We will see David in a time of discouragement, or, as we might call it, depression.
As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So my soul pants for Thee, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”These things I remember, and I pour out my soul within me.
For I used to go along with the throng
And lead them in procession to the house of God,
With a voice of joy and thanksgiving,
A multitude keeping festival.Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.O my God, my soul is in despair within me;
Therefore I remember Thee from the land of the Jordan
And the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the sound of Thy waterfalls;
All Thy breakers and Thy waves have rolled over me.The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime,
And His song will be with me in the night,
A prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to God my rock, “Why hast Thou forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him,
The help of my countenance and my God.
You know that David, and perhaps some other songwriters, pour out their hearts in many of these different psalms that we have. In bearing their souls, they describe the circumstances in which they find themselves, where it seems hopeless. They are filled with despair; they are cast down.
Here is David confessing that he is cast down. He is confessing there in Psalm 42:5 and Psalm 42:11 that his countenance has fallen—that the depression and despair of his life can be seen on his face. He no longer has the joy of the Lord.
He has lost his appetite, and instead he is eating tears. He is weeping night and day and cannot seem to stop crying. His enemy is not backing away; the enemy is closing in, saying, “Where is your God? Where is your God?”
It says in Psalm 42:4 that his soul is poured out within him. He just keeps pouring out his soul within him. “What is wrong? Why are you passing through this?”
This phenomenon that I am calling depression—spiritual depression, we might say—is known in the lives of a number of the saints. Paul himself experienced it. Turn to 2 Corinthians 1 for just a moment. This is one of several autobiographical references in Paul that gives us the intimation that Paul went through severe times of mental anguish.
In 2 Corinthians 1:8-9, Paul, talking about the great God who comforts and his own experience of God’s comfort, says:
We do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.
Indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.
As you read other passages in 2 Corinthians, you find that Paul was weighed down in many ways: with the care of the churches, with the care of souls, and with the persecution he was facing. Paul was a man who, like all men, was susceptible to depression.
Now, when I talk about depression today and tomorrow, we will not be talking about the specific psychological problem of manic depression, although certainly many of the things we will say will apply to that. We are not trying to hold a course in psychology for people who have that very specific problem.
Rather, we are going to talk about the depression that seems to attack every Christian at one time or another. There is really nobody I have ever met who is immune to depression. There is a certain category of person, which we will look at in a moment, that tends to fall under this problem more frequently; but actually, everybody who goes through life becomes depressed at times.
So I want to make this as general as possible and take some passages of Scripture to show what some of the problems are that lead us to depression.
I have asked our brother Johannes also to share in this time. If I get through by the end of this hour today and there is enough time, our brother is going to come up and share some specific things regarding how we can overcome depression. Or, if we are not through—if I just barely get through, and Johannes does not have enough time—you will have to be depressed overnight, and then tomorrow Johannes will share some of the ways of overcoming. But, of course, it is all in Christ.
We are taking this matter of depression from the perspective that there is an enemy behind the scenes who takes the circumstances of our lives and the trauma of our lives and twists them in such a way as to use our inner struggle against us.
It says in 1 Peter 5:8 that there is this lion adversary prowling about, seeking ways to devour us. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we should not be ignorant of his schemes. Not only does the enemy attack us from without, but he attacks us probably more frequently from within.
Oftentimes, we find ourselves ignorant of his devices and schemes, especially as younger Christians. Only as we go through battle after battle do we become suspicious. We are dealing with a force behind the scenes that is engineering things and trying to bring us into a permanent and debilitating state of depression.
There is a wonderful passage that is remedial even in its reading, in John 14, regarding the invulnerability of Jesus through these enemy attacks.
In the midst of John 14, as He is talking to His disciples and is about to leave them, He says in John 14:30:
I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.
I have felt that this passage means that although the enemy comes with all sorts of temptations and pressures upon Jesus, the enemy cannot find any hook. There is nothing in Jesus that responds to the temptations of the enemy, even though He certainly was pressurized more fully than you or I have ever experienced.
We must always keep this in mind: Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, and with greater pressure. But He never had the loopholes in His life, or the hooks in His life, that enabled the enemy to jump on Him, take advantage of Him, and gain some measure of ground in His life.
No matter what the enemy came to say—“All Your disciples are no good. All of them are leaving You. God is going to turn away from You. This is all in vain.”—there was nothing that the enemy could latch onto. Jesus, though tested as we are, never sinned.
Using that as the example of the Overcomer, I want to make this statement as simply and uncomplicatedly as possible. I am going to list some of these hooks in our lives that the enemy can latch onto and drag us down into depression.
I have categorized three areas of vulnerability:
I want to take these three areas, explain them, and give examples that we find in Scripture and that are common to our experience.
