A Model for Prayer
Psalm 138:6-8 is one song on Steadfast that I find myself coming back to again and again.
There’s something about the interplay of melody and the woodwind descant and that heralding bass drum that makes me cry every time. But beyond the music, this passage has become a prayer I love and return to often.
This passage intersected my life in a particularly disorienting season of anxiety. At the time, my friend Allie and I were regularly memorizing Scripture together, choosing passages each week to set to music, and on a uniquely low day, I googled “Bible verses about God not forgetting his people,” and Psalm 138:6–8 came up.
When I read it I cried. There was something in those verses that felt tailor-made for what I was walking through: declarations of a God who sees the lowly, who defends the weak, who stretches out his hand in the midst of trouble combined with this quiet plea tucked in at the end: “Do not forsake the work of your hands.”
That honest tension—between faith-filled declaration and humble request—felt sacred to me. It’s a powerful model for prayer.
In this passage, David is speaking both to God and to himself. He reminds himself who God is and what he has done: the one who delivers, who preserves, who sees. But he also is honest in his need: Don’t forget me. Don’t walk away from what you’ve started in me. That kind of prayer—one that holds the reality of God’s character in the face of the unfulfilled need—is holy.
But, if I don’t actually know who God is, saying “God is with me, for me, protecting me…” is entirely unhelpful.
But when David writes, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life,” he’s not just making a poetic statement. He’s anchoring himself in lived experience. He’s recalling real moments when God delivered him from Saul, from the Philistines, even from the betrayal of his own son.
And then there’s that phrase: steadfast love. It’s more than just a comforting idea. It’s a callback, a phrase that carries the whole history of God’s relationship with his people. When David uses it, he’s remembering back to when God revealed himself to Moses as merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6), and all the moments since then that God had proven his steadfast love.
This prayer, this way of praying, it gave me the permission to hold the tension, to know what is true about God while acknowledging that I was still waiting for him to show up for me.
God’s love and care for me can remain true when I don’t feel it, when hard things happen, when I don’t understand. If I trust that he doesn’t change (Malachi 3:6), he abounds in steadfast love and mercy (Ex. 34:6), that he cares for me with the deepest affection (1 Peter 5:7), that he is good and a refuge in times of trouble (Nahum 1:7), then I can wait with expectation that I’m going to see him move in my life for my good and his glory.
