Psalm 42: (Defy Yourself)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. My name is Kendall, and I'm so thankful to be bringing this second message in our series on the Psalms to you this evening. Last week, we opened up our series by examining Psalm 1, which taught us about the essence of the blessed life, which is being rooted in Jesus Christ.

For if you're rooted in Him, which is what we learned in Psalm 1, then you can never be unrooted from Him. You will be like a tree that is planted beside streams of living water, growing up strong in this life, bearing fruit in this life for the Lord, even as you await for the coming life, the glorious return of Jesus, where you will stand perfectly in His presence forevermore.

The Spiritual Desert and the Need for Hope

Now, all of that sounds great, but what happens when your life doesn't look like that? What happens when your life looks more like a withering plant than a strong oak that is planted beside the water?

What happens when you look around at this life and you don't see streams of living water, but the only thing you see is a spiritual desert and a wasteland? Then what do you do? What hope are you supposed to have in times like this?

And it's today that we come to a very important psalm that deals with one of the most important topics that you and I could ever consider. What are we supposed to do as Christians when our life doesn't feel blessed?

What are we supposed to do when we're stuck in the spiritual doldrums or in spiritual depression when God feels distant, when our hope seems gone, when brokenness and pain and heartache and dysfunction seem nearer to us than even God?

What are we supposed to do on those days? And it's in this very psalm, Psalm 42, that is going to teach us how to have hope even when everything around us seems totally hopeless. So I want to invite you to turn with me there as we examine this beautiful passage together.

The psalmist says, as a deer pants for the water brooks, my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all day long, where is your God?

These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go along with the throne and lead them in procession to the house of God with a voice of joy and with thanksgiving, a multitude or a keeping festival.

So why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become so disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise you for the help of his presence. O my God, my soul is in despair within me, therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan, from the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mazar, deep calls into deep and the sound of your waterfalls and all of the breakers and your waves, they rolled over me.

And the Lord will command his loving kindness in the daytime and his song will be with me in the night. A prayer to the God of my life and yet I will say to my God, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

As the shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me while they say to me all day long, where is your God? Why are you in despair, O my soul? Why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him for the help of my countenance and my God.

This is the word of the Lord. Lord Jesus, I pray that you would open up this passage to us today, that, Lord, you would reveal your truth in it to us, your people, and that, Lord, we would see by the end of this passage the wonderful truth that it presents.

In Jesus' name, amen. Now, there are many who actually believe that this psalm was written after the destruction of the Jewish temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Babylonians came in and they burned the temple to the ground.

And the man who was writing this is likely a priest who would have been one who led worship in the congregation, who offered sacrifices in the temple. So of course he's in despair. If you'll remember, the Jewish temple was this sort of unique spot on earth where God determined to make his presence known.

It was this unique place on planet earth. You couldn't go to China. You couldn't go to Russia. You couldn't go to the Americas. If you wanted to get to know God, you had to go to Jerusalem and to the temple in Jerusalem where God Almighty was pleased to make his presence known.

So therefore, losing this temple was one of the most earth-shattering events that could have ever happened in the entire Old Testament. And the psalmist here is desperately crying out, not because he lost a building, but because he lost the one place on earth where God was pleased to make himself known.

And now this man is in agony. He's wondering if God's presence is ever going to return to his people again. And for you and I, we have to remember that this man is writing before Jesus Christ, before the redemption that we have, before the gospel that was given.

And this man is in absolute and justifiable agony over these things. We have to remember that this man is writing before Jesus Christ, before the redemption that you and I have experienced in the gospel, before the spirit of God had been given.

And this man is in absolute agony over what he is seeing. And this would have been entirely relevant to him. Where is God? How can I find God? I feel like I'm in a desert, God. And while we know that it would have been highly relevant to the writer, highly relevant to those Old Testament saints, I do want us to understand that this passage is incredibly relevant for us today as well.

For on the one hand, this man is yearning after God. He's desperate for God's presence. And at the very least, his enthusiasm and his passion for God ought to leave us convicted here. This passage ought to be relevant to us alone on the simple fact that this man is yearning for God while you and I struggle and even yawn at God.

