Finding help in a time of difficulty
[0:00] A very good evening to you. Welcome to this pre-recorded service for Calvary Evangelical Church! here in Brighton, south coast of England, for today the 7th of February 2021. My name is Philip Wells,! I work for the church as pastor elder and I'm going to be leading the first part of the meeting and later on our very very good friend to whom we're very grateful, John Woods from Lansing, is going to be speaking on Psalm 77. And the order of things is up on the up on the screen just by my head. So the first thing we're going to do is sing. We're going to sing the song which says, Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. It looks back to the way God's been faithful in the past in mighty, mighty ways and takes comfort that God will be our help in these days. So we'll sing number 260.
[1:21] Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55.
[1:32] Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55.
[1:42] Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Let's sing number 55. Our God, our hope in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.
[2:37] Beneath the shelter of your throne, Your saints have lived secure, Sufficient is your arm alone, And our defence is sure, Before the hills in order stood, For earth received her frame.
[3:25] From everlasting you are gone, To endless years the same.
[3:37] A thousand ages in your sight, Are like an evening gone, Short as the watch that ends the night, Before the rising sun, Before the rising sun.
[4:11] Time like an ever-rolling stream, Will bear us all away.
[4:24] We've lives forgotten as a dream, Dies with the dawning day.
[4:39] Our God, our hope in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Be our defence while life shall last, And our eternal home.
[5:04] And our eternal home. Now we're going to read Psalm 77.
[5:16] I'll give you a moment to find it. It says, For the director of music, For Jejuthun of Asaph, Asan.
[5:27] I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord.
[5:39] At night I stretched out untiring hands, And my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered you, O God, And I groaned. I mused, And my spirit grew faint.
[5:52] Selah. You kept my eyes from closing. I was too troubled to speak. I thought about the former days, The years of long ago.
[6:03] I remembered my songs in the night, My heart mused, And my spirit inquired. Will the Lord reject forever?
[6:14] Will he never show his favour again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?
[6:25] Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion? Selah. Then I thought, To this I will appeal.
[6:37] The years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will meditate on all your works, And consider all your mighty deeds.
[6:53] Your ways, O God, are holy. What God is so great as our God? You are the God who performs miracles. You display your power among the peoples.
[7:05] With your mighty arm you redeemed your people. The descendants of Jacob and Joseph. Selah. The waters saw you, O God.
[7:17] The waters saw you and writhed. The very depths were convulsed. The clouds poured down water. The skies resounded with thunder.
[7:28] Your arrows flashed back and forth. Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind. Your lightning lit up the world. The earth trembled and quaked. Your path led through the sea.
[7:40] Your way through the mighty waters. Though your footprints were not seen. You led your people like a flock. By the hand of Moses and Aaron.
[7:55] We are going to sing number 614. What a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.
[8:06] The psalmist prayed and found relief as he prayed and meditated in the presence of God. And that song, oh this song, captures that thought.
[8:18] What a friend we have in Jesus. For our sins and griefs to bear.
[8:30] What a friend we have in Jesus. For our sins and griefs to bear.
[8:41] What a friend we have in Jesus. For our sins and sins and sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins.
[8:52] For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins.
[9:06] For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins and sins. For our sins and sins. For our sins and sins. What a privilege to carry Everything to God in prayer Oh, what peace we often forfeit Oh, what needless pain we bear Oh, because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer Have we trials and temptations?
[9:44] Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged Take it to the Lord in prayer Can we find a friend so faithful?
[10:09] Who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness Take it to the Lord in prayer All we've got heavy laden Burdened with a load of care Jesus is our mighty Saviour He will listen to our prayer Do your friends despise forsake you?
