The Dance of Hope

Have you ever looked at someone's journey and made the comment, they walk to the beat of their own drum? I want to take us through, as it were, the psalm as a dance, as it were, as a song that has a particular refrain through it that appears three times in Psalm 42 and 43.

And generally these two psalms that open the second book of the Psalter of Psalms were always considered as one psalm in the Tanakh and the Old Testament because...

The second psalm, in a sense, helps answer the first.

And there's the same refrain in both psalms that we'll see where the psalmist asks himself, why are you so downcast, so disturbed within yourself? Put your hope in God.

And I want to talk about hope.

It's such a vast subject that I hope we can do it a little bit of justice.

And I'm going to walk through the psalm and pull out some threads and I guess in a sense toss them out to you and hopefully weave together a clear tapestry at the end of it all.

If I don't, you can just go away and go, what was he on about? But this psalm has been one that's been very special to me over my Christian journey.

As a psalm that I, as someone who has personally had a complete breakdown and took years to recover, one year completely on a sickness benefit, losing track of time and memory and all sorts of things, and I'm grateful to the grace of God for recovering, although some people still think I'm not quite right in the head.

so I have something to blame.

But this psalm became the refrain of it, something that was special to me in that night season where we were living in Taradale and Napier at the time, where I would sometimes just quote these words, why am I feeling this way? I choose to put my hope in God.

And hope is more than wishful thinking.

We use that word a lot, don't we? Some people have been saying, I hope it rains soon, so they don't have to water the garden or it fills their tank, and others are saying, I hope it doesn't rain.

We can all hope for different things.

Hope in a biblical sense is not just wishful thinking, and it's also not whitewashing reality.

Hope is something that we look for that we know we haven't got yet, but is real and tangible.

And it's a reality that we hope for.

And this psalmist does a dance of hope, as it were, as he journeys.

And the question I've asked is, what is the soundtrack to your life? Who likes movies? We all like a good movie, don't we? But could you imagine a movie without a soundtrack? It would be really interesting, wouldn't it? Sometimes I've asked God, well, why when I have dramatic moments, there's no soundtrack, dramatic music, you know, where I'm down and there's soothing music to lift me up.

We all, in one sense, have a soundtrack, a narrative in our mind that we are listening to that impacts on how we dance, how we walk through life.

Sometimes we're conscious of it, sometimes we're not.

And this psalmist, as it were, has a soundtrack going through his mind as he's wrestling with his personal sense of depression and the feeling of feeling distant and disconnected from God, overwhelmed by the circumstances of his personal journey and also the world around him.

And we'll see that in that psalm, the watching world, as it were, puts shame and scorn on him.

In the inference of, you have this hope in God, you believe in God and look at your life, look at the world around you.

And he wrestles with a number of different issues.