When the Night Feels Too Dark | Psalm 116

This Mother’s Day, our family added a new fur baby to our collection. Our first child was a fur baby. We started with fish. Once they—well, many didn’t live. But once we practiced a little bit with them, we upgraded to a fur baby, and then we have children. I have a poster from our first dog that says, “Remember, I’ll always be your firstborn,” for my first Father’s Day. This is our new one; this is Peaches. Our other one’s called Pebbles, so she’s just called Peaches because we thought those were cute names together. She’s very young, about 11 weeks now. And so we are experiencing some of the joys of nighttime babies. It’s not the same. I’m not trying to say it’s the same. If you’re in the thick of a real nighttime baby, then I’m not trying to say it’s the same thing. However, there’s been a few nights where a puppy has wanted attention multiple times through the night and we’ve had to try to work out how to deal with that.

We’ve all had different experiences of a nighttime wakeup, whether it’s parenting or other things. You know that experience where your body should start moving, your brain should be thinking something, but those things are just not happening. We had a couple of those nights where there’s a cry. I can hear it. And it’s like that in the pit of your soul. Your body says, “No way. I’m not moving out of bed right in this moment.” Eventually, you have to fight that. There’s this experience, I think, that happens when you’re in the dead of a difficult night for whatever reason and everything is covered by the darkness of night. You know that experience where you just long for morning because it’ll just be so much easier. Everything looks completely different. Whether it’s you’re trying to fall asleep and your mind is running over and over things, or it’s the middle of the night, you’ve woken up and you’ve got struggles that you’re wrestling with. Or you’re being kept awake by something that just holds you awake. We all know that experience, and there’s something about the light that sheds light on that, right? It transforms things.

One of the helpful things as we come to the Bible is often the Bible talks about that fog of the night. It often talks about darkness, but it draws us back to the light. It keeps reminding us of the light. And so as we come to Mother’s Day and think about the light in the silence, which has been the message we’ve been thinking about during Esther, we thought we’d take a break from Esther and spend a bit of time thinking about that in one of the Psalms. There’s a whole lot of Psalms that were written around the same time that the book of Esther was written. There are clues in the Bible of them being the same time that Israel had been exiled. And then we call it the post-exilic. It’s the phase of time where they were allowed to come back to Israel. And so these are the post-exilic psalms. We’re going to look at Psalm 116. And I think Psalm 116 gives us a really good glimpse into that picture of the light amidst the night.

Because it’s a psalm, which is a song in the Bible, we want to treat it with that kind of structure. We want to think about how this song is delivered to us. This song in particular, Psalm 116, is so clearly broken into two halves that for a while it was considered two different psalms. But eventually, it was realized this is actually one psalm that’s just two different halves. And so it became Psalm 116 all on its own. So we’re going to look at this psalm this morning, think about the light amidst the night. I want to think about these two. I’ve broken the psalm into two halves this way. The first half of the psalm is going to be sing to your soul. And the second half of the psalm we’re going to look at is sing of your savior.

Sing to Your Soul

The first half of the psalm, sing to your soul. This song has a really light-to-night-to-light pattern to it. It starts off in the light. And it’s a really encouraging thing in that space. Getting light onto darkness is really important for us to understand that. I don’t know if you saw this story in the news recently. This is Nico, a five-year-old who called 911 in April because there was a monster under his brother’s bed. The police showed up and they have the body cam footage of Nico answering the door. I don’t know where his parents are. I understand he called 911, but they don’t answer the door when the police knock. Nico shows up dressed in his SWAT gear. He’s got his Nerf gun. He’s got his mask and he explains to the police officer, “There’s a monster under my bed.” And the police officer asks, “What does the monster look like?” He says, “It’s sharp teeth.” He says, “What kind of sound does it make?” It’s like a scratching sound. And so the police officer says, “Look, Nico, I don’t think we need to call the SWAT team. I think you and I got it together.” And he takes him into his brother’s bedroom, crawls in under his brother’s bed, and he pulls out this mask. He pulls that out from under the bed. When it moves, it makes this scratching. It’s a roar, but it’s a low-quality speaker kind of roar. It is just a dinosaur mask. You see them in Kmart. And you understand that in the light on the shelf in Kmart, this is a fairly fun little kids’ toy. And you can imagine in the dead of night looking under your brother’s bed at this thing that’s making a noise. It’s a totally different thing. The way the body cam footage ends is the police officer gives him a badge saying, “You’re now officially part of the SWAT team. Thanks for helping me.” And leaves with the mask and says, “Go back to bed next time. Tell your parents.” I just feel like the kid woke up in the morning, said, “Tell these parents what happened in the night.” Like, “Look, I’ve got this SWAT team badge.” His parents were like, “What the heck is where have you found that? And what is this story?” It’s pretty amazing. It’s amazing the difference shedding light on the night makes. And that’s what we get in this psalm. We get incredible light at the start.

