Psalm 77:1-20

There will be days that are troublesome to us.  There are times that we will feel like we cannot go forward and that there is no hope for the future.  It is during these times that we must learn to seek the Lord with all of our hearts and cry out to Him.  Both day and night we must call upon the Lord to help us and to transform our thinking.  Even though we seek the Lord during these difficult times, we must be prepared to feel as though God is distant and does not care.  There will be times when we will not find comfort immediately.  Every fiber of our being will simply tell us that trusting the Lord is useless.  Our souls will moan and our spirits will grow tired of waiting on the Lord.  We must not expect that our walk with the Lord will always be easily understood and comfortable.

WE MAY FEEL ABANDONED BY THE LORD: During times that we are depressed or afflicted we are the most vulnerable to the feelings the Lord has somehow abandoned us or does not care.  We feel that we are all alone in the world and that we are without hope.  Times of sweet fellowship with the Lord and experiencing joy in our lives end up feeling like distant memories that will never return.  It feels like God has rejected us and that His favor will never return to us.  All of our senses cry out that God has forgotten us and His promises.  To us it looks like God’s love has turned into hatred and that God is angry with us.  We must be prepared to face these feelings because they will inevitably happen in our lives.  We cannot live in light of these feelings and we must constantly remind ourselves that these feelings are not correct, but we must not be surprised by them.  The fact that we live in a sin cursed world should cause us to expect feelings like this to come along.


WE MUST FOCUS ON THE WAYS OF THE LORD: We must combat the way that we feel by focusing on the way that the Lord has worked in the past and the way that He truly is.  It is important for us to look back on the faithfulness of the Lord.  We must fill our minds with the blessings that the Lord has bestowed and recall His glorious works of the past.  Remembering God’s faithfulness of the past will help us have hope for the present and the future.  We must always remember who God is and what He has done instead of being controlled by our feelings.  Israel is encouraged to look back as see how the Lord released them from slavery and delivered them from their enemies.  They were to recall how God opened the Sea for them to pass through, how God fed them from the sky and how He defended them in times of war.  The enemies of the Lord should live in fear and the children of the Lord should live in faith.  God is great and we cannot forget Him especially when we feel like He has abandoned or rejected us. 

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