Psalm 119, verse 49, this is God's word. Remember you're a word to your servant in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort and my affliction, that your promise gives me life. The insolent utterly deride me, but I do not turn away from your law. When I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort, oh Lord. Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law. Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning. I remember your name in the night, oh Lord, and keep your law. This blessing has fallen to me that I have kept your precepts. Read that far in God's word. When you're suffering, what's your prayer request? You pray for the suffering to be removed? Seems natural, and of course it's legitimate prayer, but is it the best thing to request? Should it be the only thing to request? This passage teaches us that God gives hope, he gives comfort, and a song to sing during our suffering. These are good things to pray for. Pray for hope, pray for comfort, pray for a song to sing during our suffering. This passage does not tell us that our God removes all our suffering. Powerful God could remove all of our suffering, and one day he will, but our God is more powerful than just removing all of our suffering. He's so powerful that, look at our main point, through remembering his promises, our God comforts us in our suffering, during our suffering. Our God gives us hope during our suffering. He gives us comfort, and even a song to sing. Most of us don't live on that high level of strong hope that God gives us, making full access and full use of all of the great hope that God gives us. We don't actually live that out. Most of us are down here dealing with stress and worry and anxiety. Most of us don't yet possess and experience the deep comfort that God gives us consistently every day, no matter the situation. But in this stanza, We continue with that theme we saw last time of getting to know God. Last time we looked at verses 41 to 48, getting to know God and specifically his love, God's love for us. Well that theme of getting to know God and his love for us continues now in the scenario in which we're suffering. Getting to know God and his love for us during our suffering, what does that look like? Getting to know God by prayerful study of his word. The emphasis here is finding God to be our comfort despite life's suffering. You know, we're not supposed to read our Bibles because we're supposed to read our Bibles. Instead, we're supposed to read our Bibles because we need to and we want to. Do we know that we need to? Sometimes God uses suffering to drive us back to him through his word and to cause us to know that we need his word. We need his direction, instruction, perspective every day. to get through our suffering. Sometimes suffering is a procedure, like a spiritual procedure that God performs on our souls to remove all of our deceptions about this, so that we know we need God, we need his word, his love, his help, his comfort, his hope, because we know that we need God today. When we're suffering, God is saying, run to me. When we're hurting, God is saying, Do you now understand nothing else and no one else is going to be sufficient for you in this struggle except for me? That's truth. He's teaching us truth. It hurts, but we learn it. God says, run to me. And stronger than that, God says, I insist, run to me. When times are good, we truly need God, but we don't know it very well. When times are hard, We know good and well we need God. One of the purposes of suffering is to bring truth, to bring convicting, convincing truth to our awareness that we do need God this bad, this much. And the purpose of the gospel is to bring us the truth that we have this God. The God that we need is the God that we have, and we can rejoice in that. That's where the songs come in, but we'll get to that. God promised to redeem His people, even though it came at a great cost. God the Father paid the cost of sending His only Son. God the Son paid the cost of His own sacrifice, undergoing a cruel death on the cross for us and rising again. Our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit went ahead and fulfilled all of His promises. That's how our section begins. The first word is remember, right? Calling upon God to remember His promises, which He's done. Since this was written, God remembered his promise and fulfilled his promise in the gospel of his son, the Lord Jesus, and we could build our whole life on that truth, the truth of God's promises. So we'll see these three points. Hope during our suffering, verse 49. Comfort during our suffering, verses 50 to 52, and enough cheerfulness to actually sing a song of praise during a night time of our suffering, verses 53 to 56. Let's start with verse 49, usually call this our headline verse, it kind of contains and presents to us the topic for the whole section. Verse 49, remember your word to your servant in which you have made me hope. When the child of God calls upon God to remember, It's an act of faith. Look at how the phrase is put in verse 49 at the start. Remember your word to your servant. It's a prayer, so the servant is talking to God, asking God to remember. What's he asking God to remember? To remember his word, his promises, his statutes, his word. It's not that we think God can forget, but rather that we're calling on God to act upon a promise on our behalf, and in that sense, to