Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Praying Our Tears

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

What do you do with your tears? This is a psalm about weeping, about suffering, about grief. If you were to break the 150 psalms into categories, one of the categories will will be lamentations: psalms of tears, psalms of weeping and grieving. There are many other kinds of psalms, but I’ll tell you, every commentator says there are more lamentations than any other kind. This is the biggest piece of the Psalter. Tears.  What do we learn here what to do with our tears? We’re told three things: 1) expect tears, 2) invest tears, and 3) pray your tears. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on February 27, 2000. Series: Psalms – The Songs of Jesus. Scripture: Psalm 39:12-13; 126:1-6. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. We'd like to help you prepare your heart for Christmas by sending you a free daily devotional during the Advent season. To sign up, just visit gospelinlife.com slash Advent to receive an email each day from December 1st through December 24th. Again, to sign up, just go to gospelinlife.com slash advent. Now, here's today's teaching from Tim Keller. Let's read Psalm 39 verses 12 to 13 and Psalm 126 verses 1 to 6. Hear my prayer, O Lord. Listen to my cry for help. Be not deaf to my weeping,

for I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger as all my fathers were. Look away from me that I may rejoice again before I depart and am no more. When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, The Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great

things for us, and we are filled with joy. Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him." This ends the reading of God's Word. Now as you can see, this is a psalm or a couple of psalms about weeping, about suffering, about grief. We're looking for several weeks, not many, it's a short series, on the Psalms.

It's sort of the opposite in a way of the series on the Apostles' Creed. When you take a look at the great teachings, the great doctrines, the great principles of the Christian faith, it stretches your mind. But when you go to the Psalms, it goes deep into the heart, deep into the emotions, deep into the motives of the heart. And what you have in the Psalms, and this is a general introductory word I'll probably say every week, the Psalms gives us a gospel third way with your feelings. It's a third way between what religiosity and what secularity ordinarily tell you to do with your feelings. See, religiosity is very uncomfortable with feelings. Religious

people, by and large, want to deny the power and the depth and the darkness of their feelings. But on the other hand, secular people tend to see discovery and expression of your feelings almost as a good end in itself. And once they discover their feelings, in a sense, they bow to them, well, that's my feelings and I have to go with my feelings. But you see, to bow to your feelings or to stuff your feelings, to be overawed by your feelings or under aware of your feelings. That's dangerous. The Psalms doesn't either. The Psalms suggests neither. The Psalms does not say deny or vent,

but pray your feelings. Pray your deepest feelings. Bring them before God and process them. And that's something that I must tell you honestly, I have myself, as I would say in my own Christian life, that's a relatively recent discovery of what the differences are between those three. Today, last week we looked at doubt, this week we're looking at pain and sorrow, tears. What do you do with your tears? There's three things that these texts tell us. By the way, if you were to take the Psalms, 150 Psalms, and if you were to break them into categories, one of the categories always will be what are called

Lamentations. One of the categories is always Psalms of tears, Psalms of weeping and crying and grieving. And there's many other kinds of Psalms, but I tell you, even though it's always a little bit arbitrary which Psalm to stick in which category and so on, everybody admits, every commentator says that if you were going to break the Psalms into categories, there's more lamentations than any other kind. This is the biggest piece of the Psalter, tears. What do we learn here about what to do with tears? We're told three things.

Expect tears, invest tears, and pray your tears. Expect them, invest them, pray them. Now, first of all, let's take a look. Expect tears. Now, Psalm 126, verses one to three. Look, when the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like the men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter. Now, what is that? We're not sure

exactly what it is. I mean, there's, you know, there's debates. People say, well, this is the return of the children of Israel from exile in Babylon after 70 years and they rebuilt Jerusalem. We're not really sure. Nobody can be sure, but it doesn't matter for our purposes. The point is, God did something for them that was so big that all the other nations saw it and it was beyond anything they could even have imagined. Look, it says, we were like men who dreamed. It was a fulfillment of dream. They felt like all their dreams had been fulfilled more than they ever dared ask or imagine had been given to them. So God had done something terrific, but then we don't know what it

