Psalm 5 "Penguins in the Morning"

Psalm 5:1-3

Give ear to my words, O Lord;
    consider my groaning.
Give attention to the sound of my cry,
    my King and my God,
    for to you do I pray.
O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice;
    in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.

Comments:

Notice this psalm is a lament (it asks something of the Lord). It is my cry in this season of my life. There are seasons where everything is going well and you can be tricked into thinking that you can actually get by on your own, or with minimal “swing pushing” by the Lord. Then there are seasons where we are required to see more clearly that we are dependent on the Lord for each moment. It is in such seasons of bittersweet clarity that we come to the end of our own resources and have to ask the Lord to consider our groaning and pay attention to our cries. What is remarkable is that he does just that.

“Consider my groaning”

Our groaning before the Lord are those deep issues that perhaps we can’t even put into words for the emotion, the pain, the weight is too great and we wouldn't even know how to pray. Yet not only does the Lord consider our groaning but his Holy Spirit prays for us in those moments.

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. (Romans 8:26)

“Give attention to… my cry”

Photo by Martin Wettstein on Unsplash

Not only does the Lord hear our words and consider our “groaning” but he “gives attention” to our cry as the psalmist asks. When I read this request I tend to think about penguins—don’t you? Before you cry, “Random!” stop to think about all the nature movies you have seen where they show a picture of a million penguins and talk about how the mother penguins know the cry of their own chicks out of all the voices in the rookery crying, “Haaah, Haaaahh!” Well, who made penguins that way? If God created the penguin with such sensitivity to the cries of their young, is it any surprise that he intimately knows and responds to each of his children's prayers? Not really.

“In the Morning…”

Galilee Photo: Greg Dueker 2011

One other insight I glean from these verses is that the psalmist doesn't wait until evening to pour out his heart to the Lord. He cries out as soon as he starts his day! I wonder if we miss out on much that the Lord wants to do for us because we slog through our day in our own strength until we think we need to ask for help. We have even invented a phony Bible verse to support this idea, “God helps those who help themselves.” Actually, God helps those who know they can’t help themselves. The psalmist realizes that actually, God helps those who know that they can’t save themselves, much less change other people. I want to live into this idea that I will speak to the Lord early in the day—confessing, worshiping, believing—for, after all, the day is his anyways.

The sound of groaning penguins in the morning! Sounds like the beginning of a blessed day!