Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Psalm 42-43
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  March 22, 2020

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Online Bulletin

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Right now people across the world are dealing with droughts because of the Coronavirus. There is a financial drought, as businesses close, workers are laid off, and the stock market plunges. There is an entertainment drought as teams hang up their jerseys, movie theaters turn off their screens, and restaurants lock their doors. There is social drought as we no longer gather together physically for worship, or visit our friends, and are cooped up in our houses. (Apparently there may even be a toilet paper drought). All sorts of drought. Today we look at Psalms 42 & 43 and what it means to deal with a spiritual drought. When your faith feels like it has dried up. When God seems distant and uninvolved. When you feel downcast and anxious. How will you deal with a drought?

Psalms 42 and 43 address this condition specifically. The two psalms are actually one single composition. They share the same refrain, content, and heading. We aren’t sure why they were separated, it’s thought perhaps for liturgical use,  but in any case we should read them together as a unit. They were written by a Son of Korah, a leader in temple worship, who has been displaced from Jerusalem. We don’t know exactly what happened, but he is now living near Mount Mizar in the far north of Herman. My guess is it happened in the invasion of Israel’s territory by the Arameans during the reign of Jehoram, but we can’t be sure. In any case he now finds himself spiritually isolated in Herman, he cannot worship with God’s people and has run into a spiritual drought. The parallels with our life and the text already begin to appear.

He begins in verse 1: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.” The Hebrew literally reads, “As the deer pants for a channel, a streambed, a ravine of waters.” This is significant because it clarifies that the desire is for a streambed flowing with water, as opposed to a dry ravine where a river once flowed. So the picture here is of a deer which has come to a ravine in the heat of the day, perhaps after running from predators, and has found that the river which used to flow has now dried up in a prevailing drought. And it begins to pant with a deep and almost bitter thirst. That’s how this psalmist describes his thirst for God. He isn’t just saying, “I want to be with God really bad.” He’s saying, “Where are you? I need you and I can’t find you. I pray but I don’t feel your presence. I needed you and you weren’t there! I came to the river to drink, but it has run dry.

Multiple times he calls his soul “downcast”. That is a word used to talk about those who bow their head in mourning, or walls of a conquered city laid low after war. He says in vs. 10: …my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?” This spiritual drought has left him in a terrible position. And it doesn’t seem to be any fault of his own, no grievous sin, no specific reason is given. Even his foes are really just secondary to his main problem: God feels absent.

I think we all have droughts spiritually. Maybe you are in one right now. A time when you feel like God, his blessing, his love, his care has dried up just when you hoped to find it. A time where the enemy inside your own head taunts, “Where is your God?” Don’t you go to church? Maybe things were already tight financially and then the Coronavirus hit and you are laid off. “God, I prayed about this. Where are you?” Maybe your marriage is struggling, and then schools closed and you’re even more stressed, but you can’t talk about it in front of the kids. “Seriously, God? Where are you?” Maybe you already struggle with depression, and now you’ve been told to go further into social isolation.But now you begin to see the same tendency in your child. Maybe you are in the most vulnerable position right now. You already have an underlying condition and have spent so much of the past year in the hospital, and now you are legitimately concerned about your life because of Covid-19. But at a time when you’d love to be in church and be around your friends and family, you can’t be. You feel terribly alone. It feels like everything is compounding, piling up on top of you. The psalmist describes that feeling too. He says in the second stanza, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” Have you ever been near a waterfall? It looks so pretty in the pictures, but when you get near one, they are incredibly loud. Especially, I imagine, if you’re in the water. Here the psalmist pictures himself in a turbulent river, approaching the falls. The roar of the waterfall ahead is all he can hear, all he can think about is what terrible things may lie ahead. And as he fights to keep his head above water in the furious rapids, wave after wave keeps rolling over him. It’s this hopeless feeling, this panic, this severely anxious feeling. I know a lot of people are in this position today. And the root cause of all this anxiety is that in their inmost being, in their soul, they are dealing with a drought.  As the psalmist says, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. How do you deal with a drought? What can we do about it? Well, in this psalm there are a few practical things we can do and then one most important thing we need to take to heart.

