“I Will Yet Praise You”
Emotions, part 1
Psalm 42
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
November 12, 2006
Have you ever been depressed? The story is told of a businessman whose wife was experiencing depression. She began to mope around and be sad, lifeless—no light in her eyes—no spring in her step—joyless. It became so bad that the man made an appointment for her with a psychiatrist. On the appointed day, they went to the psychiatrist’s office, sat down with him and began to talk. It was not long before the wise doctor realized what the problem was.
Without saying a word, he stood, walked over in front of the woman’s chair, signaled her to stand, took her by the hands, looked at her in the eyes for a long time, then put his arms around her and gave her a big, warm hug. You could see the change come over the woman. Her face softened, her eyes lit up, she immediately relaxed. Her whole face glowed.
Stepping back, the doctor said to the husband, "See that’s all she needs."
The husband thought for a moment, then said, "Okay, I’ll bring her in Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, but I play golf on the other afternoons.”
Wouldn’t it be great if depression could be cured that easily? Of course we know it can’t be. If you can truly help someone out of deep sadness or depression with a hug, the sadness wasn’t all that deep, and the depression wasn’t really depression.
Today is the first of a brief series (3 parts) I am going to do on emotions. Today is sadness, which I will refer to as depression, though I do not mean depression in the clinical sense but more in the sense of profound sorrow or sadness or gloom, or being what you would call “very down.” Next week we’ll discuss joy as we lead into Thanksgiving. The week after that we’ll look at anger to close out the month of November.
When is the last time you were so depressed you thought of doing something drastic? When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean killing yourself (although that’s drastic), but maybe quitting your job, leaving your family, or simply staying in bed for a week, or deciding that showering is an option. Do you ever find that those moments of deep depression just take you by surprise? When you’re in those times, do you just feel like you might never come out of it?
I’m taking a preaching class right now. I need a preaching class, as I never went to seminary and I’m a self-taught public speaker. So a few weeks ago I was working on one of my more difficult assignments in this preaching class and man, all of a sudden I just hit a wall. I felt angry with my instructor. I felt stupid and incompetent. Pretty soon I started telling myself all this ridiculous stuff. “You stink, man. You’re never going to get any better. You shouldn’t even be a pastor, because you don’t know how to preach. You’ve never been to seminary and you are a failure.”
It got worse and worse as I continued listening to these things running through my mind. And then, when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it took a dramatic turn down another path altogether, and got a TON worse. The next train of thought in my mind went like this. “Dave, you are an imposter. You are struggling and are not meant to preach, and if you are not meant to preach, you have no business leading a church. Who are you to stand up in front of these people week after week and teach them? You don’t know anything about any of this.” As I continued to entertain those ideas, I actually found myself wanting to quit my job. I honestly spent about two hours thinking that I could just scrap it all and take a counseling job somewhere and not have to complete the class, or deal with the difficulty of becoming a better preacher.
Now folks, this is simply from having difficulty with an assignment. I was depressed. I was miserable. I was desperate. I was in depression (to depression is to lose hope). In January we’re going to get into a sermon series on the lies we listen to that lead to failure and man, I was listening to them all. Now for the past two weeks I have been sharing with you my dream of starting this church, and that prayer we prayed for four years, and how convinced we were that this is what God wanted for us, and how we were willing to take this great leap of faith and risk everything we had in order to get this place started. All that faith, all that excitement, all that certainty that God is with us, and here I am struggling with a little homework assignment and thinking, “You stink. You shouldn’t even BE a pastor. Why don’t you just quit. You’re pathetic.” And it was true, I was pathetic alright, but not as a pastor or preacher. I was pathetic for listening to those stupid voices, even for a moment.
But a lot of us do that. A lot of us have times when we sink into depths so deep that completely irrational thoughts start seeming reasonable. I know that some of you deal with stuff like that. Some of you would crawl under a rock if other people knew how vulnerable you are to depression and depression. But what’s our basic MO here at Wildwind, folks? How do we approach life? What did I write on the back panel of the brochure we hand out to our guests? We’re all just people. I figure let’s just admit it and stumble toward God together.
So there. I have jumped first. I admit that I struggle, at times, with unbelievable depression, sometimes to the point of despair. In some books pastors are told not to reveal things like this about themselves because people have a need to believe their pastor has it all together. While I can understand how someone could feel that way, any of you here who need to believe that are in the wrong church.
