He Will Sustain You (Psalm 55:22)

Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved.
– Psalm 56:3–4

Oh, what a good word from God for each of us today. Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you. Just to hear God sing that today to you. Cast your burden. Any weights you are carrying right now.

Psalm 56:3–4 teaches us that God is the upholder of our lives.

Just think about those weights, those burdens on your heart and your life, your family, work, church, and the world. Just think of any burden you’re carrying. And God is saying right now in his Word to you, “Cast it on me and I will sustain you. I will not permit the righteous to be moved. I will uphold you.”

This is similar language to earlier in Psalm 54. God is the upholder of my life, and what I love is the context. Even here in Psalm 55, David is in agony of soul. He is hurting, and at one point earlier he said, “Fear and trembling, come over me. I say that I had wings like a dove would fly away and be at rest. Yes, I would wander far away. I would lodge in the wilderness. I would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest.” Don’t we all know what that feels like?

Some of you know what that feels like right now. You just wish you could get out from underneath what you’re walking through. Just wish that you would get away from it all in a sense. That’s what David is saying in Psalm 55. And he gets down to verse 22 and he’s speaking to himself… Just saying, “Here’s what I need to do. I need to cast my burden on the Lord and know that he will sustain me so I don’t have to run from this. I just need to lay this before God and trust him with it and trust my life in his hands that he will enable me, help me to stand in the middle of it all.”

That’s the last phrase sentence in this whole Psalm. “But I will trust in you.”

Psalm 56:3–4 encourages us to cast our burdens on the Lord.

So, I just want to lead us to pray and to do this, to do Psalm 55:22, to cast our burdens on the Lord with trust in him.

Oh God, we come to you right now with all kinds of burdens. I just think about in my own life, things that are heavy on my heart, ways that I want to be free from this or that, things that are weighing me down. And God, I just think right now about all the different people who are listening to this right now with different burdens, with different weights, with heavy things on our hearts. And so right now in obedience to your Word, and we’re so thankful for your Word, oh God, we want to do it right now to cast all these burdens on you.

We praise you for being big enough, strong enough, merciful enough, faithful enough for all of our burdens, for each of our burdens, the things that are heavy on our hearts for each of them. You know them better than we even know these burdens.

God, we come to you as heavy-hearted, burdened people in this fallen world, and we cast our burdens on you, and we praise you for your care, for us, for your love, for us, and for your promise to sustain us in the middle of this fallen world with these burdens that we’re carrying.

This verse challenges us to place our trust in God.

God, even when we think about Jesus’ words in Matthew 11, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest.” God, we pray for the rest, for the sustenance, for the peace, for the confidence, for the comfort, for the hope, for the wisdom that come from you. For the care in all the ways you promise to care for us. When we cast our burdens, our anxieties on you. To use language from 1 Peter 5, we praise you for this all over your Word. You’ve made it clear to us, so we do it now and we trust in you.

We say with Psalm 55:23, we trust in you. God, we praise you as our burden bearer. We praise you Jesus ultimately for bearing the burden of our sin upon yourself and for suffering and dying for us. And we praise you for your Spirit in us now, who’s our Comforter and our Counselor, and the Spirit of wisdom and strength that we need with these burdens in our lives. We cast them on you and we trust in you and your promise to help us sustain us. Grant us all the mercy we need, new mercy we need today amidst whatever we’re walking through.

This verse reminds us to encourage others with these truths of Scripture.

And God, we pray you would help us to encourage others with this. Help us to point others to you as the burden bearers, those that can cast their burdens on God. We pray you make us sensitive today to other people who are carrying burdens. Help us to be an encouragement to them. Lord, help us to lift them up. Help us to be a picture of your upholding hands in their lives. Help us to be comforters and encouragers.

God, we pray that for brothers and sisters in Christ who are walking through difficult things in their lives, who are burdened. God, we pray this for friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors who don’t know you. We pray that you would help us to point them to you as the one who will bear our burdens.

Ultimately, the burden of sin and suffering and death you’ve taken it. Jesus, we praise you. Help us to proclaim you today. And God, we pray for people who’ve never heard about Jesus and the price he’s paid for the burden of sin and the penalty of death on the cross, his resurrection.

Prayer for the Dagi People

God, we pray for the Dagi people of India, some Hindus, some Tibetan Buddhist, some believing a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism, most never having even heard the good news of your love in Jesus. God, we pray that they would be reached with the good news of your grace, the doggy people, that they would come to know your love for them as their burden bearer.

We pray all this according to your Word. In Jesus’ name, according to Psalm 55:22. Amen.