Longing for the Lord
Last week we focused our attention on Psalm 32, and established the fact that our unconfessed sins can cause us physical problems. When we don’t confess we can experience distress. What we’ll learn this morning is that pain is not always a direct result of sin.
Last Monday night, when our family was having supper, I announced to everyone that no one was going to have dessert that night. I lamented that we’ve been eating too many sweets, and we shouldn’t expect to have dessert every night. I may have even thrown in the line that parents like to say, “When I was growing up, we didn’t have dessert every night!” Later that night, when the girls were busy doing something, I opened the freezer and served up a big bowl of ice cream covered with hot fudge sauce and devoured it before anyone could see me. Unfortunately, I left my bowl in the sink and Beth caught me. Our sins have a way of finding us out! I lamely explained to Beth that I just forgot.
Now, I probably should have gotten a bad stomachache for sneaking ice cream but instead my conscience started screaming. The next morning I wrote my family a note. This is what it said: “I need to ask your forgiveness. Last night at dinner I announced that no one could have dessert. Later, while you were all busy, I had some ice cream. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I was being a hypocrite and I sinned against you. Please forgive me. P.S. Everyone (but me) can have dessert tonight.”
I don’t know about you but I get tired of sinning and having to ask for forgiveness. I also just plain get tired of myself. And sometimes I just feel down for no reason at all. Do you ever feel like that? While it’s certainly true that sin can mess up our bodies, there are times when we just feel blue.
I’ve had a couple periods in my life when I was really down. About ten years ago, when I was experiencing some health problems, I was overwhelmed with feelings of despair. The cumulative effect of months of misery led me down the slippery slope of sadness. I can remember trying to snap out of it to no avail. I confessed every sin I could think of, and even some I’ve never committed, just to make sure that my physical pain was not the result of something I had done.
The other period in my life when I got really low was during our time as missionaries in Mexico. I hesitate sharing this because I don’t want the Becker’s to think that their experience will be the same as mine was. As you may know, I really struggled to learn Spanish. While Beth and the girls were very supportive and encouraging, I felt like a failure. I felt alone and walked around in a fog of disillusionment and depression, hoping no one would ask me a question in Spanish. We were supposed to be church planters, focusing on building relationships with Mexicans so we could share Christ with them, and I could barely ask where the bathroom was.
My guess is that you experience some daily discouragement as well. Most of us go through some dry times and low seasons of life. Many years ago a young midwestern lawyer suffered from such deep depression that his friends kept all knives and razors out of his reach. He questioned his life’s calling and just wanted to give up. This is what he wrote in his journal: “I am now the most miserable man living. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell…to remain as I am is impossible.” Do you know who wrote those words? Abraham Lincoln.
Charles Spurgeon, one of my favorite preachers from a previous century, shocked his listeners when he said this in a sermon: “I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, depression strikes about 17 million adults in the U.S. each year – more than cancer, AIDS, or heart disease. Half of all Americans say they, or one of their family members, have suffered from depression. The Journal of the American Medical Association has stated, “More suffering has resulted from depression than from any other single disease affecting mankind.” (N. Kline, 190:732-40).
Let me say at the beginning that I don’t know much about clinical depression, though I may have tasted it personally a few times in my life. I do know that depression is a very complex condition that can be rooted in spiritual, emotional, mental, biological, or physiological causes, or a combination thereof. If you struggle with depression this morning, I hope you are seeking professional medical help. There is no shame in admitting that you need some assistance.
Having said that, I want us to take a look at Psalm 42 in order to better understand the kind of depression that can hit us in the spiritual solar plexus. Let me list a couple background truths before we jump in.
1. Psalm 42 is a “maskil.” Similar to Psalm 32, this is a teaching psalm, intended to help us learn how to handle the spiritual blahs. We could call it, “How to Deal With Depression,” or “Beating the Blahs.”
2. The inscription identifies this as a maskil of the sons of Korah. This refers to a family of singers, much like the Wong family in our church. They loved to sing and lead others in worship. Tradition regards this a psalm written by David for the sons of Korah who put it to music. The context in which David wrote this is when he was forced to flee into the wilderness because his son Absalom was leading a rebellion against him in 2 Samuel 15-16. David was removed from the throne, his life was threatened, his friends had bailed on him, he was ridiculed and mocked, and he was miles away from the temple where he loved to worship.
