sermons
Praying with the Psalms
A Path in the Faith Journey
Lydia Shiu
Jan 25, 2026
Psalm 73
A psalm of Asaph.
73 Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are have a pure heart.
2 But me? My feet had almost stumbled;
my steps had nearly slipped
3 because I envied the arrogant;
I observed how the wicked are well off:
4 They suffer no pain;
their bodies are fit and strong.
5 They are never in trouble;
they aren’t weighed down like other people.
6 That’s why they wear arrogance like a necklace,
why violence covers them like clothes.
7 Their eyes bulge out from eating so well;
their hearts overflow with delusions.
8 They scoff and talk so cruel;
from their privileged positions
they plan oppression.
9 Their mouths dare to speak against heaven!
Their tongues roam the earth!
10 That’s why people keep going back to them,
keep approving what they say.[a]
11 And what they say is this: “How could God possibly know!
Does the Most High know anything at all!”
12 Look at these wicked ones,
always relaxed, piling up the wealth!
13 Meanwhile, I’ve kept my heart pure for no good reason;
I’ve washed my hands to stay innocent for nothing.
14 I’m weighed down all day long.
I’m punished every morning.
15 If I said, “I will talk about all this,”
I would have been unfaithful to your children.
16 But when I tried to understand these things,
it just seemed like hard work
17 until I entered God’s sanctuary
and understood what would happen to the wicked.
18 You will definitely put them on a slippery path;
you will make them fall into ruin!
19 How quickly they are devastated,
utterly destroyed by terrors!
20 As quickly as a dream departs from someone waking up, my Lord,
when you are stirred up, you make them disappear.[b]
21 When my heart was bitter,
when I was all cut up inside,
22 I was stupid and ignorant.
I acted like nothing but an animal toward you.
23 But I was still always with you!
You held my strong hand!
24 You have guided me with your advice;
later you will receive me with glory.
25 Do I have anyone else in heaven?
There’s nothing on earth I desire except you.
26 My body and my heart fail,
but God is my heart’s rock and my share forever.
27 Look! Those far from you die;
you annihilate all those who are unfaithful to you.
28 But me? It’s good for me to be near God.
I have taken my refuge in you, my Lord God,
so I can talk all about your works!
Would you pray with me?
Loving God
We don’t know how to make sense of things going on in the world and in our country and even in our own hearts sometimes. How do we keep the faith? How do we hope? How do we persevere toward peace and mercy when we’re so distracted, angry, busy, and overwhelmed? We don’t even know how to pray sometimes. Teach us lord. Help us to be open to the hearts of saints that have come before us, that we might learn how to pray, so that we might be changed. So that we can stand on the strength of faith in you God, even now, we pray in Jesus name amen.
I have doubts about a god. When you are young, you first learn the rules. Be good. Be nice. Be kind. I taught these things to my kids at a very young age, 2, 3 years old. But already, at 5 and 7 years old, they’re starting to see the cracks.
We went to the library the other day, and saw Jenny the Juggler, who made sure that at the end of the show every single kid got to take home a balloon mouse she called, Rocket Mouse. You hold it in your hand, pull the tail, and let go and shoot it up into the sky like a rocket. Rocket Mouse. Oh they loved it. They came home and shot it up in the air again and again. They played to see who went higher. Jesse’s went higher. He won! And then, Sophia’s went up higher and she says,
I won!
And Jesse says,
no you didn’t.
Sophia the 7 year old older sister, she lets it go and says,
okay it was a tie.
They shoot it again. Sophia’s definitely goes up higher. She says
mine went higher.
And Jesse says,
I didn’t see it.
Finally she comes running to me, crying, saying,
“Jesse never lets me win. Even when I win, he says I didn’t. And when I say I won, he hurts me”
And the kind, understanding, sweet Sophia says,
“I never want to play with Jesse ever again!”
Cause what good did it do Sophia, for her to go along with her brother, not upsetting him, okay it was a tie, when it clearly wasn’t. She was kind. She was patient. But at some point she thinks, this is unfair!
Jesse, he’s not bothered at all. I asked him, did Noona (older sister in Korean)’s Rocket Mouse go higher? And he’s like no. I ask him,
“Are you sure?”
and then he says,
“I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”
Sometimes, following Jesus in this day and age, can feel like what Sophia is feeling. And this story is as old as time, as they say, or at least a few thousand years old, which is what our guess is for when various parts of the Psalms were written. And yet we still read it because it checks out. This feeling of,
“Okay, so God is good to those who are pure in heart. But then why are the wicked so well off?”
It’s how the book of Psalms actually starts out. In Psalm 1. It lays out the basic understanding of a world, one in which those who are wicked will perish and those who delight in the law of the Lord, prosper.
Walter Brueggemann, a biblical scholar of Psalms, describes Psalm 1 as a Psalm of Orientation.
“For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.”
1+1=2. That’s how it works. Basics. Things are black and white. Clear. There’s no ambiguity. One could even go as far to say that, those who have such worldview, those who rely on the binary and never depart from it are “naive or privileged.”
