Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 42, emphasizing the deep longing for God's presence during hard times. He highlights the psalmist's honest questions and the importance of remembering past joys and God's faithfulness, encouraging believers to seek God earnestly even in silence. The main point is that our struggles can lead us closer to God, and we should preach hope to ourselves, trusting that God's presence will bring renewal and joy, much like rain awakens dormant seeds in a desert.
Housekeeping and Introduction
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Amen. Great job singing, young people. If you have a child who wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, they can be dismissed this time. I think we could learn a lot from these young people as they sing to the Lord, unafraid, unashamed, just belting it out. I love it. I think it's great.
As we think of Jesus and the times where the children came to him, he said,
Suffer not to let the children come to me because it's of the childlike faith that we have when we come to Jesus.
I think as we get older, sometimes we abandon that childlike faith when oftentimes we need to remind ourselves and go back to that and believe as a child would believe and trust the Lord in those times.
It would do us good and it would do us well to do that. Psalms 42 is where we're going to be at. Brody this morning read Psalms 43. Psalms 43 is the second part of Psalms 42.
It's the conclusion of Psalms 42 and I'm not going to preach it today, but I'm going to preach Psalms 42 this morning. It starts out with a familiar passage, a familiar song. We actually have sang this song before, this song before in churches,
As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you. And this is where this psalm comes from. This is where that song gets its words from. And it's often good to sing scripture.
It's good to sing what the Lord has for us. And anytime we can sing the Bible, it's a great thing. So if you found your place there, Psalms 42 will stand out a reading of God's word.
Nine verses this morning, or I'm sorry, 11 verses this morning that we'll read. And we'll jump into the message this morning. It says, As the deer longs for flowing streams, so I long for you, God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I come and appeal before God?
My tears have been my food day and night. While all day long people say to me, where is your God? I remember this as I pour out my heart. How I walked with many, leading the festival precision to the house of God with joyful and thankful shouts.
Why, my soul, are you dejected? And why are you in such turmoil? Put your hope in God, for I will still praise Him, my Savior and my God. I am deeply depressed.
Therefore, I remember you from the land of Jordan and the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to the deep in the roars of the waterfall. All of your breakers and your billows have swept over me. The Lord will send His faithful love by day. His song will be with me in the night. A prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about in sorrow because of the enemy's oppression? My adversaries taunt me as if crushing my bones. While all day long they say to me, where is your God? Why must my soul,
I'm sorry, why my soul are you so dejected? And why are you in such turmoil? In this last phrase, put your hope in God, for I will still praise Him, my Savior and my God. Father, we love you. We thank what you've done for us. Thank you for the reading of your word.
I pray that you help us as we preach your message this morning, that you would help us to prepare our hearts even for communion coming up, that we would have clean hearts and clean hands for that. In your name we pray. Amen. Man, you can be seated.
One of my favorite authors of all time that I read after is C.S. Lewis. C.S.
Lewis is a great writer, someone whose words have impacted us through so many years. We get the Chronicles of Narnia from that and the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe and several different things that he's written. But not a lot of people know about C.S.
Lewis in some of the personal sorrow that he had to go through. And I want to share one of those stories this morning. Many people don't know that he experienced the sorrow later in his life, in his later years.
But years and years of bachelorhood, most people would know that he wasn't married until later in life. He fell in love with an American writer named Joy Davidman. Their love was intense,
but it was brief. Not long after their marriage, Joy was diagnosed with cancer. And for a time, it seemed like she might recover. But the cancer later returned and it took her life.
Lewis was devastated. He watched the love of his life for just a small portion of time, not a very long portion of time, be taken from him and die in his arms. In the wake of her death, Lewis didn't write fancy or any theology.
He wrote brutally and honestly in a journal called A Grief Observed. In it, he said this, Where is God?
Go to him when you are desperate, when all other help is in vain. And what do you find?
A door slammed in your face and the sound of the bolting and maybe even the double bolting of the lock inside. He was grieved to his soul and he was trying to find God. And in his desperation, he was just struggling in his lament.
Lewis, a man who defended Christianity publicly, found himself weeping, even doubting. And in private, he was aching for God. And yet through the pain, he eventually found his footing again.
