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May 12, 2024

Between Here and Hope

Between Here and Hope

Passage: Psalms

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Practice the Presence - Prayer

Keywords: truth, praise, salvation, depression, light, soul, altar, cast down, jot

Those who place their trust in the Lord are not immune to hardship, nor to the loss of hope we might associate in our day with depression. The experience of hopelessness is reportedly on the rise in many places and among several demographics, and with it the desperate attempts to reduce its causes and limit its effects. Part of the problem, now many observe, is that we have succeeded in creating a world we were not made for, and increasingly find uninhabitable. Each era has its afflictions; each era seeks its own remedies. What is the way between here and hope–specifically to pray between here and hope?

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Psalm 86:1, 10-11

LEADER: Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me,
for I am poor and needy.

ALL: For you are great and do wondrous things;
you alone are God

LEADER: Teach me your way, O LORD,
that I may walk in your truth;

ALL: unite my heart to fear your name.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/CREEDAL STATEMENT/SCRIPTURE READING: Matthew 26:36-39

LEADER: Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.” And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

CENTRAL TEXT: Psalm 42-43
Psa. 42:1 As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.

Psa. 42:5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation
6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
have gone over me.
8 By day the LORD commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock:
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my bones,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”

Psa. 42:11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.

Psa. 43:1 Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause
against an ungodly people,
from the deceitful and unjust man
deliver me!
2 For you are the God in whom I take refuge;
why have you rejected me?
Why do I go about mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?

Psa. 43:3 Send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill
and to your dwelling!
4 Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy,
and I will praise you with the lyre,
O God, my God.

Psa. 43:5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.

BENEDICTION: Lamentations 3:22-24
LEADER: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

ALL: “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. The word across time and even in modern times has a kind of elasticity to it, but ever experienced what you might call depression? What was (is?) it like? What might(’ve) account(ed) for it? What wisdom have you received or followed to face it?
  2. Pull our your atlases. Note the geographical locations in the Psalm. How far are the places named from each other? How, did we argue, are the distances a metaphor for something?
  3. Explain to someone what it might mean to thirst for the living God? What does it look like to have that thirst met? Can you speak from your own experience of that desire?
  4. You hear from the Psalmist both hope and dread in the same breath. How can that be? How does that sound real?
  5. What do you hear the Psalmist repeating three times in two Psalms (which are really one likely in their original form)? What is the Psalmist doing and why? What do we do if we can’t find the strength to take our hearts in hand and preach to ourselves? What words of reassurance could we add in light of the gospel?
  6. On what personal matters are you somewhere “between here and hope”? What does the Psalmist’s lament have for you as guidance in your pilgrimage?
  7. Why would the following be words that are not just encouraging but true: The most fundamental decision is the decision to get out of bed. And it too communicates something. The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering. . . .your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway. O. Alan Noble

ILLUSTRATIONS:

InView Media Album

QUOTES: 

  • Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks. Christian Wiman
  • doubt has little to do with distance from events. . . We may think that it would be a great deal easier to believe if the world erupted around us, if some savior came down and offered as evidence the bloody scars in his side, but what the Gospels suggest is that this is not only wishful thinking but willful blindness, for in fact the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves. Christian Wiman
  • Be careful. Be certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your complaints about your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world. Christian Wiman
  • I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. . . .The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: 'Why art thou cast down'-what business have you to be disquieted ? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: 'Hope thou in God'-instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: 'I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God'. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression
  • The most fundamental decision is the decision to get out of bed. And it too communicates something. The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering. . . .your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway. O. Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed
  • I’ve got a sort of mental box, Susannah’s Big Box of Unanswered Theological Questions. One thing that was incredibly helpful was realizing that it’s ok to have such a box, and that in all likelihood there are going to be items in it until I see God face to face, and possibly afterwards. But the fact that we have unanswered theological questions, that we don’t see how all the data points of scripture and experience and tradition fit rationally together should not, not even for a moment, allow us to discount the data points we do have about God’s character. That is one thing we do not need to doubt. Susannah Black Roberts

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