ALL believe our God is amazing! All believers agree God listens.  Most believers trust God in all circumstances and have learned that pain is gain on our faith journey with Him.  Many turn to God first when overwhelmed with despair.  But it seems there are only a few who are completely honest in our lament before God in surrender of will with knowledge of our incompleteness. 

The writer of Psalms 101 is praying, crying out to God, with lament. I remember my own lament to God last week.  Then my mind takes me to the lament of Isaiah, the prophet we quote often. Isaiah was God’s spokesperson in a world of lament for His people. The great prophet, Isaiah lamented as he expressed his own humanness of imperfection before our Perfect God in ways that bring us to our knees.  We have all been called of God to tell others of our Redeeming Savior but we also lament over our inadequacies in fulfilling this command of Jesus. When God speaks as we stand in His Holy Presence, it personal.  We are undone and broken before Him—surrendered to Him. This is exactly when God does His best work in us as He molds and shapes us into all He created us to be and do.

Let us learn from Isaiah. Isaiah, who was called of God to speak for Him to others of their sins fell to his knees before God, “ruined and terrified” after seeing God in a glorious vision. Isaiah immediately realized his own sin and the wrong words of his people when standing in the presence of the Holy God.

There is something real and powerful when we stand in the Holy Presence of God with fully focused eyes and ears ready to hear what He says.  Listen in with all that is within us to hear what is going on between God and Isaiah;

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Master sitting on a throne—high, exalted! —and the train of his robes filled the Temple. Angel-seraphs hovered above him, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew. And they called back and forth one to the other,

    Holy, Holy, Holy is God-of-the-Angel-Armies.
    His bright glory fills the whole earth.

The foundations trembled at the sound of the angel voices, and then the whole house filled with smoke. I said,

‘Doom! It’s Doomsday!
    I’m as good as dead!
Every word I’ve ever spoken is tainted—
    blasphemous even!
And the people I live with talk the same way,
    using words that corrupt and desecrate.
And here I’ve looked God in the face!
    The King! God-of-the-Angel-Armies!”

Then one of the angel-seraphs flew to me. He held a live coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with the coal and said,

‘Look. This coal has touched your lips.
    Gone your guilt,
    your sins wiped out.’
And then I heard the voice of the Master:
    “Whom shall I send?
    Who will go for us?”

I spoke up, ‘I’ll go. Send me!’

He said, “Go and tell this people:

‘Listen hard, but you aren’t going to get it;
    look hard, but you won’t catch on.’
Make these people blockheads, with fingers in their ears and blindfolds on their eyes,
So they won’t see a thing, won’t hear a word,
So they won’t have a clue about what’s going on and, yes, so they won’t turn around and be made whole.’

Astonished, I said,
    ‘And Master, how long is this to go on?’
He said, ‘Until the cities are emptied out, not a soul left in the cities—
Houses empty of people, countryside empty of people.
Until I, God, get rid of everyone, sending them off, the land totally empty.
And even if some should survive, say a tenth, the devastation will start up again.
The country will look like pine and oak forest with every tree cut down—
Every tree a stump, a huge field of stumps.
    But there’s a holy seed in those stumps.’” Isaiah 6:1-13, MSG

Read the lament of our psalmist while thinking about Isaiah’s words…

Psalm 102, The Message

A prayer of an afflicted person who has grown weak and pours out a lament before the Lord.

^1-2 God, listen! Listen to my prayer,
    listen to the pain in my cries.
Don’t turn your back on me
    just when I need you so desperately.
Pay attention! This is a cry for help!
    And hurry—this can’t wait!

^3-11 I’m wasting away to nothing,
    I’m burning up with fever.
I’m a ghost of my former self,
    half-consumed already by terminal illness.
My jaws ache from gritting my teeth;
    I’m nothing but skin and bones.
I’m like a buzzard in the desert,
    a crow perched on the rubble.
Insomniac, I twitter away,
    mournful as a sparrow in the gutter.
All day long my enemies taunt me,
    while others just curse.
They bring in meals—casseroles of ashes!
    I draw drink from a barrel of my tears.
And all because of your furious anger;
    you swept me up and threw me out.
There’s nothing left of me—
    a withered weed, swept clean from the path.

^12-17 Yet you, God, are sovereign still,
    always and ever sovereign.
You’ll get up from your throne and help Zion—
    it’s time for compassionate help.
Oh, how your servants love this city’s rubble
    and weep with compassion over its dust!
The godless nations will sit up and take notice
    —see your glory, worship your name—
When God rebuilds Zion,
    when he shows up in all his glory,
When he attends to the prayer of the wretched.
    He won’t dismiss their prayer.

