God for the Dry Times

       One of the experiences of life which is hardest for most Christians to deal with is spiritual dryness -- the times when it seems that worship is motion without emotion, prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling and rattle around in the room, and God seems to be an infinite distance away.

       I suspect that everyone here has gone through these dry times and that few if any of us would welcome their return.  This may even be your condition today.  Your Christian life feels flat and it was hard to make it to worship today.

       It was from one of these times of spiritual dryness that Psalms 42 and 43 were written.  Here the author speaks first of her deep awareness of need for God:

"As the deer pants for the water brooks,

So my soul pants for You, 0 God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and appear before God?"

       That’s the need.  But the need has not been met.  God seems absent.

"My tears have been my food day and night

While they say to me continually all day long, where is your God?'

       The words of the psalmist describe it well.  Whether others ask us the question "Where is your God?" or we ask it of ourselves during these times of dryness, the result is the same. We seem out of touch with God.  He seems nowhere to be found and tears can become our food.

       That's what spiritual dryness feels like.  If you've felt it, you don't need it described further. The question is: "Where does it come from and how do we deal with it once it arrives?"

       Psalms 42 and 43 are really two parts of one psalm.  If you look at the inscription that introduces this psalm you will see it is called a maskil.  Maskil is the Hebrew word for teaching.  So this psalm is intended to teach us something.

       What?

       Well, judging from the repeated refrain, it is intended to teach us how to handle times of spiritual dryness and depression – those times when we get up morning after morning and ask, "Why are you cast down, 0 my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?"  The psalms’ purpose is to show us the road to hope.  From her hard personal experience the psalmist says to us, "If you want to overcome depression, then you must look to God —even when that is hard to do.  Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him."

       Right now she feels cut off from worship and from the people and the activities that gave her life significance.  But she remembers better times -- how she joined pilgrims processing to the house of God and shouted with joy and thanksgiving.   These memories help hold her up in the dark time.  "Why are you downcast, 0 my soul? Wait for God.  My former joy was wonderful. It will come again.  I must wait for God."

       The idea of waiting for God is very important in the Bible.  This waiting is not the waiting of a person lying on a chaise lounge at Club Med waiting for a waiter to bring a fancy umbrella drink.  The Hebrew word describes the waiting of a runner in the starting blocks--coiled, ready, listening for the sound of the starter's gun to spring into action. Isaiah 40:31 tells us that those who look expectantly for the act of God which is around the corner will find that this hope gives them new strength now.

       The psalmist knows this too.  She knows that she will be able to keep going if she can live in hope. Where there is hope, there is life.

       I believe that the second stanza of Psalm 42 proves that the psalm is the genuine reflection of a depressed person who yearns for relief.   This isn’t a theoretical psalm.  The psalmist's first word of comfort and rebuke to herself just don't work.  She can't just pull herself up by her mental boot straps. "I told myself to shape up but my soul is still downcast within me. I am overwhelmed. I am crushed. I am drowning.  I desperately need something to hold on to, a rock to cling to, to save me from the flood.  God, I thought you were that rock, but You failed me."

       “I will say to God, my rock, 'why have you put me out of your mind?'  My soul is cast down.  But that is exactly why I call you to mind for You, God, are my only hope. 

        This psalm is about more than just changing your thoughts --slapping yourself across the face telling yourself to shape up.  It's a deeper understanding that expects God to act.

       Honest prayer sometimes involves getting things off our chest.  The psalmist has longings, frustrations, distress, hurt, resentment and anger.  She does not hide them.  She could try to hide these from God --but that’s impossible.  So she lays it all out on the table.

       She expresses her feelings to God.  This is not just an emotional catharsis, like crying your heart out in an empty room, or losing your temper and taking it out on the cushions. That doesn't solve anything. It only intensifies the anger.  It is more adult to say what you feel to the person you regard as responsible. The psalmist does that. She does not hesitate to be straight with God.  She assumes that God is big enough to take it and loving enough to absorb it.