is, but it was great. But then in verse four, look, suddenly here where we are now is restore our fortunes, oh Lord. By the way, if you're studying this carefully, you'll see that the first three verses is in the present tense that the first three verses is in the present tense. And the last three verses is in the present tense. Now you say, wait a minute, how could this be? And the answer is, they remember the blessing of God, they remember the great thing God has done so vividly that they're describing it in the present tense. But where they are now is, restore our fortunes like streams in the Negev. Now the Negev was a barren, terrible desert, a lifeless desert.

And though now we, again, we don't know what was wrong, we don't exactly what happened, we don't know if they were going through a famine, a literal famine, if they were, you know, a literal heat, a sort of a literal desert experience, or whether they were going through a plague, or whether there was some crushing military defeat, we don't know. The point is now, their lives were like a desert. They've been blasted. Now, what's the first point? What do we learn?

The first point is even if God's in your life, even if you're walking with God, you should still expect tears. You should expect tears. You should expect lots and lots of tears. By the way, I'm giving you this as a...you know, you always like to hear...whenever...I don't know about you, when somebody says, I got bad news and good news, what do you want to hear first? I want to hear the bad news first. I want to end on good news. So I hope you don't mind. We're starting with the bad news. And the bad news is this. Christians have a little myth. And the little myth goes like this.

If I'm a good little boy or girl, if I'm a good little Christian, God's not gonna let anything really bad happen. But look carefully. We don't know what's happened. It's terrible. Their lives are like a desert. But there's no word of repentance here. Do you see anything? Do you see them saying, oh Lord, return. We have sinned. We have strayed from your ways. We have turned to the right hand or the left. But now, oh Lord, we commit ourselves to you again and be our Lord and we… No. There's no repentance. They're not saying it was because of our sin that our lives are like a desert. No. Their lives are like a desert even though they haven't done anything wrong, particularly. What's this mean? This means

that the Christians are wrong. Christians are supposed to expect tears. Not just because they live in the world where everyone has tears, where things do go wrong, but I'll press you a little bit on this. I think this indicates, since most Christians tend to think, well, if something's going wrong in my life, I must have been doing something wrong, I'm not having my devotions, or I'm not praying like I should, or I've done something wrong, not necessarily. If anything, you might want to realize that the Bible indicates that becoming a person of faith, if anything, may lead you to weep more. You say, well, how can that be? I'll give you two quick reasons why. Number one,

there's a great little metaphor that the Bible uses both in the Old and New Testament to describe conversion. I know there's many, many terms for conversion, but this is one of my favorite ones. In Ezekiel 11 and 36, Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians 3. Ezekiel says this, or God says this in Ezekiel. He says, I will remove from their heart, I will remove, pardon me, I will remove from their heart, pardon me, I will remove from them their heart of stone and I will give them a new heart of flesh. Now what's that mean?

It probably means a lot of things, but it means at least this. When the gospel changes your heart, when God comes into your heart, your heart becomes more of a heart. It's getting softer, it's getting more vulnerable, it's getting more touchable. In other words, you feel the evil and pain around you, and you feel also the pain of the people who are the victims of evil, and you feel grief over the evil,

you feel the things around you that before you just didn't. You found ways of, you found self-defense mechanisms, you found ways of disdaining the people around you, for example. When you saw evil people, you disdain them. The gospel changes that. When you saw people around you who were screwing up their lives, you said, well, you know, that's their problem, it's not my problem, but now you know what you've got and you know what they could be. Listen, there are all kinds of reasons why, if anything, Christians, as they grow in grace, should expect to cry more. And I guess the last proof of this, since I guess I would have to think that some of

you would find this a little hard to believe. There was once, according to the Bible, a perfect human heart that came into the world and lived here for a number of years. And one thing we know about that perfect human heart, he was always crying. He was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And so, do you see the reason why there's some kind of illogic here when the average Christian says, I want to be like Christ and I believe that as long as I'm good and as long as I'm walking with him, he won't really let too much bad happen to me.

