How Long, O Lord? Learning to Pray Through Pain

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Learning the Language of Biblical Lament"

"Handling Unswered Prayer"

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Dannah Gresh:

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long will I store up anxious concerns within me,
agony in my mind every day? (Psalm 13:1–2 CSB)

Have you ever been this honest with God? Or—and be real with me—are you afraid to be? Maybe you’re worried it’s not appropriate to express this depth of emotion to the Lord. But here’s the thing. Those words I just read were penned by King David, and Scripture calls him a man after God’s own heart.

So maybe, just maybe, it’s more than okay to be honest with the Lord. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s what God wants from you, His dearly loved daughter.

I’m your host, Dannah Gresh. You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Our first guest is going to read more of David’s prayer with us in a moment. Mark Vroegop is President of The Gospel Coalition—and he’s had many opportunities to pray through pain over the years, as a pastor, but also as a husband and father. 

One of those painful moments began when his wife Sarah noticed their nearly full-term baby girl wasn’t moving. 

Mark Vroegop: After my wife told me that something was wrong, I immediately fell to my knees and just cried out to the Lord. I said, “Lord, please, not this!” I was just sensing that we needed His help, and also, there was a great level of fear of what might be in front of us.

Eventually, we made our way to the hospital, and it was confirmed that our daughter inside the womb had passed away. She had died. We were just a few days before delivery. Then my poor wife had to go through delivering a child that wasn’t alive but fully formed. Sylvia was her name, and she weighed nine pounds.

That set us into a long journey of grief that was just unbelievable, and yet, also very, very instructive. It shaped our understanding of ministry, of loss, and also what it really means to lament.

Dannah: This was one major part of a series of losses that Mark and Sarah experienced in relation to childbearing.

Mark: Yes, little did we know that was only the beginning! One of the scariest things about grief is the fear that it won’t go away or that something will happen again. There were multiple miscarriages, a false positive pregnancy, moments when, frankly, we wondered, God, are You mean? What is going on?

And then, all of the emotions connected with that we’re trying to think through, knowing that God isn’t mean. But when you’re in the midst of a dark valley of suffering, there are just really challenging questions that emerge. And then, what do you do with those?

Dannah: Mark sat down with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth to unpack that question. What do we do with our pain? How do we pray through our pain?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I’ve known you and Sarah all these years and watched you not only go through this, but watched God redeem it in your lives and bring beauty out of things that looked like they had no beauty attached to them.

But that really was the beginning of a journey for you and Sarah in this whole thing called “lament.” It feels like a really old-fashioned word. That’s not an everyday word that we use in our Christian language. But it’s something that at some point in our lives, every one of us needs this concept, this understanding, of lament.

Mark: It is, because life is filled with all kinds of sorrows and pains. If you live long enough, you’re going to suffer. And when you suffer, and if you’re a follower of Jesus, you need to land in trusting God’s purposes and in His sovereignty. But how do you get there?

I think lament is the language that helps you move from the poles of a hard life to trusting in God’s sovereignty. I also think that anybody can cry. To cry is human. We enter the world by crying, but to lament is inherently Christian.

So I think there is not only a place for helping people to know how to deal with their grief, but also realizing that of all the people on earth who ought to know how to lament, it ought to be people who know the redemptive arc of biblical history and the fact that we’re waiting for the King of kings to come and end all of our pain so that there will be no more lament!

Nancy: Amen! Amen! Let it come!

Mark: Amen!

Nancy: So, Mark help us. What’s the difference between just natural crying in a time of difficulty and Christian lament?

Mark: By definition, “lament” is a prayer in pain that leads to trust. Crying is simply expressing sorrow . . . and there’s nothing wrong with the expression of sorrow. Our world is filled with all sorts of issues where we’re mourning various losses.

But what Christian lament is, is taking that pain and talking to God about it for the purpose of seeing it as a platform for worship, as opposed to a pit of despair that I’m going to linger in. And so, what lament is, it’s a biblical language that allows us to move through our pain while talking to God. We are reinforcing what we believe to be true, and also being gut-level honest about how much this hurts!

Nancy: One of the earliest psalms of lament in the psalm book is Psalm 13. I wonder if you’d just read that psalm for us. We’ve probably heard it before, but it’s probably not the first one we go to when we’re hurting.

I think it illustrates so beautifully and poignantly the freedom we have to (and maybe the duty) in our times of dealing with injustice or pain or things not being right in this world to be honest with God as the psalmist was. So this is a prayer; it’s a prayer of lament. Just to give us a feel for that category of psalms in the Scripture, would you read that for us?

