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[Music] [MUSIC] me yet. Please be patient with me. God is not through with me yet. Oh, when God gets through with me, when God gets through with me, I shall come forth, I shall come forth,

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I shall come forth, I shall come forth, I shall come forth, I shall come forth as new grown. Let's all say amen. These choirs and particularly the leaders in this song, the Ames Twins and the Watterson, appreciate this contribution which you make to the music ministry of our church and particularly

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in this presentation today. The basis for our message is the first five verses while we consider the entire Psalm number 30. We lift up the first five verses as the basis for the morning message. I will praise thee, O Lord, for thou hast not let my foes rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to thee for help, and thou hast healed me.

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O Lord, thou has brought up my soul from death, and restored me to life from among those gone down to the pit. Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name, for his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with

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the morning. That is the New English Bible translation of that particular passage. The subject of the message, "Put down and pulled up." Put down and pulled up. There are times when we are put down. I think this experience is expressed very succinctly in the language of the black spiritual

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"sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, sometimes I'm almost to the ground. Nobody knows the trouble I see, nobody knows but Jesus. The psalmist describes a familiar human experience in this particular song. There are times when we are not only on the ground trying to pick ourselves up, there

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times when we are put deep down in a pit, times when we descend into the depths. The psalmist is familiar with this experience because he has been put down. In fact, he has been put down in the dismal dungeon of despair. Circumstances have a way of of putting us down.

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We are put down by conditions over which we have no control. We are victims of poverty. We are victims of deprivation. We are victims of ignorance.

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We are victims of discrimination. We are victims of alienation. We are made prisoners in the dungeon of despair. And then sometimes we just put ourselves down.

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We belittle ourselves. We put ourselves down when we doubt ourselves. It's one thing to be put down, but it is even worse to be down and out. To be down and out is to be without hope.

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It is to succumb to the enemy, that which we ought to be fighting against. And we are really in a terrible situation when we are our own worst enemy. Sometimes we are put down by others. We are made to feel that we are less than we are.

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We are humiliated. We become depressed. battered and bruised by human conditions. To be put down physically is to be critically ill. It's to descend to the depths. It's to go as far as you can go. It is to be at death's door.

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And that's what the psalmist is talking about. He's been put down. It's not some rabbit hole like that described in Alice in Wonderland. He knows what it is to be at death's door and then to be pulled up. It's like being put in a well and left to die. Joseph was cast into a pit by his brothers and then he was later rescued from that pit and sold

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into slavery. We noticed also an account in the scripture of Jeremiah who as he was going about in his ministry that he provoked the anger, the jealousy, and the opposition of the ruling class and they cast him into a pit. It was possibly an abandoned well. It was without water but it was muddy and he possibly would have died having been put down in that pit. But there was one of the

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servants of the king, one of the black servants of the king by the name of Eben-Melech who went to the king and pleaded with the king reminding or telling him of Jeremiah's condition and the king gave him permission to rescue Jeremiah and he took some old clothes and let them down by means of a rope into the well and

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instructed Jeremiah to take the old clothes and to put them under his arm pit and he was drawn up out of that horrible pit. He was rescued, he was put down, but he was pulled up. And so to be put down as far as we can possibly go is to be wounded in spirit. It is the crucifixion of the spirit that leaves us

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without strength to pull ourselves up. Here the psalmist speaks of the dismal depths and referring to Sheol. Sheol is the habitation or the abode of the dead. Sheol is also referred to as hell. That shadowy dark gloomy existence that foreboding place. The psalmist speaks of being put down into a pit. He speaks of

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the grave. Death's door. Being a prisoner of meaninglessness at death's door is to be unaware of who we are. It is to engage in an existence without meaning and to follow a way of life where there is nothing worth remembering. And so the Thomas cries in the night. He said, "I cried unto the Lord." He cries in the night in the midst of

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the darkness of that pit. In the dismal dungeon of despair, we find him crying. He's crying in the night. His existence is wrapped in sackcloth. He's in sackcloth and ashes. He weeps. He is down in the dust and he cries for deliverance. Listen to the words, "I will praise you O Lord for you have pulled me up. I was lost. There was

