Are you coping, or actually healing from what you carry? /// Prayer: Part 4

We're so glad you've chosen to listen to our online experience! Here at Plum Creek, we’re all about changed lives, changing lives; and what that simply means is that what Christ has done in us is not just for us, but it’s for us to share with others in our community and around the world.

///

If you're using this teaching for a Home Groups setting, we've included discussion prompts to help guide your conversation:

1. Think about the ways you tend to cope with pain (bury it, numb it, stay busy, blame, or spiritualize it) and discuss which one shows up most in your life and why. 

2. How might your relationship with God change if you practiced bringing raw, honest emotions to Him instead of filtering or avoiding them?

3. Reflect on a time when you avoided dealing with pain and consider what healing might have looked like if you had addressed God, named it, asked for help, and chosen to trust Him. 

4. Look up Psalm 22 and discuss how the movement from honest questioning to asking and trusting can shape the way you pray during difficult seasons.

5. In what ways could learning to lament actually deepen your worship and trust in God rather than weaken your faith?

///

Wondering what Plum Creek Church is all about? Watch this video.

///

Links

Home: https://www.plumcreek.church/

Next Steps: https://www.plumcreek.church/next

Ministries: https://www.plumcreek.church/ministries

Give: https://www.plumcreek.church/give

Transcript

Message Start

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Plum Creek Church Podcast. We're so thankful that you're listening along with us in this way. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. But if you're new or fewish, we'd love to become part of your listening for today. So be sure to subscribe and follow to be notified when new episodes are available. Now, before we get into the message, we want to remind you of one thing. We really believe that if Jesus is right about God, about life, about the soul, then it only makes sense to rearrange our lives around what he says is true. Because when you choose to follow Jesus like that, it really does change everything, including the lives around you. Okay. Let's posture our hearts for what God has in store, this message. Good morning, Plum Creek. How are you? It is true, we are in a series where we are learning how to pray together. And we're doing this because our rabbi, Jesus, prayed not as an accessory, but like as core to him. And so that's what we're doing together. And I just want to reiterate two things. If you have not um jumped in and grabbed a prayer guide, listen, it isn't too late. This is practicing learning five different forms of prayer practically in your everyday life. And then on Tuesday nights, I want to invite you out. Um, it's 45 minutes where we're literally practicing everything we learn. We gather in here, we do a little bit of worship, and then together we practice these forms of prayer, right? So that we can integrate this into our everyday lives. So please come out and be a part of it. Okay, question for you. Once you go back into your memory banks, um, here's the question. Do you remember who taught you how to ride a bike? You very remember? Yeah? I remember I was actually thinking about this week. My dad taught me how to ride a bike, and he thought having just one training wheel was a good idea. Um, it was not. Um, uh who taught you to drive a car? Some of you I've seen you drive. You need another lesson. But seriously, think about all the big moments in your life. Somebody probably taught you how to cook, taught you how to shake a hand, look somebody in the eye. The big moments in our lives, somebody usually came alongside of us and they sort of taught us these things. So, one more question. Who taught you how to cry? See, if you're like me, nobody. Right? In fact, if you grew up a certain in a certain generation, I was taught not to cry, right? Many of us were taught not to cry. Like, hey, suck it up, stop crying, rub some dirt on it, right? That was that was that was the solution. And yet, here's what's interesting. Do you know in your lifetime, men, you will cry about 20 times a year, women, you will cry about 40 times a year. That's not a joke. Um, that's biological. We will you you we will feel these emotions over the next seven years, thousands of times. And here's the truth no one oftentimes has ever taught us how to cry or grieve or to feel pain. What do we do with it? Most of us have no tool set. No, no one taught us what to do. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Because really, most of us walk through life and um sometimes we're surprised by trouble, but we shouldn't be, because Jesus said, in this life you will have trouble. Like pain is a part of the human existence. Crying is a part of being human. So what do we do with it? Well, most of us do what most of us do, and that is we learn ways to cope with pain, with trouble, with crying. And um, it's pretty interesting because if you were to sort of take a room this size, and even the people online, we sort of all sort of fall into a certain rhythm, little tools that we picked up along the way that help us get through crying and grief and trauma. And and um let me just sort of highlight a few of them because I I bet in a room this size, some of you are like, oh yeah, I know that one. The first one is this um we we deal with our tears through through the bariot method. Anyone know that method? That's the one where you take your pain and you put it in a box, and then you put it in another box, and then you surround it in