How Do You Pray in Times of Suffering? (Psalms 4-7)

A Few Thoughts to Consider

How do you pray when life is hard and challenging circumstances dominate your world?

In Psalms 4-7, David wrestles with this very question. Psalm 4 is a night Psalm, while Psalm 5 is a morning one, indicating that we are to call out to God at all hours of the day. And what strikes us is the honesty and rawness of David’s cries.

In Psalm 4:1, David says, “Answer me when I call, God, who vindicates me. You freed me from affliction; be gracious to me and hear my prayer.” In Psalm 5:1, he says, “Listen to my words, LORD; consider my sighing.” In 6:2, David says, “Be gracious to me, LORD, for I am weak; heal me, LORD, for my bones are shaking.” And then in 7:1-2 David says, “LORD my God, I seek refuge in you; save me from all my pursuers and rescue me, or they will tear me like a lion, ripping me apart with no one to rescue me.”

In the words of Pastor George Robertson, “No other faith has a holy book whose writers talk to God as the psalmists do.”^[1]

Throughout the Psalms, this pattern emerges. It goes like this:

• Scream to God.
• Trust in his sovereignty.
• Rest in his goodness.

Let’s take Chapter 4, for example. David pleads with God to answer, acknowledges what God has done, and then lies down to rest. As Robert Alter writes, “Restful sleep as a restorative manifestation of the speaker’s trust in God’s protection is a recurrent motif in Psalms.”^[2]