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The scripture reading of the morning is the Psalm numbered 42. As a heart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me continually, "Where is your God?" These things I remember

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as I pour out my soul, how I went with the throng and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. My soul is cast down within me, therefore I remember thee from the land of

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Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mazar. Deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts. All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock, why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a deadly wound in my body,

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my adversaries taunt me while they say to me continually, "Where is your God?" Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. And may the same Spirit who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy

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Spirit, amen. She said to me, "What are you going to preach on this week?" I said, "Discouragement." She said, "You've preached on that before." I said, "I know, but there's still a lot of discouraged people around, so I think I'd better talk about it again." So let's talk about discouragement, and let's talk about the strength which hope brings to a discouraged heart. It is

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generally considered that all of the Psalms, or most of the Psalms, were written by men. Now, we don't know that as an actual fact, but the history and culture of the time in which the Psalms were written would indicate that to be so. But we have before us this morning a Psalm which may be the only exception in the Psalter, for it was probably written by a woman, a very

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discouraged woman, but a woman who's fighting back and is utilizing hope to defeat her discouragement. Now, we think this is a woman because of two clues which appear in the Psalm. In the first verse and in the second verse, the words are these, "As the heart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for the living God."

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Now, that word "heart," as the heart, refers to a stag, a male deer. But the translation here is quite wrong, because in the Hebrew, it is a feminine form. In other words, it should really be translated as, "The doe longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul, the psalmist's soul, the doe's soul, the feminine soul, for thee, O God." The picture you see is of some beautiful

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doe who comes seeking water, and she extends her long graceful neck, trying to scent out where the water is. But all she finds is dust and stones. And the Hebrew is very specific. This dryness which she encounters is not something which has happened in just a moment. This is a long-term drought. It is not a sudden calamity. There has been an expended length of time here in which

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there has been no water. The seeds of expectation have blown away. The dreams are like the earth which has cracked and broken. What's being talked about here is an extended time of real heart hurt. But that's not the only discouragement she knows, because she goes on to say in verses 6 and 7, "My soul is cast down within me from the land of Jordan and Hermon. Deep calls to deep at the

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thunder of thy cataracts, and all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me." Now you see we have a picture which is exactly the opposite of the first one. She describes herself at being at the headwaters of the Jordan River, where the cataracts and the rapids run full and destructively with great power. And she finds herself caught up in these. There's a complete reversal of images

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here. Discouragement depicted first as long-term dryness. Discouragement predicted second as the sudden flood that carries everything away. In the first instance, we have the heart hurt of many, many months, perhaps years. But in the second instance, we have trauma which comes unexpected. The first discouragement is erosion. The second discouragement is earthquake. But then she goes

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on to list a third discouragement, and this appears in verses 3 and 10. She says, "My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me, 'Where is thy God?' I go in mourning because of my enemy. As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me." Now you see the picture here, and this is where we get our second clue about the author of this psalm being a woman, the picture here is

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of a woman who has been taken into slavery, and she is being displayed by her captors. She is being pinched and prodded and marched around the room so that the buyers can decide whether they wish to bid on her purchase or not. And she's laughed at and scorned and taunted by those who view her. If you've ever been in real discouragement, you know that whenever that kind of God-shaped

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hole occurs in your heart, there are always seven devils that want to enter in. And one of those devils, invariably, is the criticism or the sneering commentary of some individual who says, "Well, I thought with your faith everything would be all right." So here we have a woman who knows the discouragement of drought, the discouragement of flood, and the discouragement of ridicule. But

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notice, please, she doesn't just cope with this, which means hang on, and she doesn't mope, that is, increasing her depression, and she doesn't dope, she doesn't try to narcotize herself into some state where she won't know what's going on. Instead of that, she hopes. Now, in the Bible, hope is a very active thing. Hoping is not wishing. It is not wishing something to be so,

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and then waiting for some miracle to make it so. In the Bible, hope is working. It is to move toward that thing that you want to come to pass. Four words are used in the Old Testament to describe hope. The first word refers to the weaving of a rope, and it means you are to weave your life into the life of God. The second word means to scan the horizon, and this suggests that you're

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to be looking for opportunities to open themselves to you. The third word means you are to hide in a cave, that is, you are to seek comfort in the protecting arms of God. And the third word means, or the fourth word for hope means, that you are to have high and buoyant enthusiastic expectations, and she brings these four dimensions of hope to her time of discouragement. Notice how she does

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it. First of all, she remembers. Verse four, "I remember how I went up with the throng and led them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival." She uses her memory, you see, to reclaim times in the past before the discouragement has come upon her. She brings these examples. She selects them from the slide trays of

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her recollection and projects them upon the screen of her mind. She pulls out things that will hearten her once again. That's the first principle in using hope against discouragement. You focus not on today's defeat but on yesterday's victories. Take a case like Ann Sullivan. Ann Sullivan was a little girl who was ruled insane. She was put in a mental institution in Boston, Massachusetts. She

