The Way of Life: Soliloquy | Psalm 103
Brian Hedges | November 17, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Psalm 103.
Whether you realize it or not, you spend a lot of your life talking to yourself. Even this morning, when you got up, whether you were conscious of the fact or not, a little running monologue started in your head, where you were saying certain things about yourself or about the day or about the world or about your circumstances, your environment, your emotions, or whatever. We all do this. We talk to ourselves. We do this in our heads all the time.
There’s an old word for this. It’s the word “soliloquy.” Have any of you ever heard the word “soliloquy”? Maybe if you took an English lit class or something like that you did. Soliloquy is understood as this form of self-talk, of speaking to ourselves. You have lots of examples of this in literature and culture.
For example, you might think of a Shakesperian soliloquy. Maybe the most famous of all is Hamlet, as he stares at the skull and he’s contemplating existence and death and his problems, and he says, “To be or not to be; that is the question.” It’s a very famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s plays.
Or, maybe a little closer to home for some of us, you might remember the old musical The Sound of Music. You remember when Maria is going to meet the Von Trapp family for the first time, and she’s trying to psych herself up, and she’s asking,
“What will this day be like?
I wonder.
What will my future be?
I wonder.
It could be so exciting
To be out in the world,
To be free!
My heart should be wildly rejoicing!
Oh, what's the matter with me?”
Then she starts trying to convince herself that she has the confidence, she’s got this. “I have confidence in me!” as she goes into this new job.
Or, maybe you would think of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings—Gollum Smeagol. He’s almost this schizophrenic character, right, two different personalities in the same body. So Gollum is telling him all the bad things, and Smeagol is covering his ears saying, “Not listening! Not listening!”
I actually think that’s a portrait that’s pretty close to the experience that sometimes we have in our own lives. You remember how the apostle Paul said in Romans 7 that “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” It’s even confusing trying to say that! The experience is certainly confusing. Maybe you feel that way sometimes in your life. You kind of have this ongoing dialogue, these different aspects of yourself and your personality, at war within.
Now, those are more dramatic examples from literature, from pop culture. But everyday, garden-variety self-talk may be not as dramatic, but it’s still very powerful. Listen to what a couple of psychologists, Christian psychologists have to say about this experience of self-talk.
Eric Johnson, who I’ve been quoting a lot in this series, says, “Humans are always engaging in self-talk. It is typically habitual and serves to maintain current values and reflections. Therapy usually requires examining the ongoing conversations one is having with one’s self.”
Or here’s another pair of psychologists, William Backus and Marie Chapian, in their book Telling Yourself the Truth. They say, “Self-talk means the words we tell ourselves in our thoughts; it means the words we tell ourselves about people, self, experiences, life in general, God, the future, the past, the present. It is specifically all of the words you say to yourself all the time.”
My contention this morning is that all of us are doing this. We are talking to ourselves, whether we are doing so self-consciously or not. We are saying things in our minds to our own hearts and souls, we are commenting on and responding to our lives, our circumstances, to other people, to the world around us. We are interpreting all of this. As we do so, we’re building an inner world that may or may not correspond to the reality of the real world as God sees it.
We are also, as we do this, reinforcing certain beliefs and perspectives and attitudes and patterns of response. We’re doing this either for good or for evil.
As we do this, we are contributing to our formation as human beings, and we are either helping ourselves to be more and more conformed to the image of Christ or we are allowing ourselves to be molded into the shape of the world or some other distortion of who God created us to be. These are formative things that we say to ourselves, so it’s important for us to examine our self-talk.
Now, this is part of a series. This is message number five in a series of six messages on “The Way of Life: Vital Practices for Your Spiritual Journey.” We’ve been saying every week that the way of Jesus is the way to a rich and satisfying life and that this way is marked out by certain practices. We’ve been looking at these practices, spiritual disciplines, spiritual practices, and we’ve looked at four so far. We look at meditation from Psalm 1, recollection from Psalm 86, contemplation from Psalm 63, and then last week was confession from Psalm 38.
Today, we’re going to look at this practice—and it actually is a spiritual practice—called soliloquy. We’re going to go to Psalm 103.
I want to begin by reading this psalm to us, reading from the NIV. Then we’re going to work through some definitions and illustrations of this, and then how we apply it in our lives and cultivate the skills for a better, healthier, godlier kind of self-talk in our lives. Psalm 103, beginning in verse 1. The psalmist says,
“Praise the Lord, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.”
