Praying Your Trouble | Psalm 77
Brian Hedges | July 3, 2016
Someone once said that all of scripture speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us. Eugene Peterson has called the Psalms tools for prayer, and if you have any experience with tools, you know that to use a tool well requires developing a skill. And I think that for many of us the skill of praying well requires the practice and the use of the Psalms as tools.
And so this morning we’re going to begin a six-week series where we’re thinking about how to use these Psalms as tools for our prayer life. And I have to say I’m really excited about this series. And in part I’m excited because I’m not the only one preaching these messages. Okay, so I’m about to go on a writing leave and a study leave, and we’ll be gone for a number of weeks, but I’m really thrilled with what’s coming for you and I’ll be listening even though I’m away. In the next number of weeks, some of the men in our church are already preparing to bring messages to you from the Psalms. So you’ll be hearing in the coming weeks from Brent Paulus and Andy Lindgren and Phil Krause, and then Luke Potter, the pastor over at New City Church and a dear brother to all of us will be here on July 31st, and then I’ll be back to finish off the series the first week of August.
But, today we begin the series. And today we’re going to be talking about praying your troubles from Psalm 77. So, if you want to turn in your Bibles we’re going to be in Psalm 77.
Now this is a Psalm that was written by Asaph, who is one of the three temple worship leaders during the days of David and Solomon along with Jeduthun and Heman (see 1 Chron. 16:41-42). Asaph was the author of at least 12 Psalms that bear his name, Psalm 50 and then Psalms 73 through 82. And if you’re familiar at all with the Psalms of Asaph, you know that he was painfully honest in his prayers and songs. That’s one of the things that really stands out in Asaph’s psalms. He was one of the great poets of Israel, and in his psalms he sounded the depths of human experience, navigating through some of the most difficult questions that believers ever ask. And we see that here in Psalm 77.
So let me read this Psalm to us:
To the choirmaster: according to Jeduthun. A Psalm of Asaph.
1 I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. 2 In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. 3 When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints. Selah 4 You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak. 5 I consider the days of old, the years long ago. 6 I said, “Let me remember my song in the night; let me meditate in my heart.” Then my spirit made a diligent search: 7 “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? 8 Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? 9 Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Selah 10 Then I said, “I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High.” 11 I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. 12 I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds. 13 Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God? 14 You are the God who works wonders; you have made known your might among the peoples. 15 You with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. Selah 16 When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; indeed, the deep trembled. 17 The clouds poured out water; the skies gave forth thunder; your arrows flashed on every side. 18 The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lighted up the world; the earth trembled and shook. 19 Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen. 20 You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
This God’s word.
So, Psalm 77 is a Psalm of both lament and remembrance. You have the lament in verses 1 through 9, and then it shifts to the remembrance of God’s mighty deeds in verses 10 through 20. But the occasion of Asaph’s psalm, the background of this psalm was some personal or perhaps national experience of trial and trouble. And so this morning we’re going to talk about praying our troubles using this psalm, Psalm 77, as a tool to teach us how to pray our troubles.
And I want you to notice three things:
I. The time of trouble (vv. 1-9)
II. Our appeal in trouble (vv. 10-15)
III. The God for troubled times (vv. 15-20)
I. The time of trouble
First of all, the time of trouble. And you see this in the first nine verses. Asaph’s trouble, first of all, arose from circumstances. Trouble from circumstances. You see this in verses 1 and 2: “ I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. 2 In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;”
And immediately we see the intensity of his anguish and his distress. Notice he doesn’t simply pray, he cries. He not only cries, he cries aloud. And he does this all night long. The end of verse 2: “in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying.”
And despite his night vigil and prayer, comfort alludes him. He says, “my soul refuses to be comforted.” This is really intense. He’s in deep anguish, deep trouble, deep anxiety, deep turmoil and trial.
Now, the precise nature of these troubling circumstances is not defined. We’re left to speculate just what was going on in Asaph’s prayerful cry. What prompted this? And that undefined nature of the trouble is intentional. It’s intentional because it makes this prayer relevant for everyone who is going through trouble, no matter what your troubles are.
