Shall we begin with prayer? Father in Heaven, we can look back at 2025 and be comforted and be encouraged if I also know that there were challenges. We look ahead to 2026 and we know that there will be challenges but that we are not alone. As we consider your word this morning, we pray that there might be encouragement and instruction and that all that is said and done would be to the honor and glory of our Savior, our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, and whose name we pray, Amen.
The book of Psalms is 150 chapters and as one has said, it says everything that you could say to God and a great deal of it can be described by three things. Please, thank you. Sorry. There are wisdom psalms, penitential psalms, and prechatory psalms, kingdom psalms, psalms, royal psalms, psalms of gratitude.
There are eight psalms of lament and here you are at the end of 2025 looking toward 2026 and you're thinking why is the speaker going to talk about such an uncomfortable word as lament out of all of these 150 psalms. I am picking three of the eight psalms of lament for us this morning. Why might you be in a state of lament? Sometimes I suppose that it is very often justified that you should be in a state of lament.
Perhaps sometimes it is not. Perhaps you are in a state of self-pity and God needs to deal with you. Perhaps you are disoriented. Perhaps you are ill.
Perhaps you feel unjustness or unfairness in your life. Things like that can disorient us. But when we get disoriented as we know, it is not because the Lord has changed. It is not because the geography of God himself has changed.
God is unchanging. It is probably because our hearts and our minds need to change. We need a compass. Did you know that the magnetic north pole has moved a little closer to Siberia?
I do not think you lost any sleep about that last night. The compass I really enjoyed as a teenager doing a type of cross-country running called orienteering and I have not heard mention of orienteering in decades. You would, this is a compass with a ruler and magnifying glass and I would hang this over my neck and tuck it in and figure out with the map how far I had to run in what direction. You need to have a clear head even though you are tired.
I hope that in 2026 you will have a clear spiritual head even when you are tired. And of course in spiritual terms this is not really the kind of compass that you need. I will call this the royal compass. May this be your compass.
It does not change. The principles. That royal compass is eternal. The king whom we follow in worship does not change.
People, these songs, they are all at once, three things. They are poems. They are songs. And they are prayers.
And particularly songs that lament our prayers. Prayers of pain. I do not know if you have ever seen these things in real life. There is a certain sense of absurdity and yet there is a sense in which they represent what is very human.
The desire on the part of human beings to reach out to God expresses itself and finds expression on this planet in many, many ways. Of course not all of them meaningful. Spinning a wheel in the hope that prayers will be flung toward heaven. Maybe is it spinning it faster?
We get more prayers out of it. We would look at that and say that is kind of sad actually. But it is an expression of I think the human desire to reach out to God. Jesus spoke against as you can see in that verse.
Vain repetitions and people who think that they will be heard because of much speaking or much repetition of a prayer. My wife and I will be heading to Japan to be there most of the month of May. And as a result I can't tell you how many YouTube videos I have watched warning about what to watch for in Japan and what are some of the nice things about Japan. I came across this and Japanese are very efficient if nothing else.
And when you often approach a tarii which looks like a letter to Greek letter pi except it has a second roof very often, you are entering what they would consider to be a sacred area. And before entering that you can go over to a booth and they actually have the prayers in I don't know Japanese alphabetical order. What kind of prayer do you need? Put in 10 cents, take this prayer, read it, tie it up on this by the tarii.
It is another expression of desire to express our needs to God. It is very human. And this is a Shinto practice, Shinto being the religion of Japan. A little closer to things that are in the Bible that is the so-called wailing wall or western wall below the Temple Mount upon which there is the Al-Aksa Mosque, the single most contentious acre on the planet.
That is none other than Bibi Netanyahu tucking his prayer into the cracks between the great blocks at the western wall. I have in my life been in places where I have seen and I have experienced to some extent a very wide range of religious activity, experience, expression. And I'll never forget standing above the courtyard looking down upon that area on a Sabbath evening, Friday evening. That was one of the most intense views of religious expression that I have ever seen in my life.
It was very, very, it's like a mixed thing, you know. These people are incredibly sincere. They love the Torah, but they don't know the Messiah. Very intense.
You have yet, you know, when you think about writing something down, well, after all, what is this? About 3,000 years ago, King David wrote probably on a dried animal skin on a parchment the Psalms that we will consider today. And God in his wisdom has preserved them for you to read for 3,000 years. Wow, that must mean that what is written here is for your edification.
