Hey, let's give it up for Martha for being willing to share her story with us this morning. Today we're going to be in Psalm chapter 34, and we're also going to hit 1 Samuel 21. So if you want to mark that in your Bible, my name is Pastor Bobby. And today, one of the things we're going to see the second week in the Psalms is that the Psalms are both timely and timeless. Meaning, they stand outside of us, they were written almost 3,000 years ago, and yet they speak to something that we can be going through today.
And what we're going to see in Psalm 34 is that it is a picture of how to follow God when we're going through a dark time in life. Because here's the thing, I'm so appreciative of Martha being willing to share her story. And here's the thing about her story, and here's the thing about emotional darkness. That story is not rare.
That story is not rare at all. You would not believe the amount of people in this room right now. Just since our Thursday and Sunday morning service, people that I've talked to, addiction, losing a child, suicide, trying to commit suicide, depression. And a lot of times it's an issue maybe that was done to them, or something that was not their fault, and that caused them to go into this spiral of isolation and anxiety and depression.
And that's what we're going to be talking about today. A lot of people deal with emotional darkness. A lot of people deal with the situation in life where we feel like we are helpless and we feel like we are hopeless. And here's the thing that happens in this sort of situation.
And I just want to address this at the front of the message because this is going to be a bit of a theme that we're going to talk about. When we have a problem in life, maybe it's our fault, maybe it's not our fault, there's this problem in life, especially around anxiety, depression, emotional types of issues. They can cause us to feel shame. So you have the problem, and then you have shame. And what shame can do is it can cause us to want to isolate. We end up isolating ourselves from other people, and we also end up isolating ourselves from God. And what that can cause is even more darkness in our lives, and what we end up getting into is a spiral of fear, shame, anxiety, and darkness. And the most insidious thing about that sort of spiral, even if your problem started with, man, something bad happened to a family member, it wasn't even your own sin.
It wasn't something that you caused. The further you go down into darkness, the further then you go into shame and anxiety and isolation. You know, if you've ever met someone that's struggled or dealt with an addiction, right, a lot of times an addiction is like, okay, you have the problem, and then you have the shame from the problem. Then you have the, man, I feel like I need to isolate because I don't want God to know about this, I don't want other people to know about this. Okay, I feel darkness, and then at the end, where do they go? They go right back to the original problem. And that's why I say it's such an insidious sort of thing.
We end up, many times when we're going through a dark time, we end up doing the exact opposite thing that we should actually do. So at the beginning of this year, me and my two younger sons started watching through the Harry Potter movies. I had seen them before, but they were old enough to kind of begin to watch them. And in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, there's a scene where they get trapped in this like massive plant. And the more they fight, the more they struggle, which is that's like the natural thing to do, right, when something's like squeezing in on you. The more they fight, the more they struggle, the plant squeezes even tighter. So you have Hermione, Ron, and Harry, and of course we all know, I don't know how old they were, nine years old, we all know a nine-year-old girl is inherently smarter than a nine-year-old boy, right?
Sorry boys, sorry. That's true. So she figures out the quickest, hey, I need to stop fighting, I need to stop struggling. And she drops through, and then Harry finally figures out, and then Ron, he does what most of us would do.
The natural thing is to fight, and so he's fighting, and the plant is gripping tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And I think that is a great lighthearted picture of what that shame spiral can feel like. The last thing we should do is isolate. The very last thing we should do is not tell others. The very last thing we should do is not put it in the light, and that's exactly the thing that we do, and therefore we get gripped tighter and tighter and tighter. And what we're going to see today, and we've got to bring this to light, God, here's the big idea, wants us to call out to him in the darkness.
We have to stop believing. When I'm struggling, I can't be in a relationship with God. I could be in community, I could be in a group, I could serve when things are going well, but when I am struggling, I have to isolate. I have to kind of go away from God, and that's what we think so many times. Walking through a dark time does not disqualify you from calling out to God. In fact, there's more stories in the Bible than we even realize of people deeply struggling and walking with God at the exact same time. We get in our minds that after our salvation, if we begin to deeply struggle, we can't also have a relationship with God, and that's just simply not true, and we're going to see that in Psalm 34 today. So let's jump into Psalm 34. Here's how the pretext of Psalm 34 starts. In the Hebrew Bible, this is actually verse 1. It says of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away.
