Just this morning as I was spending time in the Psalms, God brought back to mind a few things I heard in a testimonies at the Watermark Baptism Service yesterday. As I listened to the story of a young man, who was escaping the pain and real pain of his parents divorce by spending hours at the local library as a child… reading everything he could, raised by Buddhist parents. Then he found a Bible there, and opened it for the first time.
“I opened the Bible to Psalms, and the cries of David to God were the very words that my heart had been trying to say”
One of the things that I love about the Psalms is the brutal honesty of the writers. When they cry out to God, there is no holding back. When they praise God, there is no holding back. They speak the words that sometimes go unsaid in our own hearts.
As I remember back to a time in my own life where my heart had run out of words, I remember reading through Psalm 40
“I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD”
For those many dark months, I waited for deliverence from my own poor choices. At the end of my rope… a broken, unusable, cracked vessel. For years I had tried to be everything to everyone. I had invested countless hours trying to make it on my own power. For the first time, I understood the words of 2nd Corinthians 4:7: ” But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show us that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
Through those months, the words from Psalms were the “words that my heart had been trying to say.” God is faithful, and today “Many, O LORD my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare”
