The Unbudding Fig Tree
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Habakkuk 3:17-19
| Devotion
It’s a burdensome, tiring, and maybe unsustainable thing to worship God when you don’t feel like it. Every human is wired for worship to have a holistic integrity. If I’m worshiping God, I should feel an alignment between the act of worship and how I feel about it. I should want to worship God.
Suffering has a way of sabotaging our “wanter.” It’s hard to rev up the motivation, the internal engine of worship, when difficulty and pain are overwhelming us. Bitterness sours everything, and joy feels like a real chore.
Thank God for the biblical songwriters who flooded the Psalter with worship songs that express the suffering and sing through it. And thank God for the musical prophet Habakkuk, whose short book not only prophesied a word to an Israel headed into exile but also modeled a faithful path for worshiping through suffering.
Habakkuk opens with a complaint against God, a complaint that’s pretty defensible. He’s received a word from the Lord about his people. He is to be the messenger of that word. He ponders that word and then recognizes rightly that something is not quite fair about God’s ruling. And so Habakkuk opens with a “that’s not fair, Dad!”
Habakkuk knows that Israel has rebelled against God and that Israel needs the Father’s loving discipline. But he sees God’s course of action as unjust. God has chosen to use the Babylonians – a far more pagan and wicked people to mete out his justice on Israel. “It’s one thing to punish us, God,” Habakkuk says, “but it’s another to do so by giving triumph to people who are far worse than we are” (Hab. 1:3).
And so Habakkuk folds his arms, closes his case, and basically says, “I’m going to wait to see what God has to say about that” (2:1). And as often happens when we make a lot of our seemingly airtight arguments against God, God puts Habakkuk in his place. God thunders back at Habakkuk, similar to the way God spoke to the sufferer Job when it was time. God reminds Habakkuk, “Remember who you’re talking to, my child.”
Humbled, Habakkuk yields, penning a prayer that sounds strikingly similar to the praise song in Psalm 18. The sufferer goes back to the old, familiar, well-worn worship songs that are baked into the memory of his heart. He goes back to simple faith and the simple act of being just a worshiper.
The act of pouring himself out in a worship song before the Lord leads to something – an addendum, a resolution at the close of the book, which we just read. This resolution states that “though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines… yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab. 3:17-18).
It’s the counterintuitive discovery that to worship God through suffering – to worship God when we don’t feel like it – has a mysterious way of strengthening our faith and aligning the desire to worship with the act of worship.
Every week, sufferers of all sorts limp into our worship spaces carrying seen and unseen burdens. Some sufferers are in such pain that the best they can do is sit in the back row and stare at the floor or quietly weep. There’s a blessing in just being there. Sometimes sufferers are buoyed up when other Christians sing around them, sing for them. Other sufferers hide the pain by dressing up and going through the motions of singing, praying, receiving preaching, receiving grace at the table. There’s a blessing there too. Sometimes God breaks through the numbness.
But with any kind of suffering, the book of Habakkuk stands as a testament that God is not distant from the sufferer in his or her moment of need. To the contrary. “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). So band together and take some time to pray for all the kinds of suffering that will be brought to the cross in the upcoming worship service, even and especially if it’s your own.
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Pray for sufferers who may be struggling to decide whether to even come to church this week. Ask the Holy Spirit to bring them.
- Pray for sufferers who are knowingly or unknowingly bitter toward God. Pray that God’s kindness and gentleness would be evident to them in worship.
- Pray for the tone of the worship service to be devoid of harshness and filled with the peace of God and the wooing love of the Holy Spirit.
- Pray that sufferers of all stripes would feel like worship is a safe enough space to lay that pain, honestly and authentically, before God and others.