How Faith Talks
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How Faith Talks
Psalm 55
Main Idea: Faithful Christians can acknowledge hardship while trusting the Lord.
I. I Need Help (55:1-5).
II. This Is Hard (55:6-15).
III. I Believe (55:16-23).
The Psalms are full of pain. They speak from a range of difficult experiences: inside problems like sin, guilt, and shame; outside problems like injustice, military threats, or one of the acute experiences here—betrayal.
We don’t know what experience prompted this psalm. It could be pointing to the story in 2 Samuel 15, when David’s counselor, Ahithophel, betrayed David and helped Absalom lead a revolt to overthrow David. Sadly, David experienced more than one betrayal, so it’s hard to pin down.
Though betrayal is the acute experience of suffering in this psalm, it’s not the only experience of hardship here. Ultimately, I hope we see God’s glory shining out in ways that strengthen our faith.
The question isn’t, Will you have problems as you live in this world? Of course you will! The question is, How do we, as people who trust in Jesus Christ, respond to hardship? Where do we turn? Will we allow our instincts to be trained by the truth of God’s Word?
There is a vocabulary of faith in this passage—three things people of faith are invited to say.
I Need Help
You hear that request underneath every verse in this chapter. I need help.
Verse 1 contains a classic example of Hebrew poetry:
Listen to
my prayer.
Do not hide from
my plea for help.
This is two ways of saying the same thing. But look at the light it throws on what prayer is: “my plea for help.” That’s not everything the Bible says about prayer, but it is what Psalm 55:1 says about prayer.
Have you ever bumped into the prayer police? Someone gives you the impression that your prayers, if they’re really spiritual, aren’t concerned about your own life. “If you want to really pray, you won’t even think about yourself; you’ll only be focused on God’s glory.”
We might respond this way. “Well, yes, God’s glory matters more than anything in the universe. I would never want to dispute that. But where did we get the idea that God’s glory and our good are mutually exclusive?”
This reminds me of what you see when you watch little boys play battle with little army figures. When the battle reaches a fever pitch, you know it. Because one of the army guys is being hammered down on top of the other figure. Similarly, Christians can take one group of Bible passages and use them to smash another group of Bible passages. Friends, there is a better way! And as it relates to the relationship between God’s glory and our good, according to John Piper, the beauty of the Christian faith is, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” In other words, God gets glory by being a refuge, a rock, a shelter for his people.
The psalmist isn’t afraid of the prayer police. He uses “I, me, my” language twenty-seven times in thirteen verses. He relates eleven hard experiences in eight verses. I hope this liberates us to run to God in prayer! Paul Miller says, “Prayer is a moment of incarnation—God with us. God involved in the details of my life” (A Praying Life, 125). See those descriptions in verses 4-5: “My heart shudders within me; terrors of death sweep over me. Fear and trembling grip me; horror has overwhelmed me.”
Prayer is what happens at the intersection of real life and an all-sufficient God who hears when we call to him. One of the reasons I love the Psalms is you hear God telling you in no uncertain terms, “You can say verse 4 kind of stuff, and those can be words of faith.” David’s requests carry the force of imperatives: listen, do not hide, pay attention, answer.
This Is Hard
We get to overhear David’s anguish—restlessness, turmoil, pressure, pain. It’s all here. And he’s bringing it all, his real life, into God’s presence. David isn’t too proud to plead. What is he after? It becomes clear in verses 6-8: rest and shelter.
Think about this in your personal experience. Have you ever found yourself reaching for something God’s Word says is a good thing, but you can’t get your hands on it? It’s a frustrating and painful place to be.
This is where David is in verses 6-8. We move from what David feels to what David sees: “violence and strife” (v. 9). This reminds me of something an Old Testament leader named Nehemiah faced as he led the effort to rebuild the protective wall around the city. Nehemiah discovered that there wasn’t just danger from the outside, but there was opposition on the inside. And here you see phrases telling that story: “in the city . . . on its walls . . . within it . . . inside it . . . its marketplace” (vv. 9-11).
