Yearning Day 5: Yet to Be

Day 5: Yearning Prayer: Yet to Be

¹ As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.

² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?

⁸ The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me-- A prayer to the God of my life.

 Psalm 42

¹ Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation; rescue me from deceitful and wicked men.

³ Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.

⁴ Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.

 ⁵ Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. 

Psalm 43

Yearn for the “Yet To Be.” A deer will run to water when thirsty, but also when in need of shelter from danger, when combating an opponent, or when sick with fever, and needs the water’s refreshing coolness. In times of spiritual isolation, danger, battle, and affliction, we also will spiritually thirst for God’s presence in prayer. God uses our bad circumstances to get us to cry out to Him.

Adversity did not lead the psalmist to give up on God. He didn’t become an agnostic or an atheist. He was cast down, but he chided himself for being so.

“Yet shall I praise Him.” (Ps. 42: 5, 11; 43:5) Perhaps he remembered ancient Job, who said, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him,” (Job 13:15). The same Spirit resided in him would later lead Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to say, “even if He does not deliver us, we will not serve your gods.” The same Spirit led Peter to say, “to whom shall we go, You have the words of life.”

The same God inspired the apostle Paul to write the following:

⁶ For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness , hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. ⁷ But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. ⁸ We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed ; we are perplexed , but not in despair ; ⁹ Persecuted , but not forsaken ; cast down , but not destroyed ; ¹⁰ Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

Don’t despair. Don’t be downcast. “The Lord will command His lovingkindness” (42:8), God will send forth His light and His truth (Ps. 43:3). There is a “yet to be” in your future, when you will go to the altar of God, not in tears but in joy and delight; you will sing praises again (Ps. 43:4).

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God,” may seem like a fanciful cliché or some pithy statement. However, when you discover what led novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to pen those words, you would find his life was just as dramatic as those he would later write about.

Convicted of treason in 19^th century Russia, Dostoevsky had been blindfolded, clothed in burial gowns, paraded to mocking crowds and tied to a post for his execution. The phrase, “Ready, aim…” had already been shouted, when a horseman rode up, announcing the Tsar had changed his sentence to hard labor in a Siberian imprisonment. A woman gave him the only book he was allowed to have: a New Testament, from which he learned of God’s grace.

Have your hardships driven you to yearn and thirst for God? There is a “Yet to Be” in your future. In your darkest night, let His song be with you, a prayer to the God of your life.