1. Understand that a spiritual drought affects your whole being. In verse 3, the psalmist says, “My tears have been my food day and night.” In other words, he has lost his appetite and is crying much of the night, instead of sleeping. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a Welsh doctor who became a minister, wrote about the interwovenness of the mind, soul, and body in his book Spiritual Depression. He does a great job of avoiding a reductionist’s view of suffering, which says “Oh this is a physical thing, just get medicine and you’ll be fine.” Or “This is just a spiritual problem. Just pray and it will get better.” Or “This is all in your head. All you need is a good psychiatrist.” No, Dr. Lloyd Jones understands that once a spiritual drought takes place, the whole person—mind, body, soul—are affected and must each be considered. I think about how in 1 Kings 19, God sends an angel to Elijah when he is feeling cast down. (He actually prays that his life would end.) The angel doesn’t come and tell him to pray harder, he doesn’t castigate him and identify some moral failure, the angel cooks him a meal and tells him to eat it. This is a good reminder for us to take care of ourselves physically, when we are in a time of spiritual drought. God created your body as well as your mind and your soul, they are all connected.
2. Pour out your soul to God in prayer. The Psalmist says, “These things I remember, as I pour out my soul” (42:3). This happens throughout the Psalms and Job, I think especially of some of Jeremiah’s prayers. Jeremiah, was inspired to record some of his prayers where he tells God he feels like he has been abused. He is incredibly frustrated and deeply sad, even angry about his situation. Pour out your soul in prayer and don’t be afraid to be honest with God. If you are afraid, tell him. If you are angry, tell him. If you are disappointed, trust him with it. Let his ear be the one place that you can be completely, unashamedly honest about what you’re going through. This is biblical, this will help. Pour it out to God. Tell him that you came looking for water, but the stream was dry. Tell him you feel anxious and apprehensive of the future. Talk to him about your insecurities. Prayer isn’t a vending machine, it’s about a relationship. Pour out your soul to God in prayer.
3. Preach to yourself. And in order to get into this, we need to look at the psalm’s structure. The psalm has three stanzas each followed by a refrain. The stanzas are focused on his terrible feelings as a result of God’s absence. But the refrain is different. In the refrain, he actually talks to his own soul: “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He preaches to himself! This is something we all need to learn to do. If you only listen to yourself, you will spiral down continually. We say so many negative things about ourselves, don’t we? Listen to some of the lies you tell yourself sometime. Things like, “It’s never gonna get better. This is just what you are, a failure. You need to be smarter, you need to be more disciplined, you need to be thinner, you need to be a better Christian.” This is what we say to ourselves. And at some point, we need to grab our soul by shoulders and preach. Hey, put your hope in God! (Notice, he doesn’t tell himself to feel better!) He says, “Put your hope in God! I will yet, even now, praise him, my Savior and my God!” Preach about God’s love to yourself. Preach his promises. Preach his truth. Listen to your feelings, but at some point you need to preach the truth. I received an email just this past Wednesday from a woman in our congregation who works at Meriter hospital. They are asking her for more hours and she knows the danger of her environment probably better than she wishes. But she said that when she starts feeling overwhelmed, she starts repeating “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” She preaches to herself about God’s love and his sufficiency and said it calms her fears and gives her peace. What a great example. Do you know how to do that? Can you preach to yourself? Do you have a favorite Bible passage that brings you peace? Can you grab your soul by the shoulders when anxiety overwhelms and say, “Put your hope in God!”

4. This is actually something God does. And it is the most important line of the entire Psalm. In Hebrew literature there is a technique called a chiasm. And at its most basic level it means that the innermost verse of a composition holds the most weight rhetorically. Now if you take psalm 42 & 43 in Hebrew and count in from the either end, the line you’d find at the very center, is verse 8. Right in the middle of the second stanza of distress there is, conspicuously inserted, a verse chock full of God’s love. (This verse is also distinct in that it is the only verse in which God serves as the subject of the verb and the only verse in which the Psalmist uses the word LORD, instead of God, denoting his covenant faithfulness.) Verse 8: By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life. The word “directs” here can also be translated commands. Like a general who directs his troops, God commands his love for you. He commands his love to you through his Word, through pastors and teachers, through faithful friends, through your parents, through family, through medical professionals, he commands his love through a good meal and a warm bed, through all the million details he takes care of, on which our existence depends, which we take for granted. He commands his love for you. 

Just like when he commanded his Son for you. When Jesus, at his Father’s direction, laid down his life so that you would become a child of God. Jesus was forsaken in your place, his foes hurled insults at him asking “Where is your God?” And yet, he didn’t command his angels to fight back, he commanded his love for you. He shed his blood to end the drought, to fill the streambed of your heart. To overflow the banks with forgiveness, so that you can drink deeply of his love and know that God is near. Say what your feelings may about a drought, about being alone, but the truth is that God is with you. By day he directs his love for you. And at night, the psalmist says, his song is with me. Like a father softly singing over the bed of his child, who sleeps unaware, your God sings over you. Though you may not feel him, though in your earthly dream, it may seem like he is absent, God is singing over you. 

As I said before this Psalm is made of three verses of sorrow followed by three refrains of hope, with this one beautiful center verse. That structure teaches something extraordinary in and of itself: that although our stanzas of sorrow and refrains of hope may never stop repeating, at the center of it all God’s love is constant. I’m not sure what the future holds. It looks like our quarantine is going to last more than a few weeks, probably a few months. It can potentially be a time of fear, of anxiety, and of great loneliness. But this is how you deal with a drought. Feelings will come and go, but remember what is always true. By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with you. May your heart rest in him. 

Amen.