I love this first verse of the psalm. It says, “I love the Lord because he hears my voice.” The first thing the psalmist wants to remind himself is that the Lord knows him, hears his voice. In fact, he says, “and my prayer for mercy.” He says, “When I pray, I know the Lord hears it.” We understand that idea of recognizing a voice. In fact, it echoes very similar to Psalm 23 where it says, “The shepherd knows his sheep.” But this is the other—sorry, the sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, but we get that picture that the shepherd knows his sheep, which is the picture we get here. We know that idea of even recognizing your own children’s voices and the impact it might make. There’s a difference between hearing another child cry and hearing your own child cry. Not that you are suddenly heartless and don’t care about other children, but there is something different about that kind of experience.

For Susie and I, when we were going through that phase, we were doing that juggle between figuring out whether sleep is going to be child-led or parent-led. It’s always child-led whether you like it or not. But trying to encourage a child to self-settle, we’d have these moments where we would have to go through this checklist of saying, “Okay, nappy is dry, food has been fed, bed is warm, there’s nothing else to do, and we need to let this child see if it will settle.” But the next thing was us standing outside the door, encouraging each other not to go in. Be like, “I’m done. I’m done. I’m going in.” And go, “No, we’d set a timer. It’s just going to be five minutes. Just set five minutes.” And you’d be like, “Okay, it’s five minutes. No, it’s 60 seconds.” And so you kind of egg each other on saying, “No, you just come on. Wait five minutes.” Because the sound of the cry is a difficult thing to process. That’s the picture we get here of a God who hears and knows the psalmist’s voice. But the next bit is even greater. It says, “because he bends down to listen.” And so the psalmist says, “I will pray as long as I have breath.”

It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it? In fact, this is 400 years before Jesus, but this is a beautiful picture of the God who draws near in a very physical way in Jesus. That is the story of Christmas, of a God that draws so near to us that he becomes one of us. He comes to show a way to God. But at the same time, he experiences humanity in a way that brings us a new unity with God. And then he has also come to make a way that we might be united with God. This is the God who bends down to hear.

A Real Terror in the Night

And it’s important we start with the light because there is a very real night. The Bible never shies away from telling us that there’s a darkness. There’s a criticism people say of faith stuff that we just use it to make things easy for ourselves and pretend the terrible things aren’t there. That’s not the picture of the Bible at all. The picture of the Bible is very clear the terrible things are there. It’s very anchored into that. There is a real terror in the night. We see it as we’ve been working our way through Esther and that time period where prophets are silent and through the book of Esther, there’s no mention of God. And it’s this big question, what is God doing in the silence? But when we step back from it all, we see that God is at work even in that silence. And the reality is we face our own difficult terrors. And I think we all know what they are. Some of us experience things that others haven’t. And some of us experience global terrors in countries where there’s real terrorism. But many of us experience terrors in our life and are right now experiencing terrors in our life. There are real terrors. And the psalmist doesn’t shy away from saying there is a night. He says, “The terrors of the grave overtook me.” Once again, we get a real picture of Psalm 23. You know those words, “Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” That’s the message we get from Psalm 116. He says, “The terrors of the grave overtook me. I saw only trouble and sorrow.” There are real terrors. The Bible doesn’t shy away from it. And Jesus came and experienced terror himself. I think we see that really clearly in the garden of Gethsemane where we’re told there was so much stress on him that the blood came out of his sweat. This is a God that came near and experienced the darkness in a very real way.