It took a process for him to get through this, not by pretending that everything was okay.
He went through a wrestling process with God that was hard, that was brutal, that most of us look at and say, I don't want to have any part of that.
And Psalms 42 invites us in to not have fake smiles, not to have shallow answers, but real, raw faith in the middle of sorrow.
Helping Hard Times
I've titled the message today, Helping Hard Times, because we are going to go through hard times. We're going to go through struggles and difficulties and pain.
And when your soul is cast down, when your life is cast down and you begin to wonder where God is, the psalmist in this passage sort of gives us the words, almost like we'll put it like this.
He gives us permission to sort of question and begin that path forward to say, God, where are you at? What are you doing? How is this impacting my life? And how am I going to get through this? It's a process. It's a struggle.
But I believe the psalmist gives us some help, especially near the end of this psalm. And so the first one is this, a deep longing for God. In verses one through three, he cries out and says, my soul thirsts for God.
This is a deep longing to be near someone, to be with someone, and the deep longings that happen in our life.
I've shared a little bit of our story before in the past. I may have shared this before here, but when me and Allison began dating the end of our freshman year of college, going into our sophomore year of college that summer, we began liking each other.
And I went to her father, and I know her mom listens, and so she can verify this. But I went to her father, Glenn, and I said, Glenn, I really like your daughter.
I want to talk to her this summer. And he said, okay, tell you what, I'll let you talk to her, but you can talk to her one day a week for 15 minutes a day. I was like, okay, so I can talk to her every day for 15 minutes?
No, no, pick a day of the week, and you can talk to her 15 minutes in that one day and no more. I said, what about emails? Nope. What about text messages? This is one text. Nope, none of that. Only phone calls 15 minutes one day a week.
And so I got whatever day it was, Tuesday or Thursday, we were going to call, and I had a little timer set up on the table. And as soon as she picked up, I hit the timer button.
And I would talk to her for 14 minutes and 30 seconds, and she would just listen the whole time. Like she asked like one question in this process, and then I would talk for like 14 minutes.
And then as soon as it got to 14 minutes and 30 seconds, I said, all right, got to go. Love you. Bye.
We didn't say I love you yet. I say love you now. All right, got to go. Bye.
Hung up. Hung up the phone, and summer came to an end. I mean, I was longing to be with Alice. I was longing to be around her. These 15 minutes were like painful.
And so we got back to Arkansas, and we got to see each other. We got back to college, and I went up to Glenn, and I said, Glenn, I said, thanks for letting me talk to your daughter. I did my best. Keep it under 15 minutes. And he goes, Green Beret, military guy.
Grab him by the hand. He said, you did good, son. I checked your phone records. And in that moment, I was like, whoa, what's going on here?
Like, this is the guy that's going to eventually one day be my father-in-law. But what it was was that in that moment, in that space of not talking long, it drew me closer to want to have a relationship, want to be closer to Allison.
Longing for God
And this is what happens in our relationship with the Lord.
It should be that when we don't talk to him for an extended period of time, we are longing to get back closer to who he is and what he's done for us.
And so oftentimes, we go days and weeks and months without talking to the Lord, and there's not a longing for us to get back to him. So what does this look like? The first is this, a thirsting for his presence. The psalmist opens up with this imagery.
He opens up with this picture that he's painting by saying, a deer panting for the water. This isn't just a casual thirst.
This isn't, oh, I'm thirsty, I'm going to go get a little bit of water, and I'm going to quench the little bit of thirst. This is something or someone that is in survival mode.
This is the deer, if he doesn't get water in the next couple of minutes, he's going to die. It is a survival mode type of desperation.
I am at the moment where I am so deprived of whatever this is, water, food,
spiritual water, spiritual food, that I've got to get to the Lord, that I've got to get this moment in my life, because if I don't, my soul is going to die. And they say, thirsting of, I have got to get to this point.
I've got to get this person that is so essential in my life. I want you to imagine a person lost in the desert,
going about the desert and being able to be going out there for days on end, and they haven't seen water, and they're beginning to dehydrate, and they're beginning to literally die in front of them. And on the horizon, they see a lake of water.
Their soul would be so thirsty for that water. Their physical body would literally find the energy to get to that moment to get that water. And oftentimes, our life, we can feel spiritually that same way.
We can feel spiritually dehydrated that we just need God, that we just need to get to Him so that He can spiritually pour back into us. And the question I want to ask us this morning is, when is the last time that you were so desperate for God? Not out of routine.
Not out of, in the morning we get up and we read our Bible, or at night we read our Bible and we pray with our kids or our spouse. Not out of routine, but out of a soul-level need of saying, God, I need you in my life.
I need you to have your presence in my life that I'm thirsting after you for my very existence of life.
Desperation for Spiritual Nourishment
When's the last time we felt that desperate for God? It may have been a tragedy that happened in our life.
It may have been something or an event that happened where it drew us to the Lord.
With the natural disasters that are going on right now, with the flooding in various different states, and you can look at conspiracy theories and whatever you want there, but there is a thirsting for help. People are having their homes wiped away, as we saw just last year with Helene.
People are having their livelihood taken from everything they've known, and they are thirsting for help. They are thirsting for something or someone to come in.
And this is that same desperation of saying, God, I need you in my life. I'm so desperate for you.
Not only is there a thirsting for His presence, but there's a hunger for His voice.
It continues on by saying that my tears have been my food.
My tears have been my food. This is showing both physical but also emotional depletiation of our life. We are so physical depleted, we're so spiritually depleted, that the tears have literally began to give us comfort.
He starves not only physically, but spiritually for comfort, for answers, and ultimately for the presence of God to be in his life. This last couple of weeks ago, we were at youth camp, and the guy that was speaking, Stuart,
opened up for a question and answer time. He said, any young people or adults that want to stay after, you can ask me any question.
I may not give you an answer, but I want you to give the opportunity to ask a question. And one young girl over to my right, I stayed after for a little while, she raised her hand and she said, Stuart,
how can I know the voice of God? And he said, this is week four or five of camp. He said, every week, someone your age, and it's been a girl, has asked that exact same question. How do we know the voice of God? I'm hungering after the voice of God. I'm hungering after knowing who God is.
How do I know it's the voice of God? He gave like a 15-minute answer. I'm going to condense it to like 30 seconds. He said, I want you to start by taking everything that's your fears and everything that's your affirmations,
everything that gets you glory when you hear it, everything that you're afraid of, and I want you to put it on the altar of God.
And I want you to say, God, I want you to take these, and if my deepest, darkest fear, his deepest, darkest fear, he's a martial artist guy, he said, my deepest fear is one day I come home around
the bend to my house, and there's police officers in my house, there's ambulances there, I come in, my wife has been pulled out on a stretcher, my kids have been pulled out on a stretcher, and they look at
me and they say, someone broke into your house and they killed your children, and they killed your wife. As a martial artist who can kill someone with my pinky, that's my deepest fear, is I wasn't there to protect my family.
And when I come home, I mentally say, God, if that happens tonight, I'm giving it to you.
And he begins talking through this, he says, as I begin laying that down, he said, now begin to strip away all that you have, all that's in yourself and all that's around you, and when you get to what's left, and then you go to the Bible and you read God's word,
that's the voice of God speaking to you. It's not your own mind, it's not your own fears, it's not your own aspirations, it is God speaking through his word to you.
And oftentimes it's that voice of God that we hunger for, and we say, God, I just need your voice, I just need you to speak to me again. I feel like when I read my Bible, it's just words on a page.
God, I want them to not be words on a page, but something that encourages my soul, that feeds my soul, and it's a hunger for his voice. And then there's this hurting in the silence.
It goes on to the end of this verse three by saying, where is your God?
The psalmist writes down this question of, where's your God? It's almost like it's a taunt from others, but it's a cry from within.
It's other people saying, hey, where is your God? You're going through hurt, you're going through trials, you're going through tribulations. Why would your God allow this? But it's also from within your own soul, you're saying, God, where are you at? God, what are you doing?
Why are you doing this to me? Why are you absent in this moment, and I feel like you're not here?
I don't want to even believe that it's real, but I want us to ask and say, God, why is this happening?
And sometimes it's in the silence of a moment where you're in your house or in your room or in your quiet time with the Lord where you begin to just wrestle with this question by saying, God, I'm hurting. I don't hear you.
I don't feel you from your thirst. I don't feel you from your feeding. I feel like I'm spiritually dehydrated.
I'm spiritually starving. God, I need you in my life, and there's a hurting that begins to come from this silence. This morning in Sunday school, this was one of the questions that Scotty asked was,
when has there been a time where you felt the presence of the Lord when times were the most hard and you just knew God's presence was there? When I was the end of my, starting my sophomore year of college,
there was, no, I'm sorry, it was my freshman year of college. My freshman year of college, I was in college. I came home that Christmas, and I was spending time with my family. My grandfather, who I was really close to, had open-heart surgery and had a valve replaced.
The VA had messed the surgery up. They gave him the wrong valve, and they had to go back in and replace the valve, and he never woke up from that surgery.
I was there that Christmas, and I remember spending time in the hospital with him, and the doctors are saying there's no hope for him. There's nothing we can do. Everything's on, he's on life support. There's nothing that we can do.
And my dad and my aunt and uncle were trying to get my grandma to the point where they were, would go ahead and allow the doctors to take him off life support. It was not my grandfather's wish to still be on life support. It took my grandma 45 days to make that decision.
And in that time, I had already went back to college. I was a, we were very poor growing up. I didn't have a lot of extra money, and my grandfather passed away in the middle of January of my freshman year. And I remember I was walking up the stairwell.
It was on a Saturday to a bus visitation meeting, and on the way up, my dad had called me.
I haven't heard my dad cry many times. My dad called me, and he was crying. He said, two words, grandpa's gone.
And he hung up the phone. As I'm walking up the stairwell, I knew I didn't have the money to get home. There was no way for me to get home in the middle of the college semester as it started. I began crying. As I came around the corner,
our pastor was coming down, and he grabbed me and said, what's going on? I said, my grandpa just passed away. And he grabbed me and hugged me.
And he said, I know it's gonna be tough. I know it's gonna be hard. He said, but God's gonna be there with you. And he prayed with me real quick. And I just felt the presence of God there in that moment. But in those days preceding that, and following those days,
all of a sudden, there was silence. There was hurting.
And I began crying out to God, God, why can't I make it home? Why can't I go back?
I was not able to go back to my grandfather's funeral because of finances and various other things. And there were times in the silence of God in those moments where I began hurting and saying, God, I just need you. I want you to be with me. There's pain.
And there's almost like someone's out on the middle of an ocean. And they're shooting up the signal flares. And they're asking for help. They're asking for, they're in trouble.
And it begins to ultimately bring us back to the point where we say, God, I don't understand this. I don't know why this is going on, but I'm just gonna trust you even in the silence. And what happens in the hurt is number two, our hurt begins to lead us to God.
Remembering Joyful Moments
Our hurt is a driving factor that should drive us to God and drive us to who he is.
Verses four through eight, the one of the things that points out in this very first verse, it says, these things I remember. It should be a time where we remember what the Lord has done.
And this is some things that helped me in my season of hard times and most of my seasons of hard times. And I counsel other people in the verses four through seven, the Bible, the psalmist lays out his remembering for his past joys. He remembers his past joy.
The psalmist recalls the times he led worship. He lays out where he says, I remember leading the festival of possession to the house of God.
I remember leading the worship times with Jesus and remembering the times where the Lord blessed us and then he met with us and he began to work in our life.
He begins talking about how he was with the people of God and how when he was with the people of the Lord, there was joy that was brought about us.
You can remember back, I'm sure, with family reunions and family get togethers where you were around uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces and there was laughter and there was joyful expressions.
Just last night, we were at my mom's house for a baby shower. My nephew's having twin girls and they were laughing and we were carrying on, had a good time. And we remember those joyful occasions as we were sitting outside.
My nephew, of course, he was raised by my sister and she's an absent mom that's on drugs and it's a very difficult situation. But we were sitting outside and he said, I don't think I'll ever forget the love and the joy that was shared today.
He said, we have 30 or 40 people at my mom's house and the kids are swimming and we're inside eating and we're having gifts. And he said, I don't think I've ever received this many gifts in my entire life of birthdays.
And my girls are not even born yet and there are more gifts to my kids because of the love and the joy that was shared today. And we begin thinking through that and remembering and he said, I'm never gonna forget this joy and the love that was shared.
This is what the psalmist did. He went back to the times of past joy and even in the heartache, even in the sorrow, we can lift ourselves with hope.
It's like someone who's looking through old photo albums and they're looking through and they're like, oh, I remember that time. I remember when so-and-so chased the squirrel up the tree and all this stuff.
Like all of a sudden you begin sharing joyful moments and you begin to, even as you share some of those moments in those photo albums, you begin to see pain, but also the promise of the Lord in those moments. What moments spiritually, church,
of joy or nearness to God do you need to remember? Oftentimes in the Old Testament,
Moses and God would say, set up a monument here. Set up this altar as a remembrance so when your children and your grandchildren walk through here and they say, Dad, what are those stones there for?
Well, let me tell you about the time where we were at the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army was behind us and there were mountains on both sides of us and there was a river in front of us, a
sea in front of us and we couldn't get across and God came down and he parted the waters and we walked across on dry land and as we were walking across, 12 of our men picked up stones and
brought them from the middle of the sea and set them down over here to remember what God had done for us.
Oftentimes, church, we don't need to forget what's happened even in the hard times, even when there's difficult times, we need to remember that to remind us what the Lord has done for us. Remembering the past joy and sorrows. Number two, remembering God's faithfulness.
The first part of verse eight, he says this, the Lord will send his faithful love by day. The faithful, steadfast love, even when we don't feel it, even when we don't know where the Lord's love is coming from, the Bible says that it is steadfast and his love is active.
Oftentimes, you'll be outside. Have you ever been outside before? A couple people, a couple people are still asleep. Anybody ever seen the sun before? Okay, a couple more. Hands are raised.
We're waking up a little bit. Okay, anybody got a sunburn before? Okay, I get sunburned because I'm a ginger and it turns red and then it goes back white. Two of my kids are like that. Brody, for some reason, he goes brown. He's got mom skin.
I'm envious of that. But you're outside and the sun's out and all of a sudden, as the sun's out, you will experience this if you've got young kids, Hudson, of course, and younger kids.
They don't understand this fully, but we were outside the other day and Hudson goes, Dad, where did the sun go? I said, what do you mean? The sun's out. He's like, I don't see it no more. It's a shadow.
A big cloud. I looked up and a big cloud had came and covered up the sun. Oftentimes, in a young person's mind, they're going to say, well, the sun's gone.
Finding Hope in Darkness
There's no more sun. And we know that the sun is still there. It's just hidden for a moment.
And in a moment's time, that cloud's going to pass away and it's going to rise again the next day.
And even when storm clouds and it rains all day and we maybe never even see the sun, the next morning it shines and the birds begin to twerp and all the things begin to happen.
And the sun comes back up and the sun never left its moment, but for a moment it was hidden. Jesus said this to his disciples. He said, I'm going away to prepare a place for you.
And you know the way I'm going by the way that I'm going. And he made this parable and he said, I'm going to be gone for a little time, but do not lose heart because I'm coming again to get you and to receive you as my own.
And oftentimes we get to the point where the sun is hidden by the clouds and we say, there's no more sun. There's no more hope. There's no more joy. I just don't know what's going on. And God says, I'm faithful by day by day.
It says here in the verse part of verse eight. And then he continues on in verse, the end of verse eight. And he says this, his song will be with me in the night.
So I read that, as I read this passage and I sort of got to this point, I just sort of stopped and said, how many times has the Lord's song been with me in the night?
How many times has it been a prayer to God of my life as it continues on where night was there, it seemed darkness. It could be spiritually, it could be physically, it could be spiritually, where we are so in the dark, but yet his song was with you.
A song that came on in the radio that just began to come over your mind and it began to work in your life. And God says that he's given us this song in the night.
