Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (16th November, 2025), continuing our journey through the some of the prayers of the Bible, in all their richness and rawness.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘In your search for tender mercy | No one seemed to care | The faith that used to be your crutch | is now your cross to bear.’
― Richie Sambora[i]
READ: PSALM 77 (NLT)
SCREAM
I still remember my first day of primary school—more than forty years ago now.
I can vividly remember my mum holding my hand as she led me into a room full of strange faces… and then letting go. Passing my hand into the teacher’s and then turning to leave.
To go from the tightness of tenderness to the distance of detachment was more than I could handle.
To say I cried would be an understatement.
I erupted. I bawled.
I screamed at my mum not to leave me, to come back, to take me with her. But she kept walking toward the door, not turning around. The moment I didn’t see her face anymore, something inside me broke. I tore my hand from the teacher, ran for the door, but before I could reach her, she was through the doorway and the classroom door closed between us. I tried to grasp the handle, but the teacher scooped me up and carried me to my chair, where I sat, crying my eyes out for most of the day.
Please don’t misunderstand, my mum was a caring mother. And as a parent, who has since experienced that emotional day from the other side, I understand that, had my mum turned around, I would have witnessed tears rolling down her face, too.
But that day was my first experience of what I would call despair. My first experience of abandonment.
Not my last.
That moment has echoed throughout my life— especially in the area of my faith.
To pick one moment from among the many; fifteen years ago, at age thirty, during a nervous breakdown, I sat in my car screaming at God. I felt derelict. Like God had turned his face away and walked out on me, with a door a slamming shut between us. As verse 9 describes, it was as if God had clenched His hands shut against me.[ii] I yelled at God for hours that evening, pleading, crying, feeling God was a million miles away, asking Him why he had forsaken me; asking Him to “come back.” And sensing nothing but silence in response.
Out of that silence, there erupted anger and accusation: ‘You’ve failed me, God!’
It was not a pretty sight to behold nor an angelic sound to hear. And it’s just one of many.
I don’t know if you have ever felt abandoned by God, if you have ever felt the chill of the ‘Dark Night of the soul,’ as St. John of the Cross aptly called this experience. For those who have, you’ll understand the agony I am describing better than those of us who pad ourselves with “cotton-wool theology.”
But there are times when God feels tender and close, and times when God seems absent.
Times, if I’m honest, that remind me of the tag line of the 1979 movie Alien: ‘In space no one can hear you scream.’
C. S. Lewis, in his excellent book on prayer, described this anguish we feel when we are desperately seeking help and every rope snaps when as pull on it, every door slams as you reach it, and even God seems mute. For an atheist, this is no problem. But for a believer—someone who has tasted God’s goodness—it is and agony that ‘presses most painfully’ upon us.[iii] The sudden silence wounds.
We don’t fully know why God seems to hide Himself. We have theories, but most are speculation. More important than explanation though, is acknowledgement.[iv] For all of us who follow Christ, we will all taste, at some point, this felt sense of dereliction and despair.
As the late pastor and writer, Eugene Peterson, wisely advised,
‘Any understanding of God that doesn’t take into account God’s silence is a half truth—in effect, a cruel distortion—and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.’[v]
THE CRACKED VOICE OF A CRACKED HEART
Asaph, the writer of Psalm 77, understands this pain.
Some Psalms sing. Others scream. Psalm 77 is the latter, as Asaph wrestles with this sense divine neglect.[vi]
Asaph doesn’t tidy his thoughts or sanitize his emotions. He doesn’t fill in the blanks. And nor does he rush to a praise break. Which, to be honest, is something I am tempted to do when reading the Psalms that voice discomfort; ‘Let’s just focus of the on the uplifting bit.’
Instead, Asaph sits in the ache of it all, naming it, refusing the easy clichés that try to put God back into a box.
The opening ten verses of this Psalm reflect the cracked voice of a cracked heart. Psalm 77 doesn’t begin with some serene devotional reflection. There’s no ‘Dear God’ or ‘Gracious Father’. Just the raw and desperate voice of someone on the edge, staring into the night and shouting because the silence has become unbearable.
‘I cried out to God for help … ’
Asaph says it twice, ‘I cried out to God to hear me.’
‘Oh, that God would listen to me!’, as one translation puts it.[vii]
He goes on to say, in verse two, that he has been up through the night, yelling out for God—with his hands raised, his eyes flooded with tears, and still, he found no comfort.
