So let us turn in our Bibles to the Psalm we just sang, number 130. As we prepare to receive the Lord's table this morning, I can't think of many Psalms that would be a much better meditation as we do so. Psalm 130, beginning in verse one, let us now lift up our hearts to heaven and ask, God's blessing as we read and hear his word together. Out of the depths, I have cried to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. And in his word, I do hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning. Yes, more than those who watch for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is abundant redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. This is the word of our God. Well, beloved congregation, the Bible teaches us to examine ourselves whenever we come to the table. And as we read in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 28, it says, let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. as is often been proclaimed in this church, beloved, making a true examination of ourselves begins with understanding our sinfulness, that we are sinful and accursed apart from Jesus Christ, and that we should therefore be displeased with ourselves and humble ourselves before him. And so, beloved, when you meditate on your life as a Christian, and you understand your sinfulness, how easy it is for ungodly attitudes to creep into your thinking, how easy it is for ungodly words to flow from your lips to the point that you become displeased with yourself, where does that leave you? As you examine yourself and discover again and remember Those sins that often blind you to their very presence. Where do you go from there? When you take an honest inventory of your life, you realize that we are still given to breaking God's commandments. That we are still given to selfishly placing our own fleshly desires before the things of God. and still demonstrating by our actions and our thoughts and our words that our zeal and our love for God is so often lacking. I mean, who among us can deny this, beloved? And so having done all that, having taken a spiritual inventory of your life, the question again becomes, now what? What does the realization about our spiritual poverty and the conviction that comes over us by the power of the Holy Spirit because of our sins, what does all of that mean to us as we come to the table of the Lord? Should this realization about ourselves that we have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God and have never kept any of them, and am still prone to all evil, as the answer to question 60 of our catechism says, should this realization drive us to the point of despair? Should the examination of ourselves as commanded in scripture make us reluctant to come to this table? Even afraid to come to this table? knowing in our heart of hearts how much we sin and how far we still fall short of the glory of God. And the answer to that question, beloved, is no way. No way should we be discouraged from coming to the table. We ought not be afraid of coming to the table. For it's an important part of our testimony, an essential aspect of remembering Jesus Christ, as this meal calls us to do, when we come to that supper, testifying that we live in the midst of death, that we live, as Paul says, in bodies of death. and that we are seeking life outside of ourselves, outside of our own sinful fleshly bodies, coming to the table, testifying that we need forgiveness of our sins, that we need a savior, that we need the salvation that only God can bring. That's why I think it's good for us to hear this psalm today. Because as we prepare to come to the table, beloved, this psalm shows us that when we become desperate about our sins, there is only one place we can turn for help. And that is to the only true God who alone can save. And so I invite you to meditate on this psalm with me this morning as we consider first the psalmist's lowly condition. When we read the book of Psalms, beloved, one of the interesting things we find in almost all of them is a sense of motion, of development, a progression from the start of the Psalm to its conclusion. And Psalm 130 is certainly an example of this. It begins with the author who is unknown to us. There's speculation about that, but no one knows for sure who wrote it. It begins with this author crying out for mercy from the depths of his soul, and it ends in a note of triumph, with the psalmist raised up to renewed hope and calling on the people of God to trust in his redemption. But we have to begin where he does, if we're going to be faithful to the text, where he begins is in the depths. Out of the depths, I have cried to you, O Lord. Now, the depths here is a poetic reference to the sea. Here and in other places in the Book of Psalms, we find the author using the imagery of a person sinking in water, of being swallowed up by the ocean, a way of conveying to us a sense of being overwhelmed with grief. of a person on the verge of slipping away forever, of losing all hope, of being devastated by despair and anxiety. It's as though he's locked away in a dark and miserable place, a place from which there's no escape. And now he has moved in hard to cry out for help. We find a similar plea in Psalm 69 where David writes in verses one and two, save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. Also in Psalm 107, the psalmist writes beginning at verse 26, of the plight of sinners, how they go down to the depths and their courage melts away, reeling and staggering like drunken men until they cry to the Lord in their trouble, who stills the storm and calms the waves of the sea. We may think too, beloved, of the story of Jonah, who can also help us understand the fear and the terror excuse me, the fear and terror that the psalmist was experiencing here in the writing of this psalm. We remember how that prophet was thrown overboard by fishermen and was literally sinking into the depths of the sea. And if you read what Jonah prayed in Chapter 2, actually, which he recorded after his rescue, but if you read that prayer of Jonah in Chapter 2, he reveals the despair