There are moments in the human journey when language becomes too small.
Grief too large.
Silence too heavy.
And the soul… too tired to pretend.
Moments when we don’t simply pray —
we cry.
And not the gentle kind.
Not the kind you can tuck into a sentence and offer politely at prayer meeting.
I’m talking about the cry you don’t want anyone to hear.
The cry that leaks out of places you thought you had sealed shut.
The cry that sounds like a question more than a prayer,
and an ache more than a request.
Every one of us has been there.
Some of us live there more often than we want to admit.
There are places in the heart where words like faith, trust, and hope
sit uncomfortably beside doubt, fear, and unbelief.
The place where we know God is good,
but we cannot feel Him.
Where we know His promises,
but we cannot sense His presence.
Where we know His faithfulness,
but our own experience seems to contradict it.
You don’t need to live long to learn that human beings —
even believers —
can feel forsaken.
It doesn’t mean we are.
But it means the experience is real.
And it means the cry is real.
And tonight, I want to speak to the cry.
Not the theology around it.
Not the doctrine beneath it.
Not the commentary on Psalm 22 or the structure of lament literature.
But the cry itself —
the place where suffering and faith collide,
where disappointment and devotion live in the same chest,
where belief and unbelief mingle like tears on the same face.
Because the gospel does not begin with answers.
It begins with a God who knows the sound of human pain.
There is a line in the Gospels that I cannot read quickly.
I cannot rush it.
I cannot skim over it.
Because it is the most human sentence Jesus ever spoke.
It is the one moment when His voice sounds like ours.
“My God, My God…
why have You forsaken Me?”
There it is.
The cry.
Not whispered.
Not whispered reverently, quietly, respectfully —
but shouted into the midday darkness.
A cry with anguish in its tone
and a question in its center.
A cry that doesn’t resolve neatly.
A cry that feels like a door without a hinge.
A cry I have never dared to explain away.
Because to explain it away is to remove the very thing that gives me hope —
that Jesus was not just God for me,
He was human with me.
And if you listen closely —
if you pause long enough —
you realize something astonishing:
Jesus did not cry out instead of us.
He cried out with us.
The cry of Psalm 22, the cry of Calvary,
is not the sound of a distant deity performing a divine script.
It is the sound of a human heart breaking under the weight of real pain.
It is the sound of God stepping fully into the places
we usually assume He avoids.
And here’s the part that stops me:
He didn’t soften His humanity.
He didn’t insulate Himself.
He didn’t leave the edges off the experience.
He went all the way in.
All the way down.
All the way human.
Because you cannot redeem what you refuse to enter.
You cannot heal what you won’t touch.
You cannot carry what you won’t feel.
And Jesus —
the Word made flesh,
the Son of God,
the One who was with the Father before the world began —
felt forsakenness.
He did not imagine it.
He did not symbolize it.
He did not dramatize it.
He felt it.
The darkness that covered the land was not theatrical lighting.
It was the physical expression of a spiritual reality:
Christ entering the depths of human alienation.
But here is the tension we must name honestly:
I do not know His level of forsakenness.
I cannot measure His cry.
I don’t dare compare my pain to His.
Whatever Jesus experienced on the cross,
His suffering runs deeper than any line I’ve walked.
He carried sin, shame, judgment —
weights I was never meant to lift.
He entered depths I will never have to enter alone.
But though I cannot match His agony…
I recognize something in it.
When He cried out,
it wasn’t foreign to me.
It wasn’t theoretical.
It wasn’t rhetorical.
It sounded… familiar.
Not because I’ve ever borne the sins of the world —
but because I have known my own small, human, earth-bound forsakenness.
I know what it is to feel unheard.
I know what it is to feel unseen.
I know what it is to pray and feel nothing come back.
I know what it is to lose my bearings.
I know what it is to question my own heart.
I know what it is to be disappointed in myself —
my unbelief, my doubt, my arrogance, my defiance, my bitterness, my pride.
I know what it is to feel partly to blame for the mess I find myself in.
I know what it is to live with the ache of regret.
And though my suffering will never touch His…
His suffering touches mine.
That is the miracle.
Jesus does not just sympathize —
He identifies.
Sympathy says, “I feel bad for you."
Identification says, “I have been where you are.”
Jesus doesn’t heal us from a distance.
