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Has God Forgotten to be Gracious - Psalm 77 By David Calderwood

I'll start again. Do you recognize ASIF's situation?
It's a very horrible situation really when you start to unpack it and think about it.
We don't know any specific details. We're not given them and therefore
presumably they're not important. What is important to note here is that
in whatever situation ASIF finds himself, his confidence in God has been so shaken
that he's actually starting to wonder now if God has actually changed.
He's suffering very real, very physical and I take it very debilitating.
Symptoms. Symptoms that have linked to his thinking.
Now you and I know that sort of situation well enough to know how awful it is
to be so much in turmoil in mind that it actually makes you physically ill.
Worse than that, it seems like his doubts have really come to the point where he's actually wondering
if everything that in the past he has believed about God is really true.
Now this sort of sound doesn't need any further introduction.
It's something as with so many of the sounds which are sounds of experience
that we so easily and readily identify with.
Perhaps already I've described you this morning and how you're feeling at present.
Perhaps you're confused about where you're at as a Christian.
Perhaps you're here this morning wounded and hurt, struggling.
Struggling in a way that nobody around you even comes close to knowing.
Perhaps you've really lost heart as a Christian or even now are in danger of losing heart for any service of Christ
and just feeling like you just want to throw in the towel and give it all away.
Perhaps you've been worn down by ongoing illness, chronic pain, clouds your thinking.
Perhaps your dreams have been lost as your marriage crumbles
or as you see your children grow and turn their back on the gospel.
Perhaps you're struggling with being single or being childless or struggling with getting older.
And so the list can go on.
Friends, the result of those sorts of things weighing heavily on us
is that oftentimes we can feel ourselves either falling into or sliding into a black hole,
confused, unnerved, losing any sense of joy in being a Christian.
Even getting to the point of wondering, well, what's God up to in all this?
Like Asaph, perhaps we wonder if God has forgotten to be merciful, if God has forgotten to be gracious.
I need to tell you that whenever I get to feeling that as a pastor, and I do,
the questions I struggle with are rather specific and you'll recognise for your specific situation.
The question for me is, does the gospel really work at the end of the day?
Are people really changed? Or is it all just something we pretend about?
I'll look at my sin and I'll look at and interact with the sin of the church family in different ways.
Does anything really change?
Does sin just keep on coming back, resurfacing, destroying everything good?
Is pastoral effort really worth it? Or am I just going through the motions?
Now those are things specific to me, no doubt, in my position.
You will have your own questions specific to you in your situation.
The interesting thing and the important thing is that they're real questions, real doubts,
real dilemmas in our mind, they create real turmoil and they can leave us with real illness,
real upset in our physical body.
There's no question that we have those sorts of periods and those sorts of thoughts.
The question is, what do we do when we feel like that?
What do we do when we feel like we're in a black hole in our relationship with God?
What do we do when we lose heart for serving Him?
I suspect there wouldn't be one person here who's a Christian this morning
who at some point or other in life, if not now, hasn't been in that situation where I think,
I don't know if I want to serve the Lord, or maybe even more aggressively,
I couldn't care less about serving the Lord.
So what do we do when we feel like that?
Well friends, as is often the case, and again I say almost like a crack tracker,
that's why I love the Psalms.
When we come to look at the Psalms of David and Asaph and others who've written,
we see such a brutal honesty.
And I think that's the first thing we need to do, and I've said this before,
the first step is to be honest about the awfulness of being in a spiritual black hole
in our relationship with God.
If you look at verses 1-9, I think you'd have to agree with me that Asaph's honesty is quite shocking.
He spells out his physical and emotional anguish.
He can't find any comfort in his situation.
It's not that he's not trying, it's not that he's completely passive.
No, he's trying this and he's trying that and he's trying the other thing,
but nothing he tries seems to work.
Nothing gives relief.
Nothing brings light at the end of the tunnel.
In fact, as I'll unpack with you in a minute,
it would seem like the things that have been the sort of characterizing mark of his relationship with God in the past
now have become frustrations to the relationship with God in the future.
The things that he had relied on in the past no longer work
and in fact have become a frustration to,
as he's seeking to revitalize his relationship with the Lord.
And the anguish, I think, is all the greater, given it is Asaph's or Asaph's.
Because here's a man who would have to say has giant character.
