Sermon Transcript
Our scripture for today comes from the book of Psalms. Psalm 42 reads, as a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night.
While they say to me all the day long, where is your God? These things I remember as I pour out my soul, how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you downcast, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God my Rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all day long, where is your God?
Why are you downcast, O my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
Psalm 42 was, of course, written by a person who was very upset, maybe a person who was even depressed. And, and while we don’t know all the circumstances surrounding when this psalm was written, the writer gives us some information which quite strangely aligns to our current circumstances. Many of us will resonate all too well with what the psalmist experienced. So this was written maybe 3,000 years ago, maybe 2,900 years ago, 2,800 years ago, we’re not sure. But the psalmist tells us that he has been separated from his church community.
Now, does that sound familiar? Verse 4, he says he remembers when he would go to the house of God and sing with other people. But now He is prevented from being able to do that. In his situation, he is in a different location from where the people are worshiping. He’s quite a distance from the temple and where the festivals and worship would take place.
He’s up in Mount Mizar, which, if you aren’t up on your biblical geography, here’s what you need to know. It’s not Jerusalem. He’s actually up north for some reason, and he can’t get to where the people are. And it’s upsetting him.
We understand his pain, don’t we? You know, we’re finding out during this time of sheltering in place just how important face-to-face relationships are, just how important community is. I know all of us are in different places on the spectrum when it comes to how much we need to be around other people. Some of us need to be around other people all the time, like Beth, my wife. And some of us only need to be around others a little.
But what we’ve found out during these days is that all of us need to be in relationship with other people. And not— and this is what we’ve really learned, right? Not in relationship with other people only through text messages, social media, phone calls, video chat. Now those are great, of course, I’m glad we have them, but we need more than that, don’t we? If that’s all we have, if we only have text messages and video calls, we can start to go a little crazy, maybe start to lose our minds a little bit.
We need To see other people, to actually see them, be in their physical proximity and talk and laugh and hear about their lives and tell them about our lives. We need that. And when we don’t have it, it causes us grief.
The author also tells us about his circumstances and other of aspect to his situation is that some event has taken place that has made people question God. Verse 3 and verse 10, other people are asking this guy, where is God? Verse 9, the author asks himself, all right, where is God? Why have you forgotten me? Now, we don’t know exactly what has happened, of course, but we know something substantial enough has happened that made people look up and ask, where is God in all of this?
Has God forgotten us? Will he ever bring us relief? The situation actually feels oppressive, verse 9. Whatever has happened feels like it has a weight to it. It’s smothering, it’s suffocating.
The psalmist has not only experienced a momentary affliction. Instead, his affliction has an ongoing nature, like, when will this end? Verse 2, when will I appear again before God? Verse 3, the suffering is day and night. It just rolls from one day to the next.
Now, he’s gonna point himself to hope eventually, but in terms of the circumstances themselves, he doesn’t know when this is gonna be over. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no evidence that the situation is going to change anytime soon. And we totally understand how he feels, don’t we? These days have an oppressing weight to them.
We want out. We don’t want to do this anymore, but there’s no way out. There’s no choice. There’s no relief.
You know, Psalm 42 has been famous for a long time, and people tend to read it whenever they experience affliction. But there’s something about Psalm 42 that rings especially true for our days. Like we said earlier, we resonate with the author a little too well, which makes the psalmist’s reaction to his circumstances quite striking. Like we said, he’s in a situation just like us, but what he desires and what he prays for while he’s in these circumstances might shock us a little. You know, here’s someone who can’t be together with others and who is continuing to suffer with no end in sight.
Maybe he’s involved in a regional tragedy of some sort. So So we would expect his prayers to sound like, get me out of this, God. Let me be with my friends again. End our suffering. That’s what we think he would say.
That’s what we think would be on his mind. And it would be totally understandable to feel that way. There’s nothing wrong with wanting this to be over. There’s nothing wrong with praying those prayers. There are plenty of other Psalms in which the authors pray to get out of a situation, you know, deliver me from my enemies.
So if you’re praying for all this madness to end, that’s fantastic. Keep praying that. I pray for this to be over multiple times a day. But that is not what is on the mind of our psalmist. He’s not asking for his circumstances to change.
He has a bigger desire than simply wanting to return to normal. He wants something more than relief from his situation. He has some kind of sense that this is an opportunity for something deeper. Verse 7, he says, deep calls to deep. Maybe past experience has taught him that suffering can provide an opportunity for kind of the deep things of God to speak to the deep things within himself.