I mean, I would say Jesus was walking pretty well with God. I don't think you could say nothing bad ever happened to him. And therefore, the first thing is, expect. Now, the reason I say this, very important. Maybe this seems too obvious. If you don't expect tears, you will always be crying about two things instead of one, and it's your fault. You'll be crying about the thing that grieves you, and you'll be crying about the fact that you're grieved.

You'll not only be crying about the thing that makes you unhappy, the trouble, the disappointment, but you'll be saying somehow deep in your heart, maybe unconsciously, but semi-consciously, you'll be saying, why is this happening? I've been living a good life. What good is this? Why is God letting this happen to me?

I shouldn't be crying. I shouldn't be weeping. See, you're weeping about two things. You're weeping about the thing that made you weeping. So you're weeping about two things. You're weeping about the thing that made you weep, and you're weeping about the weeping. And you're weeping about two things instead of one thing. And there's only, listen, you're gonna sink under that. One thing at a time is all we can take.

So adjust your expectations. Number one, expect tears. Secondly, invest your tears. Now, I'm using that word deliberately even though because we're modern people and we live in New York, but actually the metaphor is a little different. You'll see what I mean. Here's the metaphor and it's a very interesting thing that the psalmist says in verse five and six. Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him."

Now, at first, that doesn't look like something at all unusual. First of all, farmers go out to sow seed. And someday, I mean, it doesn't happen right away, but after a while, someday, they come back and they're filled with joy because they've gone out and there's sheaves coming up and they harvest the sheaves and they come back. So that's no big deal, right? We all know that when farmers go out after they've sown the seeds and at a certain time in the time of harvest they come back with songs of joy. But that's, it's saying something else here, and here's why.

It's true that all farmers go out, come back with sheaves of joy, I mean with songs of joy, but do they go out weeping as they sow? What's going on here? This is a poetic image, and here's the poetic image. The poetic image is the farmer is going out sowing tears or else perhaps watering their seed with tears. The poetic image is a little ambiguous, but that's the job of poetry. It's here to evoke, and this is what it's telling us.

Number one, do not avoid your tears, but on the other hand, don't just express your tears. You have to plant your tears. You have to sow your tears. Think about it. There's two ways. Remember we said religious people tend to stuff their feelings and secular people tend to just express them. But neither of those things are envisioned here. Because if you take your seed and just sit on it,

you'll never have a harvest, will you? But on the other hand, if you take your big bag of seed, walk six feet on out into the field and just dump it and come home, you're not going to have a harvest either. You can't stuff your seed and you can't dump your seed. You have to plant it. In other words, we're being told or being, to plant, to sow your tears, to see your tears as an opportunity for fruitfulness and growth. Now, there's a book I read some years ago that I don't remember anything about the

inside of the book. I don't think it was a great book, but I love the title. Never forgotten the title. It's helped me over the years, and the title of it was, Don't Waste Your Sorrows. Don't Waste Your Sorrows. See, that's very different. That's not a masochistic idea where it says, you know, embrace your sorrows. It's not saying that. But on the other hand, it's not a hedonistic spirit that says, avoid sorrows. It says, when the sorrows come, invest them. Plant them. plant them see investing. I figured was something I had to say to you because most of you probably don't work on a farm And yet, you know investing is the same idea

You don't just dump your money You invest it you find a place you send it out And if you've done it well, it brings in a return. And therefore, what we're told is we have to sow our tears. And look, what is the reward? What is the result? What are the sheaves? It's joy. This is really a mind-boggling thing. This is going beyond what most of us would hope the Bible teaches. And it does. We hope the Bible teaches that tears give way to joy. And of course, that's what the Bible says. Psalm 30 verse 5 somewhere, I think it is. It says, Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

So of course the Bible teaches that tears give way to joy. But this is deeper. This is more profound. This is saying that in the gospel, this is what the promise is, if you plant your tears, the tears produce joy. The tears don't just give way to joy, they produce joy. We don't just wait for the tears to go away. We plant them. They produce joy. So that's the reason why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4.17, he says, for our slight momentary affliction is achieving an eternal weight of glory that outweighs everything. Now that's the NIV, the New International Version, that word achieving.