If you read his psalms, he is capable of, in poetic expression,
rising to the most lofty thoughts.
He's a man of deep godliness.
And so his frustration, his dilemma, his turmoil of mind here is all the greater, as it were.
Because this is a psalm contrary to some of the other psalms which are brimming full of a vibrant faith in God.
This is a psalm of struggle, frustration and distress.
And so what we need to understand when we read these words in verses 1 to 9,
this is no sort of shallow day-by-day person having a bit of a whinge
because they happen to be having a bad hair day or just a feeling off for the day.
This is a giant of a man who's crumbled,
who's been brought to this sort of distress, confusion, despondency,
wondering if God no longer cares,
wondering if God has actually changed and decided no longer to be merciful and gracious.
And you can sense the awfulness of it because, you see,
when you have, like Esa, enjoyed a rich relationship with the Lord,
then to be in a situation where that's evaporated just makes the gap enormous.
And the longing for it to be restored, just unbearable.
And so when we start to look at the details of some of these verses, verses 1 and 2,
his prayer seemed useless.
Now, I really do want you to follow through with me here and feel the man's turmoil.
Again, I say, perhaps because of some physical circumstance or situation, we're not told,
but it would seem like predominantly this is what's happening in his head.
Turmoil of mind about his relationship with God.
Either way, in desperation, here we have Esa just crying out to God, night after night, in prayer.
Lord, hear me. Lord, help me.
I cried out to the Lord for help. I cried out to the Lord to hear me.
When I was in distress, I sought the Lord.
At night, I stretched out untiring hands. Night after night. Night after night.
This guy is praying, praying, praying.
Lord, reveal yourself to me. Lord, help me. Lord, just hear me.
Determined to get some comfort, those prayers didn't seem to go any higher than the ceiling.
His prayers seemed to be useless.
Just words falling out of his head, certainly bringing no comfort.
He had a persistent restlessness that went with that.
We often say that a person makes a good friend, but would make a lousy enemy.
Well, it seems to be that that's how Esa was thinking about the Lord.
If you look at verse 3, I remembered you, O God, and I groaned.
I mused and my spirit grew faint.
Now, why would, if he remembered the Lord, why would he sort of groan
and go all weak at the knees and just feel overwhelmed?
Well, I think it's because Asaph still realises that there's a God and that he's a holy God.
But the problem for Asaph is that if this holy God no longer wants to approach Asaph as a friend in harmony,
then the alternative is just too much to bear.
If this holy God wants to now act towards Asaph in pure holiness with Asaph as a sinful man,
then Asaph could only think, I'm in serious trouble here.
This is a serious situation.
His thinking is opening the gap between himself and God, not bringing comfort as it closes.
The result? Well, we're told they're sleepless nights. You keep my eyes from, you kept my eyes from closing.
We've probably all been there. I'm there all too often. I just toss and tumble.
Your mind won't switch off. The stuff just goes round and round and round and round and it troubles you
and it disturbs you and your heart's racing and it's just awful.
But for Asaph it was even more awful because he was too troubled even to speak about it.
It was too deep, too personal, too scary, whatever, maybe all those things.
And so he withdrew into silence, the silence of his own mind, which was turmoil he was withdrawn into.
He treats into silence wondering why God has allowed things to go on as long as he has done.
Why are things as hard as they are?
Why hasn't God given me any tokens of his interest and his ongoing love and commitment?
For Asaph it was just too much to talk about, too much to express.
And again, you'll recognise that. You think, well, if I even begin to talk with this,
I'll break down in tears or I'll unleash that sort of big damn wall and I'll never stop crying.
So troubled is he that not even remembering the good old days brighten things up for him.
Look at verses five and six.
I thought about the former days, the years of long ago.
I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart mused and my spirit inquired.
It cast his mind back over the good old days,
the times when he was able to, as it were, just drift into sleep with songs of praise on his lips.
The former days.
The very aspects of God's character that once were a refuge to Asaph
seem to have gone for good.
My friends, I'm hoping that you're starting to feel your way into this sound
and feel Asaph's situation.
Asaph has actually become totally unsure of God.
Now, that's a pretty big statement, isn't it, to become unsure of God.
When you know that this God you're unsure of now, he's a holy God, a vengeful God.
Has God changed his mind about the covenant, Asaph is wondering?
