One afternoon I came by the church to pick up a few things. I parked around the back, and there discovered two of our members, plus our sexton, in major trouble.
These men had purchased a heavy-duty safe for the church office, and were intent on moving it inside. The safe had been hauled here on a small truck, and a hand dolly had been placed at just the right spot to receive the safe off the back end of the truck. The only trouble with that plan, however, was that the ground was wet and therefore muddy; and the truck was parked on a slight slope ... and so when the safe came off the truck bed and landed on the hand dolly, it promptly slid to one side, and mired itself in the mud.
By the time I got there, it was quite a mess. Everywhere mud. Feet and legs churning, trying to push what seemed like a ton of concrete and steel, but those feet going deeper into the mud, those legs just churning up the ground. A steel bar was being used to pry up one corner, but the steel bar was just pressing down into the mud. The harder these men worked, the more they got mired in the mud. Frankly, it looked hopeless to me.
I thought briefly about trying to help. But I had two good excuses: first, I had good clothes on. And second, I had something spiritual to do -- never had been so grateful for hospital visitation! And besides, one of these poor struggling souls muttered some comment about staying away unless I wanted to hear sane things that I might not want to quote from the pulpit. So I left.
About three or four hours later that evening, I returned, and they were all still here. So was the safe, and so was the mud. But this time there was a difference. They had gotten the safe out of the mud and were just about to bring it through the back doors, inside at last. All three of these men were a mess (at least two of them still are), they were cold and tired and worn out, but at last there were shouts of victory. They had moved the unmovable and had saved the unsaveable. How? How had they done it? It was really very simple: they had found some broad, flat, solid planks; they had placed these boards in the mud and had managed to get at least a corner of the safe up on those boards. And the strong, broad wood floated on top of the mud long enough and well enough that they could get some footing and lift that safe.
Wherein lies a parable: as the Greek philosopher Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world". If you have a place to stand, you can get out of the mud and the mire. You can be rescued from the quicksand. But without a place to stand, without a footing, you will sink in frustration.
If you have somewhere to stand, you can be drawn out of the mire. If you have a broad, strong floor under foot, you can find a secure footing. But lacking that, your life will dissolve in impatience.
By the way, I will not, of course, name any names. Naturally I would not want to violate anyone’ s privacy. The mere fact that two of the men in the choir are squirming right now should not tell you anything at all!
The psalmist says, "I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure ... Happy are those who make the Lord their trust."
I could not ask for a better image for the plight of this world and for our own lives -- this image of the desolate pit, the miry bog. We get mired down, bogged down, in the burdensome details of our lives. And we just cannot get a secure footing. We just cannot get started on going where we want to go. We are overwhelmed.
Now lots of us come out of the South, where we got used to dealing with red clay. That red clay earth does get slippery, and it does get messy: but for the most part, it packs hard, and you can walk on it even when it’s wet. But some of you are from New England or from some of the coastal areas, and you know what a bog is. You know that a bog may look like land. It has grasses growing on it; but it’s more water than earth. If you step in it, you sink, you get caught, and, in fact, the unsuspecting can die in these bogs. They’ve found the bodies of prehistoric people and animals preserved in bogs, where centuries ago they stepped in and quickly were overwhelmed. Like quicksand drawing them in, they were pulled down by their own weight and by the suction underneath, and the more they struggled, the more they were doomed.
That’s what the psalmist us telling us life is like. You just get pulled into something that is a whole lot more overwhelming than you expected. And the more you struggle, the more engulfed you become.
Some of you have had jobs like that. You get enmeshed in them. You can’t take a break or a vacation, because you just can’t get loose from all the responsibility. The job was supposed to be a means to support yourself and a way to derive satisfaction, but now it’s become a desolate pit and a miry bog, overwhelming.
Others experience their families this way. Some family member has become totally dependent; they tell you they need you, and they need you all the time. Every time you think of doing something for yourself, there’s that child or that spouse or that parent or whoever, clinging to you and dragging you down. Family are supposed to be the folks who support you and care about you, but here you are experiencing a family member as a desolate pit and a miry bog, overwhelming.
