Transcription
The scripture for tonight is Psalm 42 and 43.
As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants 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 continually say to me, "Where is your God?" When I remember these things, I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go with the multitude; I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with the multitude that kept a pilgrim feast.
Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance. O my God, my soul is cast down within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, and from the heights of Hermon, and from the hill Mizar. Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls; all your waves and billows have gone over me.
The Lord will command His loving kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I will say to God, my rock, "Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of my enemy?" As with a breaking of my bones, my enemies reproach me while they say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God.
Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation. O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man, for you are the God of my strength. Why do you cast me off? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to your holy hill and to your tabernacle.
Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy; and on the harp I will praise you, O God, my God.
Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God.
This is God's word.
When it comes to physical growth and physical health, you've got sort of two kinds of practices or disciplines. You've got trainers and you've got doctors. You have trainers because, through nutrition and exercise, trainers help you get further than you were. They help you make progress physically. But when you get sick or maybe injure yourself, you need a doctor to get you back on track.
So you need trainers to get you forward from where you were. You need doctors to get you back to where you were physically. The same thing applies spiritually. There are spiritual disciplines that are more like training, and we've been looking at them. We're in a series on the Psalms, looking at what are the spiritual disciplines by which you grow into the person God meant you to be.
There are some disciplines that are more along the lines of training. They tell you things like scriptural meditation and prayer, and we're going to continue to look at them. But there are some spiritual disciplines that are defensive; that is, they are ways of treating problems and difficulties. Tonight, we're going to look at one: Psalm 42 and 43, a way of dealing with a condition that will come on you if you are in any kind of spiritual pilgrimage at all.
If you don't know how to deal with it, it can be disastrous. There is a condition described here, a set of causal factors, and finally, a set of cures. There is a condition that is certain to come upon you. There are causal factors, and there are cures. For you to become skilled at dealing with this condition is absolutely critical if you're going to make spiritual progress.
So let's take a look at the condition. What is the condition? Well, verse one gives it in metaphorical form, and then verse two explains the metaphor. First of all, it says, "As the deer pants for water brooks." Now, keep this in mind: deer aren't stupid. They don't wait until they're dying of thirst before they go look for water. A panting deer is not just a thirsty deer; a panting deer is a deer that's literally dying of thirst.
Therefore, a panting deer is a deer that has come down to the place, the riverbed or the stream, where it's used to assuaging its thirst through cool, clear streams of water and finds the riverbed dry. You see, the psalmist is saying, "I'm like the deer, and God is like the dry river brook, the dry riverbed."
Then verse two explains, "My soul thirsts for God, for the Living God." It's not that he doesn't believe in God anymore, but the psalmist can't sense God as a living God. The personal sense of dealing, a personal sense that there's a God who's there, that I'm dealing with, and He's dealing with me—the give and take—it's gone.
Keep going on the verse: "When shall I come and appear before God?" which literally is, "When shall I see the face of God?" Over and over again in verse five, it says, "Hope in God; I will yet praise Him for the help of His countenance." He's lost the countenance of God; he's lost the face of God.
That doesn't mean he doesn't believe there's a God who is everywhere; it means that he's lost his relational experience of God's presence. He has no more taste, no more feel, no more sight, no more sound of God in his soul. You know what we mean by that? Thoughts about God that used to comfort him, sweeten, soften, strengthen him—they don't resonate. They don't strike; they don't do it anymore.
The condition he's describing is that he's lost the reality of God, not belief in God. He's lost the reality of God; he's lost the presence of God, the sense of God's presence on his heart and in his soul. He no longer feels like he's got hold of God. He no longer has a sense that there's a God who's there, who is in a personal relationship with him.
He's experiencing a spectrum here: he's experiencing spiritual dryness, spiritual drought, spiritual darkness, spiritual deadness. Nothing resonates. What's important to see here is that there are other Psalms in which this spiritual dryness and deadness coexists with a sense of guilt.
