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.
[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.
