Thank you, Brad. I really appreciate
Phil and Brad for all that they do. I really do. I especially
love to hear the reading of God's word and joining in our hearts
as we hear someone else who trusts Christ pray. Don't you? God has given us that, and what
a blessing it is. In my life, I have heard people
direct us to the struggles that we have and also to the experience
of what was described in our last hymn on page 27, But God. He says, and this is the song
that Don Fortner wrote, but it's really from scripture, so this
is the Lord's words. My soul in darkness, death, and
sin was lost and all undone. I did not know my lost estate. I could not see God's son. Those
two things. Neither could I see my own lost
estate, and I could not see God's son. It was all dark. But God
in grace and power divine stepped in to save my soul. His gracious
purpose has prevailed. He has made me whole. Now, when
we think about the experience of such a person who writes this
song, we always think, at least I do, man, I wish I had that
experience of that sense of feeling of being lifted up and brought
out of this horrible darkness and a peace and joy that comes
from that. But what's being said here is
that when God does step in to save our souls, He directs us
outside of ourselves to the Lord's experience, to His work, and
to our salvation in Him. That's where we find peace. That's
why we're joyful, because what we need is in Christ. And we don't have to look for
it and should not look for it within ourselves. So I thought
of that when we were singing that song. And I know that that's
a tendency that I have had in my own experience. I'd hear someone,
in fact, people in our church when I was a kid would stand
up and give what they called a testimony. And I always thought,
man, In all honesty, I can't get there. I'm not there, and what do I
do? Well, the good news is that I don't look for it in myself.
I look for it all in Christ. God has provided everything in
the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's our salvation. That's all. We're
complete in Him. Now, if you want to turn with
me in your Bible to Psalm 42, if you're not still there, Psalm
42. I want to bring a message here. I normally reserve the
Psalms for our Thursday night Bible study, but I was reading
ahead and I came to Psalm 42 and I thought, this seems appropriate for us. This
seems appropriate for us. It's easy to be discouraged,
isn't it? Every little thing can discourage
us. Something at work, something at home, people leaving the church,
moving away. I'm not trying to make people
feel bad, but it happens, right? Circumstances, our own inward
outlook on things, and we begin to feel bad. And that feeling
of being downcast, it turns out, according to this psalm, is the
experience of believers. And that might shock us, because
you listen to the testimony of people, as I'm thinking back,
and it was not something I heard that someone would stand up and
say, my soul, thirst for God, and also, why are you cast down,
oh, my soul? That wasn't what I heard. I always
thought, I'm happy, happy, happy all the time. And so I thought it would be
appropriate to look at this psalm together today. It's meant to
be a comfort. It is meant to direct us to the
place of comfort. It's meant for us to hear what
God gave to one who was under the distress of inward trouble. And there's so much to be learned
by it. But one of the first things that
I experience when someone tells me about their trouble, and this
is a sinful thing, so you understand, is that we naturally think, well,
why don't you just dot, dot, dot? But that's not what we can
do, is it? That's the reason we are feeling
this way. It's because we can't fix it.
And that's the position of the psalmist here. I can't fix it. And I'm feeling horrible, trouble
inside. And this is the worst kind of
trouble. I can't get myself out of this. And so let's read this
together and go through it as Brad has already done. The heart,
H-A-R-T, in the King James Version, is a deer. He says, as the heart,
as a deer, panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God. A man is crying out to God. He compares his experience to
what he understood when he looked at a deer. A deer is a helpless
animal. It can't defend itself against
its enemy. The only defense it has is to
run. And when the deer runs, it obviously
expends a lot of energy and strength, and it comes to the end of itself. And at the end of itself, having
been hounded and hunted, and now thirsting and having no moisture
in itself, it looks for the familiar cool, refreshing, and reviving
streams. And so he says, as the deer panteth,
And you've seen an animal after it's running, its tongue is sticking
out, it's panting. This is what my soul does. So
panteth my soul, not after water in this world, but my God. So
panteth my soul after thee, O God. Now God did this. God made him
pant after God. God taught the heart to pant
after God. And our panting after God is
going to only be satisfied when God satisfies it. When he himself
gives us of himself. And he has done that in the Lord
Jesus Christ. And so he's expressing here an
inward soul thirst. And you know what thirst is.
The kind of thirst described here means I don't have it within
me. I have to find it elsewhere.