Still others are bogged down in debt, covering the MasterCard bill with the Visa card and the Visa card with the American Express. It’s not long before that is a desolate pit and a miry bog.
And yet others are mired down in some unfortunate habit, barhopping to overcome loneliness but just getting more and more lonely ... taking pills to get high and then taking more pills to come down ... a desolate pit and a miry bog. And, frankly, it can be fatal.
What has the psalmist to teach us, then, about what to do when our lives get bogged down? What is the word of the Lord about the frustration of struggling for a footing in the desolate pit and the miry bog?
I
First, the psalmist decides that he must act responsibly. The psalmist recognizes that in order to get out of the morass, he has to do something for himself, and that he has already been given, basically, what he needs to know. He just needs to act responsibly on it.
He says, "Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, ’Here I am ... I delight to do your will, 0 my God.’”
I hear the psalmist saying that the first step in getting out of the muddy mess is to see that God has already given us common sense and a teachable mind. It is simply irresponsible to run around pleading with God to get us out of the pit, when we know full well that we are not doing what we could do to avoid it! It is irresponsible to implore God to correct the mistakes we’ve made just because we didn’t want to be taught.
I like so very much the psalmist’s phrase: "You have given me an open ear." Literally what it says is, "You dug out ears for me …" Out of my stupid thick skull you dug out ears, Lord, so that I can listen, and I can learn. "Then said I, ’Here I am … I delight to do your will, 0 my God; your law is within my heart. ’"
In other words, since you dug ears out of my thick head, I need to do more than just ask you, Lord, to dig me out of the miry bog in which I put myself.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to be the kind of guy who, when confronted with a new piece of equipment I’ve never used before, would rather start pushing buttons and turning switches, just to see what happens, than to read the instructions. Are you like that? I think instruction manuals are for sissies; let me just push this button and see what happens. Who needs information? Who needs to learn? Just blunder ahead and get overwhelmed. Only when all else fails, then read the instructions.
Well, there is, you see, a false piety which spends its energies talking about all the horrible problems I have and how hard other people are on me and how I just can’t get anything done and on and on ... and pray, will you, pastor, that I will be delivered from these people and this mess will be removed from me? My response is: God has given you open ears. God has dug out ears for you. Use them. You can learn. You do know his will. Just do it. Just act responsibly.
The first step, then, out of the overwhelming, desolate pit and miry bog, is to act responsibly with what you know to do.
If you have a place to stand, you can get out of the mud and the mire. You can be rescued from the quicksand. But without a place to stand, without a footing, you will sink in frustration.
If you have somewhere to stand, you can be drawn out of the mire. If you have a broad, strong plank under foot, you can find a secure footing. But lacking that, your life will dissolve in impatience.
II
The second step out of the desolate pit and the miry bog is to offer a witness to what God has already done. When you feel overwhelmed, you stop and review what God has already done in your life. And then you go find somebody to tell it to. To get out of that desperate, desolate sense of being overwhelmed, you tell your story and you tell your world what God has done.
The psalmist says, "I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips ... I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation."
You see, you can gain an incredible release from desperation if you just tell somebody what you feel and what you’ve experienced. Usually, if you have a good listener, you will find more that is positive than you find negative; you will discover more of the mercy of God than of His judgment. And you will remember that a God who has delivered you before will be able to deliver you again.
The special thing here is that the psalmist is not only admonishing us to remember what God has done, but also to tell it, to describe it … to rehearse it, to make a witness of it.
I think he’s on to something. I think the psalmist knows that when you really have to share your mind ... when you really have to tell someone what is happening in your life … the very act of telling the story brings a healthy perspective.
I know that in my private moments I can get kind of down. I can look at the responsibilities and tasks I have before me, and I can get overwhelmed. I can play a very good game of "Poor Me". I do know how to whine.