that he felt in his soul as he was literally sinking down, as he went under the waters at that moment when he was almost certain that he was going to die. And his pleas for help, in fact, are direct quotes from the Psalms, including from Psalm 69, which I read a portion of earlier. Now, in Jonah's case, we know why he was pleading for help. He was dying. He was literally sinking down into the depths of the sea when he was suddenly swallowed whole by a large fish. And the prayer he prayed inside that fish revealed his despair, his feeling of helplessness and hopelessness as though he had been placed inside a tomb in the deep blue sea. He thought he was left for dead after fleeing from the Lord who had called him to go to Nineveh, which he was purposely disobedient to. And in Psalm 130, the text before us, what is the great threat, beloved? What is the source of the psalmosphere? It is similar to Jonas. What was it that so troubled the soul of the psalmist that he cried out to God for mercy? It was the realization of his own sin and guilt before God. It was the recognition of his great unholiness, of his unrighteousness in the face of a holy and righteous God. He was terrified by the thought, overwhelmed as it were by the thought of God's justice and judgment. As he writes, if you, Lord, should mark iniquities, oh Lord, who could stand? This author was under the conviction of the Holy Spirit about his life. And he's contemplating that if God was to hold his sins against him, and all of our sins against all of his people, if God were to treat us as our sins deserved, if God were to punish us as our sins deserve, how could any of us ever stand? Notice how he calls on the name of God twice in a very few words in verse three. That's important. He refers to him first. He uses two different names for God. That's also interesting. The first one in the original Hebrew is Yah, short for Yahweh. The awesome, the self-existent one, the I am, who revealed himself to the Israelites by that name when he delivered them from Egypt. And then as Adonai, the second time, it's translated as Lord in both cases, but it's two different words. The second one being Adonai, which means Lord, an acknowledgement of God's authority over his life and over the life of all creation, that he is the Lord, as it were, the Lord of lords, he is Adonai. So in a very few words, the psalmist acknowledges the awesomeness and the holiness and the eternality of God and his absolute right to rule over him. And so in light of this, he's communicating a very awful sense of the fear of God, of God's glory and majesty and how we should rightly dread his wrath. So I have to ask you, have you ever thought of God in such a way? I believe there's some very important takeaways for us right here. The first one being that we should acknowledge the awfulness of our sins in the light of God's awesomeness and authority. That's exactly what the psalmist is doing. We should not give in to the fleshly instinct to make light of our disobedience. You know, there is something supremely dreadful about a person, people like us, who have come to know the Lord and have savored of his goodness to us. There's something supremely dreadful about people who know the Lord and yet who sin before his face. And beloved, isn't it so? So easy for us to get all riled up and upset by the grotesque sins of reprobate people. And in doing so, make light of our own inequities by comparison. Isn't that easy for us to do? It's so easy to fall into that trap. But when we're sober in heart, when we're in our right minds as Christians, We realize that it's just us and our supremely holy and eternal God with whom we have to do. And it is then that we realize the awfulness of our own sins before God. It is then that we remember again, as the psalmist wrote in Psalm 51, that against you and you only have I sinned. in doing this, that we're driven to call on his name from the depths of our misery. We have to come to grips with our misery. That's part of preparing ourselves for the Lord's table, remembering our sin and misery. A very needful part of our self-examination, beloved, of preparing ourselves to come to the table, which, by the way, the Corinthians The Corinthians that Paul wrote to obviously were not because of the way they were conducting themselves toward other people. Not making light of our sins. Not pointing our fingers at others. Not holding ourselves as above other sinners. Not telling ourselves that we, well, I just made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. not making excuses for our evil, but taking stock of the horrible nature of rebellion against a holy and righteous God. And remembering, as the catechism causes us to do, remembering our obligation to continue in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them. That is our obligation in life. Because it's in realizing these things, beloved, that we'll be properly moved to call on the Lord from the depths of our heart as the psalmist does. There is so much to be miserable about in this world, and yet, out of our misery, We understand from verse three that if God took careful account of the things we do wrong, and took careful account of the right things that we fail to do, there would be no hope for any of us, no hope of survival. We would have absolutely no way to help ourselves, no way to escape his vengeance, no way to avoid his judgment, no way to stand confidently before him, Our obligation as his creatures at all times, in all places, is always to love him with all of our hearts, and with all of our souls, and with all of our minds, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is our continuous 24-7, 365 obligation every single day we live on planet Earth. and remembering that together, remembering that this is our obligation to love the Lord with all of our being and to love our neighbor of ourselves, and remembering how often we still, as Christians, fall short of that. We're moved to remember that if God dealt with me in strict justice, I would be quickly and completely and miserably be undone because of my