These Psalms are preserved, these prayers are preserved to help you, to strengthen you, to guide you. Here we read and it came to pass that as he was praying in a certain place when he ceased one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, he just to pray, as John also taught his disciples on the Baptist. We read likewise, the Spirit also helped us our infirmities for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit make a thing for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Isn't that interesting?
Is that where our heart is? A heart and mind that's open to the instruction of God, but also a spirit that says I'm inadequate. And when Paul says our infirmities and we don't know how to pray, I think he's including himself, he wrote a significant portion of the 29 books of your New Testament. And he said, we don't know how to pray.
Our infirmities. That makes me feel a little bit better. I think within the general spectrum of Christendom broadly defined, what you can see in church services perhaps is mirrored in what you can experience or find in the realm of prayer itself. You can go from church services which are passionate and wild and even a bit chaotic.
And it seems like there's some kind of a flame burning brightly. I don't know what color it is sometimes. And I don't always know what it meant, what I heard. So there's that extreme.
And then with human beings going all the way to the other extreme, it's almost like a recitation. What day is it today? What does the calendar say we should recite? Let's recite it and go home.
And there's no flame and it's stone cold. And you go about your business when you go home and you sort of think, well, I hope the fact that I can recite such a thing will maybe have some kind of a spiritual benefit. This is not a book of incantations. You know, we don't say, mmm, we have our Harry Potter magic wand and hope that something magic happens out of some kind of incantation.
This is not about magic. It's not about superstition. It's about genuine prayer from the heart of the redeemed person. But hopefully somewhere in between, we can have a true flame and legitimate passion.
And as you look toward 2026, I hope that you will examine yourself as I've spoken about this morning. We have weakness, as Paul says there, in Romans 8. We can be comforted by Psalm 104. He remembers our frame and nose that we are dust.
What we see from Romans 8 is that God works with you at what you are trying to express. The Holy Spirit can express. And so the Psalms of lament, 3, 6, 10, 13, 22, and 88. There are also, in fact, in the Psalms, corporate expressions of pleas for deliverance and of suffering and 44 and 60 and 74 and 79 and 80 suffering.
Unfortunately, I think in Canada, I'm conscious of the snow outside and minus five and all of that, that we have a bit of a tendency due to our climate and due to the distances involved, not to get together as much I think as we ought. I remember one of the elders at the Redo View Bible Chapel where we went for four years there in near Carlton University. And he was an Egyptian and he has spoken from this pulpit. His name is Bushra McHale.
And he was a man of great humility and he would recount how the believers in Cairo. You know, I don't know if you have any sense of what they call now a Megalopolis. Tokyo has nearly 40 million people and they debate whether Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, is larger or not. That probably means Jakarta has more people because they don't keep very good senses.
They're not very good at having an accurate, an accurate census. Cairo, there is something like a hundred thousand people that make a living picking through the garbage dump. If that gives you any sense of the size of that Megalopolis, it boggles the mind. And so a lot of the believers in Egypt who are persecuted terribly at the end of the day when they're probably dirty and tired and just baffed out.
We used to say when I was a teenager, baffed out, they'll get together and sing and Bushra would say and wash their cares away. It's a little harder for us to do that. We all have winters and have to jump in our cars, but we do sometimes need to get together and know something about each other's pain and pray together and we together. There's a certain pattern, it's not a very strict pattern, but it is a framework that exists for the Psalms of Lament.
So I will be considering three of them, 313 and 42 according to this pattern. The cry, the complaint, the connection and the petition and then look to the future. So although thinking about Psalms of Lament this morning as we look to 2026, we can take instruction as to how these three Psalms end. There is perhaps a simpler breakdown where a cry and a complaint is the antecedent situation up to that point in time that has given rise to the cry, given rise to the complaint, what has just been happening in my life that I'm down in my knees with my heart broken.
When you see a pattern like this and David having written, there's eight of them in the Psalms, I don't actually know if he wrote all eight of them, he didn't write all. Of course 150 Psalms, Asaf wrote quite a few, Moses wrote one, but there is this pattern and perhaps we might say all of our prayers have to be spontaneous and so on. Well wait a minute, that's not the case here. There's a pattern here.
And when we return to that place of Lament, when we return to that place of grief of calling out to the Lord, we might have a sense of how I've been here before. Well what I gather from this is it's okay to have been here before. That's okay. That heaviness that you might bring to that situation of prayer before the Lord, at least you're alive.
At least you have some kind of sensibility of the need and you are underneath the three that we'll consider this morning. The cry to God, my mother used to say, don't bottle things up. You don't hear people saying that very often anymore. And my mother was certainly a warm hearted believer and she had many things that caused her grief, myself being one of them sometimes.