And we’re all facing troubling circumstances at one time in our lives or another—perhaps right now. And the trouble that you face right now may be physical, or it may be emotional. It may be some deep anxiety of heart that’s caused by the circumstances of your life, maybe a change is coming in job, in vocation, or in a move/location. Maybe you are battling some kind of threat to your illness. You may be battling cancer, you may be facing or recovering from some kind of a surgery, something that threatens your physical well-being. You may be struggling financially. You may be carrying heavy burdens with your extended family. It may be some combination of these things, but of this we can be sure: right now, you’re either facing trouble, or you will be pretty soon. Because that’s the nature of life isn’t it? As we read in the book of Job, “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Light a fire, and as sure as the sparks of that fire are going to float upwards into the sky, just as sure, your life is going to be troubled.
You’re going to face trouble. And we face this trouble in our circumstances. Though what makes our trouble especially acute and especially painful is that when we remember God, sometimes it makes the trouble not better, but worse. And you see this in verse 3, he’s troubled when he remembers God. Look at verse 3: “when I remember God” he says, “I moan.” Now that’s not what you’d expect. You would think he would say something like this, “when I remember God, peace floods my soul.” Now, that’s not what he says at all. He says, “When I remember God, I moan.”
Asaph is troubled. He turns to God, and it doesn’t make things better, it makes things worse. John Goldingay, the Old Testament scholar, says that this word “moan” while it’s “moan” or “groan” in the English versions, it often means something more tumultuous and aggressive. (Goldingay, Baker Old Testament Commentary, Psalms vol. 2, p. 463)
So, I did a little word study to see how this Hebrew word has been used other places, and it’s really interesting. This is the word for the noisy tumult of a busy city street. (Prov. 1:21)
It’s the word that’s used for the howling of dogs. Psalm 59:6: “each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city.”
It’s the word used for the growling of bears, Isaiah 59:11 “we all growl like bears.”
It’s the word used for the roaring of waves in the waters of the sea, Psalm 46:3 “Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam...”
It’s the word that’s used for deep anxiety and inner turmoil of heart and soul. Psalm 42:5: “Why are you cast down, Oh my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?”
These are all related or are this Hebrew word or cognates of it. That’s the word that Asaph uses, so he’s calling God to memory, but he says when he does this it actually produces more anxiety, more turmoil within him. And then at the end of verse 3, when he meditates, he’s not strengthened; he says, “When I meditate, my spirit faints.”
You would expect him to say, “When I meditate, my soul is strengthened.” But not at all; that’s not what he finds. In other words, Asaph discovered that when he turned to God in times of trouble, things didn’t get better, they got worse. The means of grace seemed to fail him here. Verses 5 and 6 show us why this is so. He compares his current situation with the past, he’s looking back. He says, “I consider the days of old, the years long ago. I said, “Let me remember my song in the night; let me meditate in my heart.”
But as he does this, it actually raises questions. Here is a man who is praying all night long, he’s experiencing insomnia. He cannot sleep, in fact, in verse 4 he says to God: “You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.”
Deeply troubled person! He’s comparing his present circumstances with his past experiences, and he looks wistfully in the past, and now he wonders if God has forsaken him forever. And that leaves him to ask five questions or six questions depending on the way your translation reads. These questions show up in verses 7-9: 7 “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? 8 Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? 9 Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
Now, the key thing to notice here is just how unthinkable these questions are. They all concern God’s covenant love. You have words here that belong to the covenantal language of scripture. Words related to God’s steadfast mercy, his promises, his grace, his favor. But Asaph is asking this question that seems like it should never be asked. “Has God forgotten?” “Is God unfaithful to his promises?” “Has God forgotten to be gracious?”
John Goldingay again notes that “nowhere else does the psalm ask whether Yahweh's commitment has ceased.” (Goldingay, 466) In fact, we have other psalms like Psalm 136, where the steady refrain through the Psalm is “His steadfast love endures forever.” All right? But here, Asaph is not so sure. He questions this. He questions truths that should be unquestionable. In the fact that he’s asking, “Where is God? Has God forgotten?” “Will God never show mercy again?” So this is the time of trouble. Troubling circumstances leading to deep trouble in spirit and in soul that’s been made worse by remembering God.
