He is calling His children to leave the worthless, broken cisterns they have built that hold no water in the dry and thirsty lands of rebellion. He is calling them to turn back to Him to be fed from His table, to drink from Him, to fast from the world and feast on Him. 

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul?
And why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him
For the help of His countenance.
6 O my God, my soul is cast down within me;
Therefore I will remember You from the land of the Jordan,
And from the heights of Hermon,
From the Hill Mizar. Psalms 42:5-6 (NKJV) 

It is a good thing that we realize that our Soul is cast down, that our spiritual fulfillment is just a shadow of what it once was not that long ago when we walked close with our Lord. Some of you reading this are in the valley. God has impressed upon your heart a dissatisfaction with or given you a sense of shallowness within your Christian walk. Your walk has taken on a veneer of superficiality. Where once there was an intense joy born from a close intimate walk with our Lord, there is now some sort of barrier fixed between Him and you. You feel like you need to pray more, worship more, surrender more to His Lordship. There must be something that can be done to attain that tender intimacy again! However, there is also a fear that too much water has gone under the bridge. Too much rebellion or anarchy within your heart is being used by our enemy to accuse you of being unworthy of even being called a child of God. Since you have not been walking closely with our Lord, you have taken up the reins of your life thereby losing the Joy of Lord because of an eroding of the level of abiding in our Lord that you once had. This also seems to enhance your ability to hear the sneering accusations of our enemy. You have a deep desire to get back to the sweetness and warmth you once had with our Lord as He gave you His Joy freely as you were able to abide in Him because you were Spirit-led. Now, you are self-focused and that means that a mist of spiritual blindness has descended over your spiritual eyes. Your reasoning is bound to your flesh whereas when you were Spirit-led you saw the Lord’s truth clearly and could easily see the depth of spiritual blindness in many of the professing Christians all around you.

If this describes you or someone you know then take heart. It is a good thing that God has caused our Souls to be cast down. Why? He is using our sense of unease or guilt or despair to draw us to Him. He is preparing us to deeply drink and feast on Him by giving us a hunger for Him that is deeper than we can comprehend. Waiting at the end of this path of Soul heaviness is the throne of grace where we confess and repent in brokenness to a depth that we could only reach by His grace. As we reach the end of ourselves, the Lord then will reach out His arms to draw us to Him. When He does this we will find a deep hunger or thirst for Him that is analogous to someone who has become dehydrated in a desert because they have neglected to drink water. Our neglect of our walk before the Lord has caused us to become spiritually parched. The Lord, in His perfect timing, will then cause us to see our foolishness.

1 As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So pants my soul for You, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God? Psalms 42:1-2 (NKJV)

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