Psalm 34:17-18 - When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

What are we to do about all of the challenges that each day brings? When chronic illness or pain rears its ugly head and seems unbearable, what do we do? When a close relationship is strained and on the verge of collapsing, what do we do? When you look at your bank account and realize there is nothing left to pay the bills, what do you do?

Sometimes it can feel like no matter what we do, help just won’t come. Maybe you see a medical professional for your health and they send you home with some medication but it doesn’t really help the problem. After that you see another professional in natural medicine only to find that their solution is really not solving anything either. It’s easy to feel frustrated and to begin to fall into a season of despair when help does not seem to come.

Yet, in these verses we see the psalmist write that when the righteous cry for help, the Lord responds in two ways. One, the Lord hears us and two, the Lord delivers us. What is challenging about this is that we can sometimes see God as being about as helpful as the doctor who says they can help, but nothing ever gets better.

The truth is, we don’t know whether things are getting better or not because we can become so focused on the emotional or physical pain that we don’t see healing and help and in other areas. The medication the doctor provides may not make the pain go away, but it may be healing parts of your body that need to be healed first before the pain can be addressed.

In the same manner, we often do not see what God does in response to our prayers for help, but as we see in this verse we can count on him to hear us and we can count on him to deliver us from trouble in some way shape or form. Why can we count on the Lord to do this? Because he is near to us. He sees your brokenheartedness because he is with you in it. He knows your pain and sorrow to an even deeper level than you do.

God is faithful and compassionate towards us, and he knows how crushed the spirit can be in times of trouble. He experienced it to the utmost extreme when he went to the cross. We may not see him working, but he is. We can get so set on specific outcomes when we have pain and suffering that we may miss that God is healing us and helping us in ways we won’t realize until we are finally with him.

As you face the troubles of the day, do not let the devil convince you of the lies that God is not for you, that God is not with you, that God does not hear you and that God will not help you. It is hard to fight this fight of faith, but you can fight it because the Lord is with you. Despair need not win this battle. Hope in the listening ear and mighty supporting arm of the Lord to carry you through today’s troubles. He is ever with you, cannot fail you, and he is the one who will bring you home to a place where trouble will never harm you again.