04/13/2026
Psalm 13 – How Long, O Lord
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, 4 lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,” lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. 5 But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 6 I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Wrestling with God
Psalm 13 is one of the clearest examples of a lament prayer. These are the kind of desperate, heart-wrenching, intense prayers that make up much of the book of Psalms and honestly make me uncomfortable and comforted at the same time. If I'm being honest, it makes me uncomfortable to see a devoted follower of God, not to mention the anointed King David, accusing and questioning God so blatantly: "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (v.1). How can a man of God get to such a point as to question God's presence? How could the King of God's people who knew God so intimately accuse God of hiding from him? And how could a holy God allow a man to talk to him this way? How could a perfect God let someone accuse him of abandonment like this?
I believe these prayers are uncomfortable to me because they feel too messy, too real, and too close to home to be considered Scripture and "God-breathed." This is the type of messy prayer I often want to pray but am at times too afraid to say out loud. And yet, here it is in Scripture. Why? This is where Psalm 13 becomes comforting. Maybe messy prayers like Psalm 13 are in Scripture because God welcomes my wrestling so much he wants to give me a template, an example on how to do them. Maybe because when God asks me to surrender myself, he means every part of me, not just the presentable parts. Maybe because the Creator wants me to come to him even if all I have are difficult questions because I am still coming to him instead of retreating from him (v.1-2). The truth is, if I never come to God with my difficult questions and feelings of abandonment, I will never get to the point where I can declare "I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation"
~ Jaxon Harden