So it's like, what is going on here? We're going to spend a little bit of extra time here because it's going to really tell us, not the what of Psalm 34, it's going to tell us the why of Psalm 34. Why did David actually write Psalm 34? So we know it's a psalm of David, and the Bible has put this in here to tell you he wrote this song after he went through this situation, and this situation was when he changed his behavior before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away.
Some of us are like, I have no idea. Honestly, I didn't even know what the story referred to when I first read this. So if you go to 1 Samuel 21, here's what happened. David was anointed king before he was crowned king. Saul was still the king, and Saul began to have this evil spirit, and he kind of went crazy, and he began to try to kill David. And it was one of the lowest, darkest moments of David's life. And right before this, before 1 Samuel 21, we have David and Saul's son together, which they were really good friends, and David is just overcome with grief. His stomach is on the ground, he's crying, and then right from there he goes on the run. And so the first thing he does, he's just not himself.
If you go and read this whole thing from the beginning of 1 Samuel 21, you'll see he's just not himself. He goes to a town called Nob, and he goes to this priest called Ahimelech. And he goes to this priest, he's by himself, and he makes up the story. He lies, he lies to the priest. He goes to the priest and he said, hey, Saul has sent me here on this secret mission that I'm on.
It's all a lie, he's making it all up. And David's like, do you have any food? And the priest is like, I don't have any food, but I do have the consecrated bread.
Which is like, yeah, you probably shouldn't eat that, right? I mean, people get struck dead in the Old Testament for all sorts of things, and David's like, it's fine. Don't worry about it, I'm on a secret mission, give me that. So he gives him that. And then David's like, do you have any weapons?
And the irony of this story when you really dig in, he's like, yeah. He's like, well, we don't really have any, we're not like storing any weapons here. But we do have one weapon, and it's Goliath's sword. Now, David killed Goliath and took the sword. And so now they have Goliath's sword. Now, the Bible talks about Goliath being nine foot tall, and I'm guessing David's like five foot six. So if you're nine feet tall, you have a sword that's around five feet tall. So David gets a sword, the handle of the sword is probably up to the side of his head.
He gets the sword. And then, so David's on the run, what does he do? He then goes, this is crazy, guys, he goes to a town called Gath, okay? This town is a Philistine town where Goliath is from. So David's on the run hiding, and life is spiraling so out of control. He's like, I'm going to get the five foot sword, I'm going to lie to the priest, I'm going to steal the consecrated bread, and then, man, where can I go to hide?
I'm going to go to Goliath's hometown, like he's not going to be recognized. Have you guys seen any of those? I love watching them. ESPN did one where they take these professional athletes and they'll send them to like a college tryout, you know, and they'll put different hair on and different. I saw one where Eli Manning went to Penn State. He was trying to walk on as a guy named Chad Powers, you know, like hair down to his shoulders, you know. And by the end of the episode, he's throwing like 65-yard passes, and it's very obvious, like, okay, this, you know, you're not, you know, six foot five and walk on to Penn State. Like, this is David here going to Gath. He thinks he's going to hide. He's got Goliath's sword with him.
And within seconds, they recognize who he is. 1 Samuel 21, David rose and he fled that day from Saul, and he went to Achish, the king of Gath. And the servants of Achish said to him, is this not David, the king of the land? So he's there for like two seconds, and they're like, that's David. Did they not sing to one another of him in dances?
So this little song that people made up. Saul has struck down his thousands and David his ten thousands. And David took those words to heart and was much afraid. So we begin to experience and see the emotions that he was going through here and the emotions that were going on when he wrote Psalm 34.
He was much afraid of Achish, the king of Gath. So he changed his behavior before them, and he pretended to be insane. Now, when we first read this, we're like, that's funny.
That's not funny. It's embarrassing when you have to pretend to be insane because you're so afraid and on the run. So, what did he do? In pretending to be insane, he started scratching the doors of the gate. He let spit run all down his beard.
What an embarrassing situation. Then Achish said to his servants, behold, you see this man's mad. He's crazy. Why have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen that you've brought this fellow to behave as a madman in my presence?
Shall this fellow come into my house? So all of this is setting up why Psalm 34 was written. David wasn't on the mountaintop. He wasn't crushing it with his relationship with God. He was in a dark, embarrassing, shameful place. Because when we're in that place, we want to run, we want to hide, we want to isolate. So Psalm 34, we're going to see David doesn't do that. He doesn't run, he doesn't hide, he doesn't isolate. He actually calls out to God, and so by the Bible putting this as the prescript, it's telling us on the front end, hey, you can have a relationship with God and be deeply emotionally struggling at the very same time. This is a low point of shame and fear for David's life.