So I’ve jumped first. Now how about you? Do you ever deal with depression? Do you let yourself get so worked up about things sometimes that you start entertaining ridiculous ideas in your mind? Does difficulty or failure in one area of your life begin resonating out into the rest of your life until you are convinced that you are irredeemably hopeless in every way, and that just by going to church you are a hypocrite because you’re allowing people to think you’re not as awful as you really believe you are?
I stand here asking you this, and sharing my experience with you, not to say, “Poor me – I hope you feel sorry for me.” I stand here sharing this and asking if you relate because we gotta understand a little bit of what’s going on inside ourselves. Because if we can’t acknowledge this in ourselves, then we can’t allow it in others. And if we can’t allow it in others, we cannot create an environment where human beings can be human beings. And if human beings cannot pursue God as human beings, they cannot pursue God at all.
So let’s get honest about the darkness today. When you want to get honest about your emotions, when you want to strip away all the pretense and deal with raw, hardcore reality, where do you turn? Jerry Springer? Some band you love? Self-help books? Nature? When I want to get honest about my emotions, when I want to acknowledge and wrestle with my own darkness, I know I will find companionship in the Psalms. So I want to use Psalm 42 as a backdrop for our examination of depression today.
The first thing we must do in dealing with depression is to realize that to be depressed is to be human. To be depressed is to be human. Let’s look at our text.
Psalms 42:1-11 (NIV)
1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
4 These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng.
5 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and
6 my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon--from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.
8 By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me-- a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God my Rock, "Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?"
10 My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
11 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
Look at all the depressive statements in that passage – I have underlined them for you. Without question, here was one depressed dude. Everyone gets depressed at times. Almost everyone finds themselves buried under an avalanche of sorrow, or sadness that is so heavy it is suffocating, maybe even to where we just start to lose hope. I would refer you to the story of the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings ch. 19, where we see Elijah begging for God to kill him. Or the prophet Jonah, in a funk and begging for God to kill him. Or Jesus in the garden before his crucifixion, saying his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow, even to the point of death.
These are just a few examples. These are holy people folks, who were overwhelmed with sorrow, with depression, with emotion. To be depressed is to be human. We must begin there. Second, we see in this same passage that not only is it human to be depressed, but that your spiritual lows do not invalidate your spiritual highs, and your spiritual highs do not prevent your spiritual lows.
Psalms 42:4 (NIV)
4 These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. 5 Why are you downcast, O my soul?..
He says, things were so good for me before. I used to be a spiritual leader, the first one to the temple. I was joyful and thankful. But look at me now – why am I so upset? See, that’s depression for you – it just hits you, and the high you had yesterday will not protect you from the low you might experience tomorrow. Your spiritual lows do not invalidate your spiritual highs, and your spiritual highs do not prevent your spiritual lows. The fact that you may be down today does not mean yesterday’s up wasn’t real. The fact that you may doubt God today doesn’t mean yesterday’s assurance wasn’t real. The fact that you may feel far from God today does not mean yesterday’s closeness to God was not real. And the fact that you may feel very close to God today does not mean you will feel that way tomorrow. The fact that you may feel deeply motivated to pray today does not mean you will feel that way tomorrow. That’s exactly the reason why our faith must be based not on feelings, but on decisions and commitments.
Third, depression is capped off, completed, made as bad as it could possibly be, by the feeling that God is far away. The Psalmist is already feeling lousy – already struggling with depression – and to make matters worse, where’s God in all this? Almost all of you can relate to this. You get so upset that darkness just falls all around you. Your mind is in the garbage can, entertaining all kinds of ridiculous ideas. You feel such sadness, or frustration, or emptiness, or a strange combination of all three. You might recall your last spiritual high, the last time you felt God near to you, but it seems like a distant dream. And that’s the worst part of the whole experience – the sense of having been abandoned by God. Look at how the Psalmist describes this feeling of distance from God:
Psalms 42:1-3 (NIV)
1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
This guy is in the desert. Ever been in the desert before, spiritually speaking? Have you ever felt completely cut off from God, like at your core you are unlovable, maybe even sensed that you are damaged goods, or wicked?
Not only is it human to be depressed, but depression is made complete when we sense we are cut off from God. The Bible speaks of hell as a place where God’s presence is missing – this is the ultimate terror, the ultimate kind of thirst. Emotions crowd around us in a kind of gathering dark. They suffocate us. They pin us down. They force bitter thoughts through our minds, and we lose a sense of God’s presence – we can see the process happening in the writer of this Psalm. He’s just struggling here. Where is hope of resolution? How do we get out?
I’m going to tell you, and my answer to that question is going to seem like a cliché at first, so bear with me. The way out of depression is to focus on God. I told you it would sound cliché. But let’s look at this, because actually it is a profound truth.
