O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you.
– Psalm 88:1
So that’s the first verse in the Psalm. And when you keep reading on, there’s just continual crying out to God day and night. My soul is full of troubles. I’m counted among those who go down to the pit. My companions are shunning me. This is a person who just feels overwhelmed by it all and can’t get relief anywhere in this world.
He says it over and over again. O Lord, I cry to you in the morning. My prayer comes to you. Then he starts asking, why this? Why that? Then the very last verse says, you have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. And that’s how the Psalm ends. So the Psalm doesn’t end on this high note where everything is fixed and everything is all right.
Psalm 88:1 is a picture of faith during dark days.
It ends on this low note with the Psalmist saying, darkness is all around me. Even my friends I can’t rely on. They are shunning me. He’s totally alone before God. One of the reasons I want to read the first verse and the last verse is just to remind us that there are some days, some seasons where even as we’re crying out to God, things still feel really dark and heavy and weighty and full of trouble and sorrow.
It’s not that just because we cry out to God, the darkness immediately goes away. Now, that’s part of the beauty at the same time of Psalm 88, because it shows us this picture of faith that keeps crying out to God day and night, even when the darkness remains. I’m guessing we can all identify with that, crying out to God day and night, and things at the end of the day are not better than things that were at the beginning of the day.
Things at the end of the week, the end of the month, the end of the year don’t seem better than they were when we started crying out to God. But this is the posture of faith to keep crying out to God, knowing that he hears us and knowing that he will give us what we need for each day, even when the darkness remains. And crying to God in faith that one day the darkness will be gone. That one day we will see how God was working in a Romans 8:28 kind of way and all these things for our good.
And so we cry out to him day and night in faith, in trust, with hope in him, even when the darkness remains. So I just want to pray for those of you who are in that kind of picture right now. And for all of us, for any points we will find ourselves in these kinds of days, seasons, that we will in a Luke 18 kind of way, Jesus says he taught them this parable so that they would pray and never give up.
Psalm 88:1 encourages us to cry out to God in faith so he will deliver us.
Cry out to God day and night in faith and trust that he hears and he will answer in time all who cry out to him and trust in him. So God, we pray for Psalm 88 kind of faith in hard days and nights that continue on day after day and night after night. God, we cry out to you with so many different needs in our lives. And we praise you for hearing us. We praise you for hearing our cries to you on our own behalf, our cries to you on others’ behalf.
We praise you for Psalm 88:2 inclining your ears to our cries. So help us to keep crying out, to keep praying, to keep interceding, petitioning you day and night. God, help us not to give up. We pray for faith on days and in moments when faith is hard to come by. And we say with the Psalmist in Psalm 88, we trust you. We trust in you even when darkness is all around us.
You are our hope. You are our light. Even when the circumstances are not changing day after day, we trust that your goodness and your grace and your wisdom and your power and your providential purposes for our good and your glory are all unchanging. And so we pray for grace to trust in you, even as we praise you for your trustworthiness. And God, we pray for people who don’t know they can cry out to you when they’re walking through the darkness of this fallen world.
Prayer for the Moro Joloano Tausug People
God, we pray, help us to shine the light of Jesus so that others might know that you are the God of our salvation, that you are the God who will save us, who does save us. God, we pray specifically for the Moro Joloano Tausug people of the Philippines. This people group, Muslim men, women, and children, 1.7 million of them. No known followers of Jesus among them. God, we pray, they need to hear about your salvation.
Please help us, help the church in the Philippines, others alongside them to get the good news of your salvation to all who cry out to you, to the Moro Joloano Tausug people of the Philippines. Please, oh God, may it be so we pray. All of this in light of Psalm 88:1. Make us a people who cry out day and night before you, the God of our salvation. In Jesus’ name we pray, 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.
