Trusting God in the Midst of Suffering: Remembering His Mighty Works

 

Then I thought, “To this I will appeal: the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.”  Psalm 77:10-11

 Sometimes life is hard. Things just don’t add up. You hurt. You’re worn out. You’ve waited and waited, and reprieve doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. The Bible doesn’t shy away from these difficult seasons in our lives. It doesn’t shame us, or tell us we’re wrong to feel sad, scared or lost. Instead, it comes alongside us and says, yes, your brothers and sisters have felt that way too. You are not alone.

 In our Psalm today, 77, the psalmist (Asaph) lays out his struggles before God. He starts out in confidence that the LORD will hear and pay attention to him. Things had gotten so bad that he felt like, maybe, God had forgotten him or rejected him. He wondered if God was so angry with him that He had withheld His compassion. That’s a dark place to be. Maybe you’ve been there too, I know I have.

 Instead of giving up, instead of walking away from God, the psalmist stops in his tracks. In the NET version, verse 10 above reads very differently, “Then I said, "I am sickened by the thought that the sovereign One might become inactive.” He is shaken by his own thoughts, and it is clear to him that he has lost sight of truth in his thinking. I see Asaph go through a form of grounding here. You may have heard of the technique of naming 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, etc. I think Asaph is doing something very similar here where he is falling back on what he knows to be true. He is remembering the amazing things that God has done in the past and the marvelous truth revealed about Him through them.

Here’s the Thing: Sometimes life doesn’t make sense. Sometimes we’re smack dab in the middle of it and the pieces just aren’t adding up. What are we to do with that? Like Asaph, we can find hope in the heartache by grounding ourselves in the truth of what we know about God.

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