Let's pray again. Lord, we've been now in this psalm all these weeks, four weeks and two weeks in between preaching about joy. And I think, Lord, of the people in this room who are struggling with a downcast spirit. And even after all this, the darkness isn't lifting. Lord, we just sang all these songs about you as refuge And you're a cleft in the rock where we can hide. You are our shield and our protector. And we sing about you as refuge, but Lord, sometimes we just don't experience you as a refuge. And there are people here in the room, Lord, who are being battered by hardship, and they don't feel the warmth and safety and security of you as refuge yet. They're looking for it. They're striving for it. They're doing just what this psalmist is doing. They're turning to you, but like him, they haven't experienced it yet. And I pray, Lord, for many, now would be the hour. Lord, give a respite from the storm. Let those who are struggling and suffering in this room feel you as their refuge. this hour. Give them a taste of what it's like that they might seek it all the more for your glory. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Think for a second of how many different voices are vying for your attention, screaming for your attention, especially this time of year. Advertisers coming at you from every direction, every medium, talk show hosts, newscasters, fundraisers, preachers, teachers, friends, family, God, all these voices. Some of them you listen to more than others. Most of them you just filter out. But there's one voice that you always listen to. Every time it speaks, it always gets through. When that voice comes up, you listen to it and not only hear it every time, but you take it to heart every time without exception. That voice is yours. Paul Tripp speaks about this, he says this, is no one is more influential in your life than you are because no one talks to you as much as you do. You're in an unending conversation with yourself. You're talking to yourself all the time, interpreting, organizing, and analyzing what's going on inside you and around you. That's really true, isn't it? I mean, you're always talking to yourself. Maybe you're talking to yourself about, why do I feel so tired today? Or maybe you're reliving some conversation that could have gone better. Or you're anticipating a conversation. What will I say? Or you're weighing the pros and cons of a decision. Should I do this? Should I do that? Or you're trying to make sense out of what happened to you. There's just this constant internal conversation with yourself. And that conversation is shaping what you are. It's making you what you're becoming. And so a really good question to ask yourself is always, how is that conversation going? How's the inner conversation going? Tripp goes on, he says, what do you regularly tell yourself about yourself, God, and your circumstances? Do your words to you inspire faith, hope, and courage, or do they stimulate doubt, discouragement, and fear? How wholesome faith-driven and Christ-centered is the conversation that you have with you every day." One of the things that we're learning here in Psalm 42 and 43 is how to improve that inner conversation. These Psalms teach us, especially in times of discouragement and depression, how can you make that conversation more what it should be. Before the holidays came, we were studying through Psalms 42 and 43, one prayer that spans two Psalms, But we didn't quite finish before Christmas, and so we've got one message left today. And you'll remember, if you think back, the working outline that we're dealing with has summed up all the points in these psalms, summed up under three headings. P-E-P, first pray for help. E, enjoy God's presence. And then today we finally get to the last P, preach to your soul. This psalm has a chorus that appears three different times throughout the two psalms. Word-for-word all the same all three times the first time is in chapter 42 verse 5. Why are you downcast? Oh my soul Why so disturbed within me put your hope in God for I will yet praise him my Savior and my God So God is teaching us in these Psalms the right way to carry on this inner conversation You see there in that chorus. He's talking to his own soul. Why are you downcast? Oh my soul put your hope in God So he's talking to himself. This is how you do your the inner conversation when times get hard. Getting your joy back isn't easy. He doesn't give us any quick fix here. Ed Welch has an excellent book on depression. He calls it, the title is fitting, he says it's Depression, the Stubborn Darkness. It's a good title, isn't it? If you've ever struggled with depression, you know it's a stubborn Darkness and you can see that in this song because even after all his work all his prayer you're calling on God remembering the past Preaching to his soul focusing on attributes of God Trying to draw near to the presence of God putting his hope in future grace all of that Everything he's doing here even after all of that look at the very last thing He says in both psalms the last statement in both psalms 42 11 and 43 5. Why are you downcast? Oh my soul It's still downcast He makes progress and then the darkness comes back. But here's the thing. As many times as it comes back, he keeps fighting it. That's what's happening in that closing verse. That's not a discouraging end to the psalm. It's not defeat. It's fighting. He's still fighting. This is a picture of a man who will not give up in the fight for joy. And that's saying something because the number one weapon your depression will use against you is to try to get you to give up. in the fight for joy. You'll be tempted to just stay in your pajamas all day or just park yourself in front of a TV or in bed and just check out of life because you won't have any energy to go on and it's crucial in times like that just keep moving. Take a lesson from this psalmist and keep pressing on, keep moving, don't give up. You know my family we love to go off-roading and a number of times we've gotten into snow or mud or whatever where we're We're losing traction. The wheels are spinning and we're just barely moving. The wheels are spinning really fast, but we're just barely moving along. And everyone is tense because we all know if something makes us stop, we're done. We're stuck, right? But even though the wheels are spinning, if we're moving at all, then there's still hope that sooner or later we'll get to a point where we get a little more traction and then we can get out of there. But boy, as soon as you stop, you're stuck. That's the way our emotions are when we get discouraged. As long as you keep moving, just keep churning, eventually you can get to a spot