When Life Falls Apart 5: Hope in the Dark

This podcast is brought to you by Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley, D.C., in the hope that it will draw you closer to the one who loves you most.

I had been used to, up until this time, being around family and friends all the time.

And now it was just me and the men who worked for me that lived there.

My neighbors were far away.

They had been in the area for decades, sometimes generations.

I was brand new.

They were all married.

I was single.

And other than ranching, I had very little, actually nothing in common with them.

For the most part, I was lonely and miserable, except when I would go back to Provost to visit family or connect with some of my college friends somehow.

But God used this time of loneliness to be a blessing to me in a way I didn't expect.

You see, it is a great blessing to be surrounded with wonderful people who love you and to enjoy good health and to have an abundance of food, clothing, and shelter.

Those are all good things.

And in our Western culture, we tend to call this the good life.

And we often think that if we have the good life, then we have everything we need.

But when we think in this way, and we all tend to do that, we make a huge mistake.

It's called a category mistake.

We're mixing two different things up in two different categories.

We mix up the gifts, which are blessings, with the giver who gives them.

And when we make the gifts the ultimate thing in our lives, then we set ourselves up for a terrible fall.

Because the gifts God gives us can never carry us through the dark valleys of life.

And because of this, strange as it may seem, the absence of those gifts, whether it is in times of loneliness or exile or isolation, can be a blessing to us because they wean us off of our addiction to the gifts, and they help us to recognize our need for the giver.

It turns out, dear friends, that we human beings need a good crisis now and again to help us to grow and becoming more like Jesus.

So let's consider this question.

Where do we turn when loneliness, distance, or crises leave our heart and mind filled with turmoil?

And today, as we come to the end of our series called When Life Falls Apart, we will turn to Psalms 42 and 43 for God's answer to this question.

Now, these psalms were likely actually one psalm together.

There's a heading on Psalm 42, but not on Psalm 43.

And the heading for Psalm 42 tells us that the Psalm was written to the choir master by the sons of Korah.

Now, these would be Levites who were responsible for the tabernacle or the temple's holy things and for leading God's people in song.

This was like the men's choir.

And so this is a song, these two psalms, is a song that God's people have sung in worship for centuries.

Now we don't know for certain who wrote it, but the content suggests that it was a Korahite, one of the people in the clan of Korah, who was carried far away from Jerusalem, likely during a Syrian invasion.

He is cut off from the worship he loved, and he is taunted by his captors.

And he writes, My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, where is your God?

Now we may never be kidnapped and taken into exile in a faraway land, but we will all know or have known this kind of loneliness and isolation.

Because relationships can fall away because of distance or time.

Seasons of life can separate us from the people who once surrounded us.

And we can find ourselves in a new place where everyone else has known each other for years.

Perhaps we're single while everyone else around us is married.

Whatever it may be, we're out of step with a community that we long to belong to.

And if we live long enough, our heart, our health will fade, and one day we will face our own impending death.

And so you see, these two psalms together are talking about the ultimate loneliness that each of us will face, which is death.

And that's a lonely thing to face because none of our human companions can walk with us to the edge of that abyss and beyond.

We face it alone.

And all the gifts we enjoyed in life, the relationships, the comfort, the possessions, will all be stripped away.

Physical and relational pain may come together at that time and cause us to cry.

My bones suffer mortal agony, as my foes taught me, saying to me all day long, where is your God?

And as death approaches, we may feel alone and isolated, far from where we long to be, just as the psalmist remembers the people and the places he loves from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon from Mount Mazar, which are great distances from Jerusalem.

In our innermost thoughts, we may even wonder to God, why have you forgotten me?

Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?

Now, for some of us, that isolation comes wrapped in mockery, just as it did for the psalmist.

There's people who question our faith out loud who or attack us for it.

For others, it's quieter.

No one taunting us.

Just the ache of distance and the silence of a season nobody else can see.

Either way, we are not alone in it.

Because on the cross, Jesus endured the very taunt the psalmist described.

As he hung there, those passing by hurled insults at him.

He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself.

He's the king of Israel.

Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.

He trusts in God.

Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, I am the Son of God.

It's the same taunt with a different voice.

Where is your God?

Now, whether our isolation is loud or quiet, Jesus has already been there.

He's been mocked for trusting his Father in the middle of suffering.

And yet he's still the Son of God.

He's still loved by the Father, even in the silence.

And it's the same with us.

In Jesus, we remained, we remain beloved, forgiven children of God, even when the darkness makes it feel otherwise.

Now here in Psalms forty-two and forty-three, we see as in other psalms, raw emotions are directed with unvarnished honesty toward God.

But there is something new here.

Three times the psalmist dialogues with himself.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

And despite all of the losses, the loneliness, the pain, and the grief, the writer keeps yearning for God.

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.

Where can I go and meet with God?

And that heartfelt desire for God craves the freedom to express itself in worshiping God.

Vindicate me, my God, and plead my cause against an unfaithful nation.

Rescue me from those who are deceitful and wicked.

Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight.

I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.

The psalmist is not only pleading for rescue.

His ultimate longing is for the Lord Himself.

A reunion fulfilled through worship.

This takes us back to the tension we named earlier: that when the gifts we love are stripped away, what's exposed is the truth of what we've been worshiping all along.

