Mysterious Ways

Psalm 13

November 26, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

The best songs “are born in the wilderness of suffering” (Card, A Sacred Sorrow, pg. 63). Over the last month, we’ve walked through just a very few of what are called psalms of lament, and I hope you’ve begun to discover this truth. There are times in our lives when we struggle, when difficulties present themselves, when we face challenges that threaten to overwhelm us. And it’s okay to talk about such things. It’s especially okay to talk about them with God because, as I’ve said over and over again, he can handle it. So we’ve talked about the importance of continuing to pray, staying in the conversation with God because he has not and will not abandon you. And we talked about the right way to complain, how to share our struggle with God. Then last week we discussed asking boldly, and moving from the complaint to the “yet,” where pain and belief live in tension. But that’s not the end of the story. There’s a final piece to lamenting prayer we’re going to move toward today, and it connects with this season of thanksgiving. Psalm 13 can show us the way, and as we look at this psalm this morning, I’m going to show you another three-letter word that is also critical to our life of prayer.

Psalm 13 is another psalm that gives us no indication as to the original setting. We don’t know what happened to or near David that caused him to sing this psalm, but we do know he’s in another place where he feels forgotten by God. As an aside—it should give us all some comfort that David, one of the big heroes of the Bible, so often felt alone. We’ve seen this pattern so often that it makes me realize how many psalms we wouldn’t have if David’s life had been smooth sailing. What would we lose if he hadn’t been challenged in his life? And so in Psalm 13, we first hear him asking a familiar question: “How long, Lord?” This is a prayer written for someone who is facing a long haul, a long struggle with no end in sight (cf. Goldingay, Psalms for Everyone, Part 1, pg 43). It’s a prayer to a God who he feels is hiding, so we have the familiar complaint, and a bold request: “Look on me and answer, Lord my God” (13:3). It seems you’ve hidden your face from me, Lord, so now I’m asking you to turn back toward me. Look at me, God! Answer my prayer, because if you don’t, my enemy will win the day. “Look on me and answer,” he prays. That’s a bold request that, I’m willing to bet, some of you have prayed many times. I know I have. In the midst of dark nights, when everything seems to be going wrong, I have found myself awake, tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, asking God to answer. Maybe you’ve been there, too, with David, facing down an enemy. Maybe the enemy was cancer or some other disease, or a loved one’s health struggle, or a loss you couldn’t understand. Maybe it was a broken relationship or a financial challenge or a fear of the future that just would not go away. Look on me and answer, God! I want you to feel the desperation of the psalmist because only when we sit with him in that will the next piece of the prayer make sense.

In verse 5, we come to today’s three-letter word, a word that changes the whole tone of the psalm. Again, similar to Psalm 22 that we looked at last week, this simple word changes the viewpoint of the psalmist from looking at his own troubles to considering the character of God. And more than that, he makes a choice to trust the character of God. The word is “but.” B-U-T. Listen again to the verses that end this brief psalm: “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me” (13:5-6). Those are some power-packed verses, and I want to spend some time here breaking them down, because the final piece of lament is that we choose to trust, even when it might seem crazy to do so. Packed within these verses are three affirmations of trust, three commitments the psalmist makes to believe in spite of the evidence around him.

The first affirmation is this: “I trust in your unfailing love” (13:5). Choosing to trust involves affirming that God is trustworthy (cf. Vroegop, Dark Clouds Deep Mercy, pgs. 77-79). God has a history with his people, a history recounted in Scripture and down through church history as well. So when we face what seems to be a long struggle with no end in sight, we would do well to recall the ways God has come through in the past. We remember Abraham, to whom God promised a son when he was well past child-bearing years. We remember Noah, who built a boat in the desert while his friends made fun of him. We remember Moses and the children of Israel, who stood before a sea with an approaching army behind them and dared to believe that they would still be rescued. We remember Daniel standing in front of a bunch of lions, Nehemiah rebuilding a wall around Jerusalem, Mary facing a pregnancy that would be scandalous and having to tell a fiancé who could have her killed, John being exiled to a remote island and there encountering the risen Jesus—and I could go on and on. God has a history with his people. God has been faithful and because God is who he is, he will continue to be faithful to his people.

