Pleasing God, Making Disciples of Jesus Christ

A Needed Conversation

PSALM 42:5 – 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.”

A NEEDED CONVERSATION. In the course of a lifetime, the number of conversations we will have had are enormous. Just take the past week as a sample and the amount of dialogues with people that occurred. Our families, friends, neighbors, and even strangers were engaged by us in all kinds of conversations. Some short, some lengthy. Some shallow. Some deep. Some of the matter of fact type. Some emotionally-charged.

In surveying the many conversations, have we thought about the person who gets the most of our attention in them? It is the person we greet in the mirror each morning. We talk to ourselves more than any other person in the world. The conversations with ourselves are nearly non-stop. And they have significant bearing on our spiritual lives. Yet, when it comes to our conversations with ourselves, we likely do more listening than talking and spiritually, that is not good. We too easily listen to our feelings which lead us to bad spiritual places. We too easily listen to our emotions which also takes us to bad spiritual places. Still yet another area of listening to ourselves which produces disastrous spiritual decisions leading to consequences is that of listening to our own understanding.

In today’s scripture, David is a great model for us as one who learned to talk more to himself than listen. Read the verse again. David isn’t preaching to others. He isn’t engaging a friend. He is talking to himself. In doing so, he is giving us the example to follow if we want to live a consistent spiritual life not tossed up and down on the rollercoasters of feelings and emotions. To rightly understand this, ponder the following words from D. M. Lloyd-Jones taken from his classic book Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, “The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul, ‘What 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. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, who God is, and what God is, and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’. That is the essence of the treatment (depression) in a nutshell. The essence of this matter is to understand that this self of ours, this other man within us, has got to be handled. Do not listen to him; turn on him; speak to him; condemn him; upbraid him; exhort him; encourage him; remind him of what you know, instead of listening placidly to him and allowing him to drag you down and depress you.”

Talking to oneself. Yes, it is essential to a healthy walk with Jesus, but it is a talking to oneself the truth as it is in Jesus – a most needed and daily conversation!

PRAYER: “Father, help me to develop a life of Spirit-developed self-control freeing me from living by feelings.”
QUOTE: “Learn to talk truth to yourself. Reason truth with yourself. If not, you will be unstable, living by feelings not truth.”

Because of Him,
Pastor Jim