Is he so angry with seeing that now he will no longer show any signs of love and commitment and goodness,
but he's committed to judgment?
He'll no more show mercy to those he promised to love.
What spiritual agony this man must have been in.
My friends, I say, I've no doubt there will be people here.
Some of you here this morning are feeling precisely like that.
Physical, emotional anguish that leaves us feeling it's all too hard.
We just want to give up.
You see, here's the problem. Well, we double the problem.
The problem's already how we're feeling, but we double the problem because all too often we suffer in silence.
And we do that because we think it's ungodly to feel like this.
And so we're not going to admit it to ourselves, let alone tell other Christians.
Well, my friends, I think I can say with the authority of scripture this morning that it's okay to feel like Asaph.
It's not okay to remain there and wallow, but it's okay to feel like Asaph.
Such doubts, I believe, if you look across the whole of scripture, are not unusual to the believer,
nor are the debilitating results of those doubts.
The problem comes in how we react to such situations.
Now, you see, one of our problems today is that many who call themselves Christians
actually teach quite aggressively that it's wrong for Christians to have doubts.
It's wrong for Christians to hurt. It's wrong for Christians to struggle.
And so that leaves people with very few options.
And so lots of people commit themselves to this happy-go-lucky approach to Christianity,
where regardless of how you're feeling, you just keep a nice veneer of, yeah, it's great, isn't it wonderful?
The psalm tells us that honest inquiry of God is a good thing.
Don't pretend things are okay when they're not.
The key is what we do when such a situation arises.
And so the second point this morning is to know, the second key is to know the process of spiritual rehabilitation.
I'm going to suggest three strategies. There might be more. These are three I can come up with.
But before I do that, I just want to hear this very carefully, please.
The process of spiritual rehabilitation, I believe, is never a quick-fix formula approach.
Perhaps I shouldn't say never, but it's not usually a quick-fix formula.
We're going to look at verses 10 to 20 and see what Asaph says and does and thinks.
But it would be really wrong, I think, to assume that this is just a linear equation.
Problem in verses 1 to 9 explained in very, you know, just a few minutes.
Solution, verses 10 to 20, adopted and applied and affected in the same few minutes.
I don't think it works like that.
We're dealing with a poem. We're dealing with a long experience.
And, in fact, there's nothing again in this psalm, like so many other psalms, to say that his circumstances have changed slightly by the end of the psalm.
But what's changed is his ability to deal with his circumstances and live in his circumstances.
What's changed is what he's able to hang on to in his mind.
So we mustn't ever think that these sort of processes of spiritual rehabilitation are just,
OK, here's the problem. Plug in these three strategies. Bob's your uncle. Everyone will be right tomorrow morning.
If you try and do that, then I suspect you'll be even more depressed, more frustrated, more distressed in the coming week.
Asaph isn't giving us an instant cure-all, but strategies that will help us move to a solution, I believe, over a period of time.
The first strategy is to avoid extremes.
Now, it's a sort of repeat, but many Christians seem to opt for a simplistic, quick-fix solution, a quick-fix extreme,
such as even what Asaph himself tried, recalling the good old days, the very thing that Asaph tried and failed him.
We hear it on TV all the time. It's all around us. People just say, well, you know, everyone will be working out,
and then they'll try and distract us by reminiscing. Oh, remember this old story and remember that old story?
It's such a load of rubbish that it's just really not helpful.
Christians seem to have taken aboard this approach, cranking up past experience,
or perhaps even closer to home for some of us, just freely quoting a verse,
as if so somehow that quoting of that verse will provide relief for the situation you're in.
Now, don't misunderstand me. It's good to remember scripture. Of course it is.
We'll see how that all puts together in a minute, but it's never going to be a quick fix.
And in fact, in fact, it may, like Asaph has discovered here, be one of those things that actually opens the gap,
because if you think, well, I should be able to trust that verse, I should be able to respond, but it still leaves me lifeless and cold.
It can actually open the gap and make you feel even worse.
The other extreme, of course, is despair, thinking there's no solution.
And sometimes as Christians we sink into that. We think, well, what's the point?
Nothing ever changes. Nothing's going to get better. You know, it's all just a joke.
We've got to avoid both extremes.
There is a process here that will provide spiritual rehabilitation, spiritual health, if we're prepared to work hard at it,
even though there might well be hard days ahead in the meantime.