This is a poetic way. The psalmist is writing down it like this to say that God meets us where we are or meets us in the darkness. And he says, I see you there. You're not alone.
You're not in the dark. Let me bring this song back to your mind. Let me bring this word of encouragement. Let me bring this poetic psalm back to your mind to encourage you in the darkness.
All of our kids, as we've raised them at nighttime, we have a white noise little fan that we play over the phone and we would play this little humming noise. And there are times where Hudson, when he won't go to sleep and I'll have him there on me and I'll begin humming.
I'll hum that. And he's getting tired and he'll go like this. He'll go, his little hand will come up. He'll go, shh, dad, stop. You're putting me to sleep. Why is that?
Because in the nighttime, he remembers hearing that. And as he hears that, it reminds his mind of what's going on. And all of a sudden, now he is back into that moment of trying to go to sleep. And God, in this same moment, as Zechariah says,
in Zechariah chapter three, verse 17, Zephaniah, sorry, Zephaniah 3, 17, the Bible says that God sings over us.
He begins to soothe us in the nights when we don't understand what's going on, when we don't know what's happening in our life. And while these things are going on, God reaches down from eternity and begins to soothe us with his song. What has God been singing to you in your darkest nights?
As you go through heartaches, as you go through hard times, and you're asking God for help, what has he been singing to you? And have you began to clear your mind to be able to hear the voice of the Lord?
The last point we look at today, and I'll be quickly here, honest questions for hopeful faith.
The Bible begins to write down, and David, as he wrote this, he said, why are you cast down, oh my soul?
That he began to get to this point where he'd been through hurt, he'd been through heartache, he's longing for God, and now he begins to ask honest questions.
So I study through and look at the crucifixion and those time with Jesus, and I try to read through that often and read through what the disciples have went through as they were there at that last supper, as
they were there spending time with Jesus. Oftentimes, those disciples would say,
Jesus, we don't know what you're saying. What do you mean by this? I don't even know what you're talking about right now, Jesus. And oftentimes, Jesus doesn't look at them and say,
oh, come on guys, you should know this. No, he reached out and he helps them to understand what he's saying. It's a reminder to us that God cares about honest questions.
When we come to him with our questions, when we come to him beginning to say these questions in a true and proper way, it begins to give us this faith that we can see.
As we look at these last couple of verses, the first thing I want to say is ask real questions. Get to the point where you are asking real questions to God. The psalmist doesn't pretend. Listen to the question he asks.
Why have you forgotten me? He didn't say, Lord, where are you at? I hadn't heard from you in a couple of days. Is your phone dead, Lord? Did you forget to plug in your phone, God? He's not joking. He says, why have you forgotten me?
Biblical faith is not an absence of questions, but rather taking your questions to the one that can give us answers to our questions.
It's coming before God real and vulnerable and saying, God, I don't understand what's going on.
God, I don't know why this is happening, but I'm not going to pretend anymore. I'm just going to be honest and say, God, why aren't you here today? God, why aren't you working in my life? God, why aren't you doing these things in my life to give me the hope that I need?
Tim Keller said it like this, God is not intimidated by your honesty.
God is not intimidated by your honesty. God welcomes our honesty. God says, I want you to ask me these questions.
When my son comes to me or my daughter comes to me and they ask me a question that's a hard, difficult question, I don't look at them and say, how dare you ask me that question? How dare you ask me how to change oil in a vehicle? What are you doing?
No, I say, you know what? I'm going to be changing the oil in a couple of weeks. Why don't you come out there with me? Why don't I show you how to do this? Why don't I show you how to,
this is a great illustration coming to mind. Friday, we were at the house and Allison took Birdie and Jade to volleyball and basketball practice. And on Friday, I do the laundry. I try to get all the laundry done.
And we're sitting there and Hudson was with me and all of his clothes we had just washed. And he goes, dad, what are you doing? I could have been like, psh, son, get away with me. Don't ask me that question.
What do you think you're doing? What do you think you are asking me a question about what I'm doing? I said, I'm folding clothes. He said, what does that mean?
