ask them to bless our time together in his word so

Father in heaven we're just so very grateful to you for your word and

for this time that we have on Thursday nights to come together and

study your word and just be together, fellowship together.

Lord, it's really a highlight of our week to be able to put aside all the distractions

and busyness of our day and of our lives and just focus our attention completely upon you.

But Lord, we need for you to help us so that our minds don't wander.

We want to hear you speak in that still small voice as you're always so faithful to, Lord.

Speak into our lives, especially dealing with the subject matter that we're going to talk about

tonight concerning discouragement and even depression and giving way to despair.

Lord, I pray that you'll encourage our hearts, strengthen our hearts, as we commit this time to you.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right.

So, it's been a couple weeks since we were in the Psalms, really excited about being back in the Psalms tonight.

I spent some time seeking the Lord and really wanting to take a different approach to teaching this Psalm, Psalm 42 in particular,

as we're going to see Psalm 43 as well with it for a good reason.

But both of these Psalms speak very practically to those times in our lives when we're prone to become discouraged.

Have you ever been discouraged?

Me neither, so we'll just close in prayer.

Not exactly.

One would think that as you mature in Christ and grow in grace, that discouragement would not be something that you would be prone to.

But it seems that, I was thinking about this just today, in fact, actually the whole week, but where in Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes that with much knowledge comes much sorrow.

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