Sermon Tone Analysis

Defense wins championship is a phrase often used in sports to remind teams that the best offense tends not to win that sports greatest prize without a solid defense.

There are some spiritual disciplines that are offensive and some that are defensive.

Both accomplish a sole purpose; change.

In our current series on spiritual disciplines we have learned about two spiritual disciplines, meditation and application, that are offensive.

Today’s discipline is defensive.

This discipline has features of and bears a resemblance to meditation but instead of being offensive it is defensive.

This discipline is called self-talk.

Self-talk helps us traverse through a condition called undulation.

Undulation is the experience of peaks and valleys.

This aspect of Christian life will be experienced by everyone traversing this spiritual pilgrimage.

Failure to practice this discipline can be disastrous.

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down.

As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite.

C.S. Lewis - Screwtape Letters Chapter 8

Today’s text recounts a real life experience of a believer experiencing spiritual undulations.

Let’s learn from those conditions he experienced, their causality, and a curative pathway we must traverse.

CONDITIONS

The Psalmist uses a metaphor in the opening verse to describe those conditions that surrounded him.

He then uses verse two to explain his metaphor.

“As a deer pants for flowing streams is his metaphor.

Deer aren’t dumb.

They don’t wait until they are dying of thirst before they search for water.

A panting deer is more than just a thirsty deer its one that’s literally dying of thirst.

Therefore, a panting deer is a deer that has come down to the riverbed and finds it dry.

The psalmist is saying, “I’m like the deer, and God is like the dry riverbed.”

Look at verse two his explanation.

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God anymore, but the psalmist can’t sense God as a living God.

Let’s keep reading.

“When shall I come and appear before God?”

He is asking, “When shall I see the face of God?”

He repeats question in

He has lost the countenance of God.

He has lost the face of God.

The Psalmist is telling us that he has lost the relational experience of God’s presence.

He has lost his spiritual senses.

He has no taste, feel, sight, or sound of God in his soul.

Thoughts that once comforted and strengthen him don’t resonate.

Thoughts that were once sweet as honey are now tasteless.

Thoughts that once stirred his soul and sent him into heavens courts are now stagnant.

He is describing what its like to lose reality with God.

He has lost the sense of God’s presence.

He no longer feels like he posses God.

He’s experiencing spiritual dryness, spiritual drought, spiritual darkness, and spiritual deadness.

Nothing resonates.

Some of the Psalms deal with spiritual dryness and deadness because of sin.

However, this Psalmist deals with this spiritual condition from reasons not relating to sin.

This goes against our popular perspective.

Our normal response to this experience is, “what did I do wrong.”

We believe that nothing should be wrong if no wrong has been done.

When we start to experience spiritual dryness we begin to ask ourselves; what button I’m not pushing.

What sin have I committed.

Is there something on my Christian to-do list I have missed.

Have you confessed all known sin? Have you claimed the promises?

Have you rebuked the Devil?

Have you pleaded the blood?

Have you thanked God for all of your many blessings?

How could you be in this condition; if you were daily completing the entirety of your Christian to-do list.

You must be doing something wrong.”

The Psalmist has done nothing wrong and he’s dying of spiritual thirst.

I see no confession of sin in our text.

He is teaching us that this condition can come upon you out of nowhere.

Spiritual dryness and deadness can happen as a result of sin and without sin.

It can happen to you no matter how faithful you are to complete your daily Christian to-do list.

It will happen.

It is unavoidable.

This experience is most difficult on new Christian’s.

New believers are riding a spiritual high and can’t image what awaits them.

When they begin to experience this norm their cultural influence begins to work against them.

They begin to tell themselves that something is wrong and this causes them to freak out.

They not only freak out but they begin to doubt.

He cannot ravish.

He can only woo.

He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning.

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation.

Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives.

He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs-- to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.

It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.

Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best.

We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better.

He cannot 'tempt' to virtual as we do to vice.

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood.

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also.

There are probably people in this room who have been off the rails for maybe years.

A time of spiritual dryness came out of nowhere.

You had not done anything wrong you just did not know how to respond.

Let me clarify his doubts.

He is not having intellectual doubts.

He doesn’t say, “I don’t believe in God.”

He says, “I can’t feel him.”

If you don’t fight this doubt rooted in feelings it will progress to doubt in your intellect.

God will become so unreal to you that it will start to overtake everything.

America is littered with people to whom this has happened.

They remember being Christians but they don’t know now what they are.

They haven’t completely jettison the Christian faith.

They haven’t completely gotten rid of it, yet they have deep and profound reservations about God and themselves.