And when this cry comes out, sometimes it comes out with tears, I only ever saw my father cry once in my whole life at my brother's funeral. But I saw my mother cry as a teenager and at other times. When you think about a cry, there's not a lot of sort of, it's not very articulate. What's articulate about a cry?
But such as it is, bring it. Bring it to the Lord. Psalm 3, that's it. One word.
Lord. That's it for that song. I wonder whether sometimes it's going to be after that, a long pause and some tears. It's okay.
The Lord sees everyone. The Lord heard you cry. Look at this Psalm 13. This cry, how long will that forget me?
Oh Lord, forever? You're going to hide your face for me forever. David frequently made reference to the face of God. We heard this morning about beholding the face of the Lord Jesus.
It's absolutely essential. And we are in a position of being able to do that in our hearts and minds through the Spirit. Number six, about 27. That was on my wedding invitation almost 44 years ago.
The Lord's face shine upon you. I wrote it on my son's birthday card. He's 33 years old after tomorrow. And by the way, Phoebe's birthday is tomorrow.
She's going to get mad at me for saying that. And she's 39. Yeah. So what you see here is an expression of where is this?
I'm not seeing you. I'm aware of number six, but I'm not experiencing that. Have you forgotten? There's a sense in which this is a kind of complaint.
You know, shall I say that it's slightly insulting to God? Does God forget anything? Of course not. Is he hiding his face from me on purpose?
Has he moved or have I moved? But I think that to err on the side of genuineness before God, that's a good thing. Are you upset? Are you maybe even a bit upset with God?
You can actually express that as we heard this morning. He is a God of love, a God of eternal love. We can afford to be genuine before our God. It's interesting here.
We see that David's desire is analogous to thirst. And we know that the Lord Jesus is the source of living water, eternal water. And we should never stop thirsting for that water and it's also perfectly okay to express thirst for God. We mentioned was made earlier of our physical redemption.
When indeed we look forward to the time when we shall be like him. We shall see him as he is. And so we will be like him when he appears. Coming to a complaint seems like I was just saying a rather unspiritual thing to do.
How about this? I don't actually believe in New Year's resolutions. But how about this for 2026? I'm never going to complain to a human being.
I'm going to complain to God. Much better idea. Bring your pain to God. Bring your problems to God.
Bring the things to God that don't make any sense to you. Bring them all. My dad used to say something that I really didn't like because he was always right. Sometimes he would say, what's eating you?
Yeah, that's not an eating me. Well obviously there is. What's eating you? Yep.
Didn't like to hear that. Didn't want to admit it. Didn't want to admit it to him. Didn't want to admit it to myself.
Sometimes when there's something eating us, we need to admit it to ourselves and we need to admit it to God. And if it's the form of a complaint, so be it. Bring your genuineness, your sincerity. Even though sometimes it's contaminated, bring it to the Lord.
Trouble. Trouble. 55 times in the book of Psalms. Trouble.
Many are they. Many are they, many they're be. Which they have my soul. There's no help for him.
People may write you off. People may rise up. And I think that in this day and age, evil things rise up. Evil things attack you.
They rise up and they attack you. And they seem to be increasing, do they not? What did the Lord say in John 1633? In this world you will have trouble.
But take heart. I have overcome the world. Be a good cheer. I have overcome the world.
There will be tribulation. But the Lord is the one who has overcome it. I looked up how many times the two words. How long?
Happen in the Psalms. How long? How long? How long?
How long? How long? How long? How long?
How long? How long? How long? How long?
How long? 15 times. Did that bother you a little bit? Well, bring to God.
Bring your how long to God. Are things not working out? Is God going to get irritated with you for saying how long? We have in Luke 18.
It was 18. Remember that parable in Luke 18? A widow. Wasn't bangs on the judges door at the middle of the night.
Would you bang on a Nova Scotia magistrate or judges door at his personal home in the middle of the night? Ooh, I don't think so. But the Lord said it's like that. Bang on my door in the middle of the night.
And he is the judge of all the earth. The index of parables, including the parable of the widow pounding on the door at the back of that Bible, which I got for free at a thrift store. Says the import unit widow. That's not a word you hear every day, is it?
import unit. It's related to part is and the opportunity you take away the op at the front. Opportunity. Importunity.
Well, take the opportunity to be import unit. Bang on the door. Even if you have to say, you know, I'm waking up. And this is on my heart.
Of course, the judge of all the earth. He'll hear you. You can bring it to him. Tears.
Anybody take a guess as to how many diets have come into being since the Second World War? All different kinds of diets. Eat only this. Eat these three things.