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no hope of recovery but you pulled me up, you lifted me. Oh we know, every one of us knows what it is to be down in the dumps. We know what it is to be depressed at times when every one of us is depressed, we put down so to speak by the brutal circumstances of our existence. And we want to be delivered and in the midst of

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the darkness and all of the gloom that surrounds us, we cry out in the night for deliverance. We want to be lifted. We want to experience that change which is necessary that can only be brought about in the realm of the Spirit. For you see, you see, when we are put down, we cannot, in the kind of put down that the

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psalmist is talking about here, it's the kind that we cannot lift ourselves up by own bootstraps. There are certain things you can do for yourself. The story of a man who was walking through a particular section of the country road, a dark dark evening, it was at night, and he fell into a hole and he tried to get out and he couldn't. And so he just decided just to stay

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there and while he was lying there another man came by and he too fell into that same hole. And And when he fell into the hole, he began trying to climb out of that hole. And the other man who was still there was awakened by his efforts. And the other man that was trying to get out who had fallen in the last one

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heard the other one who was there before say, You can't get out of this hole, but he did. He was motivated by that unseen

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voice, so to speak, to get out of that hole. There's certain holes that we may fall into, but we may be motivated by our own sheer efforts to get out of. Whether it be fear or whatever may vote may motivate us.

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But there are certain conditions, conditions over which we have no control, that we may fall into, or we may be put into, that we cannot get out of. And it's this kind of condition that the psalmist is describing. In other words, when it comes to this kind of condition, it may be said of it that we cannot lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We have to be

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pulled up. Jeremiah was down in the well and and he was a victim of the well. He was there in the mud and he would have died there from starvation and neglect, but there had to be one who was above him to let down the means by which he was rescued from that pit. So the psalmist says, "I looked to the Lord and

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he healed me. I was at death's door. The doctors had all given me up and all of the medicines I had taken were of no avail. I was at death's door and there was no human hope for me but I looked to the Lord and he raised me up and here we find him he said I was crying in the night as he reports and we cry in the

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night when we are not favored by the circumstances of our existence we cry in the night when we find ourselves up against God. There are certain circumstances in our lives when we really find ourselves up against God. We are in rebellion against God. We are in a rebellion against truth. We're in

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rebellion against justice. We're in a rebellion against the divine love. And And when we find ourselves in rebellion, when we find ourselves up against God, God is angry. We are up against the wrath of God. And you know how it is when a parent is angry with the child and you look at the parent's face there is a

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a frown on the face. And this makes the child very uncomfortable and this brings grief because of the injured relationship here between the child and the parent. The psalmist knows something of this experience that somehow something has happened, something has come between the psalmist and God. God is

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angry, he has not obeyed, and so in the dark night of sin he cries unto the Lord. I cried unto the Lord, and we cry in the darkness. That cry comes because we are alienated from ourselves. That cry comes in the dark night when we are strangers to each other. In the dark night when we find ourselves strangers to the eternal

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reality we cry and we cry for help we cry for deliverance. But here's the good news, here's the good news. God works wonders in the night. God works wonders in the night. In the midst of our despair, in the midst of our disappointments, in the midst of our discouragement, in the midst of our depression, in the midst of our defeat,

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when we find ourselves at death's door, God works wonders in the night. So the Psalmist says, "Weeping may endure in the night. Weeping may tarry in the night, but joy comes in the morning." Weeping in the night, joy in the morning. And so really when we have sinned, when we have disobeyed God, weeping in the night is a

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prerequisite for deliverance. Weeping. In other words, what we call it is the experience of repentance. In other words, godless sorrow. Is that somehow we cry to God saying, "Lord, I'm sorry. I have sinned against heaven and against you. I'm sorry." And in the midst of our weeping, there is a change of heart. "Lord, I want to do

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what you want me to do." Weeping endures in the night, but joy comes in the morning. The morning of repentance is the experience of divine forgiveness. To repent, yes, to have godless sorrow, sorrow for our sins, sorry enough to make a change, sorry enough to weep. Weeping endures in the night, but joy comes in

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the morning. God works wonders in the night. He comes to us when we are put down. When we are put down he comes and pulls us up. Oh that happens over and over again. I can remember what as a youngster in college when I really fell down in the dumps and I'd go up to my room alone on the third floor of the

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in Marston Hall, there at Bishop College. Nobody there but me. No money, not knowing how I'm going to make it. But somehow in prayer, there alone,

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all by myself, talking with God. And yet, come out of that room, sometimes the world around you looks different when you talk with God.