And apparently he doesn’t wanna miss that opportunity for that deeper connection. I say apparently because it’s all he talks about. He’s not praying about his suffering ending, he’s praying about something else. He wants to feel God. He wants to experience God.
He wants to drink from God. But for some reason he’s not currently savoring God in that way. He has lost the joy and sweetness of being with God. Now he doesn’t seem to have lost belief in God altogether because he’s still praying to God and later he tells himself to hope in God, so in his mind it seems like God is there, but he’s lost the experience of God, this closeness with God maybe. Verse 1 and 2, as a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. Now, this is obvious, but a deer pants for water only when he doesn’t have it.
He pants, he thirsts because he’s He’s desperate for it, but it’s not there.
Here’s what’s amazing about this to me. This writer who again is separated from friends and involved in some kind of ongoing oppressive situation, he looks around and says, you know what I need? You know what would make all of this oppression and loneliness better if I could fill myself with the sweetness and goodness of God.
That’s what he prays. We ask, you’re not praying to get back together with your friends?
No, no, not praying for that. You’re not praying for your circumstances to change?
No, not right now. I’m just praying that I would have a sense of God, that I could put my hope in God, because if I had that, I think I’d be okay.
Now for those of you who are familiar with your Bible, this is— you might recognize this. It sounds similar to something that happens later, but it’s more like like a precursor to what Paul would say later. Paul was another biblical writer who lived maybe 1,000 years after the psalmist, but Paul wrote the book of Philippians, and Philippians 4:12, he says that he found the secret to being content in every circumstance, whether well-fed or hungry, living in plenty or want. Paul has contentment, he says, through the strength which Christ gives him.
The psalmist in Psalm 42 wants to get to where Paul is. The psalmist knows there is such a thing as peace which surpasses understanding, also in the book of Philippians, Philippians 4:7. The psalmist believes that exists, he just doesn’t have it right now. He says, I thirst for that, I’m panting for that, I want that, but I don’t have it.
That is his prayer.
I’ll just confess to y’all, for the last couple months I’m way closer to where the psalmist is than I am to where Paul is. I have way more thirst for the presence of God than I have the presence of God.
I wish in these days I could feel God as good and as sweet as I know him to be.
But mostly I’m just longing for that sweetness without the fulfillment of it.
And where the psalmist is.
Thankfully, however, the psalmist doesn’t just leave us hanging. He doesn’t only say that he wants to get back to experiencing the sweetness of God. He also gives us, thankfully, some clues of how to get there and how we can get there. He gives us a roadmap of how to get that joy and closeness with God back into our lives. He gives us in this psalm, we see him take at least 4 steps.
If you read the psalm, you might find more steps. That’d be awesome. Send them to me. I’d like your insights. But he gives us at least 4 steps.
One, he calls himself out. 2, he believes in God’s sovereignty in the midst of tragedy. And 3, he remembers God’s past faithfulness. Then finally, 4, he looks to the future. So first, he calls himself out.
It’s the refrain, why are you downcast, O my soul? Hope in God! He says, hey, Self, you don’t have to be without hope. Now, grieve, of course, yes. And we’ve talked about this a bunch in the last couple of months.
We can absolutely grieve. We need to grieve. Jesus grieved. Paul grieved. Lamentations is a book in the Bible For crying out loud.
So go lament. It’s so good for your soul. Just take a day, sit, weep over all the destruction and pain that is all around us. You know, and this guy’s sort of the psalmist’s circumstances. He can’t be with other believers.
Some oppressive situation has occurred. We say, go ahead and weep, grieve, of course.
But as Christians, we don’t need to grieve like those without hope, 1 Thessalonians 4:13. Or the book of Lamentations is filled with all kinds of inklings of hope that are dripping in. His mercies are new every morning. There’s all kinds of hope in the midst of the book of Lamentations.
This guy says to himself, the psalmist says to himself, what am I doing? I have access to resources that can give me joy even now. I still have these resources. I mean, they didn’t go anywhere. They’re still here.
Why am I not using them? Why am I so dejected? I have the means to uplift myself. To have hope in the midst of my grief. I have the means to have that.
So why am I downcast?
Christians, we can speak to ourselves like that. We can call ourselves out when we’re dejected. We can ask ourselves, what are we doing?
We can say in a calling out to ourself kind of way, we say we have the resources that can give us hope in the midst of this grief. So we should use them.
That’s the, that’s the first thing he did was call himself out. So what are those resources? I’m glad you asked. And those are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th steps the psalmist takes. So second, or his first resource to uplifting his soul, he holds on to God’s sovereignty in the midst of tragedy.