[11:14] Take it to the Lord in prayer In His arms He'll take and shield you Find your strength and comfort there And now we're going to pray In our time of trial and trouble, Lord We call upon you We, in varying degrees Find ourselves Dislocated Frustrated Sad Perhaps lonely Wishing things were different And wishing this was all over
[12:14] Oh, Lord Hear our complaint Please forgive In that complaint Whatever is sinful And just self-centred And help us Even in this time To be God-centred To be other-centred To be thinking how we can serve And help other people We pray to you For our nation And our government And all the nations That you will bring Into their thinking And acting The humility Which is right Before you And to be humbled Under your hand Please Enable the lessons That you want Our nations to learn To be learned And we pray this For our government For our leaders For our neighbours For our families For our friends You want us to repent
[13:14] And we pray that people Would hear that And turn back to you The psalmist Look back On the mighty deeds Of old Of the way That you led your people Through the Red Sea And redeemed them And we can look back At the way You did a mighty act Of redemption Even mightier Than the Red Sea When Christ died Upon the cross The day the earth shook And the end of the world As it were Almost happened And we praise you For the mighty Resounding victory Of Christ As he rose from the dead And as he is now Ascended into heaven We look forward To the day When he will come back And he will make Everything new But in the meanwhile Help us to be your people To live as your people Deliver us from our sins Deliver us from evil And help us to be people Who serve you And help us as we come In a moment To hear your word To hear it With proper attention
[14:16] Without distraction And that we will Humbly receive The engrafted word For Jesus' sake Amen That was the prayer Now we're going to sing A version of Psalm 77 It's the one in the praise book And you'll recognise the tune And hope you'll be able to sing along To Psalm 77 Psalm 77 I cried out to God To help me In my turmoil And my grief All night long I pleaded with him Yet my soul Found no relief
[15:17] I remembered God with sorrow And my groaning heart Reclamed Will it sleepless I could scarcely Raise my voice In lone lament Earlier days And years I turned to When my songs Ran through the night Now the bitter thought Possessed me Has God Cast us off Outright Is his steadfast Love Now ended Is his promise Now And void Have his mercy
[16:18] And compassion In his anger Be destroyed Then I called To mind The marvels Once Performed By God Most High Pondering On the Lord's Great Actions Mortal Power Could not Defy Holy Is our God No other Works The wonders Done By us Bring Jacob's Sons And Joseph's By his All Transcending Powers!
[17:14] When When O God The waters Saw you Terror Struck They turned And fled Lightning Tempest Whirlwind Thunder Filled The trembling World With dread Leaving In the Sand No footprint Through The sea Your path You took And by Moses Hand And Aaron's Led Your People Like A Flock And now I'll hand Over to John Who's Going to Lead He'll Open up The text To us And he'll Say a Prayer At the
[18:14] End And after That prayer We will Sing out With a Song That he Refers To It's 875 Be Gone Unbelief My Saviour Is Near So I'll Leave The rest To him And For my Part I'll Say Goodbye Just Now And hope To see You Soon Bye Bye Very Pleased To be With You Again At Calvary Church And To be Continuing In This Series On The Book Of Psalms And Today We Get To Psalm 77 The Psalms Are Some Of My Favourite Parts Of The Bible For Obvious Reasons There Are 150 Reasons Why I Enjoy The Psalms It's Such An Amazing Book So Rich And Varied Martin Luther The Reformer Said That All The Scripture Speaks To Us But The Psalms Speak For Us And Of course That's a Really Important Thing The
[19:14] Bible The Bible The Bible Does Speak Today And We're So Grateful That God Speaks To Us About Himself As The Creator And The Redeemer That He Tells Us How We Might Know Him And Follow Him And Experience True Hope In Him But The Psalms Speak With Another Voice They They Speak As Those Who Know God And Have Experienced God In Their Lives But They Explore The Contours Of Our Experience With God And In The World The Psalms Speak For Us They Put Into Words The Things That We Think And Feel And Long For And Sometimes They Do That In A Way That Great Poetry Does It They Compress Really Complex Feelings And Thoughts Into A Few Words And They Are Particularly Useful When We Are
[20:14] Feeling Maybe Difficulties In Our Lives Challenges In Our Lives And We Find It Just Too Difficult To Put What We Feel Into Words We Know What We Feel We Know What We Think But We Just Can't Express It Paul Writes In Romans Chapter Eight Of Prayers That Are Spoken With Groans That Are Too Deep For Words And Sometimes That's Where We're At We're In A Situation Where We're Groaning We're In Agony And We Don't Quite Know What To Say The Psalms Help Us There And In Particular The Psalms Which Are Described As Lament Psalms And Psalm 77 Is One Of Those A Lament Is A Cry Of The Heart To God And This Lament In Psalm 77 Is So Useful For Us When We're In That Situation Where We're Feeling Pain And We Don't Quite Know