That’s not, ‘I prayed and felt better.’
That’s ‘I prayed and … nothing.’
I sought God, Asaph writes, and all I got was silence. I stretched out my hands to God, reaching for Him with all I am, and it felt like God pulled his hands away.
In verse 3, he thinks about God, and it doesn’t soothe him; it hurts. Like pressing a bruise, the thought of God provokes him to groan. That’s honest theology.
In verse 4, he even blames God for his insomnia—’You hold my eyelids open.’ As if God is adding discomfort to the silence.
Then, in verses five to six, he recalls the ‘good old days’—when his nights were filled with joyful songs and God felt so tender and so close. And the comparison between what he felt then, compared to now, adds salt to the wound. We’ve all been there!
Sometimes the then is not even a matter of years ago, either, across some great gulf of time. The pain is more acute when it’s merely a matter of days and hours—when it’s sudden.
As McCartney sung it, ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away … ’
For those of us who are unused to such talk like this, those of us who are more accustomed to politeness in prayer, we’re probably already panicking, thinking Asaph is flying his aeroplane of faith too close to the surface of heresy, and that he really needs to pull himself up from this descent before it’s too late.
But nope, Asaph keeps on going. He is sleepless, traumatized, and searching. He cries out in the night, stretches out hands that find no comfort, and then, in verses seven to ten, he goes straight for the jugular, pulling out the big guns and aiming questions we rarely dare to speak:
‘Has the Lord rejected me forever?
Will God never show his favour again?
Has his steadfast love ceased, has his unfailing love vanished?
Has his promise, his word, failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?’
Some of us may recognise these attributes that Asaph questions.
Two weeks ago, we savoured God’s character from Psalm 145, the character revealed to Moses in Exodus 34:6-7—merciful, gracious, slow to anger, rich in love. Those qualities inspired adoration.
But for Asaph, in Psalm 77, in sharp and purposeful contrast to Psalm 145, the very same attributes provoke accusation. The psalmist vents—fully, ferociously. Instead of praise, there’s this language of complaint and God’s covenantal identity comes under fire.[viii]
But here’s the thing; this complaint is not unbelief. It’s an accusation irritated by belief, a complaint birthed from out of adoration.
Like Asaph, when I scream at God, it is not because I don’t believe that God is good and just, gracious and compassionate. I scream because I do believe God is good and just, gracious and compassionate, but the truth of who God is clashes with the reality of my current experience.
They’re the cries of someone who’s seen the promises and the pain, and who is trying to hold both in the same trembling hands.
THE LAMENTING LEGACY
Asaph and I are not the only ones to yell at God, to lament and complain.
One of the most reassuring things I find as I read through the Bible, and especially the prayers it contains, is that, to reword some favourite song lyrics of mine, I come across language, and I discover sounds that recognise the pain in me.[ix]
There is a legacy of lament and complaint in the Bible.
What is striking and comforting about the Scriptures is their unflinching honesty about suffering. The Bible does not romanticize faith. It does not pretend that belief in God is a guarantee against anguish. Instead, it documents the dark nights of the soul in the lives of some of the greatest heroes of the faith.
Moses (Num. 11:11–15), Elijah (1 Kings 19:4), Jeremiah (Jer. 20:7–18), Job (Job 6:80 and Jonah (Jon. 4:3) —all reached moments of despair so deep they prayed to die.
And books like Lamentations and Ecclesiastes wrestle openly with the futility and injustice that seems to stain much of our experience of life.
Many biblical prayers even go beyond complaint and into outright argument—holding God accountable to who he has proclaimed to be and what he promised to do.
Job protests his unfair treatment. He rants and raves at God throughout the text that bears his name. His friend’s urge him to change his tone in prayer into something more reverent and less argumentative, all the while attempting to persuade Job that he must be deserving of the abandonment he faces. But Job continues his outburst toward God and, at the end of the book, God states that Job spoke rightly, appropriately.[x]
The prophet Jeremiah, like all the prophets, often brought God’s protests and complaints against the people, accusing them of breaking the covenant he made. But Jeremiah, again, like many of the prophets, also protested the other way at times, accusing God of not upholding his own character.[xi]
‘Alas, Sovereign Lord!,’ Jeremiah says (in Jer. 4:10), ‘How completely you have deceived this people and Jerusalem by saying, “You will have peace,” when the sword is at our throats!’[xii]
Again, like Asaph, Job and Jeremiah’s despairing protests don’t come from any enmity with God or unbelief in God. They come from hearts that firmly believe God to be better than what they are currently getting. They are grasping tightly onto the claim that God’s love is steadfast, and that grasping cause them to say, ‘Oi! What’s going on?’
