Psalm 60

O God, You have cast us off;
You have broken us down;
You have been displeased;
Oh, restore us again!
² You have made the earth tremble;
You have broken it;
Heal its breaches, for it is shaking.
³ You have shown Your people hard things;
You have made us drink the wine of confusion.

⁴ You have given a banner to those who fear You,
That it may be displayed because of the truth. Selah
⁵ That Your beloved may be delivered,
Save with Your right hand, and hear me.

⁶ God has spoken in His holiness:
“I will rejoice;
I will divide Shechem
And measure out the Valley of Succoth.
⁷ Gilead is Mine, and Manasseh is Mine;
Ephraim also is the helmet for My head;
Judah is My lawgiver.
⁸ Moab is My washpot;
Over Edom I will cast My shoe;
Philistia, shout in triumph because of Me.”

⁹ Who will bring me to the strong city?
Who will lead me to Edom?
¹⁰ Is it not You, O God, who cast us off?
And You, O God, who did not go out with our armies?
¹¹ Give us help from trouble,
For the help of man is useless.
¹² Through God we will do valiantly,
For it is He who shall tread down our enemies.

Oh, restore us again!

Notice how he doesn’t ask God, “Make things better so that we can be on our merry way again!” He recognizes that when we run into trouble, our problem might just be that we are far from God. He knows that God has been displeased with whatever they’ve been doing, and he knows that they are not with God because of it. His prayer, then, is that they be restored to God, that they be taken back into His good graces.

You have shown Your people hard things

God sometimes even shows His people hard times. Even when we’re off doing our own thing, God doesn’t desert us. He lets us do whatever we want, and that leads us into problems. As we’ve seen before, those who don’t follow God are often getting tripped up by their own traps. We don’t just need things to get better when we’re going off on our own, we need to be restored to God.

Through God we will do valiantly

Sure, without God, someone may stumble upon good work and is probably a really decent person. [Although as Aslan said, “For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.”] On the other hand, without God, we are prone to falling into every trap along the way. And without God, we have no one to help us out of it. But, with God, we can stay on the right track. With God, we have help to do everything. With god, we can do anything courageously, boldly, worthily, greatly, nobly—in a word, valiantly.