Father, we wish our emotions were like yours. You say here that by day the Lord directs His love. You command your own love. We wish we could do that. Just give a command to our emotions and they would do whatever. But instead, Lord, we're like reeds swaying in the wind so many times. Our emotions are so fragile. Trouble comes and they blow one way and happy times come and they blow the other way. And we're so subject to weakness with regard to our affections and our feelings. And so there are some today who are here, Lord, who are really in the dark. They're down. They're way down in discouragement and depression. There's others who, it's not that bad for them, it's just kind of dry. or maybe they're irritable, they don't know why, short. Lord, all these factors come in and push our emotions around, just shove us back and forth. I pray that through your word this morning, you would give us stability in our ability to just enjoy you regardless of circumstances, through circumstances. so that we might have proper joy. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. So if you're depressed or discouraged, does that mean something's wrong with you? Is it an indication that you are spiritually immature if you struggle with depression? The answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is no. Does it mean that you're spiritually immature when you get depressed? No. No, no. Does anyone here want to accuse this guy of spiritual immaturity? The guy who wrote Psalm 42 and 43? From the heading that we see here, he's a worship leader. Do you think that he should have been asked to step down from his worship leading role until he could get his emotions under control? No. No. Not only does God not ask him to step down, but God takes his very prayer, expressing these things in his heart, puts them in his word, and then points all the saints throughout the ages to that as an example and says, be like him. He's exemplary, this guy. No, he's not spiritually unhealthy, he's not spiritually immature. God tells us to imitate him. If you ever find yourself looking down on someone because they struggle with depression, or you assume someone is spiritually immature or spiritually unhealthy because they're down, you need to realize that person you're looking down on may very well be one of the great giants of the faith, like the men and women that we read about in Scripture who got down. So, are you a bad Christian if you're depressed? No, no. But what about the first question? Is there something wrong with you if you're depressed? Well, of course there's something wrong with you. I mean, it's obvious from reading this psalm that the psalmist regarded his depression as a problem that needed to be fixed, right? That's the whole point, that the entire prayer is his effort to recover from this darkness. God wants us to have joy in him. He commands us to have joy in him. When we don't, when our sorrow gets to what's bigger than our joy, something's wrong. Now that happens to even the most godly, most spiritually mature men and women among us. It doesn't mean that you're a failure as a Christian, it just means you've got a flat tire and you need to get it fixed. And so these two psalms teach us how to do that. I told you last time that the principles in these psalms can be summed up under three main headings. Pep, P-E-P, pray for help, enjoy the presence of God, and preach to your soul. Last week we covered the first one, just briefly, prayer. And I was brief about the prayer thing, not because prayer is unimportant, but because we just spent a whole long sermon series on prayer at the end of the book of James, and so that's fresh in everybody's mind, I'm assuming. If you weren't here for the end of James, I would urge you to go through that, especially the first two messages that talk about personal private prayer, because if you struggle with discouragement and depression, prayer is going to be absolutely critical. That's what this guy is doing, is he's praying. So if you're down, if you're discouraged, pray for help. Pray for help, that's where it starts. The second point we just introduced last time, the E in Pep, which is enjoy the presence of God. That's the biggest theme in these two Psalms. I mean, that's the focus. Does he pray for relief from his suffering? Yeah, once. One verse out of the whole thing. But a much, much greater concern on his heart is just his desperate desire to go and meet with God. He wants to commune with God. He wants to find God. And he begins with that. He ends with that. It permeates through the entire prayer. That's his huge priority because he knows that what he needs, more than relief from suffering, what he needs is joy. He's got to find joy. I mean, what good is relief going to do if you don't have joy? What good will it be for me if I can get rid of all my troubles, all my sorrows and problems, if I can get rid of my financial troubles and my relationship troubles and my health problems and work problems and family problems and all my problems, I can get rid of all of it, if I'm still discouraged and still joyless, what good is that? I haven't gotten anywhere. Imagine somebody who's desperately ill because he's dehydrated and he's malnourished because of some throat problem. His throat has swollen up or whatever. And so he can't eat and drink, and so he's real sick. So he goes to the doctor, doctor gives him medicine, fixes the problems, throat clears up, and he goes home, and he's just as miserable as ever. Why? Because he's still dehydrated and malnourished. See? Even though the throat problem has cleared up, he's still gotta eat before he's gonna recover. The hardships and troubles in your life are like that sore throat. They might make it hard for you to eat and drink from God. And so getting rid of your problems might make it easier for you to commune with God. They might make it easier for you to eat and drink. They might. They might not. They don't always. But maybe it will. In some cases, it will. But even if it does, even if getting rid of my trouble will help me enjoy God more, still, it's not going to happen until I actually enjoy God, until I eat and drink. Until I do that, I'm going to stay malnourished and dehydrated. So how does one eat and drink from God? How do you enjoy the presence of God in a way that functions like water to your soul and food to your empty, starving inner man? How do you do that? Well, let's see what we can learn from these Psalms. First, it all begins with thirst. Verse 2 of 42. Psalm 42.2. My soul thirsts for God. Before you can begin to enjoy God's presence, you've got to get thirsty for it. Drinking water is actually an unpleasant experience when you're