How many of us have been in a shameful or embarrassing situation? So I remember when I was a kid, this memory is ingrained in my brain. I remember I did the swim team every year, and one of these years, it was like at the beginning of the year, there was different levels of the swim team. I think there was like, man, you're a beginner, and then you're more experienced levels. And so what they would do is at the beginning of the season, they would just line everybody up on the blocks, and they would do all these different, hey, you're going to swim 25 yards, hey, you're going to swim 50, you're going to swim 100, we're going to time everybody, and that's going to kind of depend on what team you're on.
And so you imagine the blocks on the pool, and then you imagine lines behind each one where they would send a group of kids, and they would time them. First, let me say this. I wasn't super comfortable wearing the Speedo. I know there are some European men that have no issue with the Speedo. I had an issue with the Speedo. Didn't learn to talk to girls at this point or anything, and that Speedo just felt exposing, okay?
So I was just dealing with that, right? Well, I'm third person from about to get on my block, and I promise you, I realized I about had a panic attack on Thursday just thinking of this story, okay? I realized I had a massive hole on one side of the Speedo in the back of it.
And this ain't like a normal situation because all the kids are standing around watching the couple kids that are doing their timed things. And so I was just like really freaking out of like what do I do, what do I do? But there was nowhere to go.
I was like next in line. So I get up on the block, and I had one hand over the back of it, you know? And just something inside of me when I jumped in the water said, man, you just got to keep your hand covering that hole. And I swam all the way across the other side of the pool with one arm. I didn't help my time, obviously, and what team I was getting on.
What I did is the natural inclination. People can't see this, you know, whether you caused it or not, but I can't let people see this. I got to cover up. Like I feel shame. I feel embarrassment because this thing is in my life. How cool is it that the Bible has canonized, has put in Scripture somebody's very lowest moment to tell us that there is a way forward when we're going through a dark time?
I'd hate to be the person that your lowest moment was put in the Bible as a lesson, but we should thank God that God has given us this as a lesson. It's as if David is saying, hey, the shame, the fear, the isolation, I have been there. I have seen the darkness. I've experienced the darkness.
Let me show you how I made it through. And here's the thing. We're going to see this as we're walking through all these verses. God wants us to call out to him in the darkness.
That is the way forward. Everything inside of us is going to say, isolate, shame, get away, run away. It's been happening since the very beginning of the Bible. We're going to see here God wants us to call out to him in the darkness. Let's walk through these verses starting in verse 1. I'll bless the Lord at all times. His praise, it will continually be in my mouth. My soul will boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad. You see, when you're going through a dark time, the only thing that you're going to want to talk about is the dark time that you're going through. That is the natural response. Whether you caused it or somebody else caused it, when you're going through that dark time, that is what you're going to want to focus on. That is what you're going to want to talk about. Do you think, while David, the spit running down the beard, the whole situation, do you think he always wanted to bless the Lord in that situation?
No, of course not. But what does it say? I will bless the Lord at all times. It's almost as if he was creating a habit of blessing the Lord that wasn't solely dependent on his feelings. That wasn't dependent on his emotions.
Because we know, because we see it noted, his emotions, his feelings were feelings of fear. But he was continuing to bless God. His soul was boasting in the Lord. And the reason after that, he says, let the humble hear and be glad. Because unless you have humility, can your soul boast in the Lord? It's a tough truth, but the person that isolates, they can't boast in the Lord. They isolate because they say, I have to fix this on my own. I have to handle this.
And even, you can look in and it looks like, man. But they don't have the humility to say, man, I got to call out to God. I got to call out to somebody else to help me. Verse 3, oh magnify the Lord with me.
Let us exalt his name together. What happens when you're in the darkness? The thing that you're dealing with, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
And you may get to a point, and I've already talked to multiple people this weekend that face the type of situation that Martha faced. The darkness feels so big. You're like, there's no other way out. What do you need to do?
