I was chatting with my younger sibling brother this week and I told him what I was preparing my sermon for Sunday. I gave him my subject, “When you can’t get up.” He said, “Sing I’m satisfied with Jesus here and stay in bed.” After we laughed that one out he asked what it was really about. When I gave him more information he agreed it made much more sense than his earlier comment!
• Obviously not about bed rest.
Max Lucado, pastor and author describes the topic title best when he speaks of having “doubt storms”. He said, “Sometimes the storm comes after the evening news. Some nights I wonder why I watch it. Some nights it’s just too much. From the steps of the Supreme Court to the steppes of South Africa, the news is usually gloomy…thirty minutes of bite-sized tragedies…Story after story of homes that won’t heal and hearts that won’t melt. Always more hunger than food. More needs than money. More questions than answers. On Sundays I stand before a church with a three-point outline in my hand, thirty minutes on the clock, and a prayer on my lips. I do my best to say something that will convince a stranger that an unseen God still hears. And I sometimes wonder why so many hearts have to hurt.”
• “Can’t get up” is about being in your “doubt storms” and there’s no rest in sight; no calm in view.
• Psalms 42 and 43 for answers.
I love the Psalms. The writers’ speak to life and I can often say, “I know exactly what that means. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.”
• Attempt to understand the Psalmist’s heart, to add our own questions to his and try to understand how he handled it and hopefully provide some tools to help in our own “doubt storms”.
Psalms 42 and 43 are really one Psalm. It is easy to see from the recurring phrase in 42:5, 42:11 and 43:5 (“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?”). These verses form the three-part breakdown of the Psalms and even cast a glimpse of the potential breakdown of the writer!
These Psalms take us on a pilgrimage. The wonderful lesson is, in our life journey with our pain, our questions, and our burdens there is a probing desire to experience God, to know God, and somehow, with unanswered questions and tough issues, we go to God continually, knowing that with his help we come to him and he receives us and hears us.
Asking the tough questions is good medicine! James L. Mays, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation at Union Theological Seminar in Virginia talks about how “Christians who live in a world that constantly raises the question ‘Where is your God’ {shows} the real nature of our souls’…thirst for God.” It is fascinating to realize that people often ask as if they doubt and have excuse to say “there is no God” but the truth is, their hearts are yearning to believe!
The journey before us this morning is one of dealing with being overwhelmed with the world’s demand for a sign as it required of Jesus when he lived and moved in his circles of social interaction and community. We will spend a few moments evaluating THE TROUBLE, which is, the question plaques us continually, often leading us to a sense of torment at not having the right answer, an easy answer and often times, no answer at all. As a matter of fact, if we will be honest with ourselves, the same question sometimes screams for an answer in our own minds now and then. We don’t voice it because we think to speak our doubt is to slap God in the face or we have this strange idea that we must defend God at the expense of not showing our true feelings. As we face THE TROUBLE of “the question” and enduring the torment of our own minds, we come into the experience of THE TEMPEST, which will be our second consideration. We seek to know some semblance of an answer that helps us believe God is somewhere, even if it is not where we prefer he be or in the way we would like for him to be present yet through that searching and longing, the question is often more strong. For many people it overpowers them and they become completely defeated. Through the tough stuff of TROUBLE and TEMPEST we need to know where to go when we can’t move past the questions, stuck with doubt or we find ourselves in a place where we can’t get up. We need something to pick us up and move us forward or we need what I’ve called for our third point, THE TONIC.
Let’s probe deeper and start with
1. THE TROUBLE
This title represents the first part of Psalm 42:1-5…
In these verses the belief that God is in the world is challenged. A person challenging the reality of God is not new. Sigmund Freud, a strong atheist, arguing against God through Science, made an observation of what he called “present-day white Christian civilization”. He said, “It is easy to see that…not all the questions that press for an answer receive one, and that it is difficult to dismiss the contradiction of daily experience.”
We could have a tendency to understand, if not agreed with Freud that it is hard to believe that God is present in the world. There seems to be a contradiction that God could be in the world when someone is racked with pain through disease. How do we come to terms with more news reports of terrorism or famine that wipes out another family or a bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis, killing some and sparing others?
The trouble is, no matter how badly we want to believe God is in the world we struggle with it. We search desperately to answer the question but come up dry. The best answers are gravely insufficient to response to the cries of the troubled world, the skeptical bystanders and the critical community who loves an opportunity to “rub our faces in it” when it doesn’t seem to work and God doesn’t appear very close or easy to understand.
Instead of evidence that he is close and ready to help us he never seemed so far away as when we’re in crisis. We want an answer and all we get it seems, is silence. It is because of this trouble, this “doubt storm” that we go deeper into
2. THE TEMPEST
Psalm 42:6-11…
Authur Leslie F. Brandt paraphrases to capture the image further when he wrote in Psalms Now, “While I weep in longing, people about me say, “If God is not dead, where is He?” Again, “While I struggle with the sickness of doubt, people about me say, “If God is not dead, where is He?”
Brandt with the Psalm Writer touches a chord that we often don’t want to admit. Not only does the world challenge the belief of God, the heat is turned up at a time when we don’t have an answer, when we are going through valleys ourselves when the last thing we need, is to worry about showing God to someone else. The accusation becomes intensely personal so that we begin to wonder ourselves if in fact it is true – that God is nowhere to be found. To enter here is to be in deep trouble yet we must go here.
