We know our hearts are easily divided, going our own way, away from the Lord. David is praying that God would keep him from being two-faced and double-minded, and that God would give him a single, steady aim, unmoved by the threats and pressures, only looking to God and His great name.

My father-in-law has challenged us as a family to learn Psalm 86:10–13 this year. It’s a wonderful psalm full of rich encouragement of how to live when under pressure. At the end of the psalm, David even fears for his existence, and the main message of the psalm is how to lay hold of God in times of personal need. The key to the whole psalm is the last phrase of verse 11: “Unite my heart to fear your name.” There is nothing like pressure to show how divided our hearts are. It is as if the circumstantial pressure exposes the spiritual fault lines of our hearts.

The structure of the psalm is like a sandwich; verses 1–7 and verses 14–17 are a cry for help, and in between, in verses 8–13, is the meat with a section on the praise of God.
The psalm begins with David pleading for God to answer him: “Incline your ear . . . answer me . . . be gracious . . . gladden my soul” (Ps. 86:1, 3, 4). He addresses himself to the “LORD,” using the name that God revealed to His covenant people. David recognizes that he is in a relationship with God. It is as if he is saying: “This is who I am, and this is who You are, so Lord, be all that You are to me.”
As we move into verses 8–13, God, and not David’s circumstances, dominates. You’ll notice the Lord is spelled without the small capital letters—it’s a different name in the Hebrew from “LORD.” The “Lord” (without small capital letters) focuses attention on God’s might and power. God is immeasurably great. There is nowhere else to go when dealing with life’s difficulties. The majestic power of God marks Him out as unique. There is no alternative deity that can demand universal worship, and that is the big reason that he prays, “Unite my heart to fear your name” (Ps. 86:11). God is One, there is no other. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses tells the people: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

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I’ve learned that one part of true faith-filled “waiting” is quietness. “In quietness and trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). Quietness is the opposite of striving and panic. It speaks of peaceful rest, a calm while at the storm’s center. As the psalmist put it, when mountains tremble, waters roar, nations rage and kingdoms totter, the trusting weary remain “still,” knowing that God is God (Psalm 46:1–11). 

Dear Journal,
I’ve mentioned before that life is a waiting room. I’ve lost count how many big needs my wife Gayline and I have been praying for—and waiting for—for years! A headache healing. Cancer healing. Children that need the Lord. Unconverted family and friends that still don’t believe. Racial healing in our church local and the Church. Fruitfulness in certain gospel endeavors. Spiritual revival in the Church. We’re still sitting in the waiting room for these and so many others.
And I’m sure we’re not alone. All God’s children have needs and grieve losses. We all believe. We all pray. We all weep. We all wait.
If I had one more sermon to preach, it’d be on this text: “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:30–31).
I’ve preached the whole chapter of Isaiah 40 many times, and my most frequent sermon summary of it is this: “God over all, because of Christ, gives strength to the trusting weary, in his time, according to their need, to do the remarkable for his glory.” That’s all in the Isaiah 40 text. And as I say—for a lot of reasons—if God ever gives me strength to preach one more time, that would be the text and summary that I herald.
One point in Isaiah 40 that I notice this morning is the word “wait.” It implies a period of delay in the meeting of our needs or wants, which is why I say: “God gives strength . . . in his time.” There is almost always a time-gap between when we become aware of a need and when God meets it. We have to wait because his clock moves slower than ours, and he’s never in our kind of hurry. So we sit in the waiting room of life.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Ours is a time of anthropological crisis when we as a society cannot agree on what it means to be human. In such a context, theologians who faced that issue in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are obvious dialogue partners upon whom we can draw.

Twice in the last ten days my dear friend and colleague Fran Maier has drawn attention to the importance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the church in America today. At the Catholic Thing he noted that this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, in which a number of prominent theologians in Nazi Germany publicly opposed the “German Christians” who were seeking an accommodation with Nazism. Bonhoeffer was one of the signatories. Then, at the launch event for his fascinating new book, True Confessions, he quoted from Bonhoeffer’s letters, that it is “only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
That Maier, a Catholic, calls on Bonhoeffer is a sign of the times. This is not simply because in the current climate Catholics and Protestants share common cultural concerns. It is also because the great temptation of our day, that of conflating politics with Christianity, is intense. The stakes are not as high as they were in Germany in 1934. But the principal challenge for Christians, that of remaining faithful as witnesses to the gospel rather than enablers of those whose politics resonate with our cultural tastes, is the same.
Bonhoeffer may be the most famous German theologian to oppose Hitler and Nazism, but he was not the only one. Another who speaks to our times is Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran theologian and pastor. Like Bonhoeffer, Thielicke was hounded by the Nazis, though he survived and was even able to pastor a church for a while in the 1940s. A polymath and a preacher, he wrote a massive theological ethics as well as a critique of Bultmann. Many of his sermons and lectures were collected and published. Also like Bonhoeffer, he was not an entirely reliable guide to traditional Christianity. His historical context was Nazism but his theological context was neo-orthodoxy. The latter was always somewhat more “neo” than “orthodox” at key points.
I first encountered Thielicke when I picked up a copy of Man in God’s World in a used bookstore in the late 1980s. It’s a series of lectures on Luther’s Small Catechism that he delivered in Stuttgart Cathedral in the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the series continued through the Allied bombings of the city. Thielicke knew that every lecture he gave would be the last gospel message that some members of his audience would ever hear. That gave them an urgency and a relevance I have not encountered elsewhere. Perhaps never has Richard Baxter’s comment about preaching as a dying man to dying men applied to anyone as pointedly as to Thielicke in Stuttgart during the war.
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