What rolls off your tongue when you’re in trouble? What comes out when you’re in a prison or a cave? How do you pray?
Like A Song, It Came
“Help me,” “Heal us,” and “Have mercy,” are desperate prayers my God has heard lately. There’s also been that prayer for a prodigal.
But last night, these words came. Like lyrics from songs we sang in eighth grade, they came.
Set me free from my prison,
that I may praise your name.
Then the righteous will gather about me
because of your goodness to me.
That’s the last verse of Psalm 142, “Of David. When he was in the cave.” David prayed those words when he was literally in a cave, hiding from a hostile King Saul who literally sought to end his life.
I’d just texted a few friends to ask them to pray, another SOS. Please pray that God will bring peace to our family.
Then Psalm 142 verse 7 came, like ROYGBIV and All Cows Eat Grass and The Doxology.
Like a familiar, overlearned thing it came. The Spirit sent it and it came.
Because that verse was a go-to prayer during the decade of gut-wrenching infertility, a heart-wrenching church split, and marriage conflict that came along for the ride. Those felt like a prison that I couldn’t escape. I felt helpless and hemmed in.
So I prayed.
Set Me Free From My Prison
We know anything is a blessing that makes us pray. I think thinking of the word prison today triggered it.
David’s prison was a cave. He hid in a hole in the rocks to save his life from hostile King Saul. Derek Kidner explains, “the strain of being hated and hunted is almost too much, and faith is at full stretch.”
Psalm 142 teaches us how to pray when we feel trapped and out of control, when we see no way of escape from our dark cave of troubles. It is a psalm of lament, it is a psalm crying out to God.
There is no cave so deep, so dark, but we may out of it send up our souls in prayer to God.
Matthew Henry
My prison is not a cave. It was my “decade of troubles.”
But today I felt trapped and helpless again. As if there was nothing I could do to escape hostile, hateful words from someone I love, nothing I could do to help him know how much he is loved. I didn’t feel hunted but I did feel hated.
So for freedom, I prayed.
That I May Praise Your Name
During that decade of troubles, I loved to pray this phrase of Psalm 142. Because it grounded my prayer. It turned it from being just about me and my pain to the Lord and his praise.
Bible commentator Albert Barnes, explains, “Not merely for my own sake, but that I may have occasion more abundantly to praise thee; that thus [you] may be honored; an object at all times much more important than our own welfare.”
In other words, we ground our cries for help in the glory and praise of God that will come when he frees us from our prisons. Bring my soul out of prison, not that I may live more comfortably, or insure my physical safety and financial security, but that I may praise your name.
Because God is zealous for his glory and seeks our praise, these prison break prayers are easy to pray.
So for God’s praise, I prayed.
The Righteous Will Gather Around Me Because of Your Goodness to Me
The Hebrew verb for “praise” means to confess or acknowledge. David wants to extol God’s power, goodness and mercy in the company of the saints. In other words, he wants God to answer his prayer so that he can glorify God publicly.
Here, Derek Kidner notes, David “dares to visualize the day when he is no longer shunned or hunted, but thronged, or even crowned.” David visualized a good end. In Christ, with him as our refuge and portion (verse 5), we can be sure of a good end (Romans 8:28). But we can’t be sure when.
I believe we have biblical warrant to take our cues from David and visualize a good end.
Do you visualize how answered prayer would look? Because it does seem like that’s what David is doing. He’s picturing his faithful friends, like the friends I texted who pray, coming around him and rejoicing at God’s goodness to him in freeing him from prison.
David’s visualizing is hoping.
So in hope, I pray.
Faith Joined By Hope
David’s faith was tested in the cave. It was “at full stretch,” as Kidner said. But it was “undefeated, and in the final words it is at last joined by hope.”
Sixteen years ago, God broke me free from a childless prison. Six years ago, he brought me out of an estranged prison. Today, God is building our marriage. I am a prisoner of hope.
Now I am visualizing deliverance. It’s hard, but I picture a day when the relationship filled with hurt and hate is marked by love and laughter. Then the righteous will gather around us and celebrate because of God’s goodness to us.
Friend, tell me if I can pray for you. Because I’d like to get in on the party. Because there will be a party.
The righteous will rejoice in God’s goodness to us. He has done great things, we will say together.
So together, we pray.
We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.
1 Corinthians 1:8b-11 (ESV)