where you can pick up some more traction and get back up to speed. But if you stop, you'll sink down into the mud and it's going to be very, very hard to get going again. And so we learn from this guy. Don't give up. Keep moving. Do what he did. Get dressed. I mean, sometimes that's the first thing you need to do. Just get dressed when you're discouraged. and put your shoes on and get outside and be around some people. Keep moving. Keep serving your family. Keep serving in your ministry. Don't sabotage yourself by stopping. And when I say sabotage yourself, that comes from the language here. The grammar that he uses is really interesting. All three times when he asks this question, why are you downcast, oh my soul, the word for downcast is in a reflexive, what they call a reflexive form, which means it's action done upon itself. A natural translation would be, why are you casting yourself down, oh my soul? The depressed soul has a tendency to press itself down. Doesn't it? I mean, we do that to ourselves. It's a strange thing. The depressed soul will cling to its own pain and refuse to let it go, refuse to be comforted. like Rachel and Jacob in scripture where they refuse to be comforted. The downcast heart can get to the point where if anyone comes along and tries to offer hope, that hope is rejected. No, no, I'm going to stay in my pain. And God's blessings are just held at arm's length as we cling to our sorrow. We see that here, we see it in other Psalms too. For example, in Psalm 73, 21, the imagery there, it talks about piercing your own heart. My heart stabs itself like a knife, like taking a knife and stabbing itself with its own pain. When we're down, something in us wants to just wallow in the pain and resist the very comfort we're craving, that we're longing for. Holding it off. When you feel that, don't give in to that. No matter how hopeless it feels, keep fighting. Keep moving. Keep the wheels moving, eventually get traction. And the thing that's going to determine whether those wheels stop or keep moving will be that inner conversation. Be careful what you say to yourself. Be careful what you say to yourself. You would be amazed how much damage you can do to yourself with pessimistic thinking, negative outlook, focusing all of your attention on the bad things instead of the good things. Looking down instead of up, that's what causes you to be downcast. You go too long doing that and your emotions take such a pounding that you'll never find your way out of that stubborn darkness. Your feelings will tend to follow your thoughts. Feelings follow after thoughts. So, let's see what we can learn from this psalmist about how to handle our thoughts, how to engage this inner conversation in such a way that it leads us out of the darkness back into joy. Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote a whole book on this psalm, titled Spiritual Depression, an excellent book, and he makes a really interesting observation about how this psalmist takes hold of his own soul and takes control of his thoughts. He says this, quote, I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression, in a sense, is this, that we allow ourself to talk to us instead of talking to ourself. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? End quote. That's a good insight. One of the worst things you can do is to just passively sit and listen to the natural responses that rise up in your soul to suffering. Don't ever trust the voice of your troubled soul. It will lie to you about God. When your soul gets agitated and troubled and is in pain, it will lie to you. A troubled soul can't be trusted. It needs to be spoken to, not listened to. Now, when he talks about don't listen to your soul, talk to yourself, and self talks to self, and self listens, and you can get confused about which one is self and which one is self. Let's name them, okay? Let's name them two different names so we can get it straight. The voice that you should not listen to, let's call that your Eeyore self. And if you don't know who Eeyore is, you need to read more Winnie the Pooh. Because he's the character in Winnie the Pooh who is, he's the donkey that's always so pessimistic and so negative about everything. Lovable character, good-hearted, but still pessimistic and negative. Our natural way of responding to suffering and hardship is grumbling, inner grumbling, inner complaining, negative, pessimistic, inner Eeyore. That's the natural voice that starts talking whenever you suffer. The other voice is, let's call that your eternal self, the part of you that's going to live with God forever, the part of you that can see the big picture. Many of you have just sat and listened to the Eeyore voice for years, and it's destroying you. We just subject ourselves to the winds of our natural responses to suffering, which is just all Eeyore. And we need to stop listening to that and stop listening to Eeyore and start instructing him. Speak to your soul, don't just listen. I mean, if you have to stop and say it out loud, do it. Shut up, Eeyore. Listen to me. I'm going to talk for once. Now, you might hear that and say, Does this mean I just have to, I can never think about my hardships? I just have to pretend they don't? No. No. Not saying that. When painful things happen to you, you need to think about them. You need to process the stuff that happens to you, right? You gotta do that. The point here isn't to just ignore reality and pretend nothing's wrong. Go ahead and think about your troubles. Process your troubles all you want. But there's a way to do it that will drag you into discouragement and depression, and there's a way to do it that will leave your joy intact. So it's crucial that we do it the right way, and here's a rule of thumb. Talk to God about your troubles. Talk to yourself about God. Okay? Talk to God about your troubles. Talk to yourself about God. If something painful happened, process it all you want, but process it with God. Talk to God about it. That's what the psalmist is doing here. And what that'll do is this, when you're talking to God about your troubles, that will keep you from going off the rails and thinking about your trouble without reference to God. Because since you're talking to God, He'll be there in the picture, and you'll see God in your troubles, God in your troubles, and you'll stay in perspective. And they won't drag you down into depression because you'll be constantly reminded, I do have a refuge. Talk to God about your troubles, talk to yourself about God. when your soul is in anguish, that's the time when your prayers are the best. Isn't that the time when they're the most passionate, the most heartfelt, the most zealous and