So, before moving on I think we should just pause right here and ask this question or rather say this: if you’ve ever experienced this—if you’ve ever been in a time of trouble in life and you’ve sought God and it didn’t help, if you’ve used all of the means of grace that you’re supposed to use as a spiritual, faithful Christian—you read your Bible, you pray, you seek the Lord—and it doesn’t help you, you shouldn’t be surprised by that. Because the inclusion of Psalm 77 in the Bible shows us that this can be the normal, ordinary experience of believers. It’s not unusual when someone is in trouble and they seek the Lord to not find it helpful, initially.
Now, there are all kinds of teachers who would say different. There are all kinds of people who would say, “If you just have enough faith, the problem will go away. If you just believe strong enough, you’re going to find peace in your heart.” But that’s not what Asaph experienced initially.
But—this psalm doesn’t stop there, does it? So we have to keep reading and move to verse 10, and just as Asaph moves through this, so we learn something about how we’ve got to move through these emotions and these doubts and this troubling experience.
II. Our appeal in trouble
So that leads us to the second point which is our appeal in trouble. Our appeal in trouble. Now just a little parenthesis about verse 10. Verse 10 reads: “Then I said, “I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”
It may be that you’re translation says something a little different. The ESV and the NIV both use the word “appeal” and “appeal to the years of the Most High”. But that word “appeal” is a difficult word. It could mean something more like grief or infirmity. And it’s translated that way in a number of different translations. The word “years” is also difficult. It could carry the idea of change. And the way you put this verse together really affects the way you interpret the rest of the Psalm.
So, some translations read like this, “And I say it is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.” And if you read it that way, the rest of the psalm is really just a continuation of the lament of verses 1-9, rather than a shift in perspective.
I’m following the ESV and the NIV here and viewing this as a shift in perspective, and I think it’s really a contextual question. The context really determines what’s going on here. But there are some good reasons, I think, for following NIV and ESV. For one thing, there is a break, the word “Selah”—a pause or a break between verses 9 and 10. The word “years” has already been used in verse 5 in this way, “when I consider the days of old, the years long ago.” So, it seems to be looking back to the past, and the context itself shows us that there is a change in focus in this psalm. So, James Montgomery Boice in his exposition of this psalm points out the shift in focus, which is indicated by the use of pronouns in the psalm.
So, here’s a neat little Bible study for you, go through Psalm 77 and circle every time a first person pronoun is used. And what you’ll find in the NIV is that in the first six verses there are a number of different references to the first person—“I” or “me”—over and over again. But relatively few of God. Whereas, in the last eight verses in this psalm, there are a lot of references to God but no “I’s” or “me’s” or “my’s”.
So, it seems like, even in the flow of the psalm, there is a shift from the focus on my trouble, my emotions about my trouble, my circumstances, to shift to God, his character, his mighty deeds. And so we have an appeal here.
Now what is it that Asaph appeals to? And there are three things.
(1) First of all, he appeals to the mighty deeds of God. You see this in verses 11 and 12 and then verses 14 and 15. 11 “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. 12 I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds.” Verse 14: “You are the God who works wonders; you have made known your might among the peoples. 15 You with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph.”
And I want you to notice especially that key word, “wonders.” Wonders - that’s a very important word. That’s the word that was used of God’s mighty deeds in the exodus. We already read it in our call to worship this morning from Exodus 15:11, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?”
What are these wonders? They were the miracles that God performed as he delivered Israel from Egypt and led them through the Red Sea. You remember the story in Exodus 14? The children of Israel have finally been set free, they’ve journeyed out of Egypt and they’ve come up against the Red Sea. Pharaoh and his armies are behind them, and the Israelites begin to despair. And they say to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you’ve taken us away to die in the wilderness? It would have been better to stay in Egypt! What have you done here, Moses?” And do you remember what Moses says? This is Exodus 14:13, “Fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord which he will work for you today.” And then he says, “The Lord will fight for you. You only have to be silent.”