There are numbers of Psalms, and we'll be looking at one of them in our series, where the reason why the psalmist has lost God's presence and lost the sense of God's reality is because the psalmist has done something wrong. Therefore, the psalmist feels guilt, and then he has to confess his sin and repent.
But did you notice that's not happening here? This psalmist, this speaker, this writer is experiencing deep dryness, a deep spiritual drought, deep spiritual deadness, and he's done nothing wrong. It's come upon him.
Now, this is very important. I'm going to emphasize this because Americans, and therefore Americans who are Christians, if something's wrong, they want to know who so they can sue them. In other words, nothing should be wrong. If something is wrong, there's somebody I can sue.
It's the same thing that happens with Christians who are Americans. When something goes wrong, like this, when I start to experience spiritual deadness and drought and dryness, I must be sure there's some button I'm not pushing. I'm sure there's something on my Christian to-do list I'm missing.
Unfortunately, we're very moralistic about this. I would say one of the reasons why it's tough for Christians to admit to their Christian friends just how deeply dry they are is because the Christian friends might say, "What you're experiencing—you don't have the reality of God in your life. You're not experiencing His presence; you're experiencing spiritual deadness."
Well, they say, "Have you prayed in faith? Have you confessed all known sin? Have you claimed the promises? Have you rebuked the devil? Have you pleaded the blood? Have you thanked God for all your many blessings?" Surely there'd be nothing wrong if you were doing your entire daily Christian to-do list. Obviously, you're doing something wrong.
But this guy's not doing anything wrong, and he's dying of thirst. He's dying of spiritual thirst. There is no confession in here. There's no "I am sorry for my sins; I hide them no longer; I repent." It doesn't say that.
Because you see, and this is the point: this condition will come upon you. This will happen to you. Though, of course, spiritual dryness and deadness can happen as a result of you doing something wrong, that you're violating your conscience, of course. But the point is, it can happen without that, and therefore it will happen to you even if you're doing your daily Christian to-do list.
Now, the reason why you need to know that—let me just briefly point this out to a few different groups of people that are probably here. If you're a newer Christian, and one of the joys of Redeemer is that there are always so many people around that are new in the faith, if you are a newer Christian, this is particularly a problem.
The first time you experience this, it can really freak you out. First of all, nobody explains it to you. Nobody tells you it's going to happen. Secondly, now this is what I mean by culture. I'm sorry if I'm going to be beating up on Americans. After all, I like Americans. I am American. I married American. I have three Americans.
I have, you know, I’m sort of irrevocably American, but I'm going to talk to you about some of the downsides of our culture tonight. What automatically, because of the culture in which you were raised, you don't expect this thing to happen unless you do something wrong. You know, unless you are really violating one of the rules or something like that, this shouldn't happen.
When it does happen, you freak out. One of the big problems is that new Christians, in particular, on top of everything else, start to doubt whether the whole thing is real. You know, you haven't been with it long enough, and there can be a real insecurity on top of everything else.
So if you're a newer Christian, you better learn that this is coming, and you better learn how to deal with it. That's what we're here to do tonight—to help you with that.
Secondly, all of us, whether we're new or not, really have to be careful about this because, in general, when spiritual drought happens, we do not treat it very well. You know, a lot of you busy New Yorkers, you're really good at working out, but as soon as a cold or a flu bug comes along, you can't miss work. You can't stop anything. You can't miss any of your appointments.
Next thing you know, you're in the hospital because you're really good at moving. In other words, you're really good at the positive physical disciplines, but you're not very good at the defensive ones. This is true in this case too.
Another stupid metaphor: let me give you another stupid metaphor. You know, if you're an outfielder—it used to happen to me all the time, actually, when I played baseball. I was an outfielder, and you're really pulling for your team. Next thing you know, you see a ball sailing into the outfield. They got a hit, and you know that this is terrible.