eager? Look at verse 42. He says, These things I remember as I pour out my soul. That's how you pray when you're in trouble. You pour out your soul. If you want to know what that means, just take a look at 1 Samuel We see it in vivid, living color in 1 Samuel 1 where Hannah was pouring out her heart. She was just praying her heart out because of her anguish about not being able to have a child. And in 1 Samuel 1 10 it says, In bitterness of soul, Hannah wept much and prayed to the Lord. And as she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart, but her lips were moving and her voice was not heard. Eliah thought she was drunk and said to her, How long will you keep getting drunk? Get rid of your wine. Not so, my lord, Hannah replied. I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer. I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. She said the reason my mouth was moving without me realizing it was because this wasn't an ordinary prayer, Eli. It wasn't ordinary. I was pouring out my soul. So to pour out your soul in prayer means to pray with such intensity that you're just oblivious to your surroundings. You don't even know your mouth is moving. And nothing else in life matters. And you just can't pray that way every day, can you? You just can't muster that kind of emotion up. But when you're in anguish, you can. This is one of the precious values of being in anguish. You can pour out your soul. It's a figure of speech that's a little bit like what coaches say when they say, leave it all out there on the field, or leave it all on the court. You leave it all there on the prayer closet floor. Pour out your soul. What you do with your pain and your sorrow and your agony of soul when you're suffering, It's going to determine the direction of how you will feel. What do you do when that happens? Are you supposed to just bottle it up? Pretend it's not there? No. No. We do what this guy did. We pour out all our frustrations and disappointments and confusion and fear and worry. Pour it all out. But the key is pour it out to God, not to yourself. Don't pour out your soul to yourself. Pouring out your soul to yourself is just inner grumbling and self-pity, which is the fastest, surest highway to depression. If you talk to yourself about your sorrows, if you pour out your soul to yourself, you're just going to develop this woe-is-me attitude, which will end up making it impossible for you to even see God's blessings, much less enjoy them. So talk to God about your sorrows, talk to yourself about God, why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God. Soul, come on. Eeyore, look up. Look up. And there's two parts here to what he says to his soul. So when you stop listening to Eeyore and you start talking to him, you preach to your soul, what do you say? We talk about this all the time. Preach to your soul. Well, what do you preach to your soul? Well, there's two parts, two things. First, remind yourself of the folly of your discouragement. That's what's happening here in this chorus. Why are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? That question is in the form of a rebuke. He's rebuking his soul. He doesn't wait for an answer. He just says, what are you doing downcast? Put your hope in God. The implication is, you don't have any business being downcast, soul. Given the kind of God we serve, he's a refuge, he's a rock, he's a savior. Being downcast and disturbed is irrational. When your soul becomes downcast, the reason it's happened is because Eeyore has forgotten what God's like. Why be disturbed if you've got a Savior and a refuge? This is kind of like the question that is asked in Micah 4, 9. I love Micah 4, 9. It says, Why do you now cry aloud? Have you no king? Has your counselor perished? That pain seizes you like that of a woman in labor? That's what you can preach to your soul. Soul, what are you doing? Has your savior died? What's the problem? Do you think God is dead? We all go through the dark night of the soul from time to time, but when you go through it, does your reaction make it seem like God has died or does it make it seem like God is more real than ever? Which reaction do you have? Martin Luther was prone to depression and one morning he was particularly down. And so his wife, Katie, comes down the stairs dressed all in black for a funeral. And Luther says, why are you dressed for a funeral? And she says, well, evidently God has died from the way you're acting. She was making the same argument that Micah 4-9 is making and that the writer of Psalm 42 is making to his own soul. You can't have a clear view of what God is and what He's done for you and at the same time be this discouraged and depressed. That doesn't mean it's always sinful whenever a wave of sorrow comes over, but giving into it is a sign that you're losing sight of God. You can't have a clear view of God and fall into this. Emotions are a response to your assessment of the situation, right? That's what emotions are. They're a response to your assessment of the situation. And for someone who has God as his rock, and the gladness of his rejoicing and his refuge, the situation is excellent. Right? So when he rebukes himself for being downcast, it's not just a rebuke, it's a corrective. And that's really key. He's not just rebuking himself. He's not just getting down on himself. He doesn't say, why are you downcast, stupid soul? What's the matter with you? You're such a lame Christian. You're probably not even saved. He's not saying that. The purpose here isn't to just beat up on yourself. Beating up on yourself will only perpetuate more self-pity, which caused the problem in the first place. Preach to yourself, but preach to yourself not about you, about how much you're blowing it. Preach to yourself about what? God. Remind yourself that you have no business being downcast, and then explain why you have no business being downcast. That's why the last sermon, the part three of this series, was so important where we talked about understanding the nature of God, what He's like. God is worthy of our trust. And when you have a right conception of what God is like, it doesn't matter how things look. It doesn't matter how circumstances shake out. You're so confident that God is powerful and God is good, no set of circumstances can shake your faith. So whatever happens to circumstance, Spurgeon had a good statement, he said, When you cannot trace God's hand, you must trust His heart. You see what that's saying there? He's saying, look, when you can't trust His hand is what He does. When I look at what God does, I observe, I can't make heads or tails out of what God is doing. This isn't making sense. God, I don't understand. But