The older I get and the closer I grow to the Lord, the more I’ve come to realize that discouragement is really ungodly thinking in disguise. I don’t really mean to say that one should never be discouraged. But rather a discouragement without hope, one that ruins our day and our thoughts, is discouragement that hasn’t been handed over to God. And yet, how do we hand discouragement over to God?
David, if anyone, had a reason to be discouraged. Like so many of God’s faithful he was persecuted for doing nothing wrong. He served Saul faithfully, so faithfully in fact, that Saul became jealous and began to pursue David. David, surely, knew what it meant to be discouraged and yet I want to look this morning at how he prayed about it and suggest a model for praying through our own discouragements. There are four parts to this Psalm, so we’ll go through them one by one.
Praying Expectantly
David makes clear in the Psalm that going to God is the first order of business for him during the day. Verse 3 says: In the morning O Lord you will hear my voice; in the morning I will order my prayer to Thee and watch expectantly. But do you notice how he will go to God in the morning? It says he makes his prayer requests and then waits expectantly. Why does he wait expectantly? Because David knows that God always answers.
How would your day be changed if in the morning you went to God with your prayer requests and then spent your day waiting expectantly for God to answer? If you’re like me your whole perspective would change. Perhaps this is why David and others make numerous mention about going to God first thing in the morning. Because they knew when they had spoken to God, their perspective on the day would be changed. I suspect we would be discouraged much less easily if our whole vision for the day was about waiting on God to answer our prayers.
Other Studies in Psalms in This Series:
Psalm 1: Uncompromising Godliness