“Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” (Psalm 103:2)
This week we begin our series, “Spirituality for dark times.”, ‘dark times’ is meant to refer to times of difficulty or struggle that many of us are or may face. So, how do we deal with these “dark times”? As Christians we have a distinctive perspective. We believe in a God who is both in charge of the universe in ways beyond our comprehension and yet incredibly is also totally committed to us at a deeply personal level. For us spirituality is not just a set of practices to make us feel better, but a way of renewing and deepening our faith in the God of Jesus Christ, that reorients our souls from darkness to light.
As recorded at St. Luke’s
Psalm 103 – Out of Darkness
Abide with me
‘Abide with me’ was written by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847 when he was 54, in the last months of his life as his health was failing and he was approaching death. It is a beautiful poem, that struggles with the darkness he is facing in life, but also calls out to God.
Abide with me: fast falls the eventide;
the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
The poetry brings home the emotional reality that accompanied Henry Lyte’s life as he approached death:
“fast falls the eventide”
“the darkness deepens”
“helpers fail and comforts flee”
Dark Times?
The history of the world and indeed our lives have their ups and downs.
There can be times of peace and prosperity, but also times of war and poverty.
Certainly, there is much in our world that is causing an increasing sense of darkness for many people today. Wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East, failing economies, crumbling public services, an uncertain political future with the election of Trump in the United States and the increasing power and influence of Elon Musk and the growing concern over climate change and its effects, probably including the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles this week. There is much in our news that speaks of gloom and darkness.
But, even without the concerns of the news, many will face difficult personal circumstances that lead to a sense of darkness. Like Henry Lyte, your health may be failing, or perhaps you are wracked with guilt for past wrongdoings, or perhaps it feels your life is stuck in a pit due to addiction, debt or just the circumstances of life.
Dark times can catch us in life unawares at any time, whether we are a Christian or not. But how can we deal with this darkness? Is there a way out of darkness?
Yes, I think there is. This is where Christian spirituality comes in. Christian spirituality is taking on various activities, that re-orient us to fully grasp what God has done for us and continues to do with and for us. Like Henry Frances Lyte’s famous hymn, itself a great example of Christian spiritual expression, Christian spirituality helps us grasp that God truly does abide with us. More than that it helps us comprehend what that really means.
Praise my Soul – Psalm 103
‘Praise my Soul’ was another hymn written by Henry Lyte earlier in his life. It is probably his best known other hymn. It is based on Psalm 103, which is our reading today.
It is a song of great praise of God, but it is honest about human struggles and frailties, the dark side of life. It talks about our sins, our diseases, of life being stuck in the pit (verses 3-4).
In fact verses 13-17 are used at funerals. Why? In verse 14, it describes the reality of our mortality and the frailty of life in beautiful poetic language: “We are but dust” hints at the idea from Genesis 2 and 3, that God makes us out of dust and when we die, we return to being dust. As the funeral service puts it: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We are also like the flowers of the field, we may seem to bloom beautifully for a while, but all too soon we have vanished from the face of the earth, soon to be forgotten as those who knew us also pass away. The reality and frustration of death is not ignored but faced head on.
The Psalm does not ignore the darkness of life, but I think it gives us a way out of darkness. A way that gives us the fundamental clue to Christian spirituality. The Psalm takes us from self-absorption to God-absorption. We come out of darkness by re-orienting our souls to praise God for who He is. As the first line of the Psalm says, “Praise the LORD, my soul!”
The Expanding Psalm
This Psalm does this by constantly expanding our horizons. It begins with the soul, but ends with the whole of creation.
Praise the LORD, my soul
Firstly, the Psalm starts with the soul. Indeed, the first line and indeed the first five verses are addressed to ‘my soul’. When your read it and say about God that he ‘forgives all your sins’, you are actually saying that God ‘forgives all my sins.’
This is confusing and strange. Why does he express it in this way?
I think this is the first stage of expanding our horizons. By stepping outside of yourself and your circumstances, feelings and emotions, you gain a slightly expanded perception of reality and can all the more effectively instruct yourself and so re-orient your thinking. This is perhaps particularly important when life feels particularly dark. We can close in on ourselves and quickly become self-absorbed and self-pitying.
The same technique is used in another Psalm:
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God.” (Psalm 42:5)
So speaking to yourself, and giving yourself instructions is the first step of expanding our horizons. The second step is to remind ourselves what God does for us. This is what we tell our souls, when we read verses 3-5.