steel, and you bury it somewhere deep, deep inside, and you never talk about it again, right? The bariot method, the problem with the bariot method is research will tell you it usually comes out other ways. You know, anxiety, stress, sometimes physical sickness. So bury it's one way. Um, there's another way. Some of us know this one. It's called the nummit method. And numb it is just reach for something temporary that'll just help you in that moment. So that could be alcohol, food, scrolling, screens, right? You just grab it and it helps for a minute. Here's the problem with the numb it method. Number method isn't selective. You can't numb pain without also numbing joy. You can't numb these things and numb out in these moments without numbing out in important moments. Um, there's uh another method. Um, we call this the blame method. And this is where we just blame every outside, everything that's wrong in my life on outside circumstances, right? That my boss, he's just a jerk, you know, my spouse, this job, this place. And it's interesting because there's some truth to it. Your boss might be a real piece of work, right? You know? Um, there's some truth to these outside circumstances. But what ends up happening in this method with dealing with our pain and our tears is that um it almost creates this permanent posture, right? Where you just look outside and it's all out here. It's all these other problems. And then there's one that I'm really familiar with, it's called the stay busy method. Anyone know this one? This is just move. Just don't stop moving, just never stop moving. Um, my wife pointed this out to me probably about 10 years ago. I didn't maybe even more. I didn't really even realize it, but she noticed it at a Thanksgiving dinner. And now, Thanksgiving for me, that's my favorite holiday. I don't know what your favorite holiday is. Do I have any Thanksgiving folks in here? Any? Yeah, see, that's the best. That's when Christmas actually starts. Um and I take prepping turkey real serious. Um, and for those of you that are real serious about prepping a turkey, this is not a five-hour process. This is a three-day process, right? I start three days, there's all kinds of brining and prepping, massaging. I become friends with that bird, you know. And my wife would say, you know, like, we'd have all these family members coming over to the house, and literally all I'm doing is moving around all the time until I cook the turkey, the turkey would come out, then I'd serve the dessert, and then the dessert would be done, and then I'd start washing dishes. She's like, Eric, Eric, Eric, why don't why don't you just stop and sit with your dad for a minute? And I began to realize that there was stuff inside me that almost didn't let me. And here's the problem with the stay busy method, it actually can almost look like achievement or like high functioning, high output. But sometimes I never actually stopped to feel anything, it was just movement. And and and that leads to the last method, and I think it it's particularly important in a space like this because whether you know it or not, you're in a church. And um I just call it the spiritualize it method. And it it's it's this it is unique to us as people of faith, and it does kind of look like trust. Instead of feeling pain, what we do is we just quote some scripture at it. You know what I mean? It's like you put a bumper sticker over it. You're like and and here's the thing: some of the things we say are actually theologically true, right? Like when we say God works all things together for good. That's a theologically true statement. But but inside this method, the pain, the tears, they never really get processed. We just put a t-shirt on it. All of these are tools for those of us that were never taught to cry, but these are tools we use to just manage pain. But there's a cost to this. See, you can manage pain for a really long time. You really can. But you can't manage your way to healing. You just can't. See, healing requires something different, it requires honesty and presence. Like it actually requires bringing the real thing to a real God and trusting that he's strong enough to hold it. And this is what lament is. It's a tool to heal. So before we dive into the practicalities of how this prayer works, and I'm gonna teach you today four steps of this prayer, how you actually pray it. Let's understand what it is. Here's a practical definition. Lament is the practice of taking what you've been carrying alone, like the grief, the confusion, the anger, the silence, and bringing it directly to God, not performing around it, not spiritualizing over it, not burying it, just bringing it raw, real, all of it. And the thing is with lament, depending on what tradition you grew up in or what you were taught as a kid, lament is something that is central to scripture. In fact, um we we we'll be talking, we've talked a lot about the book of Psalm. If you don't know this or weren't aware, this is like God's gift to us as a book of prayer. But did you know that over a third of Psalms are prayers of lament? A third of it. We see lament throughout scripture. In fact, one of one of my favorite stories that just sort of shows lament is found in 1 Samuel. A woman named Hannah. Now, if you know the story, you know that what scripture tells us is that this woman, um, the Lord had closed her womb. 1 Samuel 1, 5 says. In other words, she couldn't have children. And I know there are people in this room that you know that pain and the sting. And it's hard to carry that. Hannah carried that. The Bible tells us that it went on year after year. She would carry this pain, and and it