Our God specializes in transforming sadness into joy. The ultimate demonstration of this is our Lord’s resurrection which we celebrate every Sunday. Yet, God’s people have celebrated through the centuries that sorrow and suffering never have the last word in their lives. For example, King David offers a rationale for why we cannot remain silent and must exuberantly worship our God.

You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.
You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,
 that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever! — Psalm 30:11-12 (NLT)

A Psalm like this provides us with a spiritual cardiovascular workout. What do we mean by this? When we lift weights physically to strengthen our bodies, we push and pull against a force that resists us. The Psalms force us to pray when we don’t feel like it and to pray in ways that seem contrary to our feelings. Praying the praise Psalms on days when we feel sad and gloomy seems counterintuitive. Praying the lament Psalms feels cruel when joy pervades our lives.

The praise Psalms remind us that all sadness will end one day, and we will experience joy in God’s presence forever. The lament Psalms remind us that this world is not our permanent home. Suffering is real. Devastating things can and do happen to God’s people. Thus, praying the Psalms helps us to persevere and prevents our emotions and circumstances from dictating to us .

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, concurs:

“If we want to read and pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ… It does not depend on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our hearts .
If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own hearts .”

Jesus Christ entered the ultimate sadness of separation from His Father when he experienced the judgment, curse and condemnation of our sin when He hung on Calvary’s cross and laid in death’s strong bands, BUT… on the third day that the old spiritual calls “that great gettin’ up mornin'” He rose triumphantly from the dead and reigns on His throne in heaven to make sure that we get home to His home which is characterized by eternal joy because there we will experience the unmediated presence of the living God! We know this again from another Psalm verse:

“You will show me the way of life,
granting me the joy of your presence
and the pleasures of living with you forever.” – Psalm 16:11 (NLT)

May the Lord turn your mourning into dancing and your sorrows into joy!

It may take a lifetime, but the end of the story for a believer is “fullness of joy” in the Lord’s presence forever! In the meantime, take a listen to an old Scripture song from Ron Kenoly: