Have you ever felt the shame of your sin? Something you did or an attitude you embodied that was off the mark, unrighteous, unbalancing, tearing at relationships—whether with others or yourself and always with God? Have you ever felt the weight of sin, the consequences of transgressing the way you know, the emotional pangs of discomfort, the relational pangs of broken trust, the physical pangs of ruined opportunities?
Certainly, we can all identity with David in Psalm 39. Suffering because of our own sin. After all, not all suffering is circumstantial, the consequence of others’ actions, a world in pain or malevolent spirits. We are complicit in our suffering too. If we are honest, as honest as David in Psalm 39, we are cognizant of our contributions and so we try our best not to complain, to “not sin with my tongue”, and add more debt to our account with God when the internal and external repercussions of our transgressions weigh upon us. But, if we are honest, as honest as David in Psalm 39, our emotions can never remain repressed. No matter our righteous desire to “guard my tongue with a muzzle”, to not murmur against God and become like the wicked; the suffering heats up within us and bursts into flame like kerosene soaked kindling thrown upon a pile of ashes hiding white hot embers under the surface—“the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue.”
No matter the suffering, we cannot white knuckle through the painful tears of our own sin. We must cry out like David, “O Lord…” Yet, it is what follows the cry that matters most. David desires relief, but years of communion with God and saturation in the stories of his faith has taught him that his momentary suffering, as deserving and self-inflicted as it may be, is not purposeless; not outside the hand of the one to whom he sinned against; “for it is you [God] who have done it.” David desires mercy, “Deliver me from all my transgressions”, he longs for the grace he has known before, “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry…” and which goes back long before him, “For I am sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers.” He even knows that he will indeed see the wrath of God turn away from him, “that I may smile again…” Yet there is a purpose to the in-between, a purpose to the suffering that is not merely punishment but a process of resurrection.
David cries first, not for relief but for perspective, for his relativeness to God, to his place in time and eternity, “O LORD, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!” He wants the experience of Job, the thunder cloud that reminds Job of God’s awesomeness and puts all the things that humanity chases, all the things that drew him to sin, into proper perspective as “mere breath…a shadow…Surely for nothing, a noise of nothing, they are in turmoil; man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!”
When David can see himself and the things he strove for other than God in proper (eternal) perspective, then he can ask for deliverance, relief of suffering in sure hope. For he recognizes that “When you [God] discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him…”. God wants David’s affections, and David knows it. He also knows that it is only through the discipline that what he loves that is less, that tears at him and others, will be eaten away, and replaced with a love that builds up. Indeed, his suffering is both temporal and effective, the “arrows of judgment aimed at provoking repentance.”
The author of Hebrews sums it up this way,
“It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you like sons and daughters…he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
Are you suffering in your sin? Cry out to our Father for perspective, eternal realities and temporal durations, and with sure hope, endure the pangs of dying to sin and being made alive in Christ.
— Jeremy Pace