The psalms are meant for God’s people as much as they were meant for the authors who wrote them. They are meant to encourage, strengthen, instruct, and empathize in the myriad trials, joys, pain, and praise that we experience. So, in Psalm 6 we have just that—a universal psalm for the universal church. This was to be sung by the choir, leading the congregation: which tells us that the experience of pain is normal, and also that expressing pain to God is necessary.
You can cry out to God in worship, just like David in Psalm 6, and it will be beautiful to him. You can lament to God in your pain and be a faithful Christian.
You can cry out to God in worship, just like David in Psalm 6, and it will be beautiful to him. You can lament to God in your pain and be a faithful Christian.
In Psalm 6, David is teaching us to pray. We often think that prayer should be about praising God for who he is and what he’s done, and it does include those elements, but prayer is also about desperate people begging God to do what they can’t do for themselves. That’s what David gets to here right from the outset—verses 1-2 begin a passionate plea for God to remember him and be gracious to him.
So David shows us how to feel, he shows us how to worship, and he shows us how to pray, all in this psalm that is filled with great anguish. That’s encouraging as we wrestle through pain that doesn’t seem to let up. God is guiding us along in our difficulty, because—let’s be honest—when pain is ravaging your body, you don’t have the energy to figure out what to say or how to worship. Here God says to us, through David, Let me help you find the words you need.
The words David finds for his pain and anguish are raw, and they are common when we are overcome with pain:
O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath. Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing; heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled. My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O LORD—how long? (v 1-3)
Pain can make you feel that God is against you. It can even make you feel that God hates you. At the height of our suffering, our mind can play tricks on us—hurling doubt on even the most fervent believers. Psalm 6 is a collective exhalation. Our feelings might not be true, but they are most certainly real. In that raw emotion, we ask, “How long?” So pain can lead to anxiety and doubting. It can even make you weak or sick. (The Christian Standard Bible translates “troubled” in verse 2 as “weak.”) And pain is emotionally draining:
I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes. (v 6-7)
Pain has some hard side-effects that tend to hang on and drain us of any energy that is left. You get the sense from David that for him, this is a near-constant battle. It is happening all throughout the night. It has gone on for a long time.
Pain questions what we know and believe, and it doesn’t let up. Pain asks many questions but never gives any answers. Pain confuses us. It doesn’t let any light in. You wonder when the pain will end, and, like David, you may cry out all night long.
And pain can do one of two things to us.
First, it can either move us towards God in trust because we know God and we know he loves us, despite what the pain suggests:
Turn, O LORD, deliver my life; save me for the sake of your steadfast love. (v 4)
Or second, it can drive us away from God, causing us to reject him and become hardened against him because of what we see happening in or around us.
As one who has faced severe physical pain for long periods of time over the last few years, I know firsthand that in those moments, you are relying on what you already know to be true to sustain you. When the pain rushes in, you need fuel in the tank to drive you all the way home. Fumes simply won’t cut it.
In pain, you will either listen to God, who is sovereign over your pain; or you will listen to the pain that is screaming at you that God can’t help or can’t be trusted. Pain has a way of grounding you on the path you’ve chosen. Or to put it another way, pain has a way of refining you and showing you who you really are. It can expose you in your waywardness and draw you back to God, or draw you closer to the God you’ve been trusting all along—or it can reveal that you never had any sure footing to begin with, like the seed that fell on the thorny and rocky soils in Matthew 13. And so pain is, strangely, an unasked-for opportunity, if we allow it to be, stripping us of what we may hold too dear, moving us back to where we should be, and showing us that our all-sufficient God is the only one worth trusting (Job 23 v 10).
This article is an extract from Teach Me to Feel by Courtney Reissig. In the book, Courtney helps readers to express their feelings to God in a biblical way through meditation on the Psalms.
Courtney Reissig is a writer and Bible teacher. She is Managing Director at Risen Motherhood and is the author of Teach Me To Feel and Glory in the Ordinary. She's married to Daniel and they have four sons.