But I also know that when I stand to preach on Sunday, and sometimes stand here not so much because I want to but because it’s Sunday and I have to ... then that work brings me into focus. That makes me tell the truth. That makes me speak of Good News, not just bad news. Because I have to tell the glad news of deliverance to the congregation, as the psalmist says, I also begin to feel the good news. I begin to sort things out. I begin to set priorities. I begin to see what God has done. And I begin to see a way out of my desolate pit and my miry bog.
Perhaps some of you saw on 20/20 this week, as I did, Barbara Walters’ interview with former baseball star Dave Dravecky. Dave Dravecky had been an outstanding pitcher, with several seasons behind him, and a promising career ahead. But about four years ago they found a lump on his pitching arm, near the shoulder; the diagnosis was cancer. After surgery and radiation, the doctor said to Dravecky, "There is no chance, zero chance, that you will ever pitch again." But Dave Dravecky knew that the game was his life, and so he worked and exercised and built back lost tissue. Less than a year after his cancer surgery, he made a comeback, pitching again, and pitching near perfect games.
But one afternoon, as he pitched, he fell, writhing in pain. The bone in his arm had broken, and the doctors found that the cancer had come back and had spread rapidly. There was no answer but amputation ... as it turned out, a radical amputation that took not only his pitching arm but even his shoulder.
Most of us would have felt ourselves in the desolate pit and the miry bog, with nowhere to go and no place to stand. Most of us would have sat on the sidelines and nursed our wounds and felt useless. And Dave Dravecky did just that for a while.
But soon Dave began speaking about his God; he began telling others about how his faith in God had brought him through. He began to tell his story and to share his testimony. Maybe you are wondering what he will do with his life now that he can so longer play baseball. Well, Dave Dravecky now has a list of some 700 invitations, just to tell his story. I suggest to you that Dave Dravecky does this not just because he’s brave; and that he does it not just to help others. He does it to help himself and to keep his own spirits focused.
"I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation ... I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation. "
You can escape from the desolate pit and the miry bog.
If you have a place to stand, you can get out of the mud and the mire. You can be rescued from the quicksand. But without a place to stand, without a footing, you will sink in frustration.
If you have somewhere to stand, you can be drawn out of the mire. If you have a broad, strong board under foot, you can find a secure footing. But lacking that, your life will dissolve in impatience.
III
Having said all of that, however, I do not mean to leave you with nothing but a message of self-help or positive thinking. The truth is that there are desolate pits from which we cannot pull ourselves. And just using your own knowledge, just doing what we know is right, will not always do it.
And the truth is that there are miry bogs and quicksand pools too deep and too seductive, even when we tell the story of the mercy of God.
There are some pits too desolate and some bogs too miry. There are some mudholes too slippery and some heavy loads that will never yield to our determination.
That is why the psalmist’s major message is, "I waited for the Lord, He inclined unto me. and heard my complaint. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock. ... Blessed are they that trust in Him. "
This is why the psalmist’s final word is, "The Lord takes thought for me; He is my help and my deliverer."
This is why the heartcry from the pit is, "0 Lord make haste to deliver me."
That is why the world crying from the quicksand must finally cry out, "I am poor and needy.. do not delay. 0 God, to help me." We are never fully able, out of our own intelligence and out of our own bravery to do all that we must do. We can never on our own save ourselves. We can never by ourselves restore perspective and balance. We need something else. We need a God who will deliver. We need a savior. We need a savior.
Our men just couldn’t move the heavy safe out of the mud until somebody thought to find strong, broad beams to place underneath the load and to bear it up.
And we just cannot lift the burdens of our lives out of the miry, bogged down, messy, stinking mess until a Savior will bring the strong, broad, beam of His Cross to place underneath and to bear us up. On the Cross I can stand. On the Cross I can depend. On the Cross I can gain a footing. And on that Cross of Jesus my eye at times can see the very dying form of one who suffered there for me ... and I can see that he drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and he set my feet upon a rock.
Therefore I wait patiently for the Lord. He inclined to me and heard my complaint. 0 blessed are they who trust in him, crying from the quicksand.
