The Difference Between Grumbling and Lament

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Good Morning!

Yesterday, we continued our series "In the Wilderness". One of the things that has really encouraged so far in the series has been hearing stories of people deciding not to grumble because of what God has been saying to all of us through his Word. I know it can be difficult – this last week I spent a fair bit of time on a conference which gave me plenty of opportunities. But I decided beforehand not to grumble, and I didn't grumble as much as I usually do on those things, instead trying to encourage others.

I think it's important, though, to draw a few helpful distinctions between grumbling, lament and asking for prayer or help. Lament is what a lot of the Psalms do – it's bringing our sorrow into the open before God, being honest with him about it and letting him speak into it. It can be a very powerful thing. Some laments are individual, some are corporate – sometimes it's helpful to bring another person in on our lament, as we sometimes do in prayer ministry, so that they can help us see God's perspective on it and his love for us.

Sometimes we're in trouble and we need to ask other people for practical help rather than "just" emotional and/or prayer support.

I think the fundamental difference between grumbling and lament is that lament trusts God. Lament is coming to God or to others and saying "I still trust God but there's this mess in my life and I want to resolve the tension between what I know to be true from God's character and what it feels like at the moment." Lament is great. It draws us closer to God and to others, and there's loads of it in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, in Lamentations and Job. Lament seeks to bring ourselves, with all the mess and the pain, to God because he is our only ultimate hope.

Grumbling is different. Grumbling doesn't have faith in it. It doesn't point to God, or it points to a caricature of God that isn't anywhere near as good as God really is. It isn't about growing intimacy with God, it's sitting down moaning about our situations with the (conscious or not) intention to bring other people down to our level.

Yesterday, we looked at Numbers 11:24-30, where God pours out his Spirit on the leaders of Israel as an encouragement to Moses and as the antidote to grumbling. We saw that God's Spirit gives us a deeper experience of God, that he enables us to speak for God so that we build others up rather than tear them down and that he equips us to serve God so that we are all useful but none of us is indispensable.

And those things can all still happen in the midst of sorrow. Psalm 10 and Lamentations 3 are great examples. They don't become grumbles because they're filled with faith. And that doesn't always make the bad situations go away, and it doesn't always stop us from being sad in the midst of them. But it does give us a new perspective on them, where we put our hope in God rather than losing hope, where we hold onto him rather than letting go of him and ultimately where our songs become songs that point other people through the slough of despond rather than ones which drag other people down into it.

May we hold onto our wonderful Lord and Saviour this week!

God bless,


John

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