Hope for the Discouraged #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.

Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in the Truth Pulpit. It's no secret that Christians often find their own experience reflected in the Psalms, and so it's no secret and no wonder that the Psalms become quite a favorite book amongst the people of God. It's real spirituality, you might say, for real life.

And, you know, we're all constituted a little bit differently. Some of us are more prone to being optimistic, some are more wired toward pessimism and different points in between. And so Psalm 42 is a good Psalm for those of you that are prone to melancholy, those of you that are prone to discouragement, and perhaps even if you're not prone that way naturally, you find yourself in a life circumstance as you're here this evening where you are really in a gloomy frame of mind because of the way that life has been going for you. Well, Psalm 42, you find your partner in sorrow writing and speaking on your behalf. The writer of Psalm 42 is discouraged, he is down for multiple reasons, and in this Psalm he calls himself to hope in his unchanging God. And I've said in the past, I don't believe I've said it too often here, and this may sound kind of funny to you, and I know you'll be busting out laughing on the live stream when I say this.

How would I have any way of verifying if they do that or not, right? But the truth of the matter is that the most important preacher in your life is you. You must be able to preach to yourself, speak to yourself, and exhort yourself and know how to encourage yourself and to lift yourself out of the melancholy and the discouragement that your soul sometimes finds itself in. This is the most important aspect of spiritual living is the ability to deal with your own soul, to have your mind speak to your emotions in a way that they will respond to, to use your thinking in order to address your feeling with truth that will sanctify your heart and change the direction of things. Your feelings about life flow from the way that you are thinking, not the other way around. And one of the great travesties of modern Christianity today is that it is geared toward producing feelings in people as opposed to informing their minds with truth. Feelings are doomed to lead you astray eventually because eventually your circumstances will turn negative. Your circumstances will not be like you want them to be.

And then what do you do? You see, you as a Christian were never designed by God to live on emotion or to live in response to circumstances. Your responsibility, your duty, your opportunity, your prerogative, your privilege is to live in response to truth instead of your passing feelings. Now this is of course increasingly difficult in our day and age because everything from politics to entertainment to whatever else you might point to in life is designed to produce emotional responses in you.

Marketing and all of the different media aspects that you get into are play off your emotions because emotions are an easy way to get people to do things on impulse. You and I are meant to be different as Christians. What did Jesus pray in John 17? He said, Father, sanctify them in the truth that you would be set apart for truth, that truth would define your entire approach to life and that everything would be a response to truth rather than to emotion. And here in Psalm 42 we find how to use truth to bring our emotions in line with what they need to be. Rather than sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of discouragement, truth comes and becomes the means properly handled by you in your own life to lift you out of that.

And so that's what we're going to look at here this evening. Psalm 42 is our text. Now I should say, and we'll get to see some of this next week as well, Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 are very closely related together.

They have a common refrain, a common echo. Look at Psalm 42 verse 5. We're just going to kind of circle around the psalm before we get into it. Psalm 42 verse 5. Why are you in despair, O my soul, and why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence. Look at verse 11 of Psalm 42.

You see this echoed again. Why are you in despair, O my soul, and why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God. And Psalm 42 ends there in our English text, but as you continue reading on, you go to the end of Psalm 43 verse 5.

Why are you in despair, O my soul, and why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God. And so there's this common refrain in both Psalms that lead many commentators to treat them together. As you read commentaries, you'll often find Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 treated together in the same chapter. In some of the early manuscripts, we're told that these two Psalms are put together, not in all of them, but in some of them. And so it's reasonable to view them as a single Psalm. Look also at Psalm 42 verse 9. You'll see the complaint or the lament in Psalm 42 verse 9. Halfway through it says, Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? And then you go over to Psalm 43 verse 2.

Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? And so all of that simply to help you see that these Psalms are very closely related together. We're not going to treat them together tonight. We're going to separate out Psalm 43 and treat it separately.

And I'll talk more about that, their relationship next week. But I just want to point that out to you that we kind of have bookend Psalms. Psalm 43 may be being an extension of Psalm 42 and amplifying the theme that we're going to see here this evening. And so one of the things that I'm very happy about here tonight is that we'll be able to treat this theme of dealing with discouragement, dealing with depression, if you want to use that term.

