Transcript
I think there are few passages of scripture that have more of [an] immediate ring of truth for a sufferer than Psalm 73. Psalm 73 is like somebody's reading your mind and the things that you think and the things that you're going through.
It Seems Like the Bad Guys Are Winning
In Psalm 73, the psalmist looks around in the middle of his own difficulty and it doesn't seem right. It seems like the bad guys are winning and the good guys are being hammered. Like, people who couldn't care less about God, less about living in any way that would please Him seem to be having it easy. And here's the psalmist who has given his heart to the Lord and he's suffering. At one moment he says, "In vain, have I kept my heart clean?" Think about that. He's saying, "I believed in you for this? I've obeyed you for this? Is this what I get?"
That's the temptation of every sufferer. It challenges your allegiance to the Lord. It challenges your surrender. It challenges your obedience because the logic for many of us is if I follow God, I get blessed; and we interpret that blessing wrongly so, as an absence of suffering
And so, you watch in the psalm, the psalmist beginning to move from actually, a place of envying those who aren't suffering and being eaten up by envy, to struggling for his own heart, holding on to God and actually embracing, finally, the reality of eternity, that, "Maybe for a moment, people who don't know the Lord have comfortable lives; but for eternity, my life will be absolutely perfect, free of all the things that I'm now suffering."
What an amazing thing! I would encourage you if you're going through difficulty, if hardship has entered your door, if you're dealing right now with the unwanted or the unexpected, live in Psalm 73. Walk through Psalm 73. Confess that the psalmist's struggle is your struggle and preach the gospel that is there to you of God's care, His nearness, and the eternity that He has promised, free of everything that you're now facing. I commend to you Psalm 73.