Outside of me, in fact, is going to be found in God alone. And he's at that point where
he cannot provide it. He can't find it. He remembers
the satisfying and reviving and refreshing comfort and peace
and joy of having God give of himself to his soul. He remembers
that. But now, in his experience, he's
without that. He is one who hungers and thirsts
for God. And he doesn't have a sense at
all of God's presence within. He's empty. In himself, he has
no moisture. He says in verse two, my soul
thirsteth for God. He repeats it. It's God I thirst
for, for the living God, not an idol. I want the true and
the living God. I need him. I need his life. I need himself to give himself
to me in my soul. And he asked this question, when
shall I come and appear before God? The answer to his deep unmet
soul thirst is if God would bring him into his presence and give
him that water of life in his soul himself. When shall I come? When will God bring me? When
will he make himself known? When will he disclose himself
in his nature and in his mind and heart to me? so that I can
know God in myself. I need that. This is what I need. Everything else is of no importance
in comparison. When I feel this way, nothing
else in all of my life satisfies, nothing else comforts. I need
God. and I need Him to comfort me.
I need Him to give me that peace, that refreshing. Jesus said,
Whoever thirsts, let him come unto me and drink, and out of
his belly shall flow rivers of living water. I don't find it.
I need him to give me that living water. As the woman at the well,
Jesus said, if you knew the gift of God, you would have asked
him and he would have given you living water. I need that. Lord Jesus, give to me what you
give yourself. When shall I come and appear
before God? I need to know. I need to see. I need to hear again. It wasn't
enough for me to live on yesterday's experience. I need it today.
I need it now. He says in verse three, my tears
have been my meat day and night. There's no cessation. I don't
have relief. There's not a time where I go
to bed and it You know, everything gets better, day and night, night
and day, one day after the next, a continuous sense of being depressed
and despondent and downcast in soul. And when I remember these
things, oh, he says, he asks this question, my tears have
been my meat day and night, while they continually say to me, where
is thy God? Where's your God? The promise
of scripture is that those who wait on the Lord will not be
ashamed. He says back in Psalm, I can't
remember, Psalm 37, I think, I have never seen the Lord's
people begging bread. Well, I'm begging now and I don't
have water now, I must not be the Lord's. Isn't that the conclusion
that the accuser of our conscience and the accuser of the brethren
brings to us? Our own conscience has enough
to accuse us. And then I have this other enemy
who uses what he knows about the way I think to bring it up
to me and remind me of my emptiness. my failure, all that I am in
myself, I have nothing, where is your God? You say you trust
in him, yet the Lord's people are never without water and bread.
And here you are, empty in your soul. Where's your God? You must
not be the Lord's. Your trust must be hypocrisy. Maybe your thought of your experience
is a false thought. You look for something within,
you look for a time when you experience these things and you
can't find it. Because it was never real. That's the way that
this depression of soul comes to us. And the answer is to where
is thy God is in the next verse. When I remember these things,
I pour out my soul in me. My soul, my tears are being poured
out night and day. They've been my meat. And now
I pour out my soul in me. And he remembers back now, for
I had gone with a multitude, with a great congregation. I
went with them. Others went, and I was there
with them to the house of God, where God's dwelling is. And
where is that? It's among his people. Where
two or three are gathered in my name, there will I be in the
midst of them. The house of God. The church
is the temple of the living God and every believer in it. I went
with them to the house of God, to the public place, to hear
the gospel, to hear of Christ, to hear of his will, of his character,
of his name, of his work. I called upon him. because God
gave that to me, and I found in His name all of my salvation. So I went with them then, and
I went then with a voice of joy and praise, with a multitude
that kept holy day. This is the day the Lord had
drawn us to hear Him, for Him to visit with us under the hearing
of the gospel. I remember that. And I privately
worshiped in that public worship. When I heard the gospel there
with God's people, then I found it in my soul, this moisture. And yet, that was something back
then. Now, David is deprived of that. According to expositors, this
psalm was written out of the context of David fleeing from
Absalom, his son. And the situation was that David
had sinned against God with Bathsheba, had murdered her husband, had
covered it up, and then lived in hypocrisy for a long time
until God came to him through the prophet Nathan and revealed
his sin to him and told him. The Lord has, and David said,
I have sinned. And God said, through the prophet
Nathan, the Lord has put away your sin. But yet, because you
did this, there's going to be trouble in your house. And there
was. Absalom, his own son, rose up
against him. Absalom staged a coup. And David's trusted counselor
Ahithophel and most of the people of Israel and Judah took over
Jerusalem. And David had to run for his
life. He can't come back to the place of worship. He's isolated
from the city of God and from the tabernacle where God makes
himself known. He no longer can do that, and
so since he cannot be with God's people in worship, he has to