And then what does the Lord tell Moses to do? He tells him to lift up his staff and to stretch out his hand over the sea, and the sea divides, these two walls of water. And do you remember that the people passed through the sea on dry land? And between them and the [Egyptians] as they passed through the sea there is this cloud, this pillar of fire, this whirlwind of the Lord’s presence protecting them. And then when the Israelites passed through, the Lord removes the whirlwind and the Egyptians, the armies of Egypt, come through following them, and then the waters close up over them. The sea closes up over the Egyptians, and the Lord saves Israel that day from the hand of Egypt.
Now, that’s the background to Psalm 77, and in fact, Psalm 77 is really an extended prayer and meditation on Exodus 15, the song of Moses following the miracle of the Red Sea. And so that’s the first thing he appeals to: he’s looking back to God’s mighty deeds in history. To God’s wonders, to God’s saving works in the history of the children of Israel. He’s looking back to that, and he’s appealing to that in his present troubling circumstances.
(2) And then the second thing he appeals to is the holy character of God. Verse 13: Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God?
Again, he echoes Exodus 15:11 as he calls attention to God’s character, his holiness, his greatness, his greatness above all other gods. And you see now how Asaph’s questions are beginning to change. Whereas, before he was asking, “Where is God?” Now he is asking, “Who is like our God?” You see, the focus is changing.
(3) And then I think we can say implicitly he is appealing here to the very thing that he has raised questions about before—the gracious covenant of God. Do you remember those covenant words, verses 7-9, God’s favor, his steadfast love, his promises, his grace, his compassion? He had questioned this; he had questioned God’s covenant faithfulness. But now his rehearsal of God’s mighty deeds, his rehearsal—his remembrance of God’s holy character—gives him the answer to these questions. So that the truth is that God is faithful. God does restore his favor. His steadfast love doesn’t, in fact, cease. His promises never end. He’s not forgotten to be gracious. He has not shut up his compassion.
But get this, the proof of God’s covenant faithfulness, the proof of this is not seen in present circumstances. It’s seen in the history of God’s mighty redemptive deeds. The deeds of God disclose the character of God. The works of God reveal his gracious, compassionate heart. The revelation of God’s might for his people is the revelation of God himself, the God who continues to work for his people in troubled times.
III. The God for troubled times
And that leads us to the third point, the God for troubled times. We see this in the last six verses of this psalm as Asaph continues to rehearse God’s mighty deeds, but now he takes a zoom lens and he zooms in close to look at the details of this exodus event.
And as he does so, he portrays God with three pictures, three images. Three pictures for who God is and what God does. I want you to notice these quickly.
(1) First of all “redeemer” in verse 15:“You with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph.” Again, it’s language from Exodus 15:13. “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed; you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.”
Now there are three important concepts connected to God as redeemer: (i) To redeem was to deliver someone from slavery or from debts or from bondage. A redemption would be an act of liberation for slaves. That’s the first idea. (ii) It also meant to redeem by the payment of a ransom price. All right? The only way someone could be redeemed from the debt is that if the debt was paid off. The only way slaves could be liberated is if they were bought from the slave market in this ancient world. Or the only way slaves of war, prisoners of war, could be redeemed is if a price was paid in the battle. So that’s the second idea. (iii) And then the third aspect of this is that the person who would do this redemption was normally a person’s closest relative, the kinsman-redeemer. So, if someone was in deep debt and they were losing their land, the only way the land could be bought back is if a kinsman-redeemer would come, a close relative, and would offer to pay the debt so as to buy back the land. That’s the whole story in the book of Ruth, right? Boaz is Naomi’s kinsman-redeemer. Well, here God is pictured as this redeemer. He is the one who redeems Israel out of their slavery in Egypt through the payment of a ransom price. And so you have the whole Passover story in the book of Exodus. So that’s the first picture—redemption.
