he was so happy and so the holy spirit has given david words songs and and and prayers to say back to god and when we read them they are our words to say back to god as well we can empathize with david we can put ourselves in his shoes we can say well this is how he reacted and behaved when he was in a difficult position this is how we should react and behave when we are in a difficult position and for this reason it's a very good thing to sing the psalms in corporate worship but also in personal worship as well when you're at home with your family or on your own if you can sing these psalms and so memorise them because they have tunes to them then you can put your mind into the mind of David, or perhaps the other way around, put David's mind into your mind, and therefore you train yourself to think the way godly David thought. And if we could think the way godly David thought, then we, like him, will be men and women after God's own heart. This is why these psalms are so important. This is why the whole book of psalms is so important. It teaches us how to think. It teaches us how to pray and how to praise and how to react. And it doesn't do that by giving us instructions in an academic or a theoretical way. It does it in a way which makes it very easier for us to take in. We simply put ourselves in the shoes of the psalmists and we make their words our words. Then we interact with God in the way that He wants us to interact with Him. So these psalms are training manuals, they guide our thoughts, they teach us how to think and how to react. So let's look at Psalm 42 and as I said we're only going to study the first five verses this evening. I must say, before we come actually into the body of the psalm, how bizarre and how strange these words would seem, or must seem, to the ungodly person. To an atheist, for example, for someone who doesn't believe in God, they would look at these words And I think they would be baffled. They would say, what on earth is going on here? This just simply doesn't make any sense. Because these are the words of a godly person. Somebody who believes in God with every fibre of their being. Someone to whom this God, whom atheists don't believe, is so real and so fundamentally important that he actually places it higher than food and drink in his list of priorities. how weird that must seem to an atheist an atheist doesn't care about God he does need God but he doesn't feel that need he feels his need for drink and for food and for many other things but he doesn't feel his need for God and so when the atheist comes to Psalm 42 and he looks at these words he just simply cannot relate to them they don't make any sense at all to him they are odd, they are bizarre, they are out of place Why is it that this God, in whom the atheist doesn't believe, is so real to this writer here? Well, there's no way to square the circle. You just have to write the whole thing off, and think of it as a figment of the imaginations of a sick mind, unless you believe in God. But as we look into this, if we are truly born again, if we love the Lord, if we're believers, this is all so real to us. It rings so true. It is our experience and we know there is a God in heaven. I'll look there in verse one, the heart, as I've said, that's a deer or an antelope or some sort of creature of that nature. And when we see a deer or something similar in this country, it always seems to be in green pastures or in woodland or up on the glens. But I think we ought to think much more carefully about the kind of antelope or deer that would live in a dry and barren land. the kind of thing you would see on a David Attenborough program chasing around the savannas of Africa where there is a great deal of heat and where there are predators who chase that creature and it has to expend an enormous amount of energy and run almost its life out in order to escape from the cheetah or the lion and as it does that it finds itself at death's door and it must cool down, otherwise it will expire. And the water is not easy to come by. In the glens of Scotland, you can't move for water. But in the savannas of Africa, and I suspect in the wilderness of Israel, maybe down there in the Negev desert in the Southlands, water is very scarce. So there you have this deer. It's escaped from its pursuer, but it will now die unless it can find water quickly. That is the level of desperation which is pictured here and you can imagine that creature panting, you can imagine the sweat rising from its flanks, you can imagine that it's panting very very hard, thirsting with all of its being for a cooling drink, both to refresh itself, to bring fluids on board and also to cool itself down. This is how the psalmist describes his desire for God. And you really cannot imagine much more of a stronger description, can you? It's really extraordinary. The desperation for God that we see in that verse there. We're told that we should be those who hunger and thirst after righteousness by the Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, but is that a reality for us? Do we really want nearness with God? our prayers answered, a sense of communion more than we want our next meal and not even our next meal the picture here is not of someone who's just merely hungry it's someone who's about to die of thirst and that should be an illustration to us how David felt, how the psalmist felt how we also ought to be thinking but what a turnaround there is here perhaps there was a time when we were like that atheist I've already mentioned we didn't care for God at all We didn't thirst after Him. We didn't want Him. In fact, the very opposite could be true. We were running away from God. That's what we were doing. The heart does not run away from the cooling stream. The heart ran away from the lion or the cheetah that was chasing after it. But we have had a massive change in our lives, have we not? We've gone from being those who fled away from God to being those who flee to Him. That is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And that is how we know that we are born again. Look at verse 2. My soul thirsteth for God. He repeats himself. This is what I want. My soul, not just my body. It's not a physical thing. It's my soul. So much more important than physical things. It's my soul that longs and yearns for God. And so it should, because it was created in God's image. and it was created to worship God and so it is a natural state that our soul should thirst for God and yet we do not because we spoil our souls and Satan has duped us and we dabble with the world and our longing for God grows cold this is not an impossibly high standard that we see here this is where we should be and so as we memorise and sing this psalm to ourselves we constantly remind ourselves this is how I should feel about God this is where my interest should lie for the living God