Prayer - Seeking

Anthony Gentle

Tanilba Bay Baptist Church

Prayer • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

Psalm 42

Prayer

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In the midst of despair, we can still seek out God and find hope.

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Transcript

Seeking

Sometimes it feels like there is something always lost in our family.

It is not unusual for our family to be looking for a missing school shoe at the time when we’re meant to be leaving. You would think that it might have been where the other shoe was, but then logic isn’t always that straight forward.

If it’s not the shoe, then it’s the hair brush. Or maybe it’s a toy or a book. Or at night it’s the pajama shirt. In fact you could list any object we own and there’s a good chance it’s been lost.

But of course, I can’t just point the finger at my children. I tend to have a game every morning of trying to remember where I placed my sunglasses from the day before.

Now when we lose something we begin a search. Sometimes that search ends quickly. But occasionally we get baffled. We look in each of the usual locations, and nothing. We look in the very unlikely locations, and still nothing.

This search for an object can sometimes become quite distressing.

But it’s not just objects we search for. We also search for abstract things like ideas, or direction in life. And this type of search is no less distressing, in fact, at times it can feel even more distressing.

You see, sometimes we feel the answer to one of life’s problems is staring us in the face. We feel we should be able to reach out and grab it, but we can’t.

My move into paid ministry

I remember back when I was wrestling with God about whether I should enter paid ministry.

Fiona and I had spent a year in Bible college back in 2007 and it was during that year that I felt God calling me to the ministry. But due to a few factors, I ended back in my engineering job.

I remained in that job for five years, the whole time trying to seek God’s will. Should I quit my job? But couldn’t I still be effective for God as an engineer?

I felt the answer should just be there. I prayed, but particularly in the first few years of this search, I just felt frustrated because the answer should be there. Why couldn’t it just be obvious what I should do? Why did I have to go on this emotional roller coaster ride?

The church’s search

At times, a similar thing has happened here at this church.

When we had that vision day a few weeks back now, one of the things I did was to reflect on our history. I looked specifically about the various ideas that have existed on this property. But one of the things we saw was that many of the ideas that we had fell flat.

In the 90’s, some of the development ideas fell flat. In the early 2000’s, we got really close, with a signature just days away from selling some of the land to a developer, only for the developer to go bust.

And I’m sure we all remember the events of only a few months ago when once again we had a deal all lined up for a big move, only for the door to be closed again.

You see, we’ve been searching, but at times it has felt frustrating. It feels like we are in a maze, but every time we get close to the end, we come to a dead end.

The Big Question...

So how do we navigate these times?

Well that is the question I want to explore today.

You see, last week, I began a short series on prayer. I looked at the teaching Jesus gave us on prayer found in Luke 11 and I encouraged you to be bold in your prayers as we see a God that has loved us so much that he wants us to partner with him in shaping the future.

Now I hope you felt emboldened by that. But that may be well and good when we feel we have an idea of the direction we are headed in.

It can be a whole other story when we feel lost and have no idea which direction to head.

Psalm 42

Well, to help explore this question of how we navigate the times of desperate searching, I’m going to turn to Psalm 42 which was read to us earlier.

Now, if you’re the type of person that listen to other sermons or biblical reflections, and you’ve done so during this Covid period, there is perhaps a good chance that you’ve come across a reflection on this Psalm.

You see, this Psalm deals directly with the issue of finding God when things are tough. And well… while individually you might have had worse years, I think this would have to be one of the worst from a collective point of view.

Context

Well, let’s orient ourselves with this Psalm first, before we start to explore how it can help us with our question.

Now, you might notice that in your Bible, before the heading saying Psalm 42, we get an additional heading telling us we are about to start Book 2. Now, something you might not realise, every Psalm in Book 1, that is, Psalms 1 through to 41 are attributed to David, with the exception of just a few which don’t get a mention.

Well, as we get into Book 2, we find Psalms that are attributed to others, with the first 8 or so attributed to the Sons of Korah.