I said, well, I'm taking the clothes. I'm sorting them. I'm folding them. I'm putting them. Can I help you? Sure, you can help me. And so I pick up a shirt and I fold it. And he goes, how did you do that?
And so I said, I fold it. So he picked up a shirt and he goes, he just balled it up. It's like, is that how it is? Is that how it is, dad?
I said, no, no, no. You got to fold the arms in. You fold it in half. You fold it in half. And so in his four-year-old mind, this is what he did. He tried his best. He folded and he folded.
It wasn't perfect. He goes, dad, was that it? I said, that's exactly it, son. Go put it on your pile. He put it down. Allison came home later. Mom, mom, mom, guess what I helped dad with today? What? I folded my clothes.
Now, I could have been like, how dare you ask questions right now?
But instead, I welcomed those questions. I welcomed him what he was doing. I showed him what these things are doing and he began to do these. And he said, I folded all my clothes and I put all my clothes away today. It was great. But it was asking real questions.
It wasn't pretending. It was coming before us and saying, God, I need these questions answered in my life. And we, the same way, must come before God and say, God, I need these questions answered.
We may not always get an exact answer, but we begin to see the voice of the Lord. Number two, what do we do? We begin to preach to our own hearts.
Look at what it continues on to say. Hope in God, for I shall again praise him. He begins to say,
talking to God, I'm beginning to going through my soul. I'm earning to be closer to God. And now I've got to begin to shift the praise, to shift the thoughts of talking just to God, but also talking to my own soul and saying, God, help me.
Help my soul. God, help myself to be able to change what's going on because I'm so longing to be near you.
As a football player for many years, I played in some hard games. Some hard games that even as a coach where there was one specific game, it was my very last game of my high school career. We were supposed to win state that year.
And we were down at halftime. And I remember my coach, Coach Young, coming in.
And I'm going to be a little facetious here. He came in and said, boys, well, I don't think we can beat Crest this year. Let's just go ahead and pack it up and lose. He walked out of the room. He didn't do that.
At halftime, he came in. He knew we were down. He knew that we were beginning to struggle. He knew that we were going to possibly even get beat. But he came in and he stirred us back to life. He said, boys, this is going to be your last game.
If you don't show up, if you don't go out there, if you don't give it all you've got, this will be your last game. And by the end of that halftime speech, I mean, we were ready to charge.
We were ready to take on the Miami Dolphins, the perfect 72 Dolphins. We were ready to take them on at the end of the halftime speech. But what happened is, is in our own life, sometimes we must be our own spiritual coaches.
Where we must come in and we must say, hey, remember what God did.
Remember how the Lord delivered in this moment. Remember these things. Things pull yourself up and say, God, work in my life. Help me out today because I need to be able to preach to my own heart sometimes. You're not always going to have that person beside you to be able to encourage you.
Faith Over Feelings
And we must be able to ask these questions to give us what we look at this last thing. Finding hope in God alone.
As we go through our life, as we go through problems and difficulties. And we've preached to ourself and we've asked these questions. Now we're turning to God and we're saying, God, God, you are the only hope that I've got in life and death.
You are the only thing in my life that is steady, that is firm, that's never going to fail, that's never going to falter, that's always going to be there.
And I'm going to turn to you and I'm going to ask you to give me the hope that only you can give. You see, our circumstances are the things that have began to change.
And it's what happens is, is our focus begins to change with those circumstances. As Peter was on the boat and Jesus was walking toward him.
And he said, Lord, beckon me to come to you. And he steps out on this water and he's walking on the water with Jesus. The circumstances around him were the same. The water was still beating against the ship. The storms were still there.
But his focus began to take his eyes off of Jesus and onto the storm and the situations that were around him. It was only when he got his eyes fixed back on Jesus, as Hebrews 12 says, fixing our eyes on Jesus.
We get to the point where we begin to fix our eyes on the thing that matters. And the only thing that matters is Jesus in our life.
Oftentimes, our feelings define our faith. How I feel when I wake up in the morning is how my faith is going to be that day. But rather, I want to challenge you this morning.
Let your faith reframe your feelings. Let your faith in God, the sturdy, firm foundation, the solid rock on which we stand.
