The Swamp of Despair
Opening Prayer
Holy One, in this Advent season of promise and preparation, may I point the way to the One who takes away the sin of the world.
Read Psalm 40:1-17
[1] For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.
Scripture taken from the THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, NIV Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Meditate
“Waiting on the Lord is worthwhile because of what he is going to do for us. Waiting is that divine activity of expecting God to work. And he never disappoints us” (Warren Wiersbe).
Think Further
Many psalms attributed to David exude a confidence that God, who acted mightily in the past, would act mightily again in the future. Yet there is also immediacy about today’s very personal psalm: the writer desperately needs God now. God is indeed God of the remote past and of the unseen future, but the writer recalls that God has helped him recently. God has lifted him before from a slimy pit and set his feet on rock (2)—and God can do it again.
I know a young Aboriginal man with great potential for Christian leadership in his depressed, damaged, substance-abusing community. We have often read this psalm and translated it into his language. It mirrors his experience—evil forces always try to draw him back into the slippery pit of alcohol and drugs, to mire him in the black hole of depression. He has learned painfully, as Christian did in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, that he cannot, by his own efforts, pull himself out of the swamp of despair (“Slough of Despond”). Like Christian, other people who understand him can help him out, but mostly he is like this psalmist. Only God himself can deliver him (17).
Like the psalmist, we can genuinely love knowing and doing the will of God (8). We can, like my young Aboriginal friend, be powerful witnesses to the saving power of Jesus (10). For that very reason, the power of evil can draw us back down into darkness, unable to see our way out (12) in a place where others give up on us (15). Only God can penetrate that darkness. We must recognize our need of him (17). Then God can lift us out again. Only God.
Apply
What part of David’s faith can you relate to from your own experience? How so? Where do you need to exercise such faith now?
Closing prayer
Mighty God, You are present in the light and the dark. When I fall into the blackness of depression, come to me in my darkness. Let me see You.
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