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attacked everyone who came near her, so eventually she was put down in the basement in a corridor reserved for the hopeless and the dangerous. Just a little girl, expected to spend all of her life there. But there was an older nurse who would go in every day to see her and she never tried to speak to her, never got near her to provoke the violence. She would just leave cookies and milk,

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cookies and milk. And eventually little Ann came to expect that and she began to open up to this woman. And within a few months she was moved upstairs and with a few months after that she was released from the mental institution, never to return there again. Now you've all heard of Helen Keller, the blind, deaf, mute woman who brought more hope to people who are handicapped

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than any other. Who was Helen Keller's teacher? Who taught her everything she knew? Who opened up the doors that had been locked for her? Ann Sullivan, this little girl who'd been locked in a mental institution. She did more for handicapped people than any other person who has ever lived through the example of Helen Keller. You see, you look back to a story like that and you see the

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things that can come out of positive experience. Now I know that when I say that there's some people here saying, "Okay, preacher, sure there are some stories like that and you can go back and you can drag them out and you can tell them very dramatically, but the fact is that most discouraged people don't have those kinds of experiences. And that's true and I will willingly

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acknowledge that. But the reason they don't have those kinds of experiences is because they live like midgets instead of like giants. Their stories do not have to end as they do. For more than 50 years now I've been having people tell me, "Oh, the situation is hopeless. Oh, there's no way anything can come out of this. Oh, there's no way in which this can be accomplished. This is

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strictly a no-win situation." I have come to the conclusion that every single advance which has been accomplished in all of human history has been first confronted by some people who said, "It just can't be done." Mental midgets. I'm sure there was a time when they said, "Radio broadcast from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church Epitaph." Well, that's an unheard of thing, but

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we've been doing it now for 75 years. People in 32 different states and two foreign countries will hear my words from this pulpit before this day is done. And my words are being translated into magnetic impulses on tapes that will go out to more than a thousand people in the course of the next two weeks. And my image is being picked up by television cameras and will be projected

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throughout all of southwestern Pennsylvania within the course of the next seven days. Now, people would have said at the outset and did say, "This could never happen. We could never have this." But look at history. History is full of testimony to the fact that when you go at something with hope, then that thing can be yours. If you work at it and play yourself into it, then all

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kinds of things can be accomplished. One of the best sellers in our country right now is Dr. Bernard Siegel's book, Love, Medicine, and Miracle. He's one of America's most noted surgeons. And the theme of the whole book is this, that people, even people who are terminally ill, desperately, terminally, painfully ill, if they approach their condition with hope, if they remember the stories

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of those who have had triumph, they will, regardless of what happens, many will be healed, many will come out of their difficulty, all, if they approach it in this way, will have a power and a joy in their lives that they would not otherwise have had. And his book, when you look at it, is full of dozens of stories of people who have gone through things like this. You remember

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how during the war they gave K-rations to troops in the trenches? Well, he gives out M-rations, memory rations. Hold on to these stories out of the past. Remember what other people have done. That can be the beginning of victory with you. Start with a little history lesson. And remember how often hope has carried the day. The first thing the psalmist does is remember. The second

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thing she does is to reconsider. She takes the time to talk to herself. She says, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him. By day the Lord commands his love, and at night his song is with me." What she's saying is here, don't let yourself be licked from the inside. There's a scene in Margaret Mitchell's

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Gone with the Wind in which one southern gentleman has cracked under the terrors of the Civil War, and another southerner describing him says, "He could be licked from the inside. I mean to say that what the world could not do to him, his own heart could." Have you ever taken the time to study your own thoughts and the impact that they have on you? A fellow's walking through the park,

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he's pushing a baby carriage and the baby's screaming, yelling, crying, squalling. And he's saying, "Now be calm, Albert. Be quiet. Be still. Keep composed." And no matter what he says, the crying gets louder and more vigorous. But he never changes expression. "Now, Albert," he says, "just keep cool. Don't be excited by the circumstances of the moment. Don't let the situation get ahead

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of you." And a woman watching this comes over and she says, "You know, this is remarkable. I think it's incredible how you can talk to this child so calmly and so peacefully." And she reached down into the carriage and she patted the little baby's head and she said, "Now, Albert, what's bothering you?" And the father said, "His name is Harold. I'm Albert." Well, there's a lot of truth in that,

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friends. When you take the time to talk to yourself, some remarkable things can happen. Science has demonstrated this. By our thoughts, we can control our pulse rates. By our thoughts, we can control our blood pressure. We've known for a long time that medicines that aren't even medicines called placebos, if they're given to people who believe they're powerful because they

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think they're powerful, they have great impact in their bodies under hypnosis. We can have surgery, blocking off pain so that it doesn't hurt at all. I remember once I was speaking at Hope College out in Michigan and it was wintertime, very, very cold. Now, in those days, they put all their campus guests in a great big old house. And I was the only guest on campus at that time, so here I was

