Nine years is a long time to say the same sentence.
He knows the exact wording of it now. It has been polished by repetition into something quite short, and he says it the same way every night, and it has the worn quality of a step that thousands of feet have walked on.
The first year he prayed it with his whole chest.
The second year he prayed it with hope and a certain amount of technique, because by then he had read some things about how to pray, and he had tried several of them.
The fourth year he prayed it angrily for about three months and then apologized.
And somewhere around the sixth year the sentence changed its function without his permission. It stopped being a request. It became a thing he does, like locking a door, and the doing of it is no longer connected to any expectation of anything.
That is not the hard part.
The hard part is what has grown up underneath it in the silence, which is a conclusion he never once said out loud in nine years, and it goes like this.
If it were going to happen, it would have happened. Which means something about me.
He does not know what the something is. That is the cruelty of it. It is not a specific accusation he could answer. It is a general sense that the length of a silence is a measurement of a person.
So let me ask you, and take your time about it.
How long have you been asking for the same thing?
God put the complaint in the songbook
There is a psalm that is thirteen verses long in some translations and six in others, and it opens in a way that ought to be more shocking than it is.
How long, Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?Psalm 13:1 and 2
Count the times he asks. Four, in two verses, and somebody kept every one of them. You are in good company and you are in the songbook, and the Holy Spirit has never used the length of a silence to say anything about the worth of a man.
Four times. How long. Four times in two verses, from a man who is not on the edge of faith but at the center of it, and who wrote a great deal of the material this whole religion sings.
Now hold on to the fact that matters most about that psalm, which is not what David felt.
It is that somebody kept it.
Somebody copied it out. Somebody put it in the collection that the people of God would sing together, publicly, for the next three thousand years, and nobody along the way decided that this was an embarrassing lapse best left out of the official record.
God has a hymn in His own book that asks Him, four times, why He is not answering.
Hear what that does to nine years of a conclusion you have never said aloud.
You are not being measured by the length of a silence. Scripture puts how long in the songbook and keeps it there, and the Spirit has never once used a delay as a message about somebody's worth.
Let me put it the way we would put it at a table, which is directly.
If a long wait were evidence against a person, that psalm would be a confession. And it is not filed as a confession. It is filed as a song, in the section for singing, which means the community that received it understood that a person can be entirely right with God and asking how long at the same time.
And there is one more thing in that psalm, and I want you to notice where it sits.
It does not end with an answer. Look. Nothing gets resolved in the text. David does not report that God explained, or that the thing changed, or that he understood afterwards why it took so long.
What he says at the end is: But I trust in Your unfailing love.
But. Not because. Not now that. He turns without being given anything to turn on, and the psalm stops there, unresolved and unashamed of being unresolved.
The word says he trusted in the mercy, and the Spirit is the One holding a person in exactly that place, which is a real place with a great many faithful people standing in it.
But you are not being measured by a length. Psalm 13 asks how long four times in two verses and the whole community kept it for singing, and the Spirit has never used a delay as a message about somebody's worth.
So here is what changes, and it is not a technique and it is not a promise.
I am not going to tell you it will happen soon. I do not know that. Nobody who tells you that knows it either, and this house does not put a date on God for anybody.
I am going to tell you what the nine years are not.
They are not a verdict on you. They are not a message He is sending by not sending one. They are not the measurement of a person who has fallen short of something.
The word says how long is in the songbook, and the man who wrote it was the one God called a man after His own heart, and both of those things are true at once and always have been.
You have been trying to read a silence. Stop reading it. It was never a text.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Nine years, you are a length and you are not a verdict. Psalm 13 asks how long four times in two verses and God kept it in the songbook, so you are not a measurement of me and you never were.
- Conclusion I have never said out loud, that if it were going to happen it would have happened by now, you have grown in the dark for six years and in the name of Jesus I bring you into the light and end you. The Holy Spirit who did the pouring has not once used a delay to say something about a person's worth.
- Lord, Psalm 13 has David turning to Your unfailing love without being given one thing to turn on, and Your Spirit has never once used a length as a message about a man. I am sitting in this chair tonight asking for nothing at all, and the silence was never a text for me to read.
Psalm 13:1
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