Now we don’t know a whole heap about these Sons of Korah, so instead of bothering ourselves with speculation, let’s dive in and see what they are describing.

A deep longing

What we find in this Psalm is a deep longing.

There is something troubling him. It’s almost as if he can’t quite put his finger on it, but it’s just not right.

If you look at verse 4, you can see him remembering so previous time when things were good.

He remembered about how he would go to the house of God. How God would protect him.

He remembers the great joy that this would bring. There were shouts of joy and praise. Things were festive and jubilant.

But that was in the past. It perhaps feels like the distant past.

Actually, it might not have been the distant past. It might have been quite recently. But you might know what it feels like when a gloom starts to come over you. It can at times feel like that is the way it always was.

But this person identifying with the Sons of Korah wants to get out. He is longing for something better.

In despair

But before we look at how he seeks to navigate through this time, I want to keep us in his despair for just a bit longer.

Again, we don’t know what it was that was causing him to feel so downhearted, but he provides some pictures which maybe you might be able to identify with.

Dryness

The first image we get comes in the first few verses and it is one of dryness.

It is like a drought. There is this desperation for water.

In verse 3, it is his tears which have become his food. Day and night - this is not just a momentary feeling. It is just overwhelming him.

How can there be a God when things feel so arid. That is the question we get at the end of verse 3.

I wonder if this dry ache is something you resonate with?

Drowning

But in the second half of the Psalm, we get quite a different picture.

This time instead of dryness, we have a flood. The picture is of him drowning.

Look at verse 7: “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”

This man is drowning.

Perhaps this is an image you can identify with as well. When everything just keeps piling on top of you and you feel you can’t even take a breath.

TBBC application

Now, maybe you have personal experiences of this, but let me just think briefly about this from our church perspective.

You see, I mentioned earlier about the way in which we keep feeling things are just about to go ahead, only for them to come to a screaming halt.

Now we might not feel that deep distress like we do on a personal level, but it can feel hard nevertheless. You might recall those fun times we’ve had as a church and wonder why things haven’t gone up from there.

So with that, let’s now turn and consider how we seek God out of these situations.

Whether it s a situation you’re personally feeling, or from a church perspective of just trying to move forward, how do we approach God when you can just feel like you’re drowning, or for that matter, feel like you’re completely parched, with just tears as your food.

Honesty

Well, I want suggest three different steps along the seeking path.

The first of which, is being open and honest.

The Psalmist admits his soul is downcast. That he is disturbed.

He describes the agony with this brutal honesty. “My bones suffer mortal agony...” (verse 10)

You know, sometimes I think we can become scared to be honest before God.

It’s a bit crazy when you think of it. After all, God knows everything. It’s not as if we can somehow fool him.

But yet, we don’t like admitting our vulnerabilities. We like to put a brave face on when we are with other people, and it often can just naturally happen that we keep this brave face on when we go before God.

I think in part, it’s because we can feel that if we admit that we’re not doing well, that maybe we’re thinking that we’re close to admitting that God isn’t powerful to change our situation.

And so we start our prayers with thanks to God (which is actually often a good idea), but gloss over how we’re actually feeling.

But there’s a big problem with this. You see, if we can’t even admit that we’re in a hard place, how do we expect to move through it?

This first step is actually something I can struggle with.

You see, for those of you who know me fairly well, you’ll know that generally speaking, I’m fairly laid back and don’t get worried about too many things.

But sometimes for various reasons, some explainable, some not explainable, I start to feel a bit down. Now partly because I’m not being reflective enough, I can completely ignore what’s going on, and when I come to God, I pretend everything is going well.

So not only does it take honesty, but to get to that honesty, it also takes some self reflection.

From our church perspective, we sometimes need to admit that its not easy when we see plans fail. It’s not easy when things don’t quite go the way we want them to.

Asking good questions

So the first thing is to be open and honest about how we feel.

The second thing I want to draw from this Psalm, are the good questions that the Psalmist is asking.

