“Lord, help!” they cried in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress,( Psalm 107:17 NLT).
Have you ever been so downhearted or overwhelmed that all you could do was cry, “Help me, Lord.” That’s been my cry several times in my life where circumstances tried to pin me to the mat and defeat me. Make me question my faith. Make me question God’s character or his promises. Tempt me to give up hope and quit pursuing a dream.
Psalm 107 travels through several scenes of people struggling in hard situations using metaphors like a stormy sea and a barren desert. Bible scholar F. B Meyer describes the Psalm like this:
“Consider the successive vignettes of this psalm. Love (God) broods over the weary caravan that faints in the desert; visits the prison-house with its captives; watches by our beds of pain; notices each lurch of the tempest-driven vessel; brings the weary hosts from the wilderness into the fruitful soil.”
The big idea? Whatever hard times or challenging circumstances we are facing, God is always on call as our first responder. Whether our foe is external like financial setbacks, disease, or relationship trials or internal like loneliness, depression, or addiction, God will show up if we cry out to him. Let me say that another way.
When we are in trouble of any kind, God longs for us to call on him. We are his children. He is our generous and loving father. After we ask him to engage with our specific situation, faith carries us farther and helps us believe and expect him to respond.
God adores you and me. He tells us that in thousands of ways in the Bible. When we hurt, he hurts with us. The wonderful thing for us is that God doesn’t stop with sympathy. He begins to move in us and around us with authority and power to change us and the world around us.
Based on scripture and my own experiences, I believe God usually walks us through trials instead of taking us out of them. Joseph sat in prison for years before he became second in command of the Egyptian empire. King David spent years running from his predecessor King Saul’s murderous plans before he ascended to the throne. Ruth endured famine, the death of her husband and leaving her homeland and all her people before she became the treasured wife of Boaz.
God is a storyteller who uses our lives and circumstances to tell a fallen world his story of rescue and redemption. When lost people watch us endure the worst days of our lives with peace and faith, it causes them to question their world view and their life choices. When they see how available God is to us 24/7, they will want that kind of relationship with him. God loves them too and hopes they will see the loving dynamics flashing between us and him during dark times.
God cares deeply about that which concerns you today. That which robbed your sleep last night. That which drains your energy and is now going after your faith. Call out to him over and over. He never grows weary or tired of us coming to him. He is our rescuer, our defender, our champion.
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