You and I are saved with a salvation that has within its very meaning the idea of health and healing. The Greek word sozo carries this idea. Even our word holy comes from an ancient word meaning health and soundness. There is, in a sense, a built-in health and soundness in our salvation.
As we appropriate our full salvation in Christ, we find a health taking over in our lives, sometimes despite ourselves. Sometimes, without even realizing it, the Spirit of God and the precious Word of God are cleansing us day and night, consciously and unconsciously transforming us, transforming our minds, and renewing the spirit of our minds.
It is a wonderful, deep, mysterious work that God does in our lives. But the enemy would try to take advantage of areas in our lives that we are perhaps not even aware of. Nevertheless, they are areas of vulnerability.
By the weak areas of our lives, I simply mean that everybody has certain weaknesses. The enemy, our adversary, is no gentleman. He does not say, “Well, I will not take advantage of your weaknesses.” Quite the contrary: as soon as he sniffs out a weakness, he zeroes in like one of those heat-seeking missiles to pinpoint you and bring you down into depression.
For some people, their physical well-being is a weakness. Their bodies are physically weak. Some people are infirm and ill; some people have physical problems.
Probably everybody here has had some experience of how the enemy has attacked during a time of illness in life and shot in darts: “God has left you alone. God does not love you anymore. The people around you do not understand you anymore.”
Many people come into a real time of depression because of physical illness in their lives. We need to be aware of that. If you have a wife who becomes sick, I can understand why a husband would lose patience, but we have to be really understanding and see that there is a struggle going on within the lives of people who are ill, sick, or disabled.
The enemy is always attacking and saying, “See, you are no good. Where is your God?” That is what the enemies would always say to David as he ran in the wilderness from place to place.
Not only does physical illness lead to depression, but sometimes pure physical exhaustion does. You do not have to be ill; all you have to do is be completely drained.
You cannot find the grace to be patient, the grace to serve the Lord and your fellow man, or even the grace to be a human being. It gets pretty hard when we are physically exhausted. Of course, we never pay enough attention to this.
Take the story of Elijah. Elijah was a pretty depressed man, hiding up on the mount of God. One of his major problems was physical exhaustion. God, knowing that, did not beat on his brow. All God did was say, “Okay, Elijah, send him some food.”
Elijah wakes up and says, “Oh, God, kill me, kill me.” God says, “Here, eat, eat.” Elijah falls asleep, gets up, and complains again. God says, “Here.” God did not even try to get him on the couch and work out his problem at that time. He just let him sleep and let him eat.
Some people, after two days of rest—just getting away from it—come back completely changed. The depression lifts off their lives. This is something we should be aware of. Somehow, we always get to the last thread of strength in our lives before we realize that we have physically done ourselves in.
We cannot be foolish in this way. The enemy certainly will take advantage.
A second area of weakness is when we have, in our Christian lives, a partial commitment to the Lord. The enemy always likes to zero in on somebody who has only a sort of half commitment.
Romans 6:17 gives us a picture of a wholehearted, total decision:
But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed; and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.
There is a picture of total commitment, because Paul says, “You became obedient from the heart.” This heart is a very mysterious part of our anatomy, especially our spiritual anatomy. I am never quite sure what it means, but it means this deep part of our lives that is a conjunction of our mind, our will, and our emotions.
When we believe in our heart, it is not mental assent alone. It is not merely our will involved in that thing. It has our emotions in there. You are one hundred percent jumping in.
When people make a one hundred percent jumping-in commitment, their lives are changed. They become slaves of righteousness—one hundred percent, kamikaze Christians, serving God. The enemy cannot do too much with somebody like that.
More often than not, though, we find people who have made an emotional commitment but do not have the understanding of the gospel to back up the emotions. Can you imagine what the enemy can do with that? He takes away the emotions, and the person does not think he is saved anymore.
They do not have an understanding or grasp of the gospel to realize that they are still in Christ whether they feel that way or not. Christians can be up today and totally depressed tomorrow, unsure of their salvation, because they do not have the doctrinal content to understand the commitment they have made.
Some people have made a commitment to God while sort of pressurized into it. It may still be a legitimate Christian commitment, but their minds are still hung up in controversy.
There are some people who cannot live unless they fight somebody. When they come to God, they come with certain qualifications: “I still do not understand this Scripture. I do not understand why God is so mean and disciplines His kids. I do not know about this; I do not know about that.”
They are always in controversy, in a mental tug-of-war with God and with the Bible. The enemy uses this all the time to throw such a person into doubt and confusion and to paralyze them, because they have not submitted their minds. Their minds are still, in a sense, their god.
Like many of us who have been to college for about one year, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Many times our minds have to be dethroned and submitted to the Word of God before the enemy no longer has this hook in our lives, where he throws up one question and we are into a month of death.