I used to get so demoralized. "Oh no, they got a hit!" And then suddenly I realized, "Oh gosh, the ball has just gone by me." It would have been bad for it to be a single, but now it's a triple. That's how it is with spiritual dryness.
It's bad when it happens, but by and large, we boot the ball. It comes to us, and it's bad enough, but because we don't act on it, we don't know how to deal with it. We don't react the way we're going to see here we should be reacting. The singles turn into triples. Instead of one run scoring, three runs score on us.
One more thing: there are probably people in this room who have been almost off the rails for maybe years because you were a Christian. You understood yourself as a Christian, and one of these times of spiritual dryness came, and you couldn't see where it was coming from. You didn't do anything wrong; you didn't know what was going on.
In a sense, you misplayed the ball. At first, this is not a set of intellectual doubts. In the beginning, it's not a set of intellectual doubts. Notice he doesn't say, "I don't believe in God." He says, "I can't feel Him."
But if you don't do the right thing with it, if you don't treat it properly, it will become—God will become so unreal to you, it'll start to overtake everything, including your beliefs, including your intellect. I continually meet people that I think this is what's happened. Years ago, they can remember being Christians, and they still don't know now what they are.
They can't completely jettison the Christian faith; they can't completely get rid of it. Yet they have such deep and profound reservations about God, about the faith, about themselves. They're sort of in the Twilight Zone. They're not sure whether they're Christians or not.
Nobody is. I'm not. They can ask me and say, "Am I a Christian?" I don't know. I say, and usually it's because years ago this happened, and they never got themselves back on the rail. What started out as a kind of subjective existential sense of alienation from God became something much more serious, something much more pervasive and sustained.
So you need to know how to deal with this condition because it will come.
Now, secondly, what are some of the causal factors? I'm using the word "causal factors" carefully because the things I'm about to tell you don't have to automatically cause this condition. But in this passage, as I've seen in life as a pastor, they tend to go along; they tend to be associated with this condition.
Do you understand? I'm not trying to say if this happens, automatically this will happen. But in general, these conditions, these causal factors tend to be associated with the condition of spiritual dryness, spiritual drought, spiritual darkness, and spiritual deadness.
Number one: a disruption of community. Notice verse four: "I used to go with the multitude; I went with them to the house of God with a voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept a pilgrim feast."
Then down a verse or two, he says, "My God, I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, from the heights of Hermon, from the hill Mizar." Now, we don't know why this happened, but he used to be in the southern part of Judah. He used to go to the temple; he used to regularly be part of the temple worship, be part of the feasting, be part of the joy and praise.
But now he's in the northern part; he's away from the people of God. He's away from the congregation, away from the temple, away from the worship. He's up in the north, on the mountain range of which Mount Hermon is the peak.
We don't know why. We don't know if he was captured; we don't know if he was exiled; we don't know if he moved there. We don't know why. But here's the point: there's individual Bible study, and then there's corporate Bible study, community Bible study.
There's individual prayer and contemplation, and then there's corporate prayer and praise, and they are not the same. You need them both.
For example, he longs for and remembers fondly the pilgrim feast. What was the pilgrim feast? The pilgrim feast is something very similar to what we're doing tonight. The feasts were times in which the people of God corporately remembered the great and mighty acts of God that He did in order to make them a people.
For example, the Passover was maybe the prime of the feasts. What did you do at Passover? The people came together; it was a feast. They came from all over the country, and they came together. They read the scriptural passages about the Exodus and about the great things that God did, and they remembered how He made them a people and how He saved them by bringing them out under the blood of the lamb.
Then they recommitted themselves, and they praised God together. You see, it's group Bible study; it's group prayer and praise. Americans underestimate the importance of communal spiritual disciplines.
Now, here I am beating up again. I told you this was going to happen tonight. Just as Americans tend to be moralistic—that is, they tend to say, "Well, if something's wrong, I must be doing something wrong"—they're also individualistic.