You understand it's producing, see? For our slight momentary affliction, we're not just waiting for it to go away. It's producing. It's achieving an eternal weight of glory. It's glorifying us. It's changing. It's achieving an eternal weight of glory. It's glorifying us. It's changing us. See, it's bringing a harvest of joy into our heart. Or put it another way, the kind of joy you really need, the Bible says, is the kind of joy that is the product of tears.

There's a kind of joy that comes from avoiding tears. It doesn't really change you. There's a kind of joy that comes through the tears that does. Wow. So here's my question. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to sow your tears? Do you know how to plant them? Or do you just dump them or stuff them? Well, somebody says, actually all of you say, okay, how do I do that? And well, that's finally, you pray your tears. See, one of the things that's intriguing about Psalm 39 and Psalm 126 and all the laments or the laments, I don't even know how to say it, is their prayers. They're white hot, but they come before God with the feelings, with the tears. They come to God with the tears. And that's what transforms both the tears and the

weeper. Hi, I'm Kathy Keller. As we approach Thanksgiving, I invite you to join me and the rest of the Gospel in Life team in giving thanks to God for all He provides. Additionally, I want to thank God for all he's done this year and continues to do to bring people to trust in Christ through gospel and life. More than ever since Tim's death, I recognize it can be hard to give thanks when we experience the pain and brokenness of this world all around us. When we lose loved ones, when we fail in relationships or don't live our lives the way God wants us to, and there are wars and rumors of wars, but because of Christ's love we have an everlasting hope that cannot be

taken away. And through Christ's love God is bringing healing, restoration, and salvation into the world every day. We're extremely grateful for how God is working through the ministry of gospel and life, and today we give thanks for his faithfulness and yours. In Psalm 100 verses 4 and 5 we read, enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name, for the Lord is good and his love endures forever. His faithfulness continues through all generations. These verses are a powerful reminder of all we have because Jesus loves us. It's my hope that you will take time on this day between basting the turkey and setting the table

and all the stuff you have to do to give thanks for all that God provides and that we can join the psalmist in praise and thanksgiving. Thank you for all the ways that you've opened your hearts to pray for gospel in life, to support the ministry and to live out the Gospel. We give thanks for you and pray that God will continue working through Gospel in Life to shape you and encourage you.

Thanks be to God, He's changed everything through Christ. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Let me give you three things that you've got to do in a sense. Let's press the image a little bit. You have to put your tears in prayer into three things. A realization of His grace, a vision of the cross, and an assurance of glory. A realization of grace, a vision of the cross, and assurance of glory. You have to take your tears and you have to think about these three things as you cry. Here, I just want to show you what I mean. First of all, the first thing that has to happen is you... and I mean this has to happen almost before you...

you have to know this before you start crying, alright? That's what I'm telling you now. None of you actually look like you're actually crying now. Okay, so let me tell you this. You have to realize that God in His grace understands. He understands your weeping. It's safe to pour your heart out to Him. This is the thing that really hit me. It came home a couple years ago. Psalm 39, I have put the first two verses, you see, on this sheet, is really the last years ago. Psalm 39, I have put the first two verses you see on this sheet, is really the last two verses of Psalm 39. And because you don't have the whole Psalm in front of you, you don't realize how amazing, how disturbing this Psalm really

is. These are the last two verses. Let me read them to you. It's the Psalm of David. Hear my prayer, O Lord. listen to my cry for help. Be not deaf to my weeping, for I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger as all my fathers were. Look away from me that I may rejoice again before I depart and am no more. Now listen, let me tell you a little personal story here. When I first, some years ago, started going through Psalms and I got this Psalm, I had