Breggemann puts it like this,
“Such a satisfied and assured attention of orderliness probably comes from the well-off, from the economically secure and the politically significant. That is, such religious conviction comes from those who experience life as good, generous, and reliable. This does not make these poems suspect, but it permits us to read them knowingly, for not everyone experiences life this way and can speak so boldly about it.
Life is well-oriented only for some, and that characteristically at the expense of others. In these psalms (psalms of orientation) we enter into the religious sensitivity and life experience of those who know life to have congruity, symmetry, and proportion. They are those whose
“lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (Ps. 16:6). This means they have ended up with the best land, and so find it not difficult to live a life of gratitude. (26-27) “
If that is you, I am genuinely happy for you. Sometimes I wish I could keep the pure innocence of my kids. I wish I didn’t have to tell them about people who might lie to them or take advantage of them or would ever want to hurt them. You be good and you’ll always be okay. I wish I could have them stay there forever.
But then, you live a little, get a little brother who tricks your eyes, and realize, life doesn’t work the way you were simply taught. Be good and people will take advantage of you? Be kind and people will step all over you?
And so other Psalms enter our prayer repertoire. The rest of the Psalms, like today’s Psalm 73, wrestles with the fact that life is messy.
Brueggemann calls them Psalms of Disorientation. Things are not as they ought to be.
Have you had an experience like that?
1….2….3…
When your innocence was broken and you got to taste the bitterness of a broken world filled with broken people?
1….2…3…
Psalm 73 is in the innocence-is-broken moment. The prayer starts with,
Verse 1 Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who have a pure heart.
But quickly …
Verse 2 But me? My feet had almost stumbled;
my steps had nearly slipped
In the faith journey, we all come to this place of disorientation. A But Me moment. I was taught this but, but me. But what about me?
This moment can come to us at any age. At 4. 7. Sometimes in your teens.
When I was in the 10th grade. I moved in the middle of my 10th grade from Kansas to California. My father was a pastor and he got a job at a church where there was a big youth group of kids, most of them who had grown up together. But me, I was the new girl from the Midwest. It was a Korean-American church, and a pretty big one considering that I used to attend a church with 50 members all together and no other kids my age. This one had 40 students just in the youth group. I wasn’t like the other Asian Americans who had grown up in California, who knew Kpop and went to SAT classes together.
I was the weird kid from Kansas who apparently had an accent (actually it was the Californians who talked weirdly saying “dude” every other word and they called pop, soda.) I was kind of weird though. I love electronic dance music rather than pop music. I liked Bjork while they liked Brittany Spears.
I started to feel their coldness more and more and then one day one of them handed me a letter.
Apparently the group of girls had a meeting. They met up at Barnes and Noble one day and had a discussion about me and then decided to draft a letter together to give me.
The letter I got was cruel. It told me that they were going to give me the silent treatment until I changed. What I needed to change, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t clear. I literally hadn’t done anything, except just be myself but they said that they couldn’t be friends with me unless I changed. I kept that letter until I graduated and burned it, yes like with fire, before I went off to college.
During this time I felt so alienated and rejected. I remember I talked with my dad about what to do. That it felt so unfair. My dad, being the pastor, pointed to Psalms when they were unfairly mistreated. When they were blameless and yet persecuted. Verses like 8
“They scoff and talk so cruel; from their privileged positions they plan oppression.”
I was like, yesssss, this Psalmist knows what I’m going through. When everyone was against me. My dad told me to just stay quiet. Don’t argue. Let them think whatever they want. But me, I wanted to pick fights and say my piece to them. This is when I felt like my Dad was so Christian, humble, and foolish.
This was my disorientation. The world is like this. And God, the church, is telling me to what, just take it? I literally do not understand why anyone would tell anyone to “turn the other cheek” as Jesus did in the Bible. How is that wisdom for life? It sounds like wisdom for getting stepped all over.
That confusion. That defiance, the sense of,
“But, me, have questions.”
I want to tell you that this disorientation is not a lack of faith. It is not a thing that should be erased or omitted from our lives but it is a natural, perfectly normal part of life and, I want to say that it is an important part of our faith and our prayers. If it wasn’t, why would it be in the book of holy prayers like this? You shouldn’t bypass or avoid these parts. In fact they are the most honest and raw prayers. In one sense, we can only get to trust and worship and praise and understanding through misunderstanding.
But like, we want things to be too perfect instantly these days.
I was watching on YouTube a roundtable discussion called Songwriters Circle with big songwriters like Ejae, Shaboozy, and Ed Sheeran. And they were talking about the first songs they wrote. Most of them talked about how bad their first song was. Ed Sheeran talked about his first song he wrote when he was 11 years old. He said that it actually makes him cringe to listen back to the demo but in a way that he knows what comes of it.
And then he talked about how he wrote songs and showed it to his dad and his dad would just say,
“oh it’s awesome. It’s good.”
when he would play for his friends they’d say,
“this ain’t good,”
But his dad told him to just keep going. He talked about gigs he played, how fun they were, and how he felt on the stage. He felt amazing, but how it’s so rough nowadays because kids would play and record themselves immediately and listen back and it’d be so bad and immediately discouraging.
