Pastor's all over the country wish we could fit all of the sermon preparation into our Sunday messages. Sometimes it works out and everything fits. Other times information must be left on the production floor, as it were, ready to be used at a later date. Tuesday morning pastor is about using this material for purposes of encouragement.
I have been working through a series titled, "The Soul of Prayer." The series was birthed out of a season of prayer with a couple of members from the church. That night, almost miraculously, the Lord gave me the title for every message in this series along with the related passages of scripture. This had never happened to me before, so I believed the Lord was desiring to speak to the church on this topic. It has been fruitful and transformative in many ways, so I have been told. This is where we have been for the past five weeks, and this past Sunday message was from Psalm 13 on the subject: "The Soul's Path from Agonizing to Adoration." It was a message on the prayers of lament and their purpose in the life of believers.
To lament means to agonize, to mourn, to weep, to be in sorrow, to cry, to groan; it is symbolized as one who beats their breast. Davide teaches us that this kind of agonizing is not shunned by the Lord, but, instead, He invites us to come to Him in this posture of brokenness. This is the beauty of grace and mercy over His fragile, but faithful, flock. When we cry out to the Lord, He enters the pain of our soul but in the sending of a deliverer who brings deliverance.
God did it with Moses for Israel
As the people of God were enslaved and experiencing physical and psychological brutality at the Egyptians all appeared lost and their lives seemed destined for perpetual servitude. Then something powerful and miraculous happened. We are told in Exodus 3,
7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have
heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to
deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and
broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the
Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites (Exodus 3:7–8).
In these circumstances that were difficult, hard, and ongoing, they cried out to the Lord with cries of lament - agony, mourning and despair and He showed up, through Moses, and delivered them.
God did and does it by the Holy Spirit for Christians
Sometimes we can be in season of difficulty such that, even as believers, filled with the Spirit of the Lord, we give into melancholy and doubt. In those seasons it feels like you are in a country in which you do not know the language and there is no one able to help you. They try, but it does not help and, even in their attempts, it feels like you sink deeper and deeper into despondency. Prayer is, also, beyond difficult. It feels downright impossible because nothing in you can rise above your present darkness.
It is here that the Spirit helps. Paul teaches us that "... the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26).
To lament is to groan and to groan is to invite the Spirit to speak for us the words that we, through weakness, grief and, what the Puritans called, the dark night of the soul, cannot find the strength to utter. The Spirit enters our lament and lifts our souls above our troubles by praying for us
God does it by the Body for the Body
Much of what we go through is designed for us, by God, to teach us that we stand in need of help. Troubles teach us that, in this life, we need to help of fellow pilgrims on the journey to walk the journey with faithfulness and endurance.
No one walks alone, well. Isolation is not only opens us for easy target of the enemy, but it also leaves us by ourselves and with ourselves to navigate life. This is not how God made us. He made us for relationship, and He remade us for redemptive relationships - relationships with those whose life and passion is, like ours, for the glory of God. When we are in trouble, temptation, or trials - from life or even due to our own failures - we have a faith family we are commanded to lean on. Paul puts it this way: "Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).
We are saved to bear the burdens (the laments) of our brothers and sisters and, in so doing, model the act of Christ on the cross. This is what it means to fulfill the law of Christ. But my burdens can only be borne by God's people if I am in fellowship with the redeemed. But this bearing of burdens is cyclical in nature because my ability to comfort others in pain comes from having been comforted in my own pain. Paul says,
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all
comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are
in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (Second
Corinthians 1:3-4)
I am comforted in my lament by those who have been comforted in their own lament. God mercy in my lament is by the body and for the body.