Verse of the Day Devotion: Psalm 5:3 

“In the morning, O LORD, you will hear my voice; In the morning I will order my prayer to You and eagerly watch.” – Psalm 5:3  

Psalm 5 is a psalm of David.  As we proceed here, you will see this is considered a morning prayer, one that is used to start the day. David starts by asking God to hear his prayer.  “Give ear to my words, O LORD, Consider my groaning.” Psalm 5:1. He pleas with God to hear the words of his prayer, not simply the words from his mouth, but the meditations, the groanings of his heart. The word groanings refers to whispers, murmurings and musings; those things which are not necessarily said but felt. 

Next, “Heed the sound of my cry for help, my King and my God, For to You I pray.” Psalm 5:2. He is asking God to assist and help him.  He calls out to God to hear him, to attend to his cries for help, acknowledging the one who he is praying to as his king and his God. He is crying out only to Him and no one else.  For he understands that the true God who he serves is the one who hears him and answers his prayers.  He does not call out to any idol or false god, only to the true God and creator of all.

He then, in our focus verse, declares these prayers in the morning, as soon as he wakes up he calls out to God.  Notice that this is not so much a prayer of request but a prayer of resolution.  You will hear my voice.  I will direct my prayer to you.  And I will eagerly watch for your answer for I know it will come and I will rejoice over it. 

I believe this is a wonderful example of how we should communicate with God.  We should take the morning when we first wake up to spend this time with our King and our God.  We should cry out to Him with our words and open ourselves to present our hearts and minds to Him.  Often, we do not have words to express our feelings, our pain and disappointments, our failings and regrets.  However, we should not attempt to hide these for He does hear our words as well as our groanings and inward thoughts.  We must understand we cannot hide anything from Him.  He knows our requests, needs, hurts and failings long before we were even born, for He knows the end from the beginning. 

And as we look at our focus verse, we must declare to ourselves that He absolutely will hear our voice.  There can be no question regarding this.  And not only our words, but our feelings as well.  He will not close His ears to us.  John put it this way. “These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.” 1 John 5:13-15. 

Lets make the first thing we do when we wake up be going before God and spending concerted time in prayer. Let us lift up to Him our needs, fears, thoughts and feelings knowing that He hears us and loves us.  And then anxiously await His answer.  Do not only look for what we want or expect as His answer, but also what we may not expect.  He knows what is best, and we must take His answer and run with it, rejoicing as we go forward.  There is no better way to start the day.

William Funkhouser MDiv, ThD, Founder and President of True Devotion Ministries.