       However, although the psalmist does not hesitate to express her feelings freely, she also knows when enough is enough.  The expression of grief can become obsessive indulgence in grief.  Now she doesn't deny her grief.   It is very real.  But in each stanza she moves on to recognize the working hand of God.  There is a pattern here.  The feelings of the heart cry out for expression and they must be expressed.   But there must also come a time when the mind is applied to the situation too.

       There seem to be three times when we are especially vulnerable to spiritual dryness.   First there are the periods of normal depression -- the blues.

       In men, doctors tell us, this normal depression comes in a cycle about every five or six weeks and has a duration of about three days. In women, the cycle is somewhat more frequent. I don't know why this cycle exists.  I suppose it's biochemical.  But I do know that it is normal.

       The trouble is that when we feel depressed we feel constrained to find an external reason for our depression. It is easy then to focus on our relationship with God and feel guilt because we are depressed or to feel that our depression is a symptom of inadequate communion with God.  And when we respond to a normal depression with either guilt or desperation, it tends to produce more depression.

      Dr. 0. Quentin Hyder, a Christian psychiatrist, describes the relationship between depression and spiritual dryness.  "When a Christian gets depressed," Hyder writes, "he has added burdens unknown to the non-Christian.  His low mood makes him feel not only cut off from others but cut off from God.   He begins to have doubts about the security of his eternal relationship with God. He wonders if, after all, he is really the true believer he has professed to be.  Is he really saved? Are his sins really forgiven?   During this time he may quit attending church because he feels like a hypocrite -- and that only compounds the problem."

       The second period of extreme vulnerability to spiritual dryness is shortly after a person of whatever age comes to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

       Right after receiving Christ, the new Christian feels really good.  But then, the crash comes.  The good feelings disappear and unless the baby Christian is a part of a supportive fellowship that recognizes what is happening, he or she may figure that the experience wasn't real and that it's time to move on to something else.

       The experience of feeling high at conversion and then crashing isn't the exception.  It's the norm. I suspect that if I asked for a show of hands many of you would say that this was a part of your own early Christian experience. Why the crash comes, we will explore in just a bit.

       The third period of vulnerability is when we have gone through a time of loss, or frustration.  We either feel that God is the cause of our problems and we are angry, or that we are the cause of our problems and we feel guilty or else we may feel guilty about feeling anger at God.  In any case, we may feel estranged from God.  And in cases of extreme loss or shock, our emotions may be mercifully numbed – but this numbness is translated into our perception of the health of our spiritual life.

       Those are a few of the times that spiritual dryness can occur in our lives. I'm sure there are others.  In any case, it is not an unusual event.

       But whatever the cause, the cure is always the same. 

       Here is the prescription.

       Substitute faith and facts for feelings. Focus on the promises of God rather than on your feelings about yourself or about God. For the barometer of our lives is the faithfulness of God -- not our subjective feelings.       

       If you don't take away anything else from this sermon, please take this. There comes a time in each of our lives when we discover for ourselves that the ultimate refuge of any believer is in the word of God, and not in our feelings either about God or about ourselves. We live by faith in God -- not by faith in our feelings about God. Let me repeat that.  We live by faith in God -- not by faith in our feelings about God. 

       Dr. Hyder in his book, The Christian’s Handbook of Psychiatry,  illustrates the danger of relying on our feelings in place of God's promises.  "Some years ago," he writes, I was piloting a small, single-engine plane over London , and being somewhat braver than cautious, I allowed myself to become trapped in some low rain clouds. My eyes lost sight of the horizon and my feet, of course, were not in contact with the ground.  The only balance guides I had left were the semi-circular canals in my inner ears, but these are not equipped to deal with the problem of spatial altitude without the assistance of either vision or touch.

       "However, in front of me were the airplane's essential instruments -- the turn and bank indicator, the artificial horizon, the climb and descent indicator and others which gave me my air speed, altitude and direction. By carefully watching these instruments, I was able for a while to keep the airplane flying straight and level. It required uninterrupted, intense concentration.  But eventually my attention wandered and I started relying only on my inner-ear mechanism. I was lucky I didn't either stall and go into a spin or dive into the ground.  It is literally possible, for example, if the instruments are not functioning properly and the pilot is tightly strapped in, for him to find himself flying completely upside down, in the wrong direction, or going down in a dive or a spin.  I was lucky that the cloud base was high enough off the ground for me not to fly into a building or a hill.  As soon as I came down below it and saw the ground again, I knew I was safe. 

