Help From the Depths

When I was a boy, I learned to swim at a young age, but I lacked the intestinal fortitude to try swimming in water over my head. My best friends, the Harringtons, would go camping at a park on the lake behind Hardy Dam. This lake had a drop off just about fifteen feet from the shore. That put the drop off just about at the end of their dock. When we were swimming Craig and Kerry, my friends swam in the deep water, I stayed near the shore where I could touch bottom. Finally, Craig and Kerry picked me up and threw me off the end of the dock into the drop off. I remember feeling like I sunk forever before I started swimming back to the top. The panic I felt at that moment and the seemingly life or death struggle that I was enduring is exactly the emotion expressed in the opening statement of the 130th Psalm when the Psalmist says, “Out of the depths I have cried to You, O LORD."

Have you ever felt you were in very deep and dangerous waters and struggling for your very life? I am not speaking about physically, but spiritually. I think all of us can identify with this Psalmist in this predicament in his life. The Psalmist teaches us three lessons that we should learn when we find ourselves “in the depths.”
I. IN TROUBLE WE LEARN TO SEEK THE LORD (v. 1-4)
II. IN TROUBLE WE LEARN TO WAIT UPON THE LORD (v. 5-6)
III. IN TROUBLE WE LEARN TO HOPE IN THE LORD (v. 7-8)