If you are in a cave-like experience and you are complaining to everyone else but God, you are missing a great opportunity to pour out your heart to the only one who can do something about it. Good things always happen when you get honest with God. So try talking to him—and be patient, God does great work in caves.
Enduring Truth // Psalm 142:1
A maskil of David. When he was in the cave. A prayer. I cry aloud to the LORD; I lift up my voice to the LORD for mercy. I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble.
We all prefer to live out in the sunshine of grace, but from time to time we get the cave of hardship instead. Everybody get’s “cave time.” It is just core curriculum in the school of spirituality maturity. Call it whatever you want: the pit, the prison, the desert, the wilderness—the cave is basic training for believers.
Joseph had a prison; Moses had the desert; Jeremiah had a pit, Daniel had a den, Paul was in and out of jail so many times, like Motel Six, they “kept the light on for him.” Even Jesus had a wilderness. Oh, he got a cave, too. He once spent three days in one. If Jesus had “cave-time,” the cave won’t be optional for you. Every believer gets “the cave.”
What is the cave? The cave is a place of death, where you die to self. The cave is the place of testing, the blast furnace for moral fiber. The cave is where your mettle gets tested, your maturity gets revealed, your heart gets exposed! Put a person in the cave of distress, discouragement or doubt, and true character will show up. And if you are brave enough to open up to the truth about you, the cave will reveal just how much work God still has to do to get you ready for great things. What Moses spoke of as the wilderness of want was true of the cave of testing for David:
Do you remember how the Lord led you through the wilderness for all those forty years, humbling you and testing you to find out how you would respond, and whether or not you would really obey him? (Deuteronomy 8:2)
Likewise, the cave is the place of separation. Not only does God reveal the true you in the cave, he also strips you of every misplaced dependency. In the cave, God separated David from everything he had once depended on, and all that was left for David was God himself.
Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to both you and your ancestors. He did it to help you realize that food isn’t everything, and that real life comes by obeying every command of God. (Deuteronomy 8:3)
The cave was perhaps the most frustrating period in David’s life—but in hindsight, it turned out to be the most fruitful. That’s because the cave is also the place of forging. The cave is where God breaks you down in order to build you up.
For all these forty years your clothes haven’t grown old, and your feet haven’t been blistered or swollen. So you should realize that, as a man punishes his son, the Lord punishes you to help you. (Deuteronomy 8:4-5)
That’s what God does in the cave. And by the way, God does some of his best work in caves. It was there in the cave of Adullam that David wrote three of his most moving psalms—Psalms 34, 57 and 142, including our key verse: “I cry aloud to the Lord…I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble.”
If you are in a cave and you are complaining to everyone else but God, you are missing a great opportunity to pour out your heart to the only one who can do something about it. Good things always happen when you get honest with God. So try talking to him—and be patient, God does great work in caves.
If you doubt that, just remember that empty cave on the outskirts of Jerusalem. For three days, it held a crucified body. But God does great work in caves—best of which is resurrection. Perhaps that will change your mind about caves.
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