When I thought, “My foot slips,” your steadfast love, oh Lord, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.
– Psalm 94:18–19
Those two verses are so good. I was trying to choose between the two of them just to focus on one, but I couldn’t pick. They’re so good. So let’s just take them both.
Psalm 94:18–19 teaches us that God’s steadfast love holds us up.
Verse 18, “When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’ your steadfast love, oh Lord, held me up.” Just think about our lives today and the temptation for our feet to slip at so many different points today. We will be tempted all day long, bombarded by the adversary with temptations, and our feet will be inclined to slip, and it’s the steadfast love of the Lord that holds us up. I just read that and think, “Yes, God, may it be so. Keep my feet from slipping.”
I praise God for his grace in my life and all the ways and all the times he has kept my feet from slipping. He’s guarded and helped and protected and preserved me with his steadfast love, and that’s all of our stories. I shudder to think of where we would be were it not for his keeping love, his keeping grace in our lives.
So for us to just pray together and say, “Hold us up today, oh God,” and to look to him all day long as the one who holds us up and with his steadfast love keeps us from slipping. So that’s verse 18.
Psalm 94:18–19 teaches us that God’s presence cheers our souls.
Then verse 19, “When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.” So to anyone listening to this today who has many cares in your heart, let the consolations, the comforting words, and the comforting presence of God with you cheer your soul. May you be reminded today of his love for you, of his promises to you, of his comfort, not just from the outside towards you, but of the comforter who lives inside of you, his Holy Spirit. The comforter is in you today. May his consolations fill your soul and give you joy that transcends suffering.
Not that makes everything you’re walking through easy and not that just solves all the cares that are on your heart instantly, but that as you cast those cares on him, that his consolations would fill your soul.
Oh God, I pray both of these things over every one of our lives. God, we praise you for your steadfast love that holds us up and has time and time and time again kept our feet from slipping. We pray for that today. Hold us up with your steadfast love. Help us to walk by faith. Help us to resist temptation.
This verse encourages us to depend on God as we face adversity and temptation.
Oh God, please keep our feet from slipping today. We pray for this. Based on your steadfast love for us, hold us up. God, we pray as people with many cares on our hearts. May your consolations today cheer our soul, God, amidst all of our cares, many of them deep and heavy on our hearts. We cast them on you in a fresh way today. We praise you for your promises to us to be with us, to provide us everything we need, to carry us, to lead us, to guide us with your wisdom, and to comfort us with your Spirit.
Oh God, we pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit, the Comforter in us, we pray that you would help us to, as your Word says in multiple places, to experience joy, that transcends suffering, that transcends heavy cares in our hearts, even as we lift those to you and intercede for your help in specific ways according to those cares. May your consolations cheer our souls.
Prayer for the Muhamasheen People
God, we praise you for your Word. Just two verses that we need to hear, that are so encouraging and comforting. Oh God, we pray for people who don’t have this Word, who don’t know this Word, who don’t know you, God. Through Jesus, we pray specifically today for the Muhamasheen people of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for two million of them who don’t know the good news of your steadfast love in Jesus and your consolations that are eternal, that cheer our souls in Jesus.
God, we pray that the Muhamasheen people of Qatar and Saudi and other countries in that part of the world would be reached with the good news of your consolations in Jesus and your steadfast love in Jesus. God, may it be so, we pray. Please use our lives however you desire toward that end. We pray all this in light of your Word in Psalm 94:18–19. In Jesus’ name, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
