So let me speak to whoever needs this most this morning.
Maybe you came in today carrying that quiet ache — the sense that God has been far off lately, that your prayers have gone unanswered, that you’ve been walking a lonely stretch of road.
I’m not going to tell you to cheer up, or that you shouldn’t feel what you feel.
Jacob felt it.
The psalmist felt it.
Even our Lord, on the cross, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
You are in holy company.
But hear the promise again — not as a feeling, but as a fact older than your fear: “I will never leave you or forsake you.”
God said it to a wandering people in the wilderness.
God said it to a frightened leader at the edge of an unknown future.
God says it to this congregation, in this season, today.
And God said it most loudly of all at the cross and the empty tomb, where Jesus went into the deepest God-forsakenness so that you would never have to be truly forsaken again.
Jacob woke up from his stone pillow and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it.”
That may be the truest word for some of you this morning.
You have felt alone.
But you have not been alone. The God who stays has been with you in the very place where you thought you were by yourself.
So when God feels far, do what the psalmist did.
Don’t pretend.
Bring the honest “how long?” right to him.
And then, on the far side of the honesty, say the harder, truer thing: “But I will trust in your steadfast love.”
Not because the feeling has lifted — it may not have, yet — but because the One who promised has never once broken his word.
The Lord is your helper.
You need not be afraid.
He has never left you.
And he never, no never, no never will.
Let us pray.
Maybe you came in today carrying that quiet ache — the sense that God has been far off lately, that your prayers have gone unanswered, that you’ve been walking a lonely stretch of road.
I’m not going to tell you to cheer up, or that you shouldn’t feel what you feel.
Jacob felt it.
The psalmist felt it.
Even our Lord, on the cross, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
You are in holy company.
But hear the promise again — not as a feeling, but as a fact older than your fear: “I will never leave you or forsake you.”
God said it to a wandering people in the wilderness.
God said it to a frightened leader at the edge of an unknown future.
God says it to this congregation, in this season, today.
And God said it most loudly of all at the cross and the empty tomb, where Jesus went into the deepest God-forsakenness so that you would never have to be truly forsaken again.
Jacob woke up from his stone pillow and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it.”
That may be the truest word for some of you this morning.
You have felt alone.
But you have not been alone. The God who stays has been with you in the very place where you thought you were by yourself.
So when God feels far, do what the psalmist did.
Don’t pretend.
Bring the honest “how long?” right to him.
And then, on the far side of the honesty, say the harder, truer thing: “But I will trust in your steadfast love.”
Not because the feeling has lifted — it may not have, yet — but because the One who promised has never once broken his word.
The Lord is your helper.
You need not be afraid.
He has never left you.
And he never, no never, no never will.
Let us pray.