I know you. I know you. I know you're good, and I know you're powerful. I know you're in control, and I know that you're for me, not against me. I know that. You can't see what he's doing with his hand, but you know his heart. And so we know, ultimately, what's happening is for my benefit, because you're for me, not against me. Here's something you can try. Resolve to have five thoughts about what's marvelous about God for every one anxious thought you have. Five thoughts about God for every one thought about your troubles. So a discouraging thought comes into your mind, And you say, okay, that's one, so let's do this. Number one, what about God? God is, he's patient. And then you take a few minutes and think about all kinds of examples of how God has been patient with you, and you thank him for that. Okay, there's one. Number two, God is faithful. And so then you just think about, okay, he's been faithful, what does that mean in my life? What are the implications of his faithfulness to me? Okay, number three, God is kind. And then you think through the implications, and just keep going until you hit five. Then you get another discouraging thought. Okay, five more. Five to one ratio. Five thoughts about God for every one thought about your troubles. You know, it's hard to control your thoughts when life gets unfair, isn't it? Injustice happens to you and then your thoughts just start cranking and Eeyore just gets really loud. Right? And you can't, you can't get control. No matter how hard you try to divert your... So, no, I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about that. And I'm putting it out of my mind. And it's out of your mind for like three seconds. Boom! It's right back in. Right? I mean, this happens to me. Maybe I'm the only one. But it just happens. Anytime you struggle with obsessive thoughts, where you're like, okay, I've thought about it enough. Now I need to stop thinking about it. And then you can't. Anytime that happens, here's what I try. The solution to that, I think, is to crowd those thoughts out of your mind. You can't just push them out of your mind. They'll just come right back in. You need to crowd them out with other thoughts. So I try to think of things that will use up all my brain power so that I can't think about two things at once. So one thing I try is if my thoughts are running away and they're obsessing about something, I'll just start going through the alphabet. And I'll think of an attribute of God for each letter in the alphabet. So, just like, A, God is almighty, you know, and then I'll just think about that and thank him for that for a moment, and then B, and then C, then D, and go all the way through the alphabet. And then if I get done, you can't do that and stress at the same time. You just take, you don't have enough brain power. You get done with that, and then if I'm still, anxious thoughts come back, I'll go through again. Different attribute for each letter. That takes even more brain power, second time through. Talk to God. about your troubles. Talk to yourself about God. And the main thing that you need to tell yourself, your eor self, about God is that he is worthy of hope. He's worthy of hope. That's what you see. Why are you downcast on my soul? Put your hope in God, soul. That's what he says to his soul. He focuses on hope. Now let's define hope. Hope is when you feel good because of something that's going to happen in the future. There's something that's going to happen in the future, it's so great, you're so sure that it's going to be good, and you're so sure that it's going to happen, that you already feel good because of it. Now, if something's coming in the future and you don't already feel good about it, it's probably because you're not totally sure that it's going to happen, or you're not sure that you're going to like it. But if you're sure you're going to like it, and you're sure it's going to happen, you already feel good thinking about it, and that anticipating, that good feeling you have anticipating, that's hope. That's what Scripture's talking about, hope. And you need that to live. You need that to keep going. That's fuel to keep you moving. And what depression is, is lack of hope. It's just when your hope just dries up and there's nothing. And very often, that's caused by placing your hope in something that ends up disappointing you. And it sounds like that's what this guy did. the psalmist here had slipped into putting his hope into being treated fairly. And so when he got treated unfairly, he got discouraged. He got downcast. He had his hope in people telling the truth about him, and so when they went around lying about him, he was downcast. Maybe his hope was in his plans going well and things working out according to the way he expected, and when they didn't, it got him down. See, we put our hope in all kinds of things that are not worthy of our hope. because they let you down. You say, how do I know if something is worthy of hope or not? Very easy. If something is unworthy of your hope if it might let you down. Someone is unworthy of your hope if he or she might let you down. Never put your hope in anything that might let you down. It's perfectly okay to look forward to it, perfectly okay to enjoy it, just don't put your hope in it. You say, how do I know if my hope's in it? Well, if you lose it and you find yourself downcast as a result, it's because your hope was in that thing and not in God. And that's exactly what this guy is discovering. Some things went wrong in his life, he got downcast as a result, and so he realizes, oh, I've got a hope problem. And so he preaches to his soul about hope. He says, soul, why are you downcast, Eeyore? Put your hope up there. Put your hope in God. Turn to Lamentations 3, because if you want to see this principle just in living color, you'll see it in Lamentations 3. The writer of Lamentations had full-blown clinical depression. I mean, if you ever want to see somebody that is absolutely at the bottom, in fact, if you ever want to be depressed, just read Lamentations, the first half of Lamentations 3, you wanna die at the end of it. He's so miserable. He's just talking about, oh God, you're just using me for target practice and I'm miserable and this is horrible. And he's talking to God about his troubles. But he is incredibly depressed until verse 21. This guy had zero hope until verse 21. All of a sudden, verse 21, he's got hope. He suddenly has it. After all that misery, something happens at verse 21 and now he's got hope. How did he go from abject depression to suddenly having this hope. Did his circumstances change? No. No. They're the same. Here's what happened. The only thing that happened