Cross Examining Your Own Soul

She has a set of questions and she asks them in order, and she has been doing it for three years, mostly at the sink.

What is wrong with you.

Why can you not feel anything.

Do you actually believe any of this, or have you just got a routine.

What kind of person misses God and does nothing about it.

She is fifty-nine. She keeps bees and she keeps chickens and she has taught the same Sunday class for eleven years and the children love her, and she washes up at about half past six most evenings and prosecutes herself over the sink.

And here is the trap she has walked into, and she has not seen it because from the inside it looks like honesty.

The grief is the evidence. She mourns the warmth, and then the mourning gets entered against her, because a person who has to mourn it must not have it. So every evening at the sink produces a fresh count on the indictment, and the indictment produces more grief, and around it goes, and three years of it have gone by.

There is no verdict at the end. That is the thing about a court like this. It never sits, it never rules, and it never rises. It just keeps taking evidence.

A psalm where the man does exactly this

I want to show you a man in Scripture doing what you do at the sink, and I want you to notice that nobody edited it out.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.Psalm 42:1

Start there, because the whole psalm is built on it. Panting. That is a deer that has been running and has not found water yet. It is not a picture of satisfaction. It is a picture of want.

And then he turns on himself, and it is almost word for word what you say over the washing up.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me?Psalm 42:5

He is doing it too. He is cross examining his own heart, out loud, and God did not remove that from the book. It was kept, exactly as he said it, for three thousand years.

You are doing something an inspired writer did in front of everybody, and it was preserved rather than corrected. That is not me finding you a loophole; it is what the written word chose to keep on the page, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old psalm off a shelf and stands it beside a woman at a sink at half past six.

Where he turns the questioning

But watch what he does next, because this is the hinge and it is one sentence long.

He asks the questions, and then he stops answering them. He turns and addresses Someone else instead. Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.

He does not resolve the interrogation. He does not find the answer to why art thou cast down. He simply stops being the one supplying answers, and turns his face.

That is available to you tonight, and it is smaller than you think. You have been trying to win the case. You have been trying to answer what is wrong with you well enough that the questioning stops, and it will not stop, because the questioner is not interested in an answer.

You have never once been under any obligation to answer that voice. Scripture puts a psalmist's own interrogation on the page and never gives him a verdict, which tells you what kind of question it was, and the Holy Spirit is not the one asking it.

And I want to deal with the evidence directly, because it is the piece that keeps you in the loop. Your grief is not proof that the love is gone. Panting is what a creature does when it is made for water and has not had any. It is the appetite, complaining.

You are panting, and panting is the loudest possible evidence that the thing you are grieving is still in you. The written word opens that psalm with a longing soul and never once treats the longing as a symptom of departure, and His Spirit is the one who has kept that longing awake in a woman for three years running.