And you may say to me, I've never yawned at the things of God, but all of us have. Let's be honest. We've all yearned in church when the glories of God have been laid bare right in front of our very eyes.

We have all fallen asleep at our Bibles when the treasures that have overtaken this world with the glory of God are right there at our fingertips. We spend more energy and effort, more real yearning over the parties that we throw and over the anniversaries that we attend and over the gifts that we're going to buy.

We spend more time planning and seeking after the things of this world than we do seeking after God. None of us, none of us seeks after God like this man, and that is convicting. None of us can say that we seek after God like a panting deer that is searching for water on the riverbanks that have dried up in a season of drought.

None of us have ever sought God like that. And how amazing is this? This man didn't even know Jesus. He had no Holy Spirit that was fueling this kind of worship. This man had lost a building and he was in despair over it.

We don't long for God like that anymore, but we should. So dear Christian, if for no other reason than the desperation that we see in this man's life, this passage has incredible relevance because it indicts us for our tendencies towards spiritual apathy, lethargy, and laziness.

All of us have been there. We have exactly what this man was hoping for, what he was dreaming and salivating over and what he was broken over, and yet how little we rejoice because of it. This man was in despair over the breaking down of the temple, and yet the true temple of God visited us 2 ,000 years ago, and he made us into walking, talking temples of God so that we don't have to go to Jerusalem in order to know God.

We can know God right where we're at because we can be known by God in salvation, which means that we should never be in despair over God's absence. We've been cleansed by the final and pure and perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, unlike this man, and that sacrifice has brought us into perfect fellowship with God, and here we have this man without knowing a single facet of the coming redemption, is yearning deeply for it, and he's in agony over it, while in America we can barely fill a sanctuary.

We've become bored with the things of God, like a child that grows up in the lap of luxury wearing the finest clothes and eating the most luxurious meals and owning the nicest things. A child will soon grow up spoiled and in a sort of entitlement so that nothing any longer is beautiful.

When you have the world, what in the world can impress you? Well, there are many times that you and I have lived so richly at the table of God's grace and blessing and bounty that we now like spoiled children miss how beautiful his treasures are.

What this man yearned for are the very things that we go on yawning at. So like I said, at the very least, this passage has incredible relevance on this point alone. We don't see God like that, and I pray that we would pray for that, but I believe there's another way also that this psalm can have incredible relevance in our lives, and it's here that I want us to transition.

I want us to turn our attention. Do you remember last week when we were talking about the mountaintop experience and how you can have this blessed life? We began with a tree that was being planted by a stream of living water, and you get this idea in your mind of birds chirping and life teeming and thick grass and bees buzzing, and it's sort of this picturesque vision that you and I would consider to be faithful.

So that when we're in that place with God, when we're in that garden vista with God, that's when we're happy and that's when we're blessed and that's when we're fruitful and that's when God is pleased with us, and we get this sort of idea.

But here's the problem. When we get into the deserts, when we get into the valleys, we're sad and we're asking questions and we're wondering what we did wrong. And it's here that I want to teach us something about God that may just be one of the most important things that you've ever heard.

God not only purposefully places you on the mountaintops, and when he does that, you should be thrilled, but God also places us lovingly in the valleys so that we can find our joy there, so that we can find that only God is our joy there.

You see, Psalm 1 has relevance to our lives last week because we really do have these high moments in our life. We really do climb up to the mountains with God. We see God moving in our life, and he opens up scripture in our life, and we have this incredible and thrilling time of prayer, and we sing to God with the angels, and it's on these grand, clifftop spiritual moments that we sing and we praise and we rejoice in the goodness of God, and all of that is right.

But dear friend, we don't stay there. Anyone who tells you that we do is lying to you and setting you up for a Christianity and a spirituality that is doomed to fail. We don't stay there. We don't live on the mountaintop with God.

Sure, we visit there for seasons in our life, but our lives are not just high. We don't just live on the mountaintop with God. If we did, you and I and our sinful nature would find a way to even yawn at that too.