Eat protein. Don't eat. Never end of it. Well, it seems like one of the things that we need a diet of a bit in order to be spiritually healthy.
Not going to like this. It's a bit of a diet of tears. A diet of tears. Do some things break your heart?
I hope so. If you say to yourself, actually nothing breaks my heart. I never have tears. I think you need to examine yourself better to bring your tears before God.
Better to have that in your diet than no tears at all. My tears have been my meat day and night. That sounds very bad because tears don't have many calories. And if you, that's what you have for days.
It's rough. But sometimes it's the reality. And it's right to say, where is God? I'm not feeling him right now, but I know how to knock on that door.
Number three, at 12 minutes after 12. The connection. What do I mean by that? I put it in single quotes.
The part of that is a reminder to self. I'm a huge guy for post-it notes. Maybe it's a confession. Maybe it's an expression of trust.
But this moment of connection, you've had this cry and you've had this complaint. And what came to my mind was something that doesn't exist anymore. And that is the fax machine. Sometimes you used to go to the office and try to send the fax and some of the fail.
Fail. Try again. I don't know. Try again later.
And then ... The connection is going through. And paper goes through and you feel good. That connection has been made.
I used to try to make the secretary of pool laugh, walk into the department's head office and say, ah, the smell of white out in the singing of fax machines in the morning. Make that connection. Establish that connection. You need that reassurance.
You made a cry. You made a complaint, maybe you're a little bit ashamed of your complaint, but you come to that moment where you know that you're with the Lord and that God's Spirit is working with your Spirit to pray. It has various forms, but you're online with God. Here's another one for 2026.
How about spending a little more time online with God? I don't have my phone just as well, and the less time online online. That's a good suggestion, and that would make your 2026 better 2026. So the psalmist, the thou, oh Lord, are my shield and the lifter up of my head.
You didn't know that, you see. The shield was invisible. You never saw it, but it was there. It was there all the time through all the bad stuff, through all the difficulties.
It was there, and my mom used to, you know, when I was like seven, cried about something. Do you remember this, do you? Lift up. Oh, Jenna, should do that.
And we need that heavenly touch. We need the Father sometimes to lift up our head. We had to cry. We had to complain.
And then the psalmist says, but, but, but, turning the corner here, being reminded of invisible things, of the experience of God's mercy. What does it say in Lamentations 3? You wake up from your sleep. I'm going to be speaking a little bit about sleep.
They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. I'm going to be almost like a resurrection of hope and of truth and of mercy in your heart to start the day. That's good.
That's good to know that. To pour out your soul, to go with the multitude. It's interesting here. He says the past tense, doesn't he?
When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me. For I had gone with the multitude. I went with them to the house of God, with a voice of joy and praise, with the multitude that kept holy days. Why art thou cast down?
It makes me wonder, did you stop going to meeting? Is that what happened? You're looking back and you're going, you know, it was such a blessing. Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together.
Pause it. The writer to Hebrew says, as the manor of some is, yes, there are some who do forsake going with God's people to a place of worship. Don't be like that. If you want to be lifted up and overcome this sense of being cast down to come to the place and you say, well, why?
Why am I cast down? I know what it's like to rejoice. I should be rejoicing. Why am I disquieted?
I should hope again in the Lord. I should experience God's mercy all over again in his refreshment. This is kind of a soul searching. In this connection, David goes through some soul searching.
Maybe in 2026, you'll be able to do some soul searching on your knees. Maybe some of you have a post-it note on a night table and you're on your knees and you look sideways to the post-it note. This one has a need. That one's in distress.
All kinds of needs. But you know when it comes to these psalms and these prayers, where does that come from? From within. A lament is from within.
We should examine ourselves before the Lord. We should bring our petitions to the Lord. I cried unto the Lord with my voice. You pray out loud?
And you heard me. I know you heard me. What's the result? Godly sleep.
Have you experienced? Godly sleep. That's a wonderful sleep. The sleep where the heart and mind are at peace.
Yes, that's a wonderful thing. It's quite different from a fitful sleep. But God gives that. God can give to you that Psalm 3.
I laid me down and slept. The Lord sustained me. What's this? Psalm 13, another kind of sleep.
Not good. Sleep of death. Oh my. That doesn't sound good.
None of these things are good. He says light in my eyes. Are you rising darkness? That's not good.
Is your sleep not the peace of God? Is the sleep like death? Is your enemy? Whatever the enemy may be.
Rejoicing. What to do? Well, you bring all of these things to God. Bring them all.