not thirsty, isn't it? If you have to drink and you're not thirsty, it's just like, you don't want to do it. But the thirstier you are, the more you enjoy it. A meal is so much better when you're really, really hungry. One of the benefits of suffering, one of the many benefits of suffering in life, is it helps you get thirsty for God. It helps you experience attributes of God that you could otherwise never experience. You know, there are some attributes of God that the only way to experience them is through suffering. Angels will never experience them. Angels will never know about them other than asking you what it was like. Like, for example, God as a rescuer where he lifts you up out of the pit. Angels aren't going to know what that's like to ever experience that. I never knew what that was like to experience that until about 10 years ago when I was way down deep in a pit and God lifted me out and it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in my life. And it sparked love in my heart for God unlike any love I'd ever had for God prior to that. There are so many attributes of God that can only be experienced while you're suffering, while you're in trouble. God as shelter, God as savior, God as stronghold. Those are attributes of God that suffering helps you understand. So praise God for your suffering. Literally, praise God for your suffering. When you're full all the time, you just start to take that for granted and you forget how important food really is. And you can cease to enjoy it. If you're just eating, you're never hungry. We need hardships in our life to keep our appetite going. That's the way we're wired in this world. We need hardships in order to keep our appetite going. We need to be dry before we'll be energized to go and drink. You can try to discipline yourself to just read your Bible and pray every day and come to church every week and just force yourself to do that, but if you're not really thirsty, if you don't really have a burning desire, it's not going to last. It's not going to last. To really drink deeply, you've got to get thirsty. It's got to be driven by desire. So how do you make yourself thirsty for God? Just do what this psalmist did, and here's what he did. He interpreted the longings of his soul for what they really were, thirst for God. See, when we misinterpret the groanings of our heart, it makes us thirsty for the wrong thing. Interpretation of your own groanings is crucial. If you get really lonely, and you interpret that as a need for a friend, or you interpret that as a need for a spouse, or a need for a better spouse, or whatever. If you interpret that way, then what that will do is it'll make you thirsty for that thing. It'll energize you to go get married, or find a friend, or whatever it is you think that will satisfy that. If you interpret it, though, for what it really is, and that is a need for God, it'll make you thirsty for God. If you get really sick, and that sickness ends up taking away your joy, and you interpret that misery as a need for health, physical health, that'll make you thirsty for physical health. But if you interpret it for what it really is, a need for the presence of God, then it'll make you thirsty for God. See, suffering isn't really a problem unless it takes away your joy, right? If you're suffering but your joy is way bigger than your sorrow, then you're fine. But when suffering does manage to diminish your joy and bring it down so it's smaller than your sorrow and you don't have joy anymore, the remedy for that is always to experience the presence of God. That's the only thing that'll bring the joy back. It always seems like, if I could just get rid of my trouble, that'll bring the joy back. No, it won't. It won't. You've got to experience the presence of God. Look how he describes God in chapter 43, Psalm 43 verse 4. I love this. He says, Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, and look at this description of God, my joy and my delight. Literally, that phrase is, to God, the gladness of my rejoicing. How's that for a description of God? I mean, can you think of any more delightful description of God anywhere in the scriptures than that one. God. Who's God? What is God like? Oh, He's the gladness of all my rejoicing. When I rejoice, anytime I have happiness, anytime I feel joy, the core of that happiness, the nucleus of it is God. Sourcing that happiness. Now, there is that happiness of sin. There's that shallow, temporary, counterfeit version of joy that comes from sin, the pleasures of sin. But that's never real joy. It's temporal, it's phony, it leaves you emptier than you started. This here isn't talking about that. This is talking about authentic, deep, rich, real, lasting, powerful happiness that's greater than even the greatest sorrows in my life. That kind of happiness. And whenever I have that, whatever tool God used to make me happy like that, that Tool isn't the source of the happiness. The source of the happiness, the source of that gladness, is God Himself. He is the gladness of all my rejoicing. He's the gladness that supplies all the happiness to my rejoicing. If I get that happiness through some time spent with my wife, or by seeing my kids, or by enjoying some beautiful part of God's creation, or a really good meal, or a cool jeep, or a new gun, or whatever, whatever makes you happy. Sometimes those things will make me happy. Sometimes they won't make me happy. Whenever they start my heart rejoicing, whenever they work and they actually start my heart rejoicing, that's God. That's God supplying that joy. He is the gladness of all my rejoicing. Whenever I have true happiness in my life, if you see that, you come and you get a shovel and start digging, you'll find underneath there at the root is God enabling me to enjoy one of His gifts. And the more aware of that I am, the more I'm experiencing the presence of God. The psalmist understood that, which is why he wanted to meet with God even more than he wanted to get rid of his troubles. He wanted that joy and that happiness. And if God used this tool or that tool or another tool or no tool at all and just did it directly, it didn't matter to him. He just wanted to experience his presence somehow, anyway. However, that's the only thing that'll bring the joy back. The problem is, we just don't tend to think this way. We don't naturally think this way. It takes a conscious effort. to diagnose the problem of my sadness and depression as being a craving for the presence of God. That takes some work, that doesn't just naturally occur to me. So whatever you suffer, and that suffering starts stealing your joy, ruining your joy, just remind yourself, just preach yourself, tell