       "We Christians," Hyder concludes, "are often like that in our daily lives.  If we rely on our feelings, like the pilot relying on his own erroneous subjective information, we can pass into the dark clouds of life's disappointments and become completely disoriented and lose our way.  But if we keep our eyes on the instruments on the dashboard, the irrevocable facts of history and the person of Christ who is our guide and master, we will progress straight and level” -- even, in the times of spiritual dryness."

       The one other vital question we need to ask, is why God permits us to go through these times of dryness at all.  Doesn't God want us always to share the joyful feelings of close fellowship with Him?  C.S. Lewis powerfully expresses in the Screwtape Letters the answer to this question from the point of view of the demons. A senior demon named Screwtape writes to a junior tempter named Wormwood, “We want cattle who can finally become food.  He wants servants who can finally become sons.  And that is where the troughs come in. In the beginning, He will set them off with communications of his presence which, though faint, seem great to them with emotional sweetness and easy conquest over temptation.  But he never allows that state of affairs to last for long.  Sooner or later he withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs...to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.  It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.   Hence, the prayers offered in the state of dryness are the prayers which please him best.  He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there he is pleased even with their stumble.  Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do God’s  will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, asks why he has been forsaken -- and still obeys."

        Screwtape sees the truth.  It is in the troughs, the times of spiritual dryness, that faith is most developed and demonstrated.  This is a faith that is not related to our emotional exhilaration or flatness, but a faith which rests on what God guarantees in His word.

       What you get from this psalm depends greatly on how you feel when you read it.  If you are depressed - in personal, emotional, and spiritual exile -- it has a lot of help.  It helps us come back from that dryness to knowledge of God's acceptance. 

       The psalm also validates our feelings.  Sometimes we do feel depressed.   And we find that God can handle that fact a whole lot better than some people -- even Christian friends -- who have a hard time letting you possess the feelings you have --that insist on platitudes of "you're okay" when both you and God know you're not okay.

       The psalm also identifies the direction of recovery -- a regaining of hope.  The psalm helps us to recall therapeutic memories - the times when things have been okay.  These therapeutic memories give perspective on life.

        The psalm gives us a model of checking the downward spiral of emotions with a healthy dose of reality — God has been faithful in the past, He has proven his love for me in Jesus Christ, He will be faithful in the future. So I will make the effort to get out of bed and get to worship --even though I don't feel like it, because God has promised to meet me there and I believe His promises even when I don't feel His promises.”

       The psalm is very honest.  And I think that there is an implied challenge here to our life together as a church.  Are people free to come to worship here and to be honest at the same time?

       Have you ever noticed that some exercise clubs are designed only for people who don't need them?  They are places for people to put on spandex and show off their perfect physiques to each other, but God help people who come in and look like they really heed exercise -- "fat, gross, get out of here — you're offending our eyes and hurting our image."

       Well God help us if we ever act that way as a church -- if we ever start to see ourselves as a place to show off perfect spiritual physiques rather than as a place for people with genuine needs who genuinely need a savior and sometimes act like it. The church is not a show place for spiritual athletes. It is a place of healing, growth and service for forgiven sinners.  We don’t want any spiritual spandex here.

       What if you are not depressed?   What if you are never depressed? What if you never feel cut off?  Well there is also a powerful question for you in this psalm.  The psalmist speaks of a great desire to know God.  "As the doe pants after the water brook, so my soul thirst for you, 0 God.”  Do you have that kind of desire for God?   Did the psalmist have the same appreciation of God and of worship before her time of emotional exile?  Or did she take God for granted?  Will you have to go through a time of exile and return to learn to really worship?

        The other question for all of us is, “Are we, as a church, giving other people what they need to get through dry spells?  Worship is as much your responsibility as mine.  Your participation is vital -- not just for you but for the joy of others.  Corporate worship gave the psalmist what she needed and it can give us what we need.  We need more than memory of a fun time.  We need a memory of what it feels like to be in the presence of God with the people of God.    That gives us the courage, the desire and the hope to work it through.