📚 CLIMBING THE STAIRCASE
Adding to Your Faith, One Step at a Time
Booklet 5 of 6 • Then They Cried
By CHUCK TRUSTY
Pastor | Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church
Where they cry out, where God turns, and what the wise man sees.
About This Series
Peter’s eight virtues are not a menu to pick from. They are a staircase, and every step holds the weight of the one above it. This is a study of 2 Peter 1:5–8, with Psalm 107 in the middle of it, asking what happens to a believer who stops climbing — and what happens when he cries out.
The series runs to six short booklets, released one at a time. Each one stands on its own, but they are meant to be read in order — the whole point of the book is that order matters. The full list is here.
One thing said plainly at the start: none of this is about how to be saved, or how to stay saved. A child of God cannot be lost. This is about how near to God a saved man walks while he is here.
CHAPTER 16
Then They Cried
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses. — Psalm 107:13
Four times in one chapter, God says the same sentence.
Verse six. Verse thirteen. Verse nineteen. Verse twenty-eight. Four different groups, four different kinds of trouble, four completely different stories — and one sentence repeated over each of them like a bell being struck.
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses.
Hebrew poetry does not rhyme sounds the way our poetry does. It rhymes ideas. And this Psalm rhymes the same idea four times in a row so that nobody reading it could possibly miss the point.
Every one of those groups turned at exactly the same place.
Not when they fixed themselves. Not when they improved themselves. Not when they got cleaned up and presentable. Not when they climbed back up two or three steps to show God they were serious.
When they cried out.
That is the whole mechanism. That is the entire plan. And I want to spend this chapter on it, because it is the most important sentence in Psalm 107 and one of the most important in your Bible.
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The cry is the sound of surrender.
That is why God waits for it. Not because He is withholding, and not because He enjoys watching a man come to the end of himself.
He waits for it because pride cannot be healed. Pride cannot be counseled. Pride cannot be comforted.
Pride has to be broken.
And the cry is the moment a heart finally bends away from its own will and toward God's. Before that moment, a man is still negotiating. He is still working the problem. He is still explaining. The cry is where all that stops.
Notice, too, what the cry is not. It is not a speech. It is not a performance. It is not a list of promises to do better from here on out.
It is one honest word from the bottom of a man's heart.
Help.
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And look at what God did the moment He heard it.
He saved them out of their distresses.
He did not lecture them. He did not shame them. He did not make them wait a suitable length of time to think about what they had done. He did not require an explanation.
He delivered them, right then.
Grace always runs faster than judgment. That is the whole relationship between grace and mercy. If judgment were the quicker of the two, there would be no such thing as mercy — the sentence would already have been carried out before grace ever got there. But grace is faster. Grace gets there first. That is why any of us are still standing.
Think of a man who has been ignoring something wrong with his health for months. It started small. He told himself it would clear up on its own. He was busy and he did not want to deal with it, so he kept putting it off — and it did not clear up. It got worse. And finally he could not ignore it anymore, and he walked into the clinic and said, "I need help."
Now here is the thing about a good doctor. He does not spend the first ten minutes saying, "I told you so. You should have come in months ago. Look at the mess you have made of this."
A good doctor looks at the problem and says, "All right. Let's fix it. Here is what we are going to do."
That is God. He is not standing in the doorway with His arms crossed saying, "It took you long enough." He is saying, "You came. Good. Let Me heal this."
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Then He restores clarity — before He restores comfort.
He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death.
Notice the order there. He does not start by making a man feel better. He starts by letting a man see.
The fog lifts. The path is marked again. The landmarks come back into view. The believer can suddenly tell the difference between things he has been confusing for a long time. He can see his own foolishness, and he can see God's wisdom, and both of those seeings are gifts.
God restores sight before He restores comfort, because a man who feels good and still cannot see is going to walk right back into the same ditch.
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And then He breaks what was holding us.
And brake their bands in sunder.
He did not loosen the chains. He shattered them. He did not lighten the burden. He removed it. He did not improve their bondage or make it more manageable. He ended it.
And I want you to notice something about the way God does that: He hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder (Psalm 107:16). When God breaks a chain, it stays broken.