yourself, Self, if I were to experience the presence of God right now, I would have joy greater than my sorrow, even if this suffering keeps going. We've got to remind ourselves of that, constantly remind ourselves of that. That's how you increase thirst. Keep doing that, and eventually your thirst for God will become so extreme it'll drive you to do whatever it takes to find God. You can do that with the sorrow in your life, and you can do that with the pleasures in life. You experience a pleasure? Preach to your soul. Say, soul, see, this is a sampling of what it's like to be in his presence. Don't you want to be in his presence? And when you suffer? See, soul, this is what it's like. This is a sampling of what it's like to be separated from his presence. Don't you want to seek his presence? Everything in life, use it to train your soul to thirst after God. See, your soul is already thirsty for God. But it just takes a lot of work to convince yourself of that, right? When I get physically thirsty, I never crave the wrong thing. Never. I always get it right. I never misinterpret the meaning of a dry mouth and a dry throat and start craving sawdust or dirt or anything else other than a real drink. I always crave the right thing. I'm so convinced in my mind that water is the solution to my dry throat that that the sensation of a dry throat is exactly the same thing in my mind as a desire for water. Do you see that? They're identical. The sentence, this sentence, I'm thirsty, that sentence, means two things. It means my throat is dry, and it means I want water. I want a drink. Right? My goal is to get that way with the thirst of the soul, thirst for God. My goal is to get so that whenever my soul is dry, and I'm lacking joy, I'm feeling that depression, that joylessness, and I feel that as exactly, I interpret it as exactly the same thing as a desire for God. That's my goal. So that the sentence, I'm sad, or I'm afraid, or I'm worried, or I'm overwhelmed, or any of those sentences mean two things. They mean I feel crummy, and they mean I desire God's presence. It's just that connected. So it can be a process just to get to the point where you're thirsty for God, right? Some of us are really struggling. We're just saying, man, desire's not there. That thirst, that hunger, it's not there. I need some desire. So it can be a process just to get to the point where you've got that desire. But this guy who wrote this Psalm 42 and 43, he's already there. He's already thirsty. 42 to my soul thirsts for God. He is thirsty already. He feels it. Some of us have some work to do to correct the malfunctions in our taste buds and to get that thirst going. But for him, he's already there. He thirsts for God. He's at the starting point. So once you get there, What's next? Well, once you get thirsty, what's next will come naturally. You'll want a drink, right? You'll seek after God to find a way to drink. You'll do whatever it takes to find a drink. But what does it take? Well, it takes some seeking after God. Before you're going to be able to experience the presence of God as food and drink, You've got to find him. You've got to find his presence. Scripture speaks this way a lot about seeking after God, seeking his presence. In fact, here, he starts the prayer by saying, as the deer pants. That word translated pants, I don't know if that's the best translation. Literally, the word just simply means to bend toward or to be inclined toward or to look for something. That's what the word just naturally means. So the idea isn't so much of the deer panting as much as the deer Searching. I really think a better translation would be search. As the deer searches for streams of water, so my soul searches for you, O God. I've never actually noticed a deer panting, but any hunter knows that deer will do whatever it takes. They'll find water. Even if they have to risk their life to drink, they'll go. He's searching for water, or searching for God like a deer searches for water. Scripture speaks a lot about that, seeking for God. In fact, we're commanded to do that. in 1st Chronicles 22 verse 19. Now devote your heart and soul to seeking the Lord your God. That's just a command. We're commanded to seek his presence and the criterion for success, the thing you need in order to have success at that is to do it wholeheartedly. Deuteronomy 4 29. If you seek the Lord your God you will find him if, if you look for him with all your heart and all your soul. God will not demean himself by allowing himself to be found by half-hearted seekers. You can't be casual about this. We got to do with all our being. And so this man, he's searching for God like a deer searching for water. And he's doing that as a way of life. It's not just once a week at church. It's not just once a day at the beginning of his prayer time. It's wherever he is, whatever he's doing, whatever's happening in his life. And I get that from verse six. of 42, Psalm 42, 6. He says, My soul is downcast within me, therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon, and Mount Mizar. Now Hermon, Mount Hermon was a really high mountain north of Israel, a mountain range actually. It's the headwaters for the Jordan River. Mizar, it's just a Hebrew word for smallness. We actually don't know of any mountain named Mizar. We don't know of a Mount Mizar. I don't think he's talking about any specific mountain. I think we should just translate it as just literally, Little Hill. I think what he's saying is, Heights of Jordan, or Heights of Hermon, Little Hill, and then the land of the Jordan, that just most likely refers to Israel. So whether I'm outside of Israel, north of Israel, in Israel, land of the Jordan, outside there, on the highest peak, on the littlest hill, wherever I am, I remember God. No matter where I'm located geographically, I'm searching for him spiritually. He's seeking hard after God in every facet of life. Everything that's happening, he's searching after God. This guy is thirsty, and he is seeking, and he's seeking wherever he goes. He's doing this with all his heart, but it's not working. It's not. He's still dry. I don't know how long he's been doing this, but it sounds like a long time, and he's still dry. You know, if you've got some idea that in order to experience God's presence, all you do is spend 10 minutes seeking Him and boom, there He is. You gotta go back to the Psalms and look at this guy. He is a godly man, he's a spiritual man, he is thirsty for God, he's desperately seeking hard after Him all through life, and he is getting nothing from heaven but a dial tone. He wants to drink deeply from the spring of living water, but it's just not happening. His soul is just