wasn't just that it was the pain of not being able to have a child. That was deeply painful. But in her culture, in her time, it wasn't just personal heartbreak. This was like social wound, it was a source of shame, it was a stigma. And so the Bible tells us in 1 Samuel 1:7 that this went on year after year. And whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her. In other words, there was a woman who was always like messing with her. Look, I don't know what it is. I don't do social media anymore because it just sort of like makes me feel really bad. Um uh because sometimes you know, you look around the world and you're like, why are people so mean? You ever wonder that? Why are you why are you so mean? Why are you so crouchy? Like when I park crooked, I park crooked a lot. I just do. I need driving lessons too. But when someone leaves a really mean note because I parked crooked, I'm like, oops, sorry, I don't know. And I can't even write him a note back to apologize, right? But the the this is this woman. I mean, isn't it enough that Hannah can't have a baby? But to then just rub it in, that's what this woman does. And the Bible tells us in verse 10 in her deep anguish, she had deep anguish, she would cry. Um she that she prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. Just weeping. But I think this verse is really important because it starts to unpack how the prayer of lament begins to work. It says in 1 Samuel 1.13 that Hannah was praying in her heart and her lips were moving, but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk. You ever cried so hard you can't catch your breath? You ever you ever had one of those moments? Well, I was uh I had a my little grandbaby, she's six months old, and I mean she was fit to be tied the other night. She was staying at our house, and I'm the only one who can rock her to sleep, which is what Pops does, right? And I get her to sleep about two o'clock in the morning, but she had been crying for an hour, and for literally a 30 minutes later, while she was trying to sleep and breathe, she'd be like, She had cried so hard. This was Hannah. She had cried so hard. Walked into the temple, and she just lays it out in front of God. Look, let's just let's just put this to rest. Every single person in this room, every single person who's listened to me online, every single person, every single person in this world has experienced something that will make you cry. Pain. Not not some, not most, every one of us. It happens. Pain is not the exception to the human experience. Every since Genesis, the moment that sin enters the world, so did grief and loss and ache. This is part of being human. And lament. This is why I love lament. It is a biblical process for each and every one of us to sort through to deal with our tears. So, how do we do it? I'm gonna teach you four steps, four simple biblical steps. That is the prayer of lament. If you want to take notes, great. If you want to learn more about this, come on Tuesday. We're gonna actually practice this together. But here's where lament starts. It always starts with addressing God. Not ruminating, not talking to yourself, but is the direct, direct address of God. I I sort of thinking about it this way. Um, do I have any verbal processors in the room? Anybody like to verb? Anybody need that? See, okay, me too. If you're around me very long, I sometimes it feels like word vomit, right? I just gotta say it. A bunch of stuff I say, I'm like, yeah, I don't even know if I believe that. I just have to get it out into the world and go, okay, that's true, that's not. I'm a verbal processor. I see lament as verbal processing with God. But it's with him. In fact, if you look at Psalm 22, look at how it starts. My God, my God, right? It's the address of God. God. Now, what comes next is some tough stuff. Why have you forsaken me? But it always starts with God. It's like, okay, I know I'm gonna talk to you. I'm gonna, we're about to have it out, me and you. Tyler Stanton, who wrote a beautiful book on prayer, he says it this way. He says, If you can't pray with hope and faith, God isn't bothered. He wants you to tell him about your doubt, your disappointment. Don't fake it. Your part is just to show up honestly. And so the first step of praying the prayer of lament is addressing God. Now, the second step is really key. It's as key as addressing God. Then you gotta name it. You you gotta say what it is that's bugging you. What is the thing? What is this pain? And for some of us, this feels really tough because we weren't taught that you can say honest stuff in church, right? Church is where you get, when I was a kid, church is where you got dressed up and you acted like you had it all put together. But see, this isn't this isn't what God is asking for in a prayer of lament. We come and we say what's actually happening in us. Walter Brugman, who writes about lament, he says this. He says, when lament disappears, covenant with God becomes only celebration. That's a practice of denial, cover-up, and pretense. When all we do is talk about the good stuff. See, naming what's in us is so important. And you know there's research science behind this. There's actually research done at UCLA where people were experienced painful emotions, and when they put their pain to words, their pre-frontal cortex, the amygdala, where all of fear and anxiety comes from, when you named what was bugging you, what was hurting you, named the pain, the feeling, actually that the activity began to reduce. There's actually science behind it. And for some of us, this is really hard. Because some of you wouldn't know a feeling if it hit you in the face. So