The psalmist even reminds us who God is, what his character is like. He is trusting in something we talk about often; today’s translation called it “unfailing love,” but the word there in the original text is hesed. If you’ve been here very long, I hope you recognize that word. It’s translated a lot of different ways in the Old Testament, and when they first translated the Bible into English, they made up a word: “lovingkindness.” Here’s the best definition I have found, one that I share with you often: it’s when the person who owes you nothing gives you everything. God owes us nothing, yet gives us everything—that is “unfailing love.” He has been hesed in the past and he will be hesed for all eternity. It is who he is, and we can trust in that (cf. Russell, The Psalms • Part I, pg. 59).

For some people, one way to remember that truth is to keep a journal, to write down the times God has been faithful, times you have seen his unfailing love. The journal then serves as a reminder of God’s faithfulness. I heard about one person who set up a five-year journal, each page divided into five sections, and every day he would write something in there that pointed to God’s faithfulness. Over the course of each year, he would also then see the things that God had done in his life in the past few years on that date. You don’t have to get that extravagant, but for some, writing down evidence of God’s hesed and reading them over and over from time to time builds deeper trust, even in the hard times.

The next piece is in the second half of that same verse: “My heart rejoices in your salvation” (13:5). Not only is God faithful to stay by his people, he is also in business of saving, rescuing his people from sin and death. “Suffering does not mean God has forgotten or rejected his people” (Vroegop 79). God is in the saving business, and the story of Scripture is about the redemption of all of creation. When all is said and done, God will make everything right. Now, we have an advantage that the original author of this psalm did not. We know how redemption, how salvation is going to be accomplished because we live on this side of the cross and the resurrection. We know that Jesus came and gave his life on the cross and that somehow, in a way maybe we don’t completely understand, he saves us from sin and death because of that sacrifice. But the psalmist didn’t know that yet. What faith he had to rejoice in God’s salvation without knowing how it ultimately would come about! He had faith that God would save his people, even if he couldn’t see how it was going to happen.

Paul was dealing with this same idea when he wrote to the people in Rome. In the middle of that letter, he asked an important question: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” And then he lists many of the challenges and struggles we face: “Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” He quotes from one of the lament psalms, Psalm 44: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” Paul knows the struggle. Paul knows the hardship. In fact, when he writes to the Corinthians, he gives a long list of the things he has been through while preaching about Jesus: beatings, shipwrecks, bandits, stonings, imprisonment and more. Then he says, “Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches” (1 Corinthians 11:24-29). Paul knew what it was like to suffer. So how does he answer his own question? Can anything separate us from the love of Christ, from his salvation? Paul says: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:35-37). And because the love of Christ always stays with us, we are able to rejoice in his salvation.

The third way we choose to trust is in verse 6: “I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.” Yes, part of trusting in God is singing to the Lord. But this isn’t just about singing, because “singing” in this case is the Bible’s shorthand for worship. Complaints and frustration, suffering and hardship eventually end in humble worship (Vroegop 82), and, yes, that might include singing. In fact, singing is one of the most often-repeated forms of worship mentioned in the Bible. Paul, again, talks about worshipping God with “songs, hymns and spiritual songs” (Ephesians 5:19), and before you start with me, the word translated as “hymns” there doesn’t refer to songs written by Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts or even Fanny Crosby. Well, not just those songs. None of them were born when Paul wrote these words! The word translated “hymns” just means “religious song,” so it can actually refer to any song that points the singer toward God. It’s the same word, by the way, Mark uses to describe what Jesus and his disciples sang together on the last night they were together (cf. Mark 14:26). So we sing, new songs and old songs, familiar tunes and challenging tunes. We sing whatever draws our heart out of our pain and toward the love and light of Christ. And for all those who sing like Pastor Rick, there is great comfort in the admonition of the one hundredth psalm to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” (Psalm 100:1, KJV). We may have trouble carrying a tune, but we can all make noise!

But what about those times we don’t feel like singing? Sometimes we’d rather go to the dentist than sing just one more song. There have been times in my life when I was so down, so discouraged, in so much struggle that I couldn’t open my mouth to sing. And I robbed myself in those times of the power of music to transform my soul. Even when you don’t feel it, sing! Even when your heart is breaking, sing! Even when you have very little energy, sing, even if it’s barely audible. That’s what the psalmist is doing. In verse 2 he’s asking, “How long will my enemy triumph over me?” And in verse 6 he is singing because God has been so good to him. Sometimes we need to express our faith before we “feel” it. Sometimes it’s our actions that lead to feeling rather than the other way around. Some of you may know the story of Horatio Spafford, a Chicago lawyer whose livelihood had been ruined by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. A couple of years later, he planned to go to London to help with a religious revival led by Dwight L. Moody, but he was delayed and sent his family on ahead. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship his family was on ran into another vessel and sank. All four of his daughters were lost and when his wife, who survived, arrived in London she sent back a telegram to Spafford that simply said, “Saved alone.” Spafford quickly boarded a ship and hurried toward London, but he asked to be notified when they passed the place where the earlier ship had sunk. And when they did, Spafford stood on the deck and wrote these words:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

“I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me” (13:6).