So the second strategy then is focus on God and not your circumstances.
Now, as I was putting this together, I thought, oh dear, how many times have I said that?
And I immediately felt creeping into my mind, in my thinking for preparation, I've got to find something fresh to say.
I've said this so many times. This is just going to be hackneyed and like a cracked record.
And then I thought, well, why does the scripture say it so many times?
Answer, because we're notoriously bad at actually taking it on board.
And so we need to be reminded again and again and again to think about God first, not our circumstances first.
Now, I'm not saying forget our circumstances. That would just be ridiculous, wouldn't it?
Because that's dropping out of life and being foolish.
But I'm saying the order is important. Think about God and then think about our circumstances through God.
That's what Asaph is telling us here.
I've used the illustration before when crossing a creek.
Crossing a creek in danger of falling in cold water, you walk very, very gingerly.
And you pick your stones to step on very, very carefully.
Just slowly, methodically, carefully. One stone at a time to get you across the creek.
Asaph realizes that he's been sort of dragged into looking at the width of the creek
and thinking, oh, I'm never going to get across this creek.
And he forces himself to come back and look at each stepping stone in turn.
Because if he can get each stepping stone right, the width of the creek is immaterial.
He'll get there eventually and he'll be dry and he'll be safe.
God's given him circumstances that were confusing and painful and difficult to bear.
And as a result of that, he had concluded that God had changed.
Now he realizes that he needs to start off and rekindle a clear, solid thinking about God's character
and then with that in mind, move into circumstances, step by step, stone by stone, with renewed hope and confidence.
The process begins in verse 10.
And there's a delightful phrase here which you could spend, in fact, one of the questions for response groups
picks up this verse 10 and asks us to put some sort of personal content in it.
Verse 10, then I thought, in other words, Asaph, there's a break in the psalm that's highlighted by two things.
Firstly, that language of verse 10, but prior to that, the silah, the little musical notation
which everybody thinks means just stop and ponder and reflect.
So he set out his way of feeling. He set out where he's at.
It's heavy, it's awful, we need to spend time just getting into it with Asaph.
And then verse 10, there's a determined effort to change his direction of thinking.
Then I thought, to this I will appeal.
He takes his first step, the years of the right hand of the most high.
What does that phrase mean?
Well, the right hand of God is always symbolic of God's power, God's strength, God's salvation,
God's sovereignty, God's holiness.
All of those things are symbolic in God's right hand.
So Asaph says, well, okay, I'll start this process of rehabilitation
simply by reflecting on the years that I've known and experienced of God's power, God's salvation, God's holiness.
Now, lest we think and interpret that as we often do in a lazy sort of fashion as well,
okay, Asaph's solution is just to go back and read his Bible again.
I don't think that's what he's talking about.
If you look at verses 11 and 12, I will remember the deeds of the Lord.
The word there remember is not just, well, I'll just sit while I'm having my conflicts and think about one or two things.
No, it's much more purposeful.
It's much more resolute.
In other words, he's talking about a course of action that he's actually going to systematically force into his mind again
that which he has known from the past and in a sense relearn it
because it's as if something's short-circuited in his mind and all those things he's learned has been dropped out.
He's going to reprogram himself again.
So it's a purposeful thing.
It's a resolute thing.
It's a relearning thing.
It's an effort thing.
Verse 12, I will remember your miracles.
Verse 12, I will meditate on all your works and consider all your mighty deeds.
Meditate, purposely, study, carefully, consider, reflect deeply upon.
All those ideas are in that word meditate.
I'm emphasizing that because so often, here's where the quick fixings comes in.
We just think, well, okay, what I need to do is just read my Bible before I go to bed and have a quick prayer.
And then we wonder why we don't really get much benefit from it.
We don't get rehabilitated because the exercise requires something much deeper,
much more consistent, much more resolute, much more purposeful than that.
Asif was determined to wrestle the lessons of God's dealing with his people,
to wrestle what he'd known in the past from the pages of scripture.
Or we might add into it from the pages of church history.
To wrestle that into his mind, to relearn it in a way that gave him new comfort, new hope, new assurance.
And that's what he does in verses 13 to 19 to strike through and see how he does it step by step.
Your ways, O God, are holy.
What God is as great as our God?
