Why am I discouraged and sad?

‘Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad?’

Those were his questions and the questions surprised the listeners. They were aware of his pain and they knew about the stress and anguish that he was going through. His enemies had been attacking and taunting him leaving him a pale shadow of the man he once was. He was a man who was tired, he could never sleep and he was often in tears.

Why was he so sad and discouraged? Wasn’t it obvious? The listeners couldn’t understand why he would ask a question that had such an obvious answer. As they pondered his words, he spoke again:

‘I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again – my Saviour and my God!’

They knew him as a man of misery and yet the listeners began to sense a shift in him as they heard these words of hope. No longer was he going to let his pain and circumstances define him, he was going to put his hope in God who he believed would rescue him. Pain had been his captor, despair his jail cell but he was remembering that God can break any negative power and bring healing and restoration. The future was looking brighter and he proclaimed,

‘Now I am deeply discouraged, but I will remember you’.

These words from Psalm 42.5-6 & 11 describe an experience of change. The speaker/writer recognized that his life was miserable but that with God that there was a hope of change. He was able to admit his deep pain and discouragement whilst choosing to remember God and to believe that God could perform a miracle that resulted in transformation. The transformation would be in him as he put God back in the centre, as he made God the focus again, but perhaps it would also include a change in his circumstances? He could but hope.

The Psalm begins with these words:

‘As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God.
I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?’

Do we long for God? Do our thoughts dwell on him or are we consumed by pain and our circumstances? Are you discouraged? Do you feel miserable about life? You don’t have to stay in that place, remember God and put your hope in him.

‘Now I am deeply discouraged, but I will remember you’.