remember. Remember and do, remember and act, remember and be the God that you said you are, that we know that you are. This is those moments that we need you to do that. God promised to give us hope. Remember, you promised to give us hope. Right when we're suffering is when we need hope the most. Remember God's promises, and ask God to remember his promises. We remember his promises and bring it to him in prayer, and he teaches us to do that. It's his idea to write the Bible. It's his idea to write this verse for us, and it says, we should say to him, remember your word to your servant in which you have made me hope. God gives us hope during our suffering, so we're calling on him to do that. Download some hope to me, please. We should cling to God like a vine clings to an oak tree during a storm. BM. Landerville has written this, the vine clings to the oak tree during the fiercest of storms. Though the violence of a tornado may uproot the oak tree and knock it over, that vine's twining tendrils still cling to that tree. If that vine is on the side opposite the wind, the great oak is the protection for the vine. If the vine is on the side that is exposed to the wind, the wind only presses the vine closer to the trunk of the tree. In some of the storms of life, God intervenes and shelters us, while in other storms of life, God allows us to remain exposed so that we'll be pressed more closely to him. We hope in God's promise and we ask God to remember his word We're remembering that he has made us hope in his word, hope in his character that fulfills his word, all of his promises being fulfilled to us in Christ Jesus. We hope in God's promise. We do not doubt that God will verify his promise to us in God's best time and in God's best way. The details are God's. I want you to notice something about the headline verse. He doesn't ask for his suffering to be removed. Interesting, isn't it? What is he asking for? He's asking for God to remember his promise and for God to give him hope in God's Word. That's a significant prayer improvement than to pray, take my suffering away. The details are God's, how he helps us through. When we're hurting, we're called by verse 49 to form a prayer. and to ground that prayer on a promise, and then to send that prayer up to heaven as a request for God to remember. Doesn't that seem backwards from what we're taught about prayer? We're supposed to remember. We're calling on God to remember is a unique thing about this verse that teaches us. We first bring it to God asking him to remember, and then we confidently expect that he will do exactly that. God will remember his own word, his own promises. And actually, it's God's idea, so we know He loves it when we pray like this. God loves it when we say to Him, remember your promises, and call on Him to remember what, of course, we know He can never forget. He loves it when we pray to Him like this. So we've got our headline verse, so we know what the topic's gonna be. We just unpack it now as we go to our second point, comfort during our suffering. We've already had hope. Now we have comfort. Hope in verse 49, now comfort, verses 50, 51, and 52. Let's start with verse 50. This is my comfort in my affliction that your promise gives me life. Now it's our turn to remember. Think of our ongoing example. We often point to Daniel as we're studying this Psalm. Remember Daniel, Old Testament prophet, young fellow, was ripped out of Jerusalem and brought to the foreign nation Babylon. The pagans in Babylon would surround the poor fellow. Young Daniel, just think of him. Can't go to the temple anymore. He's scorned by Babylonians. He's mocked by Babylonians. They mock his religion. They mock his name. They mock his God. They mock his nation. But Daniel remains loyal to his God. Daniel engaged himself in a mental activity of remembering. Do you remember what he did? Let me read Daniel 6.10, Daniel got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God. Now some people read that and say, what in the world is he giving thanks for? Poor guy's ripped out of his home and he's off in exile. Because three times a day he's reminding himself that, as verse 50 here in our study puts it, this is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life. and for God to give me life, he's thankful for. Daniel's paying close attention, see, to God's words, to God's ancient words. Daniel's rehearsing them to himself three times a day on his knees in prayer. And he's telling them to himself over and over again because he needs to remember where his comfort is in his affliction, that God's promises is where comfort is to be found. Daniel was comforted. during his suffering, just an example of how Psalm 119 works. But it has to be my comfort and my affliction. I know we care about each other, but sometimes it doesn't strike you until it strikes you, right? Newspaper reporter phoned in a story, this is years ago before email and everything, he phoned in a story to his editor. He's a newspaper reporter, he's got a story for the editor, I've got this story, I've got this story. Yeah, what's going on? Well, an empty truck, rolled down a hill, smashed into a home. Editor is unimpressed. He told the reporter he didn't want to run that story. It's not even that big a deal. A truck ran into a house. And the reporter says, well, sir, I'm glad you're taking this so calmly because it was your house. How it changes when, as we read in verse 