Psalm 42 begins with this expression of spiritual dryness, of depression.
From that point on, the rest of the Psalm alternates between expressions of depression, and the Psalmist reminding himself of God’s presence.
In v. 4, he recalls a time when things were better. I used to lead everybody in praising God, he says. Then in verse 5, “so what are you so upset about?” And then he tells himself to do something. He says, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.” I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God. The Psalmist reminds himself that this will not last forever. He reminds himself that there is reason for hope, that one day he will praise God with joy again. You can sense this guy’s pain. He is just clinging to God in this kind of desperate way. I will yet praise Him.
And because he knows this, he says, I find no comfort in myself, so “I will remember you (v. 6), from the land of the Jordan.” The land of the Jordan was far from the homeland of the writer and basically he says, “Even here in this place where I feel so far from you, I will focus on you.” 7 Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. In other words, I am in anguish – in a flood of depression.
Psalms 42:8 (NIV)
8 By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me-- a prayer to the God of my life.
Through his anguish and depression, he reminds himself of a constant flow of God’s mercy, and that it is God who sustains him and keeps him alive.
Folks, see why this sounds cliché but it’s not? It’s not just about saying, “I’m so incredibly depressed – gee whiz, good thing God’s here to make it all better for me.” This is gritty. This is determination to cling to God and the promise of God’s presence while the writer and his countrymen are in exile in a country that has carried them off into slavery. This is searching loneliness. This is deep depression and emptiness and pain and loss. And this is how we who serve God today are to respond in our own darkness, in our own deserts. We are not only to read words like this in the Bible, we are to live by them – to repeat them again and again until God reassures us of his presence with us through them. How long would you have to read this until you began to believe it? Until you began to feel it? Read this with me.
Psalms 42:8 (NIV)
8 By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me-- a prayer to the God of my life.
It’s not something we can say that will instantly make us feel better. It’s something we have to ingest – recite again and again, and let it get into us, until it brings with it the very presence of God that it promises. Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt. 4:4) You don’t live on physical food by saying, “Gee, I’m hungry,” then sucking on a mouthful of pizza for a moment, savoring the flavor, and then spitting it out. You put it in your mouth. You taste it. You chew it. And you swallow it. The job isn’t done until it’s inside of you, until it’s part of you, until there’s no difference between you and what you just ate. You live on food not merely in the sense that you eat it regularly, but you actually ARE what you have eaten. The energy in that food was converted by your body and used to build more of you. Take that however you wish!
We see the Psalmist repeating these things to himself again and again. I will yet praise him. In verses 9 and 10, he slips back into depression again, before once again snapping out of it in verse 11:
Psalms 42:9-11 (NIV)
9 I say to God my Rock, "Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?"
10 My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
11 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
Focus on that. I will yet praise him. I will yet praise him. I will yet praise him. I will yet praise him. I will yet praise him.
Notice what the Psalmist does not do. Nowhere in this Psalm is there a prayer for God to take away the depression. God, please make me feel happier. God, please lift the clouds. God, please fix this. Do you know why? This is my last point. It’s because God has already given you everything you need to get through difficult times. Look at this:
2 Peter 1:3-4 (NIV)
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
God has already given you everything you need for life and godliness through your knowledge of Christ. There’s nothing wrong with the prayer, “God, get me out of this,” but God may very well leave you right where you are and you may need to learn to lean on his promises. You may need to learn to actually believe what God has already said. You may need to learn to trust that God is with you when it doesn’t feel like it, that God loves you when you feel unlovable, that God cares for you when you feel wretched and undeserving.
My friends, don’t get depressed over the fact that you sometimes experience depression. Remember, depression is human. Maybe you are up today but that doesn’t mean you won’t be down tomorrow, and the low does not make the high meaningless. Maybe you’re up today – you could be down tomorrow because the high will not prevent the low. Remember that the worst part of depression is feeling far from God, so the solution is not simply to read a bit of scripture, but to pray and to ingest God’s promises. Repeat them to yourself until you know, and feel, they are true. Say to yourself again and again, “I will yet praise him.”
Would you pray with me? God, you are our deliverer. You have given us your promises and asked us to trust them. Will you be our God when we are depressed and in the desert, when we experience all the pain and confusion of this life? Will you teach us how to live by every word that comes from your mouth, so that even when we are in depression and darkness, we will not suffer as those who have no hope? No matter what we go through in this life, Father, may we say “God, I will yet praise you.” Amen.
