What to Do When Your Spirits Sink

We’ve been talking a lot this weekend about enjoying Jesus. I’ve even tried to make the case that the very nature of saving faith is the awakening of the enjoyment of Jesus. And I pointed out on Friday that this can be very unsettling for people because everybody knows that our actual experience of enjoying Jesus goes up and down — so, to attach the enjoyment of Jesus to saving faith can sound like your salvation becomes fragile or jeopardized.

But Christian salvation is anything but fragile. “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). That is the golden chain of unbreakable assurance. If you have been justified by faith, there is no condemnation, and you are as good as glorified, because God keeps his own. God keeps.

I like to ask people — I’ll ask you — “What makes you think you will wake up a Christian tomorrow morning?” The answer you give to that question tells a lot about your theology — your view of God and his salvation. And the answer is not, “Because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I will use my free will to trust Jesus in the morning.” You don’t know any such thing. What you do know is Jude 24–25:

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

That’s what we know. God keeps those whom he calls. God’s sovereign grip on us is the ground of our assurance. He will hold us fast. He will hold us fast. “For my Savior loves me so; he will hold me fast.”

But we don’t solve the problem of the ups and downs of our joy by pretending that there are no ups and downs in our faith. Jesus speaks of little faith and great faith. The disciples ask him to increase their faith. Paul speaks of growing faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3). So, whether we focus on faith in Jesus or on enjoying Jesus, life is war. We fight for faith and we fight for joy. If you put your feet up, you will be overrun by the enemy. Whether you are 18 or 80, the fight of faith — the fight for joy — is a fight to the end. At the end of his life, Paul said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).

So, that’s what I want to focus on this morning: the rise and fall of faith, the rise and fall of joy in Jesus — and especially the fall: what to do when your spirits sink.

David’s Pattern for Life

One of the recurring patterns of life in the Psalms is getting into a pit and getting out again. Many psalms are descriptions of the sinking of our spirits, when we feel spiritually dry and sometimes wonder if we are even a Christian. We lack the kind of joy we know we should have, and we are drawn away by other things. It can be a very scary season. And the question I’m trying to answer this morning is whether those seasons are normal, and what we should do when they come.

One of my favorite statements of this pattern of life comes from David’s experience found in Psalm 40. We are going to focus on verses 1–3.

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
I waited patiently for the Lord;
     he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
     out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
     making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
     a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
     and put their trust in the Lord.

These verses present a pattern of life at least part of which every seasoned Christian knows about firsthand. And I hope that one of the effects of this message is that you would all be enabled to follow the whole pattern all the way through to its exciting conclusion. David leads us through six stages of his experience, and I want us to follow him closely. I’ll name them, and then we will unfold each.

1. David is in a muddy pit.
2. He cries to God for help.
3. He waits for the Lord.
4. God draws him out of the pit to safety.
5. God gives David a new song to sing (probably the one we are reading).
6. Many others come to trust God when they see this pattern of life.

Here is King David, a man after God’s own heart. Let us see if we can make his pattern part of our life.

1. The King’s Pit

First, the king is in the pits (Psalm 40:2). What is this experience? What are we supposed to feel with the king when we read that it is like being caught in a desolate pit and in miry clay? I looked up this word, translated destruction in the ESV and horrible in the KJV and desolate in the RSV and slimy in the NIV. What I found was that it refers elsewhere to roaring or tumult, like stormy waves. When you consider that the usual meaning of pit is a well or a cistern, the image you get is striking. It is as if David had fallen into a deep, dark well and plunged not into a clean, placid pool but into a roaring storm — only all dark and underground.

Then, alongside that picture is the image of mire and mud. The two don’t seem to go together. But don’t forget these are images that are supposed to make us feel what David was feeling. They are not photographs. To get a picture of this mud, it helped me to read what King Zedekiah did to Jeremiah when he wanted to get rid of him. It says in Jeremiah 38:6, “So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king’s son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only [mire], and Jeremiah sank in the [mire].”

So, perhaps what we are to imagine is falling into a well and sinking deep in the sludge at the bottom and going deeper every time we try to lift a foot — and then, all of a sudden, there is roaring water coming from somewhere and it rushes around us in the dark. And then comes the sense of helplessness and desperation, and all of a sudden air (just air!) is worth a million dollars.

Helplessness, desperation, apparent hopelessness — the breaking point for the overworked businessman, the outer limits of exasperation for the mother of three crying children, the impossible expectations of too many classes in school, the grinding stress of a lingering illness, the imminent attack of a powerful enemy. It is good that we don’t know what the experience was. It makes it easier to see ourselves in the pits with the king. Anything that causes a sense of helplessness and desperation and threatens to ruin life or take it away — that is the king’s pit.

2. The King’s Cry

Now the king’s cry: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry” (Psalm 40:1). One of the reasons God loved David so much was because he cried so much. Psalm 6:6: “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.” Psalm 56:8: “Put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” Indeed they are, because “blessed are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4).

“When will God come? At the right time. That is all we can know. And that is enough.”

It is a beautiful thing when a broken man genuinely cries out to God. Not like the jock who gets a cramp while swimming but struggles to get to shore unassisted lest he appear to be weak, but like the little child who wanders too far out into the surf and starts to get taken by the undertow and cries out immediately, “Daddy! Daddy!” God loves to answer childlike prayers. But make sure the cry is to God and for God, not to man.

Notice the inference David draws in Psalm 40:4: “How blessed is the man who has made the Lord his trust, and has not turned to the proud” (NASB). Some are willing to say they need help but will seek it anywhere but from the Lord. But God is very displeased with such behavior. A good example is King Asa. God punished him for relying on Syria as an ally instead of relying on God. But Asa refused to learn his lesson, and, at the end of his life, it says, “In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe. Yet even in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but sought help from physicians” (2 Chronicles 16:12).

The point here is not that doctors are bad, but that it is bad to make a doctor your God — to think that with him alone is healing. Whatever benefit comes through physicians comes from the Lord, and therefore his help is to be sought. “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:8–9). Therefore, when you are in the pit, you do not just cry out to anybody; you cry to God.

3. The King’s Patience

And then — and then is a very important part of the pattern — you wait. “I waited patiently for the Lord” (Psalm 40:1). The reason this is so important for us to hear is that it guards us from unbelief when God’s help seems long in coming. We can draw no deadlines for God. He hastens or he delays as he sees fit.

He knows the time for joy and truly
Will send it when He sees it meet,
When He has tried and purged thee duly
And found thee free from all deceit. (“If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee”)

Waiting for the Lord is a great part of the Christian life. There are at least two essential elements in the way we should wait with the king in the pit: humility and hope. Look back at Psalm 37:9: “Evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land” (NASB95). Then in verse 11, the same promise is repeated, but in the place of those who wait, it is the meek, or the humble: “But the humble will inherit the land and will delight themselves in abundant prosperity” (NASB). Those who wait are the humble.

Have you ever been in a large waiting room at a doctor’s office when the doctor is late returning from a call and the patients are stacked up? Who are the ones who get feisty with the receptionist and grumble to everybody? Not the meek; not the humble. Humble people can wait. They are not so presumptuous about their rights. So it is in waiting for God. We simply show how badly we need the chastisement of his delay when we do not wait patiently.

Secondly, those who wait patiently hope in God. Psalm 39:7: “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.” Psalm 130:5: “I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait, and in his word do I hope” (NASB95). The soul of one who waits for God is not listless. It is not like a weather vane pointing this way then that, but it is like a desperately thirsty animal straining toward the stream. “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1–2 NASB77). Those who wait like David strain toward the moment when God will come, and they hope in him. When will he come? At the right time. That is all we can know. And that is enough.

