Journal Entry ~ 07/20/19

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! 2 O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  - Psalm 130:1-2

I love that we love a God who wants us to cry out to Him in our pain. He wants us lift our voices from the depths of the pit, and give our struggles over to Him. The Message translates this first verse as “Help, God—the bottom has fallen out of my life!” 

How many times have we felt as if the bottom has fallen out of our lives, yet we don’t cry out to Him? Our tendency is often either to keep our panicked thoughts to ourselves, or to share them with other people. We look horizontally for comfort or resolution to our struggles, but we fail to look vertically. We stand at the bottom of the pit looking around for help, but we never look up. 

God wants us to cry out to Him with all that we have because when we do, when we truly cry out to Him, we recognize that our very life depends on Him. He is there in the pit with us, and His love is deeper than the depth we find ourselves in.  

There are many reasons we end up in the pit - sometimes we jump in, sometimes we trip and fall in, sometimes someone pushes us in. As you read the next few verses, you find that the psalmist realizes he was in the pit as a result of his own sin, and so he cries out for mercy from the only One who can rescue him. He recognizes a truth that we all struggle to see about ourselves -none of us are in the pit innocently. We’re in the pit because of a sin issue and we need His forgiveness and His mercy. We may have been pushed into the pit, but we stay there because of a sin issue. The problem is many of us fail to see that part. We want the pit to be someone else’s fault, we want to point to the reason we’re the pit, and we never want to point to ourselves. 

The beautiful part is that when we cry out to Him for His forgiveness and mercy, He hears us and He rescues us. You can know that with complete confidence - He will rescue us from the depths if we cry out to Him for mercy. 


Press on ~ you are loved 💗

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