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rattling around in this big house and it was too hot in there. And when I went to bed that night, I just couldn't sleep because it was so, so hot. So finally, I got up and I went over and I opened one of the windows. And then I came back and got into bed and pulled the blankets up over me and went to sleep and slept like a log. The next morning, I got up and went over to shut the

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window and discovered here was a great big storm window outside. It had never been opened at all. [laughter] And that's the difference that what you're thinking about can have on how you feel. If you're saying to yourself all the time, "I can't do it. I'm just no good at this. My boss doesn't

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like me. I cannot possibly learn this. Why should I even try?" What's the inevitable result going to be? But if you say, "I can't wait for them to see the faces on, the expressions on their faces when I do this. I should do this and I can do this and I will do this. I enjoy challenges and this is going to be a good one. If I need help, God is my refuge and my strength. I can do all things

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through Christ who strengthens me." When you talk to yourself like that, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Hope thou in God." That makes the difference. A man who doesn't belong to this church but who visits here quite frequently stopped in to see the organ installation and I was sitting with him up there in the balcony and the crew finished and they left. They didn't notice

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over there and so they turned off the lights and suddenly in late afternoon we're sitting up there and I apologized for the fact that we've been left in the dark. He said, "No, it's nice in here at this time. Soft lights coming through the windows, puddles of color on the floor, a kind of shadow. You know," he said, "I think of this room as a very mysterious place." I said, "What do you mean

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mysterious?" He said, "I come here sad and I go out glad. I come here with anxiety and I go out with positivity. I come here overwhelmed by my tasks and I go out of here thinking, 'By golly, I can do them.' I come in here many times hopeless and I go out with hope. I have to come again and again because I need that treatment but it happens to me here." And I said, "And I'll tell you why.

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It happens to you here because the Bible is preached here and because the power of prayer is practiced here. That's not true in every church, alas. But here it is true. We hold forth the truth and we do it with trust. And when you enter into that kind of experience and talk to your soul out of the midst of that, beautiful things happen. First you remember and then you

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reconsider." And the third thing she did was to respond. She decided to have her life ruled by hope and not by hurt. You see, hoping, as I said at the outset, is acting. It's not just thinking about things, it's acting. If you're caught up in the arid wastes of discouragement or you're being knocked down by the floods of discouragement or ridicule, what are you going to do about it?

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In the Orient, different kinds of trees have different symbolic meanings. The pine tree means longevity, a bamboo tree means prosperity, and the plum tree means courage. And why does the plum tree mean courage? Because it blooms while the snow is still on the ground. All right? Are you ready to bloom while the snow is still on the ground? The College of William and Mary

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down south, one of our great educational institutions, there was a time following the Civil War when they didn't have a single student. For nine years, they didn't have a single student. But the president of that school, Dr. Yule, every day would ring the bell in hope for what was still to be. And the students eventually came back and that school became what it is today. All right?

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Are you ready to ring your bell? Dr. William Osler, the great Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, going through a ward one day full of children desperately ill and painfully ill, and he had some of his young associates with him. And when he'd finished in the ward, he suddenly stood up straight and whistled as he walked out of the place. And when they got out of

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the room, one of his young students said to him, "Sir, how can you whistle in the midst of all that sorrow and heartache?" And Osler looked at him and said, "Young sir, I either weep or I whistle. I choose to whistle." All right? Do you choose to whistle? Paratrooper introduced to a man. The man said, "Sir, you're a paratrooper, yes.

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How many jumps have you made?" "None." "How can you call yourself a paratrooper if you've never made any jumps?" "Well," he said, "it's true. I've never made any jumps and I do call myself a paratrooper. But you see, I've been pushed out of a plane 47 times." All right. Are you ready to jump or to allow yourself to be pushed? See, this is the essential question. Not coping, that's just

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hanging on. Not moping, that's meditating on it till it weighs even more than it weighs now. Not doping yourself up in some way so that you become oblivious to your circumstances. But hoping. Hoping means weaving yourself into the life of God and allowing the memories of his experience in other people's lives and in your own speak to you. Scanning the horizon, thinking about the

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possibilities that are out there, hiding within the arms of God and seeing that he salutes your soul and so you ought to salute your soul as well. Expecting great things. That means blooming and ringing and whistling and jumping. It will mean nothing if you just listen to me this morning and think about what I've suggested. But if you'll act on it, it can mean more than you can imagine.

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Follow this good woman of a long time ago. Remember, reconsider and respond. Hers is a wonderful, wonderful heart song. And if you believe it and if you act upon it, I promise you it will make your heart sing as well. Let us pray.

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Oh God, we thank thee for the faithful testimony of this good woman out of yesterday. May her words find welcome in our hearts and our minds this day. And having found welcome, may they work out in the course of our days. For we would sing songs too. We rejoice in that hope which strengthens the discouraged heart.

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We pray our prayer in the name of Jesus, the hope of glory. Amen.