Over and over again, surveys show that 80 to 90% of Americans say, "I can be a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim. I can be a spiritual person without going to a mosque, a synagogue, or a church. I can be a spiritual person, a very good spiritual person, all by myself."
80 to 90% year after year say that. Of course, that is totally antithetical to all of Islam, all of Judaism, all of Christianity. I have to tell you, it's common sense too. How do you know you're right all by yourself?
How can you stay hot all by yourself? This man doesn't underestimate it, but I'll tell you this: we tend to, and as a result, we fall into spiritual dryness very often because we want to come as individuals. We want to get our little fix; we want to get our sermon, or we want to get our music. We want to get our fix, go home, maybe talk to one or two friends.
We really don't want to make ourselves accountable. We really don't want to become part of a regular community study, a regular community prayer, a big community, a small community, a tight community. We don't want to do that. We're busy, or we're just private.
You will not get away with it. By the way, let me just say one other quick thing. You say, "Well, I go to Redeemer, and I'm very active and very busy." I want to tell you, as a person who's been at Redeemer for a long time in New York City, this is probably true of most of the country, but especially in New York, people are constantly coming and going, coming and going, coming and going.
If you're just here year after year after year, you're going to find that unless you are actively reconstructing your community almost every two or three years, you're suddenly going to be lonely, calling from Mount Mizar, wondering, "Where did everybody go?"
You can fall into spiritual dryness because you lose your community. They're gone. You have to reconstruct; you have to work on the new friendships. You have to work on building. Who are you going to be accountable to? Who are you going to be talking to about your spiritual walk? Who are you going to be learning with? Who are you going to be praying with?
Or else, number two, the second causal factor is disillusionment at the events of life. Disillusionment at the events of life. "Where is your God?"
See, verse three, the enemies of this chapter, of this Psalm, are not like the enemies of many other Psalms. Many of the other Psalms have enemies who are after the person's life, after the author or the psalmist's life, trying to kill him. In this case, you notice the enemies are taunting him.
The enemies come along; he's living with them. These aren't the same kinds of enemies. They're taunting him, and they're saying, "Where is your God?" It's going to his heart because in verse nine, he asks the same question.
Verse nine says, "I will say, 'Why have you forgotten me?'" Now, what's that question mean? Again, we don't know the specifics, but what we know is very disappointing, disillusioning events are happening.
You don't ask that question, "Where is your God?" unless things are happening that don't fit in with the idea of a good, loving, holy, just, wise God. See, what's the question? "Where is your God?" It goes like this: "If He's your God, if He really is for you, if He's really the God you say He is, why is this happening? Why is this happening?"
And it's not just a question from outside, like in verse three and verse ten; it's a question from inside because the psalmist himself is saying, "Why have you forgotten me?"
Of course, this is a second very, very normal causal factor involved with these times of spiritual dryness. Things go wrong, and it's very hard to explain, very hard to understand. They're inexplicable.
Like, you just committed yourself to Jesus for the first time in your life, and the next two years of your life are the worst that have ever happened. The worst your life has ever been; more awful things have happened, and you sit there and you say, "Now, you know, by the way, there are some people who say, 'Well, I committed my life to Christ, and everything fell apart. Why did that happen?'"
Of course, one of the answers is, "Imagine if your life had fallen apart and you weren't committed to Christ." But that's not how you think about it. You say, "Why would God have allowed that?"
Therefore, it's the normal second causal factor. So there's disruption of community, disillusionment with the events of life, and lastly, deprivation physically.
Look at verse three. Verse three—most commentators miss this, but one commentator in particular, who was a physician, picked it up. Verse three says, "My tears have been my food day and night."
Now think about this for a second. Notice what he's saying: "My tears have been my food day and night." First of all, he's saying, "I'm not eating." Tears are all I'm eating. The only thing I eat is my tears.
