THURSDAY 4th
Psalm 88
NIV (v1) – ‘LORD, you are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to you.’
ESV (v1) – ‘O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you.’
The heading over this psalm in my ESV says ‘I cry out day and night before you’ it is a psalm in which the psalmist is in despair and as a result he is calling out to for God to him. I don’t want to highlight his troubles, rather to remind us that we can learn from him, that the way is available for us also to come before God night and day when we are in trouble and in distress. Now of course we shouldn’t just wait for those moments to come before God, it should already be something we do as his children, but there are those times when things come pressing upon us, seeming to crush us and fill us with anxiety or care and we need to know with confidence that it doesn’t matter what the need is, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it may be, it doesn’t matter how rock bottom we may be feeling, we can come before God and make our need known unto him, we can cry out to the Lord with our voice and know with confidence that he will hear us from out of his dwelling place.
Note the times when the psalmist prayed – v1 ‘I cry out day and night’ v9 ‘every day I call upon you, O LORD; I spread out my hands to you’, v13 ‘But, I, O LORD, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you’, it was a perpetual plea, it was as if the psalmist had decided that he was not going to give up until he knew that God had not only heard him but also answered him. In Luke 18 we are told that Jesus taught a parable about a persistent widow, the purpose was that the hearers including us who can read the parable today ‘that they ought always to pray and not lose heart’.
May we also learn the lesson of perpetual prayer, persisting without giving up, not just concerning our personal circumstances, but also in our praying for others, praying for the needs of the nation, and more importantly in our praying for the salvation of souls. In the words of Jesus himself, in Luke 9:38 ‘therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.’