Psalm 34 says the righteous cry, and the LORD heareth. Psalm 145 says the LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon Him.
God does not walk toward a cry. God runs toward it. The cry is the invitation for Him to come into a situation, and He has never once turned one down.
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Now let me get practical, because freedom is not a theory and it is not an emotion. It is something a man actually experiences, and I want to name seven ways it shows up in an ordinary week.
Guilt loses its grip. Guilt is the chain that whispers, you failed, you are not worth anything, God is disappointed in you. But when a believer really cries out, God does not merely forgive — He lifts the weight. We stop replaying the failure at night. We stop feeling like we have to make it up to Him somehow. We stop hiding from prayer because we are ashamed to show up. And the soul finally says, I am forgiven, and I know it. Understand this — God does not hold a grudge. Our sin genuinely grieves Him. But when a man turns around, that grief is gone from God's heart, and that is why the guilt can go from ours.
Confusion lifts. Bondage clouds judgment; sin fogs the mind. But when a man cries out, God brings light, and suddenly he knows what to do next. The Bible makes sense again. The path is visible. And notice — the situation did not necessarily change. The clarity changed.
The heaviness lightens. Bondage sits on a man's chest. It drains him. And when God breaks the chain, a man wakes up without dread for the first time in a long while. He stops feeling like he is dragging something behind him. He can breathe.
The paralysis ends. Bondage freezes the soul. We want to pray and cannot. We want to worship and feel nothing. We want to obey and cannot make ourselves start. And then, suddenly, we can. The things that felt impossible feel possible again.
Old patterns lose their power. Bondage is never just a moment; it is a rut. But when God breaks a chain, the cycle breaks with it. The temptation that used to run the show loses its pull. The habit that would not break, weakens. That is not willpower. That is deliverance.
Joy comes back. Bondage steals joy and puts heaviness in its place. When the chain breaks, a man laughs again. He smiles without making himself. He feels gratitude instead of gloom. Joy is not just an emotion — joy is the evidence that something has been set loose.
And fellowship is restored. Bondage isolates; it pulls a man back from God and from people. But when the chains come off, he wants to be in the house of God again. He wants to open the Book again. He wants to talk to God and actually enjoys it. The distance is gone. The coldness is gone. The silence is gone. He is back in the family.
That is not partial freedom. That is not emotional relief or temporary improvement. That is total deliverance, and only God gives it.
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Now I want to show you one more thing, because of how God heals the man who wandered off in the first place.
He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions (Psalm 107:20).
He did not send a feeling. He did not send a sign in the sky. He sent the very thing the man had stopped listening to.
The Word he neglected becomes the medicine that brings him back. The Bible that had been collecting dust on the nightstand is the prescription.
And think about how a prescription works. The doctor diagnoses the problem and writes out the remedy — but that remedy only helps the patient who actually takes it. Every day. As directed. Even on the days he does not feel any different yet.
That is worth saying plainly, because a man coming out of a long drift usually does not have his appetite back on day one. He opens the Book and it still feels dry. And right there is where most people quit.
Take the medicine anyway. Come to the Word anyway, and let God give the desire back. He restores appetite through the very food we do not feel like eating.
And part of that medicine is correction. My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth (Hebrews 12:5-6).
The correction that stings is not the anger of an enemy. It is the treatment plan of a Father who fully intends to see you healed. It is not God pushing you away. It is God setting the bone so it heals straight.
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And here is how the Psalm finishes each of these stories, and it is beautiful.
Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men! And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and declare his works with rejoicing (Psalm 107:21-22).
Healing leads to worship. Restoration leads to gratitude. And gratitude leads a man right back onto the staircase.
So let me say the thing this chapter exists to say, and I will say it as plainly as I know how.
It does not matter which step you are standing on. The cry works from every one of them.
You do not have to climb back to the top before God will listen. The wanderer cried from the wilderness. The prisoner cried from the dark. The fool cried from the gates of death. The sailor cried from the middle of the water.
Every one of them was heard. Not one of them had to get better first.
You do not have to fix anything. You only have to stop drifting — and cry out.
CHAPTER 17
The God Who Turns
He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings. — Psalm 107:35
Psalm 107 does not end with rescue.
