A Prayer for the Heavy-Hearted

We have a very provocative Psalm before us this evening to study together. Psalm 6 which I read just a moment ago and I would venture to say that if we were all honest at the end of this time, we would find a reason to say, "I am familiar with this Psalm by experience even if I didn't even know it by text before I walked in here." Psalm 6 gives you voice when you have lost the will to pray. I have lived through the spirit of this Psalm in the past, I'm not there now, but I have lived through the spirit of this Psalm enough that I can honestly say that I sympathize with you who struggle with discouragement, who deal with a heavy heart and who find it difficult at times to wake up in the morning. Psalm 6 is a Psalm that addresses your condition with sympathy and with words that you can adopt as your own.

Psalm 6 has traditionally been viewed as a penitential Psalm, a Psalm of repentance along with six other Psalms that we won't bother to identify here this evening and many commentators think that this is a Psalm that is expressing repentance from sin of some kind of or another. But I believe that if we look at it and just let it speak for what it says and not be completely influenced by past interpretations of it, we will see that that doesn't quite exactly describe this Psalm. This Psalm does not have any explicit confession of sin; it does not contain a prayer for forgiveness. At best, all of those things must be implied or read into the text before you can come up with that interpretation. Commentators just don't agree with each other. Some say it's a prayer of repentance, some say it is a prayer in sickness because David says...