We're going to be able to treat that twice over the next two weeks, and I think that's going to be helpful to us. Now let's go back to the beginning of Psalm 42 here as we get into the text. You'll notice that the heading says a maskle of the sons of Korah. That probably gives the indication that it's an artistic song, and it's an artistic song that is expressing wisdom. What is the wisdom here? Well, my brothers and sisters in Christ, it is perhaps the most practical and important wisdom that you could have in your practical daily living. It answers the question, it gives wisdom into the situation, what do you do with yourself when you're deeply discouraged? How do you respond to that? How do you handle yourself in the midst of it?

We're so conditioned in our modern culture that everything is answered by popping a pill in order to answer whatever is wrong with the physical or the immaterial part of the body. We're so accustomed to that, that it might surprise some to think that there's actually biblical wisdom to answer to the need, and that's what we're going to find here this evening. There is biblical wisdom that answers the problem of discouragement, that gives you hope in the midst of it. Now, Scripture tells us, and this is an important part of understanding maybe a little bit of the setting of the psalm, this is the first time that we've seen a psalm as we're going through, a psalm that was not either anonymous or was authored by David. I think 37 of the first 41 psalms were authored by David. Here we have something different, not a psalm of David, but a psalm of the sons of Korah.

And Scripture tells us that those men served in the temple, and that their responsibilities in the temple included singing and playing instruments in the course of public worship. You're going to see that reflected as we go through the psalm and see how it echoes into the things that this man is saying to us as we read what he has written. So I'm going to break this psalm into two sections here tonight. In the first five verses we're going to see the reality of discouragement, and then secondly we're going to see the response to discouragement. The reality of discouragement, or we might say the remedy for discouragement, that's going to be our simple outline here this evening.

And let me say one other thing by way of important introduction. As you read this psalm, one of the things that you'll find as he's expressing his deep discouragement, one of the things that you won't find is you won't find him confessing sin. This is not a confession of sin that he is writing here, it is a man dealing with discouragement in his soul. And not all discouragement is a product of sin, we need to understand that. Sometimes faithful Christians are dealing with discouragement, and it is a misdiagnosis at times to attribute that discouragement directly to sin, as we're going to see here.

The question becomes, how do you deal with that? And so I say that simply to say this, I want you tonight to approach this psalm in sympathy with the psalmist. There are some teachers who would treat the psalms, and when they see expressions of discouragement, they condemn the psalm writer for being sinful in his approach to life.

To me, that's unthinkable. That's not the purpose, that's not the point, that's not the teaching of these psalms. Rather, we're seeing a pattern for a godly person to find hope and to deal with their soul in their own discouragement. And the way that you view that takes you in two completely different directions.

And so, point number one here this evening, the reality of discouragement, the reality of discouragement. This psalm opens up with a, you might say, a deep sigh. He is expressing a deep desire for God's presence in the midst of intolerable sorrow in his life. Look at Psalm 42 verse 1. He creates a picture of a dehydrated animal standing on its last legs looking for water that would revive it in the midst of its dehydration. Verse 1, As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, O God.

Using the name Elohim, expressing the power of God with that particular name of God. Saying, God, my soul is thirsty. I am longing after you. I have a desire that cannot be quenched.

And in the midst of that desire, what is it that is producing that desire? It is a lot of sorrow and difficulty that's in his life. If you look at verse 3, we're going to kind of take a closer pass through the psalm and just kind of see some themes here. I want you to see the sorrow that sets the tone for the psalm because it will help you understand what he has to say. In verse 3 he says, My tears have been my food day and night while they say to me all day long, Where is your God? He's writing this out of a sense of weeping, a sense of desire for God, and he's weeping and he's hurting as he writes. In verse 6 he says, Oh my God, my soul is in despair within me.

And in verse 9 he says, I will say to God my rock, Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? See the tone?

You see the spirit of what's being said? God, I'm panting for you. God, I'm weeping so much that it's like I'm eating my own tears. I'm mourning.

I'm in despair, O God. And so you're immediately struck by the immediate honesty and transparency of the psalm writer as you read this psalm. It's very refreshing. It is in quite contradiction to that picture of Christian life that is always sugary and always upbeat, that is promoted by guys with million-dollar dental work, that they're happy to display on their books, and everything is happy. Well you know from your own personal experience, don't you, that that is not real life.

