Pastor John, we get emails often from people who are essentially asking the question, "Is there any hope for me? Is there any hope for me after I've sinned in a really stupid way and am now paying the price for my foolish choices?" What would you say to someone in that situation?

Tony, Psalm 107 has been, over the years, a huge encouragement to me in my own wrestling with a sense of failure at times and wondering, "Is there a future for ministry or even of faith?" And probably as much as any other psalm, Psalm 107 has been the one that has made it possible for me to reach out and rescue, I think, some folks who feel like there's just no hope for them.

They've sinned too many times or they've sinned in too horrible a way for God to have any future for them. So let me just share with you, or the folks that might be in that condition, what I meditated on yesterday. I was reading through the Psalms again and came to Psalm 107, which begins, "Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever." And that's the refrain that comes again and again.

The psalm ends, "Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things. Let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord." So it begins and it ends with the steadfast love of the Lord. And then four times, there's these four stories or these four stanzas where it repeats, "They cried to the Lord in their trouble.

He delivered them from their distress. Let them thank the Lord for His steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of men." So four times you read that very same pair of verses. But what makes it so amazingly encouraging is that the situations in which people cried out to God are the very kinds of situations that people get themselves into now and feel hopeless, which is why this psalm is so hopeful.

So here's one example. "Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and irons, for they had rebelled against the words of God and spurned His counsel." And I could just hear hundreds of people saying, "I've spurned God's counsel. I knew it was right and I threw it away." And that's exactly what these people are doing.

And so you tend to say, "Well, there's no hope for them." And the next thing you read is, "They cried to the Lord in their trouble and He delivered them from all their distress." Or another one was later on, it says, "Some were fools through sinful ways because of their iniquities.

They suffered affliction. They loathed any kind of food and they drew near to the gates of death." So these are people who, because they've acted so stupidly, they've got AIDS. Or they've wrecked their minds with mind-altering drugs. Or they've gotten some kind of kidney failure because of excessive alcohol.

Or their lungs are shot for 60 years of, you know, two packs of cigarettes every day and they feel like, "God owes me nothing. There's just no hope for me at all." And that's exactly these folks' situation. They don't even want to eat anymore. They're at the gates of death.

They're in the midst of affliction because they've been fools. And yet they cried to the Lord in their trouble. He delivered them from all their distresses. And therefore, the hope that this psalm brings to people who feel like there's just no hope is incredible. You get to the end of the psalm and it says, "He turns rivers into a desert." That's bad.

"And he turns desert into pools of water." That's good. Then it says, "He pours contempt on princes." That's bad. "And he raises up the needy from affliction." And I think the point is, God is free to come down here and do whatever He has to do, whether it's hard things or easy things, good things or bad things.

God's going to do these things for the sake of lifting up the upright. So it ends with, "The upright see it and are glad, and all wickedness shuts its mouth. Whoever is wise," and this is what I'd say, Tony, to whoever's listening, "Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things.

Let him consider the steadfast love of the Lord." Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you will find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke.

Thanks for listening.