• Some can’t believe I’m talking like this. Guess what?
The experience is not only known by people who have no knowledge of God. It is quite common among many pastors, leaders and well-intentioned followers of God. To believe is easier said than done. Philip Yancey is editor-at-large for Christianity Today and author of multiple award-winning books. He speaks to his own experiences of God being far away. He compared his experience with Jody Foster’s role in the movie Contact. She was lying against radio dishes day after day, listening through headphones for extraterrestrial life in space and when she heard crackling through the headphones she said, “Something is there! Yancey writes, “For long stretches, achingly long stretches, I have also sat with my headphones on, desperate for some message from the other world, yearning for reassuring contact, and heard only static.” He goes on: “Do we, like billboards for Pepsi, fan a thirst we cannot quench? Just last week my church sang: “I want to know you more / I want to touch you / I want to see your face.” Nowhere in the Bible do I find a promise that we will touch God, or see his face, not in this life at least.” Makes us squirm doesn’t it? Sounds like a false doctrine. But it isn’t. It’s human nature.
It is in such crisis and tempests that we find ourselves where Blackaby and King in “Experiencing God” speak of “A crisis of belief”. It is explained, not as a crisis in your life, like an accident, but is a word that means ‘decision’. This “crisis of belief” demands that a decision be made. You must decide what you believe about God. This is where we are most likely to crumble. We can convince our selves we know why things are the way they are and we can defend God and explain his cause and people should be fine with that. Or we feebly admit it makes no sense and wish there was something we could do and we walk away struggling with why things have to be this way. The storm continues. The tempest seeks to wash over us with every new development and we are never sure we can make it. Psalm 42:6-7… Even as the Psalm Writer declares he will remember God’s strength he follows on the heels of it with his declaration that he feels like he is going to drown in his “doubt storms”.
Now that we have come to the desperate end of hope The Psalmist throws us a lifeline, he gives us
3. The Tonic
• Tonic – a pick-me-up, stimulate, energizer
When the questions come and you are faced with the trouble it poses, don’t forget the interesting discovery that the Psalmist made –verse 4, “These things I remember…”
The answer is not an easy, comfortable response to the calamity before us. God does not always show up with an outward demonstration so that the disease is always healed or the bridge doesn’t collapse because of natural science and the physics of building structures. The psalmist remembered times of blessing and promise. He recalls that not every day was filled with pain and death. There were days of celebration and times of joy. He remembered times of powerful worship and congregational celebration.
The remembering also points to God revealing himself in the fabric of life. He shows up by writing himself in the very lives of his followers. Where is your God? They ask. He is in the overwhelming response of visitors and meals brought to the home of the ones grieving for their loved one. His soul is poured out through our tears and our touch. He is alive in the laughter of a golf game that is really horribly played!
When you can’t get up and you think you’re going to drown in your “doubt storm”, think to the past and draw strength from the times you remember when God never failed and was there. Search for the evidence in your experiences where you wondered how you would have ever got through that tough time and you realized you would not have made it if it weren’t for God standing with you.
Author Bernard Anderson in Out of the Depths speaks of this remembering the multitudes and the house of God and makes a worthy observation. He says, “This is not a longing for a one-to-one relationship with God in mystic solitude. The poet yearns to be surrounded by the believing and worshiping community; to participate in the worship services of the Temple and to celebrate with the people the presence of God in their midst. This is not the kind of private piety or spiritual individualism that is often manifest in churches today.”
There are too many people who become recluse when we can’t get up. Instead of getting surrounded with people to help us, most of us try to eat the problem away or starve the problem away and stay behind closed doors. When life is toughest we stay home from church. When we can’t pull it together we withdraw. In is in these times we need to be surrounded by church people and celebrate God’s presence!
Not only did the Psalmist remember past times of blessing and promise, he experienced God in the moment. 42:8…
The Psalm Writer went a step further – not only drawing on the past, or the present but he looked to the future. 43:3-4…
Pastor and author Warren Wiersbe draws our attention to the 51 references of the writer (psalmist) to himself – his interests, desires, feelings, questions and plans. Wiersbe advises that a healthy antidote to depression is to stop looking at self and look at God; second, to look to the past as a tool only and focus on the future; then, to hope – “the answer to depression is hope”; and finally, to stop searching for reasons and start resting on promises – e.g. a broken leg illustration. If your doctor told you how your leg was broken and what he had to do to fix it the thing that would get your attention most and give you encouragement is when he says, “The cast will come off in six weeks.” When it is driving you crazy with the weight, and the clumsiness of taking a bath, and the itch that you can’t scratch, you’re remembering that it comes off in six weeks! – in your “doubt storms” when you can’t get up, stop looking for reasons and look to the promises.
Trouble and tempest has a valuable and necessary place in our lives. In the face of such realities, “Deep calls to deep” (v7) – When the Psalmist said he sometimes thought he was going to drown in doubt, he realized something else. He realized that the deepest part of man must reach for the deepest parts of God if we will have the experience that God will show up. One writer says, “Until the depths of human nature are touched, the deep things of God make their appeal in vain.” If ever we search for God, it is through the plaguing question “where is your God?” and the ugliness of life that we search more intently for Him.
WRAP
• Trouble comes – times when you can’t get up because of “doubt storms”
• Often pushes to a tempest that makes us feel we’ll never survive.
• In those times, remember his past faithfulness, hear him now, and look to his promises instead of trying to provide reasons.