David was piled with problems. He was on the run. He was alone and discouraged. This was his personal “ground zero.” He’s been where some of you are today. Let’s listen in as he longs for the Lord in the midst of his troubles.
[Read Psalm 42]
If you’re looking for a way to beat the blues this morning, David gives us four steps to put into practice.
1 – Seek God With Everything You’ve Got
David begins by stating how much he longs for God in verse 1: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.” Deer are fun to watch. There’s something about them that makes us stop what we’re doing and just look at them. A couple weeks ago when I was at the drive through window at the bank, the tellers were staring out the window and pointing at something in the field. One of them was using binoculars. When I asked what they were looking at they told me that a doe and her fawn come out of the field each day and they all watch them.
I grew up in a deer hunting family. I shot my first buck when I was 12 (I don’t think the bank tellers would be too happy with me). My memories are filled with long freezing days when I would drink all my hot chocolate and eat all my Snicker Bars before 8:00 in the morning. Though I’m certainly not an expert on deer, I learned a lot about their habits and behavior from my dad. He has an uncanny ability to spot a deer wherever we are. When he’s driving his truck he’s constantly scanning the horizon with his eyes, looking for some fresh venison. When he spots one, he just lifts his finger off the steering wheel and points in the deer’s direction. He doesn’t even have to say anything. I know exactly what he’s doing. It’s an unspoken ritual between father and son. It’s one of my favorite times with my dad.
When a deer is thirsty, he will run full speed until he finds some water. When he finally finds it, he will stick his face into the cool stream, forgetting everything else around him. This is unusual for deer because they are normally very alert and cautious. But, when they’re panting, they’ll do almost anything to quench their thirst. During drought conditions deer will alter their daily routine to make sure they can find water.
Whenever a deer senses danger, it will run to a stream. Most hunters think the deer is trying to avoid leaving a scent. The deer, however, seeks water for a different reason. When a deer is retreating from an enemy, it develops a tremendous thirst. Fear and the physical strain of running create a strong desire for water. David is picturing himself like a deer that is on the run in desperate search of refreshment.
Verse 2 tells us that just as a deer can’t wait to quench its thirst, his soul is thirsting “for the living God.” He wants to know God. He’s seeking Him with everything he has. It’s hard for us to get really thirsty today because there are pop machines (or as we say in Wisconsin, “soda”) and water fountains (or “bubblers”) everywhere. But thirst is powerful. It must be satisfied or we’ll die. Have you ever been that thirsty spiritually? Does your soul pant for God? Only the living God can quench the thirst of the human heart. Just as a deer knows instinctively where to find water when it’s thirsty, so too, we must seek Him with everything we’ve got.
Isaiah 26:9: “My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you.” Jesus put it this way in John 7:37: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” How many of you women are in the summer IMPACT class called, “Falling in Love With Jesus”? God is changing lives through this class. I talked to someone this past week who told me that the passion and love she had for Jesus when she was first saved over 15 years ago is now back, in large part because of what she is learning in this study. She’s thirsting for God and she’s falling in love with Jesus all over again.
Friends, we’re all thirsty for God but not everyone comes to Him to have that thirst quenched. Many times we look to other things to satisfy us. Jeremiah 2:13: “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” Make it a priority to plug into Bible Studies and classes that can help satisfy your parched soul. The Women’s Bible Study will begin again in September. A group of men meet Tuesday mornings. Consider coming to the Tuesday night prayer time. And, if you’re not already in a small group, make every effort to join one this fall.
2 – Be Honest When You Can’t
The first step in beating the blues is to seek God with everything you’ve got. The second step is to be honest when you can’t. As we learned in our study of Psalm 10, the spiritual life is not always smooth sailing. We have down times as well. There are seasons in life when we’re hurting. There are times when we wonder why God seems so far away. A deer loves to find water and quench its thirst but sometimes it gets into some trouble as well. Wisconsin is now dealing with a problem among the deer herds. Some of the deer have been infected with Chronic Wasting Disease. Symptoms include tremors, stumbling, and difficulty swallowing.