that's why I came up with this. I didn't come up with this, but I carry them around everywhere. This is actually in my office. When you come into my office, one of the very first things I ever ask someone is feelings check. This is called a feelings wheel. You ever seen one of these? I know a bunch of you are like, there ain't that many feelings. No, there really are. I I I have people start to uh work from the inside out to start to learn how to name and and and not just come in, and it's the most, you know, oftentimes when I ask somebody how they're doing, they say the same thing. Fine, good. And I'm like, that's not a feeling. Fine one. Look, there's something that happens with God when we name it, when we express it. Like, literally, naming your pain literally changes your brain's response to it. And that's the second piece of the prayer of lament. We address God and then we name it, but we don't stop there. And that's key. We don't stop with just naming it. We move into the next kind of step three of the prayer of lament. We ask. Now, this might look a little bit like petition, which we're gonna talk about in a few weeks, but listen, when we find ourselves in the prayer of lament, it is important that we learn how to ask God for what we need in this moment with this pain. Big prayers. Look at what happens. Psalm 22. If you read verse one, it says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? If you fast forward now in that same chapter to verse 19, look what the psalmist begins to ask for. He says, But you, O Lord, do not be far off. He says, Don't be far away from me. Oh, you might help come quickly to my aid. Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog. This step is so key because it moves us from why to who. You see? The New Testament invites us as brothers and sisters. Listen, if you know Jesus, we're invited in Hebrews to bring our prayers, to pray boldly. In Hebrews 4:16, it says, Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in the time of need. To pray bold prayers, big prayers. That's the third step in the prayer of lament. And listen, these prayers, they do matter. When we bring God and say, God, this is what I need. They do change things, sometimes in ways unexpected. My father, who I talk about often, who passed a few years ago, tells the story of a powerful prayer that changed his life. Now, my dad grew up, son of a still mill worker, and um, we had addiction all in our family, lots of alcoholism. Um, and my dad was on that track in his early 20s. Um, you know, he he was uh loose cannon would be putting it mildly. And um the only person in our whole family that knew Jesus was his mom, my grandma. And my grandmother tells this would tell the story of how deeply she mourned her little boy Jimmy because from the time he was probably about 14, he was hard to handle. Some of you know that. Like you walked in today, and there's some stuff with your family, with your kids. Like you've been praying long prayers, hard prayers, because it feels like that relationship is busted and broken, they're far from God. And that's hard. My grandma knew it. My dad tells the story, he was 21, 22, 23, right in that age group when he had been on a bender. And he said, one night he stumbled into the house and he said, I literally stumbled in, and uh, I could hear something in this tiny little uh home in the front, uh sounded like uh voices, and when I walked in, it was my mom and she was on her knees, like fervently lamenting her son praying that God would rescue him. And my dad says, he goes, Listen, son, I gotta tell you, I was absolutely as drunk as you could be, and it was in a moment I was like sober as a judge. Right? It changed his life. In that moment, he became a Christ follower. He gave his life to the Lord, which changed my life and changed my kids' life. These prayers, they do matter. They matter. And so we ask. And then it leads to the fourth step. And I will be honest, even as your pastor, this is my hardest one. We learn to trust. In 1 Peter, language that gets used is language I replay in my mind. Listen to this first. Cast all your anxiety on him. Anxiety. Look, here's the thing with me. I don't like loose ends. Anybody else? I like to close loops. Like I have 13 emails in my inbox right now, and I'm thinking about it on this stage. I want things to get done. Like when stuff is happening with my kids, I'd rather have a fast resolution than a good resolution, right? It's like, let's get this over with. And part of what I'm learning in the prayer of lament is to cast that anxiety. And in the Greek, it's really interesting because the Greek isn't a gentle word. It is a hurl. It's like a throw. It's almost like a bit of aggression going, you gotta take this. I can't deal with it. This is you, God. But see, there's something that happens in us when we follow through with the step of casting it toward him. We really are recognizing that he's big enough to carry it. That more than that, like he cares for me enough to carry it. But you're not annoying him, you're not interrupting him, you're not too much for him. He actually delights to be yours and my safe place. And I know for some of us, lament all of this, this idea of like sitting in this pain and naming it and being forceful with God. It feels so antithetical to the faith you were taught, but you need to know this, it isn't. Walter Brugman, the aforementioned author, says, lament is not the opposite of faith. It is actually what happens when faith gets honest. When we get honest. I know some of you are like, man, for real, we did a baptism and you're gonna talk about lament. Aren't those two things the