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I don’t like to wait. I admit it. When I am waiting for something to
come or wanting something to change I am ready for it to happen. Soon. When
I am anxious for the answer to some important question or life decision with
far-reaching implications I am impatient if I have to wait for a resolution.
I strongly suspect that I am not the only person here that has that experience.
In fact, I am pretty confident that I am in the company of a number of folks
who know exactly what I’m talking about. But I am absolutely certain
that the writer of Psalm 13 shares my frustration with waiting. Psalm 13 is
a song about waiting.
Now we need to be clear what kind of waiting we’re talking about here.
The kind of waiting that Psalm13 speaks of is not routine waiting. It is not
the kind of waiting we endure when the waitress is slow, or the mail is delayed,
or being anxious for Christmas to come. The kind of waiting we meet in Psalm
13 is the long-suffering kind of waiting. It is a waiting that seems to extend
forever. It’s the kind of waiting that is accompanied by sleepless nights,
long-repeated prayers and weary endurance. It’s the kind of waiting a
parent experiences hoping and longing for the return of a lost child. It’s
the kind of waiting you experience in a long struggle with cancer. It’s
what you struggle with through years of loneliness or a desperate desire for
reconciliation.
There is a kind of waiting that seems like it will never end. And we grow
weary in waiting. Weary and discouraged. That’s the kind of waiting that
the psalmist is writing about.
“How long?” he cries. “How long will this waiting last?”
His repeated cry amplifies his message of distress as he inventories his plight.
How long will it be before I will see your face, Lord, before I can recognize
your presence? How long will it be until you act, showing your power at work
on my behalf? How long must my suffering do on? How long will this cruel injustice
continue? How long?
Four times he repeats his question. Four times he cries out for an answer
he fears will never come. How long? Forever? Behind the echoing cry lies another
question, unspoken but powerfully evident. Have you lost interest in my life,
my distress? Have you forgotten me?
The psalmist’s request of God (verse 3-4) reveals how desperate his situation
is. Unless you act, he cries, I will slip away into the grip of death. My
life, my strength, my hope are slowly ebbing away. I am at the end of my endurance
and resources. This is my desperate cry. I don’t know how much longer
I can hold on.
Some of you know where the psalmist is living. You have hoped and prayed for
so long to see something happen. With an enduring, deep longing you have looked
and waited for God to realize your hope. The salvation of a wayward child,
a change in your marriage, the healing of a debilitating or life-threatening
illness. You have prayed. You have waited in faith. You have looked with hope.
Until you are weary from waiting. Until you are discouraged. Until your faith
and hope have begun to slowly slip away. Until you have almost given up.
This psalm is especially for you. Because something happens to the psalmist
as he cries out on the edge of despair. The psalmist that is barely holding
on by his fingertips in verse 4 is praising God in confident hope, renewed
and joyful, in verses 5 & 6. Something has changed him.
The beginning of verse 5 gives us a clue. The word translated “but”
in my translation is called an adversative. It is a word that places a marker
in the text and declares that what comes after the marker does not follow
from what we have read before. The logical progression of the text (and the
life-experience of the psalmist) is broken; something is taking us in a totally
different direction. The conclusion of our circumstances tells us one thing,
but we are going to come to a very different conclusion. Something has radically
changed the “math.” Something has made the difference between despair
and joyful hope.
The psalmist tells us what that something is. It is placing my trust in God’s
“unfailing love.” He is talking about God’s covenant love.
That’s the kind of love God has given to us. It’s a kind of love
that never changes, never fails, never loses interest, never forgets. The
psalmist has remembered the kind of God that our God is, the kind of love
that our God loves with. He has learned to live in verses 5 & 6 by focusing
his attention and his hope – not on seeing the answer to his situation
or a change in his circumstances – but on the character of the God he
is trusting.
(At this point in the message I introduced a woman in our congregation who
has had cancer and continues to be a precarious health. She read her prepared
testimony of learning to live in confident trust despite her circumstances.
)
The psalmist and (this lady) have learned to live in overcoming hope despite
the fact that there is no indication in this psalm that any circumstances
have changed – only the focus of the heart, the object of our trust.
The reality of God’s unfailing love transcends the evidence of our circumstances.
(Here I transitioned to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, connecting
the signs of the supper to the declaration of God’s character of unfailing
love. Signs of hope to those who are waiting.)