You're the God who performed miracles.
You display your power among the peoples.
With your mighty arm, you redeemed your people, the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.
Let me get right into the picture of the Exodus.
The water saw you, O God.
The water saw you and writhed.
The very depths were convulsed.
The clouds poured by the water.
The sky resided with thunder.
The waves flashed back and forth.
Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind.
Your lightning lit up the world.
The earth trembled and quaked.
Your path led through the sea.
Your way through the muddy waters.
Though your footprints were not seen, you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
You, your, is regaining solid ground, step by step, stone by stone.
The text, effort, takes time to meditate and reflect.
Years ago, I fell prey to an illness that had physical symptoms, but one of the most traumatic symptoms was a depressive symptom.
The elders in the Talmud sent me to the path over nine months of just reading Jeremiah.
It slowly happened that I just read it and write about it and reflect on it and hear its lessons.
See how Jeremiah responded to the Lord when life got hard, when life got impossible.
What did you learn about the Lord? What did you learn about Jeremiah?
That's what I did for nine months.
Just the book of Jeremiah.
It was a terrific thing to do, even though at the time I thought, I didn't say it verbally, but I thought, this is ridiculous.
But it was a terrific thing to do because it involved reflection, careful meditation over a long period of time,
rebuilding that which had been lost, re-entering into the brain so that I was calibrated to get back from that rather from other things.
No shortcuts, I'm afraid.
I noticed when I got through all that, he still doesn't know what God's purpose is in this present situation.
We're still not told that he's trying to get something like that, and that makes it all make sense now because I know what God's doing.
We don't have that, and presumably, therefore, it didn't seem a blinding flash of light to explain what God was doing.
Life was still as confusing, perhaps still as hard.
But what was different was how Isaac was coming at it and working through it,
and the tools Isaac was taking into the day with him and perhaps into the night with him as he went to bed.
Now he's sitting on the solid ground of confidence in God's unfailing love for his people,
sitting on the solid ground of God's mercy and care and countenance,
sitting on the solid ground of salvation,
sitting on the solid ground of being one of God's people headed for heaven.
The result?
Isaac is now able to relax, as it were, content to let God be God.
And Isaac gets on the job of what he needs to do, reminding himself that he's a preacher, a love preacher, of this great God.
As I said before, when crossing the creek, you can't see all the solid ground from the edge from which you start.
But it takes a step at a time, and as it were, you can see the next step ahead of you,
and you get across the creek. One solid point often leads to another,
and before you know it, you're safe and secure, once again in good spiritual health.
Now my friends, how do we need to learn these lessons?
I stand before you this morning as your pastor and I say, how I need to learn these lessons.
And all the more so in our day and age, when we want everything instant,
when I feel the pressures closing in on me, I just want to go to bed and get up in the morning and have it all fixed by osmosis or infusion or something.
That's what we're like, isn't it? And it's not going to be like that.
So many believers in agony privately because of doubts,
and we stuck there because we missed the process of how to deal with it in a real and lasting way.
Why? Because we skim over scripture. We just skim over scripture.
We don't force ourselves to reflect in a way that can be actually very helpful to us.
And I see that in churches all the time. I see it in this church.
People ten years down the track still marking time, still not able, as it were,
to use scripture in a way that's helpful much more than what they were able to do ten years ago.
Now of course there are others who are quite the opposite, who've really moved on and now find the scripture a terrific comfort to themselves.
But there's no easy fix it.
I've yapped on. I think I've almost given up actually these days.
I don't yap very much about it these days, but I used to yap on endlessly about people reading church history.
Because in that, there's such a terrific source of people's experience of God in the toughest situations.
A situation a lot more tough than every will face.
And yet we just write it off as if it has nothing to teach us.
And we live for the moment.
And we wonder why we don't have anything solid to fix our bearings by when the floods are swirling around us.
We've despised previous generations. We even despise, young people even despise your parents' generation.
What would they know for goodness sake?
Well I can tell you young people, your parents have lived a damn sight more of life than what you have.
And contrary to what you might think, they can teach you a thing or two if only you will listen.
Whatever they teach you won't be right. I'm not saying pick it all on board.
But sort through and pick up that which is good.
That which has come from their experience of tough times patching together against God's word.
Thirdly and very briefly and just about finished, keep doing what you know to be right and good.