remember it as something that happened before. He's calling
to mind God's goodness to him in the declaration of the gospel
of his grace, in his revelation of himself to his heart and soul
in the past. And he draws from that when his
tears are his meat. And when his enemy comes and
asks him, where is your God? He remembers back. Like the song
we just sang, great is thy faithfulness. God is faithful to himself. God cannot deny himself. God cannot lie. He will fulfill
his promises. He will fulfill his word, not
like us. He's not a man that he should
lie. or a man that he should turn
and repent. And so he recalls God's faithfulness
and he relies on that. And then he asks in verse five,
why art thou cast down, O my soul? Notice he's talking to
his soul. He's not listening to his soul
to take direction from his downcast soul. He's telling his soul now. He's preaching the gospel to
himself. He's talking to himself. And
this is the way God works in the hearts of his people. We
saw this back in Psalm 39 in our Bible study. I said, I will
take heed to my ways. He's talking to himself. This
is what he said here in Psalm 42. He's talking to himself.
Why are you cast down, O my soul? He's going to take the gift of
faith that God has given to him, considering it his highest privilege
of any creature, of any man, and following Christ in his life
how he did and living by faith on him, he's going to judge his
Savior's power and love and grace based on his Savior's word of
truth. In other words, he's going to
judge his soul's condition and the circumstances of his life,
not on what he sees when he looks up into the clouds that seem
to hide God's favor, But he's going to draw by faith from God's
word and faithfulness, his character and his word and his work in
order to bring a correction to his own self. He's not gonna
listen to himself. He's going to preach the Lord's
word to himself. That's what he's saying here.
There's no higher privilege given to any man than to live upon
the word of Christ and to take his word as the way things are. This is the privilege of every
believer. Jesus said, you believe in God,
believe also in me. We're to look to Christ, we're
to go to him, and we're to take his word in our hand, as it were,
in our heart and with our mouth, and bring it in prayer to him.
And that's what he's doing here, in verse five. Why are you cast
down, O my soul? Why are you disquieted in me? Unrest, no quietness, no peace. Why? Here's his answer to himself. He's going to correct himself. He said, hope thou in God, for
I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. When
the Lord shows his face to us, It always reveals to us not what
we are in the emptiness of ourself, but what He is in His fullness
and what we are in Him. It's not what we find in ourself
that lifts us up. It's what we find in the Lord
Jesus Christ. The fullness of the Godhead dwells
in Him bodily and you are complete in Him. And notice in all of
this, he's not referring to, he's not talking to his friend,
his peers. He's talking to the Lord himself,
because he has no one else. His thirst can only be met by
the Lord Jesus Christ. In Psalm 73 verse 25, he says,
whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth
that I desire beside thee. That's the confession of a believer. I have no one in heaven to stand
for me, but the mediator between God and men. And I'm not relying
on angels. I'm not relying on some saint
who's gone before us. No, I'm gonna rely on the Lord
Jesus alone. And I have no one on earth that
I desire beside Thee. Now when God brings us to that,
then we know it's God's work, don't we? When we can't find
it in ourselves, but find it in Christ, that's God's work. That's the but God that we just
sang about. That's God's grace. But in all
of this, it's easy for us also to fall into another paralysis
of self-analysis. We compare ourselves to the cry
of the psalmist here, and we think, I don't measure up even
to this. I haven't come low enough. I
haven't reached high enough. I'm always still looking within,
and I'm not able to talk to my own soul. I can't preach the
gospel to my soul, because I've forgotten so much of it. or I
can't find it. I open the Bible and it's like
I can just read every word for pages and nothing happens. But
it's wrong for us to look and compare ourselves to someone
else, even to the psalmist. What we need to do is understand
that what's being said here not only describes the experience
of a real believer and God's answer to him and his grace to
him and comfort, But preeminently, he's talking about the Lord Jesus
Christ. He says in the next verse, oh
my God, my soul is cast down within me. Now, understand, this
is being honest with God. And there's nothing more comforting
than the fact that God tells us by this example here, we are
to be utterly honest with Him. He knows us. We hide from ourselves. We hide the way we feel. We're
ashamed to confess it. We're ashamed to confess our
sinful desires in the either because we're so ashamed that
it just hurts us to even say it or admit it, that that's the
way we are. This is my character. It's so
loathsome to me, I can't even face myself, what I am. And we
also play the other side where we don't want to talk about our
temptations because then we will be kept from doing them. So there's
so many ways where we cannot be honest And yet God draws us
out. He causes us to honestly confess,
this is the sinner that I am. This is how bad I am, and this
is how much I need you to save me from my sins. And also, we
admit how we feel. Because how we feel is the way
things really are. Someone else sees us, why don't
you just straighten up? I can't. It's the way I am. I'm
facing myself here. My God, my soul is cast down
within me, he tells the Lord. Whom have I in heaven but thee?