They are so persuaded in their belief that God is their hope that they will not remain silent before him.
The wonderful Jewish writer, Abraham Heschel, rightly noted that, in the scriptures, ‘The refusal to accept the harshness of God’s way in the name of his love [is] an authentic form of prayer.’ He goes on to note that the prophets often refuse to consent to God’s harsh judgement; that they didn’t simply nod and say, ‘Thy will be done’, all the time. They challenged God as if to say, ‘Thy will be changed.’[xiii]
More than this, it’s as if God wants to see if they trust Him and know Him well enough to get in his face. It’s like God wants to see if they will uplift His name, His character.
Abraham, in Genesis 18, is often lifted up, especially in the writings of Jewish Rabbi’s, as the ultimate example of a good pray-er: Not because he is polite and polished, but because he argues with God, challenging God on his motives and choice of actions: ‘Should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?’[xiv]
These great saints knew the ‘face’ of God, the character of God, and wanted to see it expressed. Their challenges proclaim, ‘May your will reflect your character.’ Or, as we’re taught to pray, ‘May your name be hallowed.’
When flicking through the Bible, prayer isn’t all glossy and rosy and complimentary. It’s a wrestling match, a ‘raging before God.’[xv]
As one writer puts it, ‘Biblical prayer is [often] impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church.’[xvi] Biblical prayer is full of challenge—challenge generated, I suppose, by this tug of war between why God doesn’t behave as we want and why we don’t behave as God wants.
The Psalms reflect this same posture of lament, argument, protest and complaint. Like Scripture as a whole, they are not a curated playlist of spiritual highs. Instead, they give voice to the whole cacophony of human experience — a raw, unfiltered chorus full of the flotsam and jetsam of human life crashing against an awareness of God.
As Philip Yancey noted, they contain anger, pettiness, remorse, irreverence—they are oh so human.[xvii]
This doesn’t only happen whenever an inspired Asaph picks up the pen; we see this also in David’s utterances.
David hits many despairing notes, desperate for the face of God:
‘I am worn out calling for help, my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.’ (Ps. 69:3)
‘I am a helpless man abandoned among the dead … You have laid me in the lowest pit, in the dark, in the depths’ (Ps. 88:5-7).
And perhaps David’s most famous words of agony, quoted by God Incarnate himself in the hour of his crucifixion:
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Ps. 22:2).
This is possibly one of David’s most famous psalm. Interestingly, his most famous psalm follows this one, and begins with:
‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’ (Ps. 23:1)
Consider that for a moment. These two Psalms couldn’t sound more different:
Barrenness and green pastures.
Abandonment and protective companionship.
Dereliction with a side-order of suffering, and a feast in the presence of my enemies where my cup ‘overfloweth’
And yet, within the text they sit, unapologetically, side by side.
Same author.
Same faith.
Vastly different experiences.
No romanticizing. No smoothing the edges. No theological sleight of hand to explain away the chasm of difference between them. Just raw, unfiltered faith.
And that’s the beauty of it.
Psalm 22 and 23 are companions. Together, they teach us that faith is not a straight line. It is a journey through shadow and light, through silence and song.
The Bible is openly showing us that experiencing such a range is not the sign of an unhealthy faith, or an abnormal prayer life with God. It’s the norm.
Sometimes we sing. Sometimes we scream. Sometimes, in the very same breath.
A SACRED RHYTHM
Lament, complaint, and even argument are not taboo. Venting to God is not sin — it is faith. Scripture doesn’t rebuke this. It records it. It honours it. It’s still the sound of prayer. Because prayer, before it’s anything else, is not technique or tone, it’s turning toward God.
I trust that you can appreciate that, in all these prayers of desperation, those who utter them do not run from God. They run to Him, even with fists clenched, voices raised—and that’s not irreverence; it’s relationship. It’s not weakness; it is spiritual maturity. It is the courage to bring our whole selves—even our complaints—into the presence of God.
It’s a far better place to do so than Facebook!
But the point I’m trying to make is that the opposite of faith is not anger. It’s apathy.
The opposite of prayer is not screaming at the heavens; it’s the silence of disconnection.
