How Long?
Psalm 55:16-17; 22
Give ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication. Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in my complaint. Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.
If You But Trust in God to Guide You LBW 453
1 If you but trust in God to guide you and place your confidence in him,
you’ll find him always there beside you, to give you hope and strength within.
For those who trust God’s changeless love build on the rock that will not move.
2 What gain is there in futile weeping, in helpless anger and distress?
If you are in his care and keeping, in sorrow will he love you less?
For he who took for you a cross will bring you safe through ev’ry loss.
3 In patient trust await his leisure in cheerful hope, with heart content
to take whate’er your Father’s pleasure and all-discerning love have sent;
doubt not your inmost wants are known to him who chose you for his own.
4 Sing, pray, and keep his ways unswerving, offer your service faithfully,
and trust his word; though undeserving, you’ll find his promise true to be.
God never will forsake in need the soul that trusts in him indeed.
Text: Georg Neumark, 1621-1681; tr. composite, alt.
This has been a week of waiting, and waiting is one of the hardest things that humans have to do. We wait for the doctor to call, for the check to come in the mail – we wait in line to vote and then we wait to hear how that vote came out…waiting, always waiting.
Christians throughout the millennia have become experts at waiting. “How long, O Lord?” is our rallying cry. We wait while evil runs rampant, while the innocent suffer and die, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket and wonder why God doesn’t just flush?
Georg Neumark wrote this hymn during a time of tremendous upheaval (yes, I know it is hard to hear, but other generations have had to deal with more, and with worse, than we!) In his 60 short years he experienced war, famine, plague, political chicanery and religious dislocation…waiting for God to come and make things right. He wrote this hymn, based upon Psalm 55, to speak to the time of his waiting. Two hundred years later, Catherine Winkworth translated it into English where it remains a word of hope to us in our time of waiting.
Prayer: How long, O Lord, how long must we wait? Yet we know that even in the midst of our waiting, you wait with us, you stand at our side, you hear our prayers, and your love will never let us fall. Amen.