Day 1 of 7
How Long, O Lord?
Psalm 13 and the prayer the church has nearly forgotten how to pray
Scripture Readings
Today's Scripture
Start by reading Psalm 13 slowly. It is only six verses long, and every word matters.
Psalm 13:1-2 — "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?"
Psalm 13:5-6 — "But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me."
Matthew 5:4 — "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
The Big Idea
Lament is an old word for telling God, honestly and out loud, that something hurts — while still holding on to him. It is not the opposite of faith. It is one of faith's native languages. The Bible does not just permit this kind of prayer; it teaches it, models it, and puts the words in our mouths.
Reflection
A prayer with four "how longs"
Count the complaints in Psalm 13. How long will you forget me? How long will you hide your face? How long must I carry this sorrow? How long will my enemy win? Four "how longs" in two verses. David is not being patient. He is not being polite. He says God has forgotten him. He says God is hiding. He prays the kind of prayer that would make people in some church lobbies very uncomfortable.
And here is the astonishing part: God kept this prayer. The Holy Spirit made sure it stayed in the Bible, in the official songbook of Israel and the church, so that millions of people for three thousand years would learn to pray by copying it.
John Calvin spent years writing a massive commentary on the Psalms, and this is how he described the whole book:
"I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, 'An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;' for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." — John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms
An anatomy of the soul. Every feeling you have ever had — including despair, anger, and the 2 a.m. feeling that God has lost your address — is already in the Psalms, looking back at you like a mirror. God did not give us a prayer book full of only happy prayers. He gave us one that matches real life.
That is exactly what Psalm 62:8 invites: "Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us." Notice how the verse holds two things together. Pouring out your heart — all of it, the messy parts included — is what trusting him at all times looks like.
Honesty is not the opposite of faith
Many of us have quietly absorbed a different rule: mature Christians sound upbeat. Start with thanksgiving, end with praise, keep the middle hopeful. Sad prayers feel like weak faith, the way a wobbling bike feels like weak riding.
The great saints of church history would find that rule strange. Charles Spurgeon was the most famous preacher of the 1800s, a man who preached to thousands every week. Listen to what he told his students:
"Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy." — Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
Spurgeon battled deep depression his whole life and never once treated it as something a real Christian should hide. C.S. Lewis went further. After his wife died, he wrote down what praying felt like in his grief — and he did not clean it up:
"But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
A door slammed in your face. That is one of the most beloved Christian writers of the twentieth century, describing the silence of God — in print, with his name on it. Lewis was not losing his faith when he wrote that. He was doing what Psalm 13 does: bringing the silence to God instead of walking away from him with it.
That is the line that separates lament from despair. Complain about God to your friends, and bitterness grows. Bottle it up, and it leaks out anyway. But bring the complaint to God by name — "How long, O Lord?" — and something different happens. You are still talking to him. The relationship is still alive. 1 Peter 5:7 describes the move exactly: "casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you." Casting is a throwing word. Lament is anxiety, thrown at God, because he can catch it.
Jesus prayed this way too
If you still suspect lament is for spiritual failures, look at Jesus.
Psalm 22:1-2 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest."
That is a lament psalm — one of the rawest in the Bible. And it is the prayer Jesus chose at the darkest moment in history. Matthew 27:46 — "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, 'Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?' that is, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" The sinless Son of God, hanging on the cross, prayed a complaint. He reached for Psalm 22 the way you reach for words you memorized long ago, when your own words run out.
Earlier, standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John 11:33-35 tells us Jesus "was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled... Jesus wept." He knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He wept anyway. Grief was not beneath him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison cell in the last year of his life, compressed all of this into six words:
"Only the suffering God can help." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
A god who had never wept could only watch our pain from a distance. The God of the Bible entered it. That is why Matthew 5:4 can promise, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Jesus does not say blessed are those who keep it together. He blesses the mourners — because he was one.
Trust built on the floor of complaint
Now look at how Psalm 13 ends. "But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation" (Psalm 13:5). David does not take back his four "how longs." He does not say, "Never mind, I was being dramatic." The complaint stays. The trust is built right on top of it — like a house built on the floor of everything he just said.
You see the same turn in Lamentations 3. The writer spends nineteen verses describing his misery — "Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall!" (Lamentations 3:19) — and then, without erasing any of it: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:21-23). The most famous words about God's faithfulness in the whole Bible live inside the Bible's saddest book. That is not an accident. That is the anatomy of lament.
Tim Keller spent years sitting with suffering people, and with his own cancer, and this is where he landed:
"If we ask the question: 'Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?' and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn't. It can't be that he doesn't love us." — Tim Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering
Lament lives exactly there — in the space between the question we cannot answer and the love we cannot deny. N.T. Wright says Christians are not supposed to escape that space:
"It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what's happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain — and to lament instead." — N.T. Wright
And we do not lament alone. Romans 8:26 — "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." Read that again slowly. When you cannot find words, the Holy Spirit groans on your behalf. Lament is not a sub-Christian prayer God tolerates until you cheer up. It is a prayer God himself is praying inside you.
Augustine explained why our hearts ache like this in the first place:
"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Augustine, Confessions
The ache is homesickness. And J.I. Packer names the safety that makes honesty possible:
"There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me... and quench his determination to bless me." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God
God already knows the worst — the doubt, the anger, the exhaustion. Nothing you say in lament will be news to him, and none of it will make him love you less. That is why you can tell him the truth.
Going Deeper
Write your own Psalm 13 today. Three lines that begin "How long..." — filled in with your real circumstances, not the polished version. Then one line asking God for something specific. Then one line of trust, even a small one, even borrowed: "But I have trusted in your steadfast love." Do not skip ahead to the trust. The order is the point. God gave us the proportions of this psalm on purpose, and he can handle every line of yours.
Key Quotes
“I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, 'An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;' for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.”
“Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.”
“But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”
“Only the suffering God can help.”
“If we ask the question: 'Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?' and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn't. It can't be that he doesn't love us.”
“It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what's happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain — and to lament instead.”
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
“There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”
Prayer Focus
Today, instead of asking God to fix something, simply tell him what hurts. Borrow the words of Psalm 13 — 'How long, O Lord?' — and let the sentence finish itself with your own circumstances. You do not have to wrap it up in praise. The psalmist will help you do that later this week.
Meditation
Psalm 13 has six verses: four of complaint, one of asking, one of trust. The complaint is four times longer than the trust. Why do you think God preserved that exact proportion in our prayer book?
Question for Discussion
If your church had to drop one set of songs — the celebration songs or the sad, honest ones — which would it drop? What does that choice say about which feelings we have learned to call 'Christian'?