Good morning, church. My name is Andy Henderson. I’m one of the pastors here at North Hills, and I want to welcome you back to our Summer in the Psalms series. Our text for this morning is Psalm 131. I invite you to read along as I read it this morning.
“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore” (Psalm 131).
I want to begin this morning with a question: Are you quiet on the inside right now? Are you calm? Is there noise? Is there anxiety that’s churning just below the surface? Is there a question you can’t let go? A silence from God that you can’t explain?
Most of us have some version of that noise running. There’s a particular kind of noise that doesn’t get enough attention. It’s not the noise of outright unbelief, of standing outside the faith and wondering if any of this is true or not.
There’s something harder than that. It’s the noise of believing in God, holding on to God even, but being completely unable to make sense of what he is doing. You’re not walking away, you’re not in rebellion, but his providence has gone dark. His timing makes no sense. Something has happened or hasn’t happened that you cannot reconcile with what you know of him. You’ve prayed, you’ve searched, you’ve tried to find the logic in it all, and it simply isn’t there.
The psalter knows this experience well. Psalm 42 and 43 give us one of the most honest portraits of it anywhere in the scriptures. The sons of Korah, the writers of those psalms, are in exactly this place. God feels distant to them. The soul is in turmoil.
What’s remarkable is what they do with this turmoil. They preach to themselves. Three times across these two Psalms (42 and 43), the same refrain appears. It’s almost like a man grabbing himself by the collar and saying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”
This word “turmoil” in Psalm 42 and 43 carries the sense of noise. It’s a boisterous churning restlessness. The soul is loud. It is not at peace. The psalmist knows it, names it, and then preaches against it: Hope in God. Don’t stay in the noise. There’s a better place to stand.
What’s significant for us this morning is that this word “hope” in Psalm 42 and 43 is the same word for hope that we find at the end of Psalm 131. The psalter is making a connection.
Psalm 42 and 43 show us a problem, a soul in turmoil. It’s loud and cast down, preaching to itself in the middle of the fog. Psalm 132 shows us the destination. It’s a soul that has arrived somewhere, that has learned a composure that noise cannot drown out. These Psalms belong together. One is the heartfelt cry, and the other is the answer.
In my years-long struggle with depression, Psalm 42 and 43 gave me language of prayer to God and how to preach to my own soul. But Psalm 131, during those years, was the goal. It was the target. My desire was that even if my circumstances and my pain did not change—in fact, even if it got worse somehow—that I could rest as David did in Psalm 131.
Before we go any further, let’s be clear about what kind of answer Psalm 131 has. It’s not a solution. It is not an explanation. It is a posture, and it comes in three verses.
Psalm 131 is one of the shortest of the Psalms, and it’s one of the songs of ascent, which was to be sung by pilgrims as they walked up the hill to Jerusalem for the festivals. The brevity of Psalm 131, I think, is part of its message. This is not a complicated thought, although it is very hard.
One more thing before we look at the text: Do not mistake this psalm for a call to detachment or passivity. The composure that’s found in Psalm 131 is not the quiet of someone who has stopped caring or who is trying to exercise some kind of stoicism. It’s the quiet of someone who has found a different ground to stand on. There’s a world of difference between apathy and peace, and this psalm is entirely about the latter.
David wrote this psalm as a man after God’s own heart. His life was complicated and incomprehensible at times. He was anointed to be king as a teenager and then spent the better part of two decades running for his life, waiting, submitting, refusing to force open the door that God had not yet opened. What he describes here, he has the right to describe. This is hard-won composure, and he’s inviting us to learn it.
We’re going to see three things from these three verses:
David’s commitment in verse 1,
David’s composure in verse 2,
and David’s call in verse 3.
1. David’s commitment
So let’s begin with David’s commitment:
“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalm 131:1).
Verse 1 shows us what David has committed himself against. His commitments are counterintuitive in some ways because our instincts, when life is confusing, are to run in exactly the opposite direction.
When we can’t make sense of what God is doing, we try harder. We play that situation in our minds over and over again. We push into the question “why” more forcefully. We feel like if we could just understand a little more fully or think a little more clearly, the fog would lift. We occupy ourselves with the mystery of it all.
David has committed himself against that, and not because honest wrestling with God or honest questions to God are wrong. The Psalms are full of those questions, as are many other parts of Scripture. But he has recognized in himself a kind of straining that produces noise rather than faith, and he has chosen deliberately to stop.
Here’s a useful way to feel the weight of what David is committing himself against: Imagine the opposite, if we were to write an anti-psalm. David Powlison wrote an article on Psalm 131 in which he did an anti-psalm.
Imagine, instead of “my heart is not lifted up,” the anti-psalm would be “my heart is proud.” It’s full of its own sense of what it deserves and what God owes it.