failure to love him and to love my neighbor as I ought. There is no way of escaping his righteous vengeance. That is how we should think as Christians as we prepare to come to this table. We are completely undone by our sins. We have no hope in ourselves, only in our merciful God. You see, that's the despair the psalmist is feeling. That's what makes this despair so deep and terrifying, is that he knows, just as Jonah did, he deserves God's punishment. That is his lowly condition. And it's good for us, beloved, to be reminded of this once again, to see always Always be reminded of the seriousness of sin. Our sins are never anything to laugh at. The world makes light of sin all the time. Christians ought never do such things. Our sins are nothing to shrug our shoulders about and say, oh, well, you know, what can I do? Our sins are an offense to God's holiness and deserve to be punished. We deserve to be punished in hell forever because we've done these things. And all of this, beloved, again, this is the black backdrop of understanding the amazing mercy of God. Because in all of this, we should be moved. We don't stop there. We don't stop in our despair. That's just the beginning preparation. Because that should move us again all the more day by day as Christians to admire God's great patience with us, God's great forbearance with us. You know, we become blind to our sins. The Bible speaks of our secret sins. And we find in the Psalms crying out, let me not be taken captive to these things. Help me to understand my secret sins. But you know, nothing is secret to God. God himself knows you better than you know yourself. And he knows better than we do that we would be completely undone if we were to mark iniquities. There's a comforting thought. He knows we are but dust, as Moses writes in Psalm 90. So here's the thing. Even though God is fully aware of every sin you have ever committed, what has he done? He has chosen to bear with you patiently, even to the present hour. And that, my friends, is tremendous reason to praise his name today. What a reason to praise God. It is only because of his great mercy and his great compassion and his great patience and his wonderful forbearance that you and I are not immediately consumed by his wrath. He is still a consuming fire. And a day is coming when the entire earth will be shaken by judgment again. And the only ones left standing are those who have trusted in the Savior Jesus Christ. Do you trust him today? Is that your only comfort in life and in death? Because this is the reality. All the background noise of culture and politics, lay all that aside. The only comforts you have in life and in death is not this political reform, or this job, or this event in your life, or getting to buy this car rather than that one, or everything falling together at work. Just forget all that. Your only comfort because of your sin is Christ our Lord. He is your only comfort in life and death. And beloved, as we come to the table this morning, let's be moved again to remember how incredibly wonderful Jesus Christ has been to you and to me. He is a God who is slow to anger. He is a God who is rich in mercy. He is a God who gave up his all to save us. Every moment of his life, he suffered. From shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee. Evil was trying to hunt him down every day of his life. People were trying to kill him in his earthly ministry, and he escaped their hand until the appointed hour, when he voluntarily, out of great love and unending mercy and forbearance and patience for you and for me, He literally allowed himself and gave himself to be taken away to die for our sins. Awesome. Our Lord Jesus Christ is awesome. Let all of that be in your mind today as we come to this table, as we celebrate the bread and the cup. those symbols of his death, his body, his blood, shed for you out of amazing, eternal, undying affection for you. That is the wonder and the beauty of God's grace, isn't it? Because the psalmist in his despair, in his remembrance of his great sin, in his understanding that if the Lord counted sins against us, nobody could stand. He says, out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord, because in that hour, he remembered that God is a God, not only of judgment, not only of eternal wrath against sinners, but a God of great mercy. and was moved in his heart in the midst of his despair, just when he is feeling like he's being overwhelmed and slipping away in the face of a just and holy God and remembering his sinfulness, he cries out to that same God for mercy. You know, we talked about our examination of these men last week. And I'll never forget what a minister told me during the midst of my exam 15 years ago now, more than 15 years ago, when I was completely unprepared. I had no idea what was coming. And he said to me, because we were talking about how we need to be saved from our sins. And he said, is it true that we need to be saved from God? And I had never heard it said that way. And I said, yes, absolutely. And I'll never forget him saying that to me and how helpful that was. We not only need to be safe from our sins, beloved, we need to be safe from God who judges sin. But he has done that. He has accomplished that once for all by the death of Christ symbolized. That's why you should not be discouraged from coming to the table today. If you trust in him and you believe in him, And you seek him once again in your humility, realizing I have no hope apart from Christ. I trust in the Savior. He has saved me by his blood. Amen. Let's pray together. Our gracious heavenly father, what wonderful love you showed the world by giving your only begotten son as an offering for sin so that whoever calls upon him, everyone who calls upon him in true faith will be saved, will not perish. We thank you for that blessed gospel hope brought to our attention again this morning in the contemplation of this psalm, in the contemplation of Christ and his wonderful mercy to us at the cross. May we be blessed and encouraged today as we come to the table, in Jesus' name, amen.