4. The King’s Rescue

When he comes, he will lift us out of the pit. “He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure” (Psalm 40:2). There is a world of difference between quicksand and rock. God transfers us, when he comes, from a sense of desperation to a sense of security. In the pit, we had not forgotten God, but our sense of his presence and comfort was not as lively as when he rescues us. In fact, the essence of the rescue is the restoration of that strong feeling of God’s nearness and help.

For David, the rescue may have been the healing of some disease as well. This was the case in Psalm 30:2: “O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.” Or it may have been deliverance from his enemies, as in Psalm 69:1, 4: “Save me, O God! . . . More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; mighty are those who would destroy me.” Or it may have been deliverance from the oppressive guilt of sin he had committed, as in Psalm 51:1–2: “Be gracious to me, O God. . . . Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin” (NASB77). Whatever it was, God showed up at the right time and put David’s feet on a rock.

5. The King’s Song

God can deliver from every sort of pit and mire, and will deliver his servants from any plight that would destroy their faith. And when he does, we will sing. Psalm 40:3: “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.” What does singing signify? It signifies that we have come to cherish something very deeply, or feel intense gratitude for something. Those who don’t sing seem to take all of life for granted. They never soar with a sense of joy in their heart.

All of us gravitate to that condition because of our fallen nature. And one of the ways God keeps us awake is by letting us hit the pits, leaving us there a while, and then bringing us out into the fresh air of his grace again. Do you know of any other way to get someone to love air besides letting them almost be suffocated and breathe again?

I was swimming at the bottom of a pool one time, about nine feet down, and I got my finger caught in the drain cover. In a matter of seconds, air was almost all I cared about. I was good for about thirty more seconds, and I cried out to God, and he loosed my finger and set me upon the concrete deck and put a new song in my mouth, a hymn to air — precious air, sweet air, priceless air — and to God.

That is the kind of love God wants from us for himself. And if he must, he will get it by hiding himself for a season, until we crave him like a drowning boy craves air. And when he shows himself again and we come up gasping into his presence, we will sing like never before. All the old songs will be new. And if they are not adequate, we will write our own.

The church ought not merely sing the songs of yesterday’s saints. Verse 3: “He put a new song in my mouth.” There ought to be new songs, and they ought to come from you, because God has put them in your mouth. Let all the poets come forth and musicians come forth. Most rich and moving songs came from this experience of the pit. The old song says, “When peace like a river attendeth my way, / when sorrows like sea billows roll.” The newer song says, “Blessed be your name / in the land that is plentiful, / where the streams of abundance flow. . . . Blessed be your name / when I’m found in the desert place, / though I walk through the wilderness.” The billows and the desert; the pit — and then the song.

6. The King’s Influence

Who knows how many people might see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord? That is the end of Psalm 40:3: “Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.” This is the final step in the pattern of life described in these three verses. Isn’t it tremendous that, whenever God gives us deliverance from the pit and puts a new song in our mouth, his aim is not only our benefit but also the benefit of others through us? Let us never view our own song as the stopping place of God’s mercies. God aims for us to sing others into the kingdom. How does this happen?

They see, fear, and put their trust in God. What do they see? They see a person who, contrary to human nature, was humble in distress; who never lost hope and banked on God; and who, when he was delivered, gave God the glory. They see something real, genuine, authentic — something that rings true in the human heart. And as the conviction starts to build in the unbeliever that there is truth and reality in the life of the godly, he begins to fear the implications of his own unbelief. If God is that real and can be depended on to help those who hope in him, then probably those who disregard him and pin their hopes on all sorts of other things are in trouble (Philippians 1:28). And by the grace of God, many will make the final move, and put their trust in the Lord. The music of the rescued saints is a tremendous means of evangelism.

What a surprise! The whole story turns out to be a lesson in personal evangelism. How shall we win others to Christ? (1) When you are in the pits with the king, (2) cry out to the Lord like a helpless child, (3) then humbly and hopefully wait patiently for the Lord — (4) and when he comes in his own time and makes you secure, (5) then sing a new song to his grace (6) so that people can see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.