was he called something to mind. Look at verse 19. He's talking about his troubles still. He says, I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them and my soul is downcast within me. But then verse 21, here it comes. Yet this I called to mind and therefore I have hope. Wow. What did you call to mind, Jeremiah? Look at verse 22. Here's what he called to mind. He called that to mind and it gave him hope. In the depths of his depression, he got to thinking about God's faithfulness, his love, and his creativity especially. And now he's got something to look forward to. He can look to tomorrow. Instead of blackness, he's got something to look forward to. He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm anticipating something good. It makes me feel good. What? What was this thing that he was looking forward to that's making him feel good? It was whatever this marvelous, loving, faithful, creative God was going to dream up for his future. He didn't know what it was. He just knew what God was like. See, you don't have to know what God is going to do to fix your problem. You don't have to know what He might do. You don't have to be able to think of it. You only have to know what kind of God is going to do it. He's creative. He thinks of new stuff, right? Isn't it true over the last year? I mean, just think over the last... over the year 2015. Isn't it true that God gave you some gifts that you... this one year that He's never gave you your whole life previous? You never got those blessings. You got them for the first time just this year. Hasn't He given you new insights into His Word that you just never found before this year? Maybe a friendship that's reaching a level of depth that it never had before? Something in your family? Sunsets, sunrises that are different than any ones you've seen before? Appreciation of new foods, new restaurants you found? Most of us, probably, if we wrote down every single time that happened, or you get a new blessing in 2015, it would be reams of paper, but most of us forget 99% of it. 2015 was really one of the most painful years of my life, and yet it was loaded with new expressions of God's love. I was just sitting thinking of all the new blessings He gave me. A year ago, I just rewind a whole year, when I turned 47, if you would have asked me then, what new thing might God give you in 2015, I would have been stumped. I would have been at a loss. I was like, I don't know. I think I've seen it all. And yet, there were countless new graces that came to me from heaven all through the year. And that's the way it's going to be forever. Forever. That's why heaven is never going to get boring because God's mercies are new. Every morning He's creative. You say, well, how can I get excited about what's coming in 2016 if I don't know what it's going to be? Well, the joy doesn't come from knowing what it might be. The joy comes from knowing what God is like. The writer of Lamentations didn't say, well, I'm miserable, and I'm depressed, and I'm discouraged, and downcast, and yet I have this hope because I thought of this great thing that God might do. No. He didn't think of anything specific. He just thought of what God is like, his nature, his character. He called to mind faithfulness, love, mercy, and creativity of God. And just thinking about that made Jeremiah realize blessing is around the corner. It has to be, given what he's like. You don't have to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You just need to think about the nature of the God of the tunnel. And you'll know there's going to be light. My son Josiah has a gift of giving. And he loves to give and he's good at it. So when I get a Christmas present from him, I know two things. Number one, it probably won't be anything that was on my list. And number two, I'll probably like it better than anything that was on my list. Because he thinks of better stuff than I think of. He's just really generous and really creative. So when you get a gift from someone like that, after you've gotten several of them, after a while, over the years, you start to get excited just seeing the box, right? You just see the box like, wow, I can't wait. I can't wait. And the fact that I can't imagine what's going to be in it makes it even more exciting. Because you know the character of the giver. When you look at your future, and it's not bringing you any joy, It's because you've forgotten what God is like. Focus on His character, and the more specific and detailed your understanding of His character, the better. Don't just stay general. If you say, well, God is loving, that's too general. That probably won't do it. Jeremiah is more specific than that. He doesn't just look at love. He looks specifically at the creativity of His love. His compassions are new every morning. Have you ever stopped to appreciate the fact that it was God who invented mornings? Aren't you glad there's days? When God created the world, Genesis 1 makes a point that he divided time into days, which gives us all a new start and a new beginning every 24 hours, which we need, right? Can you imagine if you didn't have that? Can you imagine if time just droned on in a line, just unending, incessant line? You could never say, well, I'll try again tomorrow. I'll start fresh tomorrow morning. It'd just go. You'd get behind. You'd never get caught up. God is a God of new beginnings and fresh starts and He built into the very creation that principle of... so we have days and weeks and months and years. Zephaniah 3, 5 says, The Lord is righteous. He does no wrong. Morning by morning He dispenses His justice and every new day He does not fail. That's what Jeremiah called to mind. He called to mind God's creativity and the way that He blesses His people. and it gave him hope. If a God like that is in charge of my future, I'm good, right? I'm set. I got something to look forward to. I can't imagine what, but I got something to look forward to. The gift is wrapped up, it's still in the box, I can't say, but I know what he's like. I'm excited about that gift. So Jeremiah, he doesn't try to comfort himself by minimizing his suffering. He didn't say, well, at least this didn't happen, you know, at least I didn't get mugged. He didn't say that. He saw his suffering for what it was. He acknowledged it's real suffering. But he was comforted in the midst of that suffering by turning his attention away from those circumstances back up to the character of God, from whom flows an inexhaustible fountain of creative kindness. So if you struggle with depression, spend what little energy you have focusing on the goodness of God. Not only does God have infinite wisdom, to guide you in life, and infinite