Psalm 13
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
I’ve always found it interesting that when we experience blessing in our life, when we experience goodness and wholeness, our response is often one of turning to God in praise and thanksgiving! But what happens when we experience the opposite? What happens when we are overcome by the presence of chaos, brokenness, suffering and death? What do we do? What do you do?
Habakkuk 1
How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
The law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The scriptures have an answer for this kind of question… it’s called, Lament. Lament is simply the spiritual response to the overwhelming presence of chaos, brokenness, suffering and death. Over one third of the psalms in scripture are cries of lament. In the Book of Job, Job cries out, “Why did I not perish at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” (Job 3:11). The prophets cry out to God, “Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable…?” (Jeremiah 15:18)
There’s an entire book of the Old Testament called, Lamentations which expresses the pain and suffering that the children of Israel experience after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
But Lament isn’t simply an Old Testament practice, because we find it in the New Testament as well! In Mark’s Gospel, blind Bartimaeus, cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
In fact, Jesus himself laments to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me…” (Mark 14:36). And again, in his agony on the cross, Jesus makes his own the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me…?”
Despite its wide-ranging presence in the Bible, as Christians, we seem to have lost touch with this dimension of prayer. And so as this week’s focus, we’re going to re-discover the ancient practice of lament.
We began our time with the words of Psalm 13 and now we’re going to revisit that Psalm, breaking it down into its various components in order to use it as a template to craft our own prayers of lament together.
[Turn To God]
As the Psalm begins, we immediately see King David turn to God…
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
In the midst of his frustration and pain, it is God whom he turns to. It’s this act of turning to God that makes lament distinctly Christian. We bring our fear, our frustration, our pain, our anxiety to God.
[Complain]
After turning to God, King David then set’s about airing his grievances surrounding the effects of sin and brokenness in his world.
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
David’s complaint is not simply whining about his situation. He has identified something that is very wrong and broken, and as a result, confesses his desperate need for God.
[Ask]
After confessing his complaint, David then turns to a question:
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death…
By petitioning God to answer, David lays bare the fact that he cannot fix his situation by himself. By asking for God’s help, David confesses his own weakness. It is a realization that, in his human brokenness, he is utterly dependent upon the God who is capable where he is not.
[Trust]
After pleading that God would intervene, the Psalm takes a turn…
But I trust in your unfailing love;
David confesses that he will trust God to fulfill His promise and stay true to His character. Trust in God means that we believe what God says about himself and that he will do it.
[Praise]
Then finally, David moves from a posture of trust to a posture of praise…
I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.
So… let’s now take some time to lament together. I will read Psalm 13 one last time, and after I finished, I’ll invite you to pray along with me a Prayer of Lament, and then after the prayer, we will close with a song.
If you’d like to go a little deeper, I’d like to invite you to take this template and use it to write your own prayer of lament. Begin first by turning to God, then voice your complaint. Ask God to heal the brokenness. Trust God to fulfill His promises and be true to who He has revealed Himself to be. And finally, end with praise.
Hear the word of the Lord from Psalm 13.
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
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.
A Prayer of Lament
Oh Lord our God,
To you we cry out,
To you we run,
For where else would we go?
We feel the weight of our broken world,
Through wars, famines, and disasters,
In injustice, hatred, and oppression.
The nations desperately need your deliverance.
We weep at our own brokenness
For the guilt, shame, and pain we feel
Weighed down by sin, held back by fear
We mourn our distance from you.
Be near to us, Oh God
Remember not our sin or failures
Reveal your Kingdom to our hearts and our community
Restore us to an awareness of your presence.
For we have experienced your grace
And we will experience your restoration
Through your atoning death our sins are forgiven
And in your return we will be made whole.
So we will give you thanks,
For you have become our salvation.
We will say, “the LORD has done this!”
Let us rejoice and be glad!
Should I Thank You For Pain?
Aaron Niequist, David Gungor & John Newton
Should I thank you for pain?
Should I thank you for sorrow?
I bring you my shame
The threat of tomorrow
Thank you for all that can finally grow
In the soil of death and despair
And thank you for meeting me there
Thank you for meeting me there
Thank you for doubt
Thanks for despair
When options run out
For mercifully unanswered prayers
Thank you for all that is possible
In the space that pain can create
I cling to amazing grace
I cling to amazing grace and wait...
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now I’m found
Was blind but now I see