Notice how he’s addressing his own heart, his soul.
“Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
“The Lord works righteousness
and justice for all the oppressed.
“He made known his ways to Moses,
his deeds to the people of Israel:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
“As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.
“The Lord has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.
“Praise the Lord, you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his bidding,
who obey his word.
Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts,
you his servants who do his will.
Praise the Lord, all his works
everywhere in his dominion.
“Praise the Lord, my soul.”
This is God’s word.
1. Definition
Let’s begin with some definitions. I’m saying that there is a spiritual practice that is exemplified here in this psalm, a spiritual practice that used to be soliloquy. We don’t use that word anymore, so we might think of this as a spiritual practice of self-talk. What is this practice, the practice of soliloquy?
Here is a definition. This comes from Kyle Strobel, who is a Jonathan Edwards scholar. He wrote a book called Formed for God’s Glory: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards. That’s what first put this on the radar for me about seven or eight years ago. Kyle Strobel says,
“Soliloquy is a method of prayer whereby you speak to both God and your own soul as you hold it before him. This prayer is modeled after the psalmists, who preached to their own souls in the presence of God.”
That’s a good definition, and he draws from the example of Jonathan Edwards. I’ll quote Jonathan Edwards here in a few minutes.
We could expand this and say that soliloquy is the discipline of calling your soul to attend upon God. That’s what you see the psalmist doing here in Psalm 103. He begins, “Praise the Lord, my soul.” Your version may say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”
Then, at the very end of the psalm, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” There’s an inclusio here. There’s a frame to this psalm. It begins and it ends with this call to bless the Lord or to praise the Lord.
So, soliloquy is the discipline of calling your soul to attend upon God, and it’s also the regathering and the refocusing of your faculties, your thoughts, inclinations, affections, and desires on God. Notice how verse 1 says, “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being praise his holy name.” He wants everything within him— “all that is within me, bless your holy name.” Everything within him he wants to focus on praising God, and he’s exhorting himself to do this. He’s speaking to himself. This is a soliloquy.
Now, this is related to the other disciplines we’ve looked at, but there are slight distinctions. Meditation is a focus of our mind and our attention on the Scriptures, on the word of God. Recollection is a focus on the self where we are recollecting the fragmented parts of our hearts and of our souls. Contemplation is a gaze on God and his beauty and glory. And confession is a focus on our sins, as we acknowledge our sins before the Lord.
But here, with soliloquy, this is somewhat distinct. It’s related to all of these, but here it’s not just thinking and reflecting, but it’s actually taking your soul in hand and intentionally speaking truth to your heart. It’s preaching the gospel to yourself.
We might call this spiritual practice of soliloquy “sanctified self-talk.” It’s sanctified self-talk. You’re already doing self-talk, but how can that self-talk be sanctified?
We need this because it is one of the most effective weapons against what Paul Tripp and other writers have called “gospel amnesia.” Just imagine what it would be like to have amnesia, the partial or total loss of memory. Can you imagine how unsettling that would be to begin to lose your memory? Or maybe all of a sudden you don’t remember your past, you don’t remember who you are? You’ve lost a grip on your own identity. You don’t remember your relationships with other people. That would be a very unsettling experience to have. Many people have experienced that because of shock or an injury or some other reason.
But gospel amnesia is something that we all struggle with. Gospel amnesia is also a kind of forgetting. When we have gospel amnesia, we forget the goodness of God. We forget the grace of God in our lives. We forget who God really is and we forget who we are in Christ. We forget our identity in Christ. We forget about who we are in relationship to God, and we begin to view the world and our circumstances without reference to God and his wise, sovereign, good, fatherly care.
That’s why the psalmist in verse 2 says, “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” He’s trying to battle this tendency of his heart to forget. He’s battling gospel amnesia.
What is he not to forget? He’s not to forget the benefits of God which are expounded in this psalm in terms of God’s covenant love. That great Hebrews word hesed is the word for the covenant love of God, the steadfast love of God or the mercy of God, the grace of God. Four times in this psalm—verse 4, verse 8, verse 11, verse 17—it really structures this psalm, as the psalmist thinks about and reminds himself of the benefits that flow to him from God’s steadfast love.