Now, whatever’s going on for him, which we don’t fully know, and it might even be that people are hurting him in some way. Verse 9, he says an enemy is oppressing him. So his circumstances might not be pandemic or famine or illness. It might be an actual person acting in an evil way toward him. But even if that’s the case, he keeps his understanding that ultimately the whole world and everything that happens in it is in God’s hands.
He says, verse 7, your breakers, your waves, have gone over me. They aren’t somebody else’s waves. This drowning sensation I have, like I can’t get up for air out of this circumstance, those are God’s waves.
He says, ultimately, God, you are the one who is in control. Nothing can happen in this world without your approval. I wouldn’t be in this circumstance unless you had a purpose for it. The psalmist holds on to that, and instead of— which this might be the reaction some of us have— instead of twisting that around as some kind of blame for God, like, God, you must not be a good God if you allowed this to happen. Instead of that, when the psalmist reminds himself that the crushing waves belong to God, That helps our psalmist hope in God.
Now, um, there are some people, and, uh, just wonderful people who love God. There are some people, and if this is you, I’ve, I’ve been praying for you this week. There are some people, again, wonderful people, but they believe that since God doesn’t stop tragedy from happening, he must not really be sovereign. They believe something like, God can’t change this situation. Now, he’d like to, of course, he’s good, but they believe his hands are tied for some reason, and there’s any number of reasons that they might believe that.
So if that’s you, this is how I’ve prayed for you this week.
I have prayed logic like that would be appalling to you.
And I’m begging that you don’t go down that route.
Please don’t think God is good, but his hands are tied and he can’t do anything about this. I know your motivation behind that is probably that you think it will help you maintain some hope in God and preserve some of God’s goodness or something, but actually I think the opposite is going to end up happening. Believing God’s hands are tied and he can’t do anything I think in the end will end up ripping away your hope. Because our hope is that God will eventually fix this later.
But if his hands are tied now, his hands may be tied in the future. So there’s no guarantee this will end well. And that erodes our hope. If you want to believe that he can fix it later, then there’s no reason that he couldn’t fix it now. The only reason he isn’t fixing it now is because he has chosen not to fix it now.
If you want to sum this up, what the psalmist believes is God can, God isn’t, But God will.
Not only is that the psalmist’s faith, but that’s the ancient faith of this Middle Eastern Israelite community that has been passed on to us. When thinking about God’s sovereignty during tragedy, they believed God can fix it, God isn’t fixing it, but God will fix it.
And for them, that drove them to God instead of away from him. They thought, here’s the one who has the power to fix it, so I’m going to trust in him even if he chooses not to fix it. That’s what this psalmist does. He calls God his rock, verse 9, but then he asks his rock, he says, hey rock, Why have you forgotten me? Also verse 9.
He’s like, I’m gonna keep standing on you even when you don’t give me an answer, even when I don’t understand, even when I feel abandoned, you are still my rock.
Now why in the world would the psalmist do that? Why would the Israelites do that? Why would anyone stand on a rock that has forgotten him?
One reason is because of God’s past faithfulness, and that is our next signpost on the map to experiencing the sweetness of God. The psalmist remembers past encounters with God, verse 4 and verse 5. He calls to his mind how God has been faithful to him before. Now in other Psalms, the authors typically call to mind how God had been faithful to the community at large. You know, God created our nation out of one man.
God liberated our nation out of slavery. God preserved us in the desert. God has been with us every step of the way, and God will be with us now. But this psalmist calls to mind specific events out of his own life, not not the events out of Israel’s collective history. He remembers how good it was for him to worship God, verse 4, how great it was for him to be with God, verse 5.
He’s remembering his past. So listen, if you don’t have a way to record how God has previously worked in your life, I highly recommend you start something now. Write a journal, make little selfie videos, come up with your own idea. And then when you’re in a time like now when everything feels upside down, you can go back and read it or you can go back and watch it and it will help you experience God again.
In fact, You should keep a journal of these days. That’s what Psalm 42 is. It’s someone’s journal that documents a difficult time in his life. He was, he was in a tough season and he wrote a journal entry. We are in a tough season, so we should make some journal entries.
And here’s what that’ll do for you, especially if you make an entry every day or every couple days, every week, even if all you write is, I’m so tired today. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Or maybe you write, I actually had a good bit of energy today. Or, I watched church and when I watched church I heard my friends sing about God and it brought joy to my soul. Or, you know, I read my Bible today but I still just feel so lost.
