Psalm 44:20-26 – If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign god, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart. Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!

THEME OF THE DAY. IT BUILDS OBEDIENCE AND PERSEVERANCE. No Christian likes to be in the places we find God’s people in today’s scripture. These are painful experiences, but necessary if we want to get close to the Lord and enjoy the sweet fellowship with Him we were saved to have. Let’s go to these two places.

First, there is the place of suffering as God’s children – “For your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered”. Fellow believer, we must come to grips with suffering in our lives. It cannot be avoided; nor can we not find ourselves complaining and rebelling in the inevitable suffering we will encounter as Christians. The Apostle Peter was very upfront with this reality – “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). And why suffering? What is God really trying to do in us through suffering? The same thing His Son learned through suffering – obedience. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews penned these mysterious, but instructive words – “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). Now we cannot interpret this to mean Jesus was ever disobedient and had to learn obedience. If that were true, we have no Savior. The proper interpretation is that of Jesus experiencing the human aspect of obeying God as the God-man. And all acceptable obedience to God will come through suffering for in this experience of pain, we are weaned from ourselves; self-sufficiency and self-reliance, leading us to moment-by-moment dependence upon the Lord. Yes, suffering is hard but it will bear the wonderful fruit of God-pleasing obedience if we submit to its working in us.

The next place of painful experience we find the children of God is the loss of a sense of His loving Presence – “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love! Nothing grieves a child of God more than time in this spiritual wilderness where God seems nowhere to be found. Look at the language of God’s people. It is intense, personal, even anguishing. But there is more . . . it is language of pleading PRAYER. Yes, pleading prayer. We learn the perseverance of prayer not in the clear sunshine of a relatively easy life. We learn to really pray when it feels like the bottom has dropped off in our lives. Prayer becomes intimate and brings us close to the Lord when the heat of affliction and suffering causes us to cry out for Him. And this cry for help is in two directions and in the right order. In today’s scripture, God’s people are persevering in prayer for His Person. They cry “why do You hide Your face?”. They want God’s Presence foremost and that is what prayer is primarily for – to bring us face-to-face with the Lord. But there is also the plea for help – “Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love! However, even in the plea for help the focus is all about God; for His sake. We don’t cry to God for help for our sake, but for His honor and glory to be declared to all of His glorious power to save and help His people.

So, suffering and the Christian life. We need it, even though our remaining sin wants us to rebel against it. But let’s learn to submit to the pain in our suffering by looking at what will be gained; greater obedience to the Lord and persevering prayer to the Lord.

PRAYER: “Father, I praise you for the wonderful, yet, mysterious ways You draw me near to You.”

QUOTE: “God may remove a sense of His Presence in our lives in order to measure our desire for Him”