He heals us by entering the places we try to escape.
So when I say, He knows my cry,
I mean it literally.
Not poetically.
Not metaphorically.
Not theologically.
Literally.
He knows it.
He’s heard it.
He understands the human cry from the inside.
And before I ever cried it,
He cried one like it.
There is something incredibly comforting —
and incredibly unsettling —
about a Savior who meets me not at the peak of my faith
but at the bottom of my pain.
He does not wait for me to be strong.
He meets me in weakness.
He does not wait for me to clean up my theology.
He meets me in confusion.
He does not wait for me to get my emotions sorted.
He meets me while the storm is still raging inside.
He does not hold back until my pride is broken.
He steps into the places where my pride still hides.
He does not wait until my doubts have dissolved.
He meets me right in the middle of them.
Because the gospel does not begin with human victory.
The gospel begins with divine vulnerability.
A God who cries out.
A Savior who enters suffering.
A Lord who meets us at our most fragile places
and calls us by name.
Yes — billions have lived on this earth.
Yes — billions have prayed, cried, sinned, believed, doubted.
But the God of Scripture does not track us by the billions.
He knows the sparrow.
He numbers the hairs of your head.
He gathers your tears in a bottle.
He knows your cry
because He has cried it.
Not the same circumstance.
Not the same depth.
But the same language.
The same ache.
The same human sound.
When Jesus cried,
“He knows my cry”
was written into the heart of the gospel.
And that is where healing begins.
Not when the answers come.
Not when the feelings return.
Not when the faith becomes strong.
But when the soul dares to whisper,
in the presence of the crucified God:
> “Lord…
You know this place.
You know this pain.
You know this cry.”
That is where the gospel touches us first.
Not at the place of triumph —
but at the place of truth.
And truth is where Jesus meets the human heart.
---
There is a moment in Psalm 22 that most people miss.
We hear the opening line — “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” —
and we stop there, frozen by the weight of those words.
But the psalm doesn’t end in forsakenness.
And neither does your story.
The psalm begins in darkness,
but something happens halfway through:
a turning,
a shift,
a quiet but unmistakable change in the voice.
The cry becomes a prayer.
And the prayer becomes a declaration.
And the declaration becomes a song.
Not a victory march.
Not a trumpet blast.
A song.
A human song.
A song of someone who has been in the dark
and has discovered that God was not absent —
He was simply silent.
Because there is a kind of silence
only the suffering can understand:
not the silence of abandonment,
but the silence of God working in ways too deep for language.
The psalm says,
“He has not hidden His face from the afflicted…
but when he cried to Him, He heard.”
Those words are not spoken at the beginning of the suffering.
They are spoken from the far side of it.
And that is where many of us struggle.
We cry in the darkness
long before we reach the place
where the words “He heard me”
become our testimony.
We want the immediate answer,
the instant rescue,
the reassurance that God is present
before the pain has had its say.
But the psalm teaches us —
and Jesus embodies it —
that sometimes the cry comes first,
and the deliverance comes later.
It’s not abandonment.
It’s timing.
Holy timing.
Eternal timing.
A timing that does not rush grief
or silence the human cry
or cut short the work of the heart.
There is something in the cry
that God refuses to bypass.
It is the most honest sound the soul can make.
A cry is the moment when the heart surrenders its last defense.
When the facade breaks.
When the veneer cracks.
When the body says what the mouth cannot.
When the truth comes out in raw, unedited form.
A cry is not eloquent.
It does not quote Scripture.
It does not rehearse theology.
It does not reference creeds or councils.
It does not dress itself up for worship.
A cry is naked faith.
A cry is faith stripped of pretense.
A cry is faith in its elemental form —
faith without polish,
faith without performance,
faith without apology.
A cry says,
“I have nothing left but need.”
And God never despises need.
He runs toward it.
The cross shows us that.
Gethsemane shows us that.
The incarnation itself shows us that.
When Jesus cried,
He wasn’t demonstrating faithlessness.
He was demonstrating humanness.
And humanness is the vessel God chose
to reveal His glory.
We often imagine faith as strength.
But Scripture reveals faith as dependence.
Faith as need.
Faith as honesty.
Faith as the courage to cry out
when every other sound has been silenced.
And here is the astonishing thing:
Jesus sanctifies the cry.
