Psalm 102 begins, “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily” (verses 1 and 2). Psalm 102 is twenty-eight verses long, and God has not answered by the end of it. Yet the psalmist works through his anguish to a place of trust and victory and a calm assurance in faith.
The Psalms do that for us. How many of them arise out of an experience of pain and stress, of fear and weakness, of the sense of one’s own smallness in a vast universe that threatens to overwhelm! When we are fat and full, how many of us look up to God with a sense of gratitude and ongoing dependence? But God allows distresses in our lives in order to draw us to Himself, to get us to look up after we have looked around and found nothing to help. He does not put us through privation and pain out of a perverse delight in our suffering; rather, our sufferings are allowed in order to make us aware of our need, not so much of deliverance – that is a given – but of Him as our Deliverer. All life’s experiences are given us to make us hungry for a relationship with Him.
He needs nothing from us
All this in not because God is a complete egotist, itching for our praise. He needs nothing from us. He is not added to when we praise and love Him, and we cannot diminish Him when we ignore Him. He is Who He is; He never changes, whatever we do, or whatever happens to us. But He loves us with a powerful love we cannot even begin to conceive of. It flows in one direction always, from Him to us, like an inconceivably expanded, infinite Niagara Falls, pouring down on us gallon after never-ceasing gallon, crashing over us in a flood that never ends. If we hand Him up our spoonfuls of love back to Him, how can that increase Him?
Look up
But it increases us. And that is why He so endlessly funnels down to us the experiences we undergo day after day, good, bad, and indifferent (in our view). All the endless stuff that comes our way is given to put us in the place where finally we will look up to Him in faith and dependence and trust. Even when we have come to the place of faith, He continues to do it, for faith is not a place but a journey, and every step is meant to bring us further in toward Him, and further up in our relationship to Him.
faith is not a place but a journey
Our whole nation is experiencing a great trial in the present day, and this loving God has it securely in hand. And whatever further experiences we must go through “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, we can be confident (if we will) that they are working out God’s purposes. And one of those purposes is to draw our attention to Himself, and to cry out to Him along with the Psalmist, in faith and trust and expectation. Everything happens for our good, however bad it looks.
Dwell in the Psalms. They are one hundred and fifty cries of human hearts to the God Who continues to care for us in our day. Walk through them, and cry alongside the psalmists with your own cry of faith. I guarantee that then you will be helped, even if, by the end of your own “psalm’, nothing outwardly changes. Inwardly you will be renewed.