Praise for what God has done for me – vs. 3-5
Darkness of the soul can come in a number of forms as we saw, but the Psalm in broad brush strokes reminds us that is ultimately only God who can rescue us. It emphasises at least three ways in which God does help us:
- He forgives our sins. That may not be the first thing that you think you need, but knowing that sins are forgiven, that God does not hold us against them, that as the New Testament puts it, “in Christ there is no condemnation” is crucial to grasp if we are going to carry on praising God rather than avoiding him! What is more the psychological release from the burden of guilt can be immense in people’s lives.
- He heals all your diseases. The promise is not that we will never have disease, either physical or mental, but that God will one day deliver us from them, sometimes miraculously in this life, but certainly in the next.
- He redeems your life from the pit. Again trusting in God and finding support and new ways of living as one of his people can be the secret to coming out of all kinds of difficult situations in life. But the ultimate promise is to be rescued from the pit that is death.
Without God, life does just become worse and worse, burdened with more and more things to feel guilty about, increasing illness as we become older and ultimately the pit of death. But with God, the promise is that this is not the end.
When we grasp this perspective through praising God, then we can indeed be lifted out of darkness.
Praise for what God has done for his people – vs. 6-10
In verse 6, the Psalm moves on from self-focus to reflect on what God has done for his people. He doesn’t just help me, he helps all the oppressed.
For the Psalmist writing in 1000BC, the great story of God helping the oppressed was the rescue of Israel from slavery in Egypt and bringing them into the promised land. That is where he revealed his saving power to Moses, but also more importantly his key characteristics of steadfast love and compassion.
For us as Christians, we can look to the gospel message of Jesus. How he died for our sins and conquered death for all who follow him. This is the God who works in history for the underdog and the oppressed. He brings people out of darkness and into the light. We need to expand our vision by praising him not just for what he has done for me, but what he has done for all his people.
Praise for the vastness of his love and compassion – vs. 11-14
And the Psalm keeps expanding in the following verses it picks up on those characteristics of love and compassion and shows us both how vast and intimate they are.
He thinks of the greatest distance he can imagine and says that is how great God’s love is. Paul prays a similar thing in Ephesians 3:
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
may have power, together with all the saints,
to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
and to know this love that surpasses knowledge–that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17b-19)
At the same time, he highlights the intimacy of this love, by comparing it to a Father having compassion on his children. Again a theme picked up in the New Testament when Jesus teaches us to pray, ‘our Father.’ As the intimate father, God understands and knows the reality of my existence and frailty. That our life is short.
Praise for his eternal commitment – vs. 15-18
Yet, this leads to one of the most beautiful, ‘BUTS’ in the Bible. We are mortal and frail, here one day and gone tomorrow BUT God’s love remains committed to his children. Our hope for eternal life, is rooted in God’s eternal love and commitment to us.
Only with God, is there hope in the face of darkness. Only God can help when death approaches, as Henry Frances Lyte expressed so beautifully in Abide with Me.
Praise for his universal rule – vs. 19-22
So, the Psalm goes on expanding our horizons. We’ve moved from the soul, to God’s benefits to me, to God’s salvation of his people, to the vastness of his love and his eternal commitment to finally his universal rule in verse 19.
This God who loves and cares for me, is the one who is ultimately in charge. That raises questions about why he allows darkness to come now, but is our ultimate source of hope that darkness will not last, that he will indeed lift our lives from the pit.
So as the Psalm has expanded its horizons, so now it calls on the praise to be expanded from the miniscule praise of my soul to the full chorus of heaven! With hosts of angels praising God.
Praise – The Harder and Better way
We have called this series, spirituality for dark times.
At the heart of Christian spirituality is the command to our own souls, to praise God. Not just to intellectually list the good things God has done, but to emotionally and whole heartedly praise him for them. This action of praise is the first step to dealing with the darkness of our world.
But, it is not the easy way.
The easy way: is to try and ignore the darkness and allow ourselves to be constantly distracted by entertainment, social media, gaming or to bury our emotion under addictions of alcohol, drugs or pawn or just the busyness of life. This is the easy way, but it does not lift us out of darkness, it is burying our head in the sand.
The harder way is to give our souls a talking to, as this Psalm does. The harder way is to create space in our lives from distraction and busyness, space to guard our souls and re-orient them to God.
We need to do this with and for others, which is why regularly attending church meetings is so important. There we help one another to focus on praising God.
But we also need to carve out time and space day by day to be with God. Even if it is just 10 minutes each day set aside to be with God, to guard your soul and through Bible reading, prayer and praise to re-orient your soul to the wonderful love of God.
St. Luke's Church Ramsgate 