In our sinful nature that will not be fully removed from us this side of heaven, if all God did was ever give us blessings and shower us with his mercy and with his grace, and if all he ever did was give us exactly what we needed, then we would be the kind of children that you see screaming on the floor at Target because they believe that they're always going to get their way.

If all God did was ever bless us, then we would be pure devils, and you may object to this point all that you want, but I think knowing who we are and knowing especially who I am, we would spurn the grace of God.

We would be spiritually entitled creatures if all we ever were were blessed. We would find a way to manipulate it. We would find a way to pervert it, and we would find a way to yawn at it. So praise God and his infinite wisdom he sends us to the valleys.

Praise God he puts us in the desert. Praise God that he works patience into us in the dust storms. Praise God that he causes us to yearn and to cry out and to wail and to be in agony for a season because all of those emotions cause us to long for him.

Just like Israel never did well with blessing, they went through blessing for a generation at best, and then they were off worshiping idols, sometimes the greatest act of love in your life is that God would throw you in a wilderness, that God would send you into exile, that God would burn down a temple and move you 700 miles away to a land that is not your home to reignite the flame in your heart so that you would be passionate again for God.

Praise God he does this to create longing in our heart. You see, it's when God feels distant from us, it's when we yearn for him most. I mean, isn't it when water is withheld from our lips that our thirst flares up the strongest?

I mean, how little do we honestly think about food in this country because there's no shortage of supply, there's a restaurant on every corner, but think about how consuming food would be to you if we could never get it.

Imagine how much that we would think about water if we lived in the desert. Sure, the modern man thinks about water. We pour it on our grass, we pour it on our cars, we pour it in water balloons and play outside in the yard, we pour it on water slides and we go into swimming pools and we dip in it for pleasure and we use it to wash our faces and we use it to flush our toilets.

And every now and again, we grab a glass of water and pour a few ounces of that beautiful and glorious substance in it and we drink it because we have been so spoiled in our modern industrial era and in our abundance.

Water is just another thing. It's just something we wash our car with, sometimes we'll drink it. It's just something that we flush our toilets with. Sometimes we'll use it when we're dehydrated, but think about what you would think about water in the desert.

No one would water their grass in the desert. No one would swim in a swimming pool and contaminate the water in the desert. No one would use it for a toilet. Every drop of that water would be considered as precious.

That's why God sends us to the desert, so that he will become precious to us. All of us in America have feasted at the table of God's grace for decade after decade after decade. So much so that we have sipped from his fountain so fully that there are many times in our life where we have yawned at his goodness, where we have overlooked his graces.

And perhaps the most loving thing that God can do and will do and is faithful to do in your life is to send you into the desert. Maybe it's no fault of your own. Maybe you haven't done any particular sin.

Maybe God's not punishing you. What I'm trying to tease out here is maybe God, out of his love and grace and kindness and affection for you, is sending you into the desert so that you will long for him and so that you will yearn for him.

Maybe God has you in this season right now of spiritual drought, not so that you could give up and not so that you can feel defeated and not so that you could feel abandoned or unloved, but so you would cry out to God, so that you would weep, that God no longer feels near to you, so that you would cry out instead of living in the comforts that this world has to offer, and then that you would run to him and that you would find him and embrace him and know him.

So today, I want us to talk about how to navigate the spiritual desert, because what we've done so far is we've shown the necessity of the desert. That's all we've done. We've shown that God uses the desert in our lives to bring us closer to him.

Now what we want to do is we want to lean into Psalm 42, and we want to assume that God has a plan for you when he puts you in the desert, and we want to look at Psalm 42 and ask, how do we navigate the desert faithfully?

That's what we're going to do. Now the way that Psalm 42 speaks to this issue is one of the most fascinating approaches that I believe I've ever seen in all of the Bible, because let's be honest, God's voice is silent in the Psalm.

This man's in a desert. He's all by himself. He feels like God has abandoned him. God has not abandoned him, but that's what he feels like. So in the thickness of those feelings, you would expect that there would be no voices in this passage, only the author's voice, only the one who is writing down this Psalm.