Mark: I’m happy to. It’s one of my favorites.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
[lift] up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him,"
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13:1–6).

Nancy: That’s Psalm 13, and in just the space of six verses there, we go from—count ’em—one, two, three, four, “how longs?” “How long, O Lord?” That’s this crisis of faith; this, “I don’t know if I can endure this any longer! When are You going to do something about this situation?”

You read about sleeping the sleep of death, enemies prevailing, foes rejoicing, being shaken. That’s the crisis. And then it turns the corner and, before he’s done this prayer, he’s come to trusting in the steadfast love of God.

These things—this honest crying out to the Lord and this steadfast hope in the Lord—can coexist, that they can be in the same heart and in the same prayer.

Mark: They not only can coexist, they should coexist. Because in their coexistence, they actually platform something really beautiful about Christianity, which is: in the midst of the darkest moment, there are equal truths that simply exist next to one another.

“Hard is really hard!” And yet, hard is not bad. “My life is not what I expected it to be!” And yet, God is so incredibly good! That’s why the word “but” . . . every lament turns on a word like that: “This is all true . . . but God is good!” “This is really hard . . . but God is faithful.”

Nancy: What happens if we skip the, “This is really hard” part? What happens if we try to just force ourselves or others to jump to the, “I trust in Your mercy, Your steadfast love,” but we don’t take time to voice the lament part? What does that do to us?

Mark: I think that it makes the level of trust that we’re really able to experience shallow compared to when you’re able to plumb the depths of your pain and to realize that, “Every depth of what I’ve felt, God is able to meet me there! There’s no place that pain can lead me that Jesus can’t show up in!”

There’s no place that pain can lead me that Jesus can’t show up.

I think the more honest we are . . . and, frankly, those aren’t surprising words to God. Our honesty doesn’t take Him by surprise, doesn’t inform Him about anything, but it reminds me, “God can go the distance with me in my pain!”

That’s one of the things people want to know. Is there hope not just for today, but is there hope for the next number of years? Because what happens if this happens again, or what happens if this gets worse!? By going to a point where we are able to really voice the depth of our pain, we’re able to find that even then God shows up and can meet our needs. We can trust Him!

Dannah: Mark Vroegop on learning the biblical language of lament. Is there something you need to lament in your life right now? Let this be your permission slip to get on your knees—to offer up a prayer in pain that leads to trust. 

Maybe you need to do that right now. I want you to know something, I've been there. I've been there when the pain was so deep and I didn't know how to pray. That's when I discovered the word "lament." I learned it was a whole other way Christians can pray. 

I discovered the power of that word in the pages of Habakkuk, and we're going to head there now. God’s Word invites us to cry out to Him, to seek Him for help and deliverance when we’re suffering. But what about when it feels like God is silent? What do we do then? Nancy’s gonna help you answer that tough question with some wisdom from the book of Habakkuk. 

Nancy: Be honest! Haven’t you had those times where you say, “I know what God’s Word says, but I’ve been praying. I’ve been crying out, and it doesn’t seem that God is hearing or answering my prayers.”

Then there are those times when we ask for things that seem to be clearly in line with God’s will, but nothing happens, as far as we can see. Or, perhaps, the opposite happens. You’re praying for something, and then it seems like God does just the opposite.

I remember a number of years ago where I had been praying about something along with a number of other people for a long, long time. And then, the door was totally shut, and it seemed as if God had brought an outcome that was absolutely, one hundred percent contrary to what we’d been praying and asking Him for all those months.

I can tell you that for months afterward, I could hardly read my Bible because every time I’d come to those promises about God hearing and answering prayer, I felt mocked.

Now, in my head and in my theology, I knew better than to say, “God doesn’t hear or answer prayer,” but that’s how I felt. I felt like, “Why did God put these promises in the Bible? They don’t seem to have any truth.”

So then, the next question is, “What’s the use of praying?” Why pray? Why keep on praying? Does prayer really do anything? Is it worth continuing to labor in prayer for the salvation of this husband, for the repentance of this son or daughter, for a change in this situation, for revival in my church?

It seems like nothing is happening. Habakkuk says to God, “I’m distressed by the violence and the corruption I see around me, and God I tell You about it; I cry out for help, but there’s no evidence that You’re listening, and if You are, You’re certainly not doing anything about it.”

“You will not save,” he says. You can just hear the pain in Habakkuk’s voice, the pain in his heart. His plea, “God, why won’t You do something?”