Now, this is something all of us need to learn to do, and this is particularly helpful for those of us who were raised in the church and raised in a kind of rigid, legalistic home and you find something allergic in your heart to any discussion of spiritual disciplines. There are Christians who, when you start talking about discipline, just want to push back, because they grew up in a home where there was a lot of ritual and maybe not a lot of reality; or there was a very rigid formality, there was this push to say prayers at a certain time every day or to read the Bible or whatever, but there wasn’t a lot of grace. So sometimes we want to say, “I don’t want anything to do with that; I just want to bask in the grace of God.”
What we need to understand is that the spiritual disciplines are not in tension with God’s grace. You can misuse them, but those disciplines, those practices are means by which we can actually connect to God and remind ourselves of God’s grace.
I read a book a number of years ago by a guy named Jimmy Davis. The main thing I remember from the book was he said you don’t need to have a quiet time in order for God to love you; you need to have one so that you can hear God tell you that he loves you. That’s the idea. It’s that you’re getting yourself in the presence of God and you’re taking your heart and your soul and your inner life in hand so as to remind yourself of the truths of the gospel. This isn’t a legalistic thing; it’s, rather, a practice that can help us in our spiritual life.
2. Illustrations
Let me give you some illustrations of this from Scripture and also from history. I want you to see this not only in Psalm 103, I want you to see it in a few other places of Scripture, and then show you a couple of illustrations from some of these people I like to quote.
Psalm 103, first of all. You see it here; I’ve already read these verses, verses 1-5. Notice how he is addressing his own heart, his own soul.
“Praise the Lord, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases…”
He’s still speaking to himself. “He forgives all your sins.” Who’s the “your”? He’s speaking to himself, right? He’s addressing himself.
“...who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
He’s addressing himself. This is a clear example of sanctified self-talk, the practice of soliloquy.
Listen to Spurgeon commenting on this. This is from a Spurgeon sermon. He said,
“You see here a man talking to himself, a soul with all his soul talking to his soul. Every speaker should learn to soliloquize. His own soul is the first audience a good man ought to think of preaching to. Before we address ourselves to others, we should lecture within the doors of our own hearts.”
There you have it. You have to learn to soliloquize with your soul, to speak to your soul with all of your soul, all that’s within you addressing your soul to remind yourself of who God is and who you are in Christ.
Here’s another example. This is from Psalm 42. In Psalm 42 you have twice something of a refrain, and then it’s repeated again in Psalm 43. Those two psalms were probably originally one. So with slight variations you have these words:
“Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?”
Once again, he’s questioning himself; he’s speaking to himself. Then notice the exhortation.
“Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.”
I mean, there you have it. Here is the psalmist, in the face of his discouragement, his stress, even his depression, he’s disquieted within, disturbed within, and he is taking himself in hand and he is exhorting himself to put his hope in God.
Let me give you one other example. This is Psalm 77.
“I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart meditated and my spirit asked:
“‘Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?’”
He’s asking himself questions as he’s reflecting on what are obviously very difficult circumstances. “Has God forgotten me?” But then notice what he says in verse 10.
“Then I thought, ‘To this I will appeal:
the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
I will remember the deeds of the Lord.’”
And then he begins to recount the deeds and the miracles of God.
It’s the same thing. The psalmist here is speaking to himself, meditating within his own heart, and reminding himself of certain truths.
Let me give you the example here of Jonathan Edwards. I quoted from Edwards’ personal narrative two weeks ago to hold Edwards out as something of a Protestant example of the practice of contemplation, of gazing on God. But Kyle Strobel brought this out—this is also from the personal narrative—that Edwards engaged in this practice of soliloquy, where he was speaking to himself. So here’s a quotation. This is from the personal narrative. He said,
“My mind was greatly fixed on divine things, almost perpetually in the contemplation of them. I spent most of my time in thinking of divine things, year after year, often walking alone in the woods and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, and converse with God. It was always my manner at such times to sing forth my contemplations. I was almost constantly in prayer, wherever I was. Prayer seemed to be natural to me as the breath by which the inward burnings of my heart had vent.”
There, soliloquy seems to be almost a subset of meditation or prayer. It’s a form of prayer, but it’s a form of prayer in which you’re engaging not just God, you’re engaging your own heart, and you’re speaking to yourself about God.
Edwards did this, Spurgeon said we should do this, and most importantly, the psalmists model this for us.