dried up. See, even when you seek hard after God and you do it right, you do everything right, still, the response might be delayed. God is a person, not a vending machine. And He's sovereign and He might test you to see how serious you are about this. Are you going to keep seeking Him even though there's a lot of delay? Or are you going to just revert to some substitute? Well, this guy's not going to go for any substitute. It's not happening yet for him, but there's no plan B for this guy. His only option is to find a way into the presence of God, and so he gets desperate. And at the end of Psalm 43, he cries out, God, guide me! I need your help, I can't find you, God! You gotta send two guides! Two guides, look at 43.3, send forth your light, and your truth. Let them guide me. Let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. You know, as God's children, we always have access to God's presence, 24-7, to some degree. But sometimes more access than other times. And the kind of access that it's going to take to get this guy from the depths of despair right back up to full joy, that's going to take Getting that kind of access to God's presence doesn't just come with a snap of your fingers. He's striving for it. And so far, all his searching hasn't gotten him there. Again, is he unspiritual? Are you thinking, how did this guy ever get a job as a psalm writer? I mean, he can't even find, he doesn't even know where the presence of God, how to find the presence of God? Listen, you can know everything that a writer of scripture knew about how to find the presence of God and still have to cry out, God help me, I can't find you. I need two guides, your light and your truth. So he cries out, asks God, guide me into your dwelling place and then he says this, God if you do, if you guide me into your dwelling place, then I will go to the altar of God. That's your first stop. moving into the presence of God is at the altar. Now, the altar is a place where sacrifices were offered, right? That's where you go to receive forgiveness of sins. If you want to draw near to God, at the doorway leading into His presence is an altar, and it has to start there, because until your sins are dealt with, you're separated from God. Until guilt is dealt with and sin is dealt with, it's impossible to ever approach God's presence. He won't receive you. This guy's a worship leader in the temple, and he knew where the altar was, physical altar. I mean, some people take this as he's exiled and he wants to come back to the temple. No, it's not talking about the physical temple. He knows where that is. He doesn't need guidance to find that. What he's talking about is what that physical altar represented, meeting with God, that spiritual reality of having sin dealt with and being forgiven so that there's nothing hindering my relationship with God anymore. There's nothing between us anymore. It's all taken care of. He's talking about the same thing that David was talking about in Psalm 51 when he said the sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite spirit, not just a physical animal on an altar. He wants to find that place of forgiveness and reconciliation with God through faith. Now, in the Old Testament, that was symbolized through putting animals on an altar. You burn those. You offer those to God. But we know that all those animal sacrifices were pointing to one thing, right? What? The cross of Christ, the ultimate sacrifice. The death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross in our place. So when you and I go to the altar of God, what does that mean? How do you go to the altar of God? It means you consider what Jesus did on the cross, just like we just did with communion last hour. You consider what Jesus did on the cross and we receive The gift with gratitude and faith, we welcome and receive that gift of forgiveness and redemption. So going to the altar of God means confessing your sins to God, repenting of that sin, turning from it, and welcoming and trusting in the gift of His forgiveness. If you don't do that, then no matter what else you do, you're never going to approach the presence of God. Sin and guilt have to be dealt with first. So the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, it's enough, this is the good news, it's enough, it's big enough to cover any sin you've ever committed, no matter how big. It's great enough to cover all of your sins, no matter how numerous. And it doesn't matter how many times you've gone to that altar before. Every single time you go, He'll forgive you. He'll forgive all your sins. And then you can proceed into His presence from there. When you get discouraged, you fall into depression, you fall into darkness, how do you get out of that darkness? Well, first you get thirsty enough to do what it takes to start seeking after God, and then go to His altar, get your sins taken care of, so that you're not shut out of the presence of God anymore, and then you're ready to draw near to Him. But now what? You've been to the altar, you're ready to seek Him, now what does seeking Him look like? You're not going to know intuitively. It's not going to come naturally to you. Again, this guy, he needed two guides. It didn't even come naturally to him. He needed help. 43.3. Send forth your light and your truth. Let them guide me. See, the only way it's going to happen is if God sends truth about how to approach Him, and then on top of that sends light, which means He opens your eyes to be able to understand the truth and receive it and accept it. and believe it. And for us, that comes here, right? In the scriptures. We don't find the presence of God any other way than the way that he's laid out and mapped out in here. We're not going to find it through some arbitrary mysticism. We're not going to find it through being a good enough Christian so you can earn your way into his presence. It doesn't come through rituals or ceremonies or incantations. It doesn't come through seniority in the faith. It doesn't matter how long you've been a Christian. That's not it. It doesn't come through, doesn't even come through music. You know, some people think that if they get caught up in corporate praise and they're all worked up emotionally and it becomes really, really gripping emotionally to them, then that's the presence of God. Now I've experienced God. No, no, it's not even that. People who think that way, they get into all kinds of wacky doctrine usually because they start discerning what's true based on how they feel instead of based on what scripture says. Now the only way into his presence is the way that he mapped out in his word. He sends forth the truth, then he grants light to see it, and