As Paul David Tripp writes in his book, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, human beings by their very nature are worshipers.

Everyone, everybody worships.

It's just a matter of what or whom we serve.

And our innate tendency to worship things other than God distorts everything we are and everything we do.

But on the other hand, worship of the one true God recalibrates our life's focus and satisfies our heart's deepest longings.

Even complaints and petitions like those of the psalmist are worship, providing we express those looking up to God and not down to God.

Honest complaints can actually help us by clearing the way for our heart to be more open to God.

Jesus gives us a full picture of what open-hearted worship of God looks like when he prays to his Father.

I have given them, that means his followers, I've given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, so that they may be brought to complete unity.

Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

You see, the world sees the glory of God when his people worship him, especially when they do so from a place of darkness.

So, where do we turn when loneliness or crises leave us in turmoil, cut us off from the people around us and the worship we love?

And we wonder if God has maybe gone quiet.

Whether our darkness is quiet like mine on that ranch so long ago, or loud, filled with voices that taunt us by saying, Where is your God?

The psalmist gives us three moves that we can make.

First, we tell God the truth.

The psalmist doesn't perform a faith he doesn't feel, he names his grief, his memories, his sense of abandonment out loud to God.

And we can do the same in prayer, in journaling, or in honest conversation with a close friend.

Suppressing pain does not make us more spiritual, it just leaves it to fester in the dark.

Second, we preach to our own soul.

The way the psalmist does mid-lament.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God.

Now, this might sound strange to us, preaching to our own soul.

How do we do that?

Here's a tip.

Anybody else besides me worry?

Come on, be honest.

If you know how to worry, you know how to preach to your own soul.

Just got to change the dialogue, the words.

The psalmist doesn't wait for the feeling of hope to show up before he speaks the truth of it.

And we here today know more about these things than the psalmist does, way back then.

Because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we have a rock solid hope that doesn't depend on our circumstances in any way.

In Jesus, we have God's promise that we have new life with Him.

We are adopted into God's family as his child.

We are forgiven of all of our sins and filled with the Holy Spirit.

And we are headed toward a wonderful future in which Jesus will restore and renew all things, including us.

This is the hope that we need to continually speak into our own soul.

Third, we strip away all of our layers of self-focus and self-protection, and we honestly ask ourselves, what do I really worship?

And our emotions can give us clues to the answer.

We can ask ourselves questions like, what does my heart love the most?

What do I fear losing the most?

Or when I get angry, what is being threatened?

And often the answer to those questions is our object of worship.

Now consider the psalmist.

His deepest ache isn't comfort or rescue, it's reunion with God at the altar.

Worship isn't the reward we get after the darkness lifts, it's often the means God uses to bring the dawn.

And so I want to encourage you to direct your heart to worship God and let Him restore your aching soul.

Dear friends, please be comforted by this good news.

Whenever you find yourself in a place of isolation and darkness, know that Jesus has already walked that road ahead of you, that exact road, in both its quiet and its loud form.

Approaching the cross, he said, Now my soul is troubled.

And what shall I say?

Father, save me from this hour?

No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.

Jesus uses the same self-dialogue as the psalmist.

His soul is disturbed, yet he spoke directly to that disturbance rather than let it have the last word.

He anchors his hope in the Father's purpose rather than in the relief of escape.

And that resolve carried him through the mockery of the cross and into three dark days in his tomb with no visible evidence yet of the dawn.

My darkness took four years.

But Jesus' isolation ran all the way through death itself.

And his resurrection is the reason that our hope is not wishful thinking, but a promise with a proven track record.

The darkness broke for Jesus.

And the God who seemed absent was revealed as having never left.

And as that was true for Jesus, so it is also true for us, no matter how long our darkness may last.

I think about those long, lonely evenings alone in that cellar at the ranch, reading a Bible I hadn't opened in years.

God's presence was real there, and it sustained me.

In the same way it sustained the psalmist and carried Jesus through his own dark hours.

But I needed more.

Like the psalmist, I wasn't just thirsting for God in private.

I was thirsting to meet with him among his people.

It was a thirst that eventually led me back to church, back to worship, and then to Susan, my wife.

Hope in the dark isn't a feeling that we manufacture.

It's a person.

A person who's already walked through the deepest darkness there ever could be and has come out the other side singing.

Dear friends, the words that we speak to ourselves are very, very important.

So the challenge I'm setting before you this week is this speak hope from Jesus into your own soul.

You may have patterns of negative self-talk that need to be rooted out and replaced with God's truth, and that's not an easy thing.

I know that from personal experience.

But it will be worth it.

You might need to surround yourselves with sticky notes of Bible passages that echo God's hope.

Whatever it takes, however long it takes, make it a pattern to encourage your soul with the good news of Jesus Christ.

And it's that good news that transforms us into being people who sing songs of praise like the psalmist.

And so I invite you to speak these words aloud with me.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Thank you, Jesus, for walking the road of loneliness, isolation, suffering and darkness, and even taunting for us.

Thank you for dying a death in our place that through your resurrection gives us life and hope and light that nothing can ever take away from us.

And we pray that you would help us to not only live in that light, but speak your hope into the very depths of our own souls, so that we might better reflect your love into the world around us.

In your holy and precious and matchless name, we ask this, and all God's people said.

Amen.

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Thank you and God's blessing.