Finding Hope in Psalms of Lament

In this episode, CCEF faculty share personal experiences and insights on how psalms of lament provide a framework for expressing sorrow and confusion, emphasizing the importance of honesty in prayer. The conversation explores the difference between lamenting and grumbling, highlighting the relational aspect of lamenting to God, who is compassionate and welcomes us to bring our suffering to him.

00:00 Introduction to Lament and the Psalms
03:00 Personal Experiences with Lament
06:03 The Language of Grief and Psalms
08:55 Understanding the Complexity of Grief
11:56 Lament vs. Grumbling
18:06 The Heart of God in Lament
27:04 Conclusion: The Invitation to Lament

Hi, welcome to Where Life and Scripture Meet, a podcast of CCEF, where we are in the business of restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church. We are in studio here today. I'm joined by Gunner, by Darby, and by Esther, like last time. We're looking forward to another conversation here today. 

Before we jump into the conversation, just one thing I wanted to let you know about is that we're going to be doing an audio giveaway in the near future, and it's going to be on the topic of anxiety. So we've actually pulled out three conference talks that you can download for free. One is by Ed Welch, one is by Mike Emlet, and one of them is by me. So if you go to our website, go to ccef.org/download, it'll be there and available. All you have to do is put in your email address and we will get you those files and you can listen to that. So I hope that is a helpful blessing to you. I know that conference has been a great blessing to me.

And with no further ado, let's jump into today's topic. As we thought about what we wanted to talk about today, the topic that came to the front for us was the topic of lament, particularly psalms of lament and how the psalms of lament help us in our grief, how they can provide a framework, how they can provide a guide. So yeah, just would love to spend a little time thinking about the psalms of lament and in particular how they help us, how they orient us, how they draw us, what they teach us, what your experience has been with them. So there's lots of different directions we could go. Maybe I'll start just with a brief story of my own that helps me think about what the psalms of lament are. I did not grow up liking the psalms at all. I thought of the Bible as something that taught me stuff. And so the psalms seemed like a very inefficient, redundant way and the lessons weren't always as obvious and clear. It probably wasn't until I graduated college and actually really discovered materials from CCEF that I began to understand how the psalms are this blueprint for a life lived in fellowship with the Lord, that you get to speak to him. These are prayers meant to lead your heart and your words to the Lord that also teach you plenty of things about who he is and what life looks like. And when my dad died, I was 24, and I remember reading 1 Thessalonians 4, where it says, “We do not grieve like those who have no hope.” And I had always thought, well, that means we don't grieve, right? If we have faith in Jesus and if we have confidence that God is sovereign over all things, and if all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose, then there really isn't any place for grief. That's why it says we shouldn't grieve. Only hopeless people would grieve. And I realized through that experience, no, wait, I actually should grieve. Grief is right. But I don't grieve hopelessly. It's not a grief without hope, it's a grief with hope, it's a hopeful grieving. And suddenly the psalms of lament came alive to me. I realized, oh wow, how did I miss this? There's this huge theme throughout Scripture, of course, it's outside the Psalms as well, but overwhelmingly you see laments in the psalms, just people pouring out their heart to the Lord in the midst of loss and distress and confusion and pain. And I suddenly felt welcomed into something and have been fascinated ever since. I've appreciated how much I've seen the topic of lament kind of jumping to the front and the circles that we tend to run in and swim in. I think of Mark Vroegop's book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercies, and the impact that I've seen that have. Just a sweet thing. What would you guys say? What do you see in the psalms of lament? What have been your own experiences with psalms of lament?

Yeah, Alasdair, you mentioned being welcomed in by these, and I think the forefront of my mind and experience I had was after I had taken a sabbatical in pastoral ministry, I was thoroughly burned out. I really couldn't feel anything for a while. I was just physically exhausted and very numb. I remember I would get up on the front step of the stage each week as the prayer was happening before I got up to preach, and I would just say to the Lord, “You know that I don't have anything emotionally right now.” I've tried to exegete, I've tried to study, I've tried to put together a helpful message, I've prayed, but week after week, they're just, I didn't have anything left. And in that time and during my sabbatical, the Lord really used Psalm 3 and welcomed me to him through that. It starts out, “O Lord, how many are my foes? Many are rising against me and many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God.’”