trouble with it. I'm a logical person, I'm a rational person, and it didn't fit. It didn't fit in what my understanding was supposed to be. Let me show you. All the Psalms, especially the Psalms of David, they all are filled with wrestling and weeping and crying and shaking the fist at heaven and saying, how long? But they always end. They always end on a note of triumph sometimes, but at least a note of trust or a note of confidence or a note of peace. But when you go to, and that's how most of David's Psalms end. So for example, two of them that

are very famous, Psalm 16 is filled with fears, but the last verse is, this is the last verse of Psalm 16, David says, finally he says, you have made me known, you have made known to me the path of life. You will fill me with joy in your face, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. Actually, the old King James says, in thy face is fullness of joy, and in thy right hand are pleasures forevermore. And at the end of Psalm 17, again, it's filled with crying out and tears and unhappiness, but here's the last verse of Psalm 17. And I, in righteousness, will see your face, and when I I awake I will be satisfied with seeing your likeness."

Now here we have the Psalm of David, Psalm 39, and he's wrestling and he's weeping, and at the very end, look how it ends. It ends in absolute theological incorrectness. Let me tell you what he's saying. Look at it, look at it, and I'll paraphrase it. He is saying, look away from me. Turn your face away from me. Depart from me that I might have a little bit of peace before I die. And that's how he ends his prayer. This is a unit. This is a prayer. It's a prayer of David. And it ends with such overwhelming feelings that he actually tells God to do the very opposite of what he should be saying to God.

We're not supposed to pray like this. We're not supposed to feel like this. We're not supposed to be like this. We're not supposed to talk like this. But he does. And the thing that used to bother me so much is I used to say, wait a minute, what is this doing in my Bible? He's supposed to be telling me what to do and here he's lost it, he's blown it. What is it doing here? There were a couple of times I said, what does this mean to the idea that

the Scriptures are without error? Isn't this an error? Is this the way it's supposed to be? Are we supposed to do it this way? No. Then I came across a little note, just two sentences in a commentary on the book of Psalms by Derek Kidner. I got ahold of this a few years ago, but it really didn't just give me some help from my intellectual conundrum, it also gave me a comfort I've never gotten over. This is what he says. He says, the prayer, look away from me, makes no more sense than Peter's, depart from me. Yet God knows when to treat this plea as he does when Peter says it in Luke 5 or when the crowd says it in Matthew 8.34. But now here's the final sentence. the very presence of such prayers in the scripture is a witness to his understanding. He knows how we speak when

we are desperate. Now that... Sorry, I'm showing my age here. That blew my mind. Sorry. I'm sorry, that phrase still means something to me. It blew my mind why. I suddenly asked it to think. But the very presence of such prayers in the scripture is a witness to his understanding. He knows how we speak when we're desperate. He understands when our feelings so overwhelm us that we say desperate things, incorrect things. He understands so much,

he puts an example in the scripture saying, it's safe to pray like this with me. It's safe to pour out your deepest feelings with me. In other words, Psalm 39 shows us where your deepest feelings, your anger, your tears, where they belong. Where do they belong? Do they belong deep in your heart where you refuse to admit them or express them? Or do they really belong? Express, just dump. Now, listen, I'm all for talking to friends. I'm all for talking to counselors, all right? But ultimately, where your tears belong is not managed and packaged and manicured in some little confessional prayer. They belong in pre-reflective outbursts from the very

depth of your being in the presence of God. Pre-reflective outbursts. God says, look at Psalm 39, this isn't the way you're supposed to speak, this isn't the way you're supposed to feel, but I want you to speak and feel in my presence. It's safe. I understand what it's like to be desperate. So the first thing you've got to have, why? You have to have a realization of His grace. Why? Otherwise, you will not do that. You will not come to Him. You will either stuff them or dump them, but you won't take him to him. Because you really say, I shouldn't be feeling like this. But he says, in Psalm 39, he says, he's saying it's safe to come to me. I'm a God of grace. I understand.