They say that on the battlefield, a friend of mine was big on Middle Ages history. And he told me that when a battle would begin, all these guys with swords and shields and helmets and maybe 15% of them were hired. The other guys were farmers that had been grabbed. Here take this shield.
We're going over there. We're going to fight those guys. And then the battle would break out. And on both sides, all of the guys that they had just grabbed, they ran away.
Well, that'd probably be what I would do. You drag me into a battle that I'm not even sure I care about. You use the word morale. Morale is very, very important.
As Stephen Michaels knows, as a chaplain in the military. Morale is very important. You have no morale? That's really bad.
You could actually be having and it's happened in a big majority of soldiers and lose because you guys have no morale. Do you flee at the first sign of trouble? Your inner man. It's very important.
The state of your inner man. Do you have pain in your inner person over things like where is the Lord? Or do you have pain that's physical? Which one would you choose, by the way?
Which one do you think is worse? If I tell you you're going to have severe emotional and spiritual pain, that's one option. Or you're going to have physical pain. I think a lot of people, including me, would say, I'll take the physical pain.
There are ways to deal with physical pain. If my heart is broken and I don't know what to do about my broken heart, that's worse. So let's look to the future. We live by grace.
You will hear people talk about New Year's resolutions. But we live by grace. His mercies are new every morning. Let us grab hold of them.
Our strength and hope are in the Lord. What will 2026 be like for you? I'll ask you this. What do you want it to be like?
Do you want to grow in grace? Examine your own heart's desire. That's strange. Margins change by themselves.
Well here's three things. First one from Psalm 3. I will not be afraid. Very good.
Fear is such a paralyzing thing. For morale, your sense of encouragement. It's very, very powerful. And it needs to come from the Lord.
It needs to be from the Holy Spirit. I will not be afraid. By the grace of God, I will not be afraid. It could be 10,000 people against me.
But I'm not going to be paralyzed by fear. I'll rejoice. I will rejoice. And I will sing.
How hard is that? I will sing. Ephesians 5, 19, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. So even in your heart, singing to the Lord.
It's a good thing. It's a very good thing. It's not so difficult, right? I'll tell you where it's very easy is when other people are drowning you out.
That's good. Let us drown each other out. Let us sing from the bottom of our hearts. Let's get together and do it.
And sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. It's been cut off there. And of course, that again means that we don't want to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Let's get together.
I will sing, says the psalmist. Psalm 42. Hope, now in God, for I shall yet praise him. Praises certainly, I guess, a matter of the heart arising from the heart.
But it's also a choice. It's also a choice to praise the Lord from the heart and from the mind. Just like faith. Faith is from the heart, but it's also from the mind.
And praise should come from us, from our hearts, and from our minds. So we can enjoy that number six countenance of God. So we had in Luke 11 the disciples noticing how much time the Lord Jesus spent in prayer. And they had the sense of, you know, we need to be more like that, but we just don't know how.
You know, you can also bring that to the Lord. You can tell him you don't know what to say. But you should try. In 2026, you should and must try.
And he will. And he will. And if you need some inspiration, this is the inspired Word of God. It can inspire you.
It can encourage you. It can give you some of the words that you might need to get started in your prayer to God. And in Romans 8, Paul says, the Holy Spirit enables us with groanings that words cannot express. You have some hard things to talk about with God.
Try that. Do that in the coming year. And I think if you do, if you do rely on the Holy Spirit, allow your heart and mind to be guided by God's Word. If you do get together and sing and worship and pray, there's always Thursday night, you know, but also pray on your own.
Pray from your heart like the Psalmist lament. Pray from the Post-it note. Pray, pray, keep praying. Of all the people in the world, the Christian should be a person who knows how important perception is.
Do you see the fields? Other people may not. But as a Christian, if you see that the fields are white with harvest, I hope that your heart will be stirred to go out and take part in that harvest. Lift up your eyes.
Lift up your eyes. And so as we look forward to his appearing in the coming year, which could happen. Let us be people of prayer. Let us be children of God who spend time on our knees and in prayer, whether it's a cry or a complaint or a petition, establish that connection and look forward to experiencing the mercy and power of God in the coming months.
Let's pray. Father, we have been comforted. You have comforted us many, many times. You have guided us many times.
Help us not to forget. Help us to live each day by the power of the Spirit, knowing the mercy of God, and bringing our troubles to the Lord Jesus. In whose name we pray, amen. And so we are going to sing one of my favorite hymns, expressing almost in a childlike manner that the obvious thing to do in trouble, in questioning situations.
I must tell Jesus, do that in 2026. The Lord bless you.