But worship isn’t just about singing; that’s a mistake we often make. Worship, Biblically speaking, encompasses our whole life given over to honoring God. We worship when we read and seek to understand the Scripture. We worship when we do our work faithfully and honorably. Paul said, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord…” (Colossians 3:23). That’s worship. We worship when we keep our word, when we love our families and our friends, when we serve without expecting recognition, or when we care for the creation. Because the whole earth belongs to God (cf. Psalm 24:1), everything we do can become an act of worship, and worship can help us choose to trust the one who has been good to us.

Next Sunday we begin the season of Advent, the four weeks set aside to help us prepare spiritually for Christmas and the birth of Jesus. Some of you, if you’ve decorated for the season at all, may have put up or opened up an Advent calendar. These things usually have a door or a box to open every day through the season, and that door usually has a prize or a gift behind it. There are Advent calendars for all temperaments these days. I’ve had a “Star Wars” Advent calendar before. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. My dog had an Advent calendar that I got at Sam’s one year, and this year I saw a cheese Advent calendar—apparently you get a different type of cheese each day. But somehow those things have become all about getting, much like the rest of the season has become. But what if we did things differently? 

Worship is about giving more than getting. So what if for Advent we turned around the usual approach and focused on giving—of ourselves, of our time, of our energy and our resources? One way to worship is to find a way to serve people, to be the hands and feet of Jesus by serving someone different every day. This morning, we have a different sort of Advent calendar available for you. It asks you to do a random act of kindness every day between now and Christmas Eve—doing things that aren’t about looking for recognition. And the list we have is only suggestive, and even though the ideas are numbered you don’t have to do them in order. You may also think of more and better ideas because there are as many ways to practically worship the God who is good to us as there are people in this room, and even more than that. This is something everyone can participate in and there’s no prize for completing them all. Do what you can, and do what helps you “sing the Lord’s praise.” So, in the next month, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, how will you worship the one who has been good to you?

If there’s anything we’ve learned in this brief exploration of Biblical lament, it’s that it’s okay to admit when we are in a difficult place. God understands and he never abandons us. And it’s also true that there are things we learn in the struggle that we can’t learn any other way. God shapes us into sons and daughters in the wilderness, in the barren times, in the darkness. William Cowper was a brilliant poet and hymnwriter whose works are still read today. But Cowper struggled all of his life with depression and insanity; he was even committed to an asylum at one point, and during another particularly dark time in his life he was convinced God had condemned him to hell and that he was commanded to sacrifice his own life. “Most of his life he wrestled with how to turn his sorrow into trust,” and it isn’t until what is believed to be the last song he wrote that he seems to have come to some place close to where the psalmist was. The song he wrote goes like this:

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm…

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan his work in vain.

God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain!

Sometimes the only way to learn to trust is to go through the struggle, choosing to trust in God’s mysterious ways (cf. Vroegop 72, 79).

One thing that is apparent in Psalm 13, and really in all of the lament psalms, is that those who are praying are able to see beyond the current circumstances. Even though things are bad now, even though the sky is dark now, and even though it seems like the enemies are going to win, the psalmist consistently believes that he is the one who will celebrate in the end (cf. Goldingay 43). In Psalm 13, the enemy says, “I have overcome him,” but he does not know that on the psalmist’s side is the God of all creation, the one who brings salvation, the one who is good to those who trust in him. The psalmist shows us that to trust in God is to practice what we might call “active patience” (Vroegop 74), trusting that in God’s own good time all will be well. It will probably not happen on our timetable, and that’s where the patience comes in. We wait, knowing that lament stands on the truth I remind you of often: the worst thing is never the last thing. In the end, Christ is and will be king over all the earth. He will reign, and he will win. Lament is one way we choose to trust that this is true. “Lament is how we endure. It is how we trust” (Vroegop 74). It is how we move forward with faith. Let’s pray.