None on earth I desire beside thee. Lord, this is, you are
my refuge, you are my hiding place, you are my surety, my
redeemer, my mediator. My God, my soul is cast down
within me. Therefore, he says, will I remember
thee from the land of Jordan and of the Hermonites from the
hill Mizar? Now what he's doing here is he's
remembering God's dealings with him in the past, isn't he? In
the past. In Psalm 133, he says in verse
three, as the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended
upon the mountains of Zion, there the Lord commanded the blessing,
even life forevermore. So Hermon is a place where God
commanded the blessing, and he's remembering that. Where did God
command the blessing? What mountain did God command
the blessing? Was it not Mount Calvary? Wasn't
it on our Savior that God poured out His Spirit without measure?
And isn't it because God poured out His Spirit on Him that it
runs down to all of His church, to all of His people? And what
about Jordan? Or remember the children of Israel
coming out through the wilderness, led by Joshua, which means Jesus,
Jehovah, our salvation. Led by Joshua, they're commanded
to take the ark and the Levites were to step into Jordan, that
river that signifies God's judgment. They couldn't pass that river
until the priests, the Levites, carrying the ark of the covenant,
stepped into that water and God stopped the river of Jordan.
The flow of judgment was stopped when Christ stepped into it for
his people. He remembers these things. He
recalls the gospel. As it says in 1 Corinthians 15,
if you keep these things in memory, he's looking back to what God
did outside of his experience in the Lord Jesus Christ. He's remembering the blessings
of God on his people come to them in Christ. And he finds
comfort knowing that it's in him. In verse seven, we even
see this. He says, deep calleth unto deep
at the noise of thy waterspouts, all thy waves and thy billows
are gone over me. This is actually spoken in Jonah
chapter two, the same words. Deep calleth unto deep at the
noise of thy waterspouts. Jonah was in the belly of the
whale. And in that belly, he said, all of your waves, your
billows and waves are gone over me. And Jesus said in Matthew
12 that that experience of Jonah was pointing to his experience. The son of man is the Jonah,
the fulfillment of it. He himself would go into death
and into the grave, and all of God's wrath would come over him.
And under that, he's saying, wave upon wave, continuously,
go over me. All of your waves and billows
are gone over me. There's no cessation, no end
of it. And here, in the experience of
a believer, we often feel like this. There's no end to this
downcast low point. but were drawn out here by verses
six and seven to see that this was actually the experience of
the Lord Jesus Christ. So he stood here in our place
and God's waves and billows came over him so that God's deliverance
of him is our deliverance in him. And even though we experience
these sense of the loss of God's presence and the accusation of
the enemy and the humiliation that that brings in confessing
these things to God, we find the answer from God's throne
to us is to consider what he did in Christ. And verse eight,
because these things came upon the Lord Jesus, he says, Yet
the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night
his song shall be with me and my prayer unto the God of my
life." The God of my life. What is he saying? There is life
only in God. My life is His life, and His
life is my life. He's the God of my life, and
this proves to us that the Lord Jesus Christ is God. Because
in Galatians 2.20, the Apostle Paul says, I'm crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, I live, yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in
the flesh, I live, by the faith of the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me. Christ is our life, says in Colossians
3 verse 4. God, the God of my life, Christ,
the Lord Jesus Christ, is the way, the truth, and the life.