[21:14] What To Do With It It's A Reminder That We Can We Can Pray As As Ordinary People And That Any Place In Our Experience Is An Appropriate Place For Us To Begin To Pray Someone Has Said I Only Pray When I'm In Trouble But I Am Always In Trouble Lament Prayers Help Us To Find A Language With Which We Can Speak To God And Call Upon Him To Describe Our Distress To Talk About How Deep And Painful Our Experience Actually Is So There In Verse One I Cried Out To God For Help I Cried Out To God To Hear Me Now Of Course It's Interesting That In This Psalm This Cry This Lament Is Not Brief It Continues To Trickle Throughout Most
[22:15] Of The Psalm Often The Psalms Of Lament Like The First One In Psalm Three Has A Very Brief Period Of Lament And Then There's A Kind Of Struggle Towards The Light A Struggle Towards Hope And The Movement Is Steady Now In This Particular Psalm The Question The Longing For Resolution Hangs In The Air For A Little Bit Longer It Is A Lament Now Someone Has Said That The Many Laments That We Find In The Book Of Psalms Remind Us That These Are Not Something Which Are Unusual In The Experience Of The Believer The Fact That They Happen So Often So Many Psalms Of Lament In These 150 Psalms Reminds Us That This Is Part Of A Believer's Experience And Part Of A Christian Experience It's
[23:16] Not A Sign Of Deficient Faith It's Not Something That We Can Outgrow Or Put Behind Us Classically One Of The Lament Psalms Psalm 22 Was On The Lips Of Jesus When Upon The Cross He Cried My God My God Why Have You Forsaken Me Paul When Writing To The Corinthians In 2 Corinthians Chapter 1 Says That He Had Experienced Great Anguish So That He Felt Even Under The Sentence Of Death That He Despaired Even Of Life Yes Lament Describes Human Experience A Believer's Experience A Christian's Experience And There Will Be Times When We Need To Have These Prayers Of Lament In Our Prayer Armoury As Part Of The Way That We Express Ourselves To God
[24:16] Laments Are Saying To Us It Is Okay Not To Be Okay They Say Don't They That The Greatest Lie Spoken After A Church Service Is The Use Of The Word Fine How Are You I'm Fine How Are You I'm Okay Now Of Course Not Everybody Can Bear Too Much Reality Not Everybody Can Endure The Pain That We Might Be Going Through At A Moment And We Don't Particularly!
[24:52] Want It's Okay Not To Be Okay Says It's Okay To Be Down It's Okay To Be Sad It's Okay To Be Afraid It's Okay To Be Angry To To Be Angry To Be Angry To Express Our Anger To God As Long As We Allow Our Anger Not To Separate Us From God To Keep Us From A Loving Relationship With God God But Actually We Bring That
[25:52] Feeling Of Anger Into Our Relationship So That We Might Experience Resolution And Healing And A Way Through It's Okay To Struggle It's Okay To Cry It's Okay To Question God It's Okay To Fail And I Think The Psalm Wants To Say To Us Today It Is Okay Not To Be Okay If You're Struggling Struggling Maybe With Health In This Global Pandemic Struggling Perhaps With Fear About Your Financial Circumstances Or You're A Child And You're A Little Bit Worried About Not Being At School Or Not Quite Having The Same Education As Normal Wondering About What Impact That Might Have Upon Your Education Your Employment Prospects In The Future It's Okay Not To Be Okay God Is Interested In
[26:53] Those Things God Is Interested Some People Say You Know And I Think It's A Helpful Saying! Nothing Is Too Big For God's Power And Nothing Is Too Small For God's Love You See If You're A Human Father Nothing That Troubles Your Child Is Unimportant To You You Care For Them And God Our Heavenly Father Cares For How We Feel And Wants Us To Express That Articulate It Verses 2 And 3 When I Was In Distress I Sought The Lord At Night I Stretched Out My Hands And I Would Not Be Comforted I Remember You God And I Grown I Meditated And My Spirit Grew Faint The Psalmist Is Bringing His Lament To God But There's A Cautionary Note Here Isn't There The Language That
[27:54] The Psalmist Uses Is Pretty Much All First Person Pronouns And There's A Lot About I And Me And Of Course This Is What Happens When We Experience Pain It Is Our Pain And We Feel The Pain Very Personally And When We Talk About It We Can Be Fixated Upon Ourselves And There Is A Dangerous Corner That We Can Easily Turn We We Move From Talking To God And Trusting In God To Becoming Obsessed With Ourselves Obsessed With Our Fears So That We In fact Look At Ourselves Rather Than Look At God Someone Said This That Pity Is Adrenaline For Acts Of Mercy Self Pity Is A Narcotic That Leaves Its Addicts Wasted!