So the first thing he's saying is, "I have no appetite." He's stopped eating; he's lost his appetite—a sign of clinical depression. But notice something else: he's not sleeping because he doesn't just say, "My tears have been my food all day." He says, "My tears have been my food day and night."
I'm weeping all night, and you don't weep all night unless you're not asleep. So he's not eating, and he's not sleeping. What does that mean?
What it means is you're not going to be able to deal with the overall condition if you ignore the fact that there's now a physical aspect to it. It could be the disillusionment; it could be the disruption; it could be other things that led him to this situation.
But now you're not going to pull yourself out of it because the physical—the tiredness and the lack of eating and sleeping—is aggravating the situation. David Martin Lloyd-Jones, who was a physician before he became a pastor, preached a very famous sermon on this text, on this passage, years ago.
This is what he says about verse three, which is interesting: "Does anyone hold the view that as long as you are a Christian, it doesn't matter what the condition of your body is? You'll soon be disillusioned if you believe that. There are some in whose cases it's clear to me that the cause of their depression is mainly physical.
On the other hand, people who are physically weak are more prone to attacks of spiritual discouragement and depression. But if you recognize that the physical may be partly responsible for the spiritual condition and make allowances for this, you'll be better able to deal with the spiritual issues."
Now, this is extremely important. I'll just take a minute or two on this. Dr. Lloyd-Jones is saying something very important. By the way, even though he was British and he preached 50 years ago, it's another critique of American culture because American culture is not just moralistic, and it's not just individualistic.
It's—and this isn't a very familiar word—it's dualistic in that it pits the body and the spirit against each other. American Christians tend to, when they look at spiritual discouragement or somebody who says, "I just don't feel God," we have a tendency to ignore the physical.
But you shouldn't. Lloyd-Jones says if you don't see that the physical is very often involved, because you've got a physical aspect as well as a spiritual aspect.
In the early '90s, I can't remember what year—'91 or '92—I had about two months, about eight weeks, in which every single sermon was agony because all during the sermon, all the way through, I would almost essentially hear a voice saying, "They're never going to believe you. Just shut up. Why would they believe you? That was a stupid point; that was unclear."
Just accusation, accusation all through the sermon for about eight weeks. At the time, the way I looked at it—and Kathy and I talked a lot about this at the time—we looked at it and said, "Well, I'm just not praying enough."
Now we look back, and it was very obvious to see I was just enormously overtired. You see that here in verse three. There are inextricably linked.
Listen, let me summarize it like this: there are people who say—the secular people who say everything is basically physical. So if you are discouraged or depressed, one-dimensionally, it's physical. Take your medicine; there's take medicine; it's physical.
There's another kind of person who reduces everything to moral—people from traditional societies. In fact, I'm afraid a lot of Christians reduce everything to moral. If you're discouraged or you're depressed, buck up, pull yourself together, keep a stiff upper lip, stop sniveling.
Okay? And then there's a third kind of person who doesn't reduce everything to the physical and doesn't reduce everything to the moral but reduces everything to the psychological and emotional.
So if you're discouraged and oppressed, well, we're going to listen to you and accept you and support you. But not listen—will you listen? The Bible says that you have an emotional aspect, so you need friends, and you have a physical aspect, so you need rest and food and maybe medicine.
But you also have a spiritual aspect, and you need truth. As a result, if you have a Christian worldview, a Christian view of human nature, you should be the least reductionistic, the most nuanced, the most multi-dimensional, the most balanced.
You shouldn't say, "Buck up." You shouldn't just sit and listen or just yell and say, "Buck up," and just give the truth or just, you know, give medicine. But you have to recognize that all of these things are involved—all of them are involved.
As we look at the cures here, which we're about to do now, you will see an astounding balance that you won't see in any other approach or any other worldview—an astounding balance of both listening to the emotions and at the same time talking to the heart.
Both listening and figuring out motivation and being kind and supporting, but at the same time being tough too. This is a fascinating balance here.
