Psalm 5

When we find ourselves in deep distress, our words often vanish like smoke. We find our desperate longings cannot be formed into sentences with subject, verb, object. We are like the mute-wordless, with nothing on our lips but sighs.

And yet the Lord hears us!

In Psalm 5 David asks not only that the Lord might hear his words, but that God would consider his "sighing" as well. What else can this mean but that David's pain had grown too great for words? What words he had, he offered in prayer; but this was not enough. David therefore asked the Lord that he might accept even his sighs!

What an amazing God we serve, who hears not only our spoken prayers, but also our speechless sighs. Even when we do not know what to pray for, God's Word tells us that "the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26) And so God meets sigh with sigh-and thus works for our benefit!

Excerpted from a devotional in "The Encouragement Bible," pg 711. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing.