But Paul describes your future this way (2 Thess. You may feel as if life is going reasonably well. You may not feel like you’re in that pit. If you have not yet cried out to God to save you from judgment and eternal punishment for your sins, then you are in a deep pit with no human way out. He was trapped and unable to free himself. If you fell into a pit whose walls and bottom were mud, you would be in big trouble! That’s where David was. It gets on your shoes and you can’t walk. Arizona mud is especially sticky and slippery. We were hiking in the rain in Nepal when Marla slipped and hurt herself. We were hiking a muddy trail in Kauai when the man in front of us fell flat on his face, covering his entire front side with mud. Marla and I do a fair amount of hiking, and we have encountered a lot of mud. Perhaps as with Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” we are not told so that we can relate all of our trials to David’s situation. Some think that it was David’s enemies, while others think that it could have been physical illness or some deep emotional distress. But he doesn’t exactly say what the first pit was, except to describe it as a “pit of destruction” and “the miry clay” (40:2). The second pit clearly involved the consequences of David’s sins (40:12) and many enemies that were trying to destroy him (40:14-15). The pit could be any of a number of life’s trials.ĭavid does not specify exactly what the trials of the first pit entailed. When you’re in the pit, wait intently on the Lord.Ī. Rather than follow the structure of the psalm, I want to follow David’s plan for getting out of a pit and his example of what to do when the Lord rescues you.ġ. When you’re in the pit, wait intently on the Lord and proclaim His goodness when He answers. So it’s a psalm about what to do when you’re in the pit. Because David waited intently on the Lord to rescue him from the first pit, he knew how to wait on the Lord to get him out of the second pit. Rather, it is evident from the second half of the psalm (40:11-17) that he is in another pit, crying out to the Lord to deliver him from this one. But he did not then live happily ever after. In the first half (40:1-10), David tells how God got him out of one pit and he sings God’s praise for doing so. Rather than turning away from the Lord, you must learn to turn to Him to rescue you from life’s pits. If you’re going to persevere with Christ, you must know in advance that you will face times when you are in the pit, and you must know what to do when you’re there. 3:12), many that profess to know Christ stumble and fall away when they get hit with various trials. Yet in spite of these words and many other similar Scriptures (John 15:18 Acts 14:22 1 Thess. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage I have overcome the world.” They will make you outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God.” He ends that chapter in a similar vein (16:33), “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. He begins John 16 by stating (16:1, 2), “These things I have spoken to you so that you may be kept from stumbling. Jesus told the disciples to expect trials. I got on the airplane the next day, and I was just praying… “God give me something to say to this family, that will bring hope in a hopeless situation” and I opened my Bible, I was reading from Isaiah Chapter 43 and verse 18 & 19 jumped out on me, it says “don’t remember the former things, behold I would do something new and now it will spring forth will you not see it? I’ll even make a road way in the wilderness and a river in the desert”… and on that airplane, I wrote down the words and the melody of the song to sing to them at the funeral and I never even did sing it at the funeral, I sang it for them privately and I recorded it and I said to Suzan, put this above your kids and sing cos when everybody leaves, there are gonna be days when you need to hear that God will make a way where there seems to be no way and here’s the line He works in ways we cannot see, that’s what I wanted to say to them.The late Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, said to his frustrated, impatient daughter, “My dear, if you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.” (Source unknown.)
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