well our God is a living God and he is the giver of life and he is the supplier of our personal existence he is the one who breathed life into every living being but he is the living God supremely in that all the other gods that you could mention do not have life the idols and the mollusks and the bales None of them are living God. David says, my God is a living God, a living, breathing God who responds, who reacts, who speaks to me, who I have a personal relationship with. He is the only living God. He's unlike all other pink things that men call gods. When shall I appear before God? He said, that's his desire. I want to appear before God. And again, we see an enormous change here, don't we? No ungodly man wants to appear before God, because if they do, they will be appearing as a guilty sinner before a judge. In that last day, those ungodly men will not be saying, oh, I'm looking forward to appearing before God today. They'll be saying, rocks, mountains, fall on me, earth, swallow me up. I do not want to appear before the living God, but David does. And so should we. It should be a longing in our heart to appear before this living God. although not necessarily in that ultimate way immediately, but in our day-to-day life, we want to be close to God. We want Him to hear our prayers and answer our prayers. We want to be in tune with God's mind. We want to be appearing before God in that sense. But there is also, of course, here a sense of the corporate worship. This isn't purely the spiritual relationship between an individual and God. this is a desire to have corporate worship and as I've said most probably what we're talking about here in Psalm 42 is David being unable to come and worship corporately with the people in the Temple of Jerusalem because his son Absalom has taken the throne away from him temporarily and he longs, he desires deeply he doesn't miss his palace or his crown or his throne or his capital or his armies or his wives his children that couldn't be with him, his riches, his toy toys, his playthings. What he misses, far above everything else, is being able to worship with the people there in Jerusalem. We should feel the same. We should be striving in our lives to have a strong love of corporate worship, of coming to church to be with our brothers and sisters in Christ and worship together. And that means to pray, to praise, to sit under God's word, all of those things. Now, of course, we might say, well, I don't feel like that because there's something wrong with the church. I don't like the way the praise goes. I don't like the preaching. I don't like some of the people who sit in the pews with me. Well, there are any number of reasons why you might make an excuse and say, I'm not looking forward to going to church today. And some of them may have some legitimacy to them. And no church is perfect. But what we ought to be striving for is this heart of David. We want to be there. We want to be with God's people. We want to be in that special place where we worship God corporately, where God's word is spoken and attended by the Holy Spirit, where the gospel is proclaimed. We long to be there. Nothing will keep us from it. Let's stir up our own desires so that we emulate David in this regard. There should be no satisfaction when we are apart from God. shouldn't be a comfortable position at all. Can you imagine that you're a young parent and you have a two-year-old you've taken to the supermarket, there are thousands of people there and you're pushing your trolley around and you realise the two-year-old is not with you. Can you be comfortable as long as you don't know where that child is? Do you carry on shopping and assume that somebody in a green jacket will turn up sooner or later and there'll be an announcement on the tannoy and you'll be reunited with your child? Do you just carry on? Of course you don't. You leave the trolley where it is and you run off to look. And you alert the security guards. You cannot possibly be comfortable as long as you are separated from that small child. And it should be the same. with us and God. Now let me explain what I mean. Clearly David's separation from God was a political and geographical one to a certain extent. It was to do with the situation at the time. But it speaks of an ordinary separation from God where sometimes in our Christian lives we can go through a period where we don't feel that close communion. We don't feel as though our heart is being moved in the worship perhaps. we don't feel as though our prayers are being answered we feel as though when we come to pray our throat is lined with sandpaper and our ceiling is made of brass and we cannot get through to God and we struggle and the Lord has withdrawn himself now that may be because we have sinned and we have to repent of something but it equally may be that the Lord does sometimes take his felt presence away from us a little bit in order to strengthen our faith. But we must not be comfortable with that situation. We don't just sit back and say, well, if the Lord has decided that, I'll just wait for Him to come back. No! We pursue Him, as David did. We do everything within our power. We pour out our souls. We seek after Him. We thirst for Him. We hate that situation. We long to be close and back in fellowship with God. We long for our prayers to be answered. We long to be able to pour out our hearts and to become eloquent in our prayers, we long to be able to sing his praise and feel the joy in our hearts. We long to be back amongst his people and greatly enjoying our service for him. Do you see how this psalm teaches us how we should think and how we should feel? Do you see how it instructs us and how these words, we should memorise them, we should form our own thinking around thinking of David we should use it to strengthen ourselves so we see there in verse 3 that the psalmist is in a very difficult position he's not experiencing God's close presence and in addition to that he's being attacked by the unbelievers my tears have been my meat day and night while they continually say unto me where is thy God people were mocking him people were laughing at him People will say, ah David, you should never have usurped the throne of Saul. Ah David, you claim to be a holy man, but where is your God now? What has he done for you? And you can be sure that when these difficult times come, Satan will do everything within his power to try and attack and make you doubt. He will try and get in when you are at your weakest. He will try and make you think that you have believed in vain. He'll ask you whether you shouldn't perhaps be a bit like such and such a person down the road. or whether perhaps you shouldn't give a little bit more attention to other aspects of your life rather than this purely religious aspect and he will try and make you doubt where is your God is his favorite