Sometimes, all prayer is is the flailing of a faith that refuses to go mute. And so, we lament. We rant. We wrestle. And in doing so, we trust.
So, if your prayers have lost their polish, if your soul feels hoarse from screaming, you’re in good company.
The prayer life of the Bible encourages us to bring our grief, our rage, our confusion. God can handle it. God doesn’t flinch at this.
Have the courage to lament in the presence of God.
THE PIVOT OF PROMISE
I could leave it here.
But … for those of us who are feeling abandoned, I just want to encourage you with something else that Asaph says in his psalm.
In verse 10, there’s a pivot. Not a resolution! Asaph doesn’t escape his despair, but he does zoom out of his current circumstance, and he reorients it.
Asaph isn’t denying the pain of his current reality, but he re-narrates it into the context of a bigger picture and starts tracing God’s past actions: He remembers the Exodus, dragging the ancient story of deliverance into his present anguish.
I like this, because Asaph refuses to let the boundaries of his lifespan and understanding define the boundaries of God’s faithfulness. I need this lesson. It’s a good practice, I’ve found, when sitting in despairing moments, to remember that God’s experience runs deeper than my own.
In verse 19, Asaph says something powerful:
‘Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen.’[xviii]
This is one of Scripture’s most profound lines.
God’s way is through the sea — not around it, not above it. Through the depths. Through the chaos. Through the trauma.
And yet — contrary to that famous poem we all know – there are no footprints.
It’s a confession: God was there—even when unseen, even when untraceable.
The psalmist is admitting, ‘I can’t sense you now. The people couldn’t sense you then, either. Yet, you were present.’ It’s an acknowledgement that unseen does not mean absent. Untraceable does not mean inactive.
We never get to anything like a resolution in this Psalm—it’s left open ended.[xix] Like many of us, Asaph is caught between this tension of drowning in despair and awaiting dry ground. But, Asaph, in recalling this story, entertains the very real and likely possibility that this present silence is not the end of the story.
Wherever you find yourself right now, please know that it is not the end.
I could mention that, at the end of that traumatic first school day, my mum came and collected me and the embrace was reestablished. But the things is, many of us are not in that place. We’re in the tension.
Instead, I will tell you this: On that first day of school, as I sat crying at the table, another kid—Michael Shaw—turned to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, your mum’s not left you.’
They are words I have never forgotten.
To those who feel abandoned: God has not left you.
Asaph drew of the Exodus story to consider this. But we can also draw on the Cross: God suffered for us, with us, going to hell and back for me and you. God did not leave us then, and he will not abandon us now. Nothing can separate us, as Paul writes in Romans 8, from the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ.
One day you will see it, even though you cannot sense this right now. You will look back some day, as I have often done, and see that God remained close through it all, even though we were unable to detect his steps during it all.
For now—until that day—keep turning toward Him. If you’re hurting, go ahead — rant at God. Tell Him how you really feel. Your utterance, however broken, is still a prayer.
The tears, the fists, the exasperated ‘why?’—all of this is the sound of belief reaching out, the cry of hope, the voicing of trust.
God does hear it. God does see you. God is with you.
The psalms are filled with these ‘pivots of hope.’
One of my favourites is in Psalm 27:13-14.
David, once again facing a dark night of the soul, writes primarily to himself, saying: ‘I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.’
He doesn’t stop there.
Encouraging himself amidst the struggle, he pens these words to his soul—words that I imagine him returning to often during the darkness. Words we, too, can read as we sit in the gloom, awaiting the dawn of a better day:
‘Wait for the Lord; be strong, take heart, and wait for the Lord.’[xx]
‘The pivot of hope has become my moment of taking a long deep breath when I’m in the miry pit. It causes me to pivot my head upwards, to change my perspective – yes, I am overwhelmed by troubles without number, but those troubles without number can never overwhelm the goodness of God.’
― Rob Merchant[xxi]
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES:
[i] Richie Sambora, lyrics from the amazing song Harlem Rain, from Sambora’s sensational 1998 album Undiscovered Soul.
[ii] As Robert Alter notes, the term often translated ‘withheld’, as in the NIV, is the Hebrew verb used for clenching the hand into a fist and hence withholding—the opposite of an open, generous hand. Alter, in his own translation prefers to translate verse 10b as, ‘He closed off in wrath His compassion.’ [Rober Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Volume 3: The Writings, Psalm 77 (W. W Norton & Company, New York, London, 2019), p. 186]. Other translations poignantly offer modern parallels, such as, ‘Has he slammed the door on his compassion’ (NLT, v.9), or, ‘Has he angrily stomped off and left us?’ (MSG, v.9). All of them carry the tone of Asaph’s sense of abandonment.