You see, it’s one thing to be honest about where things are, but we need to engage with this with our minds.

In both verse 5 and verse 11 he asks of himself: “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?”

He’s starting to engage with his feelings.

But not only are the questions directed inwards, he’s not afraid to ask some hard questions of God.

In verse 9: “Why have you forgotten me?” he asks of God the Rock.

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

Now this are not questions you can give a pat answer to. We’re going to see shortly that he will get an answer, but the answer doesn’t suddenly make our problems into some nice neat package with a flow chart.

And I think this is why we sometimes struggle with hard questions like this.

We want simple answers. But what we actually want, is to skip this whole process of seeking altogether and just have the answer.

The thing we find however, is that in the process of seeking, we actually find something much deeper.

And this is what we find in this Psalm. The Psalmist is engaging in a process, and we’re going to find that the answer is going to come as a result.

On a personal level, this means we need to think through what God is doing in our struggles. Ask him the question, and then reflect on those questions.

On a church level, as we pray, ask why God has taken us down this path. Ask what he is teaching us. Ask why things haven’t always gone the way we expected they would.

We need this sort of reflection if we want to seek out God’s will for us.

Finding Hope

So, we start with being honest about what is happening. We then engage God with what is happening.

The final thing I want to draw from this Psalm, is that we find hope.

You see, when we engage God, we will always find signs of hope. That is because, even through the struggles and difficulties that will naturally occur in our lives, God is always moving and powerful ways. We just need to be able to take the time to see that.

Now if you look, you will see that verse 5 is repeated again in verse 11. Actually, on a side note, if you look even further, you’ll see that this verse is repeated again in verse 5 of the next Psalm, which is often thought to be a continuation of this Psalm.

But in this repeated use of this verse, we actually see the process I’m talking about.

His openness and honest questioning leads him to the conclusion:

“Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God”.

But how did he get there?

Well, let me take you to verse 8.

Now remember this verse comes after verse 7 which provided us that picture of the the water that surrounds us… giving us the impression that we are drowning.

Well, following this openness, he actually comes to a realisation.

Let me just read verse 8:

Psalm 42:8 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life.

Now earlier he suggested by day and night his only food is his tears. But now he sees something different in his reflection of day and night.

By day, the Lord directs his love. You see, that deep reflection brings out an understanding that God has this deep love for us. A love that covers everything.

A love that means we don’t need to worry about any wrong we may have done, or mistakes we’ve made along the way. A love that accepts us exactly the way we are.

But then he has a reflection of his night.

At night, he finds a song inside him.

Now I just love this idea of a song. You see, a song is more than just the words. A song carries emotion. In fact, if I can be so bold as to suggest that a song actually moves us onto a spiritual level, where our souls are being ministered to.

This is actually why songs are such a vital part of church. It is in these songs that even at night, we are being ministered to.

In both the night and day, our prayers then lead us to the God of my life.

You see, as hard as life gets, when we honestly engage with God, we will find a God that loves us deeply, and with this we will find hope.

I want this to be encouraging for us as a church. Things haven’t always gone the way we thought they would. However as we look, there are so many signs of hope.

We can see this hope in the way God has moved in the lives of individuals here. We can see it in the way God has blessed others through us. And from this we can see that there is hope.

Conclusion

Now, I’ve spoken quite a bit about feelings and emotions today.

For some of you, this might be right down your ally. For others (and in part I might put myself in this category), I can be a bit more practical and just want to see what is happening without all this talk of feelings - after all, feelings can be deceptive.

Well, I don’t want to separate this from the practicalities. But when we only focus on the practicalities, we’re actually ignoring a lot of what God is doing.

You see, seeking God is not about just reading the writing on the wall, or hearing the booming voice from heaven. Believe me, I’ve never heard from God in those way.

But seeking God is actually a process. A process that starts with being open and honest. Engaging with God in what he is doing. And looking for those signs of hope.

We need to seek God. Our prayers should be looking for the way forward.

So let me pray now...

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