tactic how many men and women are screaming that out from every vantage point at the moment from the from the news from the quangos from government from the schools even from the television, from the social media, we see on every hand the clamour of these men and women saying, where is this God that you speak of? We cannot find any evidence for him, they say. And Richard Dawkins, he writes books, book after book after book, we cannot find any evidence for God. There is no such evidence. Anyone who believes in him is a fool, and he has all of his followers who love him, and books are written, ten to the dozen, about this subject of the lack of evidence for a God, and scientists, they say it as well. They follow evolution, they say this is the case, we came here by chance. Where is your God, you Christians, you fools? You'll be extinct within a generation. Nobody will carry on with your outdated beliefs. It will all go. We say to ourselves, well, the churches are very weak. and there aren't many that seem to be faithful in this day and age and some discourses have all closed down and we don't have a voice in the media and none of the main political parties will stand up for us anymore well maybe they've got a point of course they haven't got a point we find ourselves in exactly the same position as David did and therefore we follow his example we say to ourselves now that we find ourselves in this position How do we behave? How do we react when these atheists taunt us? But before we get to the answer, which we'll find in verse four and five, let's take a little step back and ask ourselves, what is the Christian life like? If this is an example of the Christian life, what is it like? Is the Christian life very easy and luxurious and a bed of roses and just so straightforward that a faithful man will waft to heaven without so much as having to raise a bead of sweat? Or is the Christian life such that even a godly man like David will go through untold difficulty and trial and pain and thirsting unto death and pouring out his soul and making his tears his meat night and day? It's clear, isn't it? The whole Bible talks of the Christian life as being a struggle and as a fight. And yet, as we know, A plethora of churches nearby will tell us that that is not the case. We must be wise and on our guard, not to listen to the false teacher that comes to us as a wolf in sheep's clothing. The Christian life is hard, it is difficult, but our God is very strong. Look there in verse 4, we see the first step of a two-step process when you find yourself in a difficult position like David when you find yourself a little out of touch with God longing for a closer relationship with him when you find that you're being mocked at every turn and you're in a difficult position step one in verse four is to look back I remember these things I pour out my soul in me for I had gone with the multitude I went with them to the house of God with a voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy day. David remembers days of bliss, going up with his people to the temple, singing God's praise, when they all had a heart of joy together, when they went as a great crowd to worship their God, and that cheers him. when he remembers how close he used to be to God and you also may be able to do that you may be able to say well at the moment I don't feel my prayers are being answered I feel that I'm struggling as I read the Bible but I remember just last month or last year oh how precious it seemed to me how much joy I had when I went to church and sung those hymns and those psalms how blessed I was when I went out to witness for God it was wonderful I remember those days so you look back And you encourage yourself at what God has done in the past. And then step two, can you guess what it is? You look forward. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted of me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him. I will praise him again in the future for the help of his countenance. We'll come to that word in a second. But David looks forward and he says, there's only one outcome here. God is faithful. God is strong. God has promised. he will bring me back and so he trusts even though he doesn't have the feeling of comfort even though he doesn't have the emotion if you like of being close to God he knows in his heart the facts of the matter and they are that God has been his God and has blessed him in the past and that God will bless him in the future if not in this life then certainly in the next and so he reasons with his own soul and he says to himself this is the way it's going to be my friend my soul as he talks to himself it may be hard now but it was grand in the past and it will be wonderful again in the future and so let's hold fast let us be strong let us trust in God and He will again bring us back and there will be that word there countenance that means face what David is saying is that it's as though the Lord has turned His face away from me for a little while now and I can't quite get His attention although it's much more complicated than that. But the time will come when his face will turn back to me, and he'll incline his ear to me, and his face will smile upon me, and the light of his countenance will bless him again. And so, that's what we do. Very simply. We look back, and we look forward. But during that difficult time in the middle, we must trust. We must have faith. I use the illustration of two or three big scouts, like the airline pilot coming into land, and he can't see the runway, or where he should go, because he's encased in fog and cloud. But his instruments tell him exactly where he is. They tell him how fast he's going, they tell him how high he's going, they tell him how quickly he's descending, and they tell him exactly which direction he is going in. And so he is safe, as long as he trusts in those instruments. He cannot see with his own eyes, but he trusts in his instruments. Now, if he were to look out the window and say, I think I can see something down there, I think I'm on the wrong course, and to slightly bank to one side and to lift the tail up a bit and to put his foot down and go a bit faster, well, he would crash. He must trust completely in those instruments. And it's the same here, isn't it? He cannot see God, he cannot feel God. He feels cut off. But he knows the truth of the matter. So he holds fast in faith. He doesn't listen to the mocker. to that one who is reviling him even though he said it's like a sword in my bones when my enemies reproach me later on in the psalm he keeps faith and the Lord will bring him through so David goes through this test of faith and he passes that test and his faith is strengthened may the Lord bless you as you go through deep waters as you're called to go through difficult times may the Lord help you to hold your faith and bless you amen