3. What Does This Look Like?
What would that look like? What would it look like to engage in this healthy, godly, sanctified kind of self-talk? Let’s move into application now. Let me suggest that all of our self-talk can fit into three broad categories.
First of all, you’re talking to yourself about yourself. You are saying things to yourself about your identity, about your desires, your feelings, your emotions. You talk to yourself about yourself.
Secondly, you talk to yourself about the big picture. This is what we might think of as our worldview language; it’s the lens through which we view the world. Now, we may be deliberate and intentional in this, but it may just be the default lens through which we view the world. We’re essentially saying things to ourselves that reinforce a perspective about the way the world is and about good and evil and right and wrong in the world and about God and God’s involvement in the world. Or maybe we think of God as indifferent to the world—whatever it is.
Then thirdly, we’re connecting our talk about ourselves and our talk about the big picture, we’re connecting those two things when we think about our own circumstances. This is our interaction with the world. So you’re talking to yourself about your life and the things that happen to you and to other people, and so on.
Now, just think for a minute in each of those three categories of some of the negative ways that we might engage in this.
What are some negative ways that you might engage in self-talk about yourself? You might say things to yourself like this: “You know, I’m just stupid. I’m a stupid person. I’m not as smart as other people. I’m clumsy. I just don’t quite get it.” You might have something like imposter syndrome, where you just feel like you’re always on the verge of being shown up at your job or at church, wherever it is, and you’re kind of afraid for people to really see the real you.
You might say to yourself continually, “I’m just a failure. I’m a bad parent. I’m not doing well at parenting. I’m not a great Christian. I’m a failure as a Christian. I’m a failure as a husband. I’m a failure as a father.” You’re saying those kinds of things. You may be commenting on your appearance, your personality. You may think to yourself, “I’m attractive or I’m unattractive,” or, “I’m smart; I’m stupid.” “I did well or I didn’t do well. I’m failing at everything.”
There can be both positive but also really negative self-talk, and I think for most people, most of the time, if we’re not intentional about it we default to negative kinds of words to ourselves about ourselves that don’t reflect the kind of humble confidence that we see in Scripture. I’ll give you an example of that here in a minute, the way we should talk to ourselves.
What about our circumstances? What do we say about our circumstances? We might say, “Well, it’s hard. My life is hard. It’s not fair. I don’t have the same opportunities that other people have.” Or, “I hate my job.” Or, “When will I ever get out of school?” Or, “Why don’t I have any friends?” You’re thinking about problems in the world as they relate to your life.
Then when you’re thinking about God and this big picture and God’s relationship to the world, you may just think about the world without thinking about God at all. You may think, “The world is just a mess, the world is a dark place, the world is a dangerous place.” When you think about God, you may think, “God’s obviously indifferent. God doesn’t seem to care. Where is God? Why is God uninvolved?” Maybe you think God is love, but you think about God as love without any real biblical content to that, and it essentially just means that God will give you a pass on anything. But you don’t think about God’s love as being specific and tangible and practical care in your life, of God being involved.
I think it’s easy for us, even though we believe intellectually in God, it’s easy for us to function as if God were not involved. We function as almost practical atheists.
These would be negative ways that we talk to ourselves in all these categories.
What I want to show you in Psalm 103—we’ll limit ourselves to this psalm—is that you can see how Psalm 103 can be applied for sanctified self-talk in all three of these categories. In each category, you can see the psalmist saying things to his soul that shape the way he thinks of himself, the way he thinks of the world, the way he thinks of God. Let’s look at each category.
(1) First of all, yourself. What do you say to yourself, based on just Psalm 103? The first thing you would say is, “I am mortal; I am not God.” Look at Psalm 103:14-16.
“...for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.”
What is he doing? He’s reminding himself here that, as human beings, we are dust and grass. You might be thinking, “That’s not very encouraging. Pastor Brian is telling me to call myself dirt.” That’s not what the psalmist is doing here. He’s reminding himself of his mortality.
It really goes all the way back to the Genesis narrative, when God created Adam, the first human being, from the dust of the ground. Then after the fall, he says, “From dust you were created; to dust you will return.” This is reminding us of our basic human condition. You are a creature; you are not the Creator. You are mortal; you are not immortal. You are a human being; you are not the divine being. You are a fallen creature, subject to mortality; you are not God. That’s just honesty, for us to recognize the limitations of our lives. We have to start there.