[29:15] Absorbed Not To Be Consumed By Self Pity Oh Poor Little Me We Need To Think As We Lament Less Of Myself And More Of Him We Are Not Going To Get The Solution From Ourselves We Only Get The Solution From Him The Psalmist Says That In His Praying He Felt You Kept My Eyes From Closing I Was Too Troubled To Speak He Feels That He Is So Concerned About What Troubles Him That He Is Not Able To Sleep He Has Had That Experience Maybe The Experience That You Have Had Or Having Regularly At Present Of Not Being Able To Get To Sleep At Night Or Maybe Waking Up In The Middle Of The Night And Tossing And Turning And Worrying About What Might Be Happening Next It As Though You
[30:15] I Am Too Troubled To Speak I Can't Even Get Words Out I Am In Pain I Am In Trouble I Am Experiencing Panic Unspeakable Distress Unspeakable Pain You Know We Are Living In A Time Of Great Pain And Distress Too And This Can Lead Us To Worry And To Toss And Turn In Our Sleep Just Recently Gone By The Milestone Of 100,000 Deaths Related To Covid 19 We Are In Anxious Difficult Times Although We Praise God For The Speed By Which The Vaccine Is Being Rolled Out We Still Have An Alarming Rate Of Death
[31:15] Symbolised By That Very Famous Death This Week Of Captain Tom Moore 100 Years Old Catapulted Into Fame During The Last Year Because Of His Remarkable Sponsored Walk And Other Activities That Raised 33 Million Pounds For The NHS!
[31:39] We Live In Anxious Times We Live In Times Of Loss And Threat And Fear What's The Next Year Going To Be Like Maybe A Child Has Said That To Mum Or Dad Will It Be Okay Will We Get Through Will Things Ever Be Better Let's Hope So In Fact The Psalmist Does What We Do In These Circumstances He Moves From His Present Situation To Think About The Former Days Verse Five I Thought About The Former Days The Years Of Long Ago I Remembered My Songs In The Night My Heart Mused And My Spirit Enquired Verses Five And Six Ten Times In
[32:39] This Psalm The Psalmist Uses Different Types Of Terms For Thinking Thinking Meditating Remembering And It To Think Through Why We Feeling It It Is Good To Lay Out All Our Thoughts And All Our Feelings On The Table And Have A Conversation With God To Talk About What The Situation Actually Is But The First Thought That The Psalmist Has Is Not Entirely Positive And Not Entirely Helpful To Him He Is Thinking Back To The Former Days And It Actually Adds To His Sense Of Being Anxious And Cast Down He's Thinking Back To The Time When Things Were So Much Better And Now That
[33:39] Makes The Present Feel So Much Worse So Is It Possible Isn't It To Do That We Look Back To The Time Of February 2020 When Things Were Fairly Normal And We Could Do Spontaneous Things And There Was Freedom Remember The Last Sunday In February We Had Our Farewell Service At Lansing Town The Building Was Completely Jam Packed Full We Were Able To Hug Each Other We Were Able To Enjoy A Lovely Tea Together I Went Off At The End Of That Week To Latvia To Do Some Teaching With The School Of Preachers Trust There And During That Trip That Week That Two Or Three Weeks That I Had In Latvia The Lockdown Began In Latvia And Then The Lockdown Began In England
[34:40] My Final Service In Latvia Was A Service Like This Where I Was Preaching To A Camera To A Distant Congregation It Is Absolutely Easy Isn't It To Think Back To Former Times And The Memories Of Former Times Not To Lift Us But To Actually Make Us And Loss And The Psalmist As A Result Of This Memory Bombards God With A Whole Range Of Questions So Six Questions That Arise There In Verse Seven Will The Lord Reject Forever Will He Never Show His Favor Again Has His Unfailing Love Vanished Forever Has His Promise Failed For All Time Has God Forgotten To Be Merciful Has Has Has
[35:40] He In Anger Will Held His Compassion There Are Questions Which Which Arise In The Heart Of A Human Being And Obviously So If Things Are Not As They Once Were If Things Are Not As We Would Like Them To Be Is It Perhaps That God Has Gone Off Duty That God Is Not Picking Up The Telephone That God Is Not Responding Favorably To Us Anymore That God Has Just Stopped Being The Kind Of God That We Can Trust If We Can't Find Hope And Mercy And Help In God Where Can We Turn To To It's OK to ask questions if we allow ourselves to be guided by God to the answers that he wants us to have.
[36:42] And what happened to the psalmist? How was the psalmist guided back on track after asking these questions? Well, in verse 10, we read, Then I thought, to the Sallall appeal, The years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
[37:02] I thought to myself, I'm going to appeal not just to the past, but I'm going to appeal to the God of the past, who is the God of the present and the God of the future.