A Real Rescue

And just as there’s a real terror, the psalmist wants to say there’s a real rescue. That’s not where it ends, just in a God who experienced the terror, but it’s a God who is in control over the terror. And so this psalm goes from light to night back to light again. He gives us this creedal statement, this statement of faith and belief. Verse 6: “How kind the Lord is, how good he is, so merciful this God of ours.” This is a statement that is repeated throughout the New Testament. In fact, the Old Testament. The first time we see it is in Exodus 34. Moses is receiving the Ten Commandments and he gets this statement from God, this reminder of who God is, that God is kind and good and merciful. We see it again in some of the psalms like Psalm 103. It says it like this: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love.” In fact, it’s a psalm we read at funeral services because it’s a reminder of the God who is kind and good and merciful. In the Anglican prayer book, it’s a psalm that is used to announce forgiveness from God, that he is kind and good and merciful. This is the God of the Old Testament that time and time again we’re reminded of this. Sometimes we look at the Old Testament, we think the Old Testament God is the God of judgment. And certainly, the Old Testament brings to light the terror that is in the world in a way far more significant than we find in the New Testament. And therefore, because the terror of the world is so in the forefront, the God who addresses that terror, the God of justice and judgment, is also in the forefront. But he’s not a different God. He’s still the God who is kind and good and merciful.

Singing in the Night

And so we are encouraged to sing in the night. And we’re encouraged to do that by singing to our soul. This is what he said in verse 7: “Let my soul be at rest again for the Lord has been good to me.” This is what the psalmist, this is the way, the therapy for the terror: to remind himself of the God that is kind and good and merciful, to sing that song to his very soul. It’s something we do when we gather together all the time when we’re singing. When we are singing together, we’re doing many things in that moment. One of them is singing to each other’s soul. We’re declaring things together. One of them is we’re uniting together while we sing the statements that we believe. And one of those things we’re doing is singing it to our own soul to remind ourselves of the truth. And you may have experienced that moment in church where either it’s hard to sing a line of a song where it really hits you and you think, “Do I really believe that in this moment?” And we have to sing that truth to our soul even when we don’t feel like we believe it.

And so we sing to our soul, and the words we sing is that my soul will be at rest again. We’re reminded the place where we belong is in the presence of the Savior. God’s goodness is in that place where there’s rest in his presence. I think of that experience that happens when a child has a nightmare and the comfort they have in going to their parents. They say things like you shouldn’t let your child sleep in your bed because they’ll just keep wanting to sleep in your bed. I myself slept when I had a nightmare. I’d go to my parents and sleep in their bed and hardly ever do anymore. You know that moment that happens. I have an experience, actually, I don’t know what age I was, but there was a moment where I had this night terror and I went into my parents and they just said, “Go back to bed, you’ll be fine.” Maybe I was just hitting an age where they were like, “You’re old enough to handle this.” I remember this one night where I just was in terror and I didn’t know what to do, just over nothing, and the loneliness that comes from that moment. It’s one of the things I feel like no matter how much I feel out of it, if the kids come into our room at night, I want to try to make sure I’m there for them. Try to not let them experience that kind of loneliness. But we do experience that, and we know the power of the comfort of the presence of someone who cares for us. God is that. There is rest in his presence. The one who gives us rest for our soul. And so we sing to our soul that we can return to rest for our soul in him.

Sing of Your Savior

We sing to our soul, and the psalm also tells us we sing of our savior. One of the reasons this psalm so significantly breaks into two halves is it moves from this language where the psalmist is singing to himself to this language where he’s proclaiming things to others. In fact, it opens with verse 10 which says, “I believed in you so I said.” Now, the way the New Living Translation has translated that, it flows into the next sentence. It says, “I believed in you, so I said,” and then it goes on to what it said. But actually, there’s a statement going on in that little clause that’s even more significant than just opening what he said. The statement is that because of that belief, the psalmist feels the need to speak. The biggest reason we can know that that’s true is that’s what Paul says in the New Testament. This is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4. He quotes this psalm. He says, “We continue to preach because we have the same kind of faith that the psalmist had when he said, ‘I believe in God, so I spoke.’” That’s what’s happening here. There’s a shift in the psalmist that’s saying, “Not only am I singing to my soul, I’m going to proclaim it to others.” That one of the things that is good for me is for those words to not just be internalized, but to be external, to come out of me to others.