But notice that he doesn’t stop here. This isn’t the only thing that you can say about yourself in light of Psalm 103. You can say, “I am mortal; I am not God,” but then you can also say, “But I am loved by God, who gives me so many benefits and blessings.” Again, you see the thread of God’s love running through this psalm.
“Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion.”
Here’s a God who has love for his creatures who are dust. In fact, I love two words that are put together in the title of another book by this author Kyle Strobel. He wrote a book called Beloved Dust. That’s what you are. You are dust, but you are beloved dust.
You see, you put those two things together and you see what it gives you? It gives you humility because it reminds you of your mortality. You’re just dust. But it also gives you confidence, because you are beloved dust. You are dust that God, the Creator of heaven and earth, loves. He loves you.
You have to have both of those things in your mind. If you lean in direction without the balance there, you can end up not having the kind of humility or not having the kind of confidence that you need.
(2) What about the big picture? What do we say about the big picture—the world, good and evil, and God? Let’s just focus on three things we should say to ourselves about God, and that will shape how we think about the world.
First of all, God is my Savior. You see this from Psalm 103:3-12. Let me read from verses 8-12 to give you an excerpt.
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.”
Of course, that’s basically a quotation from Exodus 34.
“He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
What’s he doing here? He is reflecting on God’s redeeming love, that God saves his people, that God forgives us of our sins, that God removes our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west. The infinite magnitude of the love and the grace of God is expressed in his redemptive mercy.
Maybe some of you will know the words of this old hymn from Henry Lyte. It’s a great hymn that’s based on Psalm 103, a hymn that maybe we should revive and use again here.
“Praise, my soul, the King of heaven,
To his feet your tribute bring;
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore his praises sing.
Praise the everlasting King!”
That’s who you are. You are ransomed, restored, healed and forgiven. Why? Because God is a Savior, you see? It’s reminding ourselves of the grace of God.
This will help you if you find yourself dealing with feelings of guilt and shame. The solution is not to bury those feelings, it’s not to pretend they’re not there, it’s to take those feelings before the face of God and remind yourself of God’s grace given to us in Christ. God is my Savior. He’s the one who forgives my sins.
Secondly, God is my Father. Just look at verse 13. “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.” Here’s an image of God as a good, kind, compassionate father who looks on his children with tenderness and with love.
Now, that image of God in the Old Testament, that doesn’t happen very often in the Old Testament. There are just a few times where God is likened as a father. But when you get to the New Testament, every single time Jesus addresses God—except one—Jesus addresses God as Father. The only time he doesn’t is when Jesus is on the cross, he’s dying on the cross, and he says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s the only time that Jesus does not call God Father.
J.I. Packer says, “‘Father’ is the Christian name for God.” But you see it right here in the psalmist, as he reflects on God’s fatherly care for his children.
Add to that that God is my King. You see this in Psalm 103:19-22. “The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all.” Here’s the universal sovereignty of God, the kingship of God over all things.
Then he goes on to exhort the angelic beings, the mighty ones, the heavenly host who do his will to praise the Lord. “Praise the Lord, all his works everywhere in his dominion.” What is the dominion of God? It’s the realm over which God reigns because he is sovereign. He is the King.
You see how, when you combine these things together, you get such a complete picture of God. God is not only our Father who cares for us, he’s also the King who has the power to protect us and to provide for us, to govern our lives. He governs this world. That’s then going to shape how we view our circumstances.
(3) Let me give you a couple of examples of that. How do you speak to yourself about your circumstances if you’re trying to do this sanctified self-talk? Consider a couple of examples. If you have suffered injustice, if someone has wronged you or hurt you or abused you, if you’ve been the victim of a violent crime, what do you say to yourself about that? Those are the experiences that can mark you for life. What do you say about that?
Verse 6: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.” When you read the psalms, one of the pictures of God that comes through in the psalms is, here is God who cares about justice. Here’s a God who cares about the oppressed. Here’s a God who cares about the poor. He cares about people who are mistreated. He cares about them; his heart goes out to them. God is a just God, and our assurance is that that injustice that we’ve experienced will someday be brought to light and God will see to it that every wrong is made right. He will, because he is a God of justice. That can comfort you, that can help you when you’re dealing with feelings of being a victim of injustice.
