News of Deliverance

Passage: Psalm 40

During my first few years in Detroit, I accidentally ended up in a helping relationship with a very needy person.  I say accidentally because I really didn’t go out looking for someone to help.  And I didn’t particularly like it helping when I was called on to do so.  It started one night when I was driving to a meeting.  It was a rainy November evening.  Halfway between home and church there was this couple – a tall skinny guy pushing a middle-aged woman down the street in a wheelchair.  After a moment of internal conflict, I pulled over the family mini-van, and asked them if they needed a ride.  They did.  I loaded the wheelchair into the back while they got situated.  It turned out they were at the halfway point of a 5-mile walk from the hospital, where they’d just left the ER, and a pharmacy in my neighborhood.  They had no other means of transportation.  I dropped them off at the pharmacy.  They asked me, while I was at it, if I could help them with some food.  I said I was late for a meeting, and would get in touch with them after it was done.  We exchanged cell numbers (a move I would, at times, come to regret).  I went to the meeting.  Afterward I called.  They needed a ride home; and they needed food.  I picked up a hot and ready pepperoni pizza.  Found them outside the pharmacy, from which they were in the process of being evicted by security (they had, on past occasions, panhandled there).  I walked up and asked if I could help.  The woman said, “See, we’re not here to cause trouble.  I just need my prescription.  This is my pastor!”  The security guard looked at me skeptically.  I confirmed that I was, indeed, their pastor (granted, I’d only been their pastor for about an hour).  We completed our business, and I brought them home.

Two years later, after numerous emergency phone calls for food, warm blankets for winter, fans for summer, changed locks after a break-in, and rides to appointments, I was talking with the woman.  And she said, “I tell all my friends about you.  You’re not like their pastors, who don’t even acknowledge them half the time because they’re embarrassed.  Remember that time we were at the store?  And I said you were my pastor, and you said, ‘Yes’?  I tell my all my friends, ‘That’s my pastor!’” 

I rethought all the times I’d let her calls go to voicemail.  All the times I’d grudgingly responded to her calls for help.  And I thought about the props I’d been getting the whole time in this woman’s motley community of friends and relations.  Good props.

Psalm 40 is a cry for help.  The author – King David, presumably – is in dire straits.  Not for the first time.  In desperation he calls out to the God whom he’s asked for help again and again.  He appeals to God because God always comes through.  Partway through the Psalm, David says this:

I have told the glad news of deliverance
    in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
    as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
    I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
    from the great congregation.

It’s as though David is saying, “God, you have done your part in rescuing me time after time.  But look – I’ve done my part, too!  I never fail to give you your props.”  Remarkably, this is what God wants.  The God of the Bible never withholds his deliverance from his people.  All God asks is that we give him his props.  That we tell the communities of our friends and relations about a God who has made himself our God.  Who always comes through for us.  Whatever your trouble, ask God for help.  Then, when it comes, spread the “news of deliverance”.  Give God the props he deserves.