The phrase “incline your ear” appears in the Bible approximately seventy-six times. As is relatively evident, it generally means “pay attention!” It appears a lot in the book of Psalms when the psalmist asks God to incline His ear to the psalmist’s complaints or request for deliverance. It’s also a way for the psalmist to accentuate his desperation. He’s saying, “God, please pay attention!” In this time of difficulty, he needs God to hear him, and more importantly, to respond.
The simple fact that these human words (the prayers of the psalmist) became a part of the inspired Word of God (the Bible) means that as Christians, there’s nothing wrong with crying out for help to God in times of desperation. The Bible is endorsing cries for help. It’s God’s way of saying, “It’s okay to feel desperate sometimes!”
But being desperate means feeling hopeless, and Christians should never feel hopeless, right? Wrong! In fact, it’s to be expected. Sometimes I get to feeling like if I come to a place of desperation, then it means that there’s something wrong with me, or that I lack faith. Every time I get into a desperate situation and feel at my wits end, like I have nothing left, no more patience, no more faith, no more grace to give out, I’m tempted to become overwhelmed with a sense of guilt because, after all, good “Christians don’t feel this way.”
The Psalms corrected my wrong-thinking on this (2 Tim. 3:16–17). I read the Psalms and remember that it’s okay to cry out for help. Times like this will come, and God wants us to cry out to him. He’s ready to incline his ear and respond.
Even Jesus felt this way at times. The most notable is while he hung dying on the cross and he cried out to God, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus, in this time of great need, was quoting Psalm 22:1.
I said earlier that feeling desperate at times is not only okay but to be expected. Someone once said that when we come to the end of ourselves, God begins. This for me is a reminder that when God gives us God-sized tasks, we need always to be careful to draw on His strength and not our own.
The fact is that when we take our faith seriously and seek to grow, to be healed from the disease of the sin nature and the evil self that often lies quietly beneath the surface of things, we have to come to the end of ourselves. We have to put to death the ego. This means going through the desert. It means facing times of deprivation; it means facing times of desperation. If we want to grow, we have to be courageous to walk through the desert of desperation. When that happens, we’re to ask God to “incline your ear!”
