He's in this great distress, and he asks the Lord to hear him, to hear that cry for help. Will the Lord hear? This points also to how persevering he is in pursuing the Lord. He doesn't ask just once, but returns and returns and returns to the Lord in His distress and in His need, asking for help. And also we see here an eager anticipation that the Lord will hear. Verse 5, I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I hope. The emotion is not just distressed here, but undergirding the distress is hope and confidence in the Lord. And so this psalm comes to us with a range of emotions, but showing how the heart must be engaged in the song that we offer to the Lord, as well as in the prayers that we offer in the Lord. He says, I hope in the Lord the way a watchman looks for the morning. I don't know how many of us have been watchmen. It takes a little bit of imagination for most of us to put ourselves into this situation. I see a seminarian smiling, and I think, well, maybe there have been seminarians who've been watchmen over at Meadowbrook. And I suspect in the modern world we don't so much watch for the morning as we watch the clock. And we're waiting, we're waiting, we're waiting. And the image here, though, is of a watchman who's perhaps been on the walls of the city. And he has the duty to wait until morning. And the night has been cold and the night has been long. And he keeps looking at the eastern horizon, waiting for some evidence of light. And we can imagine how slow the minutes pass, how long the night seems. And in the midst of that waiting and longing and seemingly endless vigilance, there still is hope. There is still an eager anticipation that the light is coming, that relief eventually will be on the way. And so here's a beautiful picture of a range of emotions of the one who needs the Lord, who's looking to the Lord, who's seeking the Lord. And I think it's important for all of us to keep in mind that when we're singing, we need to try to enter into the emotion of the song. It's not enough to just be on key. Some of us find that a major struggle. And my children occasionally turn to me when they're standing next to me in church and say, Dad, do you really think you're singing the song that's being played? And I remind them that it's more important to be emotionally engaged than to be on key. And I won't fight with others about that and the importance of being on key. but here's the crucial thing, that we enter into the song, that it becomes the expression of our heart. And this is possible. You know, one, I think, of the modern mistakes about emotion is that emotion cannot be sincere if it is not spontaneous. But music is almost always not spontaneous. It's almost always planned. Now, there may be some forms of jazz that can be semi-spontaneous, but in reality, if we're all going to sing together, it's better not to be spontaneous. We need to all have the same words and the same tune and at least pursue singing the same tune, and that has to be planned. But it doesn't mean we can't enter into the emotional reality of what's happening there. So our worship songs need to be passionate, and our worship songs need to be purposeful. They need to aim at something. And here we see that beautifully displayed in Psalm 138. There's a very definite aim here in Psalm 130, and the aim is to find forgiveness for sin. It's the reality of sin that is overwhelming for the psalmist here. The psalmist presumably has entered into the temple. The psalmist is thinking about the holiness of God. He's standing perhaps by the altar of sacrifice and seeing the blood that must be shed for the forgiveness of sins. And he's looking beyond the altar to the entrance to the holy place that he knows he cannot enter. and he knows beyond the holy places, the most holy place where the Ark of the Covenant is to be found. And he's thinking about the holiness of his God. He's thinking perhaps of the song of the angels, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts, the whole earth is full of thy glory. And he's overwhelmed with a sense of his own sinfulness. And he's crying out to the Lord for forgiveness. And this is so critical that we return to this point again and again. On the one hand, we are a forgiven people. Christ has forgiven all our sins if by grace we have faith in him. But it is also true at the same time that sin remains a daily struggle for us. And sin remains the most foundational issue of our lives. And we have to have a sensitivity to the reality of the sinfulness that besets us even as Christians. And so this psalm gives voice to that reality that we remain a sinful people in need of the forgiveness of God day by day. Our Lord taught us the Lord's Prayer that we might daily pray. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And here the psalmist is giving rich and beautiful expression to that and expressing the hope of his heart. For with the Lord, verse 7, there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. What a wonderful promise. What a glorious declaration. It's not some of your sins that the Lord will forgive. It's not a select few on a list that he will forgive. It's a full redemption of all your sins. That's the promise that God has given to his people. And that's the promise that we're called to embrace. That's the promise that we're called upon to rest in. that our God is motivated in relation to his people by a steadfast love, a covenant love that cannot fail. And that word redemption that we find in verse 7 is a word that has a little bit of the flavor to it of ransom, that we will be bought back. And the notion of redemption and ransom leads us, of course, to consider our Lord Jesus Christ and His great saving work on the cross, that we might be delivered, that we might be ransomed, that we might be redeemed and find the forgiveness of sins in His blood. He is the one who really hears our prayers for mercy and delivers us and is near to us. And so we see the requirement of passion in our songs. we see the requirement of a clear purpose in our songs. Sometimes it's more purpose than just one. But our songs ought to be going somewhere. They're not meant to be sort of vaguely general. And then finally, and this has intrigued me and sort of comes even closer to Nicholas's question, why do I like the Psalms? I have always felt that there was