Trusting God In Uncertain Times: Psalm 146 (SEEN SERIES)

Teresa walks through Psalm 146 alongside the story of the bleeding woman, exploring what it really looks like to anchor your hope in God when life feels uncertain. Drawing from a raw personal experience, she unpacks why human hope always disappoints, what God's goodness actually means, and how praise can practically reshape the way we see our circumstances.

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Transcript

A Hard Question About God’s Goodness

Teresa Whiting 0:00

And he kept saying the same thing. Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And I was like, stop saying that. I want you to give me an assurance that things are going to get better. And he said, Life is uncertain. I cannot give you any guarantees. Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And honestly, I was ready to punch this guy in the face. I wanted certainty. I wanted him to tell me that this was going to happen and this was not going to happen. And he refused. I've returned to that question over and over again. And the certainty that I have learned to embrace is not the assurance that things will go my way. Hi, friend. If you've ever wondered how God's word connects with the messy, broken parts of your story, you're in the right place. Welcome to Beauty in the Brokenness, where we have honest conversations about the Bible, our real life struggles, and the hope God brings for healing. I'm your host, Teresa Whiting, an author, Bible teacher, and trauma-informed life coach, but mostly a friend and fellow struggler. No matter who you are or where you've been, I'm inviting you to encounter the God who is still creating beauty right in the midst of your brokenness. So we've been talking about the bleeding woman these last couple weeks. We did the creative retelling of her story. And then last week we had a conversation with Ashley Jameson, which was so, so life-giving. If you haven't listened to that yet, I highly recommend you go back and hear it. But today I'm going to be sharing Psalm 146. So, as you know in my Bible studies, or maybe you don't know, um, for every woman that we study, I always pair her with a psalm. I feel like the psalms are such a beautiful expression of our hearts, our emotions. They connect us with God in ways that are different than other parts of scripture. I mean, they are poetry, they're songs. And so for each woman in the scene study, she has a psalm that goes with her story. And the psalm for the bleeding woman is Psalm 146. I'm gonna read that psalm and then we're gonna talk about it. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord my soul. I will praise the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground. On that very day their plans come to nothing. Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He is the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them. He remains faithful forever. He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free. The Lord gives sight to the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow. But he frustrates the way of the wicked. The Lord reigns forever. Your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord. This is a psalm that begins and ends with praise. It begins and ends with the phrase, Praise the Lord. And it's interesting because it starts with praise the Lord, like a command to you, but then the psalmist turns to themself and says, Praise the Lord, my soul. I want not just to tell you what to do, but I want to counsel myself that it is good and it is right for me to praise the Lord. Verse 2 says, I will praise the Lord all my life. I'll sing praises to my God as long as I live. And I think this is a great life purpose. I have all kinds of goals. I'm sure you do too. I'm sure you think about things that you want to do with your life, ways you want to spend your time. But what better way for us to spend our time, to spend our days than to live speaking God's praise aloud, telling his praise to other people, sharing with others his goodness and his glory. But the psalmist doesn't stay there. He gets so practical so quickly. And this next segment of the psalm, man, it is written for such a time as this. It says, do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save. So back in the day, princes, though those were the people who were powerful, influential. Those were the ones who had money, who had reputation, who had political power. And what a great reminder for us that it's so easy for us to want to put our hope in a person, whether that's a political figure, an influencer, um, somebody that we think might be able to do something for us. God is saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't put your hope in those people. They can't save. Human beings are powerless to do anything for you, to fulfill the hopes that you have for your life, to fulfill the hopes that you have for your family, for your culture. I think about the moment in history that we're living right now, and there's so much unrest, there's so much unease all around us. And I know people who want to put their hope in a political person, whether it's on one side or the other, it doesn't matter. Either place is misplaced hope. The only one deserving of our trust and our hope is God. Because whoever you're putting your hope in, that is a mere human being. They're here today, gone tomorrow. I love some of the other psalms that talk about the frailty of life, how we're like grass. It's here today, it gets mowed over and blown away tomorrow, and we don't even remember the place where it was. And this psalm is a reminder that our hope never ever