I want that to land, because most of us would have been satisfied if it did. Four groups in trouble, four cries, four deliverances — that would have been a fine chapter and we could all go home.
But the Psalm keeps going. And what it goes on to describe is bigger than rescue.
It is restoration.
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The whole closing section swings on one Hebrew word, and it shows up twice — in verse thirty-three and again in verse thirty-five.
The word is haphak, and our Bible translates it turneth.
It does not mean to patch. It does not mean to repair, or to stop the bleeding and send a man home. It means to overturn. To flip a thing completely around so that it ends up the opposite of how it started. It is the word used for a cake being turned on the griddle, and it is the word used of Sodom being overthrown.
And notice it cuts both directions in this passage. Verse thirty-three: He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground. Verse thirty-five: He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings.
Same verb. Both ways.
The God who can dry up a river is the God who can spring a desert. And both of those, in this Psalm, are aimed at exactly the same thing — bringing His people home.
That is why the word for this chapter is restoration and not rescue. Rescue is not a big enough word for what God does. He does not just stop the fall. He reverses the story.
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Anybody who has lived in rural Arkansas long enough has seen what a field looks like after a controlled burn.
The day of the burn it looks like nothing but ruin. Black stubble and ash as far as you can see, and if you did not know better you would think somebody had destroyed a good piece of ground.
Come back in the spring, and that is the greenest, most productive field on the place.
The fire cleared out everything that had been choking the good growth. The ground that looked ruined was actually being made ready for the best harvest that field ever produced.
That is haphak. That is the God who turns. What the drift ruined, what the wandering cost, what the chains took, what the storm broke — God turns it. And what comes out of the turning is often more fruitful than what went in.
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Now walk through what the Psalm says He restores, because it lists seven things and together they paint a whole picture.
Where there was no life, He brings life. He turneth the wilderness into a standing water. The dryness that came with the drift — the joy that left, the appetite that faded, the prayer life that went quiet — He reverses it. A dry soul that comes back to God becomes a watered soul. Springs come up where there was nothing but dust.
Where there was no growth, He brings growth. And dry ground into watersprings. Here is the part that gets me. A man who spent years being careless and has nothing spiritual to show for it — God does not throw those years out. He turns that dry ground itself into a source of water for somebody else. Your story of being restored becomes another man's spring.
Where there was wandering, He gives a home. And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation. The wanderers found no city to dwell in. And when God restores, He does not only hand them a city — He gives them the hunger and the purpose to build one. The wanderer becomes a builder. The man who was lost becomes the man who establishes something that lasts.
Where there was lack, He brings abundance. And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase. Not just enough to scrape by. Fruit that increases. And often it is the very area where the drift did the most damage that becomes the most fruitful ground a man has.
Where there was loneliness, He brings people. He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly. Drift always isolates — the wanderers had no city, the prisoners had chains, the fool lost his appetite, the storm-tossed were holding on alone. Restoration multiplies. God puts the solitary back in a family.
Where there was pride, He turns the ground over. He poureth contempt upon princes... yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction. God is not impressed by position or title. The proud come down and the humble go up.
A farmer does not plant in ground that has not been turned. The top of a field can look fine and still be packed down hard as a road. The good soil is underneath, and before anything can be planted, the plow has to go in and turn it over. What was on top goes under. What was under comes up. From the road it looks like destruction — but the farmer knows exactly what is about to grow there.
And where there was chaos, He brings order. And maketh him families like a flock. A flock is not a random gathering of animals. A flock is ordered. It is guided. It is protected. It moves together behind a shepherd. God's last picture of restoration is a family with an identity and a direction and a Shepherd and a future.
The restored believer is not merely rescued. He is placed. He belongs. He has a flock.
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Now let me be careful with something before I close this chapter, because a preacher can do real damage here if he is not honest.
This passage is a picture of a nation's land being restored, and it is written in the language of fields and vineyards and flocks. I would not have you read it as a promise that God will give every man back the same specific thing he lost. Some things do not come back on this side. A man who has buried somebody, or lost years he cannot get again, does not need me making him a promise the text does not make.