That's the only voice that you would expect to hear, but yet in this passage, there are three distinct voices that are speaking that are going to be incredibly helpful for us to take notice of. As you and I walk through the desert, there are going to be multiple voices in our life that are going to be vying for ascendancy, that are going to be speaking into your life, and only one of them is actually helpful for you.

You see, in this passage, we see three voices. Two of them are entirely toxic, and if you listen to them, you will be stuck in the desert. But the final voice, the voice of reason and truth, if you listen to that voice, then you'll be led out of the spiritual desert.

You will learn what God wants to teach you, and you will once again enjoy a renewed sense of intimacy with God. So with that, I want us to examine the first wrong voice that is in our lives when we are going through the spiritual desert, and that voice is the voice of the world.

Defying the Voice of the World

Notice the reviling voice of the world that is there to accuse this man as he seeks after God. The psalmist describes it this way. My tears have been food for me day and night while they, the world, say to me all day long where is your God?

Here are the writers in such soul-level affliction that he can't even eat. He can't even fathom eating or drinking. And let's be honest here, his depression is not clinical. He's not suffering from physiology or a chemical imbalance.

He's not upset because his best sheep died. He's suffering from the fact that God feels distant to him. This is a spiritual depression. And he is willing to do anything and everything, even foregoing food to have the joy of his salvation returned to him.

And in this passage, the only thing that is keeping this man's tongue from sticking to the roof of his mouth is the salted tears which flow in abundance down his cheek and onto his lips and down through his mouth and into his throat.

That is the only food that this man has eaten as he yearns for God. That's how much he wants God. And while he's searching for God with that level of ardor and that level of intimacy and that level of passion, the world's voice is looming over him, beating him over the head and attempting to silence him with such ridiculous questions as where is your God?

Now this surely happens to us. The world has no category for a people who seek God above everything. The world has no category, no way of dealing with a person who will seek God even when God is seemingly hiding from them and distant from them.

The world cannot understand that at all. You see, the world invests in things that produce. The world invests in stocks that are going to win and make money, and if not, they sell. They leave. They abandon.

Men and women gamble on winning teams. You don't find people betting on the 2019 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Now maybe they're going to bet on the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but nobody was betting on that team.

You see, the world bets on things that are going to produce. The world bets on things that are going to win. The world bets on things that are going to give back more than what you put in. No one pours in this world time and energy and effort into a situation like this man is in.

They can't even understand it. Here, this man is in a desert, exhausting himself in prayer, wearying himself out with truth into the world. This looks like the most frivolous venture that anyone could ever undertake.

And they say to him and they say to us in our day the very same thing, where is your God? While you are fervently in prayer, the world will look at you and say, where was your God when this virus hit?

And when you're seeking after God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, this world will look at you and say, where is your God when that tsunami landed? Or where's your God when all of this evil is present in the world?

Or where's your God among church people who seem like hypocrites to me? Where is your God? Maybe you've never been attacked like that by the world. But I do want us to ask a very honest question of ourselves here.

This is not the main point, but this is a point. Maybe you and I have not been assaulted by the world like this because we have not sought God like this. Because when we seek God like this man, with a sort of intensity and a reckless abandonment, viewing everything in our life as rubbish in light of finding this God, when we seek God like that, the world's going to call us mad, the world's going to call us crazy, they're going to say that we've lost our minds, and they're going to look at us as if we're barely even human.

They have no category for seeking God like that. And maybe, I'm not saying this is completely 100 the case, but maybe we don't experience this level of attack from the world because we have played it safe for far too many generations.

We attempt to blend in with the world around us so that they won't take notice of us. We do our faithful parts in secrecy behind closed doors in a church and behind closed doors in a car and behind closed doors in a living room.

And maybe we don't have a crowd of people who are day and night accosting us like this man because we cannot even begin to imagine living like this man lived. There were crowds of people who knew how faithful he was.