And it just felt like there were all these things inside me and outside me that were just insurmountable troubles. And I was just so grateful for the opening of that psalm and then where it led me from there because it really became kind of an anthem, a vehicle of expressing my own grief, pain, hardship to the Lord, but leading me too also to a place of understanding better and experiencing better his comfort and rest. So Psalm 3 is something that I always think on as directly related to and resonant with that sabbatical that the Lord used powerfully in my life and I think for our church.

I think that's a sweet way to think about the psalms, right? It's our God, our daddy knows what we need. And often when we're in so much anguish, like you were saying, Gunner, you were doing everything you in your own power could do, but you didn't have the words or the categories or even the access to your own heart. And he gave you what you needed. And I think that's what's so surprising about Psalms is they're written to us. He has us in mind. We know they're written to a specific situation, but they overlay on what our hearts need because our Lord knows what we need in such a sweet and intimate way. So it's just encouraging that they give us language when often grief takes language away from us.

Can we keep going with that, Darby, when you say grief takes away language. Why does grief take away language? Intuitively I'm nodding my head, like, yeah, it does, doesn't it? But why is that?

Some pain is just so indescribable, or you're trying to talk to someone else and they cannot imagine what you're experiencing. There's really no way to capture the loss of a loved one or the devastation of a failed marriage, you can't say it in a neat paragraph, all that you're feeling or you don't know how to describe it. And yet the Psalms seem to capture anguish so beautifully, whether we're feeling it in our bodies, you know, the tears, the inner turmoil, and the pain in our bones, a psalm talks about, or it's in our spiritual doubt, it gives voice to that, or in just the intellectual, “I don't understand, how can this be happening to me” or “Where are you?” So it's so complex, grief. And I think the Psalms just have a way of giving us words that we don't have access to in the middle of deep anguish.

Yeah, there's kind of a layering effect, isn't there? The more different ways the Psalms come at grief, the more you get permission to experience pain in different categories, to put different things on the table with the Lord and to know like, yeah, this is also a valid conversation. And oftentimes even I think, oh wow, I wasn't really thinking of my experience like this, but now that I hear a psalmist articulate that, I'm actually realizing there's probably an element to my pain that I hadn't even had a name for. I'm looking at the beginning of Psalm 3, Gunner, and even just “many are saying of my soul, there is no salvation for him in God.” That's a brutal statement. That's an incredibly profound assault that others would stand around you in your suffering, whatever the suffering might be, and for them to say, for whatever reason, in whatever way, you're cut off from the Lord. You don't have the hope, the very thing on which your life as a Christian is founded, it is not going to prove true. I mean, that's a devastating blow. And yet how many of us can resonate with that voice in our own head? How many of us can say, yeah, I've actually been the one saying, yeah, there isn't a salvation here. That lie has become enormously compelling to me. Would I have had the clarity to even see that if the Psalms weren't so good at laying out that fundamental sense of being cut off from the Lord as the greatest danger or hardship or ache you could face.

Yeah, and Alasdair, I think that is really expressed well in just the title of the psalm too, that Psalm 3 is “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.” And then you go back to that story in 2 Samuel, it just is indescribable, as Darby said, the grief that David was under for all sorts of complicated reasons that went back years and years and years, but had culminated in this point. It is just, it's strangely comforting to be given those words from someone who suffered in that kind of way, in all the different intricate ways that a person can suffer, some of which were even tied back to some of his choices before. And grief is not always tied to the things that we've done. Many times it's things that are being done to us or other things. But I think the complexity of that title is something that Scripture, it just represents how Scripture really speaks to us, as Darby said, and gives a voice to these things that otherwise we don't have language for.

I imagine for those who don't necessarily have comfort in using their words or maybe just don't access it that way, like, you know, to the extent of, “Oh, I feel bad today.” But the limited vocabulary that you have to express sorrow, grief, distress, fear, anxiety, the way that the Psalms expand your vocabulary, and like what you guys have been saying, gives us words to speak for ourselves that we might not have access to ourselves is really beautiful and just allows us to plug in our lives and our sufferings into these words that have already been written to us and for us. And yeah, I just imagine in times of deep sorrow when emotions are so intense that we fail to be able to find the words to adequately express it, the psalms of lament become beautiful guides and become beautiful voices that speak on our behalf that we can then speak to the Lord. So even just the fact that we can read it and that can be our expression to the Lord is a beautiful tool that I've certainly used in my own life as I've struggled to find permission to struggle in the Christian life and feeling like the majority of my Christian life I felt like I needed to be really happy and like the faithful Christian is the joyful one, the exuberant one, the one who always has a smile on her face. And so to be introduced to Scripture that gives permission for that and also helps me give voice and articulate what my experience even is while I've lacked the vocabulary myself. I’ve really appreciated the psalms of lament.

