January 10, 2021
Upcoming Events and Notices
This week San Diego Country remains in the highest COVID-19 risk category of Purple/Widespread. The State of California guidelines for San Diego County states that all worship services should be conducted outdoor. And given the challenges of weather and logistics, we will continue to hold our Lord's Day worship service online only.
Please join us 10 AM, January 10, 2021, for worship. You can participate in this week's service via YouTube here. You can find the order of worship and songs here.
You can find the sermon from the January 3, 2020 service here.
January 10 (Lord's Day 11:15 AM): Please join us for fellowship after the worship service via Zoom: Meeting ID: 879 4595 5692 — for meeting passcode please text pastor Ken.
January 13 (Wednesday 7 PM): Please join us for for "Knowing God" Zoom study. This week's study will cover chapter 14 — "God the Judge." Meeting ID: 831 0828 6050 — for meeting passcode please text pastor Ken.
Thank you for your continued support of Grace Fallbrook (PCA). Your loving support makes the proclamation of the gospel and the building up of the saints possible. Please continue to mail in your gifts and offerings to our church treasurer, Bruce Summers. In addition, our church website now features online giving. Please visit the church website and click on "Give" which you will find in the upper left corner of our church's website. When you click on "Give Online Now" button on that page, you will be directed to the PCA Foundation where you can give towards Grace Fallbrook (PCA).
Before We Worship
Psalm 42 is for the depressed people. Indeed, it begins with a desperate picture. "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God." Contrary to popular sentiment, this is not an idyllic scene of a deer frolicking in a dreamy meadow, something perhaps the likes of Thomas Kinkade might paint. A deer looking for water is a desperate deer. Their survival depends on finding water. That is, the picture that Psalm 42 draws for us is more like that of a marooned sailor who arranges rocks and debris on the beach to spell out S.O.S in hopes of being saved.
The psalmist's desperation has two main sources. One, he is far away from home, from Jerusalem, and he cannot appear before God to worship. He remembers "as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival" (v.4). This is a strange sentiment for people who think nothing of missing worship. Can it be said of us, "My tears have been my food day and night" because we are unable to worship with God's people? This certainly says a lot about us.
Second, the psalmist's desperation comes from the lack of encouragement. Twice he repeats, "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?" (vss. 5 & 11). Thus, cut off from worship, and with a heavy heart, the psalmist cries, "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?" Psalm 42 is a song of a depressed saint.
Depression can have clinical causes (i.e. medical & physiological). In such cases we need to seek medical help. But depression can also have spiritual roots. We face depression, not necessarily because of our previous spiritual failures, but because God can only teach us somethings about himself (and about ourselves) in our isolation that he does not teach us when we feel content in the glow of fellowship. Depression makes us very keen to the fact that we are painfully cut off from people. And we come to realize we have depended too much on the encouragement of others and not enough on God. Indeed, depression and discouragement often take hold of us when we look to something other than God with the expectation that they will save us. But nothing can live up to that expectation, and they all let us down.
In Psalm 42 God becomes bigger through depression. Thus the psalmist ends, "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God." God can bless us even, and particularly, when we have lost heart. Would you hope in him? May our souls learn to be desperate for the presence of our God, and only for his presence!