When Trouble Comes: Learning to Wait on the Lord

There is a moment most of us know well. The phone rings with bad news. The diagnosis comes back worse than expected. A relationship fractures. A career collapses. Or perhaps it is something smaller but no less real — a temptation that has followed you for years, a conflict that will not resolve, an anxiety that will not quiet. In that moment, when the pressure mounts and the mind races, what do you do?

The ancient words of Psalm 25 were written for exactly that moment. What makes this psalm remarkable is not just its content but its construction. In the original Hebrew, it is an acrostic — each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in sequence from beginning to end. That is not a literary flourish for its own sake. In the ancient world, acrostics were used to make important things memorable. They were tools for crisis moments, when the mind is overwhelmed and needs a reliable structure to follow. The message of Psalm 25 was meant to be carried with you, ready to be retrieved precisely when everything feels like it is falling apart.

So what does David give us? A single, organizing response to trouble: wait upon the Lord.

Two Pathways
Before unpacking what that waiting looks like, it helps to understand the choice David sets before us. In Psalm 25, two pathways are described. The first is the path of righteousness — trusting God, walking in His ways, holding to His promises even when the road ahead is dark and narrow. The second is what David calls the path of the wantonly treacherous, which might be better understood as pointless faithlessness. It is the path that abandons God's promises in favor of whatever feels easier or more immediate.

The sobering truth is that the second path is not chosen by people who have obviously given up on everything good. It is chosen by ordinary people in ordinary moments of pressure, when the path of righteousness feels too long, too uncertain, and too costly. The way of faithlessness is wide and well-lit at the beginning. It offers relief without waiting. It offers pleasure without discipline. It promises everything and delivers nothing, but by the time that becomes clear, the damage is done.

When trouble arrives, that crossroads appears. And the question is whether you are prepared to choose rightly.

W — Worship
The first response to trouble is worship. David opens Psalm 25 by lifting his soul to the Lord, and throughout the psalm he declares true things about God — His goodness, His steadfast love, His faithfulness, His uprightness. This is the essence of worship: declaring true things about God back to Him so that those truths echo into your own heart and steady you.

Worship is not primarily a feeling, and it is not only singing. It is the deliberate act of reminding yourself and declaring aloud who God is. In a moment of crisis, when fear and confusion are competing for your attention, worship redirects your gaze. It says: whatever is happening around me, this is who God is. He is good. He is faithful. He has not changed.
This is part of why regular, consistent gathering with other believers for corporate worship matters so deeply. It is practice. Every Sunday is preparation for the crises that will inevitably come. The person who has spent years declaring truth about God in worship will have something to draw on when the ground gives way.

A — Admit
David does not come to God pretending to be fine. He asks God to remember not the sins of his youth, to pardon his guilt, to forgive all his sins. He comes as a sinner in need of mercy, not as someone presenting a record of good behavior in exchange for relief.

There is an important distinction here between discipline and punishment. David does not believe God is punishing him with what he does not deserve. He understands that God, like a good father, uses hard seasons to expose sin, to build character, and to press His people toward growth. The path of the wicked cannot see trouble this way. It can only see injustice, only feel sorry for itself, only insist it deserves better. The path of the righteous begins with honesty: I am a sinner. This is hard. But God is using this for my good.

James 1:2-4 captures this same idea, describing the testing of faith as something that produces steadfastness, working toward completeness and maturity. Admitting sin and embracing discipline is not weakness. It is the beginning of genuine growth.

I — Incline
David's repeated cry in Psalm 25 is teach me, lead me, make me know. Behind those requests is a posture of humility — an acknowledgment that he does not have all the answers and that he needs to be taught. To incline toward God is to lean into His instruction rather than trusting your own instincts or feelings.

Psalm 25:12 asks who the man is who fears the Lord, and answers that God will instruct him in the way he should choose. The fear of the Lord is not terror but reverent confidence in His power and complete trust in His knowledge. It is the settled conviction that God sees everything, knows everything, and that His ways are better than ours. When we choose sin, it is almost always because we have, in that moment, stopped believing one of those things.

T — Trust
Finally, David calls himself and his readers to trust in the promises of God. His soul shall dwell at ease. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him. My eyes are ever toward the Lord. These are not wishful sentiments. They are anchored in the covenant promises of a God who does not lie.

The New Testament fills these promises out even further. The peace of God guarding hearts and minds. Jesus preparing a place and promising to return. Paul's confidence that the Lord will bring His people safely through to His heavenly kingdom. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is pull out those promises and let your mind rest on them.

Psalm 25 ends with a single plea: Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles. Everything in the psalm flows from this. The ability to worship, admit, incline, and trust is only possible for people who know they need a Redeemer. The path of righteousness does not begin with getting your life together. It begins with confessing that you cannot, and that Christ has already done what you could not do for yourself.

That is the ground on which you stand when trouble comes. And it is ground that will not shift.