Psalm 38:9 Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.
Prayer for a Quiet Heart
Five-year olds are not very good at bottling things up. I’m not saying they can’t do it, but generally if they are thinking it, they are saying it. There are no secrets with five-year olds. That is why it is wise to be careful about the people you trust with your five-year old; all the family secrets can be divulged in about five minutes. Most of us learned very early to open our ears and shut our mouths, and generally, I think that is a good piece of advice. Sometimes we can hear too much and say too little.
David was a man who had a lot of problems. In Psalm 38:6 he says, “I am troubled.” There are three elements that show us where David was and the point to which he came. First of all we see what David took in. In verse 8 he says, “I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart.” He was so full of things that were coming into his heart and head that he was broken and weak. Our hearts and heads are full of noise every day. We confront personal issues, international issues, and issues of other people. David was noisy of heart because of what he took in.
The second element is what he cut off. In verse 13 David came to a point when he didn’t want to take any more in. He says, “But I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that opened not his mouth. Thus I was a as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no reproofs.” Some of David’s problems were the chastening of God. But there came a time when David just decided that he was going to be like a deaf man and not hear what flooded his ears and heart.
Most importantly, we see what David put out or sent up. In verse 15 David says, “For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God.” David refused to hear, and he knew that God would hear. Verse 16 says, “For I said, Hear me.” Verse 9 says, “Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.” Most of the psalms I have read lately seem to be David responding to problems. David says, “There’s not a thing that I want that You don’t know. There’s not a thing that troubles me that hidden from You, God.”
Why was that? God knows everything. He is God. But in the context of this psalm, just as quickly as things were flooding into his heart, David was pumping them to heaven and giving them to God. We see the disquietness of his heart, the deafness of his ears, and the activeness of his mouth. He was giving his problems to God and resting them there.