This majestic Psalm of David that blazes with radiant praise, would have been a song that a Hebrew first grader would have learned. It is written in an acrostic format, with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet starting each line. This mnemonic device helped lock in those letters much like our song “ABCDEFG” has done for the typical English child, yet with an amazing caveat: This song was designed to transport both the child and monarch directly into the throne room of God. Let your first grade heart soak up, for a moment, the concepts within:
When I came across Psalm 145, I was in a low place in my life. I lay awake one night, unable to sleep — and it wasn’t the first night of insomnia either; it was the second in a row. It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like to be so tired but unable to sleep. I lay in my bed moment after moment waiting for sleep that wouldn’t come. What made it even worse for me was that at that time I was a young college student at the very beginning of my recovery from an addiction to pornography. Being awake in the middle of the night wasn’t a particularly safe situation for my recovery.
The specter of temptation loomed large in my mind, and amid all of this, I was incredibly angry at God. Why wasn’t He making things easier for me? Wasn’t I trying to go the right way? Why was I suffering like this?
Even though I could have, I didn’t turn to pornography that night. Instead, I turned on a light, sat up on my bed and opened the Bible directly to the middle and began to read. And that’s when I found Psalm 145. In my anger, I began to read these beautiful words before God. As I read the Psalm, I felt a strange shift inside. The first verses speak of praising God for His wondrous attributes. My stoney heart was met by how God is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love,” and how He has “compassion on all He has made.”
Verses 14 through 16, however, really pierced my heart:
In that place on my bed at 2 a.m. in the morning I felt bowed down, and here within Psalm 145 God was promising to lift me up. I had spent so long trying to satisfy myself through my addictive behavior, yet I couldn’t do it. I had failed miserably and had ironically driven myself to deep depression and suicidal thoughts. But here God promised something different — that He could open His hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. Could God really satisfy me? Were the words of Psalm 145 mere hyperbole or were they a genuine promise from a God who knew all things and had the power to fulfill His promises?
God spoke to me then — not audibly — but I knew that He was saying one simple truth — I love you. That morning, I cried more tears than I had ever before or since, flooding my pillow with Spirit-induced confession and repentance. And in the years that followed, I would learn that “[God] fulfills the desires of those who fear him [and] hears their cry and saves them.”
That’s what He did for me. I thought I had ruined myself too much to be loved. But God loved me, and then He brought other people into my life to love me, too. And one of those people later would become my wife — a relationship I thought I could never have and could never be worthy of. And He taught me that His ways truly satisfy, that far from trying to keep me from pleasure, God was instead the only legitimate route to pleasure. When we experience the fullness of God, we are moved to praise Him in the same way that David does in this Psalm. The joy that fills our hearts overflows.
Psalm 145 will always be dear to me because God used it to set a new path for my life, and I’m so, so, so very thankful that He did.