There were crowds of people mocking and jeering him and sneering at him because of the way that he was seeking God so publicly and vibrantly and out in the open. So we have to ask the question, is my faith like his?

And if it is not, then maybe, just maybe, that is the reason that the world has left us alone because they see nothing special about us. They see nothing significant within us. They look at us and they believe that we are of the same constitution and of the same material as them.

But I want all of us to want that. I want all of us to be the kind of people who skip going out to a bar so that we can go to a Bible study because we're so desperate to know God. I want you and I, the Shepherd's Church, I want us to be the kind of people who live like today is the very last day of our lives and instead of participating in the office gossip or the chatter, we go off and get by ourself and get in the Word of God because that is where we find our Lord and our King.

Instead of being consumed with all the cares of this world, this life, this worth money and sex and power and status and clothing and furniture and booze and politics and cars and everything else that this world has to offer us, I want you and I to be people who yearn for God like this man yearns for God.

Not so that we can be persecuted. Our aim is not to be persecuted. Our aim is to have God. But when we search for Him like that and when we seek after Him like that, we will be persecuted. But I do pray that we would stand up and that we would defy the world.

That we would defy the world and defy their logic and we would ignore their taunts and we would put our head down and we would run to Jesus. That we would leave them laughing behind us because we have a treasure that we're willing to sell everything in the world to have and we're willing to run to and spend all of our effort and energy having it to have it.

But this isn't easy. Let's not make any pretensions that this is easy. Look at what the psalmist says in verse 10 when he considers these things. He says, as a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me.

And when they say to me all day long, where is your God? The psalmist is saying to us to have a realistic expectation that the droning on of this world is so painful to him and the opinions of the world are so pressing on him that it feels like his bones are actually shattering within him.

And let's be honest, this is painful for us as well. None of us want to be rejected. All of us want to be accepted. We want to be known and loved and appreciated and we don't want anyone to have negative opinions of us.

We don't want anyone to revile us as they were reviling this man. But we must remember that we already have these things in Jesus Christ. We already are loved fully. We're already known perfectly. We're already appreciated and accepted infinitely.

And if we look for these things from the world, then what we're going to do is we're going to end up exchanging God's love for the world's love, which is like trading in diamonds for a grain of sand. It'll cause us to stop seeking God with his passion and his intensity and we will start trying to gain the world's favor, blessing, and approval, which is functionally worthless.

No one would trade in a grain of sand for the world's supply of diamonds. And why would you and I trade in the love of God for the love and approval of the world? We must seek God with all of our hearts because he is worthy, even if they hate us for it.

Because when we do this, we demonstrate the value of God in our life. Listen, anyone can sacrifice the things that they love most if the thing that they love most is not truly infinite. If my love and your love are basically on the same level, then yeah, I can sacrifice my love for your love.

But when we're talking about the love of God, when we're talking about people who know who God is, we can never sacrifice his love. We can never put down his affection and his acceptance and his approval, as high and as glorious as it is, because why would we do that?

For the approval of men? Why would we gain something that is fundamentally worthless so that we could give up something that is altogether priceless? No one would do that. And when we do that for the world, far from being a better witness to them, far from being more loving and more appreciative and more missional to them, what we're actually doing is we're showing them how little we actually think of God, that we're willing to trade him in for their pitiful approval.

And why would anyone turn to a God like that? If God is so pitiful and so weak that we would give him up like Judas on a moment's notice so that we could gain someone's opinion, why would anyone turn to a God like that?

But if we cling to him when they hate us, if we hold tight to him while they revile us, that is a God worth turning to. Because not even the world's most fierce criticisms and pain being rendered upon us can cause us to stop clinging to the Savior that is priceless to us.

That is a God worth turning to. So it's here that I want us to see the point. We must seek God and we must seek him especially in the desert because he put us in the desert so that we could seek him and so that we could find him and so that our energies and passions would be multiplied so that we would long for him and so that we would yearn for him.

And while we're in the desert, we must defy the mocking, jeering, sneering world that is going to put us down because of our love for God. We must defy them and we must stand up in this momentary affliction and spiritual depression that we are in and we must not squander it.