(2) The second picture is God as a mighty warrior. You see this in the evocative language of verses 16 and 17. The psalmist actually personifies the water: 16 “When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; indeed, the deep trembled.
He’s picturing the waters of the Red Sea. To see God the mighty warrior come and the water trembles and is afraid and draws back. And in verse 17: “The clouds poured out water; the skies gave forth thunder; your arrows flashed on every side.”
What are the arrows? Well, the “arrows” is lightning. He’s picturing lightning bolts as the arrows of God, the mighty warrior. And again it’s Exodus 15 language, Exodus 15:3: “The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is his name.”
(3) And then the third image is in verses 19 and 20. The image of shepherd. What does a shepherd do? A shepherd leads and a shepherd guides a flock of sheep. Well, you see this in verses 19 and 20: “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen. 20 You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.”
So, God the redeemer, God the mighty warrior, and God the shepherd. And, of course, we know don’t we, that all of these images, all of these motifs find their fullest fulfillment and resolution in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the redeemer, the kinsman-redeemer, who has come in our nature, in our flesh, as our brother, as our relative, and through the payment of his own life as a ransom price, has liberated us from the darkness of our sin. He’s liberated us from our Egypt in a new exodus. Jesus is also the mighty warrior who comes and vanquishes the powers of darkness and of evil. And Jesus is, of course, as John tells us in John 10, “the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.”
And so, this psalm even as it, for Asaph, pointed him back to the Exodus, this quintessential saving event in the history of Israel, this psalm points forward to the new Exodus, the true salvation that Jesus brings to us in the new.
Now, as we close, I just want to suggest several take-aways. Several lessons to learn from this Psalm. Take-aways for us this week and for this season in our lives. Three lessons, really, and here they are: The first thing we need to learn is that:
(1) Genuine faith can coexist with real doubt.
Genuine faith can coexist with real doubt. Now, I think that there are many false expectations that we as believers sometimes get about prayer and about faith in the Christian life. Not least of all does this come from TV preachers and radio preachers who will make promises for us that they really have no right to make. That if you will just believe enough, God will deliver you from this current, present trial, whatever it is.
Do you know what? The Bible does not make that promise. The Bible does not lead us to expect that. Sometimes God delivers and God is faithful to us. He will carry us through and sustain our faith, but God doesn’t always deliver us from the immediate financial crisis or from the immediate threat to our health. God doesn’t always do that. Sometimes he does, but he doesn’t always. And it’s a false expectation and it can lead to a real crisis in our faith if we believe that if we only had enough faith then we can be sure of a temporal deliverance from a temporal trial.
And I think what happens for so many Christians is they’ve been taught this either in the church or through what they’ve read or through what they’ve heard. They’ve been led to believe this, they’ve been led to think this, and then they get into a trial and they pray, they seek God, and nothing changes. And so they start to doubt, they start to worry, they start to question, and sometimes they even begin to walk away from their faith.
The psalmist, I think, leads us to a better way of thinking about our faith during times of trial. It doesn’t give us an assurance of an immediate temporal deliverance. God sometimes faithfully will do that for us. He’s very good, but he doesn’t always deliver us from the immediate trial. Sometimes the cancer takes someone’s life. And I mean, when you think of it, all of us eventually face death, right? There’s an end point. We’re still mortal.
The answer is that God will sustain our faith through the trial, but we often will not be able to see exactly how he’s working. There’s a hint of that even in the psalm here, in Psalm 77:19: “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen.”
Even as he rehearses God’s mighty deeds, he has to say, “Your footprints were unseen.” And it reminds me of that great hymn by William Cowper, a man who struggled with depression all of his life. He was never fully delivered from it and he wrote that great hymn,
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
And so we have got to reckon with this. We’ve got to realize that genuine faith can exist with real doubt, with real trial, with real struggle, and that if that you’re going through something like that and you haven’t seen an answer to prayer, it doesn’t mean you don’t have enough faith. It doesn’t mean you’re not a true believer, it doesn’t mean that God’s covenant mercies have failed, it doesn’t mean any of those things. The scriptures actually lead us to expect that sometimes we’re going to go through trials and our comfort in the trial is not that God is going to get us out of it, but simply that he will be with us through it. That’s the first lesson.
