Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Psalm 42:5
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Discouragement. The state or feeling of being without courage, hope or confidence. I’m sure most of us have faced discouragement at some time in our life. You may even be going through that right now. Reasons include broken dreams, serious disappointments, financial losses, and failures of family and friends. Or maybe there are health issues as asthma, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, or heart disease…or maybe just regular old age that limits us so much. Whatever the reason that we’re being discouraged, it opens us to being susceptible for Satan to lead us in a wrong direction, away from our Heavenly Father. God wants us to trust Him and draw on His grace. That’s something we have to be intentional about because we still live here on this earth and haven’t yet moved to our heavenly home where there will be no reason for discouragement.
When we are discouraged, it’s easy to become self-centered, focusing on ourselves and our woes and we begin to lose our focus on Christ. When we look at our circumstances rather than God, we begin to sink like Peter did when he tried to walk on water. Jesus showed mercy by reaching out and rescuing Peter (Mt.14:31). Each one of us can probably look back to a time when Jesus, in His abundant mercy, reached out His hand and pulled us up out of the swirling waters of discouragement that were threatening to suck us under.
It’s encouraging to look back and realize that some of the greatest men of the Old Testament also suffered times of discouragement. These include Moses, Job, David, Elijah, and many more. But even in their discouragement, God was right there with them to encourage them again. Whether we become discouraged is really not as important as what we do about it. Don’t allow the enemy to drag us further down and to keep us down which often renders us useless to the Lord. When we recognize that we are discouraged, instead of wallowing in self-pity, let’s turn to God for hope and cheer. We need to be intentional about it as David was in our Scripture passage. He recognized where his soul was, and he intentionally did something about it. He made the decision to praise God and then acted on it.