Allow that to be the thing that is defining our feelings as we go through life. Circumstances come, I'm standing on God. Difficulties come, God's my rock.
I'm just going to continue standing on him because he is the only one that gives us hope. Maybe you've never accepted Jesus this morning. Maybe you need to put your hope back in God and put your hope back in who he says he is. As Terry comes,
I want to give an illustration. I meant to put these pictures up here and I forgot. But just imagine with me and you can look it up if you want. But Psalms 42,
he begins to lay out that it's okay not to be okay. Oftentimes, the world says if you don't have everything planned out by the time you're in second grade and you've got your entire life planned out, then you're going to fail in life.
Awakening the Soul
But I'm here to tell us that the psalmist struggled in a lot. He struggled in a lot of difficulties.
He struggled in a lot of heartaches in his life. But the difference is he didn't stay there. He found his way through scripture, through God as his solid rock, to work his way out of the pit that he was in. Through God's help.
Oftentimes, we're going to thirst and hunger and even question. And that should draw us closer to God, the only one that can satisfy us. There's a desert in Chile called the, I'm going to butcher the name, the Ata Kama, the Ata Kama Desert of Chile.
I'm going to butcher it. I know I will. It's one of the driest places on the face of the earth. Rain is so rare in this area that they say that it can go years without a single drop of water.
And to the naked eye, it looks like a wasteland. It's cracked.
The soil is completely destroyed. There's dry rocks. There is no terrain to be seen in this desert. But right beneath the dry crust, something incredible is hidden. Thousands of dormant seeds are waiting right below the crust. And when rain finally does come, sometimes it's just a drizzle,
and it triggers one of the most beautiful natural phenomenons the world has ever seen. It's called the desert bloom. Seemingly overnight, vibrant flowers explode across the sand.
One picture that I found, all the flowers were purple. It was one of the most beautiful pictures of the before and after of what happened. A brilliant display of colors.
Once it was lifeless, but then after that little bit of rain, it became breathtaking. The beauty was always there. The beauty of that desert was always there. It was hidden.
And it just needed to be awakened by a little bit of rain. This morning, and maybe it's not today. Maybe it'll be five years from now. Your soul is going to feel like a desert.
You're going to say, God, I haven't heard from you. I don't even, I feel like you're dry. I feel like you're distant from me. I feel like I'm lifeless, and I almost feel forgotten by you, God.
That's when Psalms 42 comes in. In Psalms 43, it gets even better. God's presence is like the rain. His love, his faithfulness may not come when you expect it. Like I said, that desert sometimes goes years without even a drop of water. But then the rain comes.
And the rain comes in our life when you need it the most. The seeds of joy, the seeds of hope, the seeds of faith are inside of us.
The Bible tells us not to lose heart, not to give up. Rain is coming.
And when it does, the whole church, when the rain comes again, your soul will bloom.
The flowers that are inside of you are going to come out. And it's going to be this moment where you're going to be rejoicing because you didn't give up in the hard times. You allowed God to work in those moments, and you began to see God's faithfulness even in the desert storms.
Three things as I close. Be honest before God. Stand before God and say, God, I am honest with you. Just as you would be honest with your spouse or honest with your kid or honest with me. Stand before God and be real and be honest with him. He cares about us.
Bear your soul to the Lord. Say, God, I don't know what I'm going to, I don't know how I'm going to take the next step.
I don't know how I'm going to deal with this child. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this co-worker. I don't know how I'm going to deal with these situations in my life. But God, I just want to put it before you.
And then begin to see the hope that only he can bring.
It's only through God that we have hope. It's only through Christ and through faith alone what Christ has given us that we even have the ability to wake up in the morning. And we can stand and we can say God is faithful in the good times and in the bad.
Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for what you've done. Prepare our hearts for communion in just a moment. Be with us as we trust in you more now than we ever have. Lord, I thank you for the hard times.
Closing Prayer and Reflection
Often we don't. Often we want to run from the hard times. God, drive us to those hard times and moments to where we can drive our soul back to you. God, help us to follow you more than we ever have. In your name we pray.
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