Thoughts on Psalms… 13

Psalm 13 is a rather short one again today… but as is often the case, big things come in little packages.

Let’s dive in…

Interested in knowing Why? this series on Psalms…
check out the 1^st post.

Psalm 13

¹How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
²How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
⁴lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
⁶I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

My Thoughts

The Question: Look back up at verses 1-2. Have you ever felt that way? I have… most assuredly.
- Sometimes we feel like we’ve somehow wound up in a place where no one ‘gets it’… no one can even understand what we’re going through, much less help find a solution.
- What’s worse than that even, is the feeling – based on what we see with our eyes – that God himself is distant and unable or unwilling to help. We wonder if it’s a time of testing, of discipline, or worse… rejection. We can easily feel as though we are all we have… so we take counsel in our own soul (since no one else is available) and we dwell in sorrow.
The Prayer: Nevertheless… there’s something to see in verses 3-4… David prays.
- Isn’t it interesting… he wonders whether God is distant, yet it doesn’t stop him from praying.
- How many times do people (you, me & half of society), when they feel that God is distant, simply not pray because of discouragement… because of the feeling that “God’s already distant, so what’s the point?” … yep … Guilty!
- Yet David gives us another example… he prays anyway. I like that David guy!
The Foundation: Why can he pray? … because he has history with God.
- These two verses bounce twice between the past and the future.
  - David has trusted and his heart shall rejoice.
  - He will sing to the Lord, because the Lord has dealt bountifully with him.
- Wait… what? Dealt bountifully? … he just got done questioning how long God would forget him!? … True, but this wasn’t his first trip around the sun with God. David nurtured a relationship with God over many years… so he had more than simply this one situation to base his faith on. So David could look back and be reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness to him in the past… which nourished his faith for the future.

Food for Thought…

The more you have history with God, the more you realize that present circumstances are sometimes just a bump in the road. Sometimes they’re painful bumps, but the road is long and you can look back on many more times when the Lord has given you reason to trust him than to doubt.

Are you newer in your walk with the Lord? That’s OK… trust him for what he’s doing today and when he brings you through, it will give you faith for things that are yet to come.