50, it's my affliction. It's striking me, my comfort and my affliction. Why is it that we don't seem to see a difficulty until we feel it ourselves? Haven't we heard about people getting sick and we don't really think much of it until we ourselves have the exact same sickness? And we heard about people being unemployed or facing a loss and we don't have much concern about that until the same thing happens to us. Other people found God to be enough in that struggle when they suffered that struggle. Have I? Have you? What if it were you? Would you have a walk with God that will enable you to walk through that with God's promise of giving us life? Again, verse 50 ends this way, that your promise gives me life. Should that sound familiar to us? Those of you who are studying Psalm 119 with me, give me life, remember? Request we found first in verse 25, give me life. We found it again in verse 37, give me life. We found it again in verse 40, give me life. And here, he's trusting that your promise does give me life. The prayer request to give me life is answered. I think the question is not when someone near you, but when you. face affliction, your affliction, my affliction, you can say, when you have a really bad day, when you have a difficult circumstance, I don't know if it's medical, I don't know if it's vehicular, I don't know if it's your house, I don't know if it's relationships, you're having a really bad day, you're having a really bad time, the question of our passage is, where do you turn then? Where do you go for comfort? I think it's a very important question. Let's say you go to money. You want to experience the power of buying something. So you log on, you put Amazon to work, and you bring packages to your place, because it feels good. To another person, they might experience comfort of leaning on another person. You always call so-and-so, and after talking to so-and-so for 25 minutes on the phone, you feel better. Some people want to have a good time. So the... Go where there's fun, to experience pleasure, to replace experiencing unpleasant things. I want to experience pleasant things. Some people just straight up escape. We call it medicating, whether it's actual medicine or whether it's food or alcohol or TV, etc. But none of these actually give us life, do they? that suffering and misery have a life-shrinking power to them and we would need a life-expanding power to counteract it. Where do we go for a power that is greater than the power of misery that shrinks everything? A Christian who's studying God's Word, who's walking according to our passage, turns to God's Word, and there we find the life-giving power of it. Look at verse 50 once more. This is my comfort and my affliction, that your promise gives me life, because God stands behind His promise, and He's the life-giving God. He wrote my affliction in verse 50. Look down to verse 54. The psalmist wrote my songs. How do we go from my affliction to my songs? From my affliction to my songs? The answer is in between, in verse 52. When I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort, O Lord. This phrase, when I think of, is the word for remember. When I remember or when I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort, oh Lord. Is comfort enough for us? Just comfort? You see what I'm asking? Let me say it another way. Too often we expect that if there's a godly person who does all the right things and has the right attitude and strong faith that God's supposed to reward him or her with that medical recovery or with that new job or with the solution that he or she needs. We don't just pray, Lord, comfort them in that giant mess, but straighten out the giant mess. But is comfort enough? And too often we pray for and expect the grace of healing or blessing when the greater gift, the more valuable, greater gift from God that might be instead of the job or the illness being healed, is the grace of opened ears to hear what God is saying. Maybe God wants to comfort that person by saying, you know what, even in this, I'm sufficient for you. Maybe God's comfort is saying, I alone am enough for you. Maybe God is sending the message to the sufferer saying, death is a conquered enemy. Maybe God is saying, trust me with all of this. Let it go. and you'll see what I'll do with it. Comfort, spiritual comfort, is that enough? Spiritual comfort without the problem being resolved. You don't get the job, you don't get healed. Hmm, is comfort enough? You see what I'm asking? Maybe God's comfort comes in the form of teaching something like this. For purposes you will not yet understand, I need to get your attention. And this suffering is how I'm getting your attention. Run to me. And all this is summarized in a marvelous way, famously actually, Heidelberg Catechism. You could do well by taking this question and answer and memorizing it, keeping it in front of yourself somehow. Refrigerator, screensaver, piece of paper on your desk. Heidelberg Catechism, first question. What is your only comfort in life and in death? Answer. My only comfort in life and in death is that I, body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil, and so preserves me, that without the will of my Father in heaven, not a hair can fall from my head. Indeed, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him. That's pretty good. I recommend it. It summarizes our second point, comfort during our suffering. Our third point, enough cheerfulness to sing. I said I'd get to that whole thing about singing. Here we go, enough cheerfulness to sing a song of praise during the nighttime of our suffering? Verse 53, hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law. Sometimes our nighttime of suffering comes from people. You know, human beings made in the image of God, filling their lives with sin and even wickedness. Wicked people. This is what he's talking about, verse 53, look at it. Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked. Wicked people who forsake God's law, to be exact, can make Christians suffer. Let's take our example again of Daniel. I'd like to go back to our running example, the poor guy Daniel. It was people, people in Babylon who came over and attacked his nation and brought him home as a prisoner. And when he got there, The people who mistreated him and taunted him, as Babylonians are wont to do, right? But it was other people too. It was his fellow citizens in Jerusalem who sinned so much against God that God brought this whole exile thing upon them. And then when they come into exile, it's the ones who start to acclimate to Babylon instead of acting like God's people. Fellow citizens of Jerusalem now compromising What are they doing? Forsaking God's law. That's exactly what verse 53 says. Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law. Daniel's a prisoner at war from Babylonians, but he's also being let down by his fellow prisoners who didn't please the God of Israel as exiles in Babylon. Sometimes it's people who bring us our nighttime of suffering. Verse 54, your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning, my journeys, my journey through life. Notice how the psalmist dealt with this. Verse 54, he made the statutes of God theme of his personal singing. In his sojournings, in his travels, in his walk through this world, wherever he went, the psalmist formed a habit of singing truth of God's word. Even though he's still suffering, in this case, from verse 53, at the hands of the wicked, the psalmist went around singing God's truth. Your statutes have been my songs. He's singing truth back to God in worship. He's singing truth to his own self, reminding himself. Went around singing God's truth. It brings us to verse 55. I remember your name in the night, O Lord, and keep your law. There's the night. There's the nighttime we're talking about. Believer remembers God's name in the nighttime of suffering. The covenant name of the Lord is listed, actually, in verse 55. The Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. It's signaling to us in English that it's referencing back God's covenant name. Jehovah, we sometimes use the word Yahweh, God's covenant name. He's keeping his covenant to us, the covenant keeping God. And then the psalmist wrote, verse 55, I keep your law. He's not proclaiming personal innocence or the fact that it's works righteousness and he's good enough. No, no, no. He's simply talking about obedience in response to God's covenant love. The believer remembered two things, God's covenant name and God's word. When did he remember them? In the night. What's the night? It's that whole poetic nighttime of suffering. So verse 55 all together once again says, I remember your name in the night, O Lord, and keep your law. Even in the night, the nighttime, the proverbial nighttime, the believer remember God's name. Remembering his name is remembering his covenant. Remembering his covenant is remembering his love and his promises and his fulfilling of the promises and he will be our God and we will be his people. Even in the night, the believer remembered God's word. The night is that picture of suffering, and what comforted the author in the nighttime of his suffering was God's promises based on God's name and his word. Our last verse, 56, builds on this. It says, this blessing has fallen to me that I have kept your precepts. There are some of God's blessings and comforts that are only obtained by obedience and careful living. Certain blessings of hope can only come through following the instructions of God. You can't have a retirement nest egg if you don't put any money away. You can't have a clean house if you don't clean the house. There are certain things that only come by certain actions. Certain blessings of comfort can only be enjoyed by learning to obey God, to live as God's called us and equipped us to live. This is all key to the song in your heart. The song in your heart only comes by a habit of obedience, a whole lifestyle that's on that right pathway, the pathway of walking with God. We have to learn to live in the comfort of doing what's right instead of living in the fear of doing what's wrong. Another way to say it is godliness is its own reward. What a blessing to learn to color within the lines, to stay where we're supposed to stay, to do what we're supposed to do, This blessing has fallen to me, that I have kept your precepts. This blessing has fallen to me. I'm not only saved by my God, but he's sanctifying me and making me more and more obedient to him. This blessing has come to me, not just justification, but sanctification. Not just saved by Christ, but made more like Christ. What a blessing. He's still not asking for the suffering to be removed. He's saying, reformulate me to be more like Jesus because of the suffering pressures. What have we seen through remembering his promises? Our God comforts us in our