Now, what are the cures? Four things that this person does, four things this speaker does that you have got to do when this comes on you. He pours out his soul, he analyzes his hopes, he remembers the loving kindness of the grace of God, and he preaches sermons to his heart.
He pours out his soul. He analyzes his hopes. He remembers the grace of God, and he learns how to preach to his own heart.
Number one: he pours out his soul. See, he says that in verse four: "Therefore I pour out my soul." But you know what he's doing? That's the whole psalm.
Let me tell you what's ironic about this: he says, "I don't feel God." He says that's his problem: "I don't feel God. I get nothing out of worship. I get nothing out of prayer. I get nothing out of Bible reading. I just don't sense Him there at all."
And what is he doing in Psalm 42 and 43? It's an eloquent, theologically rich, sustained, beautiful, reflective prayer and meditation. In other words, and this is the first thing you've got to do: if you don't get anything out of worship in this period of time in your dry time, if you get nothing out of worship, don't miss it.
If you get nothing out of prayer, don't miss it. If you get nothing out of Bible reading, don't miss it. Pour out your soul. You say, "But I don't feel anything." Fine, then talk about that.
If nothing else, talk to God about how you're getting nothing out of it. If nothing else, talk to God about how much you miss Him. If nothing else, talk to the absent God about His absence.
So the first thing is do not ignore those spiritual disciplines. In fact, be more disciplined about them than you ever have been before.
Okay, number one: he pours out his soul. Number two: he analyzes his hopes. Now, there's a refrain that comes up three times, and this refrain is, in some ways, the theme that runs right through the passage.
In verse five, in verse eleven, and then in verse five of 43, almost repetitious—not quite. I'll tell you about that in a second. But it says, "Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you disquieted? Hope in God."
Three times he does that: "Why are you cast down and disquieted? Hope in God." Now, this is a question about this question. Is this a rhetorical question? "Why are you cast down, O my soul?"
There are some rhetorical questions that are not after information. If you say to somebody, "Why did you do that?" you're not asking for information. What you're really saying is, "That was stupid."
You know, you're just saying that was stupid. "Why did you do that?" is a rhetorical question. You're not asking for information; you're saying, "You know, why were you so stupid?"
I don't think that's what he's doing here. The commentators that I like the most, the commentators that I respect the most, say he's looking for information. He's actually asking himself, "Why did I get so downcast?"
Now you say, "Well, wait a minute. I thought you said that though he's downcast, it's not the result of sin. It's not the result of something he's done wrong, right?"
And yet he's still doing some self-examination. What is he looking for? He's looking for his hopes. He says, "Why am I so cast down?" It's because I put my hope in some things that are now letting me down.
Even though, as I said, spiritual dryness can come upon you without you sinning to cause it, however, spiritual dryness is a perfect time to examine your heart because spiritual dryness reveals inordinate love, false hopes.
A perfect example of this is in Psalm 3. Psalm 3 is about when David was on the run for his life because his favorite son, the son that he loved the most, Absalom, had actually pulled off a coup.
Absalom was trying to take David's throne and was now trying to hunt him down and kill him so he could have the kingship. There were two things in David's life that had been the source of his glory.
Now, the word "glory" literally means weight. It means significance. It means something that makes you matter—weightiness. The two things that were David's glory were, number one, the love of his son and family, and number two, the love and acclaim of his people.
He lost both of them. Yet right in the middle of Psalm 3, verse three—it's a short psalm—he says this: "But you, O Lord, are my shield, my glory, and the lifter of my head."
Pretty famous verse. But do you see what it's saying? "You, O Lord, are my shield, my glory, and the lifter of my head." What he's doing at that point is he says, "My son used to be my glory; my people used to be my glory. I've lost them, and it hurts me, but I'm not devastated because what I am doing in this moment is I am relocating my glory.
I'm relocating my glory in you—your approval, your smile, your love, your support. I've got that, and if I've got that, then I won't be devastated by the loss of anything else. I will lift up my head anyway."
