Fighting For Hope

“Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise Him,my Savior and my God.”
(Psalm 42:11)

Have you ever had those kind of times when outer circumstances become not what you hoped it would be? King David was having one of those times where the adversary was probing his mind repeatedly suggesting to his mind, ‘Where is your God?’

I cannot even begin to tell you how many hundreds of times in the last five years I have fought back the heaviness of discouragement with these words: “Hope in God, Marty, Hope in God. One day you will again praise Him. This miserable emotion will pass. This season will pass. Don’t be downcast. Look to Jesus. The light will dawn. “Marty, Hope in God.”

And so this psalm is so worn out in the pages of my Bible because it is an example by David of how he dealt with discouragement. Sometimes it feels like God has forgotten. David poses the question, Why?
But he wasn’t without some hope. 

In the midst of the discouragement he affirms his love for God, Verse 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.”

Even though he says it looks as if God has forgotten him, he never stops believing in the absolute sovereignty of God over all his adversity. 

What he did in the midst of all this in verse 8 , what does he do? HE SINGS! 
He refreshes his soul with who God is and was in his life and remembers the faithfulness of God. 

I think God crafts difficult situations where our sense of time isn’t moving in sync with His perfect timing. In it, God has not forgotten, He is busy at work helping us in the discouragement to look up, find Jesus, and hope in His rest in the middle of it all, walking on water saying, “peace”. I’m comforted by this, and an able to cope with it all because I see God is at work, sometimes just not in the time I want, but what He knows is perfect for me. Thank You God.