Instead of “my eyes are not raised too high,” it is “my eyes are haughty,” scanning to see whether I’m getting what I merit, measuring others and comparing my lot and life to theirs, calculating my position.
Instead of “I do not occupy myself with things too great or marvelous for me,” it would be “I chase after things beyond me, demanding answers that I cannot access,” insisting that God’s ways conform to my comprehension.
That anti-Psalm is loud. Anxiety is the sound of a heart that is not getting what it deeply desires. Despair is the sound of a soul that chased what was beyond it and came up empty. And it’s subtler than we think.
We rarely experience our own pride as pride. We experience it often as a reasonable expectation, as a righteous frustration. “I just want things to make sense.” “I just want God to explain himself to me.”
From the inside, the demand for an explanation feels like faith, but it actually comes from something else, often. It’s a heart that is lifted up, insisting that God’s ways should be legible to me, that he owes me an accounting of his will and his ways.
The word translated “marvelous” in verse 1 is one that we find throughout the Old Testament, specifically for the acts of God, the wonders, the mighty works of divine providence that exceed what any human mind could fully trace.
David isn’t saying here, “This is beneath me.” He’s saying, “This way above me. There is a category of things that God does that my mind simply cannot comprehend or contain.” And David has committed himself deliberately to stop reaching for what his mind simply is not able to grasp.
Consider what Paul says at the end of one of his most extended theological arguments, the great arc of Romans one through 11. It’s the theological section of the book of Romans, before the practical section of the book of Romans begins in Romans 12. In between then, at the end of chapter 11, we see this doxology:
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways” (Romans 11:33).
This is not a defeated concession by the apostle. This is an acknowledgement of faith. It’s the same commitment that David has here in Psalm 131. It’s not ignorance, but it’s wonder.
We need to identify the ladders that we have been climbing individually: the ladder of needing an explanation, of needing vindication, of needing to see how it all makes sense before we have a settled heart. David’s commitment is to stop climbing. Not to stop caring, but to stop straining. That release is not defeat. In fact, it is the first note of true composure, which brings us to verse 2 and our second point, which is David’s composure.
2. David’s composure
“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalm 131:2).
Verse 1 shows us what David is committing himself against. Verse 2 shows us what David has composed himself toward, and it gives us a truly powerful image: David compares his soul to a weaned child resting against its mother.
The single most important word here in this image is “wean.” This is not a nursing infant. It’s not a child mid-feeding. It’s a weaned child. When you watch a hungry infant placed on his mother’s lap before the weaning process is complete, they can be agitated, they’re squirming, they’re reaching, they are fussing… If he doesn’t get immediate satisfaction, those emotions can escalate to anxiety, frustration, anger, despondency.
You see there, with that picture, in miniature, exactly what we experience as adults, often, when we face difficult things, when things make little to no sense, and God is not explaining the why of it all. The infant is loud. He is, in the moment, a picture of us, a picture of the soul in Psalm 42 and 43: churning and boisterous and preaching to itself in the dark.
Now, you watch that child just a few weeks later, successfully weaned. Place that child on the mother’s lap, and he may rest. A dramatic change has taken place, not in his circumstances, but in him. The mother hasn’t given him what he’s crying for, but the child has stopped crying for it. He has found something better than the milk. He has found his mother herself.
This is the spiritual movement that Psalm 131 charts for us, the heart of what I mean by “David’s composure.” The movement from a faith that rests on understanding God’s ways to a faith that rests on God himself, from needing his answers to being satisfied with his presence. Something that once meant everything (the explanation, the vindication, the resolution) comes to mean far less, not because we’ve stopped hurting or caring but because we have found something much better.
Look at the verbs in verse 2: “I have calmed and quieted my soul.” Those are active verbs. This is something that David has pursued deliberately, volitionally. He has wrestled his unruly soul down, which tells you that the soul does not go down quietly or easily. It resists; it cycles back to the wound.
The composure here is achieved. It’s not spontaneous. It comes only by grace. You cannot produce it by sheer willpower. The noise of a proud, self-trusting heart cannot be silenced by a prouder, more self-trusting act of will. You need something from outside yourself.
The weaning process—the process by which God loosens your grip on what you think you need in order to be okay—only works because he’s drawing you to something better. He doesn’t just take; he substitutes. He gives himself.
God weans us from explanations that come easily, from seasons where his hand seems to be invisible, from a faith that required understanding before it could rest. He moves us into the fog, not to harm us, but to grow us, to move us from a faith satisfied with his gifts to a faith satisfied with him. And the process hurts at times.
The weaning child reaches and cries, but the mother perseveres, and eventually the child rests. This is not simply resignation. This is a grace doing deep work in the human soul. The mother’s chest in David’s image is not a metaphor for a vague divine comfort. It is the specific, covenantal, secure comfort of a God who has bound himself to us and his Son.
