Never abandoned

Can I ask you a question today?: Have you ever followed God into somewhere or something—and when you got into that somewhere or something the mess was so bad you said, “Now God you got me IN this mess—so now if you got me in this mess—why do I feel like I’m all of a sudden all by myself?”

In order to really understand, say, the 24th Psalm, you’ve got to understand what David is going through.
It is a cry for help
It is a cry for deliverance out of something that David never would have been in if he wasn’t following God.

Isn’t it amazing that sometimes it appears that when you are following God it can often appear that you are in more of a mess than you were before you decided to follow God’s will, God’s purpose and God’s plan?

Sometimes it seems that despite all we're going through, God still is capable of fixing things. But isn’t it amazing that sometimes you follow God and then wonder why in the world you followed God because what you ended up in was not what you thought that you were going towards in the first place?

Isn’t it amazing that every now and then you can feel like you are all by yourself.

Now you must understand initially—that when he says “Why have you forsaken me”…he is not talking about the ABSENCE of the PRESENCE of God. And we know he’s not talking about that because he’s talking to God.  In other words, he’s not complaining there is no God. He’s complaining, screaming, yelling, painfully calling out to a God who he feels simply is somewhere else. He’s saying God is doing things, just not with him.

When he says “God, you’re forsaking me”…the spirit of the text suggests that he is confessing “God you are ignoring me”. It’s not that you’re not here—but God you are ignoring me. And the reason that I feel that you are ignoring me is because I don’t see anything on the outward exterior happening on my behalf.

What we call that feeling of being ignored is being abandoned.

Now, rejection or abandonment by people is a fairly common experience. Friends leave us, family have feuds, even marriages break down. Those feelings of abandonment often cut deep, cut hard and cut long. Abandonment represents core human fear. We have all experienced it.

But none of that is near the situation that feeling God is around but isn’t doing anything on our behalf is. Being abandoned by a friend isn’t nearly as scare as feeling you’ve been abandoned by God.

You know what I mean – you are in desperate need and he seems to have just abandoned you. Like Elvis, God has left the building.

It may have been that you were ill or maybe had a friend or a parent or child that was desperately ill and you were crying out to God, asking him for help.

Maybe.

Just maybe.