Now that's the first thing you've got to have. The second thing, so you have to plant your tears in a realization of his grace. The second thing, you have to plant your tears in a vision of the cross. And in some ways, this is the most important. Listen to me. I know you are. You say, what else can I do? You got the microphone. All right. Why is he so understanding? Why do we have a God who understands the cry of dereliction? Because we have the only God who even claims, we have the only book, we have the only scripture that even claims that our God Himself came down into this world, became a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, and in the Garden of Gethsemane He said, my soul is sorrowful even unto death. And what he was saying when he said that was,

I think my sorrows are so great they're going to kill me before I even get to the cross. God knows what it's like, God knows what it's like to look to God and to have heaven barred, apparently. You see, God knows what it's like to look to heaven and to feel nothing. God knows what it's like to give a cry of dereliction, a cry of desperation. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And here's the reason why he's able, here's the reason why he's able, to keep coming to us even after we've said, turn away. Why can he say, why will he keep coming to us even after we said, turn away. Why will he keep coming to us? Why would he even put

it in Psalm 39 as an invitation? Why would he say, keep coming to me even though you said turn away? Because when Jesus Christ himself said, come to me. God turned away from him. In other words, Jesus got the abandonment we deserved. Jesus was calling for God and God turned his face away so that when we say to God, turn your face away, God will come because he experienced what we should have received and therefore he can be understanding. And when we see him on the cross and we put our tears in the vision of the cross, this is what I mean. On the cross we see the deep magic in a sense. You know, CSO has talked about deep magic. The medieval alchemists were looking for a magic way to turn lead into gold, right? But this is the magic that will turn your tears into gold.

If you look at Jesus on the cross crying, Why me? Why have you forsaken me? You will still cry sometimes, Why me? But you'll never cry, Why me? the same. When I see Jesus Christ on the cross, I see tears producing joy. Jesus Christ did not save us just by getting through the tears. His tears produced the joy. His tears produced the joy of our welcome into the bosom of God. And that means that whenever we see that, here's what we do.

Take your tears and think about him crying out on the cross. Think about him looking for God and God turning away from him. Here's what's going to happen. The first thing that's going to happen is your tears are going to change because we have a tendency when bad things happen to us to feel guilty. Right? Don't we say that? We say, what's wrong? Am I being punished? Am I a bad person? Get rid of that. How? You look at the cross and you say, wait a minute, even though I feel like I'm being abandoned by God, I'm not. Even though I feel like God's punishing

for my sins, He's not. Why? Because He was punished for my sins. Even though I feel like God's abandoning me, it's only an apparent abandonment because on the cross Jesus got real abandonment. And so if you ever feel during your suffering that God has rejected you, abandoned you, or you feel like a terrible person, you feel like a guilty, shameful person, that's because you haven't planted your tears in the vision of the cross. You're not looking at him dying for you. That means that God does not reject you. Jesus was rejected for you.

So plant your tears and you'll get rid of that unnecessary guilt. Secondly, plant your tears in the vision of the cross and something else will happen. You'll get rid of that self-pity. The thing that'll kill you, weeping is fine. Weeping in grief is fine. Weeping in disappointment is fine. Jesus was always weeping, but weeping in self-pity, ah. That will make you a small little person.

Someone who can't forgive, someone who is always feeling ill-used, someone who gets incredibly touchy and incredibly oversensitive. So what are you going to do? Look at the cross and say, you have really suffered for me. My sufferings are nothing compared to yours. If you suffer for me, I can be patient with this suffering for you. Or give me a thirdly, what if you're weeping and you're saying, I don't see what God is doing in this? You're impatient. Your tears are impatient.