then we follow that way. That's why we're just constantly studying the Bible around here. That's why we are Agape Bible Church. Bible's our middle name. And we do, in the scriptures, we're just going verse by verse. In the sermons, every week, we're just going verse by verse through the scriptures. We do that not because we're into academics. It's not because we want to become a bunch of, eggheads or experts or scholars or anything like that, we tear into the scriptures every week, every day, because we're saying the same thing this guy is saying. God, send forth your light and your truth to guide me into your presence. I want to find your dwelling place. If you want to experience the presence of God, you've got to crack this thing open. You've got to crack open the scriptures. Don't leave it on your shelf all week from Sunday all the way to the next Sunday. You gotta crack it open. Secondly, it has to crack you open. I mean, the truth isn't up. Remember, there's two guides. You can't just have truth. If all you've got is truth, and you don't have the light to understand it, to receive it, to accept it, to believe it, to be able to to see it as beautiful and delight in it, that's what the light is. If you don't have that light, then the truth isn't gonna get you anywhere. If all you do is read the Bible for information, then if you try to get out of your depression by reading the Bible for information, all that'll do is give you an informed depression. You could get a PhD in theology, and then you would have scholarly depression. But the goal isn't informed depression or scholarly depression. The goal is joy, right? Joy. We approach the Scriptures not as a student trying to master a textbook, but as a newborn baby craving pure spiritual milk of the Word, sucking with all his might to draw out from his mother nourishment to sustain his life. That's the way God tells us to approach His Word. Seek God in the Scriptures. Read a passage and then ask, what does this tell me about what God is like? How does this show me the Lord? What does this tell me about His will? What does this tell me about what pleases Him and what doesn't please Him? And how can I learn more about Him? And God, show me and open my eyes, give me light, open my eyes to see how this verse is relevant for me today. How do I live it out? If your Bible reading is dry, Get with a mentor, a pastor, someone, your prayer group leader, somebody who can help you encounter God in the scriptures. That's crucial, that's crucial. I think one of the healthiest things you can ever do is just open up to a psalm, any psalm, and get a piece of paper and just write down every attribute of God that's either stated or implied somewhere in that psalm. And then take that list and let that list inform your soul, correct wrong perspectives about God in your soul. Let it correct your natural way of thinking about God, because your natural way of thinking about God isn't going to be right. Our perception of what God is like is always being corrupted by human wisdom, and it's in constant need of correction. It's always getting contaminated. All these corruptions. It's like the operating system on my computer, just always getting messed up. After a while you just have to reboot, reinstall. It's like the alignment on your car. Sometimes it just gets bent, it just needs to be straightened back out. That's the way our theology is. Our theology might not waver, but our way that we think about God, our way of feeling about God, it just gets out of alignment, doesn't it? It needs to be corrected by scriptures. Let the light and truth of scriptures correct and shape your whole outlook, your way of thinking about God, your way of thinking about yourself, your way of interpreting circumstances, everything. And keep that up until you have an attitude like this guy's attitude. This guy's attitude is amazing. One thing that really stands out in Psalms 42 and 43 is his attitude about God. Last week we saw, he did, he felt rejected by God, he felt abandoned by God, right? Forgotten. Psalm 42, 9. Why have you forgotten me? Psalm 43, 2. Why have you rejected me? That's how he felt. And he's very honest about that. He's not shy to say that to God. But did this guy really believe that God had actually forsaken him, rejected him, forgotten him? No. No, obviously he doesn't believe that or he wouldn't be praying to God. Right? If you want to know what this guy really believes about God, Just look at the way that he talks about God all the way through here. So many references to God. Just in this short little prayer, he calls Him, God, my God, in 43.4. My Savior and my God. The God of my life. God my rock. God my stronghold. God, the gladness of my rejoicing. I mean, this is the way he speaks about God. That's how he really felt. See, suffering hardship can ruin you or improve you. It can make you better or bitter. It can hurt you or help you. And the biggest factor that determines which way it's going to go is what you believe about what God is like. That's what's going to steer it. If you want to recover from discouragement and depression, it's just absolutely essential that you allow the Word of God to inform your conception and your perspective of what God is like. You know, when Bob read Psalm 42 and 43 at the scripture reading a few minutes ago, I timed him. It was under three minutes. He was reading really slow, and still it was less than three minutes. This is a short prayer. Even both of these Psalms together, it's a short prayer. And yet, he's got all these attributes of God listed out in the prayer. I don't know about you, but if I pray a three-minute prayer, typically I don't get a dozen different attributes of God just floating out of my mouth. How does he come up with all that? Did he pull his Wayne Grudem systematic theology off the shelf and look up a bunch of attributes of God and stick them in the prayer to beef it up? I think it's possible he did something like that, but I think it's more likely that he prays this way just because this is his way that he felt about God. This is just how he felt about God. He calls him all these things. He calls him, my God, because he knew without question that he had this special covenant relationship with God. He's my God. and he called him my savior because he knew that this is my only hope for being rescued. God. Nothing else is going to save me. He's my savior. And he knew that God had already promised to be his savior and that conception that he had in his mind of what God is like, he's a rescuing, saving God who has compassion on his children. He'll never reject them or forsake them. He called him the God of my life. Why? Because he just could