Today's Sermon:

"When Life Gets You Down"

I. Cry Out to God- 42:1-2

II. Be Honest About Your Feelings- 42:2b-3, 7, 9-10, 43:2

III. Remember ..... - 42:4, 6

IV. Tell Yourself ...... 42:5-6a, 11, 43:5

““We have to talk to ourselves instead of allowing ‘ourselves’ to talk to us!...I suggest the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self…You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why are you cast down? What business have you to be disquieted?’ You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself, ‘Hope in God,’ instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way.”-Martin Lloyd-Jones- Spiritual Depression, page 21

V. Tell Yourself .....

“When you realize that God has taken you from the gutter, so to speak, and made you a (child) in his own house— you, a miraculously pardoned offender, guilty, ungrateful, defiant, perverse as you were— then your sense of God’s ‘love beyond degree’ is more than words can express.”

Ask Ourselves: “Do I, as a Christian, understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny?...Have I sought full assurance of my adoption? Do I daily dwell on the love of God to me?...Do I think of Jesus Christ, my Savior and my Lord, as my brother too, bearing to me not only a divine authority but also a divine-human sympathy? Do I think daily how close he is to me, how completely he understands me, and how much, as my kinsman-redeemer, he cares for me?”

Say to Ourselves: “I am a child of God. God is my Father…My Savior is my brother…Say it over and over to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true. For this is the Christian’s secret of— a happy Life?— yes, certainly, but we have something both higher and profounder to say. This is the Christian’s secret of a Christian life.”J.I. Packer, Knowing God, ch. 19