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When you really talk with God, if you know what I'm talking about. And you don't have anything in your pocket, nothing material in it has changed, but you have a new spirit, you have a new determination,

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and you have a new heart with which to go on. Your spirit is renewed. God somehow pulls us up when we are put down. God gives us the strength.

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God gives us the power to go on. Oh, that happens, that happens. It happens. It happens.

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The Psalmist talks about what happened in his personal experience. It happened in the life of the Jewish nation during the time when the nation was occupied by the the Greeks, Antiochus, Epiphanes, humiliated the entire nation by sacrificing a pig in the Holy of Holies. That's about as profane as one could get

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in relationship to the Jewish people to go to the most holy place and to take a pig, that which they had nothing to do with, which was looked upon as being anathema, and sacrifice it upon the altar. And so the temple was profane and they engaged in what we call the Maccabean Wars and Judas Maccabeus led the revolt

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against that onrush by the enemy and finally they emerged victoriously and the temple was cleansed and the people worshiped there once again. But when that awful thing happened they were put down into a pit but somehow God pulled them up and as God pulled him up they could identify with the language of the

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Psalmist, "Weeping may endure in the night, but joy comes in the morning because God works wonders in the night." God turns our midnights into morning. Joy comes in the morning, may get stuck in the mud. There may be some experiences along life's way where we are stuck in the mud and we don't know how we're going to get out,

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but God provides a way on the rope of prayer we can somehow be lifted up and we can be delivered. David had been down and out but he could say that the Lord has lifted me, he brought me up from the muddy pit, out of the mire and the clay, he pulled me up, he delivered me, he sat my feet on a solid rock and he has

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established my going, praise his name. Weeping may endure in the night, but joy, joy comes in the morning." Because what God does for us, he somehow gives us the blessedness of getting rid of the garments of mourning. Somehow he's able to say to us, "Blessed are they that mourn." For when you mourn, when you're really

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weak, for in Zion, when you mourn and you're concerned about righteousness, that there is a certain blessedness that comes. Because weeping may endure in the night, but joy comes in the morning. And then the psalmist says, "Well, I want to rejoice. I want to rejoice. I know what God has done for me and he says not only can I testify about what God has done for me,

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not only can I testify in the family, but I want to go to the temple. I want to go to the temple where all of the people of God are gathered and I want to report what God has done. I want to tell them how he has turned my mourning into dancing, how he has pulled me up from the horrible pit, how he has given me a new

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lease on life. I want to tell others about how good God has been to me." And that's the language of the Psalmist, because he says, "I don't only want to do it just this time." You know sometimes people say, "Well, they say thank you God for this," and then they forget about that. And then many times in this present

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generation we say to our friends, "Well, what have you done for me lately?" And we forget all the other things that have, but God is remembered for all that he has done, and he says that I will praise him forever. I'm gonna praise him forever for light of friction which is but for a moment, worketh for us, more exceeding an

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eternal weight of glory. Thanks be to God that when we are put down, He pulls us up. He delivers us. He rescues us, and he turns our sadness into gladness. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Come ye, disconsolate. Maybe you've been depressed. Maybe you've been down in the dumps.

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maybe you've been a prisoner in the dark dungeons of despair, but God will lift you if you will but reach out to him. He'll deliver us from every condition and circumstance that serves to threaten our existence and to destroy our being. We invite you to come now. By letter or Christian experience we invite you to

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A profession of faith. Come. Come you disconsolate. [Music]

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♪ With the ♪ ♪ Love you ♪ ♪ My ♪ ♪ Bestest ♪

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♪ Family ♪ ♪ Every moment ♪ ♪ Is a new adventure ♪ ♪ Every breath ♪

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♪ O come, O come, Emmanuel ♪ ♪ And ransom captive Israel ♪ ♪ Joyful, joyful, ♪ ♪ I would not forsake ♪

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♪ God of my nature ♪ ♪ Angels I would love to see ♪ ♪ The new ♪ ♪ Is this ♪

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♪ The love ♪ ♪ That I'm ♪ ♪ Desiring ♪ [Music]

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