My tears have been my food day and night,

While they say to me all the day long, 

“Where is your God?”

These things I remember,

As I pour out my soul:

How I would go with the throng

And lead them in procession to the house of God

With glad shouts and songs of praise, 

A multitude keeping festival.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, 

And why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

My salvation and my God.

—Psalm 42:3-5

They say that when something in the Bible is repeated, it means it’s something God really wanted you to pay attention to. I think the same logic applies to our everyday lives. If we pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us, our pastors’ sermons, and our fellow believers, it’s likely we’ll notice the same message popping up a few different times.

That’s what happened to me yesterday. Between our pastor’s sermon, the discussions we had in our small, and over the radio, I heard people reference no fewer than four times the concept of preaching to yourself. So I’m going to try to listen. 🙂

I don’t know about you, but when I think about the idea of preaching to yourself, I immediately see an image of a person standing in front of the mirror practicing a sermon with the same gravity as if they were rehearsing for a Sunday morning, but I don’t think that’s what the sons of Korah had in mind when they wrote Psalm 42. 

The picture developed in this psalm is intimate. The speaker is broken emotionally and desperate for closeness with God. Whatever has happened has left this person in a place where pretense is broken down, and what is left is real, raw grief. In fact, the picture painted in the first half of verse 5 is of someone whose grief is so great that they have collapsed and are wailing so loudly they sound like the roaring of a lion.

That’s not to mention the other signs of grief mentioned in this passage—the tears, the inability to eat, the questioning of God and His care for His people. These are all common responses to severe grief.

But what’s not so common is the speaker’s reaction to that grief. Our culture today has gotten caught in the incorrect belief that we can’t control our emotions. There is a sense in which there is some truth to that idea. Our emotions are reactionary and we can’t always control our genuine reactions to what happens in our lives, but the problem comes when we choose to believe that we can’t affect those emotions in any way.

I’m not saying that when we experience strong emotions, especially grief, we can just willpower our way out of them. That’s suppressing our emotions and it’s generally not very healthy, but what we can do is remind ourselves of the hope we have in Christ. 

People often ask why a good God wouldn’t just take away the pain good people go through. For most people who ask this, it’s a genuine, raw question, but I think the desire to have all the pain taken away does miss a beautiful truth. Part of the answer to this question is that the world is broken by sin and God is patiently waiting to get rid of that brokenness because He wants as many people as possible to experience His healing.

The other part of that answer is even more amazing to me. Since it’s not yet time to heal the world of all its brokenness, the Almighty God doesn’t wait for the brokenness to be gone to draw near to the ones who will let Him. In those difficult times, in those struggles and times of grief, He is there, mourning with us. 

It is one thing to have a friend who likes you enough to want to fix your problems for you. It is something completely different and something much deeper to have a friend who loves you enough to sit with you in the brokenness, especially when they wouldn’t have experienced it at all otherwise.

To actively remind ourselves of the hope we have in Christ, like the speaker does in verse 5, is to open ourselves up to feel the comfort and presence of Jesus in our pain. Psalm 34 tells us that God draws close to us when we are brokenhearted. He’s the Good Father who wants to scoop up His little ones and comfort them when they are hurting, but He won’t force this on us. Even for those of us who already know Him through His Son Jesus, we can sometimes be so focused on our grief or hurt that we miss the miracle of His presence in our pain.

That’s where preaching to ourselves can make all the difference. It won’t take the pain away completely, but it opens the door for our Savior to come sit with us in the hurt so we can feel His presence and comfort and love. It forces us to turn our eyes away from the darkness and look at the light that was always there.

I don’t like ending a devotion without practical application and talking about what this would look like in our lives, but I’m out of room this week, so I hope you’ll join me next week when we talk about what preaching to ourselves in our pain looks like.

In the meantime, if you’re in that dark place where it seems like there is no hope, remind yourself daily, hourly, by the minute if you need to, that there is a God who is intimately acquainted with your grief. He keeps a record of your tears, longs to comfort you, and will redeem that pain, giving you beauty for ashes if you will let Him.