Sometimes we talk about the idea when we’re singing in church that because it’s all about our relationship with God, people use the language sometimes about an audience of one. “Sing as though you’re singing to an audience of one.” That it is just you and God. But the reality is when we sing together, it’s not just an audience of one, is it? There are others there. And if we are just to pretend they’re not and do what’s best for us, that could actually be quite a selfish form of singing. It’s not just about when we sing together whether I feel like singing and what’s good for me. It’s also what is good for all of us. It’s not just what I’m declaring and reminding myself of. It’s what I’m declaring to all of us. It’s something we’re doing together. And so we sing of our savior in the darkness. We don’t just remind ourselves of the light. We remind others of the light. This is a song still of doubt. It says in verse 11, “I am deeply troubled, Lord.” The psalmist hasn’t suddenly ignored what’s going on. As he talks to others, he’s not pretending everything’s okay. But nonetheless, he wants to do the same thing he did for his own soul. He wants to draw back to the light.

A Song of Salvation

And so he sings a song of salvation. Here’s the key part of that song of salvation. This is verse 12 and 13.

What can I offer the Lord
    for all he has done for me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
    and praise the Lord’s name for saving me.
Psalm 116:12-13

“What can I offer the Lord for all he’s done for me?” That is the ultimate question. What do you get the person who has everything? That is the question the psalmist is asking, right? I don’t know how you went with Mother’s Day presents this year and you say, “What do I get the mother who has everything?” The psalmist is saying that’s a small thing compared to trying to think about what you could offer God. What can you offer God who has everything? What does he say? He says, “I’m going to offer God my own needs. I’m going to long for him even more.” That is like the—it’s not quite like this. You know the idea that when someone’s been—so a mother’s been working in the kitchen and says, “I’ve done all this to prepare this meal, you’ve done nothing.” And the child says, “I’m going to eat it. It’s my contribution.” You go, “That’s not really the thing you’re after to contribute.” However, you also know the opposite is true. When you’ve gone to great effort to cook a meal and you put it in front of kids who don’t want to eat it, that is a problem in itself, right? That is a whole another kind of feeling like this was a waste of time and frustration. That’s part of the picture we get here. What do you offer the one who has everything? You take what he has offered. You enjoy the thing that he has given you.

That’s the picture. We have a cup of salvation. In fact, this psalm is one of the group of psalms that was read in the Passover meal in Jesus’ time. And so it became part of the tradition of the Jewish people after these psalms were written to read these psalms. And in the Passover meal, there’s a number of toasts that happen. The expectation is the third toast. The understanding is probably the third toast, the cup of redemption, is the one that Jesus held up and he said, “This is my blood poured out for you.” And then this psalm would be the fourth toast, the cup of salvation. This is a song Jesus himself sung with his disciples, reading these words about lifting up that cup of salvation. And more incredibly, the next day Jesus lifts up that cup of salvation by himself being lifted up. That there’s a reminder that the God who draws near and experiences terror also is the God who made a way that we can live beyond the terror. A God who draws near in presence in a physical way of becoming humanity has made a way that we can live in his presence even now. That the punishment that humanity deserved for rebellion against him, the punishment that every individual deserves for rebellion against God, Jesus took humanity’s rejection on himself so that he might offer forgiveness for that rejection and a way for us to be friends with God. So, how do we repay the one that has done all that? We receive the gift that he offers. We need to stop trying to pay God back, but instead bring our thirst to the fountain to lift up the cup of salvation.

An Invitation into the Family of Light

We sing to our soul, but we also sing to others’ souls. We sing a song of our savior. Let me finish with this. There’s an invitation there to become part of the family of that light. In the darkness, there’s an invitation to become part of God’s family. These are the words towards the end of the psalm: “Oh Lord, I am your servant. Yes, I am your servant, born into your household; you have freed me from my chains.” This is the invitation that as we lift up the cup of salvation, there’s an invitation into the family of light. In Ephesians chapter 5, Paul uses that language, “live as children of light.” That’s the picture that we’re given and that’s the invitation we’re given. As we think about all the dynamics of families over Mother’s Day, we’re reminded that this is a true family that is the best place. Our creator who made us has made a way that we can be united with him and he invites us into that family.

I want to encourage you once again, like we said, we’re not running Alpha today, but this coming Sunday we will have Alpha in the Sunday afternoon. If you still have someone you’d like to invite to hear the Alpha talks and hear more about the goodness of God and the salvation he offers, it’s not too late. The first week is a primer to the course. The second week asks the question, “Who is Jesus?” If that’s you and you want to wrestle with that yourself, then I would encourage you, it’s not too late. Sign up for Alpha. But also just talk to someone in your life who loves Jesus because there is an invitation that we sing this to each other. We share the goodness of God and his salvation.

Oh, there is a child. His name is Jesus. His name is Jesus. His name is Jesus.