His Song Is Within Me Series

I want to start by pointing out that Psalms 42 and 43 are believed to be one psalm. It seems pretty obvious when you look at verses 5 and 11 of Psalm 42 and verse 5 of Psalm 43. All three verses ask the exact same question:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

And why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him,

My help and my God.

All three verses ask the same question … “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are disquieted in me?” … and they all provide us with the same answer … “Hope in God” … hope in my help … hope in my God.

Now … you’ve probably heard me say this before and you will no doubt hear me say this again: “Pay attention to every word in the Bible.” Pay close attention to every word in the Bible.

Every word? Even words like “and” and “the” … words like “a” and “to”? Yep! Even words like “a” and “the” and “to” can make a significant difference when it comes to the meaning of what you’re hearing or reading. Trust me … pay careful attention to what you’re reading.

Take Psalms 42 and 43, for example. What stands out in Psalm 42 and 43? Well … the three verses that I just mentioned … verses 5 and 11 in Psalm 42 and verse 5 in Psalm 42. You might have noticed something else. The wording for all three verses is exactly same. This didn’t just happen by accident. When King David wrote this psalm, he did this for a reason. The repetition serves a very important purpose. Can you guess what that is? If King David repeated these lines over and over, it must mean that he wanted to draw our attention to them and the reason that King David wanted to draw our attention to them is that they must be very important to our understanding of what he was trying to convey to us through these two psalms, amen?

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” The noun “soul” is mentioned six times in Psalm 42 and 43. But notice something else. Remember … pay close attention. Did you notice something? It’s pretty significant. Every time that King David mentioned the word “soul,” he attached another word to it. What word is that? It’s a very small word … just two letters … easy to just skip by it. Do you see it yet?

It’s the word “my.” Every time King David mentioned the word “soul,” he didn’t call it “a soul” or “the soul” or “some soul.” He called it “my soul.” In other words, he didn’t describe it as some indiscriminate “soul” but as a very a very specific “soul” … his “soul.”

Have you ever been so down in the dumps … have you ever had the blues so bad … have you ever been so hopeless … so overwhelmed … so full of despair that even your soul is in agony? If you’ve never experience torment of the soul, trust me … it’s literally one ‘hell’ of a place to be. There are a lot of different kinds of torment and agony in the world but … for me … there is no torment like the torment of the soul. If you’ve never experienced it, I couldn’t describe it to you in a million years and if you have experienced it, then you know what I’m talking about and I don’t have to describe it to you.

You see … I always thought that I had a “soul” … but I always thought of it as some kind of energy or ghosty thing that lived inside of me somewhere, somehow … and when I died, it would rise out of me like some kind of Casper the Ghost thing that looked like me … you know, like you see in the cartoons. This ghosty thing would rise up out of my body and either hang around and roam the earth and scare people or float idyllically up to Heaven.

So … my “soul” was just there … living inside of me … going where I’m going … doing what I’m doing … and I never paid it any mind. I wasn’t “aware” of it so I didn’t think about it and certainly didn’t take care of it … I didn’t think I had to. My body needed to be taken care of … my body could get sick and break down … even die … but “souls” … they might be real but they don’t need attention … they don’t need to be taken care … they can’t get sick … or breakdown … or die … like my body can … or so I thought …. [pause] …