Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up
November 22, 2017·Tim Clark
When I was a teenager, I remember a rather campy commercial; the kind of commercial that was on mostly during the middle of the day or late at night. In this ad, senior citizen Mrs. Fletcher fell and hurt herself while she was in her house alone, but she was able to use her “LifeCall” device to alert first responders. Maybe you remember her famous line: “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”
This week in our “Pause” Bible reading plan, we encountered Psalm 130, which has been personally meaningful to me since I started to follow Jesus wholeheartedly as a teenager. In this passage, the writer starts by admitting an inability to get back up after a bad fall: “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord; Lord, hear my voice. Let Your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.” That’s the Bible’s version of “Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve prayed that prayer when I found myself in that very situation in my life, not because I don’t want to tell it, but because the occurrences seem beyond measure.
Early on, I learned about the incomparable grace of God, and in deep awe of His mercy, I’ve joined with the Psalmist to say: “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with You, there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve You.” While we aren’t flippantly careless with the grace of God, we do, in reverence, recognize that God freely forgives us when we fall, so we can continue to serve Him.
After the countless times I’ve called out to the Lord to rescue me from the pit I’ve fallen into (or dug for myself), I’ve then done what this Psalm recites: “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in His word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.”
If you’ve ever tried to stay up all night, you know that at about 3:30 or 4am, your eyes get super heavy, and you just want to fall asleep. But watchmen have a job to do, and they wouldn’t dare catch some “Z’s,” under severe penalty. Or, like Mrs. Fletcher in the commercial, we know that the only way we’re ever getting up is to wait for help to arrive. Either way, though watching and waiting isn’t the most fun thing in the world, there is no other way to “get up” outside of the Lord helping us to stand. In fact, I want to suggest that when we do fall, instead of throwing up a quick “forgive me” and moving on, that we sit and wait, with our whole being, and let the reality of God’s grace go deep, until we’ve come to fully put our hope in God’s Word and stand in His strength.
The Psalm finishes: “Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with Him is full redemption. He Himself will redeem Israel from all their sins.” Because of God’s unfailing love, He desires to redeem what becomes broken and lost because of sin, and to access that redemptive possibility in our own lives, we need to fully put our hope in the Lord. And we can put our full hope in Him, because according to this Scripture, He is a faithful, forgiving, merciful, attentive, responsive, loving and redemptive God.
In other words, He’s a God who can, will, and loves to help us get back up again!
Grace,
