How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

David wrote Psalm 13 above in the midst of a spiritually dry time. When God seems far away or against us, we tend to try harder with our spiritual disciplines in order to climb our way out of the pit. But God often sends the pit not so that we try harder but as a way to increase our hunger for him. It takes a desert to really appreciate an oasis. It takes thirst to love a drink of water.

We tend to think that a dry time in our faith means that we have failed in some area of our walk. But these times are actually given to build character. Many times they have nothing to do with consequences for disobedience.

Below is an outline of what we can learn from David’s prayer in the midst of the spiritual desert.
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Yesterday I talked about how Ephesians 5 says that thankfulness will keep you from coveting immoral sexual pleasure thus saving yourself from being denied entrance to the Kingdom of God.

But I also pointed out that there are many times where I cannot come up with anything powerful to be thankful for when the temptation to lust is strong.

Today I want to help us work toward an understanding of what we have in Christ that will equip us to be thankful.

If you look at the first three chapters of Ephesians you’ll see that Paul is actually building a very strong case for what we can be thankful for. In the first chapter alone I count at least 20 things God has done for us that we can be thankful for.

In this post I want to focus on three of those:
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I know… It’s a little after the fact to do a post on giving thanks when Thanksgiving was a few weeks ago. But just like a student often forgets everything they learn after the exam, we also tend to say, “I gave thanks already this year. What’s next?”

So here is my post-thanksgiving plea to be thankful all year. And I get my inspiration for it from this passage about sex:

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