I need a wake up call every now and then. Not a literal wake up call; I’ve got an alarm on my phone for that. But I need to be awakened from the soul slumber I easily slip into.
Pain is what usually does this.
Physical pain. Emotional pain. Relational pain. Financial pain. Political pain. It doesn’t really matter which kind of pain I experience, just that I experience it.
A rude awakening. A slap across the face. A cup of cold water to the face. A jolt.
The simple nudge of spurs are enough to enable a horse to tap into energy it didn’t realize it had. I need to be spurred from my soul sleep on a regular basis.
My youngest son has become an accomplished piano played through putting in hours of practice each day for the past few years. And that paid off recently when a classical pianist who would be performing in our city chose him to have a lesson with her before her performance. Though the lesson was for him, it wasn’t private. At least 50 of us watched. And what we saw was painful.
Over and over and over again, she stopped my son and grilled him about the details of his playing. “Why are you doing that?” she’d say, interrupting him. “Play that again, but do it so slowly you can hear every note. You need to know why it sounds the way it does.”
It was so unexpectedly difficult, the organizer of the event apologized to my son for being put through the ordeal. But as hard as it was for me to watch my son squirm for possibly the longest half hour of his life so far, I knew this was the best thing he could experience at this stage in his development as a pianist. He needed this rude awakening to new possibilities and to ways of practicing he would have rolled his eyes at if I’d suggested them to him.
Only pain works. There is no replacement for pain’s ability to wake us up and get us moving.
This is true of spirituality at least as much as it is of the rest of our lives if not more.
Pain is the greatest inspiration we have toward prayer. Without it, I don’t know how much I’d pray. Really. When life is rolling smoothly by, who needs to pray? I don’t. At least, I don’t feel like I do. But when life throws me all kinds of obstacles and a whole variety of hurts from small to large, I find myself on my knees.
We tend to feel bad about this. We believe we ought to pray just as often and just as diligently at all times, not just in the crucible. But we have the witness and companionship of the Psalms to teach us otherwise.
The vast majority of the Psalms are prayed out of pain. The one great collection of prayers in the Bible is filled with sorrows. We should, therefore, never feel guilty if it’s our pain more than God’s glory that leads us to pray.
How we get to our knees is unimportant. What’s important is that we get there.
Psalm 41 is but one of our prayed pains. Although its unique combination of the pains of sickness and slander aren’t something I’ve experienced, I have experienced those two separately.
This David psalm begins with wisdom, a three-verse proverb about how those who take care of the weak are taken care of in their own weakness by God.
Blessed are those who have regard for the weak;
the LORD delivers them in times of trouble.
The LORD protects and preserves them —
they are counted among the blessed in the land —
he does not give them over to the desire of their foes.
The LORD sustains them on their sickbed
and restores them from their bed of illness (Ps. 41:1-3).
According to the proverb, there are five things God does and one thing he doesn’t do. He delivers, protects, preserves, sustains, and restores. He doesn’t give over to their foes those who are kind.
Wisdom sayings like this can seem trite and feel like they trivialize our pain when we’re in the middle of it, even if they’re true.
A week after my sister’s death from an accident caused by a drunk driver, a young man quoted Rom. 8:28 to me —
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
It’s a great verse and central to biblical faith. Our God is good and trustworthy and turns what feels painful and looks like failure into beautiful things. The cross is proof of this. And yet, dropping that quote into the early days of my grief was inappropriate, almost mocking me with a truism.
But there still is a time for these distillations of wisdom. Almost always, their time is after the initial pain has dulled and some perspective has been gained. That is, unless we seek out wisdom in the middle of our pain, in which case those we approach for wisdom have a freedom to speak it to us. But in Psalm 41, David himself is speaking to himself the wisdom he has learned from past experiences into his current one. And that is always the most appropriate use of wisdom.
So, David tells his current situation, beginning with a simple prayer. Pain has brought him to his knees.
I said, “Have mercy on me, LORD;
heal me, for I have sinned against you” (Ps. 41:4).
Sin and sickness are both prayed about. Here David sees a connection between the two — his sickness somehow being the result of his sin — but that’s not always the case. In the ancient world, people connected illnesses to sin far too easily and far too often. In the John 9 story of the man born blind, Jesus’s disciples show this too-easy connection by their question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) But Jesus turns their assumption upside down.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).