What the text promises is that God restores. That His mercy runs through the whole story. That He is not finished with any drifter who cries out to Him, and that what He builds after the turning is worth having.
That is enough. That is more than enough.
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And let me say one last thing, about what a watchman can and cannot do — because I need to say it as much as you need to hear it.
The watchman cannot restore the land. He cannot heal a soul. He cannot undo the drift, break a chain, close a wound, calm a storm, or make a wilderness into springs. Not one bit of that is in a preacher's hands, and any man who thinks otherwise has confused himself with God.
But the watchman can warn. He can point. He can call. He can remind. And from this wall, in every sermon he has left in him, he can keep saying the same thing:
Come back to God's order. He is the God who restores.
The God who turned that wilderness into springs is working on your wilderness right now.
Cry out — and then watch what He turns it into.
CHAPTER 18
Whoso Is Wise
Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the LORD. — Psalm 107:43
God put the punchline at the end.
Everything in this Psalm — every group, every downward staircase, every cry, every rescue, every reversal — all of it was moving toward one verse. And He saved that verse for last.
That is unusual. Most psalms of this kind open with the point and then support it. This one tells four true stories, pulls back for a wide view of what God does with a ruined field, and only then turns the camera around on the reader.
It is designed the way a good story is designed. You have to see the whole thing before the point becomes clear.
And here is one more thing about it that I would not want you to miss. This Psalm does not end with a command. It ends with a condition.
Whoso is wise.
Whoever. It leaves the door standing open and lets the reader decide whether to walk through it. God does not force the lesson on anybody. He tells four true stories and then asks who has been paying attention.
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So we had better find out what He means by wise, because the world has handed us a very different definition.
Wisdom is not intelligence. A man can have an extraordinary mind and still be a fool in the ways that matter most. Some of the brightest people in any generation have done astonishing foolish things when it came to God, to their families, and to their own souls.
Wisdom is not education. You can hold every degree they offer and still repeat every mistake in this Psalm. Education hands a man information. Wisdom hands him direction.
Wisdom is not age. The older folks in the room know exactly what I mean. Age gives a man experience; it does not automatically give him anything to show for it. Some people spend eighty years collecting experience and never learn a thing from any of it.
And here is the one that surprised me: wisdom is not even our own experience. Because the whole point of Psalm 107 is that a man can learn from somebody else's experience. That is what the Psalm is for.
The Hebrew word is chakam, and in that language it is a craftsman's word before it is ever a scholar's word. It is the same root used for the skilled workmen who built the tabernacle. It means skilled.
Skilled at living. Not skilled at talking about life. The Psalm does not close by asking for smart people. It closes by asking for skilled ones.
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Everybody talks about the school of hard knocks — learning from your own mistakes, your own falls, your own pain. And there is something honest in that. A man does learn that way.
But there is a better school available, and hardly anybody enrolls in it.
It is the school of observation. Learning from another man's hard knocks before you have to take the same hit yourself.
Every group in Psalm 107 is a free tuition lesson. The wanderers are saying, you do not have to lose your landmarks — look at us and go guard yours. The fools are saying, you do not have to wound yourself — look where carelessness comes out and choose different.
The school is open. The tuition is paid. The only entrance requirement is a teachable spirit.
Think about a farmer who can walk outside in the morning, look at the sky, and tell you what kind of day is coming. He is not guessing. He has observed thousands of mornings. He has watched what a certain cloud means, what a certain wind means, what a certain feel in the air at daybreak has meant every other time. And now that observation makes his decisions for him. He does not plant on a morning that looks wrong.
His wisdom was built entirely out of paying attention.
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That is exactly what the verse asks for. Whoso is wise, and will observe these things.
And the word behind observe is worth a minute, because it is tenderer than it looks. The Hebrew is shamar, and it means to keep, to guard, to watch over. It is the same word used of Adam keeping the garden. It is the same word in the blessing every one of us has heard at a graveside and a wedding both: The LORD bless thee, and keep thee.
So this is not a glance. This is guarding something valuable so that it does not get away from you.
The wise man does not merely notice what God has done. He keeps it. He holds onto it so the lesson does not slip.
And he observes three things in this Psalm.