^18-22 Write this down for the next generation
    so people not yet born will praise God:
“God looked out from his high holy place;
    from heaven he surveyed the earth.
He listened to the groans of the doomed,
    he opened the doors of their death cells.”
Write it so the story can be told in Zion,
    so God’s praise will be sung in Jerusalem’s streets
And wherever people gather together
    along with their rulers to worship him.

^23-28 God sovereignly brought me to my knees,
    he cut me down in my prime.
“Oh, don’t,” I prayed, “please don’t let me die.
    You have more years than you know what to do with!
You laid earth’s foundations a long time ago,
    and handcrafted the very heavens;
You’ll still be around when they’re long gone,
    threadbare and discarded like an old suit of clothes.
You’ll throw them away like a worn-out coat,
    but year after year you’re as good as new.
Your servants’ children will have a good place to live
    and their children will be at home with you.”

WHAT DO WE LEARN—HOW DO WE RESPOND?

“Bring everything to God in prayer” is the hymn we sing; but do we? 

What am I holding back?  I’m asking myself this question this morning as I write this with God’s Holy Spirit guiding me in a session of counsel, conviction, correction, comfort, while compelling me to be more and more like Him in every way.  May we seek to lament in healthy ways that grow our faith!

Here’s what we learn from the Psalmist and Isaiah:

IN OUR LAMENT, WE SEE OUR IMPERFECTIONS BEFORE A PERFECT GOD!

“Before we can minister to others, we must permit God to minister to us. Before we pronounce bad news and God’s judgment upon others, we must sincerely admit our own sin and inadequacies. Isaiah’s conviction led to confession, and confession led to cleansing (see 1 John 1:9). Like Isaiah, many of the other great heroes of faith saw themselves as sinners and humbled themselves before God: Abraham (Gen. 18:27), Jacob (Gen. 32:10), Job (Job 40:1–5), David (2 Sam. 7:18), Paul (1 Tim. 1:15), and Peter (Luke 5:8–11).”—Warren Wiersbe, Wiesbe Study Bible

God warned Isaiah that his ministry would end in seeming failure, with the land ruined and the people taken off to exile. But a remnant would survive! It would be like the stump of a fallen tree from which the shoots (“the holy seed”) would come, and they would continue the true faith in the land. Isaiah needed a long-range perspectiveon his ministry or else he would feel like he was accomplishing nothing—God provided exactly what His spokesperson would need in His lament to God!  Our God is amazing, always Good, forever faithful, loving, and compassionate in our lament to Him.

LEARNING HAPPENS IN OUR LAMENTS WHEN WE LISTEN—

Doubts are express by the committed but always addressed by the God they know personally—not because of unbelief per say in God but in what we do not know yet. We know God will answer with wisdom, insight, and understanding beyond what we possess at any given moment in our lament.  Relax, I’m still figuring this out for myself, but I know enough about God to seek God more and more—especially in and through my laments to Him.

HONEST LAMENTS SERVE TO GROW OUR FAITH IN OUR GOD WHO LISTENS!

I’m thinking now of a humbled, committed woman of God who served in the streets of Calcutta, India.  After many years of service, she was interviewed and asked, “When you pray, what do you say to God?” He asked this because of how she served those who others had rejected because of their wounds and filth.  Mother Teresa replied, “I don’t talk, I simply listen.” 

HOLY GOD HEARS ALL LAMENSTS AND ANSWERS WITH COMPASSION

Still not convinced?  Consider Hagar.  The story of Hagar is found in Genesis 16 of the Bible. Hagar was a lonely, mistreated, and pregnant slave by Abraham who ran away into the desert. God found her there, listened to her distress, and named her unborn son Ishmael, which means “God hears”!

Hagar named God El Roi, meaning “the God who sees me”.

GOD SEES OUR HEARTS, KNOWS OUR NAME, HEARS OUR LAMENTS AND RESPONDS WITH COMPASSION TO ALL WHO CALL ON HIS NAME.

Just calling on His Name gets the attention of God. This is the seed of faith that begins to grow exponentially by God within us as God answers with the majesty of power and strength coupled with His unconditional love, unending mercy, and amazing grace. There is no one like our God!

There is nothing we cannot bring to God in prayer in surrender to His will. There is nothing we have done that god will not forgive.  It is God’s desire that all the people He has created would not perish but be saved by grace.  THIS is our God.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. John 3:16-17

There is no one that God does not love.  We must love like God Loves us.

Lord,

As I stand in your Holy Presence this morning; I am undone.  Remove all that does not belong within me.  Cleanse our hearts, renew our minds, refresh our souls, and restore the joy of you in us and us in you. Thank you for ministering to us this morning. Thank you for saving my soul and making me whole.  To you be all glory, honor, and praise!

In Jesus Name, Amen