belongs in another human being. Verse 4, when their spirit departs, they return to the ground on that very day their plans come to nothing. Man, people like to make plans. They like to talk about what they're gonna do and how they're gonna do it. And yet, in an instant, God says, Your plans are nothing. I think of the um the guy in the New Testament where Jesus said, You fool, your life is required of you today. James says, You don't even know what your life is. It's a vapor, it's a mist. It's here today and gone in an instant. And in contrast to us putting our hope and our confidence in people who are frail and fallible, whose plans come to nothing. It says, Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. That word help is one of my favorite words. It's the word azer. It's the idea that God is the one who comes to the aid of his people. He's a warrior fighting on our behalf, he's our rescuer, he's the one who is our help, and he's the one who we put our hope in. In the Lord their God, not some distant deity out there, not some God that belongs to another nation or another person, but our God, we get to put our hope in him, and it's sure, and it's safe, and it's something we can hold on to. You know, I am a person who wants certainty. I want someone to tell me this is what's gonna happen. This is A, this is B. If you do A and you do B, C is going to be the outcome. I think about a time in our life where I was desperate for certainty. Greg and I had been going to counseling and we were at this um, what do you call it, like a 10-day intensive? And this was a conversation that I had with the counselor. So we're nearing the end of our time there, and I wanted to go home with something I could hold on to. And the counselor kept saying the same thing. He kept saying to me, Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And I was like, Well, yes, but what about this? And he was like, Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And I was like, Yeah, but what if nothing changes? What if this happens again? And he kept saying the same thing. Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And I was like, Stop saying that. I want you to give me an assurance that things are going to get better. And he said, Life is uncertain. I cannot give you any guarantees. Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And honestly, I was ready to punch this guy in the face. I wanted certainty. I wanted him to tell me that this was going to happen and this was not going to happen. And he refused. He just kept simply repeating that mantra. Will you stay true to the revelation that God is good no matter what? And I think about over the years, that was about like 20 years ago, I realized that that conversation, that question actually has become a handhold in my life. I've returned to that question over and over again through 31 years of marriage and in seasons when God seems slow to answer my prayers. And the certainty that I have learned to embrace is not the assurance that things will go my way. My hope and my anchor in my uncertainty is the goodness of God as revealed in his word. He's good. Period. Not because he answers my prayers the way I want, but because his goodness is rooted in his nature. And when I say God is good, I mean it sounds so vanilla, right? Like we think of this rating scale of like poor, fair, good, excellent. Like, meh, God is good. But the goodness of God is it's his glory. It's so interesting. When Moses said to God, Show me your glory, God said, I will make my goodness pass before you. God's goodness is synonymous with his excellence, his perfection, his beauty, his grandeur beyond anything that we could see. It is his presence in our lives. He sees our tears. And I think the way God's goodness shows up most gloriously is that he was willing to enter our suffering. He was willing to leave glory and come walk among us. And so this is where we can stake our hope in God's love for us, in his goodness, in his character. It's not just in our answered prayers. Verse six says, He is the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them, he remains faithful forever. Well, when we see God as maker of heaven and earth, it's hard because I feel like some of us live in places where we don't see the glory of heaven and earth that often. I mean, we're we're kind of in our houses or we're driving on concrete roads or we're surrounded by buildings. But whenever I get out in nature, whenever I get out in front of the ocean or on a trail in the mountains or in the woods, or I'm up late at night and I'm in a place without a lot of light pollution, and I can see the glory of God in the stars, the sea, everything in them. God is the maker, like he spoke these things into existence. He knows the name of every single star. And he remains faithful forever. That's where my hope is again. God's faithfulness. And then it goes on to list the things that he does. He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, gives sight to the blind, lifts up those who are bowed down, loves the righteous, watches over the foreigner, sustains the fatherless and the widow. Like all of these good gifts that God gives to us. Many of us are not technically oppressed and hungry and blind and foreigners and widows and fatherless. And yet we need that kind of love. We need that kind of care from God. Here's what I see is that God sees. It can mean to be pushed down or depressed. And it says the Lord lifts up. When have you seen God lift you up from that position of just being completely and utterly pushed down in your life, whether that's emotionally, spiritually, physically, where you have just