[37:18] I'll appeal to the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. I'll remember the works of the Lord.
[37:29] I will just rehearse in my memory what God has done in the life of my people and in my own life.
[37:39] And I think it's important to recognise that there is a negative looking back, a negative looking back with nostalgia to the good old days, assuming that everything good is past and there's no way that we're going to have a decent present or a decent future.
[38:01] There is that kind of memory. But there's also a memory which goes back to the past and retrieves the lessons of the past and brings them into the present.
[38:15] His love in times past forbids me to think he'll leave me at last in trouble to sink. Now the psalmist is going back to his memories of God and the memories are beginning to stir a confidence that God may well be at work in his life now and at work in the future.
[38:42] We need to remember the story and remember the God of the story. Your way, O God, is holy. What God is great like our God?
[38:53] You are unique. There is no one like you. If anyone's going to get me out of this situation, it is you. If anyone is going to give me a different attitude, it's you.
[39:05] You are the God who performs miracles. You are a God of great power. Now it feels to me that something very special needs to happen to get me out of this particular frame of mind, this particular trouble that I have, says the psalmist.
[39:24] But of course you are a God who can get people out of trouble. You are the God who has rescued people from the impossible situation. You are the God who has done things that can not be imagined by us.
[39:38] It's like what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 3, that you're able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. And it's important to recognise that, isn't it?
[39:49] You know, if you're in trouble, you don't phone up someone who is as confused as you are. If you can't do something, you don't phone someone who's incompetent.
[40:00] You phone someone up who can do it. You phone someone up who does understand it. And here the psalmist is summoning up his memories of a God who can do things when our backs are pressed against the wall.
[40:17] A God who can deliver us out of our fears and out of the pressures of human life. And what he remembers is remarkable.
[40:28] He remembers that God, the time of the Exodus, the time when the people of Israel were delivered out of Egypt, he remembers that God delivered them through the sea.
[40:42] The water saw you, verse 16. O God, the water saw you and writhed. The very depths were convulsed. Your path, verse 19, led through the sea.
[40:55] Your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen. What he saw was God guiding the people through the waters, through the Red Sea, from their captivity into their promised freedom.
[41:21] And that's the helpful thing. As a friend of mine said, they go right through the trouble. They don't go around it.
[41:32] They don't go above it. It's not in spite of the trouble that they get through, but they go through the trouble, through the sea. Your path led through the sea, through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen.
[41:53] Now that's the remarkable thing, isn't it? That God is invisible, yet his works are visible. That sometimes it appears that human beings are facing defeat.
[42:09] After all, the people of Israel, facing the Red Sea, with well-equipped, experienced soldiers in large numbers, pursuing them from Egypt.
[42:24] The obvious thing to assume was, this is it. Prepare to meet your God. There they were, facing the waters. And how were they to escape?
[42:38] There was no way of escape. But God gives them a way of escape, through the waters. The waters divide and they go through the waters. It appears that they were helpless, hopeless.
[42:54] It appeared as though there were no options available for them to make progress. But God works in their circumstances.
[43:06] Now you may feel like that. You may feel emotionally, spiritually, economically. You may feel, as a church, that it's difficult quite to discern the way forward.
[43:20] Difficult to understand what God is doing and how God is leading us into the future. Well, that was the experience of the people of Israel.
[43:30] Yet God did guide them through. Their path was through the waters. We did not see your footprints. God's actions were visible.
[43:45] God's ways are not always visible. God's ways are not always comprehensible to us.
[43:56] We don't always understand what he's doing and why he's doing what he does. Israel survived. Israel existed because of the action of God.
[44:10] The seen actions of an unseen God. When we pray, when we say to him, we're not okay, we're struggling.
[44:22] We don't quite know how we're going to get through. We come to this God and we know that he is with us and he is working through us. Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were not seen.
[44:39] You led your people like a flock. There's that lovely picture, isn't there, in Isaiah 40. But God shepherds his flock and he takes those, the young, the young lambs, and he nestles them close to his heart.
[44:59] God is a tender shepherd. He is concerned for each member of his flock, the oldest and the youngest. His love for us is faithful and firm.
[45:17] His love for us can be depended upon. You led your people like a flock. You led your people by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
[45:28] God is pleased to lead us. God is pleased to give us people who will lead us in our churches, in our families.
