Sermon Tone Analysis
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Be It Resolved...
Introduction
Good morning and Happy New Year to you.
It’s so good to have you here with us.
This morning’s message will be a little different.
I want to open the New Year by challenging you to long for the Lord.
Go ahead and open your Bibles to Psalm 42 and 43.
We’re going to take a look at both today.
Let me first ask you a question and let you think on it:
What is it in life that you truly long for?
Is it success at work, to be popular, to have a lot of money?
Do you long to be married, have children, maybe get a better job, or maybe to retire and collect seashells on a beach somewhere?
What do you long for so much that it drives you?
Most of us have longings in our lives that drive us to act.
Often we don’t long for God like we should and I wonder why that is.
In our passages for today we are going to see the psalmist longing for God and expressing that longing through his writing.
Not just longing in an abstract way but particularly, longing to worship with the people of God in the temple again.
Let’s read from both Psalm 42 and 43 and see how he longs to worship God.
This is the Word of the Lord, let’s pray and ask God to change our hearts and lives.
I.
Even Christ-followers face tough times.
We don’t fully know the situation for the psalmist, but he longs to return to worship again.
It’s quite possible he was in exile or fleeing from an enemy.
He feels much anguish.
He pants for God.
He wonders when he’ll see the face of God again.
He’s consumed with tears.
His soul is cast down.
His pain is in his bones.
These times are especially tough when he remembers previous days when he could go to worship.
Others who’ve followed God faithfully have also faced tough times:
Moses was burdened with God’s people (Num 11:11)
Elijah was pursued by the queen (1 Kgs 19:4)
Paul despaired even to death (2 Cor 1:8)
ILLUSTRATION from a website:
Life can be so unpredictable—joys and sorrows, beautiful blessings and distressing difficulties can come unexpectedly.
Our life’s dreams and plans can change in an instant.
We all know this to be true.
So how can we find peace amid such turbulence?
Horatio Spafford knew something about life’s unexpected challenges.
He was a successful attorney and real estate investor who lost a fortune in the great Chicago fire of 1871.
Around the same time, his beloved four-year-old son died of scarlet fever.
Thinking a vacation would do his family some good, he sent his wife and four daughters on a ship to England, planning to join them after he finished some pressing business at home.
However, while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the ship was involved in a terrible collision and sunk.
More than 200 people lost their lives, including all four of Horatio Spafford’s precious daughters.
His wife, Anna, survived the tragedy.
Upon arriving in England, she sent a telegram to her husband that began: “Saved alone.
What shall I do?”
Horatio immediately set sail for England.
At one point during his voyage, the captain of the ship, aware of the tragedy that had struck the Spafford family, summoned Horatio to tell him that they were now passing over the spot where the shipwreck had occurred.1
As Horatio thought about his daughters, words of comfort and hope filled his heart and mind.
He wrote them down, and they have since become a well-beloved hymn:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll—
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know
It is well, it is well with my soul.2
Because we live in a fallen world we sometimes face tough times because of some one else’s decisions.
Sometimes we face these times because of our own foolish decisions.
In fact, that’s probably quite a lot of the time.
But, there is another reason these times happen: God wants us to thirst for Him.
God will use the hard things in your life to cause you to long for Him.
He’s shaping us to be more like Him, to love Him more, and to be what we are supposed to be.
II.
TOUGH TIMES SHOULD LEAD US TO THIRST FOR GOD
Listen to the psalmist’s words.
He pants for God.
He thirsts for Him.
He feels forgotten and rejected, but still he cries out to God.
Sometimes we face these times, too, when we wonder if God’s even listening to our pray ing.
When that happens we have two options:
1. Give up on God.
2. Long for Him even more.
Turn to Him in desperation, admitting the hole in our heart and understanding that God sometimes turns off the waters of blessing to make us want Him more.
AND that in and of itself is a blessing.
Sometimes, it’s a blessing when you don’t get what you want.
In 2023 I want to be desperate for God.
Do you?
I want us as a church to be desperate for God and for us to follow Him closer than we ever have.
I want us to be devoted to the things He has prescribed in His Word for His children to be all about.
Illustration of desperation for thirst
In 1963 the Looney Tunes Daffy Duck cartoon Aqua Duck came out.
It features a scene where Daffy Duck is crawling threw the desert, completely worn out, somehow he’s dehydrated but sweating… I’m not sure how that works out.
He’s crawling along saying water, water, cool, crisp, tingling or something like that.
He sees a sweet oasis of water and jumps in and starts scooping the water into his mouth.
He does this for awhile until it’s revealed that this is a mirage and he’s actually scooping sand into his mouth.
It’s played for humor in the cartoon but that’s what I thought about when I started thinking about panting for water or a desperate thirst.
Maybe you’ve been without water for awhile.
You’ve been asleep all night and maybe you had something sweet to eat before bed.
You wake up and you almost can’t move your tongue because your mouth is so dry.
You can’t swallow… so you head for a glass of water.
Or maybe, you’ve ever held your breath for a long time.
When I was a kid my dad, brother, and I would have these challenges where we would see how far across our public pool we could swim underwater without coming up for air.
My friends were all amazed because we could go pretty far.
My dad could go all the way across and back and then maybe halfway again.
So we’d try and go as far as we could but at some point, you can’t go any farther and you’re desperate to take a breath.
You get to the surface as fast as you can and you gasp for air because you need it to live.
That’s the kind of desperation and thirst I want for God.
It’s what I want you to have for God.
And sometimes, friends, that is what God is trying to accomplish in our tough times.
In our times of trial and our times of suffering.
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