I feel like there's, even as I'm hearing you say that, Esther, I'm realizing there's just a, there's something that happens in you if you are regularly taking the Psalms in. And some of those things are direct lessons learned, direct teaching, direct verses or Psalms that become particularly sweet to you. But even just at a more, I guess, broad, generic, fundamental level, the more time you spend with the Psalms, the more time you spend hearing the laments of Psalms, the more you just begin to get this sense of, this is what life is supposed to look like as I speak to the Lord constantly. I pour out my heart at all times, you know, to use the Psalm 62: 8 language, but yeah, I'm constantly actually invited to bring the details that I put into any given verse, right? So, you know, beginning of Psalm 3:1, “Oh Lord, how many are my foes?” Well, we know particularly David had the foe Absalom and his, you know, literal armed forces coming against David. And we know the complexity of that relationship; here's his own son. Our foes, our betrayals, our tensions, our relational awkwardnesses are going to be different, right? And we get to bring those and just that sense of you just get to bring your whole life. You get to bring your heart to the Lord in all things. You can't spend time in the Psalms taking them for what they are, taking them as prayers, as speech to the Lord, and not begin to get the accent developing in your own heart and in your own life, which I really appreciate. You know, one question we were kicking around a little bit earlier that I think would be well worth some time is, what's the difference between lament and grumbling? The Bible encourages, invites, I suppose you could even argue commands us to lament. It very clearly commands us not to grumble. So, grumbling bad, lamenting good, discuss.

When I read Exodus 17, for example, when the Israelites get out into the wilderness after they cross the Red Sea, there's a bunch of references to them grumbling against the Lord. And we know those stories and some of the disciplinary things they face from the Lord as a result of that. And I sometimes wonder what would it have looked like or sounded like for them to lament and to take their concerns and troubles to the Lord instead? And I do think maybe one of the differences would be something like in complaint, or grumbling specifically, there's a kind of contempt that's being expressed. Whereas I think with lament, it's more a sense of pain that's being expressed. And in that sense, I do think that sense of maybe contempt sometimes in the way that I might grumble, there's a sense of closedness to it. Whereas I think in lament, there's an openness. I'm bringing this to you and I'm in a place of confusion, I'm in a place of wondering, I'm in a place of not understanding why this is the situation in my life, why I'm facing what I'm facing. I'm expressing that to you. But there's an openness, Lord, to how you hear this and what you want to do in me and for me to learn and to be kind of fathered and cared for by you. So those are least two broad things that it seems like are different, but it's so nuanced because we're talking about a difference in the human heart and what gets mixed up there and how we express it.

And I think just to be reassuring, in some ways, we want to strive to be people who lament, who have the hard conversation with the Lord. Like to me, lamenting is more of a relational conversation. And yet at the same time, there were so many places in Scripture, even early on in the Exodus story, where the people were complaining and the Lord heard their cry and his compassion called them to act and deliver them. And again, in some sense, the psalms of lament actually show us that our hearts don't have to be sanitized and perfect. It's the Lord's response to our heart that is what we want to be focused on. And the psalms of lament show how he remembers his people and his steadfast love so much clearer. So I don't know as humans in the midst of grief, right, if we can always dissect, “Am I complaining or am I lamenting? I'm just miserable.” And yeah, and the Psalms say it clearly, right? I feel forsaken. I feel abandoned. Like, how could you do this to me? You know, I'm one of yours and you've left me. Those are pretty big complaints. And so, yeah, I think I just want people to know that we give voice to those things and we trust. I think when I'm working with people whose lives have been really upended, I trust that the Lord is going to shape their complaint into a lament because he pursues his people and he shows who he is to them and he reestablishes that relationship. So I don't think I get as hung up on, I want that direction to happen, but I'm not fixated on where are we on that spectrum.