That's what's happening here. Do you know that what he's saying is, "I see that one of the reasons I'm so downcast because of the events of life that have made me wonder and all the other things that have happened is I see there's certain things I've been putting my hopes in."
Again, we don't know what they are. He doesn't say what they are. In Psalm 3, it's easier to discover what those things are because in Psalm 3, you have the example of David and Absalom and how he's lost his kingship and he's lost his son's love.
Here, you don't know what it is, but I can tell you this: in times of dryness, that's when to look. What is it that you really hope in? What is it that is your real significance? What are the things that you really rest in?
Don't rest so much in them; relocate your hope. Shift your hope, and that's what he's doing. It's very, very profound during times of spiritual discouragement and dryness.
He's not repenting; he's not beating himself on the chest saying, "Oh, I must be doing things wrong. I guess I'm not praying enough. I'm not reading my Bible enough. Maybe I need to do this, and maybe I need to do more of this."
No, but what he is doing is he is doing self-examination at a profound level. He sees things that he puts his hopes in which are not going to be able to sustain his soul unless he hopes in God.
So he pours out his soul, he analyzes his hopes, and thirdly, he remembers the loving kindness of God. You notice how down here in verse five, verse six, he says, "My soul is cast down; therefore I will remember."
So he is very, very deliberately thinking about something, remembering something. But he's not only thinking about God in general. In verse eight, "The Lord will command His loving kindness in the daytime, and the night His song will be with me, a prayer to the God of my life."
The commentators say this: he is thinking about God's loving kindness, which is the Hebrew word "chesed," which means covenant faithfulness, unmerited grace, unconditional love.
He's thinking about his entire life. He's thinking about the history of redemption—that's the Bible—and about he's seeing the grace of God in all of that. He's thinking about his own personal history, all of his life, and he's thinking about the grace of God, and he's turned it into a song.
You know why, by the way? Because the heading of this—though we didn't have it printed—this is not a psalm of David; this is a song of one of the sons of Korah. First Chronicles 6 tells us the sons of Korah were professional musicians, full-time artists.
Notice this one happens to be a string instrumentalist because at the end he says, "I'm going to pick up my harp again someday." What he's doing is he is turning the grace of God into a song that he sings to himself, even at night.
Now lastly, he's remembering the grace of God, he's reanalyzing his hopes, he's pouring out his soul, and then he finally—this is the key in a way—he takes all that, and what does he do? He has learned to preach to his heart.
Notice the three refrains are not prayers. He's not talking to God. He's not saying, "Why am I cast down, O my God?" Nor is he talking to us. He's saying, "Why are you so cast down, O my soul?"
Dr. Lloyd-Jones, in his famous sermon, says this is the key: you'll never get out of spiritual dryness unless you learn how to do this. He's listened to his heart; he's poured his heart out; he's analyzed his hopes; he's thought about the grace of God.
But at one point, he stops listening to his heart, and he starts talking to his heart. "Why are you cast down, O my soul?"
Look at this: do you know how to do that? Don't you? In times of spiritual dryness and discouragement, every morning you wake up, and your heart is talking: "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh no, no, it's terrible! It's terrible! It's terrible!"
At some point, you have to grab your heart and say, "Listen, heart, shut up and listen." Do you know when to do that?
Do you see the balance here? This is not "buck up," but this is not just "listen and listen and listen." I'm sorry to be so self-referential, but I can't help it. This guy has learned to preach.
Now, I know something about this, and let me tell you: it takes a lot of listening to be a good preacher. If you want to preach to people in New York, you want to preach to people in Bombay, you want to preach to people in London, it doesn't matter.
Wherever you go, you can't just walk in and say, "I know what I'm doing." You have to listen to them. You have to live with them. You have to find out what their hopes are, what their fears are, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, so that you can build up their strengths and you can identify their weaknesses.