something unique about the Psalms. Not just unique that they're inspired by God, that's a really great uniqueness to the Psalms, but I've always sort of felt that they felt a little different. Now, I know we as Reformed people aren't supposed to feel very much. Part of the purpose of this sermon is to say it's all right to feel something. Indeed, we ought to feel something. We ought to be passionate about something. And I've long sort of felt that the Psalms just are different from hymns that we sing. And I've had trouble putting my finger on it. And I have at least made a little progress. And I do think the Psalms provide a pattern for participation that is somewhat different from what most hymns offer. there's a pattern in the Psalter that is really quite distinctive, and that pattern is about who's participating in the songs. Now, of course, we're all singing, so we all participate in that sense. I'm sometimes surprised when I go places and look at congregations not here that I find people aren't singing. I never can quite figure that out. Now, maybe the singing is so beautiful they just want to stand and listen, but that's a bad thing. We're all called to sing together. We all need to be lifting our voices together. But the participation I'm thinking of goes a step farther. You know, when we think of our worship songs, we rightly think they are directed to God. And that's correct, of course. They are directed to God. But when we look carefully at the Psalms, we find that the Psalms are not directed only to God. The Psalms are also directed to ourselves, and the Psalms are directed to one another. And that used to sort of puzzle me. Why aren't they just directed to God? Have you ever thought how often in the Psalter, God is not addressed as you, but is addressed as He? If we're calling God He, it means we're not speaking to Him. We're speaking about Him. Why do we do that? Why does the Psalter regularly do that? Because it's giving expression to the covenant relationship of God and His people in praise, where we're speaking all the time to God, but we're speaking also all the time to ourselves and to the whole community. And Psalm 130 particularly helps us to see that. Verses 1 through 4, Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Here the psalmist is speaking to God. Lord, hear my voice, let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy. If you, O Lord, should mark on iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared. So there's the direction of our song that we would expect and anticipate. Talking to God. But then in the next two verses, the psalmist is talking to himself. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word, you notice his word, not your word, in his word, I hope, my soul waits for the Lord. And this is one of the characteristics of the psalms. We speak not only to God, but we speak to ourselves. Now, sometimes if we're caught speaking to ourselves, people think we're a little strange. But that's not the point the psalmist is making. The point the psalmist is making is we need to take stock of ourselves. We need to encourage ourselves. We need to remember who we are in the Lord. And our praise speaks not only to God, but to ourselves, about ourselves. And then the psalmist speaks to the whole worshiping community. Verses 7 and 8, O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption, and he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. And so the worship songs that the Psalter models for us is worship songs that are constantly reminding us that we are speaking in our singing to God, but also to ourselves and to one another. And this is something of the uniqueness of the Psalter and the uniqueness of its blessing. It glorifies God, but it binds us to one another, and it binds us to God. Now, that pattern we find also in Paul's reflection on Christian praise in the New Testament. We find it in Ephesians 5, where Paul talks about singing, and we find it very succinctly in Colossians 3, verse 16, where the three elements of this pattern are expressed by Paul. Colossians 3, verse 16, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. There's the direction of our praise, our song, the Word of God to each of us individually. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another. Did you ever wonder about that? Why are we to teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs? Because that's the very character of singing that was established by David in 1 Chronicles 16 and reiterated in the Psalter at various parts, including Psalm 130, and now is taken up again in the New Testament. So we speak to ourselves, we speak to the whole community, and then Paul tells us, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. So we're speaking to God as well. And so the glory of our worship songs is that they speak to everything and to everyone, not just in a narrow sense to God, but changing our own hearts, changing our own congregation as we draw close to God in our covenant participation. Now, we've just scratched the surface, and you're probably afraid I won't stop, but I will. We've just scratched the surface of what worship songs are about, but I think in a day where there's a lot of confusion and in a day where there's a lot of worship songs that aren't particularly helpful or particularly follow the model of the Psalter, we ought to keep this clearly before us, that our words, our songs, our singing should be passionate and should be purposeful and should be following the pattern of thinking about the audiences of our singing, God, our own hearts, our whole community, that we'll be drawn closer to Him and closer to one another as we worship Him together and praise Him. May God grant that we all can enter in to those kind of worship songs. Amen. Let us pray. O Lord our God, we are thankful that you have commanded us to sing, and we're thankful, O God, that you have given us songs to sing, and we're thankful, O Lord, for the privilege of books to sing from, and tunes to sing, and the ability to read, and the joy that can fill our hearts, as well as the sorrow and laments that can fill our souls as we enter in to great songs and praise you and help one another in our singing. So bless our singing, encourage us in our singing, that you might be praised. For we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.