[iii] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer (Collins, Fontana Books, London and Glasgow, 1966), pp. 46-47
[iv] The best books on this experience are those that simply acknowledge it, more than those that attempt to lure us into panic mode when we experience them. St. John of the Cross’ classic, The Dark Night of the Soul, has been valuable for many generations for good reason. But if you’re looking for something more recent then my friend, Mauro Martinez has written a helpful and accessible book, Backstage God: When Faith meets Divine Hiddenness.
[v] Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 156
[vi] We don’t know the details Asaph’s current plight as he laments this dereliction. Like the other Psalms of Asaph that open the third section (book) of the collection we know as ‘Psalms’, it is possible that Asaph’s grief originates in the world-shattering experience of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon.
[vii] Psalm 77:1b, NLT
[viii] As Tremper Longman III notes, ‘These charges are serious and bold, but God does not strike the psalmist dead for his impudence. The very presence of this prayer in the Psalms makes it clear that God invites his people’s honest and courageous prayers.’ – Psalms, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (InterVarsity Press Academic, Downers Grove, IL, Nottingham, UK, 2014), p. 287
[ix] A reword of Richard Ashcroft’s lyric in the seminal classic Bittersweet Symphony, from The Verve’s aptly named album Urban Hymns.
[x] Job 42:7
[xi] As Walter Brueggemann notes, when talking about the ‘psalms of complaint’. ‘The assumption of the complaint psalms is the same tight world of covenant sanctions to which the prophets appeal. Whereas the prophets hold to the sanctions and consequent indictments in asserting that Israel has betrayed the covenant, the complaint psalms hold to the sanctions accusing Yahweh of not having honored the covenant.’ [Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1997), p. 375 (Italics original)] Brueggemann makes this comparison when specifically discussing the ‘counter testimony’ of the Psalms, but does also, throughout his work, refer to the prophets testimony.
[xii] NIV. Of course, context is important here. Many commentators add, in there uncomfortable-ness of this verse, that Jeremiah is referencing God’s allowance of false prophets to deceive the people of Jerusalem with false proclamations of peace and prosperity, and not an accusation declaring that God has been actively involved in an act of deception. However, this being the case (and I have no qualms with it being the case), Jeremiah’s brief lament is still directed toward God for allowing this to transpire. Jeremiah may not be referencing an act of deception by God, agreed. But he does lament the inactivity of God in preventing this and holds this to be unfitting of God.
[xiii] Abraham Joshua Heshel, A Passion for the Truth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1973), pp. 265, 269
As an aside, inspired by thinkers like Heschel, I feel it’s I important to note that many (if not all) of the ancient religions taught people to accept the world as it was (attempting to justify every state of disorder and how to navigate it) or escape it. But Jewish and Christian faith — rooted in the Hebrew Bible and fulfilled in Christ — teaches us to engage it. To wrestle with it. To cry out against injustice, suffering, and silence — not because we’ve lost faith, but because we believe God is still listening and that God is just, and that the world is not as it ought to be.
[xiv] Genesis 18:25 (NLT)
[xv] ‘raging before God’ is a reword of Miroslav Volf, where he discussed the importance of placing our ‘unattended rage before God’ in the context of forgiveness and reconciliation. See, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1996), p. 124
[xvi] Walter Wink, Prayer and the Powers, in Sojourners, vol. 19, no. 8, October 1990, p.13
[xvii] Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does it Make any Difference? (Hodder & Stoughton, A Division of Hachette Livre UK Ltd, London, 2008), p. 57
[xviii] Psalm 77:19 (NIV), italics mine.
[xix] As J. Richard Middleton notes, ‘the psalm feels unfinished to me. This isn’t just a matter of my perception. At the formal level of Hebrew poetry, the psalm is incomplete. Up to verse 16 (with one exception) the psalm consists in bicola, but starting with verse 17, we have tricola. The last verse (v. 21) is different, however, with only two lines. Where is the third line? (https://www.thetorah.com/article/traumatized-and-sleepless-the-psalmist-seeks-comfort-in-gods-immanence)
[xx] Psalm 27:13-14 (NIV)
[xxi] Rob Merchant, Broken by Fear, Anchored in Hope (SPCK, London, 2020), p. 85
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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