And all that trouble seems to be connected to a source, which happened to be one of David’s closest friends (vv. 12-14,20-21). No wonder the Bible goes to such great lengths to work on how we as believers treat one another. No wonder there’s so much instruction about forgiveness and reconciliation and peacemaking. The fellowship we share in the body of Christ is not a fellowship of men and women who are models of perfect contentment, selflessness, and humility. James asks, “What is the source of wars and fights among you?” (Jas 4:1). And his answer is that we want things too much. We want something we’re not getting, so we try to force people to give it to us. We want peace, but instead we have children, and they, on any given night, don’t seem interested in the “peace” thing. So we blow up. We want to be worshiped (of course, we don’t just come out and say that!), but instead someone thinks to criticize us.
Our fellowship, even as believers in whom God is working, is fellowship with fellow sinners. However, this is not a reason for apathy. God wants to work precisely here. So, for example, in New Testament books like Ephesians, Romans, Philippians, and 1 Peter, there’s a clear connection between our vertical worship and our horizontal relationships, between knowing God has forgiven us in Christ and forgiving others, between the story of Jesus humbling himself and becoming a servant and the exhortation to esteem others more highly than ourselves.
No one should have a clearer understanding of how to lower the heat in our relationships and pursue peace than Christians. No one should demonstrate better what a real apology sounds like than Christians. And no one should be more eager to put a stop to abuse and injustice than Christians. That, by the way, is what’s behind verses like verse 15. The so-called imprecatory prayers are basically prayers asking God to make it stop. Stop the violence in the city (vv. 9-10). Stop the oppression and deceit (v. 11).
As it relates to us, is it OK, for example, to pray that the acts of those committing domestic violence would come to light and be brought to justice? Or are we only supposed to pray for the salvation of the guy who is hitting his family members? It’s a false dilemma. We can pray for both. As a matter of fact, we can pray while we pick up the phone to call the police.
The imprecatory psalms teach us something critical. They remind us that the instinct to pray (and, for that matter, to work) against injustice and oppression is not only permitted; it’s commanded. It’s a vital way we reflect God’s image and display his character.
Think about this in your own life. Do you talk to God about what you’re feeling (v. 2), saying (v. 6), and seeing (v. 9)? The psalmist models the vocabulary of faith.
I Believe
There’s this beautiful progression of first-person statements: “I am” (v. 2). “I said” (v. 6). “I see” (v. 9). “I call” (v. 16). “I will trust in you” (v. 23).
It is hard to read the Psalms and get the impression that God wants us to speak to him as if nothing is wrong in our lives—as if the sole purpose of prayer is to review the finer points of theology in his presence.
We know that to become a Christian we shouldn’t try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes to praying we completely forget that. We’ll sing the old gospel hymn, “Just as I Am,” but when it comes to praying, we don’t come just as we are. We try, like adults, to fix ourselves up. Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the nonpersonal, nonreal praying that you’ve been taught. (Miller, A Praying Life, 32)
If you want to fall out of the practice of prayer, start by nurturing the idea that God doesn’t want to help you. Think of prayer as a field full of land mines, trip wires everywhere. Or think of prayer as paperwork with pages and pages of fine print. Rules that, if broken, ruin the whole thing. “Oh, that’s an infraction. You got too honest.” Or, “Oh no. You asked for help too soon. That’s a breach of prayer protocol. You need at least a paragraph of adoration before you’re allowed to sound like you’re dying.”
Christian friend, if that’s how your prayer life died, Psalm 55 welcomes you back to try this again. And this time, don’t pray in a way that forgets the gospel. Here’s our story: We sinned against the God who made us. It separated us from him. As sinful people we don’t deserve answers to our prayers. We deserve condemnation, not blessings. And instead of condemning us, which he could’ve done and been perfectly righteous, he sent his Son to reconcile us to him—to die for our sins. And in rising from the dead, the living, resurrected Jesus addresses every man, woman, and child here and offers you salvation. He calls us to trust in his perfect and finished work, to humble ourselves before him and receive the mercy we so desperately need and he is so eager to give. We turn from sin and trust in Christ, and we are then reconciled to God forever.
As it relates to prayer, once that happens, there isn’t a moment in your life, even on your worst day, when God isn’t utterly, completely, and irreversibly for you. And that’s the reality David is finding here! “I call to God” (v. 16). And he’s preaching truth to his soul: “and the Lord will save me” (v. 16). “I complain and groan . . . and he hears my voice” (v. 17). I’m not talking to the ceiling. I’m not godforsaken. He’s listening. “Though many are against me, he will redeem me” (v. 18).
