Choosing Faith During Hardship
“As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
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 thanksgiving among the festive throng
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.”
-Psalm 42:1-5
How do we pray when we are in the midst of really hard and difficult times? How do we stay motivated to bother trying to pray when we feel depressed or sad and it seems that maybe God has forgotten us or has stopped “taking our calls”? These are very real and common experiences for everybody and that does include Christians. Some believers think they need to keep those feelings to themselves and that expressing them is a sign of doubt or a lack of faith. That kind of thinking is exactly why we need to look more closely at the Psalms and remind ourselves that the psalmists had all of those feelings and emotions and wrote them down in their prayers to God. Today we will look at Psalm 42 and 43 which have been read by millions of people and been a source of comfort for them in the midst of their own times of trouble. Psalm 42 and 43 go together. Most Bibles note that in many Hebrews manuscripts, they were one psalm. All we have to do is read them together and we will know why.
There is great sorrow in the heart of the psalmist and he says that “tears have been my food day and night” (42:3) and “my soul is downcast within me” (42:6). He cries out to God “why have you forgotten me?” (42:9) and asks “why have you rejected me?” (43:2). He tries to find comfort in remembering better times, when he “used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving” (42:4).
We hear the cry of a soul that is in deep distress and pain and yet still feels deep thirst and longing for God, recognizing that God is the only one who can save and bring him back to “joy and delight” (43:4). So how do we find that kind of spiritual depth? How do we grow towards that kind of close and intimate relationship with God?
Part of the answer is found in a key verse that is repeated three times in the psalm:
“Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.”
This chorus is found in verse 5 and 8 in Psalm 42 and again in the final verse of Psalm 43. It comes to us like a jolted change in perspective. We can imagine the psalmist thinking to himself wistfully, remembering easier times and better days, and then snaps back to the present reality and gives himself a “talking to”, saying “Why are you downcast, O my soul?”
This statement is the psalmist making a declaration to his own soul, calling himself to make a willful choice to hope in God and praise God, even in the midst of the pain of his circumstances. We must be clear: there is no denial of reality, no refusal to acknowledge the frustration and loss in this psalm. Expressing sorrow and wrestling with doubt are not sinful signs of a weak faith or spiritual immaturity. Christian faith is not a repressed denial of reality, but a recognition that God is with us in that reality.
In one sense Psalm 42 and 43 are a poetic work and so there is a literary purpose in restating the verse that becomes the central refrain. In another sense, we can find a reflection of the reality of the “ups and downs” of our faith journey. One minute we are feeling depressed and rejected and the next we somehow find the grace of God to make the choice to hope in God and praise him, and then just as quickly we find ourselves slipping back into despair. Does this sound familiar? Have you ever experienced this “rollercoaster” of emotions? I suspect that most of us have.
There is a tension and a wrestle that we all experience. We can read it clearly in Psalm 43:2-3. One moment the psalmist is crying out, “God, you have been my stronghold, so why have you rejected me now?” (my paraphrase); in the next line, he is making a prayer for God to break in and save him: “Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain…”. We must take real comfort in these Scriptures because the fact that they are included in the Psalms speaks to us about our own journey with God.
Both Psalm 42 and 43 end with the refrain to remember hope and call us to praise God, who directs his love to us (42:8) and is our Savior. Prayer is often a choice. We make the choice, when our soul is downcast, to put our hope in God and to offer a prayer of praise. We make a choice to call out and pray for God to “send forth light and truth to guide” us.
As we go through these times of pressure and hardship God will spiritually fashion and form us and we will be able to have the same testimony that God is our joy and our delight.