resources to provide for you in life, and infinite knowledge to teach you, and infinite mercy to care for you, and infinite compassion to comfort you, and infinite love to restore you, and infinite strength to protect you. But on top of all that, He's given you great and precious promises for the future that are wonderful and beyond imagination or comprehension. So when you preach to your Eeyore soul, What do you preach about? Talk about what God is like and what the implications are for your future. And while you're at it, talk about what God was like in your past. Think back and invoke gratitude. One of the iron bars that will lock you into depression forever is ingratitude. But thankfulness can awaken joy because it enables you to enjoy God's past goodness again now. Remember when we started this study, we talked about the importance of the three streams of joy that all three have to be flowing in order for your life of joy to have enough flow. The stream from the past and the present and the future. Those three tributaries feeding your river of joy. And if one of them gets blocked up, then the river dries up and when the rocks fall down, they'll block the whole thing. One of those streams, if it gets choked off, you won't have enough joy. the one from the past, the thing that will clog up the flow of joy from your past is ingratitude. It doesn't matter how much God has blessed you in the past, how many wonderful, delightful experiences you've had in the past, ingratitude will make you blind to all of it. You won't be able to remember it. It won't bring you any joy. Ingratitude makes you remember only the hard things and forget the wonderful things. When the psalmist looks back into his past for joy, he specifically mentions gratitude. Look at verse 4, Psalm 42, 4. These things I remember as I pour out my soul, how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God with shouts of joy and what? Thanksgiving among the festive throng. That's all part of the joy. The connection between Thanksgiving and joy is just everywhere in Scripture. As an aside, take a little rabbit trail here. Notice that when he appears, or when he remembers God's past goodness, it's in the context of fellowship. And this is another connection between joy and fellowship that you'll see a lot in scripture. These things I remember as I pour out my soul how I used to go with the multitude. See that? Leading the procession to the house of God with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. The procession, the throng, the multitude. It was with God's people. His joy was all wrapped up with fellowship. When you get depressed, you don't have the energy to deal with social interaction, typically, and so the natural response to depression is to withdraw from people, right? This is what we do. We just back away. But all that does is make the depression worse. It makes us more susceptible to worse depression. Remember Elijah? He ran 100 miles, then he left his companion, he went all by himself, a day's journey into the desert and then that's when he collapsed under the broom tree and asked God to take his life. And God first showed him his voice and then sent him back to be with people and to be back in ministry. Going off by yourself isn't going to help. You need to get around people who have enough energy to point you back to God when you don't have the energy to do it for yourself. Paul had overflowing joy I've been reading Philippians. We decided to go a little different direction. The next book we're going to do is Philippians. And so I've been reading Philippians, and the thing I've noticed about joy is Paul's incredible joy. I mean, he's in prison, horrible circumstances, and he's overflowing with joy. And he connects it with two things, fellowship and gratitude for that fellowship. Philippians 1.3, he says, I thank my God every time I remember you. There's the gratitude. And all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your fellowship in the gospel. He was so happy with being with the saints as they did what God called them to do and he was part of it. God gives us joy in large measure through his people. If you want to have a really strong, really robust joy, pay attention to the joy of the people around you during worship. When we come together in our corporate gatherings, Just pause periodically through the morning and thank God for some delightful characteristic that you see in... Just look around. Just look around. And just spot some people that have some really cool characteristics that God had built into them. And just be happy about that. Just thank God for it. It's amazing how much joy this will give you. I really have some precious memories of doing that here just over the last nine years with all of you. Times when I've just seen you walk in the hall. I just spotted someone in the parking lot. I hear a voice, and it'll be singing, and I'll just hear a voice somewhere singing behind me, and it just, my soul just fills up with love for that person, and it brings joy. I have so many memories of just the hundreds of times I just sat in that row there and just listened, and your voices just cascaded over my troubled soul, and the problems that seemed so horrible on Saturday just sort of, melt away and give way to hope. In fact, I had that experience just this morning. You guys are really singing this morning. Typically, it's first service that does that. You guys did it today. It was great. And it just fills me with joy. Let the joy of fellowship feed your memory. Let it lodge itself in your memory. File these experiences away in your memory in places that are really accessible and easily and readily accessed. Sometimes I'll remember things, you know, just a feeling of being used by God in ministry here or I'll remember the times at the Lord's table, you know, when God spoke in a special way to me like a couple months ago when Andrew was talking about Jesus praying for me and it just really, really touched me. I'll remember these special times. I remember the supernatural times in this room. I think of the souls that have passed from death to life in this room. I think of the grace that's just poured out over people to bring spiritual strength and health when people are all using their spiritual gifts in this place. The moments when God opens someone's eyes for the first time to see some great truth from His Word. So many times thinking about those memories have just melted the icicles on my heart when I've been downcast. And if you want to know the secret to having memories of amazing moments of fellowship with God's people, here's the key. Here's the secret. Have lots of moments of fellowship with God's people. Have lots of