He dignifies it.
He turns the language of suffering
into the doorway of salvation.
He does not erase the cry.
He lifts it.
He takes the most painful sentence ever spoken by human lips —
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” —
and turns it into the hinge
on which the plan of redemption swings open.
Because if Jesus had never cried,
you and I would never know
that our own cries are welcome
in the presence of God.
There are Christians — sincere ones —
who live under the impression
that God wants consistency from them
more than honesty.
That He wants reverence more than reality.
That He wants composure more than confession.
That He wants spiritual strength
more than emotional truth.
But the cross destroys that illusion.
The cross says:
“God is not offended by your pain.
He enters it.
God is not disappointed by your weakness.
He shares it.
God is not repelled by your doubts.
He shoulders them.”
And the cry of Jesus proves it.
He cried the cry we fear.
He entered the feeling we dread.
He voiced the question we silence.
And because He did,
you and I never need to fear
that our cries are too dark,
too small,
too faithless,
too bitter,
too human.
Jesus teaches us that the cry itself
is a prayer.
Not the prayer of triumph —
but the prayer of truth.
And truth is what brings God near.
Somewhere along the journey of faith,
many of us learned to measure our relationship with God
by how “strong” we feel.
But strength is not the currency of heaven.
Honesty is.
Strength impresses people.
Honesty connects with God.
Strength makes us capable.
Honesty makes us reachable.
Strength builds walls.
Honesty opens doors.
Strength says,
“I’ve got this.”
Honesty says,
“I can’t do this without You.”
And honesty is what God waits for.
I know what it is to pray politely
when the heart is breaking.
To speak in measured tones
while the soul is unraveling.
To quote promises
when you can’t feel any of them.
To defend God
even while you silently wonder where He is.
But Jesus shows us
we don’t have to protect God from our pain.
He is not fragile.
He is not threatened.
He is not shocked.
He is not intimidated by the places
where our faith trembles.
If anything,
He draws nearer to the trembling soul
than to the confident one.
Because the trembling soul
is the honest one.
What I love about Psalm 22
is not just that Jesus quoted it,
but that He lived it.
He entered the cry.
He walked through the silence.
He felt the isolation.
He bore the sorrow.
He shouldered the weight.
He endured the darkness.
He swallowed the bitterness.
He carried the judgment.
He breathed the loneliness.
Not just for the world
but for you.
For your story.
Your nights.
Your wounds.
Your questions.
Your unbelief.
Your doubt.
Your pride.
Your defiance.
Your hidden bitterness.
Your quiet ache.
He did not carry an abstract category of “human suffering.”
He carried your suffering
before you ever lived a day of it.
He did not die for a demographic.
He died for a person.
He died for a name.
And that name is yours.
So when you cry,
He is not listening from a detached throne.
He is listening from a place of deep, human recognition.
He knows the sound of being misunderstood.
He knows the weight of being unseen.
He knows the ache of being rejected.
He knows the silence of unanswered prayer.
He knows the bitterness of abandonment.
He knows what it feels like
to be surrounded by people
who don’t understand what’s happening in your soul.
And He knows what it feels like
to lift up your voice in the darkness
and ask a question
that shakes heaven.
Jesus didn’t cry out because He lacked faith.
He cried out because He was human.
And in doing so,
He baptized the human cry
into the life of God.
He took the darkest moment
and turned it into the bridge
between human despair
and divine hope.
He made the cry holy.
And because He did,
your cry is not a failure of faith.
It is the doorway to grace.
Your tears are not evidence of abandonment.
They are evidence that you are still reaching for the One
who entered your sorrow
so that you would never drown in it.
When Jesus cried,
He tore down the wall
between divine strength
and human weakness.
He made it safe
for you to be honest
in the presence of God.
And that may be the greatest miracle of all.
---
There is a moment, somewhere between the cross and the resurrection, that Scripture does not record.
A sacred silence.
A holy pause.
A breath held by the universe.
We are not told what happened in those hours when Christ lay still.
We are not given the language to describe what His spirit walked through.
We do not hear the prayers He prayed or the silence He endured.
But we do know this:
He did not come out of that darkness alone.
He carried humanity with Him.
He carried you with Him.
And when He rose,
He did not rise as the God who had visited human suffering.
