How do you heal the pain in your life? Many people are suffering from emotional pain and it seems they just cannot move on. So they fill their lives with whining and complaining and it gets harder for them everyday to enjoy life. When they talk to others, often they hold 30-minute monologues about all the things that they are struggling with in their lives. As a result, they become lonely because very few people want to hang out with people who suck your energy.
That doesn’t mean we’re never supposed to complain. Many of the Psalms are filled with complaints as well, but the writers of those Psalms bring their complaints to God before they bring them to anyone else.
King David was an expert complainer, and Psalm 69 is one of the prayers he prayed asking God to turn things around in his life. In this Psalm we can see how he turned his pain into praise. It seems that here he expresses the feelings he had when he was hurt by people who doubted his integrity when he raised an enormous amount of money and resources to build the temple in Jerusalem.
A great summary of this Psalm are verses 29 and 30 (NLT):
I am suffering and in pain.
Rescue me, O God, by your saving power.
Then I will praise God’s name with singing,
and I will honor him with thanksgiving.
What are the some of the things David did to turn all the pain he was suffering into praise?
1) He acknowledged his situation
David said to God that he was in suffering and in pain. A big part of the Psalm puts more words to these feelings of David (see vv.1-4,7-11). It even got so bad that David said: “I am the favorite topic of town gossip, and all the drunks sing about me” (v.12). When was the last time the drunks in your town sang about you? That’s what I mean… it got pretty bad for David!
Before David could receive any healing, he needed to look in the mirror and stop pretending! He needed to acknowledge to God that his situation was pretty desperate. And he did! And so should we if we want the pain we are carrying around to be turned to praise.
2) He prayed, prayed and prayed
Psalm 69 is a prayer interjected with lots of complaining (or the other way around: lots of complaining interjected with some prayers). He said: “Rescue me, O God, by your great power!” This was a very short prayer. But short prayers work when you have a solid relationship with the Lord. Why? Just compare how you sometimes only need to look in a certain way or speak one word and your spouse or your best friend immediately knows what’s going on in your mind.
David prayed other kinds of prayers in this Psalm:
- Prayers of confession: “O God, you know how foolish I am; my sins cannot be hidden from you” (v.5)
- Desperate prayers of supplication: “But I keep praying to you, Lord, hoping this time you will show me favor… Rescue me from the mud; don’t let me sink any deeper! … Answer my prayers, O Lord, for your unfailing love is wonderful… Don’t hide from your servant; answer me quickly, for I am in deep trouble! Come and redeem me; free me from my enemies.” (vv.13-14,16-18)
- Angry prayers: “Come and redeem me; free me from my enemies… Let their eyes go blind so they cannot see… pour out your fury on them; consume them with your burning anger… pile their sins up high, and don’t let them go free. Erase their names from the Book of Life…” (vv.18,23,24,27,28). Ssshhh… don’t tell anyone if you ever prayed prayers like this… they make you seem really immature and unspiritual… Just one thought, though: it is much better to communicate with God in anger than not communicate with him at all!
- Thanksgiving: “I will honor him with thanksgiving” (v.30). Always good to be grateful what others do for you, especially if the other person happened to create the universe…
- And then praise…
3) He did not withhold his praise
After he experienced that God had not forgotten him, David said: “Then I will praise God’s name with singing” (v.30). The word used here in Hebrew is “halal” but has nothing to do with food that is ritually clean for Muslims. Here are some of the aspects of the meaning of that Hebrew word: to shine, to praise, to boast, to glory, to act like a mad man, to be clamorously foolish, to rave, to celebrate.
I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a big and loud party!!! Sounds like the party we would have had if Holland had won the World Cup! Or it sounds like the party the Spaniards did have! God is not offended at noise; we are offended when people are noisy. When we are truly full of joy, it’s hard to keep quiet. Let’s praise God with all the strength in us! Let’s learn from David, whose pain led him to pray and his pain finally turned to praise.
David knew that God had called him to build the temple. His son Solomon eventually ended up building the temple with the resources his dad had gathered. This didn’t stop David from writing Psalm 30:11-12:
You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.
You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,
that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!”
Our mourning will turn into dancing, our pain will turn into praise when we acknowledge the situation we are in to the Lord, when we pray, and when we don’t withhold our praise! Why? Because Jesus gave us the victory when He died on the
This blog post is based on Sebastiaan’s message last Sunday in Thousand Hills International Church. If you would like to view the video of the whole message, check it out here:
Turning Pain into Praise (“The Pretenders” series) from Thousand Hills Int’l Church on Vimeo.