Look you stumble your way, in a real cringe way, to becoming someone talented like Ed Sheeran. And that’s life. Like real life, right? And if you ever think of God as a father, I hope we think of the likes of Ed Sheeran’s father saying, keep going. Oh that’s amazing, just keep going, when everyone says it ain’t good.
And I think God kind of does this with this Psalmist throughout this prayer. Though in their heart, they are confused and they are disappointed and angry. Verses 1-12 laying out the contradictions in life, the problem and the dissonance they saw between their faith and their actual experiences. They describe the absurdity of it all.
And the Psalmist moves through from blaming others to blaming themselves. Verse 13-14
-
13 Meanwhile, I’ve kept my heart pure for no good reason;
I’ve washed my hands to stay innocent for nothing.
14 I’m weighed down all day long.
I’m punished every morning.
You ever go through such a line of thinking?
First you blame others. When you’ve exhausted yourself of others to blame. You’re only left with yourself. I’m the worst. I deserve this. I did this to myself.
1….2…3…
I heard this from this amazing community called Faith and Justice Network. Rev. Dr. Peter Choi who runs the program said this. That scholars agree that this was probably written by someone who studies and teaches about God. So when they say in the next verses
15 If I said, “I will talk about all this,”
I would have been unfaithful to your children.
They were probably thinking, well it’s hard for me to teach about God when I’m weary about all this. This theologian, maybe a pastor, thinks, I’m not fit to teach this stuff.
It says in vs.
16 But when I tried to understand these things,
it just seemed like hard work
The Psalmist is so upset, so confused, blamed others, and blamed themselves, they are just tired. They are overwhelmed by the task at hand.
And that’s why I started this sermon with the words,
“I have doubts about a god.”
Because it’s true. Though I am a professional Christian, there are so many days when I feel discouraged and I wonder, what is God doing with this world? When I am seeing the wicked boast. It doesn’t bother them. They’re rich and happy. And the good folks are suffering, struggling, unfairly treated. How am I supposed to give a sermon on a stage with a mic and lights about how God is good when I really do not feel good because of how much unfairness and injustice I am seeing in the world?
1.2.3.
I’m right there with the Psalmist.
But then the Psalmist makes a turn on vs. 17.
17 until I entered God’s sanctuary
and understood what would happen to the wicked.
18 You will definitely put them on a slippery path;
you will make them fall into ruin!
19 How quickly they are devastated,
utterly destroyed by terrors!
20 As quickly as a dream departs from someone waking up, my Lord,
when you are stirred up, you make them disappear.[b]
The prayer kind of reverts back to the formula they know. My side YEAH, God will make them disappear!
But then also, in verse 21 the Psalmist starts to soften and not just praying for the destruction of their enemies but gets tender and introspective of oneself, confesses to their own shortcomings.
21 When my heart was bitter,
when I was all cut up inside,
22 I was stupid and ignorant.
I acted like nothing but an animal toward you.
I feel like that sometimes, when I’m throwing a fit to God. This protest in me. This fight in me that prays prayers like,
“God, are you even there? What are you actually accomplishing around here? Is this one big joke to you? Will they not raise the sea levels and burn up the earth?”
But the Psalmist meanders around, through the doubt, through the questions, through it all to eventually make their way to remember God’s faithfulness.
23 But I was still always with you!
You held my strong hand!
24 You have guided me with your advice;
later you will receive me with glory.
25 Do I have anyone else in heaven?
There’s nothing on earth I desire except you.
26 My body and my heart fail,
but God is my heart’s rock and my share forever.
Another commentator said it like this, that
“The goodness of God is not defined by the Shalom the wicked enjoy, nor is it denied by the affliction suffered by the pure in heart. The ultimate misery is to be “far from God” (v. 27)” – (James L. Mays, Interpretation of the Psalms)
This prayer is a picture, an example of what a faith journey looks like. One with many meanderings, as one does, because that is life. Prayers don’t have to be correct. They are just steps we take in the journey. One step at a time. And if you misstep, you can always take the next step, toward God.
There you’ll come to another But Me moment. One that truly knows who you are.
But me? It’s good for me to be near God. I have taken my refuge in you. My Lord God. so I can talk all about your works!
But me, I know where I can be safe. I know where I belong. God is my refuge. God is my home.
No matter what’s going on with you. Whether your brother is giving you trouble. Or your friends reject you. I hope you know that God cheers for you. Welcomes you home and says,
“You’re so good. I believe in you. You’re amazing. I love you.”
Do you hear that?
I hope we can all hear that deep in our hearts.
Let me pray for us.
Loving God, be close to us. Be near to us. Help us to hear your voice saying, that you love us deeply, no matter what misery befalls us, no matter what mistakes we’ve made, no matter who we’ve hurt, others, or even ourselves, God help us to know that in you, we are forgiven and welcomed, not rejected, but embraced by your merciful love we pray. Give us that power and faith more and more that we might go out into the world with that same love we pray, in Jesus Name. Amen.