He rose as the God who had inhabited human suffering —
entered it,
walked its valleys,
felt its depths,
and redeemed it from the inside.
When Jesus walked out of the tomb,
it wasn’t simply a display of power.
It was a declaration of intimacy:
> “I know the deepest pain of the human soul —
and I am stronger than it.”
The resurrection is not merely victory over sin and death.
It is victory over the one thing that terrifies us most:
the belief that our deepest cries go unheard.
Christ’s resurrection tells your suffering story something profound:
> “Your cry is not the end of your story.
It’s the beginning of your healing.”
Because if the story ended on the cross —
if the only sound we ever heard from Jesus
was the cry of forsakenness —
we might conclude that God understands our pain
but cannot rescue us from it.
But the empty tomb says otherwise.
It says that the God who knows your cry
also knows your future.
The God who has felt your forsakenness
has planned your restoration.
The God who has entered your darkness
is leading you into light.
The God who has touched your wounds
is making you whole.
The resurrection is God’s answer
to the cry of the forsaken soul.
Not an abstract answer.
Not a theological construct.
A Person.
A living Christ.
A risen Savior who walks into locked rooms
where His followers hide in fear
and says the one thing they believed
they would never hear again:
“Peace be with you.”
And He says it
with scars in His hands
and scars in His feet
and scars in His side —
not erased,
not hidden,
not smoothed over —
but glorified.
Why?
Because scars are the language
of people who have suffered.
And Jesus keeps His scars
so that you will recognize Him
as the One who knows your cry.
He does not greet the redeemed
as the God who never suffered.
He greets us as the Savior who suffered exactly enough
to understand us perfectly
and redeem us completely.
When you step through the gates of the world made new,
you will not be greeted by a distant deity
who stands above your pain.
You will be welcomed by Someone
with the marks of suffering in His hands —
marks that say,
“Your story mattered to Me.
Your pain mattered to Me.
Your cries reached Me.
And I came for you.”
That is why Scripture says,
“He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Not angels.
Not saints.
Not heavenly attendants.
He will do it.
Why?
Because only a God who knows the cry
has the right to wipe the tear.
This is the hope of the gospel:
Not that we avoid suffering,
but that we are never forsaken in it.
Not that we escape pain,
but that our pain meets a Savior
who has walked the road before us
and walks it with us still.
The beauty of the Christian story
is not that God prevents sorrow —
but that He transforms it.
He takes the cry of the forsaken
and turns it into the song of the redeemed.
He takes the silence of heaven
and fills it with resurrection life.
He takes the bitterness of human failure
and turns it into the balm of divine grace.
This is why your cry matters.
Not because it is unique.
But because it is known.
Not just known by God in the way a king
knows the plight of his servants.
Known the way a brother knows the sound
of his sibling’s voice
in the middle of the night.
He knows your cry
because He has made it His own.
He does not meet you at your strength;
He meets you at your wound.
He does not wait for you to rise above your humanity;
He enters it.
He does not shame you for unbelief;
He reaches into it.
He does not recoil at your pride;
He heals it.
He does not chastise your bitterness;
He softens it.
He does not punish your doubt;
He walks with you through it.
He does not condemn your defiance;
He calls you by name.
And when you finally reach that moment
when the soul cracks open
and the cry rises —
the cry you cannot articulate,
the cry that carries years of hurt,
years of disappointment,
years of fear and failures and frustrations —
that is the moment
you are closest to the heart of Christ.
Because He knows that cry.
He has spoken it.
He has felt it.
He has prayed it.
He has sanctified it.
He has redeemed it.
And He has answered it
with an empty tomb.
This is the miracle we forget:
The cry from the cross
is not the end of the story —
it is the turning point.
Jesus cried not because God abandoned Him,
but because He refused to abandon us.
He entered our darkness
to lead us out.
He stepped into our forsakenness
to give us belonging.
He touched our death
to give us life.
And now He stands before the universe
as the God who knows what it is
to be human.
Truly human.
Fully human.
Beautifully human.
He is not ashamed of His humanity.
And He is not ashamed of yours.
So when you cry out in your darkest moments —
when you confess the unbelief
you wish you didn’t have,
the doubt you wish you could overcome,
the bitterness you wish would disappear,
the pride you wish you could uproot,
the defiance you wish you could stop acting out —
He hears you with a tenderness
that can only come from someone
who has walked the same valley
and felt the same ache.
