Psalm 12: Safety

Every road to recovery starts with a turning point. We talk about rock bottom or the end of our rope, but the truth is, we can’t ever recover, from anything, until we turn around. For the last few Psalms we have been reading from David’s low points. Betrayal, disappointment, frustration, anger and grief; these were the reality of his experiences and his feelings. David wasn’t wrong about anything he did, and his writing was simply the honest expression of his feelings. He wasn’t wallowing in his pity, he wasn’t being dramatic or faithless, he was exploring his heart, giving the Spirit of God room to reveal his wounds and his hard places. David was living out what he wrote, what he prayed for in Psalm 139 “Search me and know my heart”. When God searches our heart, it is not to see what He can find, it is so that He can show us what He wants to do, what He wants to heal, change and break through. God doesn’t work to keep us from the depth of hurt, He works to root the hurt out of the deep places of our hearts and to break through the hard places that we have established as our own form of protection. This takes us to the bottom so that He can turn us around and lead back to the place of trust, hope and love that He has always planned and desired for us. 

The Psalm starts like many others. David was discouraged and frustrated. This time though, his hurt was coming from loneliness, from the lack of fellowship and safe community. He laments that the “godly one has gone”, “the faithful have vanished”. There are two things that soothe our hearts when they are hurting, two things that we were created for and that were designed to work in tandem in us and for us, the presence of God and the people of God. Two often we try to separate these gifts, not realizing that they work best together. The first church, filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit devoted themselves to God’s presence through the apostles teaching and prayer and to each other through fellowship. There was a Spirit-led understanding that they couldn’t serve each other without knowing Jesus, but that they couldn’t fully know Jesus unless they were committed to serving each other. In David’s trial, in his hurt, in his brokenness he knew that God was with him, but he knew he needed God’s people just as much as he needed God’s presence. 

What was David’s turnaround? It was the moment God spoke. God interrupted David’s lament, He spoke in the midst of David’s grief and simply promised, “I will now arise . . . I will place him in the safety for which he longs.” God didn’t promise to remove the hurt, to change the situation, or to answer David’s request and destroy the wicked, He promised to set David in the safe surrounding of God’s people. We have this terrible tendency in which we flee from fellowship when we experience hurt. We isolate when we should insulate, we run when we should sit down, or we sit alone when we should go and look for others. What I have too often missed is that when the Shepherd leaves the 99 to go and find the one who is lost, hurting or stubborn, it is not so that they can have time alone, it’s so that he can bring him back to the flock. The prayer closet is important, intimacy with God is necessary, a “personal relationship” with Jesus is beautiful, but God created us to be with Him and with each other. We function at our highest, we heal fully, we transform completely when we are fully devoted to God’s presence and God’s people. 

The safety David longed for was not the absence of pain or enemies, it was to be surrounded by brothers and sisters. I think often of the words the angel spoke to Elijah in I Kings 19, “the journey is too much for you”. Then the angel cooked for Elijah, fed him and gave him water, and Elijah was empowered to go on a journey that just hours earlier had been “too much”. Our journey is too much for us. We face a journey that will bring us to and through discouragement and dysfunction, heartbreak and hurt, some will endure betrayal and loss, the experiences may be different, but the journey is the same in that it’s not just too much for you, it’s too much for me, it’s too much for all of us. But just as the angel provided Elijah with the food he would need for the journey and God gave David the promise he would need to endure, God has given us each other. We fight from weakness when we fight alone. We turn into those who “have a form of godliness but deny the power” when we separate ourselves from each other. How much clearer could God be about our created need for interdependent relationship: “It is not good for man to be alone . . .”; “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed”; “not neglecting meeting together . . . but encouraging one another”? If the first church, the church meant to be our example in following Christ and witnessing to the world, was devoted to God’s presence and God’s people, how can we be different? How can we can neglect God’s people and still be in right fellowship with God’s presence? 

David’s turning point was a simple promise from God, that He would restore him to the place of safety that came from fellowship with the faithful. Elijah’s turning point came when God partnered him with Elisha. Maybe your turning point will be when you choose God’s people even while you’re still lamenting your difficulty? We all know we need God’s presence, my prayer today is that we will come to believe that we also need God’s people, that our safety is not only found when we are in God’s hands, it’s also when we are with God’s people.