“Into your hands” (Psalm 31:5)

Psalm 31:1-5,15-16
Acts 7:55-60
John 14:1-14

Listen and Watch Sermon

Pastor Tom Johnson, May 10, 2020

“Good Shepherd” by Bernhard Plockhorst (1825-1907)

“Into your hands I commend my spirit.” This is the prayer of Psalm 31 that we sang earlier. David prayerfully surrenders his breath, life, and spirit to God. He calls God his rock, his refuge, his castle to keep him safe, his crag, his stronghold. God is his tower of strength. There is no safer place—there is no more loving place than to be in the hands of the Lord, our God of truth. This Psalm is a prayer of distress. But it is also a prayer that strengthens our confidence and trust in God. I don’t know about you, but when I saw the readings appointed for today, I thought, “This is exactly what I need to hear.” God is faithful. He may not give us what we always want; but he gives us what we need.

At the height of World War II, Pastor Dietrich Bonnhoeffer published his book The Psalms: the Prayerbook of the Bible. It went to print in a time of great distress. The Nazi’s stopped print when they realized he published a book that praised Jewish poetry—right under their noses. Bonnhoeffer said of the Psalms, “The Psalter gives us ample instruction in how to come before God in a proper way, bearing the frequent suffering which this world brings upon us.” “Serious illness and severe loneliness before God and people, threat, persecution, imprisonment, whatever conceivable peril there is on earth are known by the Psalms.”

“Into your hands, I commend my spirit”—my breath, my life, my body and soul and all things. “My times are in your hands,” this prayer says. Every moment, every day, every season, and every generation are all in God’s hands. “He’s got the whole world in his hands”—“you and me sister”—“you and me brother.” We are in a time of shared distress—the troubled time of a city, state, nation. We are all threatened as global humanity. And it is times like these when we need to unload our anxieties, fears, and frustrations.  We are in deep trouble when we do not pour out our troubled spirits upon God. This is what Bonhoeffer refers to as the agony of prayerlessness. We are cutting ourselves off from the great comfort and assurance of God’s grace and presence. It strikes me that when we don’t commend our times and our spirits and all things to the hands of God, we lash out at each other. Yes, someone else’s wickedness or  negligence may have caused the problems we face.
But unleashing our anger, blame, frustration, anxiety, and fears upon each other will only intensify our agony, despair, and loneliness.

David poured out his heart and spirit upon God. He placed his worries into the hands of almighty God. It is not surprising that this prayer contains the last words of Jesus upon the cross (Luke 23:46). “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” our Lord prays before he breathes his last. He is the eternal Son of God who took on our humanity. He took on human flesh. He took on David’s prayer to show us the way to pray through our greatest times of suffering and trial. Jesus entrusted himself—his body, his breath, his life, his spirit to God his and our heavenly Father. These are words of great confidence and assurance that Jesus did not perish but went home to the Father—into the fold of his loving hands and arms. When Stephen is stoned to death. He does not glare at his murderers. He gazes into the Kingdom that transcends heaven and earth. He looks to Jesus and his strong, nail-scarred hands and says, “receive my spirit.” He forgives his killers as he dies by quoting Jesus again, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

And so Jesus invites us to do the same when he said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.” In other words, do not lose spirit—do not be overwhelmed with the anxiety of this world. Trust God. Trust Jesus. This is Jesus’ invitation to see his nail-scarred hands reaching out to you. He spread them wide on the Cross of Calvary to not only forgive us of our sins but also to deliver us from evil—even the evil of anxiety and the agony of prayerlessness.

David was not alone in his distress. Jesus was not abandoned the cross. Stephen was not deserted under a heap of bloody stones. They commended themselves to God our heavenly Father—their bodies, their souls, their spirits, and all things. It is not only a beautiful prayer of surrender to the capable and strong care of God but also a beautiful testimony of their faith and confidence in God and assurance that our home is ultimately in the arms of our heavenly Father. The German Reformer Martin Luther taught his disciples to pray those same words every morning when we wake up and every night before we go to sleep: “Into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things.”

We commend ourselves into the surest place, the care of Him who gave himself for us on the cross. No thoughtful recitation of this prayer will escape thoughts about the Cross of Calvary nor the work accomplished that makes our prayer possible. We commend ourselves to Jesus’ nail-scarred hands. They are the hands that hold us—not just in our time of departure from this world—but especially now. We  entrust ourselves to the only true and capable source of refuge: Christ our Rock.