Yeah, I like that guys. Yeah, the openness, the trajectory, what's the momentum of your heart? Is it towards the Lord and his hearing you or is it away? One thing I'm struck by as you're saying that Darby is even just the word complaint is I think an especially tricky one. I think the semantic range of the word lament is mostly, this is commended to us by Scripture as the way to bring our hearts to the Lord. I think the semantic range of the word grumbling is pretty much universally negative. You're never supposed to grumble. That's this bad thing. And then complaint lives in this interesting overlapping space kind of in the middle where you mostly hear it talked about as a bad thing to complain and complaining, but you do get the Psalms talking about the words of my complaint or listen to my complaint or my complaint is this. And there's a way in which there's a validity to complaint that Scripture seems to underscore. So even just which English word we're using, I think sometimes can be, yeah, just adds to the complexity. 

I think what's been helpful to me in thinking about the difference between bad grumbling and good lamenting, or good and bad complaining, however you want to phrase it, would be probably two things. Number one, I think in general, lament tends to be first person and second person, we’re speaking to the Lord, whereas complaint often or grumbling often is about the Lord, it's in third person. He has not been good to me. Why did he do this to us? Whereas as lament I think tends to be more of a you have abandoned me, you have shot me full of arrows, why are you doing this? And I think the second thing that's been helpful to me—that's not always, but I think there can be a tendency to that. The other thing that maybe is more closer to an always, would be the difference between a question and an accusation. And so I think this goes in the direction of the contempt thing you were talking about as well, Gunner. But the idea that a grumbling is, this is what is happening, therefore you are not good, Lord. That's the fundamental posture. Whereas lament says, you are good, therefore I'm confused about why this is happening. It's because I trust and know something about your character and your goodness that I find this so awful and galling and why I come to you with dismay in my heart. And I think about Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Right there, like, you don't usually have a conversation with someone who's forsaken you. You don't say, my God, why have you? The natural move of the sinful human heart would be to say, that God, that God, why has he forsaken me? And to distance yourself even further, whereas the conversation, the rushing to, and then asking the question, why have you done this? Why are you so far from the words of my groaning? That is a profoundly relational step. That is exactly like you said. That's a huge question to ask. A grumbling would be to say, you have forsaken me for no reason. You've turned your back on me, and it's unfair and it's unkind and I deserve better from you. And why didn't you just let me die in Egypt if this is how it was gonna be?

I would just say some people honestly start there, right? Yeah, and so the beauty of that is in all things be honest. And so the Psalms invite us to be honest. And sometimes we have more of an accusation and sometimes the Lord doesn't feel like he is for you. And right, what's happening in my life is obscuring his goodness. And so I wouldn't want people to stop the honest expression, and with the hope of one day as you're saying, talking to him instead of about him, right? And even asking the Lord saying, when I don't trust what the Lord is doing in my life, it's harder to address him personally. I think so we just want to be mindful of that. That's the goal, right? We want to be able to have the courage and to say to him, this is how I'm feeling about you. We want that movement. And that's super important because again, then that's inviting that relationship. But I think it's helpful just having sat this weekend with a lot of, I actually spoke at a conference on how to support people in grief. A lot of the questions in the room are really raw. Lord, you've really messed up my life. Now they're still addressing him. So I just want to feature the honesty. And then just if you notice that you're not talking to him directly, ask the Lord, you know, can I see you as someone who wants to hear from me even when I'm this messy and angry with you.

I love that Darby, because at the heart of your concern is just this sense that we easily get trapped in our own troubles and think that we can't take these things or shouldn't take these things to the Lord. We shouldn't feel the way we're feeling even when things are disastrous in our lives. Things have truly fallen apart. They've broken down. And I like to think of the psalms of lament as really, they're kind of God-ward expressions of pain for when the chaos of life doesn't seem to match the character of God. And so I'm looking at what he said and what he's promised and even what I've seen him do in my life in the past and other people's lives. And then I'm looking at the pieces of my life, these jagged shards I'm holding and they're in me and I'm saying, how can these two things go together? And I think just encouraging that kind of honest conversation with the Lord is so key and something that the Psalms are such a vehicle for doing. I like to think of some of those troubles that I just internalize as just a cycle, like a circle that I just keep circling and circling if they stay inside. But whatever I'm dealing with, if I break that circle and I simply direct it to the Lord and also direct it towards other supportive, mature Christians who can help me, that in itself is a massive first step of taking those things into relationship, which I know is a place where more light can shine, more comfort can come, more of the burdens can be supported. So I just hear at the heart of your concern to say, take whatever it is that's going on inside to the Lord, and even if it needs correction over time, he will actually provide that lovingly as your Father.