Now he reviews theology, not out of protocol but prompted by genuine faith. God—the one enthroned from long ago—that God will hear and will humiliate them (v. 19). God will right the wrongs in his time.
Does your faith talk like this? Do you pray as to a God who is enthroned? So often, when our ancestors in faith are groaning, the truths about God that rush in like first responders are the truths about how big God is: his sovereignty, his omniscience. At one point in history, his great love for us displayed in Jesus Christ. The God who hears our prayers is the sovereign Ruler and reigning King, and the gospel tells us that God is for us.
David doesn’t yet have the full picture of what we know on this side of the cross, yet what he has is fortifying his soul in the face of hardship, so much so that he not only looks upward but outward. He calls in fellow brothers and sisters to exhort them. And what’s the first thing he says when this passage, if you will, goes churchwide? “Cast your burden on the Lord” (v. 22). And the first promise he extends to the community of faith is, “He will sustain you; he will never allow the righteous to be shaken.” You might say, “But I feel shaken.” Here again, note the parallelism: “He will sustain you.” In other words, by “shaken” he means to say, “God will never allow the righteous to be beyond recovery, beyond redemption.” This is why we may grieve—grieve deeply, in this fallen world—but we do not grieve as those who have no hope.
I wonder if any of you have seen God’s grace come full circle like it did for David—where God sustains and strengthens you to such a point that you, in turn, strengthen others? Have you ever experienced comfort from God only to discover that you are able and desirous to minister comfort to others? That’s God’s beautiful way of multiplying his grace through real human contact in the life of the church.
Psalm 55 invites us into not only faith but faith that works through love. It invites us up (to God) and out (to one another). Its invitation is, don’t just cast your burdens on him; offer God’s promise of grace to others. In one sense no one would blame David in verse 1 for not saying, “Cast your burden on the Lord” (v. 22). But here’s the thing. From verse 1, that was where God was taking him: up and (eventually) out.
I could name members of this church who have walked through hardship, and the suffering comes full circle when, in God’s timing, they steward that pain for the consolation of others. That doesn’t mean the loss is any less real, but we begin to see how God is redeeming it. And here in Psalm 55, after exhorting his brothers and sisters, David looks directly at God (v. 23) and says, God, you will bring them down. You will right the wrongs. He closes with the resolution that demonstrates the sustaining grace of God: “But I will trust in you” (v. 23).
In other words, David says, God, you do the saving, the redeeming (v. 18). You bring down the proud in your timing as you see fit (v. 23). Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll keep my eyes on you.
There is welcome realism. The truth is, an unshaken soul (sustained by grace) is not necessarily saying, “Everything is awesome.” If you want to see a soul that is held in the strong grip of God’s grace, it’s the person who may feel totally weak, unable to sleep, vulnerable in the raging storm of affliction, but nevertheless saying, “I will trust in you.” That’s faith.
We can express this full range of the vocabulary of faith that we see at each critical turning point in this psalm: I need help, this is hard, but I believe. And we turn to one another and outward to the world, and we say, “Cast your burden on the Lord. There is a Redeemer who saves. There is a God who is enthroned, and he sustains us in this present darkness.”
May this truth both steady our hearts and send us out. Our world is without rest and without shelter. And we can show them what it looks like, and we can tell them where it’s found. It’s all found in knowing Jesus. Church, keep your eyes on Jesus. Upward and outward—that’s how God makes us stronger.
Reflect and Discuss
- What is the difference between pouring our hearts out to God and praying a self-focused prayer?
- What is your instinct when responding to hardship and suffering? To whom do you turn first?
- What is your instinct when talking to God in the midst of hardship and suffering? What does that reveal about your view of God? (Think back to the last trial you faced.)
- How will you incorporate other elements in your prayers to God this week—by not being afraid to pour out to him but to also focus on other biblically necessary aspects of prayer such as confession, praise, praying for the lost, etc.?
- How did David bring his real life into his conversation with God? How can we, like David, have faith while still admitting that life is hard?
- Why is it OK to ask that sins be exposed and justice be brought at the same time we pray for salvation and offer forgiveness? What is the danger of seeing them as mutually exclusive?
- What does it look like for us to steward our pain for the consolation of others?