We must come to the place where we submit and say, “God is true, though every man be a liar. I still believe God is true.”
There are also people whose wills are not fully engaged in commitment to the Lord. They are Christians, but their wills are always tottering and they never decide. They are always on the fence.
The enemy is always beating them up: “See, you are not really a Christian.” What happens to the person with this partial commitment—emotions without the head, the head always fighting God, or the will only semi-active? They become depressed because they always feel as though they are on the outside.
Everybody else is enjoying their Christianity and praising God, but they only lift one hand, and that is only because the person on their right is watching. Everybody is praying, and they are thinking about the grocery list. They always feel condemned: “I am on the outside.”
If they would take the total plunge and stop falling back into this kind of weakness, the enemy could not get them on this point.
A third area of weakness is a lack of foundational teaching regarding justification and acceptance before God, which is, of course, the result of our justification.
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
I am amazed at how many Christians have this weakness. They do not really understand the tremendous power of the gospel in their justification. As a result, they are always haunted and become targets of that one sin in their life that they just cannot seem to be forgiven of.
They take a lap around the wilderness, come back and talk to a counselor, and say, “I just have done this sin. Maybe it was a sin done ten years ago. I just cannot get forgiveness of it.” So they pray, take a lap around the wilderness, and come back again—all condemned, all depressed. “What is your problem?” “The same sin.”
They have never grasped objectively, and in the end by revelation, that when they came to the Lord Jesus Christ and laid down their old sinful life, He took their sins away as far as the east is from the west. It is no more. They are justified by Christ.
The old unpardonable-sin problem comes up in people’s lives, or at least that one besetting sin, as it is often called, plagues a Christian. All the enemy has to do is poke at that little sin that was done ten years ago, and they are immediately depressed.
It is an understanding of how the power of the gospel through Jesus’ death on the cross has freed us from sin that enables us to go on.
Remember what Paul said in 1 Timothy 1. If there was anybody who had an excuse to have that one sin in his life that could never be forgiven, it would have been Paul.
I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy, because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus.
Praise God. Paul was a wretched sinner, yet he goes on to say that for this reason he found mercy, so that in him, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. He calls himself the chief of sinners in 1 Timothy 1:15, and yet he knows he is accepted.
When the enemy comes and says, “Ah, but you persecuted Christians. You were a blasphemer against the Lord Jesus,” Paul can say, “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses me from all sin. That is part of the past. It is dead and gone, buried in the sea, and I will pick it out no more.”
If Christians understood this gospel, it would free them from a lot of painful reinfection of old, dead bones.
When I was a young Christian, there was a minister who helped me out because I had those sins in my life that could not be forgiven. I would always go for counseling. I went up one time after a meeting for counseling, and this brother listened to me and prayed with me.
Two nights later, I was back again for the same problem. He said, “You know what you are doing, Dan?” I said, “What is that?” He said, “You have buried your old life, and your bones are rotting in the ground. Every other night, you pick them out and look at them again, and they get stinkier every time.”
He said, “Why do you not just leave them in the ground, bury them, and go on?” That is all I needed to hear. I buried that thing. I said, “Well, Jesus buried it, and I am going to bury it, and I am going on.”
Going right along with this are not necessarily the unpardonable sins, but the vain regrets of a life that was wasted: years that were wasted, a marriage that was wasted, children who grew up without the influence of the gospel.
People spend all their time beating themselves because they lived a life of vanity before they knew the Lord. Sometimes they become paralyzed from serving God now.
Do you know what Paul said to that in his own life? Though he saw a lot of vanity and nothing in his past life, he said, “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” Because of that vanity in his past, he labored all the harder now. He was, in a sense, making up for lost time—but it was not really him; it was the grace of God in him.
Paul took his vain regrets and said, “I just wish it could have been different. I wish I had never assented to Stephen’s stoning. I wish I had not been part of all of this. But what can I do now? All I can do is stand up and serve God as best I can now.”
Put those things aside and believe that the blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you, even from the years the locusts have eaten. Somehow God is so powerful, He can restore things that have been lost over the years. This is a real understanding of the gospel.
A further weakness under this lack of foundation in justification and acceptance is common among Christians who were brought up in religious homes. There can be a lingering hangover in their lives where they feel so totally unworthy that they cannot move forward and serve the Lord.
They have been brought up with an understanding of sanctification in which, subtly, they place sanctification before justification. They feel as though they have to live a holy life before God will accept them.
Even though they can talk the talk of the gospel, they still feel continual condemnation, guilt, and unworthiness upon them. It is a heavy weight, and it is a weakness in their lives. The enemy just hits them any time he wants: “You are unworthy. You are not holy enough. God will not accept you.”