You maybe can't even change the situation. You need to magnify God so that God becomes bigger. And the problem, what you're dealing with, the darkness begins to get smaller. And what's the second part of verse 3 say? Let us exalt his name together. Because the Bible knows what doctors are just discovering when someone is dealing with depression, anxiety, you go read a medical journal, and it's so funny to me because it's not medical advice, but when people are going through that, the number one thing that you will see that is suggested is community, that people need to be around other people because the natural inclination is that we're going to isolate.
And what does it say here? We're going through a dark time. We need to exalt God's name together. That is why we are here. That's why the church exists. When we come into this room, we are acknowledging whatever I'm going through in life, I cannot do it by myself.
I need other people around me. When we are in the darkness, we need to magnify God with other people. For I sought the Lord, we sung this at the beginning of the service, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. I think this is such an interesting verse because it doesn't mention getting delivered from the situation, although he does mention that later. He mentions being delivered from his fears, right?
Pastor Andrew brought this up last week. You have what's happening to us, and then you have our feelings around what's happening to us. And a lot of times, our feelings around what's happening to us can lead us to a much darker place than what's actually even happening to us. You know, this is how something bad can happen in somebody's life.
They begin to get affected on an emotional level, and it only sometimes can lead to worse things because of what's going on in their life. Verse five. Those who look to him are radiant, their faces shall never be ashamed.
Catch what it's saying. Those who look to him, it's the idea of behold. What do you go to for life?
What do you go to for life? Those who look to him, their faces radiant joy, they will never be ashamed. What it's saying is, you have the something that you behold, and then you have the results of that thing in your life. So we'll behold God, we'll be radiant, we won't be ashamed, or, and this is so easy to do, I have been there. Many of us have been there. You end up beholding the worst thing that's happening in your life.
I mean, we've all seen this, right? You have something that happens in somebody's life, maybe it happened to them, and that becomes like, man, I am beholding this thing in my life. And we end up, this is what this verse is talking about, verse five, we end up becoming what we behold. So if you behold the darkness, if you behold the grief, and that is the thing, you behold the depression, the anxiety, you will become that thing.
You have no other choice, this is how we are created as human beings. It's not that we don't look at it, it's not that we don't deal with it, but if it becomes the thing that you behold, you will become that thing. Verse six, this poor man, David talking about himself. This poor man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. Verse seven, the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them.
Verse eight, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack. You know, fearing God, fearing God means that God is the most weighty thing in your life. And when you're in that spiral of darkness, or that spiral of shame, or that spiral of struggle, you need God to be the most weighty thing in your life.
Because that's going to be able to displace some of those fears and emotions that you're having in your life. Those who fear him will have no lack. Verse 10, the young lion suffer one hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. The Psalms don't tell you to fake it when you're struggling. The Psalms, they very much, like, affirm our emotions and our desires and our feelings.
They don't always lead us in the right direction, our emotions and desires and feelings, but God has certainly given us those so we don't reject those. We deal with what we're facing. The Psalms tell us to face it and then cry out and behold God. Not to run away from it.
Not to hide it. And here's what I'm not saying before we get to the application and close today. Here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying, hey, if you're depressed, don't go to a doctor.
Don't go to counseling. You know, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying, hey, if you have an addiction, maybe you need to go to rehab. Like, we're mind, body, and soul.
So I'm not saying don't do those things. What I am saying is Psalm 34 today is teaching us, look, when you're in the darkest moments, don't run away from God. Because I promise you, every single one of us have this inclination to think, hey, I can have a really good-looking relationship with God only when I am doing well. Even the pastors, even the leaders, when we struggle, there's an inclination to say, man, I need to hide that.
I need to isolate because I don't want somebody knowing that I'm dealing with this. And this Psalm, Psalm 34, is fighting against that. I mean, how else do we reconcile? Okay, David spit running down his face. You know the priest that he goes and lies to? In the next chapter, that priest has 85 of his family members killed by Saul. So his entire lineage gets wiped out, and David finds out about it. David's lying to the priest. He's acting like he's crazy.
He's on the run. And at the very same time, David is crying out and calling out to God. Like, a lot of times when we present our relationship with God to other people, we present it in such sanitized ways.
We'll share with other people when we're on the mountaintop. We'll share when we're doing really well, but when things begin to struggle, even if it's not our fault, we want to isolate. We want to go into the darkness, and this Psalm is telling us, don't do that. You can deeply struggle and have a relationship with God at the very same time.