Again it comes through the Psalms time and time and time again.
Do I apologize for it? Not really.
Because we need to hear it time and time and time and time again.
Because if you're like me, and I suspect most of you are, the first thing that tends to go when life gets really tough is the things that we need to keep.
Because they're good.
We're still feeling best these days that if we don't feel inclined to do something then we just don't do it.
But what we need to be doing as Christians is keeping on doing things that are right.
And then eventually, hopefully, possibly the feelings will then come back again.
It's like marriage, isn't it?
The feelings sort of spike and trough.
But we've got to keep on doing what's right.
In the meantime, self-discipline is what characterized Asaph.
And it's critical to his getting back on the road to recovery.
The agony had gone on without any relief.
God seems to have departed the scene. What would you do?
Chances are we wouldn't do what Asaph did. Go back and look at verse 2 and 3 again.
Asaph, in his dilemma and his distress and his frustration, cried out to God night after night with untiring hands.
A mixed metaphor, but he kept on doing the very thing that he knew he needed to do.
The very thing he knew that ultimately would be the source and the means by which he would be rehabilitated.
He kept on praying. He kept on crying out to the Lord.
Yes, his prayer felt as if it wasn't going any higher than the ceiling, but he kept on doing it because he knew there was no alternative.
It forced himself to serious study of the scripture.
Then I thought, to this I will appeal.
Now verse 10 could be seen as a contradiction because in a sense he's looked at the good old days in the past and it didn't do anything for him.
So what does this conclude?
Well then, there's no benefit from looking back through our experience with the Lord.
No, it comes to the conclusion, I have to go back and relearn it.
I can't look back and get an immediate high from it.
But it's there, I have to go back and relearn it, rediscover it, recommit myself to it.
We need to learn the lesson, don't we?
We keep on doing what's good even when we don't find it enjoyable or even when we don't find it immediately satisfying.
I don't think I got the benefit of my nine months with Jeremiah for probably two or three years later.
It was an ongoing thing.
In fact, some of the times when I said I thought it was ridiculous to start with, some of the weeks when I was working on it,
I could scarcely get the words off the page in through my eyes, let alone the lodge in my brain.
Too easily and too quickly, too often we give up on things simply because we don't feel excited about it.
It's as if we think that, well, unless we're over the moon about something, therefore it can't be beneficial to us.
Unless we're, ah, this is wonderful, therefore we can't be learning.
Unless we're, you know, all excited and talking to everybody around us, then we're not being spiritually rehabilitated.
I don't know where that comes from, but it's certainly not scripture.
Matthew Henry said, days of trouble must be days of prayer and study.
Too often our days of trouble are simply days of token prayer and a quick read of the Bible before we go to bed.
Or before we launch ourselves into other distractions, whether it's shopping or buying new toys for us to avoid or whatever it is.
Friends, these things don't represent a complete answer.
Certainly they can't be plugged in and just neatly switched on and everything's going to go away.
But I do believe there's a lot of wisdom in the things I've said before you this morning, said before you this morning.
The last thing as I finish up here is just to remind you how this picture of the struggle of Asaph takes us again through to Christ.
Take yourself through now to the New Testament, the Gospels, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
You never see Jesus struggling in turmoil of mind, in a physical situation,
sweating drops of blood as he faced the agony and isolation of his death.
And we see in the way Christ responded a model that was Asaph's model and that ought to be our model.
Christ was very realistic about what lay before him.
Interacted with his father and father, look, is there any other way we can do this?
But his focus was in God's will and not his own circumstances.
And he pressed on in prayerfulness and in confident trust in God's goodness and God's ultimate sovereignty.
He pressed on with what was right to do when everything in him urged him to go down a different road.
So friends, Jesus tells us that Asaph's model works, but not only that.
It means that Jesus is just superbly situated to help us.
Let me finish with three verses, four verses.
Hebrews chapter 2.
Jesus knows how we're feeling.
He knows the anguish.
He knows the turmoil of mind because he himself suffered when he was tempted.
He is able to help those who are being tempted.
And then chapter 4 verses 14 and 15.
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God,
let us hold firmly to the faith we professed.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.
But we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin.
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence,
so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Christ, where did you go to?
Oh, I'm supposed to introduce the sound. Oh, you can come and introduce it.