Psalms

If you’re going through a hard time of one kind or another, it helps to have company – people around you who can give you companionship, support, love and care. It helps not to be alone. But it helps even more if the people who are with you have had some kind of experience similar to yours. It means they can relate to what you’re going through. They can begin to see life in your shoes and to empathise. Then you’re truly not alone.

Life can be cruel. Cruel to you personally, cruel to your family, cruel to your business. You see much cruelty on the news, and it can make you wonder if God is, in fact, cruel. Many people who don’t believe in God don’t believe in God because they think, from looking around them, that if there is a God, he must be a cruel God. And, as awful as it is to live in a world with nobody at the controls, it would be even worse to live in a world where there is a tyrant at the controls. And so they choose to conclude it would be better if there was no one.

As we come to look at Psalm 23 together, I’m very conscious that we are on hallowed ground. This is probably one of the most loved passages in the Bible, one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, possibly second only to John 3:16, with which Tony opened our service. Many Christians have derived great comfort, support, and help from these familiar words over the years.

It's become fashionable these days to say that there is no God. It's a bit of a modern fad. For example, Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Or the actress Emma Thompson says: "It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing. I am offended by some of the things in the Bible and in the Quran, and I refute them."

If you're ever gone for a long bike ride, or a walk, or a run, you need to know where you are and where you're going. You have to get your bearings. Perhaps you've done that thing where you get on a train or you get on a bus and you get it to drop you off some distance from where you live, or from where you're staying, and then you walk, run, or cycle back to where you started. As you get off the bus or the train, you're looking around, aren't you? Going, "Well, where am I? Which direction was the bus going in when it dropped me? What landmarks are there to tell me where I am?

Why don't you come with me? We love a warm invitation to join in something special. Come with me to the concert at the open-air theatre. Come with me on our holiday. Maybe even, for some of you, the reason you're here this morning in church is because someone who comes here regularly said to you, "I'm going to church on Sunday – come with me."

Have you ever felt hemmed in? Your problems are so vast, there is no way out you can see, so that you just feel claustrophobic? Trapped. Squeezed.

If so, this Psalm is for you.

Under pressure. Pressure pushing down on me. Pressing down on you, no man ask for. Under pressure that burns a building down. Splits a family in two. Puts people on streets. It's the terror of knowing what the world is about. Watching some good friends screaming, "Let me out!" Pray tomorrow gets me higher. Pressure on people, people on streets.

Have you ever felt as if everything is against you? As if everything you touch goes wrong? As if you’re experiencing difficulties from which there is no way out? Felt the pressure of people who are determined to stand in your way and make your life difficult, and you’re just powerless to clear your own path?

I know some of you have been there, because you’ve shared that with me. I’ve certainly been there.

It can be a black place to be, hemmed in, with others deliberately making things difficult.

Most people would appreciate some help when it comes to praying.

Many of us doubt whether God hears us if we pray. Many of us are unsure what we ought to pray for. Which means many of us don’t.

If you were here last week, we began a journey through the first few chapters in the book of Psalms. Psalms is part of the Bible, which means it’s God’s word to us. But unusually, it also contains our words to God. It’s a collection of hymns and prayers, for the people of God, all down the ages. It’s God giving us words to pray, and words to sing.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.”

At 13, I started at a new school. My parent were abroad, so it was a boarding school. And one of my new friends had been taught by his parents to pray that prayer every night.

It’s not a bad prayer as it happens. But it’s clearly a child’s prayer.

For an adult, life is messy and complicated. And we need a prayer life that is fit for the real world.

Many of us don’t pray. Or if we do, we’re unsure what we ought to pray for.