And here's the application today. For all of us, look to Jesus in your darkest moments. Look to Jesus in your darkest moments. We have to stop looking at that thing that has broken us and look to Jesus who has been broken for us. Jesus took on the shame. Jesus took on the isolation. Jesus took on the separation from God. Isaiah 53.5 says, He was pierced for our transgressions. Jesus, He was crushed for our iniquities.
The punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed. Some of you today need to experience that for the very first time. Because you have a darkness in your life, whether it's anxiety or depression or something else, but you have a darkness that's not just situational. It's deep down at the very soul level. And you need Jesus to free you, to free your soul before anything else, before any sort of situation.
Last week I was sick, and so I was watching movies and that sort of thing like we do. And I don't know how many of you have ever seen the movie 13 Lives. There's also a documentary based on this. This was a worldwide story when it was happening. There's a boys soccer team in Thailand. So imagine like, I don't know how old they were, 10, 12 years old.
And their coach, there's 13 of them. They're about to go, after soccer practice one day, they're about to go to a boy's birthday, and they had a little bit of time. So they went, it was like in their area. There's like this state park with this cave system. So they go inside the cave, like pitch black cave, right?
They got lights and that sort of thing. Well, they go in there, and the cave floods sometimes, but it wasn't like monsoon season yet. So they go into the cave. They're about a mile back into the cave, and the cave completely floods and fills up with water. And no one knows where the boys are, except all their bikes are lined up in front of the cave. And some of you remember this story when it happened.
It became like worldwide news. Like thousands of people there at the site, like Elon Musk saying, how can I help? And all this stuff, right? Well, they can't find them for the first week. So of course, you know, they think, man, there's no way that they're going to make it. Well, they send like the Thai Navy Seals in to like dive through the caves. It's filled with water. They can't find the boys. Thai Navy Seals can't find the boys. Two old dudes from the United Kingdom could find the boys because they were the best cave divers in the entire world, like 100 times X what the Thai Navy Seals are. So these guys, they get back there and find these boys stuck in the back of the cave. They're alive, but there's a 0% chance that they can get out. And they were coming up with all these ideas.
Like, man, it's almost more of a hopeless situation. We know that they're alive now, but we can't get them out. It was a five-hour dive to get from the front of the cave to where the boys were. Can you imagine?
Five hours in the darkness, there were holes like this big that you had to get through. One of the Thai Navy Seals died just as part of the whole situation. And so they were coming up with all these ideas of like, man, we're just going to have to bring them food for the next year. And they're just going to have to stay back there in this cave. Other people were like, maybe we teach them how to like swim out, you know, and how to scuba dive or whatever.
And the guys who were the real world experts, these British guys, they're like, there's 0% chance in the world. There's a handful of people that could make a dive like this. You're not going to teach these 12-year-old kids how to swim out of here. People freak out when they're in these caves. You freak out in a cave. It ain't like scuba diving like in the Caribbean. You just pop up.
Like, man, there ain't nowhere to pop up, you know. And so eventually one of these guys, an Australian guy that was there to also help like these British guys, he's an anesthesiologist, and they finally came, they were so hopeless, they came up with this idea. We're going to put the boys to sleep. We're going to put the boys to sleep. We're going to give them shots every hour, and we're going to tie up their hands, and we're going to tie up their feet, and we're going to put a mask on their face, and they're going to be asleep, and we're going to drag them out of this cave. They were expecting multiple of the boys to die. Well, they all, they all made it out. And if I were in that situation back there in the cave, I'd be like, there's 0% chance I'm letting one of you old guys from England take me out of this cave.
Because think about it. You have to be bound up, get put to sleep. Man, do you get to offer anything? Do you get to participate at all?
No. Completely 1,000% surrender. And what a good picture of the only way that we get to come to Jesus. We don't get to paddle out. We don't get to put the fins on and just help a little bit in the rescue, just bring a little bit of our good works. We get to bring nothing to the equation except faith. Faith says, Jesus, I can't do it on my own.
You did it for me. I'm going to trust, believe, and be fully dependent on you. And there are people here today, you have never made that decision because it's a hard decision to make.
We act like it's an easy, it's not an easy decision to make. If you were in the back of that cave to fully surrender to somebody else, to say, yeah, I'm going to tie my hands, tie my feet up, and fully surrender, some of you here today need to fully surrender to Jesus. Just say, I've been trying to do it on my own. I've been trying to carry the weight. I've been isolating. I've been doing this. You need to fully surrender today to Jesus.
