Lamenting More
By Wayne Williams--
I really liked Jane Lewis’ excellent blog last week about lament. Did you read it? If not, go to our GPBC website and read it now. I liked it so much that I want to continue the theme this week.
Jane began her blog with a quote from Psalm 13, “How long, LORD…How long…How long…How long…?” These are words of pain, not impatience. “How long…day after day [will I] have sorrow in my heart?” A lament is the song of a heart in pain. In the Bible, lament is a God-ordained form of worship. In fact, King David wrote this Psalm not only for himself, but also for us to use in our own private and corporate worship.
We don’t know for sure why David was in pain. Maybe it was when King Saul was hunting him; or perhaps when his son, Absalom, betrayed, rebelled, and dethroned him; or maybe it was the on-going threat from the Philistines. Whatever it was, it went on for months or years—“How long?!”—with no clear end in sight and with death as a probable outcome. Kind of like a pandemic. Only worse.
Psalm 13 has three stanzas of two verses each. The first stanza is David’s expression of pain, his complaint. In short, he says, “Lord, you are not helping, I am hurting, and my enemies are winning.” Have you ever talked to the Lord like that? Are you able to be honest with him about your true feelings? That’s what this psalm invites us to do, to lament.
The second stanza is David’s prayer. He turned his focus away from his circumstance and put it on the Lord, “Look on me and answer, LORD my God. Give light to my eyes…” And when he does, he remembers something very significant about the Lord that is relevant to his circumstance.
The third stanza is David’s praise. It begins with the biggest little word in the Bible, BUT. Something has dramatically changed. The painful circumstance didn’t change, but David’s perspective on his painful circumstance changed. His complaint was morphing into praise. “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise…”
In prayer, David remembered, or better, God reminded David of his character: he is a God of love. His love is un-failing, un-forgetting, un-changeable, un-limited, un-deserved, un-conditional, in-comprehensible, ir-refutable, and un-stoppable. It is all-sufficient and all-encompassing. His love never gives up, it never runs out on us.
It is not insignificant that the order of the stanzas is Pain—Prayer—Praise. To get from pain to praise, you have to go through prayer. In prayer we are reminded of the kind of God we worship, that his love is always up to something good for us and we can trust him, even in our pain.
I don’t know what kind of pain you may have because of the pandemic. Is it the pain of fear, or the pain of anger, or the pain of uncertainty? Whatever it is, Psalm 13 exhorts us to lament that pain as an act of worship to our Lord and then to put our focus, not on the circumstance but on him who loves us.