Sometimes it seems that God isn’t doing anything about the suffering, the injustice, the abuse around us. Is God oblivious? Does He even know what’s going on? And we say, “Of course He knows. He’s omniscient. He knows everything.”

Well, if He knows, doesn’t He care? Well, yes, of course. He loves and He cares. Well, if He cares, is He impotent to do anything about the situation? Well, no, He’s all powerful. Well, if He’s all powerful, why doesn’t He intervene?

You see, you get yourself in this circle of these unanswered questions, and any one of those possibilities—that God doesn’t hear or God doesn’t care or God is impotent or God is just choosing not to intervene—any one of those possibilities puts God in a pretty negative light.

It shakes up your world. Why doesn’t God save that child? Why doesn’t God change that situation?

It reminds me of the story in John chapter 11, when Mary and Martha have sent for Jesus because their brother Lazarus was sick.

They knew Jesus could heal him, could do something about it, but Jesus, for unfathomable reasons, decided to stay where He was for an extra four days. By the time He arrived in Bethany, their brother had died.

First, Martha, and then Mary, say to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. Our brother would still be alive.” The implication is, “Why? Why didn’t You do something? Why didn’t You care?”

There’s this sense of perhaps accusing God with wrong doing. By contrast, I think of Job chapter 1. Remember when Job faced crisis after crisis after crisis in his life, one on top of the other?

The Scripture says in all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. Now, that changed later on in the book of Job, but initially, early on, Job never charged God with wrong doing. He assumed there were things God knew that he didn’t know.

But so often, we don’t have that picture. We just have our perspective on it. We say, “Lord, don’t You care? If You’d have been here . . . why didn’t You do something?”

So we have that challenge of long-term, ongoing, unrelenting pain and problems.

Listen. Anyone can trust God with one bad day or short-term situations. But when you have long-haul suffering, it gets tough.

When you have that elderly parent who’s hanging on by a thread to life, but is in such pain. The parent is dying from cancer, who’s weak and feeble, and you say, “Lord, why don’t You take her? Why do You let her suffer on like this?

It’s the long-haul. It’s the ongoing. It’s that son or daughter who’s been away from God for years and years and has created such havoc and pain in your family. And you cry out, “How long, Lord? I keep crying out to you, Lord, but still, You don’t do anything.” It’s that “How long?” question.

“You will not hear.” Habakkuk accuses God of not listening to him. Ultimately, as we go through this book, we’ll see that Habakkuk comes to realize that he has not been listening to God.

God has been listening to him, but Habakkuk needs to learn to listen to God, and that’s what prayer really is. It’s learning to listen to God. Yes, giving Him our honest questions and then listening to what God has to say, listening to God give us His perspective.

And so, Habakkuk cries out persistently, he cries out long-term. There’s no apparent answer. Ultimately, God’s going to answer, but God says, “I’m not necessarily going to answer immediately, and I’m not going to necessarily answer in the way that you would choose.”

As we read through the book of Habakkuk, you’ll see that God never answers all of Habakkuk’s questions.

(And I hope that you’re doing that with us through these weeks. I want to encourage you not just to read it once, but to read it over and over again to grapple with the things that Habakkuk grapples with.)

It’s not that God doesn’t know the answers, but God never gives Habakkuk all the answers, and the answers God does give raise even more questions, as we’ll see as we get into chapter 1.

I want to tell you that God is not going to answer all of your questions. If you knew all the answers, you would be God, and you wouldn’t need God. God’s not going to answer all your questions, but I’ll tell you what He will do.

As you ask honest questions and then as you listen to God, He will reveal Himself to you. God gives Habakkuk a broader, eternal perspective that makes him willing to go on, able to go on, without knowing all the answers.

God wants to give you a perspective that will enable you to face your situation, to face your circumstances without knowing all the whys. Habakkuk ultimately comes to a point of being able to worship without understanding everything that is going on.

That takes faith, and the kind of faith that can worship when we don’t know the answers is what pleases God. 

That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? It’s this question: Is God worthy of my trust? Can God be trusted? I want to tell you that the answer is a resounding YES!

He can be trusted. He is worthy of your trust. And as you ask your honest questions—not accusing God, but putting yourself in a position where God can reveal Himself to you and can give you His perspective on circumstances—you will find that God really can be trusted. And then your worrying will turn to worship. No longer “Why?” but, “God, I worship You.”

Dannah: A hard truth, but a sweet one from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Do we believe that getting more of God is sweeter than getting the answers to all our questions? This isn’t a natural way of thinking; it's spiritual.