Here’s the second.
(2) When prayer and meditation seem to make trouble worse, keep praying.
Keep praying! We’ve got to learn from the psalmist how to press through—how to ground our prayers and meditations in scripture and press through to a renewed assurance of God’s faithfulness. Now, I think too often when we’re in these seasons of trouble, we’re praying for deliverance from the trouble. We don’t find it, and so we give up praying altogether. We cease seeking after God, and we cut our prayers and our meditations short. Well, the psalmist, I think, shows us here that prayer is not a shortcut to peace. It is dealing with God, but it’s a kind of dealing with God that takes time. It takes time. And it takes a sustained, continual prayer and meditation on scripture—just as this psalm is an extended meditation on Exodus 15 that leads him back to what God has done in history. And that’s what helps him. In the same way, we should ground our meditation and our prayers in scripture, where we’re looking at the real proof of God’s faithfulness. And we’re not looking for that in a change in our circumstances, we’re looking for it in the history of what God has done in scripture and in Christ.
This leads to the third lesson here.
(3) Faith’s certainty is found not in present circumstances, but in God’s covenant faithfulness and saving grace.
So, let me just kind of draw it to an end by asking this question. Okay? We’ve seen here that the Psalmist didn’t find his help in the initial remembrance of God, but only in the remembrance of God’s saving deeds in redemptive history. So, the resolution for him came, not by looking at the circumstances and not by what happened immediately to him, but by looking away from himself to what God had done in the past in the exodus event.
Why did rehearsing the history of the Exodus help the psalmist? Why is that?
Interestingly enough, I came across a statement this week from the Mishnah, which is a commentary on the Jewish scriptures by the Rabbis, and I came across this quote in another book I was reading that is totally unrelated to this sermon. And I came across this quote from the Mishnah that said that, “In every generation, every Israelite was duty bound to regard himself as if he had personally come forth from Egypt.” All right? Every Israelite throughout the history of the Jewish people, they were duty bound to consider themselves as having personally been redeemed in the Exodus. Such was their unity with the people of God, their solidarity with the people of God. So, that when they looked back to the Exodus event they weren’t just looking at history. They weren’t just looking at the history of the nation of Israel. They were looking at something that was definitive for their own personal history.
And I think we can see there the connection to our doctrine of union with Christ. Our assurance, you see, is this: it’s not on our present circumstances. Our assurance is found in our history in Christ that God in Christ has brought about the redemption from sin and from death. He’s brought about the defeat of our final enemy, death itself, and that the resurrection of Christ, God’s work in Christ and our union in him—that is our assurance. That whatever troubles we face in this life, we know the end game. We know that as Christ has been raised from the dead; so also we will be raised in glorified, immortal bodies in the future. God’s history of redemption in the past guarantees our salvation in the future, and that’s what sustains us in our present trials.
And that really leads us to the celebration at the Table. Because that’s what we do, we come to the Table. We celebrate what God has done in Christ and what God has done for us in Christ.
So, let’s pray as we celebrate these elements together.
Father, we thank you this morning for your Word. We thank you for the Psalms and how they speak for us, they give us language for speaking to you. They disclose for us the nature of human experience. They show us that in the trials that we ourselves face, we’re not facing them alone. This has been the experience of your people throughout the ages. And the Psalms give us hope, this psalm in particular gives us hope as it points us to you, our God, as our redeemer, as our mighty warrior, as our faithful shepherd. And so this morning we pray that as we think about the Psalm and as we think about Christ and how he fulfills all these things for us, and his saving work as we come to the table, that you would meet with us here in these moments. Whatever troubles and trials we’re facing today, would you sustain our faith? Would you strengthen us by your grace? Sustain our hope in your covenant love, in your steadfast love, your faithfulness to your promises. We believe that you will do this, that you continue to do this, and that you use the Word and the Table to give us the strength, so do so now we pray. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