Do you feel like you’re stumbling spiritually? Are tremors rocking your life? Do you have a hard time swallowing the things that have come your way? David can relate. Look at verse 3: “My tears have been my food day and night.” His appetite has vanished because of all his afflictions. His only source of nutrition is the salt from his own tears. Drop down to verse 7: “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” As one wave seems to call to the next, so too, the waves of worry and the breakers of bad things have swept over him. In verses 9-10, he wonders if God has somehow misplaced him. He’s so low that he feels like he’s dying: “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy? My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’”
A key part of the process of defeating depression is to be honest when you’re hurting. You can be real before God and you can be yourself in this church. You don’t have to fake it here.
3 – Force Yourself to Remember Truth
Seek God with everything you’ve got and be honest when you can’t. The third part of the process is to force yourself to remember truth. Look at verse 4: “These things I remember as I pour out my soul…” and verse 6: “My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you…” The Hebrew here conveys a strong expression of determination: “I will remember.” When you’re in the pits and you feel like there’s no way out, then resolve to remember what is true. I know when I’m down, it’s easy for me to lose sight of what is really true. Doubts can creep in and despair can skewer my soul. Even though I know what is true, I need to force myself to remember it or I will have a difficult time overcoming the blues. Peter put it this way in 2 Peter 1:12: “So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have.”
What is it that David remembers? First of all, he remembers the fellowship he used to have in verse 4: “How I used to go with the multitude…” David is alone and probably afraid. As he thinks back to the times of sweet fellowship he had with other believers, a smile begins to form on his face. He can’t wait to reconnect with God’s people again.
Friend, one of the best things you can do when you’re down is to be with the people of God. I know this is difficult because when we feel low we often want to be alone. But God has put within each of us the need and desire for community. We’re not meant to function alone. We need one another. If you’ve been disengaging from people, if you’ve been pulling back, then determine to get back in touch with people. Hebrews 10:25 challenges those of us who are not consistent in our church attendance: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another-and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
Do you know what kept the nine miners in Pennsylvania who were trapped underground for three days going? They tied themselves together so they would “live or die as a group.” They huddled closely so they could stay warm and they also worked at keeping each other encouraged. In an interview this week, one of the miners said this: “Everybody had strong moments. At any certain time maybe one guy got down, and then the rest pulled together and then that guy would get back up and maybe somebody else would feel a little weaker. But it was a team effort. That’s the only way it could have been done” (Daily Leader, 7/29/02).
Listen carefully. The only way to do the Christian life is to live it in community with others. We’re a team. Turn to the person next to you and picture yourself tied to him or her. When you’re down, ask for help. When you’re up, encourage those who are faint-hearted.
Second, David forces himself to remember the sweetness of corporate worship: “…leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng.” While it’s important for us to be with each other, we must never forget that we’re together in order to give shouts of joy and thanksgiving to God. We’re together so that we can worship.
Third, David locks into the fact that He serves a “living God” in verse 2. God is not dead. He’s not sleeping. He’s alive and at work, even when we can’t sense Him. We could say it this way: “He’s God and we’re not.”
Fourth, David remembers that God loves Him. Look at verse 8: “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me.” The word “day” here refers to prosperity. The expectation of the psalmist was that a time of goodness would return and the loving-kindness of God would again be manifested to him.
When you’re feeling low, force yourself to remember these truths:
- You need people.
- You need worship.
- He is God and you are not
- He loves you.
The Hebrew here is very interesting. The tense is not only referring to the past: “I used to go,” it also can refer to the future: “I will go.” He’s making up his mind to trust God and to do what is right, even when he doesn’t feel like it. That leads to the final step: Decide to trust God.
4 – Decide to Trust God
In this psalm David talks to God and he talks to himself. It’s not always bad to talk to yourself. In fact, when we’re down, we often need to force ourselves to remember and trust. In his book, “Spiritual Depression,” Martin Lloyd Jones says this: “The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, and question yourself. You must say to yourself, ‘Why are you cast down? What business have you to be disquieted?”
