📣 “I Believed, Therefore I Spoke”: The Faith to Cry Out

“I believed, therefore I spoke.”

2 Corinthians 4:13 (NKJV)

We were working through Psalm 118 in our small group Bible study last night. We came to verses 10–13, and the images there are vivid and violent:

“All nations surrounded me, But in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ I will destroy them. They surrounded me, yes, they surrounded me; But in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ I will destroy them. They surrounded me like bees; They were quenched like a fire of thorns; For in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ I will destroy them. You pushed me violently, that I might fall, But the Lᴏʀᴅ helped me.”

Psalm 118:10–13 (NKJV)

Surrounded. Swarming like bees. Pushed with violence. And yet—the psalmist does not flinch. The Lᴏʀᴅ helped him. There is something steel-hard in this psalm. A trust forged under real pressure.

The McCheyne Connection

I was also reminded of a passage I had read recently, following the McCheyne Bible Reading plan: 2 Corinthians 4:7–15. I’ve read it many times, but coming to it fresh off Psalm 118, it hit me differently.

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.”

2 Corinthians 4:7–10 (NKJV)

The same spirit entirely. Surrounded. Pressed. Struck down. But not destroyed. The psalmist and the apostle are drinking from the same well.

Then Paul does something I hadn’t really noticed before.

A Quote Within a Quote

In verse 13, Paul writes:

“And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, ’I believed and therefore I spoke,’ we also believe and therefore speak.”

2 Corinthians 4:13 (NKJV)

He’s quoting Scripture. Psalm 116:10 specifically. And he’s quoting the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Old Testament—which renders it: “I believed, therefore I spoke” (ἐπίστευσα, διὸ ἐλάλησα). The Hebrew original is slightly more ambiguous, something like “I believed even when I said…” but the Septuagint sharpens it into a direct causal chain: belief leads to speech. That’s the connection Paul is drawing on—faith that opens the mouth.

So I turned to Psalm 116:10 to see what, exactly, the psalmist spoke. And what I found genuinely surprised me.

“I Am Greatly Afflicted”

The full verse reads:

“I believed, therefore I spoke, ‘I am greatly afflicted.’”

Psalm 116:10 (NKJV)

I’ll be honest—my instinct was that it would say something else. Given our previous study on Psalm 34, and given everything Psalm 118 had been building toward, I half-expected it to end with: “I will bless the Lᴏʀᴅ at all times,” or “I will still trust in God,” or perhaps the great affirmation of Psalm 118:8–9:

“It is better to trust in the Lᴏʀᴅ Than to put confidence in man.”

But no. The psalmist believed—and then cried out: “I am greatly afflicted.”

That stopped me cold.

The First Step Takes Faith

Here is what I think this is saying: crying out is itself an act of faith.

When the psalmist says “I believed, therefore I spoke—I am greatly afflicted,” he is not saying that his faith produced neat, victorious statements. He is saying that his faith gave him the courage to tell the truth about his condition. To go to God with his mess. To open his mouth and say: I am in trouble. I am suffering. I am not okay.

We so easily assume that faith means projecting strength. Mustering resolve. Keeping it together. But the opposite logic is also at work in Scripture. It is unbelief that keeps us silent—that keeps us managing our own crisis, trusting our own resources, grinding through our own solutions. Unbelief says: God won’t come through. I can’t really take this to him. I need to figure this out myself.

Real faith—the kind that Psalm 116 is describing—does something different. It says: I believe God is real and present and good, and therefore I will tell him exactly how desperate I am.

This connects directly to what I’ve written about elsewhere: the cry-out principle. “This poor man cried out, and the Lᴏʀᴅ heard him” (Psalm 34:6). The cry itself is the hinge—the thing that opens the door to God’s deliverance and salvation. And what Psalm 116 shows us is that reaching that point of crying out is not weakness. It is faith.

Don’t Trust Your Own Understanding First

We live in an age that worships self-sufficiency. We are trained, from childhood, to solve problems. To research, strategise, network, execute. And when we face genuine spiritual crisis—or any crisis—our instinct is often to exhaust every human option before turning to God. Or, worse, to turn to God in a rote, perfunctory way while actually relying on our own wits.

Proverbs 3:5–6 cuts right across this:

“Trust in the Lᴏʀᴅ with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.”

The alternative to trusting in God is trusting in your own understanding—trying to wring solutions out of your own brain. And the antidote is not just prayer—as-afterthought, but genuine acknowledgement: God, I am in great distress. I am greatly afflicted. I do not have what this requires.

That first step—the cry, the honest admission, the open hand—takes more faith than most of us realise. It is not the easy surrender people sometimes imagine it to be. It is an act of profound trust in a God who is actually there, actually listening, and actually powerful enough to do something about it.

The Spirit of Faith

Paul understood this. He was hard-pressed on every side, carrying in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus, facing death daily (2 Corinthians 4:11). And his response was not stoic self-sufficiency. He believed—and therefore he spoke. He cried out. He kept announcing the gospel with a mouth that knew suffering, precisely because his faith told him that the God who raises the dead was not far off.

That is the spirit of faith. Not the triumphalist version that has no room for affliction. But the kind that says: I am greatly afflicted—and therefore I will take it straight to God.

That is where deliverance begins.