Holy Spirit, would you teach us to treasure You more than we treasure any earthly good? You is better. Help us to believe it.

What you just heard is part of a larger Habakkuk study. You can find the rest of it at a link in today’s transcript. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend for that. 

Now, we’ve been talking a lot about expressing our pain to God authentically. And our last guest is going to show us something powerful: These raw emotions, these honest questions are more than allowed; they’re what make us human.

Pastor John Piper made this point recently in response to a thoughtful question. One of his "Ask Pastor John" podcast listeners wrote, “My friend believes that emotions aren’t all that important in the Christian life. I completely disagree with him. To do so, I point to Psalm 73:25–26, where the psalmist expresses deep affection for God, saying, ‘Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.’ How do you view the role of emotions in our relationship with God? I know this is big for you. How would you talk to my friend?”

Here’s Pastor John.

Dr. John Piper: Let’s start with artificial intelligence and what it means to be human.

The emotional life of the soul—let’s be specific—the satisfaction of our souls in Jesus has everything to do with our own ultimate identity as human beings. This is a big deal, not marginal. Who you are matters. What are you made for? What are you threatened by?

One could be threatened by artificial intelligence, if you think your most defining essence as a human being is the power of reason or thinking or intelligence or speech or language. You’re in trouble. Suddenly a machine can think and speak better than you can, better than I can.

Is that threatening to you? Does it give you a sense of unease or even maybe panic that, well, maybe we’re not anything more than the accumulation of biological machine parts, and the brain is nothing more than a computer put together by matter and time and chance? I think that would make me afraid. If I thought that my most essential identity was now done by a machine, I think my life would be just about ready to disintegrate.

But I don’t think that. I don’t think it about me. I don’t think it about anybody listening to this podcast. That’s not the essence of who you are as a human being in God’s image. The spiritual capacity of your soul to see and savor—that’s an emotion of the soul, it is a capacity of the soul to delight and rejoice in and treasure. The capacity of your soul to see and savor the glory of Jesus is the essence of your uniqueness as a human being.

Now, here’s my second answer. Namely, what the emotions have to do with suffering.

The New Testament teaches that to be a Christian is to suffer—no getting around it. No one can suffer properly as a Christian without finding his supreme satisfaction in God. That’s the answer.

If you’re a Christian, you’re going to suffer.

Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. (Acts 14:22)

All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. (2 Tim. 3:12)

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matt. 16:24)

[We are] fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8:17)

Every Christian must suffer. There is no other way to heaven. Therefore, how we suffer becomes a prominent (not marginal) theme in the New Testament. And what we find is that none of us will suffer as we ought if we are not finding our supreme satisfaction in God—that is, if our heartfelt spiritual emotions are not awakened by the fact that “your steadfast love of the Lord is better than life” (Psalm 63:3).

Over and over again, the New Testament tells us what our emotions should be like when we come face to face with suffering with Jesus.

We rejoice [that’s an emotion] in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. (Rom. 5:3–4)

In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy. (2 Cor. 7:4)

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. (James 1:2)

[The apostles] left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. (Acts 5:41)

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice [emotion] and be glad [emotion], for your reward is great in heaven. (Matt. 5:11–12)

I will boast all the more gladly [emotion] of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon m. (2 Cor. 12:9)

You had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully [that’s an emotion] accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. (Heb. 10:34)

Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings. (1 Peter 4:13)

[We are] sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. (2 Cor. 6:10)

I ask you, could a person possibly read those nine texts and say that the emotion of joy in the face of suffering is unimportant? Our experience of the emotion of heartfelt satisfaction in God defines the essence of our humanity and the Christian path of suffering.

Dannah: Pastor John Piper with some powerful truths for you and I to soak in. God doesn’t only put up with our human emotions; He created them because He wants us to experience true joy in Him. As Pastor John just showed us, suffering can become a path to that joy. I’m praying this would be true for you today. 

We see this pattern all throughout the book of Psalms—particularly in the psalms of lament. You’ll find reflections on several of those in Nancy’s newly updated book, Dwell: 30 Days with God in the Psalms. We’d love to send that to you when you make a donation of any amount during the month of June. To give and request your copy, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/donate. 

Next weekend, it’s gonna get super joyful here on Revive Our Hearts Weekend! Our topic is praise, and you know, I think this is something we could talk about more. We’ll discuss what it looks like to magnify the Lord through prayer, worship, and our lifestyles in general. I hope you’ll come and magnify the Lord with me!

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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