In verse 5 and then again in verse 11, David says to himself, “Self, even though you’re depressed it’s time to trust God.” Follow along as I read: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” This phrase comes from the picture of a “cast sheep.” As we learned from Harold Davis during the sermon on Psalm 23, a cast sheep was a sheep that was flat on its back and couldn’t get up without help from the shepherd. “Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” This is a decision of the will to put our hope in God even when we can barely eke out the words. We must let our faith conquer our fears and let hope win out over sorrow. Hope is not a vain feeling that maybe something better will come; rather it is a certain expectation of faith in God that He will come through for us.
This is a courageous step to take. Are you willing to wait for God to do His work even when you don’t know how you can even make it through the day? Can you choose to praise him even when your problems are piled up? David says, “I’m going to praise God even though I don’t feel like it. I’m going to trust His character. He’s God and I’m not. He loves me and therefore I can put my hope in Him to do what is right.”
This final step is more fully developed in Psalm 43. According to many Bible scholars, Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 were originally one psalm. You can see that Psalm 43 has no heading and verse 5 is identical to verses 5 and 11 in Psalm 42. While Psalm 42 is a dialogue between David and his soul, in this next psalm David speaks directly to God.
Look at verse 1: “Vindicate me, O God” and verse 2: “You are God my stronghold.” In verse 3 he asks God to “send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.” David then gets to the core. When he’s at his personal “ground zero,” He makes up his mind in verse 4: “Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.”
David comes back to the central truth of all – God Himself. His trust in Him is now fully expressed as he comes to the altar of God. We don’t really have an altar here in this church, but we do have a table. It’s called the Table of Remembrance, the place where we can be reminded of what is really important. A place where the past reality of God’s Ground Zero at the Cross of Christ can become a present refuge and a future hope.
The Table of Remembrance
As we prepare to celebrate communion let’s focus for a few moments on the role that memory plays in our faith. When David says, “therefore I will remember you” nothing is different yet everything has changed. It’s at this point that some hope sneaks back into his life. Listen carefully. Sometimes the recovery of our hope doesn’t depend on making sense of the present moment but rather in our memories of who God is and what He has done for us. Ultimately we cling to the memory of what happened on the cross, where Jesus died for you and me.
Someone has said that the past provides a stable foundation for our existence because it’s unchangeable. We would not have a future to look forward to if we didn’t have a reliable past to look back on.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks tells us about a man I’ll call Joey whose memory is a sieve. Joey remains forever stuck thinking it’s 1945. Harry Truman is president, and the war has just ended. Joey is a very nice man but if you spend two hours talking to him and leave the room for a minute, when you come back, he will greet you as if for the first time. Dr. Sacks has observed that the overall effect of this temporal vacuum is that Joey has no joy. Joey is joyless because he is confined to an ever-changing, yet meaningless, present moment. With nothing new ever to look back on, and with nothing ever to look forward to, joy is impossible.
According to Dr. Sacks, there is only one time when Joey displays some joy. It’s when he takes communion. There’s something about this ordinance that helps Joey anchor his reality to the past. It’s the assurance that Jesus loves him and died for him that gives Joey a glimmer of hope for the present and the future.
Maybe you’re so down today that the cross is all you have to go on because right now nothing else makes much sense. We don’t come to the table because we have it all together but because we often feel like we’re falling apart. We come because we admit that sometimes we don’t know where God is. But this we do know. We can remember one time when there was no doubt where God was and what He was doing. It was that time when He allowed His Son to hang on the cross as our sin substitute.
If we’re honest, some of us feel a bit like Joey. But by God’s grace, we can find a pocket of stillness and a moment of joyful clarity when we meet Jesus at the table. We’re called this morning to take and remember, and through that, to believe. This is not a memorial to a dead hero but an encounter with the living Lord. The cross is our stable past to anchor our present and our future. Because of what Jesus did for us we can:
- Seek him with everything we’ve got
- Be honest when we can’t
- Force ourselves to remember what is true
- Decide to trust God
When we remember we find hope again. That doesn’t meant that everything suddenly becomes smooth sailing but it does give us assurance that one day we will yet praise God again. When we remember how far God went to forgive our sins, we’ll know for sure that He will never let us go. The crucifixion of Christ is a past reality that we cannot change but a reality that somehow changes us – even if we sneak some ice cream once in awhile.
