By: Isaac Crockett
In July of 2024, somewhere in the rugged wilderness of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a man had already made peace with death.
Scott Hern had gone into the Daniel Boone National Forest looking for waterfalls to photograph, but he eventually left the marked trails behind. Days passed. Then more days. He had been missing for fourteen days, twelve of them without food or water. Search teams had spent days combing through the steep cliffs, creeks, and dense undergrowth. Hope was fading. The search was becoming less about finding a missing hiker and more about recovering a body.
Then, in the silence, rescuers thought they heard something. They called out, wondering if another search team was nearby. Then they heard it again. A faint voice. “Help.” They followed the sound up a steep hillside and found Scott alive, barely able to speak. His cry had been heard.[1]
That is where Psalm 119:169-176 takes us. The psalmist is crying for help. The psalmist ends this passage with a confession that is remarkably honest: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant” (Psalm 119:176, ESV).[2][3]
This is the same man who has spent the psalm celebrating God’s Word. He has studied it, delighted in it, obeyed it, and praised it. Yet he still realizes that he is prone to wander. That is why these final verses are not a celebration of self-sufficiency. They are a prayer of dependence. The psalmist gives us three cries that show what it looks like to depend on God when we realize how much we need Him.
First, he cries, “Hear my prayer.” “Let my cry come before you, O LORD; give me understanding according to your word! Let my plea come before you; deliver me according to your word” (vv. 169-170, ESV). He doesn’t simply ask God to give him whatever he wants. He asks God to act according to what God has already said.
That is one of the great lessons of Psalm 119. God’s Word is not merely the way God speaks to us. As we learn His Word, it teaches us how to speak to Him. Scripture tells us who He is, what He has promised, what He desires, and what He has commanded. As we learn those things, we learn to pray according to His Word.
The psalmist’s prayer is also deeply personal. He is not crying out into an empty wilderness. He is coming before the Lord because he knows Him. Maybe you have wondered, “Does God really hear me? Does He really care?” The psalmist reminds us that the God who has spoken through His Word is also the God who hears His people.
Then the psalmist cries, “Receive my praise.” “My lips will pour forth praise, for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right” (vv. 171-172, ESV). Notice the connection. He has asked God to teach him, and now his response to being taught is praise.
Think about a teacher who made a lasting difference in your life. The psalmist knows that he has the perfect Teacher. God has taught him what is true and right, so his lips overflow with praise. And ultimately, that points us to Jesus. Jesus said, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27, ESV).[4] Jesus is the ultimate Teacher who reveals the Father. Through His Word and by His Spirit, He teaches us what is true. When God opens our eyes to His truth, praise should follow.
But then comes the third cry: “Help me. Rescue me.” “Let your hand be ready to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. I long for your salvation, O LORD, and your law is my delight” (vv. 173-174, ESV). The psalmist knows something we don’t always like to admit: he needs help.
Christianity is not a self-help religion. The Christian life is not about becoming so strong that we no longer need God. It is about becoming increasingly aware of how completely we need Him. We need God’s Word, but we even need God’s help to understand His Word and obey it. We need the Holy Spirit to open our minds and hearts to what God has revealed. We need God to sustain us, sanctify us, and ultimately bring us safely home.
And then comes the confession that seems almost surprising after everything the psalmist has said about loving God’s law: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments” (v. 176, ESV). He has not forgotten God’s Word, but he has still wandered.
That is the tension of the Christian life. We can genuinely love God’s truth and still discover that we are prone to wander. We can know the right path and still step off it. We can desire holiness and still need to confess our sin. Sheep do not navigate themselves home. When a sheep wanders, it needs a shepherd to find it.
Maybe you have wandered. Perhaps it happened slowly. A neglected prayer life. Less time in God’s Word. A compromise you once would have resisted. Bitterness you allowed to take root. A temptation you stopped fighting. You may still know the truth, but you realize you are farther from the Shepherd than you intended to be. Don’t wait until you “feel spiritual” again before you come back. Cry out. The psalmist doesn’t say, I have gone astray, but I will find my way home. He says, “Seek your servant.”
John Bunyan was a Baptist nonconformist pastor in seventeenth-century England who was arrested in 1660 for preaching without the approval of the established church.[5] He spent more than twelve years in prison rather than stop preaching according to his conscience. His imprisonment separated him from his family, and during those years he continued to meditate on Christ and the Scriptures. It was during his imprisonment that he wrote some of his most enduring works, including The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s circumstances did not become easier because he trusted God. But his circumstances did not change the truth of God’s Word. In verses he wrote from that cell, Bunyan said the prison had been “very sweet” to him since he came there, and that hanging would be sweet the same way, if God would appear there too.[6]
Bunyan knew what it was to wander far from God before he was converted. But after God’s grace found him, he also learned what it meant to remain dependent on God when obedience became costly. Sometimes God’s rescue means that He brings us out of the wilderness. Sometimes His rescue means that He sustains us in the wilderness. Either way, His Word remains true.
Maybe you are in a place where your circumstances are not changing. Maybe you have prayed for rescue and the answer has not come in the way you expected. Maybe you are suffering because you have obeyed God’s Word rather than compromising the truth. Or perhaps you have wandered from the Shepherd and you are ashamed to admit how far you have gone.
Don’t run from the Shepherd. Cry out to Him. Open His Word. Cling to His promises. And remember that your circumstances cannot change the character of your God or the truth of His promises.