[45:38] And it's interesting that the word that's used is by the hand of Moses and Aaron. At the beginning of the psalm, the psalmist speaks about stretching his hands out to God in prayer.
[45:52] And God's hand is stretched out to us in order to bring deliverance and guide us through.
[46:02] God's hand is a tender shepherd. The hands of the people of God. The hands of the people of God were held by Moses and Aaron, metaphorically speaking. Too many people to actually hold hands physically.
[46:15] But they had a safe pair of hands that guided them through. God was with them. God knew about their needs. God knew about where they needed to be.
[46:27] God knew about the reassurance that they needed. God knew about the destination that they needed to reach. And God was at work providing for that.
[46:40] We might worry about the future for our family, for our church, for our nation. But we need to commit ourselves to this God. We do not need to be afraid, says Corrie ten Boom, to trust or entrust an unknown future to a known God.
[47:04] This is a God we know. And this God will not let us down. He will not disappoint us. In Luke chapter 9 31, there's an experience where Jesus is on the mountainside meeting Moses and Elijah.
[47:20] They appeared in glorious splendour, talking with Jesus. They spoke about his departure, or Exodus, which he was about to bring to fulfilment at Jerusalem. The people of Israel were brought from Egypt in the mighty Exodus, the way out of Egypt.
[47:38] Jesus is the one who has come to be our Exodus. Our Exodus from sin and from death and from hell.
[47:52] To give us the freedom to know God. To have the freedom to approach the throne of grace with boldness. That we might receive mercy and grace to help in time of need.
[48:09] I only pray when I'm in trouble. But I'm always in trouble. What a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs to bear.
[48:22] What a privilege to carry everything to him in prayer. We are a people of memory and hope.
[48:33] As we remember in the right way what God has done. At the Exodus delivering Israel. At the cross and at the empty tomb.
[48:46] Jesus offering himself that we might be forgiven. And have no fear of death. And no fear of the future.
[48:57] Because he is with us. I can do all things through him who gives me strength.
[49:09] Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. God our help in ages past.
[49:22] Our hope for years to come. There is a lot of mileage.
[49:33] In remembering this God. And placing our hope in him. Let's pray. Heavenly Father we come to you and we thank you for this opportunity.
[49:48] To call upon your name in prayer. To read your word together. Father we thank you for the opportunity to read this psalm. And we thank you for the way that it very honestly expresses.
[50:01] Deep feelings that sometimes we experience ourselves. We thank you for the psalms. That give us words by which we can come to you.
[50:12] Words that help us to express. How we're feeling. How we're thinking. We thank you that you give us permission. To be honest with you. You give us permission.
[50:23] To say it's okay not to be okay. But Father God we thank you that you are the God who hears us. You are the God who answers our prayers.
[50:34] And you are the God who takes us by the hand. And leads us through. We pray that you will lead each one here. Through this global pandemic.
[50:46] Through all the uncertainties related to it. We pray that you will lead us. From a life that is centered on ourselves.
[50:58] To a life that trusts Jesus. And experiences his forgiveness. New life and hope. We pray for the church at Calvary.
[51:09] And we pray too that you will. Take them by the hand in this year. Guide them. Provide for them. Particularly we pray. Your provision.
[51:20] For long-term leadership. We thank you that. We have read. That you led your people. Through the waters. And that.
[51:31] The hand of Aaron. And Moses. Guided them. We pray Father. That you will put. People with. Safe pairs of hands. Into. Key roles.
[51:42] In the life of Calvary Church. During this year. For we ask these things. In Jesus name. Amen. Amen.
[51:53] Amen. Be gone unbelief.
[52:08] Thy saviour is near. And for my relief. Will surely appear.
[52:18] By prayer. By prayer. Let me wrestle. And prove that he saves. With Christ in the vessel.
[52:29] I smile at the waves. Though dark be my way.
[52:44] Since he is my guide. Then I must obey. And he will provide.
[52:55] With human trust broken. when mortals all fail, the word he has spoken shall surely prevail.
[53:08] His love in time past forbids me to think, he'll leave me at last in trouble to sink.
[53:30] And can he have taught me to trust in his name, and this far have brought me to put me to shame?
[53:44] Why should I complain of want or distress, temptation or pain, he told me no less.
[54:06] The heirs of salvation I know from his word, through much tribulation must follow their Lord.
[54:20] Tents all that I meet shall work for my good, the bitter is sweet, the medicine is food.
[54:42] The pain felt at present will cease before long, and then, oh how pleasant, the conqueror's song.