He observes the staircase going down — how drift starts, quiet and slow and nearly invisible. And he does not wait until he is on the bottom step. He recognizes the first one and says, "I know where this goes. I am turning around now."
He observes the staircase going up — that every single group turned at the same place. And he says, "Then I do not have to wait for a crisis. I can cry out today. He hears today."
And he observes the mercy of God in both staircases. Mercy in the warning. Mercy in the correction. Mercy in the storm. Mercy in the rescue. And he ends up worshipping a God who was faithful in every chapter of the story and not just the pleasant ones.
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Which brings me to what I believe this Psalm actually is.
It is not a history lesson about some Israelites who got lost in a desert a long time ago. It is a mirror. God held it up so we could look into it and see ourselves.
And a wise man does not look into a mirror to check on somebody else.
We all have a mirror by the door that we glance at on the way out. It has exactly one job — to show us what is actually there. Not to flatter us. Not to encourage us. Just to tell the truth.
The man who gives it half a second and says "good enough" may walk out the door with something on his face. The man who actually stops and looks sees what is there and can do something about it before he goes out into the world.
Psalm 107 is that mirror. So stop in front of it, and ask honestly:
Am I wandering — going through the motions, present in body and absent in direction?
Am I worn down — running on fumes and calling it faithfulness?
Am I in chains — is there a truth I have been agreeing with and not obeying?
Am I drifting — has correction been making me a little more defensive each time it comes?
Am I unsteady — have the disciplines that used to hold me up quietly faded?
Am I overwhelmed — have I been staring at the storm instead of at the God who commands it?
Those are not comfortable questions. But that is what a mirror is for.
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Now here is the reward the verse promises the man who looks. They shall understand the lovingkindness of the LORD.
That word lovingkindness is the Hebrew word hesed, and it is one of the richest words in the Old Testament. It means covenant love. Faithful mercy. Loyal commitment. Steadfast compassion that will not quit. It is love that keeps its promise when the other party has broken every one of theirs.
English does not have a word big enough for it, which is why the King James translators built one — lovingkindness — just to hold it.
And notice something small in that last verse: the Hebrew is plural. The mercies of the LORD. Not one act of kindness. A lifetime of them, finally seen all together.
The word for understand there is biyn, and it means to separate, to distinguish, to see how the pieces fit. It is the kind of understanding that only comes from seeing the whole picture at once. Which is exactly what the verse asks for — observe these things, all of them, the whole Psalm — and then you will understand.
I think of a farmer with a field that has given him nothing but trouble. Flood one year. Drought the next. Bad soil in one corner and a tree line shading the other end. Any sensible man would say, "Let it go. Plant somewhere easier."
But this farmer keeps coming back. Every spring. He drains the wet corner. He runs water to the dry section. He clears the tree line. He works the soil. Year after year after year, investing in a field that has never once paid him back what it cost him.
And then one season, the field produces. And what it produces is worth every bit of it — because all those years of faithful work are down in that soil.
That is hesed. That is God with the wanderers and the prisoners and the fools and the storm-tossed. Every one of them was a difficult field. And every spring, He came back.
The wise man is the one who finally sees it. He says: God was good when He warned me — that was hesed. God was good when He corrected me — that was hesed. God was good when the storm came, and good when He rescued me. And God is good right now, in the part I still do not understand.
Wisdom is seeing His lovingkindness in every chapter. Not just the good chapters. All of them.
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So let me close Part Two by telling you why we came down here at all.
This Psalm was never a detour from the staircase. It was preparation for it.
Before we can understand why the staircase matters, we have to see what happens when it is neglected. We had to meet the wanderers and the fainters and the prisoners and the drifting heart and the fools and the unsteady and the storm-tossed, and we had to understand that this is what a life looks like when a man quits climbing.
And now, having seen it, we can go back to the staircase with clear eyes.
We climbed as far as godliness before we came down here. Peter has two steps left, and they are the two most visible steps of all — because brotherly kindness and charity are not private virtues. They show up. They can be seen from the outside. They are the steps that make people say, "See how they love one another."
The Psalm is finished.
The staircase is not. Let us go climb the rest of it.
⬇ Download this booklet as a printable PDF
— Pastor Chuck Trusty, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church • yes.areyousaved.net
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