And you say, I don't see what God is doing. Look at the cross again. And think of all the people who went home that night, who saw Jesus Christ dying on the cross, which was the greatest act of wisdom and salvation and grace and love in the history of the world, and who went home and lost their faith. I always think about that, do you? Do you realize how many people looked at Jesus dying on the cross because they couldn't understand it? They said, I don't even believe in God anymore. I don't see what good God could be bringing out of this. So they looked right in the face of the greatest thing God ever did and said, because I don't understand it, therefore my faith is undermined.

When you see Jesus lying on the cross and you can't figure out what God's doing in your life, remember that. The impatience, the self-pity, the unnecessary guilt, those are the things, if you plant your seed, if you plant your tears in the vision of the cross, those things are combed out and you'll start to become more like him. You'll just start to be humbled by the tears instead of becoming proud. You'll start to feel more sensitive to other people instead of more self-absorbed. In other words, plant your tears in a realization of his grace, plant your tears in a vision of his glory, pardon me in a realization of his grace, plant your tears in a vision

of the cross, and lastly, the last thing, plant your tears in an assurance of his glory. The last verse says, he who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, might return with songs of joy. Is that what it says? Possibly will. Who knows but? No. He says, he who goes out weeping, caring see to sow, will return with songs of joy. I was reading a very good book on the Psalms by Eugene Peterson called Answering God. And when he got to the last,

you know, the last five Psalms are Psalm 146 to 150. And there are nothing but praise Psalms. There's no, nothing in there but praise. There's no lamentation nothing but praise Psalms. There's nothing in there but praise. There's no lamentation, there's no confession, there's no meditation, there's no thanks. It's just praise, praise, praise, praise. Why? And this is what Peterson says. He says, we have to realize that what the Psalms are teaching us is that all true prayer pursued far enough will become praise. Any prayer, no matter how desperate its origin, no matter how angry and fearful the experience that it traverses, ends up in praise.

It does not always get there quickly. It does not always get there easily. In fact, the trip can take a lifetime. But the end is always praise. There are intimations of this throughout the Psalms. This is not to say that other prayers are inferior to praise, only that all prayer pursued far enough becomes praise. Don't rush it. Don't try to push it. It may take years. It may take decades before certain prayers arrive at the hallelujahs at Psalm

150. Not every prayer is capped off with praise. In fact, most prayers of the Psalms or his true guide are not, but prayer is always reaching toward praise and will finally arrive there. So our lives fill out in goodness, earth and heaven meet in an extraordinary conjunction clashing symbols announce the glory blessing. Amen. Hallelujah. Do you know the joy that's inevitably coming? if you know that, I'll tell you the reason why I'm afraid to weep. When you actually feel sorrow, there's a part of your heart that says, it's never going to get any better.

This is the way it's always going to be. There's a fear. You know, there's a place where C.S. Lewis, when he started grieving over his wife when she died, he says, nobody told me grief was so much like fear. You're afraid to weep. You're afraid you're never going to stop. But if you know that all prayer will end in praise, that we're going to be with him forever, that frees you to get involved with people's lives even though you know that's going to make you weep. Are you happy enough to be a weeper?

Are you assured of the glory enough to not be afraid to weep in repentance, to be quick to repent, fast to repent? Because, you know, tears produce joy. Are you happy enough in order to get involved in the lives and the hearts of the people of the city? Hope for New York says, get involved. We have a ministry fair. Get involved in the needs of the city. Hope for New York says, get involved. We have a ministry fair. Get involved in the needs of the city. It might make you weep. Are you happy enough for that? If you are, the tears you experience in ministry, the tears you experience in repentance, the tears you experience in friendships will produce a harvest of joy for the people around you and for your own heart.

Let's pray. Father, make us happy enough to weep. Help us to know how to sow our tears. We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. The Advent season helps us prepare our hearts to focus on the birth of our Savior. We'd like to send you a free daily devotional from December 1st through December 24th. Each devotional has a daily meditation on a Bible passage that points you to the true

meaning of Christ's birth. To sign up, just visit Gospelinlife.com slash Advent. Again, that's gospelinlife.com slash Advent. Today's sermon was preached in 2000. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.