them. Sooner or later, there'll be some amazing ones. assuming you have the right attitude. If you don't have the right attitude, then you'll never have amazing ones. But that's where joy comes. There's a reason why the people in Acts 2.42 devoted themselves, from day one of the church, devoted themselves to the fellowship. And then they had joy. When the writer of this psalm slips into the darkness of depression, he fights for joy by remembering times of delightful fellowship with God's people. You've got to get around I know when you're depressed, you don't feel like it. You just want to lock yourself up. But get around God's people. Okay, that's the end of this rabbit trail about fellowship. Let's get back to the other part, and that is gratitude. Letting gratitude build your joy. Turn your heart toward thanksgiving to God. Just think about what God has done in the past. It requires some discipline, right? Think about it. That old phrase, count your blessings, that's not a trite saying. That's what we need to do. How many blessings has God given you? How many good meals has God given you in your lifetime? How many? How many breaths of air has He supplied for you? Has God supplied you with any money, any possessions in your lifetime? How many times in your lifetime has God caused the sun to rise and shine on you? How many of his raindrops or snowflakes that he sent has benefited you in some way? How many people has God given you to love in your lifetime? How many days has God spent watching you sin and just patiently waiting for you to repent? Has God provided forgiveness for you for your sins? How many of your sins has God forgiven? How many? What did it cost him to provide that forgiveness for your sins? Isn't it true that God adopted you? If you're a believer, He adopted you into His own family? Didn't He give you a spiritual gift when that happened? Didn't He give you a calling in His church? Didn't He pour out grace to you through other people's spiritual gifts? Hundreds of other people's spiritual gifts pouring out so you're benefiting from their spiritual gifts all the time? Didn't He pour out grace to you through His scriptures ever since you've been a believer? Didn't He pour out grace to you just from His creation? Don't you have the Holy Spirit living inside you, working in you to conform you to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ every day? And didn't God give you countless great and precious promises, and aren't those promises all yes and amen in Christ? Hasn't He promised you guidance? and provision, and spiritual riches, and spiritual fruit, and love, and peace, and protection, and intimacy, and friendship, and rewards? All of that? Hasn't He blessed you in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ? Didn't He say that He is going to wipe away every tear from your eye someday and give you a seat at His table and lavish you with everlasting, exuberant, rich, deep, profound, perfect joy forever? and total deliverance from sin forever? And the privilege of living with God face-to-face forever? If He didn't hesitate to give you His own Son, what good gift would He ever withhold from you? Gratitude enables you to enjoy the good things God has done again. You enjoyed them when they happened, you can enjoy them again now. through gratitude. The opposite of that is self-pity. When you fall into self-pity, you turn a blind eye to God's blessings. You focus only on the things that are going wrong. You don't see the blessings. Self-pity will block off all three of those streams. You won't have past, present, and future. You won't have any joy. But this guy, he hasn't given in to self-pity. The writer of this psalm is He is pouring out lament about his troubles. He's talking to God about his troubles, but he's not giving in to self-pity. And the reason I know that is because when he thinks back in his memory, he doesn't just remember hardships. He remembers good things. He remembers blessings. That's one way you can tell you haven't given in to self-pity. When your soul gets infected with self-pity, it spends most of its time just staring at troubles. And when it thinks back in the past, when it pulls stuff off the warehouse of memories, it's always negative things, always painful, bad things, and very little time considering blessings. This guy's not doing that. He's still saying things like he said in verse 8, "...by day the Lord directs His love, at night His song is with me." He's still saying things like that. There's a huge difference between self-pity and godly sorrow. Sorrow is appropriate. It's appropriate. When you're hurting, it's appropriate to be sad. Godly sorrow recognizes hardship for what it is and weeps, and that's okay. But self-pity will take hardship as the only thing it sees. and will ignore God's blessings. It's not necessarily a sin to feel down emotionally or to have waves of sorrow or depression or darkness come over you. That's natural. There's nothing innately sinful about that. The key is, when that happens, also keep God's blessings in view because His blessings are greater. Then you can be like Paul, struck down but not destroyed. Self-pity just basically gives up on the fight for joy. That's what happens. The bias of your soul, here's something you might want to mark down. The bias of your soul is exposed by the objects of its memory. When you think back, what do you think of? That shows the bias of your soul. When you go to the warehouse where your memories are stored, what are you pulling off the shelf? Is it all things that are just going to further your self-pity? or are there memories that will spark gratitude and love for God? You can see which direction your bias goes by what you remember. Take time to think about what God has done in the past, and then take the time to connect the dots between those blessings and God's love for you. So you didn't just say, oh, I enjoyed that. Oh, I enjoyed that. No. That came from his love. That was a gesture of his love. Connect the dots in your mind, and then give thanks. Take those things off the shelf one by one, those blessings, and just give thanks for each one. In fact, that's not a bad routine. If you're stuck in the darkness of despair and being downcast and discouraged, depressed, increase your gratitude. Make it a routine in your day. One thing I used to do when I was struggling with discouragement is I would, every night before bed, I had a habit where I would thank God for one marvelous thing He did in the previous 24 hours, one marvelous thing He did in recent years, One marvelous thing that he did over the past 2,000 years in history, before I was born, and one marvelous thing that he did in Scripture, in