Before We Know To Ask

Before We Know to Ask

Psalm 31:1-5, 9-16[1]

Trust is a precious commodity these days. It seems the more divided we become as a people, the less we’re willing to risk trusting anyone. Many of us live by the motto, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” We’re just wired that way. Self-reliance has been a virtue for generations, since long before Emerson wrote an essay about it.[2] We believe in pulling ourselves up by our own “bootstraps.” And that can make it difficult to trust—really trust—anyone. After all, making the choice to trust someone, anyone, means taking the risk that our trust will be broken. It’s simply one of the costs of living fully. It’s much easier to withdraw into our protective shell and isolate from anyone who might hurt us in any way. But if we want to experience the full spectrum of what it means to live this human life, we’ll have to learn to trust.

I think our general attitude about trusting anybody for anything rubs off on our ability to trust God. As we’ve seen in our journey through the Psalms during Lent, the psalm-singers framed trusting God as a matter of relying on God wholly and completely for every aspect of our lives. That cuts directly against the grain of our self-reliance. From my perspective, trusting God means acknowledging that there’s nothing we can do to come up with a better version of our past. It means accepting our lives just as they are in the present moment. And it means entrusting our future entirely into God’s hands. It’s hard to do that when we’re busy trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Even and especially when we can’t even find any straps to pull ourselves up by, or when we’ve lost the strength to even take hold of the straps, let alone pull them up.

I believe our Psalm for today addresses this question of trusting God with every aspect of life. It may be difficult to hear that, however. Because Luke’s Gospel has Jesus cry out, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” as his dying breath (Lk 23:46), we tend to hear Psalm 31 as a “prayer for the dying.” We think that the Psalm is about giving up our “spirit” into God’s hands at death. But the prayer in Psalm 31 is better translated, “Into your hands I commit my very life,” as in the New International Reader’s Version we used in worship today. I’ve mentioned before that the Hebrew word translated “spirit” in the Psalm means more than we may think. It refers to one’s whole existence, heart and mind, body and soul. It’s like the way we use the word “self.” Entrusting one’s very “self” to God in this way is not a prayer for dying, but rather a prayer for living.

 In Psalm 31, the psalm-singer recalls all the hardships of life, including the “frenemies” who sought to undo him, along with all the anxiety and sorrow that caused.[3] As a result of the anguish he had borne, the psalm-singer could say, “I am as forgotten as a dead man” (cf. Ps. 31:12, TEV). He likens himself to so much “broken pottery.” And yet, in spite of all the pain he’s had to endure, at the end of the day he summed up his trust in God by saying, “my times are in your hand” (Ps. 31:15). Again, this points us in the direction that the Psalm is a “life-prayer.” In this song, the psalm-singer expresses his faith in terms of relying on God wholly and completely for all of life.

Another reason for seeing Psalm 31 as a “life-prayer” is because the psalm-singer expresses his confidence in the “faithful God.” That’s the second part of the prayer: “Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God” (Ps. 31:5, NRSV). In Hebrew the idea of God as the “faithful God” is literally worded, “the God of truth” (el-emeth). One could also translate this as “the God of trustworthiness.” This phrase points us to the one whose very character is defined by dependability. The psalm-singer entrusts his entire life to “the God who can be relied on … because [God] is true to himself.”[4] Being dependable, being reliable, being trustworthy in relationship to us all is what it means for God to be true to himself. The psalm-singer shows his confidence in the God who is always faithful by essentially praying, “it is up to you, God, what becomes of me, and I am willing to have it so.”[5]  

As we’re learning about “Faith in the Psalms” during Lent this year, I think that may be the foundation for everything else. To be sure, like the rest of the Bible, faith has different facets in the Psalms. Sometimes we learn faith by hearing about all the ways God was faithful to people in the past. Sometimes we learn faith from their affirmations about God, like “God’s love never fails.” And sometimes we learn faith by following the example of those who entrusted their lives wholly and completely to God. When we take that step of faith, we’re not just engaged in so much wishful thinking. In the Psalms, faith is based on the firm foundation that God’s love for us never fails. And through the stories of those who entrusted their lives to him, God has demonstrated time and again that he is the God we can rely on. More than that, we have our own experiences of God being there for us, through good times and bad times. Again and again, God has been true to himself by being true to us. God does this simply because that’s who God is. God is the “faithful God” in whose hands we can “entrust” our “times,” all our times, past, present, and future.

If you’ve been in worship here for a while, and if you’ve been paying attention, it’s likely you recognized the title of my sermon for today, “Before We Know to Ask.” It’s a phrase I’ve used every week in my pastoral prayer since before I came here over ten years ago. I don’t use that phrase because it’s something I just memorized or it’s an “easy” way to close my prayer. I composed that phrase years ago as a way of concluding my prayer with the kind of trust this Psalm expresses. It’s a way of formulating in words that I hope we can all relate to the faith that the psalm-singers encourage us to embrace. It’s the faith that God always shows us grace, mercy, and love in little ways every day. Theologians call it God’s “prevenient grace.” I know that’s not likely a phrase you’re familiar with. One of the things I love about the Reformed Christian tradition to which we in the Presbyterian Church belong is that we believe God’s grace is always “prevenient.” That means it always precedes anything we might do. A theology of grace teaches us that God is constantly at work in all our lives, even and especially when we’re not aware of it. God is “for us” in many more ways that we can know simply because that’s what it means for God to be true to himself. And God’s unfailing love always precedes our asking or even knowing what to ask for!

Our faith is not about “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps”! Our faith teaches us to recognize that we don’t have any bootstraps strong enough to actually pull ourselves up at all. Every grace, every mercy, all the goodness in our lives comes as a gift from God’s love. Our faith is not about relying on ourselves for every little thing. It’s about acknowledging that there’s nothing we can do to come up with a better version of our past. It’s about accepting our lives just as they are in the present moment. And it’s about entrusting our future entirely into God’s hands. We do that when we follow the psalm-singer’s example and entrust our “times,” all the times of our lives, into God’s hands. We do that when we live out the faith that the God whose essential character is reliable, trustworthy, and faithful will bring grace, mercy and love into our lives before we even know to ask.

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/13/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, 1841; accessed at https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html

[3] Most modern versions follow the (Greek) Septuagint version which reads “misery” in v. 10 rather than “iniquity” in the Hebrew text (and KJV, ASV, NASB, ESV, CEV, NET, NLT [2015; NLT 1996 has “misery”]; contrast GNV, “pain”).  Cf. H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 360; Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50, 258.

[4] James L. Mays, Psalms, 143; cf. also Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 363, who renders it “the faithful, dependable God.” He also adds (p. 365), “The truth of God is the confirmation of [God’s] grace and faithfulness.”  See further, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.1:459-60, where he relates this to the doctrine of God’s “simplicity,” or the idea that God is entirely true to himself when God relates to us with love, mercy, grace, and patience. God does so because God has chosen to do so, and because God always faithful to God’s self. It is a matter of “the unity of grace and holiness, mercy and righteousness, patience and wisdom, in the total work of His love” (ibid, 460).

[5] This is Mays’ interpretation of “into your hands I commit my spirit.”  Cf. Mays, Psalms, 144.