Friday, June 30, 2017

Psalm 13

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.

From our deepest pits of despair come some of the most beautiful moments of our lives.  Sometimes when we are at our darkest, we are most willing to let God do anything with us that He wants to, therefore allowing Him to do incredible things in our lives.  It may be a long wait from the time we call out to Him in despair, to the moment we see the beautifulness of our broken. 
David wrote the Psalm above when he was in the middle of a very long trial, in despair, and feeling abandoned by God.  He felt forgotten and that God must not care because He was so silent when David needed Him the most.  We all can relate to those feelings.  Hope can hide very well in the darkness of despair.  When we can’t see the solution to our problems with our human eyes and it seems that all our prayers are going nowhere, hope fades fast.  It feels like our situation will never be better and our enemies (or life) is beating us down, over and over again.  In this situation, seconds feel like hours anyway, but often God allows us to stay in a holding pattern for a purpose. 
David starts by crying out, and then shouting.  You can just imagine, at least I can because I know I am guilty of the same thing.  I start crying out softly to God and as time passes, I am louder about my requests.  David might have felt that God was not listening to him because nothing was getting any better.  He saw no hope and for a moment, he panicked and lost it when the anguish turned to desperation.  Somewhere along the way David gets ahold of himself and turns it around and begins to hope again.  He began to realize that his only hope was God and that he had to just trust in him and wait.  And David knows waiting is the hardest part.  Then he decided to praise while he was waiting.  The sacrifice of praise.  When we are in pain and we can turn the anguish to praise, it becomes one of the sweetest emotions ever experienced.  This is praise that is the result of realizing that the situation may not change, but God is still God, and regardless of what it feels like at the time, He is still good.  This is from being resolved to the facts, knowing that it is what it is, and I will praise God and give Him glory no matter what.  David came full circle, from despair to praise.  He was able to see past the moment to his future in Christ.  Make that your goal the next time you are in despair.  Look ahead, past the momentary struggle to the deliverance ahead of you.

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