We must defy the world and not listen to the wisdom that they offer and thrust ourselves right at the heart of God and seek after him with all of our affections and all of our passions and all of our emotions.

We must use the desert to defy the world and run after God. That is our first point. But there's an even more powerful enemy that you are going to face in the desert. There's a more sinister and more awful and more accosting voice than even the voice of the world.

And that voice does not come from men and women who are far from God. It does not come from even Satan himself. That voice, that most wicked enemy that we are now turning to deal with, comes from you.

It's your voice. It's our inner man, our old man, our sinful man, our old, former, slithering, sinful nature that is inside of us, that is whispering lies to us, that is leading us into the almost awful despair.

Defying Yourself with the Truth of God

And this begins in verse 4, where the inner man is reminding our psalmist about his past. Notice how subtle it is. The psalmist tells us, these things I remember, and I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go along with the throng and lead them in possession to the house of God and with the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

Do you see what's happening to this man? His memory is causing him angst. His memory is not causing him joy. His memory is causing him anxiety. His memory is causing him to look at his former times in the temple where he is leading worship and singing songs with joy and hosting a multitude of people going to the festival.

And because of those memories, he's not reminded of God's goodness and grace. He's actually in a moment of agony. He says that his soul is poured out within him, which means that he is empty because of these thoughts.

You see, the voice of the world in some ways was easier for him to reject because it came from outside of him. But now this inner man is the one who's speaking subtly and quietly and whispering lies inside of him that is doing far greater damage to him than the people in the world.

You see, notice what this inner voice does. He reminds this man of the old days when God seemed near and when the temple stood strong and when joy overflowed and when men and women came and participated in the festivals.

And this man, this psalmist, had no care at all in the world. And yet now today he stands in misery. Do you see what the mind of this man has done? It has juxtaposed two thoughts together and it is going to lead to the most unholy conclusions.

Look back at your life, my friend. Look at all that God has done and look at where you are now. Surely this is your fault. Surely you are to blame. And this is why this man's soul was poured out within him.

And how many saints of God have been trapped in this sort of lie where we are remembering the good old days and remembering when life was good and perfect and pleasing to God when God seemed close to us.

But then we turn in a moment and we look at where we are now that God is no longer close to us. And then in juxtaposing those two memories and looking at the past and how good it must have been and looking at the present and how awful it currently is, you and I are tempted to listen to the voices inside of our head and say, this is all my fault.

God is no longer close to me because I've done something wrong. I used to be more religious. Maybe I should go clean myself up. I used to read my Bible more than I do now. And clearly God must be punishing me.

Do you see? The mind is one of the greatest enemies of all. Because in a moment, your brain, that internal voice can recall some present memory from your past. And then in just a very short switch, set it aside some struggle that you're currently having in the present, and then it will turn on you and assault you with a barrage of lies.

What a wicked taskmaster our fleshly old man is. And unlike the world that you can run from and you can avoid and you can flee and you can escape and you can leave them, you can never get away from yourself.

You can never run from the steady diet of lies that our minds are constantly heaping up upon us. And as a result of this barrage of mental attacks, the psalmist admits to us that his soul has been poured out.

He is living in the agony of his past because his present no longer looks so great. And it's here that I say to you that that old man of sin, that internal voice of mischief is far worse to you and I than the attacks of the world.

Not only can you never flee from yourself, these attacks levied against you are more personal and more damaging than anything that the world can throw at you. Because think about it this way, the world can only accuse you based off of your external visible behavior.

They can only observe what you're doing and then make comments about it, not so with your inner man. You see, your inner man knows every wayward thought within you, every shortcoming that you have ever done that no one has ever seen but has been pounded upon you by the slave driving man.

And I would even say that there has never been in your life a worse enemy to you than you. There's never been a more unjust critic to you than you. There's never been a more negative and more destructive person in your life than you.

You are the hardest person on yourself and you are the one who shows you the least amount of grace. You have heaped lies upon lies on top of your head and you have believed them as if they were the gospel all while living in secrecy.