On Tuesday, I shared a Sneak Peek with author Christina Fox. Today, I’m sharing the foreword I wrote to her new book, A Heart Set Free: A Journey to Hope Through the Psalms of Lament. I hope it will encourage you to pick up a copy of your own!
Foreword
When Paul wrote to his beloved Philippians, he told them, “For I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. For I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:11-13).
Throughout the years, I have pondered these words, longing to share in this secret with Paul, wanting to know Christ in such a way that inner joy abounds whatever the outward circumstance. And, most of the time, I have found myself wrestling with my emotions along the way.
At times, I wrongly viewed contentment as an emotional evenness that nothing could assuage. So, when emotions would arise such as sadness, anger, frustration, or grief, these were signs of my failure. If I felt too much enjoyment in the things of this earth, I viewed these emotions with suspicion. Perhaps my joy, gladness, and delight were signs of misplaced affections.
My quest for contentment often led me to try and avoid my emotions. Yet, each time I tried to push them down, they would pop back up in another form. In some ways, I found myself struggling with the fact that I had any negative emotions at all. Wasn’t I supposed to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you”? (1 Thess. 5:16-18) Did this verse leave room for sorrow, fear, anxiety, or grief?
In the midst of my inward debate, life kept happening. We suffered a miscarriage, my father had a heart attack and stroke, my mother faced cancer and months of treatment, and a dear friend died after a long fight with breast cancer. Where was I to go with the pain and loss I was feeling?
In my wrestling and thinking, my husband lovingly and faithfully nudged me back into God’s word: “Melissa, you need to go to the Psalms.”
I followed his advice and found words to express both my sorrows and my joys. The Psalms expanded my view of God, as well as my view of contentment. Here I found saints who living before me, displaying what it meant to be “sorrowful, yet rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10). In the Psalms I learned that sadness and grief were not signs of faithlessness, but part of life in a fallen world. Grief could walk beside joy and they were not in opposition to one another. Contentment was not an avoidance of emotions, but a God-centered expression of them.
In the Psalms I found a pattern for how to talk to myself. As Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote, “You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.” The Psalms provided examples of saints who faithfully wrestled with God as they poured out their souls before Him. Their emotions drove them to closer to God, in a new dependence upon Him.
These meditations refreshed and renewed my love of the Psalms. For this reason, when Christina Fox told me that she was working on a book on emotions and the Psalms, I rejoiced. In this book she faithfully nudges us all back to the Psalms, with wisdom and discernment as she guides. She does so through the lens of her own experience, with her eyes firmly focused on Christ.
Christina wisely helps us to understand our emotions and faithfully teaches the pattern of lament found in the Psalms. She directs us to cry out to God, ask Him for help, and to respond in trust and worship. She leads us into the experience of our emotions, but out of self-focus and self-pity. She is tender and truthful, blending a sympathetic heart with a theological mind.
I am thankful this book has reached your hands. I pray that it might encourage you to join with the saints of old, crying out to the Lord in your distress. May we experience Him in new ways as we seek Him in all things.
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
till the storms of destruction pass by.
I cry out to God Most High,
to God who fulfills his purpose for me. (Psalms 57:1-2)