What if you’re dealing with anxiety? If you’re anxious about the future, if you feel uncertain about your future, about your health or your job, your kids, your finances—these are things that keep you up at night, these are things that are constantly on your mind. You just feel this constant state of low-grade anxiety. What do you do? Verse 19: “The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all.” You remind yourself that this is not outside the scope of God’s control. God is still sovereign, no matter what my circumstances seem to be. God is able to intervene in this situation. God will not allow anything into my life that he will not ultimately use for my good. God is a good and gracious God. I may not see his purposes, but he is at work. Everything that happens in my life comes to me sifted through the sovereign fingers of a good God.
If you believe that, that will shape the way you think about your job, that will shape the way you think about your health, that will shape the way you think about the problems, the stresses that you’re facing right now. The very things that are causing you anxiety right now, that can help you, because you believe that God is sovereign and in control.
Do you see what I’m saying here the psalmist does? I mean, all I’m trying to do is show you how the truths that the psalmist is preaching to himself, you can use that to shape your self-talk.
4. How Do You Develop These Skills?
So, how then do you develop the skills for doing this? The final thing I want us to do is think about the cultivation of the skills of sanctified self-talk. How do you develop those skills? It’s one thing to see it on the screen; it seems pretty obvious. You look at Psalm 103; that seems pretty obvious. But you can take any part of Scripture and you can do this. When you discern the truths that are there in Scripture, you can turn that into a way of speaking to your own heart, your own soul.
Let me give you three steps that I think are necessary to develop this skill.
(1) Number one, inventory. That is, you have to pay attention to your current self-talk and to take inventory of what you’re doing right now. You’re already talking to yourself, but are you even aware of what you’re saying? You have to take inventory. It’s really hard to change something that you have not recognized as being a problem. So we begin by taking inventory of our mental habits.
That means that you’re going to have to slow down. It means that you’re going to have to unplug. You’re going to have to unplug the iPhone or turn off the iPhone, you’re going to have to turn off the radio or the podcast, you’re going to have to pull out the AirPods and get quiet enough long enough that you become aware of the voices in your head and what you’re saying to yourself.
Then you examine it and you ask, “Is this biblical?” You hold it up against Scripture. “Is this biblical? Is what I’m saying to myself healthy? Does this honor God? Does this reflect the truth about who God is and who God says that I am?”
One way you can do this to grow in self-awareness is to keep something like a journal. Now, I know that for many of you, you probably shrink at the idea of, “Dear Diary…” “I don’t want to write it out. I don’t want a journal, I don’t want a diary.” I get it. I get you may not want to do that.
I’m not saying this is something you have to do all the time, but this can be a way, maybe for a period of time, to help you take stock of what’s going on in your own heart. I would just say, for me personally, I’ve found that this is actually a crucial discipline. I don’t do it every day, but I do it pretty often. It’s what helps me sort things out. When I’m out of sorts, when I’m anxious or I’m stressed or I’m depressed or I feel guilty or I feel far from God, it helps me to write out what I’m thinking and what’s going on and do some analysis. That gives me clarity. I think it could help you as well, so maybe try it for a week or try it for a month and just try to journal so that you’re paying attention to your self-talk.
Another aspect of this inventory is to pay attention to how the different voices inside your head, the different faculties of your soul, are speaking to you. What are those voices?
There’s a great section in this sermon from Spurgeon, and I kind of wanted to use the quote, but it’s way too long, so let me summarize it for you. Spurgeon suggests that we are to use all of our mental powers and faculties to call our souls to bless the Lord. He says that “affection leads the way.” We start with affection, with the heart, and our love for God. But he says then you bring in memory: “Forget not all his benefits.” Let your memory kick in and help. You bring in your conscience. He says, “Your conscience once was weighed down with sins and condemned; now let it weigh the Lord’s pardon and magnify his grace to you. Let your conscience praise the sin-bearer.”
He says, “Bring in your emotions, bring in your knowledge, your wonder, your fears, and your hopes.” He says, “We could bring out every single mental faculty and show that David has given it scope and practically shown how every particular power of the soul can praise God.”
That’s a helpful way to think. Just think about these different aspects of yourself, your personality, your inner world, and bring each one of them to bear to help you to speak to yourself the truth. Take some inventory. That’s first.