sense that all of my strength, all of my vitality, all of my energy, my liveliness, my whole life comes from him. I need him to have that. And so you're God of my life. He felt that minute by minute. He needed the living God. He called him the God, God my rock. Why? Because he felt shaky and unstable, and his life was like spinning out of control. He was sinking down into the mud. And when he assessed his situation, it really did seem to him like the only way out of this, the only way he could maintain any kind of stability at all, is if he could rest upon God, who's a rock, for him. He called him God, my stronghold. Why? Because he's got attacks raining down on him, And he's got to run into a shelter, and these attacks are like bunker-busting bombs that will just smash right through any other shelter besides God. And so it really did feel to this guy like the only place he would ever be safe is if he could experience God as a shelter, as a bunker, as a refuge. And so he calls him, God, my stronghold. He calls him God the gladness of all my rejoicing. Why does he call him that? Because he knew that every time he's happy, it's coming from God. He felt that. It's coming from God. He knew there's absolutely no hope of him ever having joy again unless God came and he experienced nearness with God's presence. See, he's not just reciting a list of attributes that he picked up in Sunday school somewhere, Bible college or something. He's talking to God, he's addressing God, and he's just describing how he felt about God. And so all these words come out. A. W. Tozer was right. The most important thing about you is what comes to your mind when you think about God. Your conception of God, what God is like, will determine the trajectory of your life. And it's so personal. I love all the first-person pronouns, all the my's. Look at all these my's. My Savior, my God, the God of my life, God my rock, my Savior, my God. Then Psalm 43, you are God my stronghold, God the gladness of my rejoicing, oh God my God, my Savior and my God. So many my's. I mean this wasn't some detached abstract theoretical theology. It was just intensely personal for him. It's not the Savior. It's not even our Savior. It is my Savior, my rock, my God, my stronghold, the joy of my rejoicing. It's His. He felt that relationship. And here's the thing. Try this. Next time Satan comes to you and tries to convince you that God has forgotten you, He's abandoned you, He's left you, rejected you, try this. Try just saying, okay, okay, for the sake of argument, Let's just assume for a moment God did reject me. God has totally rejected you and forgotten you. Let me ask you a question. Raise your hand if that would bother you, if you were rejected and forgotten by God. How many of you? Okay, so that's bothering you. So let me ask you this. If that were true, I mean, if the thought of being rejected and forgotten by God deeply troubles you, what does that say? It says you care about God. If God really had rejected you and you're not his child, you don't have his Holy Spirit in you, folks, you wouldn't care about God. You wouldn't care if he rejected you, accepted you, liked you, hated you, you wouldn't care about him. People that don't know God, they don't care about God. They don't care about what he thinks. They don't care if they're accepted, rejected, they don't care about that. Because if you don't have the Holy Spirit, you wouldn't have any love for God, you wouldn't have any fear of God, and his approval or disapproval wouldn't matter. The very fact that Satan thinks that he can hurt you by saying, God has forsaken you, proves that you care about whether God forsakes you, which means you love God, you fear God, which is evidence that you belong to God. It's just backfiring on Satan. The very fact that he uses that is proof that he's wrong. If you're one of his children, I mean, if you care about him, that's evidence that you're one of his children. And if you're one of his children, he will never leave you. He will never forsake you or abandon you. Because he's your God. He's your Savior and your rock. So, that leaves us with the question, what about him saying, why have you forgotten me? Why have you rejected me? I mean, where's that coming from? How does that fit? Didn't he say those things? Yeah, he did. He did. Because that's how he felt. It is how he felt. How does that fit together with God is my Savior, God is my rock, God is my God? How do those things fit together? They don't. That's the whole point. That's why he's so perplexed. This doesn't make sense. What he observes God doing in his life doesn't match what he knows to be true about God. They don't fit. He knows that God is a stronghold. He knows he's a savior and a refuge. And then he looks at and makes observations about his life and all the observations, all the evidence is pointing in the exact opposite way. His theology tells him God is a stronghold. His experience and his observations tell him that God has abandoned him and rejected him. His theology tells him God is my savior. His experiences and observations say God has forgotten me. They're not matching. But here's the thing. See, this guy's theology runs deeper than even his own observations of reality. Do you get that? His belief in these attributes of God runs so deep that he just knows it to be true way down deep at the controlling level. And here's what I mean by this controlling level. When I say controlling level, what I'm talking about is things that you believe so deeply that it controls your perspective, it controls all your actions, it controls all your feelings, even without consciously thinking about it. And I think a great example of that is gravity, your knowledge of gravity. Your knowledge of gravity governs and controls the way you act and feel all the time, every day, all through the day. That's why you set your car keys on the desk instead of trying to set them in the air, right? And you're not consciously thinking about gravity, right? You're just sitting down your car keys. Gravity is the last thing on your mind. But it controls how firmly you grip something when you pick it up. It controls how your emotions react when you get too close to a cliff, the edge of a cliff. It controls how you interpret a situation where something is moving through the air and what's going to happen next. It controls all of it. Everything we do all day long takes gravity into consideration even without us consciously thinking about it. You're not going back to your 8th grade science class and figuring out, you know, 8 point whatever meters per second squared acceleration. You're not thinking about gravity at all. But you take it into consideration. You