felt like I can't even lift myself. And you've seen him come to your aid and lift you up. One of the things I love to do is look at the verbs in a passage of scripture. And I love to write out, look at all of the things that God does, upholds, feeds, frees, opens the eyes, lifts up, loves, protects, sustains. This is a God that we can put our hope in, that we can put our faith in. And when everyone around us fails, when the governmental system that we might have put our hope in fails miserably, when the people that we've put our hope in let us down, we can look at God and say, He's where I put my hope, he's where I put my trust and my faith. There's this contrast in this verse as well. It says, The Lord loves the righteous and then later it says, but he frustrates the way of the wicked. And you know, it's easy for us to say, Well, I'm gonna put myself in the category of the righteous. And I can do that, but only because Christ's righteousness rests on me. It's not because I'm great, it's not because I'm so good and so holy. It's because I have the righteousness of Christ that I don't even deserve. And yet God imparts that to me. When I come to Christ, I now have his righteousness. And it says, God loves me. He loves you, who are one of his, because you have the righteousness of Christ and He loves you. It's so easy to look around and wonder, God, when are you gonna frustrate the way of the wicked? When are you going to bring them down from their haughty, lofty position? To us, it might feel like it's kind of taking a long time. We'd like to see some justice meted out. We'd like to see God um doing things, punishing the wicked, or at least stopping them from the wickedness that they're doing. But I think verse 10 kind of puts things in perspective. The Lord reigns forever, your God for all generations. And so we have just this limited little bit of life that we see, this little slice of eternity that we're living in. And God sees the whole thing. God is faithful through all of it forever and ever and ever. He's working out plans that we don't understand, that we can't see the end of. And yet we can trust him. We can know that he is good and he is working all things out according to his purposes. And that's where we can put our hope. And because of that, we can praise him. We can speak his praise when we get up in the morning, when we go to bed at night, when we're talking with our friends, when we're texting others, we can praise God. And as we do that, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but I know for myself, if I'm talking a certain way about someone, it affects the way I think of that person. If I'm saying negative things about someone or being critical of them, I start feeling kind of this way toward them that isn't very kind. And yet, if I use my mouth to bless people, if I use my mouth to speak good things about them and to say encouraging words and to tell good things about them to other people, I start thinking of them in a different way. And so one of the encouragements I have for us, myself included, is to use my mouth, is for us to use our mouths to praise the Lord. It's not just a command, it's wisdom. It's a way for us to direct our minds and our hearts. I know there's a lot of people who do gratitude journals, and as they write their gratitude, it literally changes their minds and their well-being and their spirits. And I think we can do the same with praise. When we speak God's praise, it will change us. It will change the way we see things. It will change the way we view this crazy, mixed-up, wicked world that we live in. Rather than focusing on all the terrible things that are happening or all the horrible people that are in power or all the terrible things that are going on around the world, our hearts and our minds can be set on God, on who He is, the maker of heaven and earth, on a God who is faithful and a lifter of those who are bowed down and a lover of the righteous, one who sustains us and watches over us and cares for us. And instead of living in despair and living in pain and living in misery, we can live with hope, knowing that He is our help. I want to bring this back around just for a moment to the woman at the well. And I look at her and I think of how she might have related to this psalm. I mean, here is a woman who at times probably was trying to put her hope in humans. Maybe not princes, maybe doctors, maybe healers, maybe people who she thought could help her. And yet, their plans came to nothing. They were unable to be her help and to be her hope. And I think of this woman who experienced so much of these words in this psalm. She was oppressed. She was a prisoner. She was a prisoner in her own body. She was a prisoner because she wasn't free to go out in society and be among the people. Because of her bleeding, her condition kept her isolated. She would have been bowed down, and she would have been one that experienced God's freedom. She would have experienced Jesus seeing her, loving her, lifting her. And I imagine she would have spent her life speaking and singing his praise. I do not know what God has set you free from. I don't know where you need to be lifted up, but I know that he is a faithful God. He is for you. And I just want to encourage you today to hold on to that truth that he remains faithful forever. Thanks for hanging out with me today on Beauty in the Brokenness. To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWiting.com slash episode dash one four three to find all the show notes. In closing, I want to leave you with this prayer from number six, 24 to 26. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.