How to Deal with Your Own Soul - Psalm 42 & 43

In Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5 we are given great insights into how to deal with our own hearts:

"Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? 
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God"

 We can learn two vital things here about how to deal with our own fear and depression:

1.) Look for the underlying idol of the heart by asking, "why" you are anxious or depressed. Ask God to reveal it to you (Psalm 139:23-24) and have the Spirit dissect it out with the scalpel of the Word (Hebrews 4:12). To the right is a diagnostic question I ask myself; it's my way of saying, "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?"


2.) Preach to yourself. Use the Word to exhort yourself, saying "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God". Ask the Spirit to make your "self sermons" powerful to your own heart. I often read through the Psalms until the Spirit shows me a passage that will preach well to my heart's current condition. 

In his excellent book Spiritual Depression, Martyn Lloyd-Jones says we need to stop listening to ourselves and start preaching to ourselves:

"The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience."
"The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’."

God has used these two truths (found in Psalm 42 and 43) to renovate my heart more than I can even say. I pray he does the same for you.