Pour out your heart before Him

Bro Tim Badger led a series of talks to this title at the Mount Barker ecclesial camp a couple of months ago, and I greatly benefitted from them, and I wanted to share a few thoughts.

The first one was presented to the title above and was based in Ps 62 (which happens to be a favourite of mine:-) )
'Few of us make claims on God's help to the extent to which it is available, or lay our lives so completely on His strength as we might'. Often the power of prayer is untapped.
Tim explained that you need to think of a animals throat that has been slit to correctly understand the concept of 'pouring out your heart'. The animal has no control over it, and so we need to had our complaint to our Father, and ask Him to take it up for us.
Prayer clarifies our relationship with our Father. Don't rattle off meaningless words, or your prayer might seem aenemic to God.
Ps 42v4-6 - Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation & my God. This verse shows us that there are points that David can't praise, he's too caught up with his own burdens to focus on the blessings he's receiving and has received. He encourages us to keep hoping as we know where our salvation comes from.
1 Sam 1v15 - Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord.

I think so often we are told that our prayers should be structured like the Lord's prayer as we are growing up that we tend to believe that. But the Lord's prayer leaves no room to 'pour out your heart' in it's structure. Tim showed us so many examples of prayers of David, where it wasn't until David had poured out his heart, and left his complaint with God that he could focus on God's Greatness, Goodness & be able to praise Him again. Also we looked at Job a bit - see 10v1-2: I will give free utterance to my complaint and God never condemns him for that.

Do we turn our complaints to God when we feel overwhelmed, cause the minute we have, we do start believing that He can help us through the situation.

In Ps 89 v 36 there's a huge cange to the psalm. It was really important for this human to pour out his heart cause only then could he change his (assuming he!) attitude.
Put EVERYTHING before Him.

Pray Hard. God wants you to do it. Raise your mind to Him, even if you're doubting.

Ps 56 - God collects all your tears, every emotion that you have shed is in your bottle that He stores, He knows all about you. (The Jews used to put the bottles underneath their eyes during a period of mourning to catch the emotion to keep for later).

The pendulam jolts between the tow extremes of happy and sad in the psalms, of praise and complaint, but:
However great the burden,
However irreplaceable the loss,
However terrible the desolation which brings about our sorrow,
for the follower of Jesus, the moment must come when, having poured out all his tears into God's bottle, he lifts up the head and says 'Arise, and let us be going'.