suffering, hope during a suffering, comfort during our suffering, and enough cheerfulness to sing a song of praise, our conclusion. What is important is not getting out of our suffering. Rather, what is important is deepening our trust in God and finding God to be sufficient while we're going through our difficulties. Our prominent word is the word remember. Verse 49, verse 52 again, as translated there, when I think of, but it's the same word. And again here in verse 55, I remember. The first one is asking God to remember. The other two, verse 52 and 55, were the psalmist committing to use his times of suffering to meditate on God's word and God's character. In other words, one purpose of his suffering is to remember what God is like, to get to know God better and then keep that in front of himself, to remember constantly what God is like. A prominent word is remember. How do we get comfort in suffering? Remember. You have the greatest God that there is. You have the only God that there is. John Donne, a 17th century poet you probably heard of. Did you know he experienced great pain? He married the daughter of a lord, and the lord disapproved. This is like a master, a powerful noble within England, right? I'm not talking about the lord, but this earthly lord, that he didn't want John Donne to marry his daughter. So this is what happened. He got fired from his job as the assistant to the lord chancellor, His wife was taken from him, or better said, he was taken from his wife, and he was locked in a dungeon. And this is when he wrote that succinct line of despair, John done, and done, undone. Separated from his wife. Later, in addition to this, he endured a long illness which sapped his strength almost to the point of death. And in the midst of this, his dungeon experience, his being torn from his wife, his losing his job and position, illness point to the death, he wrote a series of devotionals about suffering. And they rank among the most poignant meditations on the subject of suffering in the English language. One of these he considered a parallel. The sickness which kept him in the bed forced him to think about his spiritual condition. suffering God's attention. Suffering forced him to look to God when otherwise he might just as well have continued ignoring God. He found it all to be a blessing. All the layers of suffering brought him a prize to think about God, to draw near to God. Is it really possible to find such deep and wonderful comfort in God that we can even start singing in the middle of real suffering? Yes. Consider Acts 16 when we're told about the time when the apostle Paul and a Christian named Silas were in prison. they were literally singing in the night. Let me read it, Acts 16.25. Acts 16.25. This is after being severely beaten. Paul and Silas were placed into a prison in the city of Philippi, and there they began to sing at midnight praises to their God. People in that watching prison, people in our watching world, have no idea what to do with such power and suffering people. How do they do it? How can you still be giving thanks to God? That's why those who heard Paul singing that night were converted. the Philippian jailer and many other people believed in Jesus that night. And subsequently in Philippi, The movement continued and a strong church was established in the city of Philippi. You know it as the Philippians, the New Testament book, the Philippians. The church in Philippi was the church that supported Paul's missionary work with generosity and commitment without fail. Time and again, it was the Philippians who were helping Paul in his expenses wherever he was going to do the Lord's work as an apostle. However, the point of bringing it up is about the singing songs during the night thing. Learning to sing songs in the proverbial night does not make the sorrows go away. It doesn't make the struggles and sufferings go away. Sometimes the Lord does not take the problems away. Sometimes the Lord does take the problems away. But learning to sing the songs of God's praise in the proverbial night does reliably lift the spirits of people who are stuck in that suffering. The songs that are sung genuinely in the middle of suffering reliably testify to the goodness of God. Do we have a God who is so great that even in the middle of bad times, he can make his goodness known to us in such a way that our hearts overflow naturally with songs to him? Even if the nighttime does not give way to sunlight? Yes, we have a God that great. For 80 years, there was a radio program that's actually still to be found on the internet. You know what it's called? Songs in the Night. 80 years, so far, it's been bringing hope, comfort, encouragement to believers around the globe because it has a unique combination of music and devotional commentary. It helps people relax and unwind in preparation for another busy week. It happens Sunday evenings at 10.30. and it's built on this verse, Job 35.10, where is God my maker who gives songs in the night? Over the years, songs in the night became known as one of America's best loved religious broadcasts. Maybe you've heard it. My grandparents used to sit and listen to it every Sunday night. I'll end with this, Romans 5, three to five, whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction. that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. Let's pray. Father in heaven, grant us the gift of remembering your promises.