The way that you do that is you say, Jesus, I've been doing it on my own. You died. You were buried. You were resurrected for me.
You literally did the thing that I couldn't do. And so I want to accept rescue. I want to believe in you, Jesus, and completely turn my life towards you.
And for the rest of us, this is what we need to get. For the rest of us here, that type of dependence, when you believed in Jesus for the very first time, you didn't bring anything to the equation. You had nothing to offer.
You couldn't put on the fins and mask and swim out on your own. That type of dependence, when you're going through a dark time, is the type of dependence on God that you need. Because it's the, I can handle this.
I can do it on my own. It's that thing that makes us isolate, that makes us go further into the darkness. You don't have to be clean to cry out. You don't have to be fixed to be heard.
You don't have to be strong to be seen. The very same faith that you had to follow Jesus for the first time and fully surrender your life, that is the type of faith that you need in the darkness. All you have to do is cry out to God.
That's what we see in Psalm 34. I know there are some of you here today, just from talking to people in the other two services, you are living your darkest moment that you never thought was possible right here, right now. You are living your life's worst nightmare, something you thought could never be possible in your life.
Or you're walking alongside somebody else in that. And you wouldn't believe how many stories I've heard of someone walking alongside somebody else going through their worst nightmare that ended up breaking the person that was walking alongside of them. And they began to live their worst nightmare of emotional darkness and pain and anxiety and fear. First, let me just say, if you're here and you're going through something like that, we love you, and this is why the church exists. This is why we're here.
This is why we're gathered today. I remember, if you're newer to Mercy Hill, you've not heard me share this story, I remember I walked alongside my brother from the time he was around 20 to the time he was around 30, dealing with deep emotional mental health crisis and addiction at the same time. And I got to witness that spiral of, man, I want help, I want to get better, but I feel shame. And the shame tells you, man, you need to isolate.
You need to not tell anybody about this. That leads to darkness. Darkness, most of the time, the next step after that is more of what the original problem was, which is just crazy. And I could feel the pain, I could see the shame, and he eventually lost his life to that, to that shame spiral. And I remember, and so many people have dealt with this, trying to walk alongside somebody else. Two years later, I found myself just physiologically broken at like the DNA level because of what I had gone through. And the first kind of inclination was to actually just feel shame around that.
Like somehow I should have done something different or taken more time off or rested more or done something else. And this is how insidious and satanic this cycle is that would tell me, man, after I've been trying to help him, I now feel shame and I feel inclination to want to isolate. And that only leads to more darkness, which only leads to more of the problem. And Psalm 34 is saying today, man, if you are walking through the darkness, you can break the cycle today because you can call out to God and you could be here and worship with other people and tell somebody else. And so I just want to encourage you as we close and pray, there is somebody that heard this message today and it has caused you to feel that shame. It's caused you to feel fear. It's caused you to feel guilt. And everything inside of you says, man, I need to go one more step down.
I need to isolate a little bit more. But you have a chance today to say, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I had somebody come up to me in the lobby after one of the services and told me just a horrible thing that was happening in their life.
And they said, man, you're the first person I've told about this. Some of you today have the opportunity to call out to God and break that cycle of fear and shame. We can struggle and follow God at the exact same time. So I'm going to close. I'm going to pray for us.
Obviously today, the topic's a little unique. We're going to have pastors here up front that, man, if you need to talk to somebody, if you need somebody to give you a hug, if you need somebody to pray with you, then don't, if you're going through it, don't leave without crying out to God. Don't leave without telling somebody else. Man, you can experience freedom today. Like, man, not everything's going to change in your life, but you will be anchored to the right thing as you're going through the darkness. Let's pray together.
God, I just know a crowd this size, Lord, there are people that are going through it today. And God, we know that Satan would rather have us isolate and feel shame whether or not it's our fault and go deeper into the darkness. God, we know that you are light. There is no darkness inside of you. And so I pray today, God, whether we come down here and just beg for mercy for somebody else or we come down here and just call out and cry out to you, God, we know from verse five anybody that beholds you, that calls out to you, that cries out to you, if we do that, we will be radiant and we will not be put to shame. So I pray today, God, that some people will be able to experience that. Lord, we thank you that we could be here and that we can worship and that there is freedom in your name, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