I, by faith, take his truth and come into the throne of God by
his blood, and I preach to my soul, Christ is my life. He underwent
these billows and waves. And I remember God's goodness
in his salvation in Jordan, in Hermonite, and from the hill,
Mizar. He says in verse nine. Oh, actually in verse eight,
look at this. Yet the Lord will command his
lovingkindness. His lovingkindness is his grace.
How does he know? He says, yet the Lord will command. Here he is in the depths of despair. All of God's waves and billows
are gone over him. And he says, yet. How can he
say that? How can he do that? He feels
absolutely empty, no water for his soul. He looks to God and
cries out, and then he says, yet, the Lord. He's convinced
of this. He's persuaded, fully persuaded
that God will yet, in the daytime, command his loving kindness.
How can he do that? Because salvation is not by what
God finds in me. It's not because of what I provide
or aid God, contribute to. God can deliver me and must without
my help, without my value to it, and without my strength in
it. It doesn't come from within,
it comes from Him, from without. It's in Christ. And He will command
this. In Psalm 71, it says, Thou hast
commanded to save me. Thou hast given commandment to
save me. And that's God's love and kindness.
His love of grace and mercy to save His people and tell them
in the daytime and in the night. His song, a song of salvation,
a song of praise, a song of joy, His song shall be with me and
my prayer unto the God of my life, unto the Lord Jesus Christ. Verse nine, I will say unto God
my rock. No one can move him. My strength
is not in me, it's in him. In Romans chapter eight, the
pinnacle really of God's comfort to his church. He directs us
to God. He always says this. And he first
talks about his foreknowledge, whom he did foreknow, them also
he did predestinate, according to his purpose. His purpose,
his work, to be conformed to the image of his son. The fact
that he won't fail in it. And those he predestinated unto
that and performed that work, he also called and justified
and glorified. And then he says, who can say
anything against us? Who can charge us? God has justified
us. If God is for us, who can be
against us? And it's Christ that died. Who
can condemn us? It's Christ that died. In fact,
he's already risen again, and he's at the right hand of God
making intercession for us. So he takes all of our fears
in this life, inward and outward, persecutions and trouble, life
and death, anything that can be brought against us, a charge
to us, or our experience, whether it be this being downcast, or
whether it come in terms of physical suffering, or financial trouble,
or our sickness, or anything. All of it's answered with this,
nothing can separate us from God's love, which is in Christ,
our rock. I will say unto God, my rock,
why hast thou forgotten me? Do you see his confession here
again, how honest he is? It's not true that God had forgotten
him. Jesus said, I will be with you
always. Nothing, he will never forsake
us. He says, no one can take my sheep
out of my hand, and my Father is greater than all, and no one
can take them out of his hand. And I will never forsake you,
no, never. So God is not gonna forget. Another
question is raised, would God forget his people? Can a woman
forget her son? Can a river forget where to run? They might, but God cannot forget. He has written them on his heart
and on his hand. I will say unto God my rock,
why have you forgotten me? Because this is his experience. He's confessing his unbelief
here. I can't see it, I can't feel
it. God must be distant, I must be forsaken. Why go I mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy? This is how painful
the enemy was. As with a sword in my bones,
it's one thing to be cut through our flesh, But to be stabbed
in your bones, my enemies reproach me while they say." Notice. Sticks and stones, my mom or
people used to say when I was a kid, so that you would toughen
up when people spoke against you, you need to get tough. Sticks
and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.
Say that. OK. It didn't help. Actually,
what they said against me was more painful than what they did.
I'd rather have them say something than slug me. My brothers would
slug me all the time. But what hurt more is when they
would say things about the way I looked, the way I smelled,
the way I talked, whatever it was. That's what hurt. You're a worm. I know. and it made me feel bad and it
couldn't be taken away. When someone you love hurts you
with words, it sticks with you, doesn't it? And so he says, as
with a sword in my bones, my enemies reproach me while they
say daily to me, where is thy God? It's your fault. You claim
to trust God. It can't be true because look,
where's your God? It's all coming upon you because
of your sin. That was true in David's case.
Shimei came to David while he's out of Jerusalem with his people
and he begins to throw stones at him and kick up dust at him
and to tell him, you're a bloody man, that's why you're experiencing
this because you killed the house of Saul and cursing David. And Abishai, one of David's strong
men said, let me go take his head off. David said, no, God
sent him to curse. God sent him to curse, and I'm
not going to prevent him. Who can tell if God will turn
his cursing into a blessing? That's in 2 Samuel chapter 16. So here, as with a sword in my
bones, my enemies reproach me. They know where it hurts. This
is the way it hurts. Where's your God? My conscience
already tells me that because of my sin, I must not be one
of the Lord's people. You can't trust in God. Look
at what a sinner you are. You haven't shown any marks of
evidences of grace in your life. You have no reason, no basis
to trust in God, no reason to expect from Him. That's the very
reason. That's the basis of coming to
him as a sinner because Jesus Christ came into the world to
save sinners and I am the chief of them. I have no hope except
in God. So he says again in verse 11,
why are you cast down? Oh my soul, he's taking everything
now and he's applying it in another sermon to his soul. Why art thou
disquieted within me? Hope thou not in yourself, believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ. Hope thou in God, for I shall
yet praise him. Here he is bolstered now, considering
since God is his hope and nothing can separate us from his love
and purpose and grace. And because salvation is all
of grace and not of me, therefore I shall yet praise him who is
the health of my countenance and my God. What a blessing it
is that God would be so gracious as to stoop to teach us that
we are to take His Word concerning Himself, concerning His name,
the revelation of who He is and His character, and we're to take
God's Word with the gift of faith, of course, to Him in prayer,
relying on Him, calling on His name. and looking to him. I wanna read to you a hymn, a
hymn written by John Newton, if you don't mind, I wanna read
these to you. These are very precious. This one is something you've
probably heard before, how tedious and tasteless the hours. He says,
how tedious and tasteless the hours when Jesus no longer I
see. Sweet prospects, sweet birds,
and sweet flowers have lost all their sweetness with me. In other
words, I don't have anything on earth. The midsummer sun shines
but dim. The fields strive in vain to
look gay. But when I am happy in him, December's
as pleasant as May. We just sang, great is thy faithfulness,
summer and winter, springtime and harvest, sunshine and moonshine,
it doesn't matter. Everything's okay when Christ
is with me. Nothing is okay if he's not.
In verse two of this hymn, he says, his name, that's who Christ
is, his name yields the richest perfume. And sweeter than music,
his voice, when we hear the gospel, his presence disperses my gloom
and makes all within me rejoice. I should, were he always thus
near, have nothing to wish or to fear. No mortal so happy as
I, my summer would last all the year. When Christ is near, it
would be summer throughout the year. Content with beholding
his face, not looking in the mirror, but beholding his face,
my all to his pleasure resigned. No changes of season or place
would make any change in my mind. While blessed with a sense of
his love, A palace, a toy, would appear, and prisons would palaces
prove if Jesus would dwell with me there. I could be in prison,
and it would be like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and the
fire heated seven times hotter than it had ever been heated
before, just as calm and cool as a cucumber, because the Lord
is with me. Dear Lord, if indeed I am thine,
If thou art my sun and my song, say, why do I languish and pine,
and why are my winters so long? Oh, drive these dark clouds from
my sky, thy soul-cheering presence restore, or take me unto thee
on high, where winter and clouds are no more. Let's pray. Father,
thank you for your word that you direct us to yourself in
the Lord Jesus Christ. The fullness of the Godhead dwells
in him. And as a man, he took all of
the billows and the waves of God's outpouring justice and
wrath because of our sins, which he took and owned and bore in
his own body on the tree. He cried, my God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me? That we might cry, the Lord will
never forsake his people because he has received from our Lord
Jesus a full answer to justice, a full appeasement of his wrath,
a full fulfillment of his righteousness in his own work for our souls. Help us, Lord, to take your gospel
into our heart and apply it by your spirit. Help us to feel
the sense of your presence. But when we don't feel it, Lord,
help us to trust in you anyway, to draw from those dark clouds
what faith sees with the eye given to it, the persuasion,
the full persuasion that God is for us, that he is with us,
that he will never forsake us, and none can accuse or separate
us from his love. It's His name, and because of
His name, that we are kept and saved. Help us, Lord, to trust
in You and call on You. Whom have I in heaven but Thee,
O Lord? There's none on earth I desire
beside Thee. Let this be our prayer. Put it
in our hearts and cause us to sing praise and joy in faith
because of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. In His name we pray,
amen.