Psalm 42:1-11
My Soul Thirst for You, O' LORD
1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while men say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go with the multitude,
leading the procession to the house of God,
with shouts of joy and thanksgiving
among the festive throng.
5 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and 6 my God.
My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
8 By day the LORD directs his love,
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 must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?”
10 My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
The writer of this Psalm and is probably King David...Many would think, well David is a King, what does he need, why is he crying out to God...He has everything...He has a lot more than me...But David is troubled...David is of great faith, and yet, he is asking, where are you LORD -in my time of need...The writer is (probably) away from Jerusalem, away from his home...Maybe he feels away from the temple of God, and he is separated from God and cannot worship Him in the way he feels most comfortable...But the author is disturbed and downcast...Something is not right in his life, right now...
On these days when we seem to need God the most, He wants to play hide and seek...He is testing our faith...On these days feeling and emotions can run more intense than other days...Feelings and emotions are not necessarily evidences for God or against God...But our feelings, especially when we are down -can block us from God...These feelings can separate us more from Him, if we let emotions completely run our lives...But God gave us emotions...And He just doesn't give us emotion and feelings for no reason...Maybe there is something on our mind (or the psalmist's mid today), some under-current, some underlying event or thought that needs to be spoken out and/or felt...An emotion, especially positive ones, can bring us closer to Him and our negative ones can take us further away from Him...Maybe positive and negative are not the proper way to describe our emotions, but the point is there are emotions that draw us closer to Him, and ones that make s drift from Him...In my opinion, there are God emotions that draw us to Him and emotions that make us drift from Him...But let us remember, there is a time to weep, and a time to laugh (Ecclesiastes 3:4)...Feeling and releasing these downcast emotions, as the psalmist does is a healthy way to express emotions of this downcast-type...
Many of us have days like this...Why are you downcast, O my soul, the Psalmist asks...There are days it seems life beats us up...There are days when we try to be positive, and it is tough, very tough...Men have ask since the beginning of time, Where are You God, and other men, who are not believers, ask when we are down, "Where is Your God?",..."Where is this God you speak and think so much about?...This is exactly what faith is...Faith is believing in God, on those days when it seems, when it seems He wants to hide from us...We hold, and clutch, and by are frayed threads of belief -we cling to God and our faith...My bones are in agony and downcast, and still You hide from me...The psalmist urges us to trust in God, despite these days, when He seems absent in our lives...
God promises that we will find Him if we seek Him with all our heart and all our soul (Deuteronomy 4:29)...He wants us to seek Him with our hearts and our souls...These are words Moses wrote for us, many years ago to follow...To find Him, we must seek Him first...This is God's style, an attribute of His...
God created our emotions...To be alive, is to have a wide range of emotions...Wouldn't life be dull without some sorrow, and best of all emotions like our laughter, our happiness, and our love -not in our lives...Learning to accept the emotions that come up everyday, to experience them, and release them, without judging them -can give us an inner strength (from Him) and help us move on with our lives and get us closer to Him...