There is a sentence in Psalm 42 that the psalmist says three times.
Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God (Psalm 42:5).
He says it in verse 5. He says it again in verse 11. He says it a third time at the end of the companion psalm that follows (Psalm 43:5). Three times in what most readers think of as one extended prayer. The same sentence, almost word for word.
You do not repeat a sentence three times when you believe it easily.
You repeat a sentence three times when you need it. When the flood has not lifted, when the trouble has not passed, when the conditions that put you on the floor are still operating, and the only thing you can do is keep saying the same true sentence to your own interior, hoping that one of these times it will land.
This is the practice of verse 5. And it is one of the most useful practices the Bible has given the believer in long suffering.
Notice what the psalmist is doing.
He is not, in this verse, talking to God. He is talking to his own soul. Why, my soul, are you downcast? He has stepped, for a moment, outside his own despair and is addressing it directly. He has, in effect, become his own pastoral carer. The believer has split into two. There is the soul that is downcast, and there is the believer who is, with great effort, speaking to that soul.
This is not denial. The psalmist does not say you are not downcast. He admits the state. The soul is downcast. The soul is disturbed. The trouble is real. The flood is real.
What he does instead is hold the soul's despair next to a different sentence, and refuse to let go of either.
Put your hope in God.
The verse does not say God will lift the flood. The verse does not say the trouble will pass by next Tuesday. It does not promise removal of the conditions. It says hope in God. The hope is in him. Not in the change of the weather. Not in the resolution of the circumstances. In him.
The help in Psalm 42 is not the lifting of the flood. The help is the presence of the God who is with you in the flood.
This is the deepest move of verse 5, and it changes what hope means.
Most of us were trained, somewhere along the way, to think of hope as anticipating that the situation will improve. The cancer will be cured. The marriage will be restored. The depression will lift. The financial crisis will resolve. The wayward child will return. Hope, in this definition, is forward-looking optimism about the changing of circumstance.
Psalm 42 has a different definition.
Hope, in the psalmist's mouth, is the active grip on the One who is with you in the unchanged circumstance. The flood may not lift. The waves may keep crashing. The dryness may continue. The yet I will praise him at the end of the verse is not contingent on the situation getting better. It is contingent on him remaining who he is, regardless of the situation.
This is the hope that has carried the saints for three thousand years. It is the hope of Habakkuk standing in the wreckage of a failed harvest and saying yet I will rejoice in the Lord (Habakkuk 3:18). It is the hope of Paul in chains writing I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation (Philippians 4:12). It is the hope of Jesus in the garden, asking for the cup to pass, and walking forward when it did not.
None of these were hopes that the conditions would change. All of them were hopes anchored in the unchanging character of the One who was in the conditions with them.
If you are in the long middle of a hard season, the practice of verse 5 is simple. Not easy. Simple.
You speak to your own soul.
Not in dramatic terms. Not in performance. Quietly, in the kitchen at 6 a.m., in the car at a red light, in the bathroom mirror at the end of a long day. Why are you downcast? You let the soul answer. Because of this, because of that, because the weight has not lifted. You hear it. You do not argue with it. You do not deny it.
And then you say the next sentence, even if it lands on cardboard ears.
Put your hope in God.
You may not feel anything when you say it. The first hundred times you say it, you may feel nothing at all. The flood is still in the room. The trouble has not moved. The waves are still crashing. The sentence does not, in this season, calm the water. It does something quieter. It tethers you, by the smallest possible thread, to the One who is, regardless of the water, still here.
Three times the psalmist says it. Once was not enough. Once is rarely enough for any of us. The practice is the repetition. The practice is the stubborn return to the same true sentence, day after day, in a tone the soul will eventually, in some small way, begin to believe.
The flood may not lift today.
The hope is not in the lifting.
The hope is in him.