You know that that's not reality. And so certain brands of so-called evangelicalism come and present this happy view of prosperity and God will give you whatever you want. Well, you know by experience that's not true, and as you come to Scripture, you see, this is not the picture that Scripture gives a spiritual life at all, that there is this room for this to be a part of the reality of spiritual life. And let's say something else about it in defense of the psalmist and hopefully in defense of some of you in the midst of your hardship and the discouragement and the weight that you feel on your soul. Let's recognize that this man has great godly desires. He's saying, God, I want you. God, my heart is longing for you. I want to be in conscious fellowship with you.

I want to have this sense of your divine presence and it's absent from my life right now. And so his desires are godly. His desires are righteous and they're unfulfilled. We don't criticize someone for having righteous desires. Where would the righteousness of our response be if that's what we were doing?

No, it's much different from that. Now as you read this psalm, and as we consider the reality of his discouragement, we're going to do something important. We're going to see, as he goes through here, we're going to see that he identifies the human causes for his discouragement. There are some very practical difficulties that he is facing that are contributing to the sorrow of his soul. And this is actually one of the keys for you in dealing with your discouragement is to try to get beyond the feeling and say, why is it like this? Why am I in the midst of this sorrow? Why are my feelings speaking to me like this? Well here for the psalmist, he lays out discernible human causes for his melancholy spirit. And there's three that we can see as we go through here. First of all it's this, and by the way, there's this guy that gets into the pulpit with me who tries to get ahead of me in what I'm saying, and sometimes I have to pull him back and say, no, no, I'm in charge here, not you.

And so there's kind of this mental conflict that goes on in the middle of my mind. What I want you to see is this, is that as we're seeing what the psalmist expresses, I think that you're going to find things that you yourself can identify with in your own spiritual life, and the things that the human causes that point people and push people into a direction of discouragement. And to see the cause is to be way ahead of the game in dealing with the symptoms.

We don't simply try to perk people up. We want to get to the cause of things so that we can deal with it in a godly way. What are some of the causes of his discouragement as he writes this psalm? First of all, he is spiritually isolated. He is spiritually isolated. Somehow, his circumstances are keeping him from the people of God. Look at verse 2. He says, "'My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and appear before God?'" Now, what he's saying here in the context of the Old Testament economy is this. Remember that in the Old Testament, God had uniquely set aside the temple as a place where he uniquely manifested his presence. And the people would gather and the Jews would gather for exuberant worship in the temple with their festivals and with other manner of worship.

The temple was the center of their worship, and it was the place where God's presence could be known, where it was uniquely manifested. And to come into the temple, therefore, was to appear before God. And somehow, as he expresses this, he's asking the question, when will I next be able to do this? When shall I come and appear before God? I want to be in the presence of the worshiping people of God. My soul thirsts for that. I want to be in the presence of the living God.

When will I be able to appear in order to do that? His desire to appear before God means that he misses the temple with God's presence and the appointed worship that God had given to his people in the Old Testament. He's isolated.

We'll see that explained a little bit further in just a moment. But, you know, it's not this aspect of fellowship and gathering together. I can tell you a secret about other people because you're all gathered together here tonight, and so that's good, and you're all faithful to do that. It's never a surprise to me to hear that people are struggling spiritually when they've been away from the people of God for a period of time, whether health reasons or, you know, disobedience reasons or work or all of that. When you're away from the people of God, you're moving into a situation where you're more prone to discouragement because part of the reason that God has appointed corporate worship is for us to feed off of one another, that you would be an encouragement to me, and hopefully I would be an encouragement to you. If you separate yourself from that, like removing a coal from the fire and setting it off by itself, that coal goes out where it would stay warm if it was with the other coals. Well, we are not meant to be isolated spiritually, and so someone who is going through discouragement might step back and say, have I been isolated from the people of God for whatever reason? Because that isolation leads to these feelings of discouragement and separation.

That's one of the human causes of it. And so I just encourage you and commend you for being here tonight and being so faithful to corporate worship. This is one of your safeguards against falling into deep spiritual discouragement.

