“Sing to the Lord, you saints of His, praise His holy name. 5. For His anger lasts only a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
These verses remind us of what our response should be to God no matter how trying life has become. When things are not going well for us, we have a tendency to blame God. We might not consciously admit this, but in the back of our minds we think that God owes us more than we are getting. Blaming God for hardships will get us nowhere. We live in a fallen world and that is the way life is in a fallen world. Trials and tribulations are part of living, and they can be tests of our faith. The question is what is our response to God when things are tough? These two verses from Psalm 30 will tell us what our response should be – regardless. “Sing to the Lord, you saints of His, praise His holy name.” What God wants from us at all times is to praise Him. Praise was not always easy for David and other psalmists. The psalms are full of complaints to the Lord because of what life was handing them at the time. Yet the psalmists also remind us time after time that we are to praise God. In psalm 35:28 David wrote: “And my tongue shall speak of your righteousness and of your praise all the day long.”If we praise God “all the daylong” we will surely, at some point, praise Him in the midst of trouble. Asaph wrote in psalm 50:15: “And call upon me in the day of trouble; and I will deliver you, and you shall glorify (praise) me.” I looked up “praise” in my Strong’s exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, and I found passage after passage about praising God. The Bible is full of the praises of God. I know that life can be hard, and that some things that happen to us are awfully hard to overcome, but it does us no good to give in to self-pity or grumbling and complaining. What we need to do during these times is to “sing to the Lord…praise His holy name.” You will be a better person for it, and you will feel better about yourself. “His anger lasts only for a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime.” This is a good reminder for us that God is not against us. He might be against the way we are living at a given time, as we are told: “His anger lasts only a moment,” which does mean that He gets angry with us. That anger comes because He knows that we can do better. When you feel God-forsaken, and think that God is not doing anything in your life, remember that you have His favor. We need to be careful with this word “favor.” We can get the idea that when things are not going our way, we have lost God’s favor. Read it again: “But His favor lasts a lifetime…” There are times when we feel God’s favor more than at other times, but God always wants the best for us, and when we forget that fact we stray from what the Lord Jesus wants of us. We do well to remember His favor, especially when we are going through difficult times. “Weeping may endure for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” There are four words that have come to mean a lot to me over the years, and they are: “this, too, shall pass.” That is what David meant when he wrote: “Weeping may endure for a night…” We need to remember that nothing lasts forever. Whatever you are going through right now will come to an end, and at the end of it there will be joy and rejoicing. Sometimes it seems that woes will never end, but they do. What we need to focus on is not the weeping but the joy and rejoicing. The choice as to how we will respond to the “weeping” is really up to us. We can pout and simmer, but that will only prolong the weeping. We just need to remember that when “morning” comes there will be joy and rejoicing. Grab a hold of this truth, and make it a way of life. The right response to the Lord is to praise Him, remember His favor and accept the joy that He sends “in the morning." Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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