biblical history. And each night, I would think of something different for each one, just to increase my gratitude. And it helps. It does. It helps. So, if you're fighting for joy, and even after all these sermons and everything, and the darkness still hasn't lifted, don't give up. Don't give up, beloved. Keep moving. Keep moving. Don't grow weary in well-doing because at the proper time you will reap a harvest if you don't give up. Galatians 6, 9. Persevere. You know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. It feels in vain. It's not. 1 Corinthians 15, 58. Don't lose heart. Even if you're wasting away on the outside, remember inwardly you can be renewed day by day. Your light momentary troubles are achieving for you. and eternal weight of glory that far outweighs all of your troubles. Fix your eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. The principles that we've learned in the psalm, they will work. They will. They'll work in God's timing, but they will work. Draw near to God, the joy will come. The closer you approach to His presence, the more the darkness will give way to light. So don't give up fighting. Fight this. All six of them. joy-killing pitfalls that we need to watch out for. And I'll just leave you with these. Just watch out for these. Sin in your life that isn't dealt with. That'll cause depression. Self-pity and inner grumbling. Ingratitude. Listening to yourself instead of talking to it. Pouring out your soul to yourself instead of to God. And placing your hope in the wrong things. That's what'll kill your joy. So if you really want your joy back, Replace each one of those things. Instead of sin being undealt with, confess your sin. Go to the altar. Confess your sin, repent of it, and He'll forgive you. Deal with it. Reject every trace of self-pity or inner grumbling. Fill up your life with thanksgiving and gratitude to God. Make it a routine. Talk to God about your troubles and to yourself about God. And put your hope in God alone. Never in things that can disappoint. Let's pray. Father, we praise your name because of what you're like. Because the fact that just contemplating your character is all we need for joy. And yet, just that we find so difficult. Give us the grace, Lord. Please, help those that are still struggling. Give them glimmers of hope. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Okay, so at what point are you running the risk of ignoring the problem instead of just dealing with it? You're just trying to, okay, I've got this problem. I don't want to think about it. I'll just hang out with some friends. And you never really deal with it. That's the part about go ahead and talk to God about your troubles. So you do need to think about your troubles. because you have to make decisions about how to handle them. The rule of thumb is think about your trouble only as much as you need to think about it in order to respond the right way. Once you get past that and you can't do anymore, you can't respond anymore, that's when you need to stop thinking about them. So for decision making, you think about them. Once you've done enough thinking to do your decision making, that's when you put them aside because there's no value in continuing to think about them. Okay, so the question is, is depression itself sin? It very often is. I can't go to the point of saying a hundred percent that it is because of the different definitions of depression. Because we do know that sorrow is not necessarily sin. Paul said, struck down but not destroyed. The struck down part I don't think is sin. And so there's a sense in which you can be struck down and not be in sin. Jesus was in great anguish the night before the crucifixion. Tremendous anguish. And yet he didn't cross over into sin. And so he wept at Lazarus' tomb and he wasn't guilty of sin. So there can be a lot of sorrow. and sin not present. But where you're putting your joy in the wrong thing, you're not trusting in God, your focus is off, all those kinds of things, yeah, that stuff needs to be repented of. And that's an excellent word, excellent exhortation. When we do the thing about deal with the sin in your life, go to the altar, sometimes the sin is just the fact that it's self-pity. You've fallen into self-pity. you've forgotten God's promises, or you're rejecting what God is doing in your life. It's one of the most common sins that we commit when we suffer. We reject what God is doing. No! No, I won't accept this. And that's why 1 Peter says, humble yourself under the mighty hand of God. Don't fight it, don't wrestle against it, don't squirm around in his arms, just accept what he's doing. Sometimes the best, I can tell you, this is going to sound odd maybe to you, The best luck I've had at getting out of depression is willingness to accept what God is doing. So I'm just going along and I feel just down, and I feel like, man, I've got to get out of this. I've got to get rid of this bad feeling. And that becomes my obsession. I need to feel better. And I won't accept the fact that I'm suffering emotionally right now. And sometimes I'm just like, OK, God. If you want me to suffer emotionally right now, fine. I'll suffer emotionally. I'll feel good in heaven long enough for now. If that's what you have for me, I'll accept that. I'm content. I'm still going to fight for joy, but I'm not going to obsess about it to the point where I'm panicked if I can't get it. I'm making an idol out of feeling better. And I've been guilty of that. I had to repent of that. So, there's a lot of subtle sins we sometimes need to repent of. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that can help too. Just tell yourself, this is just temporary. This isn't forever. Yeah, that's true. You let your emotions take a pounding in one area and it'll affect the rest of your life. It's so important that we don't just say, okay, I need to just endure my job. I just need to make it through. I just need to... That attitude is an attitude that says, I can't find any joy in this job. I just have to endure it. And that's just never true. It's never true. Whatever job God has called you, wherever he's placed you, there's joy to be found in that task, in that job. You have fellowship with God in that job, and it will produce joy, even though it's hard and painful and people mistreat you and all the rest. So don't just say, well, I'm going to have as much joy as I can ramping up to when I get to work at 8 o'clock, and then starting at 5, I'll start recovering. No. No. We need to make every moment of the day a little act of fellowship with God as much as possible, and derive joy from whatever God has called us to do, if for no other reason that He's called us to do it.