But you have to do lots and lots and lots of listening. But at some point, you turn and you say, "Now listen." If you've done your listening well, they'll do their listening well.
It's very hard to learn how to preach to a group of people if you have listened to your heart so that you found its false hopes. You know you really listened carefully.
At some point, you have to turn around, and you have to learn how to preach the grace of God to yourself. You have just like I've had to learn how to find illustrations that ring your bell. You say, "Oh, I get it."
You have to learn illustrations that ring your heart's bell. But at some point, you have to learn: do you know how to do this? After you've listened and listened, do you finally turn around and say, "Now listen, self, just shut up, and you listen to me"?
You take yourself in hand. You say, "Why are you like this? You've forgotten this. You've forgotten this. You've forgotten this."
Do you know how to do that? That is an absolutely essential skill, and you have to.
And what will the result be? What's fun is notice the realism of this psalm. He doesn't say, "Say hope in God; I do now praise Him." That would be denial.
Nor does he say, "Hope in God; I'll never praise Him." That would be despondency. He says, "Hope in God; I will praise Him."
If you look carefully, you'll see a progression. I don't have the time to trace it out, but you'll see that bit by bit, bit by bit, he starts in the dumps. He moves himself up because, you know, in verse five, he says, "Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance," which simply means all I want is to see Him come back.
But by the time he gets to the very bottom, it says, "Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him," the help of my countenance, which is his way of saying, "I can feel Him already beginning to lift up my face, lift up my heart, lift up my spirits."
The results will happen slow, but they will happen.
Okay, last point: I don't know how he preached to his heart about the loving kindness of God, about the grace of God, but we've got a resource he doesn't have.
I just told you it's very hard to learn how to preach because you've got to listen so that the people will listen to you. If you listen to them well, they'll listen to you. If you haven't listened to them well, then the things you say are just going to bounce right off, and they're going to say, "That was boring," or "stupid," or "offensive."
But let me tell you a way to preach the gospel to your heart with a kind of vividness and effectiveness that he didn't have. The biggest problem during times of dryness is you say, "I think God has finally given up on me. He's not there. Makes sense. I'm an idiot. I've been a failure. I'm inadequate. He's abandoned me."
No, says the psalmist to the heart, "I will yet praise Him. He's a loving, kind God. He's a gracious God. He will not abandon you."
Well, how do I know? Here's how you and I know. Here's something you can use in your heart: read Psalm 42 to 43 and listen to the one who really said, "I thirst," who really said, "I'm dying of thirst."
Read it and hear the one who said, "My God, my God, why have you forgotten me?" Read it and think of the one whose enemies taunted him: "Where is your God? Let's see if God will come and save him."
Don't you see? Jesus Christ really experienced not just the loss of the feeling of God; He lost God even though He was trusting God. He had the ultimate thirst, the ultimate cosmic thirst.
He was really forgotten by God; He was really forsaken by God. He really experienced the thirst of God. Why? So that in spite of your failures and inadequacy, God will never give up on you.
God treated Him and punished Him and gave Him the things we deserve so we can receive His commitment, His love, unconditionally. And that's what you have to say to yourself.
If you say that to yourself, if you preach Christ to yourself, you'll get out of the trough, and you'll be better for it. You will have grown.
What's interesting is when you deal with spiritual dryness properly, you don't just get back on track. When you do get back on track, you find yourself having—you get back far down the path, far further ahead, far humbler, far happier, far stronger than you were before.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name. In Christ, the solid rock I stand; all of the ground is sinking sand.
Let's pray. Father, we ask that now in the Lord's Supper, you would make it real to us what your Son did. We pray, Lord, for those of us who are spiritually dry right now that this actual sacrament will be part of the remedy.
We pray that you would help us, though most of all, to expect, recognize, analyze, and treat our own hearts and the hearts of those around us so that we can grow in grace in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus. In His name, we pray. Amen.
For more of this series and other resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church, please visit www.gsp.ro.