Have you called out desperately to God with prayers that echo Psalm 88? “Lord, hear my prayer! My life is a total wreck. It feels like I’m as good as dead.”


The book of Psalms is full of prayers to God—some rejoicing in all He has done, others crying out desperately to Him. In low moments since I suffered a severe stroke, I have identified with Psalm 88. Sometimes the despair has felt suffocating. Through painfully slow rehabilitation and through grief of physical, relational, or cognitive losses, I’ve felt like the psalmist crying out to God day and night.

But, even in this most hopeless-sounding of psalms, the gospel truth emerges. “Isn’t it interesting that God will do and has done precisely what the psalmist thinks he can’t? ‘Lord,’ he says, ‘will you perform wonders from the dead?’ ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I will,’ the Lord says…. ‘Will your loving kindness be declared in the grave?’ ‘Yes, it will, in my Son’s grave’” (Ligon Duncan, 2006). Lift up your most despondent prayers, and see the gospel rise above them.