live like it exists. That's what I mean by believing something down at the controlling level. This guy's conception of God as his God and his Savior and the gladness of all his rejoicing He believed that down at the controlling level. So he observes all this evidence, this counter-evidence, pointing the other way, that God has rejected him and forgotten him. But he still talks about God as his savior and as the gladness of his rejoicing. Why? Because you still believe in gravity, even when you see something that seems to be defying gravity. Sometimes you see something up in the air and you're like, That should be falling right now. How is that in the air? I mean, that doesn't make any sense. It seems like that thing is defying gravity. I can't explain that. That thing's defying gravity. But while I'm saying that, while I'm saying that's defying gravity, I'm still behaving as though I believe in gravity, right? I'm still living my life as though gravity exists. I'm still setting my car keys on desk instead of in the air. I'm not... I can't explain that one thing, but my life is still controlled by gravity, and so when I see something that seems to defy gravity, what do I assume? must not be what it seems. It can't be. I can't explain it, but it can't be what it looks like. That's what it means to believe at the controlling level. Our theology needs to run deeper, deeper than our interpretations of life. And one thing that can actually help you with that is music. Music. He talks about Look at 42.8. He says, Sometimes a song is the only thing that can get you through certain nights. I mean, this guy, even though he's beyond miserable, he is way down there. If you were here last week, you know the extremes of his desperation. Even though that's true, in 43.4 he says, I will praise you with the harp. Musical praise. I'm going to sing. When things get really, really dark and your strength is gone, sometimes what you need, you just don't even have the energy to reach, sometimes what you need is just some of the best of God's truths just pre-packaged in a song. That's why Christians sing so much. We're a singing bunch. More than any other religion, we sing. We sing about everything. We even sing about our sin. We sing about our sorrows. We sing about all of it. We sing about blood. We sing about every aspect. Because this is a joyful religion. It's all about joy and God. Horatio Spafford lost all of his kids at sea. They all died. And in response, he wrote a hymn that has soothed troubled hearts for the last 140 years. It is, Well With My Soul. when peace like a river attends my way, and sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Who hasn't been comforted by that hymn in a time of pain? Isaac Watts wrote this one. How long wilt thou conceal thy face? My God, how long the delay? When shall I feel those heavenly rays that chase my fears away? How long shall my poor laboring soul wrestle and toil in vain? Thy word can all my foes control and ease my raging pain. How would the tempter boast aloud if I become his prey? Behold, the sons of hell grow proud at thy so long delay. But they shall fly at thy rebuke, and Satan hide his head. He knows the terrors of thy look, and hears thy voice with dread." There's something about a song sometimes, right? I mean, the truths of God's Word are like a balm to the troubled soul, but sometimes it takes the melody of a song to apply that balm and to rub it in. And so we sing. So how do you enjoy the presence of God, this E in Pep? How do you enjoy His presence? First, you gotta get hungry, and you gotta get thirsty enough to get motivated to seek it by interpreting all the anxieties, all the sorrows in your life as cravings for God's presence. And once you get thirsty enough, you'll start seeking God, and that begins at the altar. Deal with your sins. Deal with it at the altar of the cross. If you're guilty anywhere else, you're done. But at the altar, there's forgiveness. There's always forgiveness. Total forgiveness. So start there. Search your heart. Pray Psalm 139. Search me, O God. Test me. See if there's any wicked way in me. Find if there's any unconfessed sins in your life. Any cherished idols. Anything that your soul thinks it has to have in order to be happy. that if you don't get it, it drives you to sin, you have sinful responses. Repent to those things. And seek forgiveness from God on the basis of the cross. When there's sin in your life that hasn't been dealt with, that just puts an iron door, just bars the door to the presence of God. You can't get there. So begin at the altar. Then, cry out to God in prayer. Pray. A huge aspect of seeking nearness to God is earnest, effectual prayer. That's why the psalmist wrote this psalm. This whole psalm is his effort to seek God. It's a prayer. Pray prayers like this, or like Psalm 63. Make an assessment of your prayer life. Just say, where am I at in my prayer life? And figure out what's the next step. And just take that next step. Don't get crazy. Don't make some kind of a New Year's resolution. I'm going to pray six hours a day, every day. You know you're not going to be able to keep it up. Just take the next step. How can you notch it up one level from where you're at now? That's what God's looking for, right? Progress. Progress. Get thirsty, go to the altar, cry out to God in prayer, then immerse yourself in the light and truth that comes from His Word. Open up your Bible every day, and before you read a single word out of that thing, ask God, open my eyes. Incline my heart send your light. Let me see Show me the way into your presence right now God open my eyes to what's beautiful and delightful About these attributes that I'm gonna see on the pages of your holy word right now Let me see it so that I can love it and and give me the faith to Believe it to down at the controlling level to weigh down deep to really believe it Start at the altar cry out in prayer, seek his light and truth in the scriptures, and then from there, just walk through the day, all through the day, everywhere you go, everything you do, looking at things through the lens of those truths. So that everything you do all day long turns into a little act of fellowship with God. This is what will bring the joy back. And every single time you see something through the lens of those truths, and it's delightful to you, you say, wow, I like that, that's beautiful. Every time you experience one of God's attributes firsthand, And when that happens, make sure you connect the dots in your mind between that joy and God as the source so that your soul understands this delight that I'm feeling right now is because of His presence. That's what it means to experience the presence of God. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for answering this psalmist's prayer and sending forth your light and your truth continue to send it, Lord. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Okay. We've got about seven or eight minutes left here before we dismiss. Any questions about the sermon? Okay. Okay, so you've got a friend who's in a time of need, and they're dry, and you just know they need God. How can you get them to thirst for God? I think just pointing them back to the scripture, pointing them to Psalm 42 and 43, and just say, look, the way you're feeling right now, that's how he felt. And I know to you it seems like you'd be happy if you got this other thing, but he knew the only thing that would make him happy was the presence of God. And it worked. This psalm and Psalm 63 are both great for just pointing someone to that. And a lot of times when you point them to that, I mean you've told them that a million times, but then when they see it in the Bible, sometimes that's when the Holy Spirit will come and bring the light and just open their eyes and then they get it all of a sudden. Okay, so chronologically, what did this guy have as regard to the scriptures? The writer of Psalm 42 would have for sure had the law of Moses. He would have had the five books of Moses, and most likely he would have had other writings after that, including a lot of psalms. I mean, unless this is the very first psalm, which it probably isn't. So I would assume that they would have had a fair amount. As each portion of scripture came along, it was added to what was considered the scriptures. It wasn't, they didn't wait till all the way to the end of the Old Testament and compile it. It was, they kept adding them right on. In fact, some of these Old Testament books, you'll see the last paragraph of one book is the same as the first paragraph of the next book. They just kept tacking them on. So, he would have had the scriptures, the rudimentary aspects, he would have had the book of Deuteronomy, same scriptures that Jesus is always quoting. He would have had all that, but he's also a prophet. So I think he had, in addition to that, direct revelation from God. which made up for what he was missing. Okay. All right. So if we can just play around with the illustration of drinking, where would Coke and beer and Kool-Aid and all that come in? I would say I use any legitimate beverage that God has supplied for us that's refreshing and satisfies thirst. I think fits this same analogy. So I wouldn't say you need to make sure you drink water and not Coke. I wouldn't say that because Because scripture talks about the Coke of their day. Isaiah 55 says, come and drink wine and milk and water. And it's just throwing out these different beverages. So I think the contrast isn't between make sure you drink the right beverage. I think the contrast is make sure you drink something that is a beverage, which represents God. All beverages, I think, represent God. As opposed to something that's not even a beverage. like sawdust or dirt. And that's what our crazy souls want to do. We get thirsty and we say, oh, I'm feeling anxiety. I guess I need the television. Or I guess I need a friend. Or I need this thing or that thing. And we're running after things. And they're all dirt. They're all sawdust. They're things that won't satisfy. They're not even drink. So that's the way I would push the analogy out. So, yeah, if you're not thirsty, does that mean you should just wait to read your Bible until you feel thirsty? No, I think what Scripture tells us is if you don't have the appetite, then taste and see. Taste and see that the Lord is good. And as you taste it, if you have the right attitude, the tasting can stimulate the appetite for more. Now, if you have the wrong attitude, then all it'll do is make you like Scripture even less because you're just doing it as homework or whatever. If you've got the right attitude, then yeah, the tasting can enhance it. Comment? Question? Go ahead, yeah. Okay, so would this be a reference to the Messiah when he says, send forth your light and truth? I would say, yes, indirectly, but not directly. So I don't think it's likely that he had the Messiah in mind specifically when he says, send forth your light and truth, that his original readers would have read that and said, oh, he's talking about send the Messiah. I don't think that's the way it would have been interpreted. I think he's talking about truth about God from what God had revealed. However, ultimately, the ultimate fulfillment of that prayer comes only through the Messiah, right? The Word of God, who God ultimately spoke through. And everything, the first five books, everything that he had as scriptures, all of that is just simply pointing us to the ultimate word from God, which is the Messiah. So yeah, I would say definitely the Messiah is the full fulfillment of this prayer, send forth your light and truth, but I doubt that he actually had that specifically in mind. I don't think the Old Testament people had to know everything about the Messiah in order to properly hope in God. They knew some things about the coming Messiah, but their knowledge was limited. And so God just accepted their faith in what they had been given. Yeah, and I would say what Andrew said there is the hope, until the rest of it catches up, the hope will carry you through the lag time. But I would add to that, this guy didn't even have a hope yet. I mean, he's saying, he's trying to convince his soul, and we'll talk about this next time, he's trying to convince his soul to hope in God, but it's not happening yet. And I think that's what depression is, is a hope deficiency. That's when all your hope leaks out. You get depressed when, I mean, there are some times you can face all kinds of hardship and you're okay, you're fine, because you've got hope. The future looks like, okay, things are gonna, we're gonna get better here. But sometimes hope goes away and you look to the future and there's just nothing, it's just black, as far as the eye can see, just black. And it's not gonna get better tomorrow, it's not gonna get better next month, next year, it's gonna get worse. And that's where you're in depression, you know. So that's kinda how I would define depression, is lack of hope. So this is a fight. for hope. I mean that's the fundamental, the most fundamental way I can describe Psalm 42 and 43 is this is a guy that's lost hope and he is fighting hard to get it back. Exactly, yeah. The reason he needs to remember so much is so that he can get his hope back because if you're already happy you don't need to rely so much on memory. Yeah, yeah, good point.