Whatever happens in the day, even if it’s just a couple sentences, Write it down. And here’s what that’ll accomplish for you later. Sometime in the future, you will come back and read how much of a struggle this was. Except when that future day gets here, you will already be through this. God will have liberated you out of COVID You know, 10 years from now, whatever is happening that makes you come back and read your COVID journal, At that future time, you will know, oh, God safely brought me out of that COVID season.
You’ll read some of your entries from these days, and some of them will probably seem pretty bleak. You know, you’ll read May 23rd, and it’ll say, all I could do was lay on the floor because I was so depressed. And that’s all you wrote that day. But in 10 years, you’ll know May 23rd wasn’t the end, and God brought you through that. In the moment, on that day, we might feel like God has forgotten us, like the psalmist did in this psalm.
But 10 years from now, we’ll be able to look back and say, he never left me. He never forgot me. And then whatever’s going on on that future date, no matter no matter how bad it is, when we come back and read our journal from these days, we will say, okay, God faithfully carried me through the loneliness and the monotony and the financial worry of sheltering in place, and that was super dark and super hopeless, but, but he never left me. So I can have confidence that he will carry me through this situation, whatever it is, in the future. As well.
If you make a journal during these days, future you, who will go through some hard times, future you will be able to look back on God’s past faithfulness during these days. Future you will be able to kickstart your faith a little easier than maybe present you is. Okay, lastly, the psalmist looks to the future. He says, I shall again praise God, verse 5, verse 11. Because he called himself out, because he believes in God’s sovereignty, because he has reviewed God’s past track record of faithfulness in his life, he thinks, okay, I know what’s gonna happen in the future.
I know that God will bring me out of this. I know that I will experience God again. I know that I will sing his praises in the future. The psalmist has confidence because of God’s steadfast love, verse 8. This word steadfast love, which is in verse 8, it’s God’s special love for his people.
I love the way that the kids’ Bible that we read our boys translates this word, This steadfast love, it translates it as God’s never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love. God’s never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love. It’s God’s covenant love. The psalmist knows the future is bright. God will see me through this.
He— the psalmist believes there will be joy on the other side of the sorrow. God is not going to give up on me. I will I will praise him again. And look, if the psalmist could have that kind of confidence in God’s steadfast love when he had never seen Jesus, how much more confidence could we have in God’s covenant love since we know all about Jesus? I’m so thankful.
For Tim Keller for his insights on this. And I’m happy to reference him and encourage you to fill your spiritual life with his books and sermons, even his sermon on this text. But on these verses, Tim Keller notes that compared to us today, the psalmist only had a small picture of God’s steadfast love. You know, God’s never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love. We know, because we know Jesus, we know to a much larger extent how great God’s love is for us.
Because when we read Psalm 42, we see what Jesus did for us. Tim Keller says Jesus was the one who really said, I thirst. When he was on the cross. Jesus was the one who really said, my God, my God, why have you forgotten me? Jesus had real enemies who taunted him and said, where is your God?
Let’s see if he will come and save you off that cross.
Jesus didn’t only lose the feeling of God like the psalmist did and like we might, He didn’t just lose the feeling of God. Jesus lost God. Jesus had the ultimate thirst. Jesus was really forsaken by God. Why?
So that in spite of our failures, God will never give up on us. Jesus lost God’s never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love so that we may have it.
And if God will go to those lengths for us through Jesus, how bright can we expect our future to be? How much confidence can we have in the days ahead of us? How much sweetness might that return to our experience of God and our relationship with him? What kind of attitude, what kind of joy might we have as we wake up tomorrow and face another sunrise?
May God’s never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love proven to us through Christ and his work. May that steadfast love fill our longing for God and give us the peace that surpasses understanding.
Let’s pray.
Father, I’m so grateful that you included this psalm in Scripture, that you’ve given us this example that it’s okay for us to say, We don’t feel you, God, and we want to. We know that you’re the answer, but we’re not there. Thank you for giving us these words so we can articulate so much more clearly where our heart is, Lord. I pray that as you led the psalmist to pursue you through remembering your sovereignty and looking at your past faithfulness, and trusting in your steadfast love to bring a bright future. I pray, Lord, that we would be able to do that same thing today.
I pray that our dryness and our longing for you would be filled, that you would, that you would give us the living water that Christ talks about so that we will never thirst again. Lord, fill us in such a way That we know You to a much deeper degree than we ever have before. And we pray that by doing so, we will find the peace that we need right now, Lord. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