(2) Number two is input. Fill your mind and your heart with truth. If you’re going to change your self-talk, you have to store your mind and your heart with good things so that you have something good to say to yourself. You’re not going to get beyond your current inputs.
This is part of the problem with so many of us: are inputs, by and large, are worldly and even ungodly rather than inputs that are either Scripture or rooted in Scripture or are helping to reinforce the truths of Scripture. Jesus said, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good, and an evil person out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of his heart the mouth speaks.” That’s Luke 6:45.
Your self-talk is going to reflect whatever is already in your mind and heart, so you have to put in the right stuff so that you’re able to recall it and preach it back to yourself. “Your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you,” Psalm 119:11.
Paul exhorted the Colossian believers, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” right? Jesus said, “Sanctify them by your truth; your word is truth.” We have to have good inputs.
(3) Finally, number three, intentionality. You actually have to be intentional in doing this, as with all of these practices. You have to learn to “preach the gospel” to yourself. I put that in quotes; I’m not sure who the first person was to use that phrase. But I think the idea started to take root in me years ago the first time I read Martyn Lloyd-Jones wonderful book Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cures. Lloyd-Jones was this preacher, one of the great preachers of the twentieth century. He ministered in London for about thirty years, and he preached a series of sermons that were then published as a book called Spiritual Depression.
Essentially, what Lloyd-Jones was doing was taking Psalm 42, “Why are you disquieted, O my soul? Hope in God.” He’s taking Psalm 42 and then he’s applying that basic principle to all different aspects of life. It was essentially Christian psychology before there was really a field of Christian psychology. He’s just counseling people from the pulpit and showing you how to counsel your own soul.
Here’s a quote from Lloyd-Jones. It’s one of the most important quotes that I think I’ve ever read. This is really helpful.
He says, “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?”
You can see what he’s doing. He’s just distinguishing here between unhealthy self-talk—listening to yourself—instead of talking to yourself, actually preaching the truth to yourself.
He says, “The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself.” That’s a pretty significant statement. The main art. That’s typical Lloyd-Jones. Everything for Lloyd-Jones was important, crucial, the most important thing. I mean, this is what Lloyd-Jones writes. But he’s onto something here. The main art in the matter of spiritual living is knowing how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, he says. You have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.
“You must say to your soul, ‘Why art thou cast down?’ You must turn on yourself [and he means turn on your flesh, turn on the negative, sinful aspects of yourself] and 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.”
Brothers and sisters, if you’re struggling right now with depression, with anxiety, with negativity—any of those things—there may be other things you need to do. I’m not saying this is the one and only solution. But this is one crucial practice that can help you. It can help you not only cope better, but my argument here is that as you learn to preach the gospel to yourself and speak truth to yourself, your very self-talk becomes a means in the hands of God that is helping to form you and shape you more and more into the image of Christ. We have to learn to do it. Learn to preach the gospel to yourself. As you do, you will find that spiritual transformation, spiritual growth is happening not only in your times alone with the Lord, but it’s happening throughout the day as you are reminding yourselves of the truths of the gospel. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious God, we thank you this morning for your wonderful word. We thank you for this psalm, Psalm 103. It’s so full of encouragement to us. And we pray that you would help us learn from the example of the psalmists and Jonathan Edwards and others who’ve gone before who knew how to take their souls in hand and exhort themselves, preach to themselves, encourage themselves in the Lord. I think of David in 1 Samuel 30, where everything’s falling apart in his life, but he encouraged himself in the Lord his God. Lord, would you help us learn to do that as well? Would you help us to develop the skills of doing that? Would you help us fill our hearts and our minds with truth and then use that truth to battle this tendency to gospel amnesia, to forgetting your benefits, your goodness, your grace in our lives?
Lord, help us with this this week. Help up start where we are with whatever our current situation is and apply these things to our lives in ways that will make a measurable difference in the days to come. Even when we wake up in the morning, let our first thoughts be thoughts of you. Help us begin before we even get out of bed to address ourselves with truth and to connect our hearts to yours.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we ask you, Lord, to continue to minister grace to us. Just as the word proclaims to us the gospel in an audible form, now the table proclaims to us the Lord’s death in a visible and a tangible form. May we come to the table with faith this morning, laying hold of Christ and of all he has done for us. May we experience a real communion and fellowship with you through the power of your Spirit. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