opposite? See, that's what we've been taught that somehow lament and worship are opposites ends of the spectrum. That worship is hands raised and eyes closed and heart full and lament is head down and eyes wet and heartbroken. But listen, they are not opposites, they are absolutely connected. Like when we cry out to God in our pain, we're not turning away from him. We're actually turning toward him. Like you're saying, I do believe you're there. I do believe you hear me, I do trust you enough to bring you the worst thing I'm carrying. And that's faith. That's worship. Mark Rogrop says it this way: Lament is a path to praise as we are led through our brokenness and disappointment. It is the path from heartbreak to hope. I think the people who praise God the most freely actually on the other side of heartbreak are often the people who cried out the most fervently during the heartbreak. Because there's something too, like, I don't know, being able to fully celebrate rescue because you know you needed rescued. Right? Lament. See, this is what God is teaching us about our tears. And I want to say this because here's here's the truth in a room this size um this isn't theoretical. Like you're in it right now. At 3 a.m., you're waking up and your head's spinning. Because of the stuff that's going on in your marriage or uh with your family or at work, like your head is spinning because of some of the pain that is deeply lodged in you. And and some of you, you have been waiting a really long time. You have prayed faithful prayers, and silence, it feels like it has been a long time. You have been waiting. And you started to wonder. And I know this because some of you sat in my office and asked me, what is wrong with me? What was wrong with me? Is God even there? Does he even understand? Jesus understands. He is no stranger to pain. In fact, Isaiah 53 calls him a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And that phrase in the Hebrew, it is deeper than it sounds. It means intimate, like knows what grief feels like. Jesus knew this, he was familiar with it. He didn't observe our suffering from a distance. Jesus, he lived inside of it. I mean, think about it. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus, he sweat drops of blood in the garden. He cried out from the cross using that same language from Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus did not avoid this darkness. He walked straight into it. Which means that when you bring your pain to God, you are not bringing it to someone who doesn't understand. When I bring my pain, I am bringing it to the one person in the universe who has felt the full weight, the full sting of human suffering from the inside. He gets it. And he's not sitting at a distance like waiting for you and me to just get it together. He's with us. Already acquainted with exactly what you're carrying. Hannah prays this prayer of lament. She comes, she just breaks down, she weeps in front of the Lord. And then in 1 Samuel chapter 2, it's called Hannah's Song. She sings this most beautiful song of praise. It goes something like this: My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord, my horn is lifted high, my mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance. One of the most exuberant songs in all the New Testament. But here's the thing that song doesn't happen without chapter one. Bringing this to him. Laying it out in front of him. You know, the depth of her praise is absolutely connected directly to the depth of her lament. I believe that to be true. Because, see, lament is something interesting. It's like the prayer language of a hurting soul, right? Lament is this gut level honesty with God when life just doesn't make sense. And let's be honest with each other, life often just doesn't make sense. I don't understand. I sat with someone just the other day and what they're going through. And the only thing I could say is, I have no idea. This side of heaven, we may never know what it is and why it is. We're walking through it. I love what C.S. Lewis says, though. He said, there will come a time, in fact, he believed that the first thing we would say as soon as we walk into heaven, into Jesus' glorious presence, is of course. And maybe until then we may not know, but this is what we do know that lament is not where the story ends. It never does. In fact, Tyler Stanton, who wrote this book on prayer, makes it clear that God collects two things: prayers and tears. And that both are eternal, that the new creation is seeded by our prayers, but those seeds are watered by God's people's tears. Your lament, it is not wasted. God is not ignoring you. And if today, man, you came in heavy, and the silence feels louder than God's voice right now. I want you to know something. God is not scared of your pain. In fact, he is present in it. And your honesty before him, your raw, unfiltered, barely holding it together. Honesty, it is not a failure of faith. It's worship. Those tears, they're worship. When we bring it to God and we just go, I don't get it. It is worship. Every time we address him and we name it, and then we ask, and then we cast it on him. This is worship. And so bring it to him. He is strong enough to hold it. And he is acquainted with every single part of it. Thanks again for listening. Our prayer is that this message encouraged and challenged you in your journey to follow Jesus. If you'd like to learn more about our church, please check us out online at plumcreek.churchor. If you find yourself within driving distance of Castle Rock, Colorado, we would be honored to see you in person on a weekend. So until next time, race and peace in the name of Jesus.