The question is not, “Is God for me?” That question was answered clearly at the cross. The only question is whether we will rest in what is already true or keep demanding explanations before we settle. You can rest, not because your questions have been answered, but because you belong in Christ to the Father who holds every answer.
3. David’s call
That brings us to our third point in the third verse of Psalm 131, which is David’s call. We’ve seen the result in verse one, what David has committed himself against. We’ve seen the process in verse two, how David has composed himself toward God. Verse three gives us the reason behind it all, and David’s call to everyone within earshot:
“O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever more” (Psalm 131:3).
This final verse is the ground that makes everything else in this psalm possible. Pride begins to dwindle as hope strengthens. The haughty eyes of verse one lower as the dependent eyes of faith look to the right object. We stop chasing impossibilities when we start pursuing certainties:
The Lord, who is our hope, is wise enough to plan and strong enough to execute. That is what makes the commitment of verse one sustainable and the composure of verse two real. Not a willpower, but a person who is worthy of our trust.
Here is where the thread from the introduction ties off: The sons of Korah in Psalms 42 and 43 were preaching to themselves in the middle of the noise: “Why are you in turmoil within me, oh my soul? Hope in God.” …the same word. David, in Psalm 131, is on the other side of that cry. He’s actually arrived somewhere.
Now he turns to Israel (and by extension to all of us), still in the middle of the noise, and says the same thing the psalmist said to himself in Psalm 42 and 43: “Hope in the Lord.” What the sons of Korah had to fight for in the middle of the turmoil, David now calls from a place of composure and rest. The answer’s not changed. The ground has not shifted. Where we are to look for our hope did. It’s not in understanding our pain; it is in knowing God.
I think the timeframe is wonderful: “…from this time forth and forevermore.” The composure David is describing is not reserved for some future moment when the fog is finally lifted. It’s available now, “from this time forth,” in the middle of the confusion, before the mystery resolves, today.
“Forevermore” tells us where this is headed. There is a day coming when what is now hidden will be fully revealed, and what felt like a mystery will be recognized as mercy. All that is now mysterious shall be bright at last, but we do not have to wait for that day to find rest. “From this time forth,” here, in the midst of the current fog, we can hope because hope is not a feeling. Hope is a forward orientation of trust toward a person.
David’s call is communal: “O Israel, hope [together].” We do this as a community. We hold each other, care for each other. In the midst of the confusion, we point each other back to the Father as the source of hope when one of us keeps reaching for explanations that won’t come. That’s one of the irreplaceable purposes and opportunities of the gathered church. It’s a community learning composure together, calling each other back to the One who is enough.
In conclusion, we return to the question that we asked at the beginning: Are you quiet on the inside right now? For many of us, the answer to that is, “No, there’s noise. There’s a question we can’t put down. A providence that we cannot reconcile with what we know of God. A silence that we cannot satisfactorily explain.” You know what the sons of Koran knew: the soul in turmoil, boisterous within, preaching to itself.
Psalm 131 does not give us an explanation. It does not promise that the fog will lift by next week. What it gives you is something better than an explanation. It gives us composure in the midst of that noise, a place to stand in the midst of our unanswered questions and unmet expectations.
David’s commitment in verse 1 gives you permission to stop straining after what exceeds you, to identify the ladder that you’ve been climbing, the one that was built out of needing God to account for himself before we’ll rest. Pride built that ladder, and it will never hold. You can come down. Some things are too great and too marvelous, and we can release them.
David’s composure in verse 2 gives us a picture of what rest actually looks like. Not the rest of a soul that got what it demanded, but the rest of a soul that actually found something much better. The weaned child does not rest because it received the milk. He rests simply because he has a trusting relationship with his mother. And you can rest there, not because your questions have been answered, but because in Christ you belong permanently to the Father who holds all of those answers. His presence is the safest place that you will ever be.
David’s call in verse 3 gives you a community to do this with and an eternal hope in a good God. You are not in the fog alone. There is a day coming forevermore when what is now mysterious shall be bright at last. Until that day, the call is the same one that we find here in the psalter and across the psalters, from the sons of Korah to David and now to us: Be still and find your hope in the Lord. Let’s pray.
Father, your son Jesus, in Matthew 11, invited those who were burdened down to find rest in the very midst of our souls, so I pray for everybody listening today, those who are listening to this broadcast, Father, that you would fill their souls with rest and with hope, God, that they will learn what it means to not occupy themselves with things too great and too marvelous.
Father, Job asked many of these same kinds of questions, and instead of giving him an explanation, you showed him yourself. God, help that to be enough for us. In the midst of the noise, may we look for you, God, not an explanation, not even a resolution necessarily, but help us to find you and to rest in you. We pray all of these things in the name of Christ, amen. Grace and peace to you all.