The final cry of Psalm 119 finds its fullest answer in Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd. Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11, ESV).[7] The Shepherd came looking for His sheep. He did not wait for us to become strong enough to find Him. He came to seek and save the lost. At the cross, the Good Shepherd laid down His life for wandering sheep like us, bearing our sin and securing our salvation. So you don’t have to find your own way home.
If you have wandered, cry out. If you are suffering, trust His Word. If you are confused, open His Word. If you are weak, ask Him for help. And if your circumstances do not change, remember that God’s promises have not changed.
The Christian warrior is not the man who never needs help. He is the man who knows where to cry for help. “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant.” The Shepherd is listening.
Stay on Mission.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. Where have you been trying to find your own way instead of admitting that you need the Shepherd?
2. What is one specific step you can take today to return to God’s Word and follow the Shepherd’s voice?
Isaac Crockett
Isaac Crockett is the pastor of East Lawrence Baptist Church and a television and radio co-host for Stand in the Gap Media.
FAQs
It is the Taw stanza, the last of the twenty-two eight verse sections that make up the psalm, and it reads as a prayer rather than a summary. The psalmist asks God to hear him, to teach him, and to help him, and every one of those requests is made according to God’s own Word. Then he closes the longest chapter in the Bible by admitting he has wandered off like a lost sheep and asking God to come find him. The psalm ends in dependence, not in mastery.
The verb is ta’ah, Strong’s H8582. Brown-Driver-Briggs gives the physical sense first, to wander about, and the ethical sense second, to err, which is exactly the double meaning the psalmist is after. The word behind lost is ’abad, H6, carrying the idea of something perished or ruined, and seek is baqash, H1245, the verb for an active search rather than a passive hope. The Greek Old Testament renders the verb planaō, the same word Peter uses when he writes that you were straying like sheep and have now returned to the Shepherd of your souls.
Psalm 119 is an acrostic. Twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each, one for every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and nearly every verse names God’s Word under one of eight different terms. A poem built that deliberately does not end by accident. The writer has spent one hundred and seventy-five verses on the sufficiency of the Word and then tells you that knowing it did not keep him from wandering. The structure is the argument.
No, and the second half of the verse rules it out. In the same breath he says he does not forget God’s commandments. This is a man who still loves the Word and has still wandered, which is the ordinary condition of a believer rather than the exception to it. The remedy he reaches for is not self-recovery. It is a Shepherd who comes looking.
You cry out before you feel qualified to. The psalmist does not clean himself up first and then pray. He prays as a lost sheep, in the condition he is in, and he asks for a search party. Open the Word again, say plainly where you have gone, and ask God to come get you. Waiting until you feel spiritual enough to come back is the wandering, not the cure for it.
Isaiah 53:6 says all of us like sheep have gone astray, and that the Lord laid the iniquity of us all on Him. In Ezekiel 34:11, God says He Himself will search for His sheep and seek them out. Jesus tells the story of the man who leaves the ninety-nine in the open country to go after the one that is lost (Luke 15:3-7) and then says plainly that He is the good shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep (John 10:11). The line runs straight from Psalm 119:176 to the cross.
It is the opposite of convenient. Every other system on offer lets you keep the credit, and this one takes it away from you at the door. The claim is not that effort never accomplishes anything. It is that effort does not solve the specific problem of a man who knows the right road and leaves it anyway. Scott Hern knew how to hike. Knowing did not get him out of the gorge. Somebody had to come up the creek after him.
[1]Wolfe County Search and Rescue Team, public operational updates of July 20 and July 22, 2024, reporting that Scott A. Hern, age 48, was located alive near a cliff line north of Bell Falls in the Red River Gorge, Wolfe County, Kentucky, after fourteen days missing and twelve days without food or water. His vehicle had stood at the Tower Rock trailhead since July 6 and his family had last heard from him on July 5. He was hoisted out by Kentucky State Police. Confirmed against contemporaneous reporting by CBS News, WHAS 11, LEX 18, and FOX 56, July 20 to July 23, 2024.
[2]Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Psalm 119 is an acrostic of twenty two stanzas of eight verses each, one stanza for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Verses 169 to 176 are the Taw stanza, the last of them.
[3]The verb rendered “gone astray” is ta’ah, Strong’s Hebrew H8582. Brown-Driver-Briggs gives the physical sense first, to wander about, and the ethical sense second, to err. “Lost” is ’abad, H6, and “seek” is baqash, H1245, the verb for an active search. The Septuagint renders ta’ah with planaō, the same verb standing behind 1 Peter 2:25.
[4]Matthew 11:27 (ESV), in full: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” The quotation in the text above begins mid verse.
[5]John Bunyan was arrested in November 1660 at Lower Samsell, Bedfordshire, for preaching at an unlawful assembly, and he remained in the Bedford county jail until his release in 1672 under the Declaration of Indulgence issued by Charles II. He was jailed again for roughly six months in 1677. Bunyan scholarship is not unanimous on the composition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The older view, associated with John Brown, placed it in the second imprisonment. The view more widely held since Roger Sharrock is that the bulk of Part I was written during the long first imprisonment and finished around 1677. Part I was entered in the Stationers’ Register on December 22, 1677 and published in 1678.
[6]John Bunyan, Prison Meditations, Directed to the Heart of Suffering Saints and Reigning Sinners, written in prison, 1665, stanza 18, in the edition of George Offor, 1875: “The prison very sweet to me / Hath been since I came here, / And so would also hanging be, / If God would there appear.” Text verified word for word against the Chapel Library edition of Offor at johnbunyan.org.
[7]John 10:11 (ESV): “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The lowercase pronouns inside the quotation are the ESV’s own and are left exactly as printed.
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