It's good that you're here. This is part of the health of your soul. And it's important for us to stay committed to that and to not withdraw from the people of God. Now secondly, not only is he spiritually isolated from the people of God, just the opposite. He's got the opposite situation. Secondly, he's surrounded by enemies. He is surrounded by enemies.

Men were taunting him and making life difficult for him. Look at verse 3. He says, my tears have been my food day and night while they say to me all day long, where is your God? And if you drop down to verse 9, you can see this as well, that he's surrounded by people who are hostile to him, that mock his faith, that mock his love for God, love for his word.

Verse 9, I will say to God my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me while they say to me all day long, where is your God? Now, I know that some of you live in the midst of this and the environment in which you work. Some of you may be in the environment of, you know, unequally yoked households.

I get that. And so I don't need to describe to you the discouraging wet blanket that that can be on your soul when the people who are with you not only are not sympathetic to what you're doing, they are actively hostile to you. And it weighs on you and it wears on you again and again and again. Well, you can relate, then, to what the psalmist is going through. This incessant pounding against his soul starts to take an effect. And these, speaking of the men around the psalmist, because I wouldn't want to say it about the people around you that are doing this to you, these reprobates are making sport of his discouragement as he writes this psalm.

They know that he's isolated from the people that he wants to be with. They know that he's discouraged and he's going through a hard time, and what are they doing when they say, where is your God? They're saying, why isn't your God helping you? Where is your God when you need him? What good does it do you to follow this God that you claim to worship? Look at your miserable condition. Your God, if he exists at all, has abandoned you.

You are wasting your time. You are an earthly fool. There is nothing to be said to you. We mock you, we taunt you.

Well, that would weigh on you. Time after time after time, day after day after day, no wonder the poor man's discouraged as he's writing this. He was alone, and his spiritual comrades were not around him to support him and encourage him, but there was nothing about his circumstances to answer the taunts that were being made at him. And so he is alone, he is receiving incoming fire again and again and again with no ability to respond to it. Nothing that would help answer his critics.

And it's even worse than that for him. Remember we said he was a son of Corey involved in temple worship? Well, you're going to see that he misses his prior role of leadership. He misses his prior role of leadership.

So he's spiritually isolated, he's surrounded by enemies, and he misses his prior role of leadership. Look at verse 4 with me. He says, these things I remember, and I pour out my soul within me. The emotions that I'm feeling are just bursting out of their boundaries.

And overwhelming me, there's an overwhelming flood that's going on here. And he goes on to explain it in verse 4. He says, for I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. He's saying, I used to be up front leading the people of God in worship, and I loved that.

Why? Not just because I wanted to be up front, but because, as you saw in verse 1, his desire is for God. And so he loves God, and he loves leading the people of God in the worship of God, and it was such a joyful time for him as multitudes responded to God in worship, and he was in the middle of that, humanly speaking.

He had a role to play in leading them. And he said, oh, I love that, but it's a memory now. That's not part of my life. I miss that. There is this void in absence in my life. He had something that was special to him that's gone now. Poor guy. It's probably something of the feeling that someone who's just lost a spouse feels. Maybe somebody that's retired or lost their job suddenly. The things that they gave themselves to, that their time and energy and emotion were invested in, and they found their love and satisfaction in, that you found your love and satisfaction in, and suddenly it's torn away and it's gone, and you're left with this void in the midst of it.

And it's so common. I always feel badly for people in those situations for multiple reasons, but when I hear them say, I shouldn't feel this way, there's just a certain added dimension of compassion and sympathy I feel for them there, because of course you feel that way. Of course you feel the loss. You can't give yourself to 40 years of marriage and have that loss and have that taken away, and then suddenly act like nothing ever happened.

You can't take two who've become one and rip away half and not feel the effect of that. And here in Psalm 42 you see the psalmist separated from the people of God, surrounded by enemies, and feeling the absence of that which he had given his life to in the past. No wonder he's discouraged.

These are the realities of discouragement. You know, friends, one of the things that I think is helpful and healthy for us to be mindful of is to have a realistic view of what Christian life is supposed to be. You are a Christian, yes, you overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved you, yes, God works all things together for good for those who love him, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We're not contradicting a bit of that in what we say. What we're saying is, what we're being realistic in is this, is that we are still humans living in a human realm with human things that we love and hold dear.