While ancient peoples connected sin and sickness too easily, we dismiss the connection between them too easily. In my chaplain training, it has been noted that a full 70% of human pain is spiritual and relational, while only 30% is physical. And numerous accounts have been documented of patients having their physical symptoms of illness disappear when spiritual and relational pains are healed.
Not all sickness is sin-based, but a significant percentage of our ailments arise from disordered souls.
Every sickness is an opportunity to reflect inwardly. Every physical pain is potentially a wake up call about a spiritual pain. Again, there’s not always a clear correlation, but we’d be foolish to not use our struggles as wake up calls and to check for possible correlations.
But sin and sickness aren’t the only issue. Slander is another slap across the face, also potentially waking him up from soul slumber.
My enemies say of me in malice,
“When will he die and his name perish?”
When one of them comes to see me,
he speaks falsely, while his heart gathers slander;
then he goes out and spreads it around.
All my enemies whisper together against me;
they imagine the worst for me, saying,
“A vile disease has afflicted him;
he will never get up from the place where he lies” (Ps. 41:5-8).
Again, we don’t live in an age where connections between sickness and sin are quickly and easily made, but David was. And his illness caused rumors to fly gleefully from enemy to enemy. Some even hoped he’d die.
While we don’t do the same so much with sickness, we do so with financial and relational difficulties. When things don’t go right for others, we easily fall into nodding heads and knowing looks, certain we know what sin or misstep caused it.
But even worse than the slander of enemies is the affect it has on David’s trusted friend (possibly Ahithophel; see 2 Sam. 15).
Even my close friend,
someone I trusted,
one who shared my bread,
has turned against me (Ps. 41:9).
There is no more painful cut than from someone close. Unexpected and unprotected, their wounds go deep. And having been cut, a defensive response is no surprise.
But may you have mercy on me, LORD;
raise me up, that I may repay them (Ps. 41:10).
Having confessed his sins earlier, David now looks to his integrity, seeing his recovery as a sign of God’s pleasure with him.
I know that you are pleased with me,
for my enemy does not triumph over me.
Because of my integrity you uphold me
and set me in your presence forever (Ps. 41:11-12).
Frankly, I struggle with this. To have David confess sin and claim integrity just a few verses apart seems odd to me. To seek God’s mercy in one moment and not even consider extending it for others in the next seems like a double standard. It looks like self-knowledge has been abandoned, like he’s hit the snooze button on his soul’s wake-up alarm.
But this is the realm of prayer. It’s messy.
I sometimes feel like a puzzle that’s not only missing pieces, but has a few extras from another puzzle tossed in by some joker. So, when I bring myself to God, the pieces I offer him don’t always match or fit together.
I can confess sin and the immediately condemn someone else without batting an eyelash. I can switch from anger to worship without transition. And that’s OK. It is. God sorts these things out. The important thing is that we’ve begun to pray.
St. Paul put it this way:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God (Rom. 8:26-27).
As God sorts our prayers out, he also sorts us out.
Did David realize the mess he was offering to God in this psalm? Did the priests who edited together the Psalter see the inconsistencies in David? I hope so. I hope they all shrugged their shoulders and said, “That’s so like me.”
And then we come to the final verse of Psalm 41 which is not actually part of the psalm at all. The Psalter is actually a collection of smaller books. There are five books of psalms (1-41, 42-72, 72-89, 90-106, and 107-150) and within them there are even smaller collections; among these are the Psalms of Ascent, short songs sung on pilgrimage to Jerusalem (120-133), the psalms of Asaph (73-83), and the hallelujah psalms (146-150). After each book, there is a call to worship, with Psalm 150 being a final salvo of praise to end the Psalms as a whole.
So, Ps. 41:12 stands on its own as a transitional burst of praise, but it is also a fitting conclusion to Psalm 41 itself.
Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
Amen and Amen (Ps. 41:12).
Having been slapped about by a variety of pains — illness, sin, slander, betrayal — and having been awakened to himself and to God, it is appropriate that he turns himself fully toward God.
The soul awake is the soul turned to face God.
David hasn’t gotten everything right. His desire for vindication has been muddied by his vindictiveness. But, again, that’s so like me. And even with dirty hands and face, he offers himself to God and invites us to join with him.
That is the best he can do. That is the best any of us can do. And God smiles on it.