And the Psalms remind us to talk to him directly. That's what's so great about them. Because it gives us that permission as Esther was saying, this is what faith looked like. Words of faith can actually sound like doubt and questions, confusion. And so it really helps us.

I'm just reflecting as we're talking about the importance of honesty in all things. You know, lament is essentially praying your grief. But we're called to pray our temptations. We're called to pray our failures. And I think on a fundamental level, if you think, what does it mean to be a Christian? Well, very few of us probably do it in exactly these words, right? But fundamentally, the Christian life begins with a human being confessing to the Lord that they don't love him, they are not for him, that they are in desperate need of help because their heart is in the wrong place and set against him. And they cannot in and of themselves, like to repent and confess your sins before the Lord and to trust in Jesus is to say, “Lord, I don't love you as I should.” Like what more hurtful, terrible, wrong posture of the heart could you ever speak to the Lord than I don't love you in the way that I should? And yet that's the very fundamental doorway into the Christian life is to confess ourselves as sinners. And the Christian life is a life of confession, it is a life of repentance. So, yeah, just the freedom that we all know that we have to come to him with whatever we find in our hearts and souls is there. And so whether that comes as a confession, whether it comes as a lament, whether it comes as just a confused sort of monologue of here's what I just don't understand that has lament-ish features to it, but ventures into other genres, you know, there's nothing that we can't say to the Lord and bring to the Lord. And I love that way of putting it. If there's a needed corrective, if there's an honest heart of conversation, he will be guiding us. And sometimes we'll look back at our lament and realize there's pieces of that we would like to confess were not coming from a great place in our heart. And as we see that more clearly, we can do that. But there's that, yeah, just the utter freedom and the invitation to pour your heart out is an incredible gift.

It's just remarkable that all of this reveals the heart of God himself. The reason why it is an invitation, the reason why we are welcomed to bring our messy, ugly thoughts and complaints to God is because of who he is. He is someone who receives those graciously. He's a God who's marked by compassion, who knows that life in this broken world is hard and painful. He's one who doesn't despise the way that we suffer in our lives, but wants to be with us in it. And Christ being the greatest example of that with us-ness of his character. And so I think as I'm hearing this conversation, I'm really moved by how all of this showcases who God is. That we even have that permission to be messy because so much of Christian life can be this notion of being put together. Figuring out, is our complaint a godly one or an ungodly one? Is this godly lament or is this like not okay? And like we can spend so much time trying to dissect that and feel like we need to have it all figured out before we can even come to God. But the beauty of the heart of God is the question of like, will you turn to him or will you turn away from him? I think that's something that I use with my counselees a lot. If they're turning to him, I'm encouraged because like what everyone is saying, there's something beautiful about, I want to maintain this relationship. I don't want to walk away from you. This is really hard. I don't understand. I'm confused what you're doing in my life. I don't know how to make sense of your promises given what my life reality is, but I'm still turning to you, I'm still speaking to you, I still want this to be a conversation between the two of us. Rather than, he's not doing what I want and therefore I'm done, walking away. I've decided he's not good and I'm just gonna walk away. So that beauty of, I want to make sense of this and I want to turn towards God because there's nowhere else for me to go at the end of the day. I find that to be so beautiful and I find what's equally beautiful is the God who receives that messy, untidy, I don't know what I'm doing. And he's like, come to me. I’m just really blessed to be reminded of the God that we serve and the God who loves us in that way, that he knows what we'll sound like when we're in suffering. And he receives it so graciously.

Esther, that feels like a perfect place to wrap ourselves up. I love that. This whole idea of lament not only teaches us how to live, but it teaches us what kind of God we serve and who he is and how he engages us. Thanks guys for the conversation and thanks all of you who are listening for joining us. Until next time, blessings.