And when those things are assaulted or when they are taken away from us, we're going to feel the impact of that. And what this psalm tells us is that God has anticipated your need in that. God has given preparation in his word beforehand and says this is the way forward for you when you are in the midst of it. For the psalmist, his present circumstances were a complete reversal of his earlier joy. He was not leading worship. He was not at the temple. He was with the enemies of God instead.

And of course it's hard. Beloved, what you should see as you read this psalm is that this psalmist had tender desires that were under attack. He had a tender heart, it was under attack, and the righteous desires that he had were being withheld from him. And so if you can identify with that, find sympathy with this psalm. God put this psalm in the Bible in part for you, for people just like you to find their encouragement and strength in. And if you're more prone toward optimism and cheery and you don't really have these difficulties with nighttime in your soul, well let this psalm at least temper your reaction to those who do. Sometimes it's easy to be a little bit overbearing toward people that are going through discouragement and to chastise them when what Scripture says that we should do, Romans 12, 15, is we should weep with those who weep.

And so we let this psalm bring tenderness to our hearts. And so as you're dealing with discouragement, what do you do initially? You look at the reality of it, you look for the reasons for it. Sinclair Ferguson helpfully says this, and I quote, he said, This psalmist experienced discouragement. He traces it to particular causes. There are specific reasons for his condition, and realizing that is half the remedy that he needs. End quote.

Say, why am I feeling this way? Ah, losses. Ah, spiritual isolation. Ah, I've got people attacking me all over.

You know, I've got critics all around me. No wonder I feel weighed down. There's a human explanation for this. Well, when that happens, what we need to do is this. You recognize it, you understand it, you say, okay, this is life. And you feel the weight of it.

But, beloved, what you must do, then, is this. You cannot give into the feelings. You can't surrender to them as if a wave was coming over, and then you just dive into the wave and start breathing in water. No, that will drown you. That will kill you.

That's not a good idea. You don't give into the feelings. It's okay to understand why they are there, but you don't stop at that. You don't allow yourself to collapse under the weight of it. You don't let yourself fall into that somewhat perverse sense of enjoying the discouragement that you feel in, and feeling sorry for yourself. You don't give into it. You understand the sources of it, the reasons for it, but what you do is you go further, and you have a responsibility. And let me give you an illustration that I've always found helpful in this regard. You have to understand what the nature of faith is. You have to understand and appreciate what it is that being a Christian, belonging to the God of the Bible, what that means and how it impacts the way that you live life and what you are supposed to do with it. Your faith is not like a thermostat.

I used to think that it was, and I learned the hard way that it's not. You know what a thermostat does? Thermostat regulates things so there's a stable temperature in the environment. And if the temperature gets too high, the thermostat kicks in and lowers it down to a reasonable degree of temperature.

If it gets too cold, it automatically operates, and so without you even thinking about it or doing anything, the thermostat is regulating the environment in which you live. Now, I used to think, I didn't really understand that I thought this way, but you go through trials, let's put it this way, you go through trials and you think that faith is just automatically going to rise to the occasion of the trial that you're facing without any effort on your part. That just part of the reality of being a Christian is, hard times hit, discouragement comes, and then it just naturally occurs. That's not the biblical pattern. That's not the life of faith.

Here's the point. Faith in that condition of soul is not passive. Your faith is to be active. In the midst of your discouragement, you have a responsibility in which you are to act and that you are to do something.

There is something for you to do in the midst of it. Well, my friend, thank you for joining us here on The Truth Pulpit, and I just wanted to let you know of an additional ministry that you may want to take advantage of. A few years ago, over a period of years, I taught through all 150 Psalms, generally doing one message per Psalm, and we turned that into a separate podcast for all of those messages.

It's titled Through the Psalms, and it goes through all 150 Psalms over a course of about three years. And if that's something that you would like to use and benefit from, you can go to our website and find the podcast link and subscribe there. That's at thetruthpulpit.com. Once again, that's Through the Psalms podcast. You can find it on our website at thetruthpulpit.com. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.