Pits and Rocks

I wish that life was such that we never had to go through difficult times more than once. I think that everyone should have to go through hard times once in their life. It creates strength of character and substance of soul. But I wish that we all only had to go through one of these per lifetime. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Learn your lessons, grab some maturity, and move on. Unfortunately for most of us it seems like life is a series of hard times. Once we go through one and are ready to get back into life as it should be we find ourselves dealing with something else.

There is a psalm that I have kept coming back to for many years.

“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.” (Psalm 40)

Over the years this psalm has spoken to me in one of two ways. Sometimes it is literally my testimony. God has taken me through a rough time and now I see it behind me. He has lifted me out of the pit and now I stand firmly on solid ground singing my heart out in praise to Him. But there are other times when this psalm becomes more a cry of desperate hope. It becomes an intense plea that one day (and it better be soon) I will find myself rising out of the pit and watching all of the mud and mire disappear while I am placed on strong, solid ground. Then I will be able to sing a new song and move on in obedience to Him.

If you read this entire psalm carefully it is really a story of both places. Being in the pit and being on the rock. The psalmist is not saying, “You know, once I was in a pit and now I am out. Maybe you too will someday be out of your pit.” After verses 1-3 give testimony to being lifted out of the slimy pit he goes on in the psalm to say,

• “Do not withhold your mercy from me, O Lord” (v. 11)
• “Troubles without number surround me; my sins have overtaken me and I cannot see” (v. 12)
• “Be pleased to save me, O Lord, come quickly to help me (v. 13)
• “Yet I am poor and needy” (v. 17)

So which is it for this psalm writer? It is both. Life often takes us back and forth between spending time in the mud and mire, and spending time on a rock. It sometimes feels like just when we have learned the 4th verse to that new song while standing on the rock our feet begin to slip and we find ourselves standing in mud looking up at the slimy sides of the pit once again. This back and forth journey of pit to rock, rock to pit is an unsettling way to live and we sometimes go from sighs of relief to sighs of desperation.

This psalm, however, is not just a way of saying, “Sometimes life is great, and sometimes life stinks!” It goes much deeper than this. The point of this psalm is not the rescue from the pit to the rock, or slipping from the rock back into a pit. The point is found in verse 4, “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord His trust.” And the song that we sing, whether from the pit or from the rock, has only one verse and it says, “I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” (v. 8) It’s a song of surrender and submission.

So even though the song may be new when you are standing on the rock, the words are still the same. That’s what ties the pit and the rock together. They are not 2 distinct places from each other. They are simply 2 different places from where we can sing the same song.