You do not need to fix your cry
before you bring it to Him.
You do not need to translate it
into a more spiritual language.
You do not need to apologize
for being human.
Your cry is enough.
Your cry is honest.
Your cry is welcome.
And the God who knows your cry
will not leave you in the dark.
He will do what He did on the morning of His resurrection.
He will call your name.
Not the name of a statistic.
Not the name of one among billions.
Your name.
And you will answer —
not because you are strong,
but because you are known.
Not because you are righteous,
but because you are loved.
Not because you never cried,
but because you did
and He heard.
That is the hope of the gospel.
That is the heart of Christ.
That is the healing of the forsaken soul.
That is the God who knows your cry.
And that is why you can walk into eternity
without fear of being forgotten,
overlooked,
lost in the multitudes,
or overshadowed by the redeemed.
Because heaven is not built for crowds.
It is built for sons and daughters
with names
and stories
and scars
and cries
that God Himself has carried.
He knows your cry.
And He will know it still
when He wipes the last tear from your eyes
and says,
“Welcome home.”
---
Appeal
There are moments when words fail us.
Moments when the heart has carried more than it was ever meant to hold…
and all that rises from the depths is a cry.
Some of you have prayed in the dark.
Some of you have believed you were forgotten.
Some have reached for God and felt nothing in return.
Some have carried shame, disappointment, bitterness, guilt, and fear so long
that you’ve begun to believe that this — this ache right here —
is all you are.
But tonight —
in the presence of the God who knows your cry —
you are invited to do something deeply human
and profoundly holy:
Bring Him your cry.
Bring Him the truth you’ve never said aloud.
Bring Him the wound you’ve learned to hide.
Bring Him the prayer that scares you.
Bring Him the disappointment you’ve never resolved.
Bring Him the fear you’ve never named.
Bring Him the bitterness you thought was too ugly.
Bring Him the unbelief you were ashamed to confess.
Bring Him the part of your story that breaks your voice.
Because He knows that cry.
And He is not ashamed of you.
Jesus did not climb the cross to meet your best moments.
He climbed it to meet the place where your soul trembles.
The place where you whisper, “God… if You’re there… hear me.”
And the risen Christ answers:
“I know that cry.
I have spoken it.
I have carried it.
And I have come for you.”
If tonight your heart is tired…
if your faith is thin…
if your soul is bruised…
if your tears have not yet dried…
then hear the gospel in its simplest, most healing form:
You are not forsaken.
You are not forgotten.
You are not invisible.
Your cry has traveled farther than you know.
It has reached the One who cried for you
and rose for you
and intercedes for you
and will one day call your name with joy.
If you are ready — even trembling, even unsure —
to say,
“Lord… here is my cry,”
then right where you are, simply whisper:
“Jesus, You know my cry.
Take it.
Heal it.
Hold me.”
He will.
He has been waiting.
---
Closing Prayer
Father in heaven,
You who see the hidden corners of the soul
and hear the cries that never make it into words —
we come to You now in the name of Jesus,
the One who knows our cry because He has cried it Himself.
Thank You that in our darkest moments,
You do not turn away.
You draw near.
You walk into our forsakenness
so that we would never face it alone.
Lord Jesus,
some hearts here are trembling,
some are tired,
some are wounded,
and some have carried burdens far too long.
We bring You our fears, our doubts, our failures, our shame,
our anger, our bitterness, our disappointments —
all of it.
Take our cry into Your scarred hands
and hold it with the tenderness
of a Savior who understands.
Holy Spirit,
breathe comfort where there has been sorrow.
Breathe hope where there has been despair.
Breathe peace where there has been turmoil.
Breathe faith where there has been fear.
Let every person here leave knowing this truth:
They are seen.
They are known.
They are loved.
They are not forsaken.
And when we cry again —
because life is not finished with us yet —
remind us that Jesus has already walked that road,
and His voice still echoes above our own:
“My God… My God… I know your cry.”
Keep us in Your grace until the day
You wipe every tear from our eyes
with Your own hand.
We pray this in the name of Jesus,
our Brother,
our Savior,
our Healer,
our Resurrection and our Life.
Amen.
