Psalm 42 – Longing for Fulfillment
Remember Psalms are songs, there’s something powerful when we sing to God.
Longing can be a great fuel and drive to achieve great things, but a longing can make us sour and make us cynical if not fulfilled.
Psalm 42
The psalmists here are longing to be back to where they were and this couldn’t be more relevant to us as we’ve been physically removed from meeting together and long to be back together again.
Practically how do we deal with longings in our heart:
- Our longings start with desire
- The desire in Psalm 42 is that they want to be back with their people worshipping together.
- Where does desire come from? 3 places it comes from; If something has been taken away or lost, something that we’ve seen or heard of and want, to do something that no one else has done before.
- Lead to prayer
- Our longings start with a desire and then it leads to prayer.
- Talk, share, and speak out your desires and longings to God, if you have a desire in your heart, feed it with prayer. Pray your desires and longings into being.
- There is a refinement as your longings turn from prayer into action
- In verse 7 they talk about waves crashing over them.
- As we pray about our desires and longings difficult things will come along. It’ll be a refining and tough time, and as they carry on we’re to hold on to God and not let go.
- Confidence
- The psalm ends with confidence that we can fulfill the longings of our hearts.
- We now live on the other side of the cross, so we can be even more confident in God than David and the psalmists that God will fulfill the longings of our hearts.
- However not every longing gets answered this side of the grave, but we can be confident every longing will be fulfilled in heaven.
We live in the middle between the cross and heaven, and there are longings and tension of wanting to see things differently and be fulfilled. But we can be confident and hope in God and he responds to confidence, in Mark 10 Bartimaeus is confident that he’ll be healed if he just calls out to him and Jesus hears and heals him.
Longing is something we all experience, Psalm 42 is raw, real, and full of pain and anguish, but all of our deepest longings find fulfillment in Jesus Christ.