Then they hear the gospel: God has accepted them just the way they are. They all praise God, but by the next day they are back into sanctification before justification.
Folks, you know the truth of the gospel: justification is first, then sanctification. First, you are accepted by the Lord Jesus Christ because of the finished work. Then you are sanctified and enter into a process of sanctification. We are talking about the process.
Many religious people have this cloud hanging over their heads. It paralyzes them from serving God. “I am just so unworthy,” because they have been led to feel unworthy all their lives. Now, none of us is worthy, but some folks make such an issue out of it that it becomes a lifelong stagnation.
They huddle in the pools of unworthiness rather than realizing the power of the gospel—that they are accepted. Do you know that you are accepted just the way you are? Do you sense that acceptance of God and that love of God?
Paul said, “I am accepted. I felt the love of God. I felt His mercy. I am moving out, serving God.” Do you know His acceptance and His love for you? Unless you do, the enemy can hit you with this lack of foundational understanding of justification.
Another major weakness is a lack of faith in God’s love during times of trial. Whenever some people have a trial or a rough circumstance, they begin to back up.
Part of the problem is that they do not realize or have not discerned why they have the problem. It is amazing how long people will put up with a problem without asking God why they have it. Inside, I think we believe we deserve any problem we get.
Because we cannot discern what the problem is, we feel it must mean that God does not love us. But what is this trial? Is it an attack from the enemy? If it is, I should resist. Is it persecution from the world? Then I should rejoice. Or is it discipline from God? Then I should submit.
Often we are not sure what it is. “Is it persecution? Well, I am not worthy enough to be persecuted. Is it the enemy attacking? Maybe it is, but maybe it is God disciplining me. Well, I do not know.”
Christians go around with a cloud over their heads because they do not know: “Is this discipline from God? Is this the enemy attacking?” For everybody, it is, “I do not know.” So they live in a dull state rather than asking God what it is.
Of course, there is a fourth category that we invent. It can be an enemy attack, discipline from God, or persecution from the world, but we invent the fourth area: “Usually, this is some other Christian purposely doing this to me.” The old paranoid complex gets in there.
“This is just my husband’s way of being mean.” Thus we take it out of all the realms where we can get hold of it and do something with it. Because of confusion about where this thing is coming from, we do not resolve it, and it puts us into depression.
When you have a trial and you do not know what to do with it or where it has come from, you just get depressed. We should seek Him and find out what it is.
The last point regarding weakness is that one of the great weaknesses among Christians, which the enemy uses for attack, is a total absence of discipline.
If you are one of these people who is just saved by the grace of God and is not doing anything about it, wholly lacking personal discipline in your life, I want to say to you: you are an open target for the enemy. He can get you because of this lack of discipline any way he wants. He just chooses which button to push, and you go down the chute.
In 2 Peter 1:5-7, Peter makes statements that lead us to understand that basic self-discipline and the discipline of God need to come into our Christian lives:
Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge; and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness; and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love.
There is a good list of impossible things to do except by the grace of God. But add diligence to your Christian life.
When we lack discipline, we procrastinate and do nothing. When problems come, we stick our heads in the sand and say, “I know if I am an ostrich Christian, this is going to go away.” We stand up, and it is worse. It does not go away.
Maybe we think, “If I wait until tomorrow, it will go away.” I often have this technique with papers on my desk or bills: “This will fly away by a breeze from the window, and I will not have to handle the situation.”
We handle our spiritual lives with a lack of discipline. I sometimes talk to a Christian who is so depressed that they feel God is nowhere in their lives. They cannot feel Him, know Him, anything. I say, “Well, have you prayed?” It has been weeks since they prayed.
They go off and spend one hour in prayer, and they come back like the freshest flower ever picked off the hillside. But they have developed such a backlog of prayer through a lack of discipline in fellowship with God. No wonder they feel that way.
Some people believe that you receive the truth of God through spiritual osmosis. You just sit there, go, “Hmm,” and the Bible is going to seep into your brain. They have no fellowship with the Bible, not understanding that through the Bible and through the ministry of the Word, we receive the truth of God.
We become weak, confused, and lose the light of the Word of God on our Christian lives. Sometimes the greatest remedy for somebody in a state of depression is to open up the Bible.
How many times has this been true in your own life? When your life is all out of focus and all out of sorts, one day in desperation you spend an hour or two, or even half an hour, and you just break open your Bible. Immediately, light comes into your life.
Because of our lack of discipline, sometimes the panic button has to be blinking red before we even consider these things. They should be a basic part of our Christian lives.
It is not just a matter of prayer backlogs or Word backlogs. We get ourselves into trouble and into emotional heaviness when there are too many unresolved issues in our lives.
What should we do about our child who is spitting juice all over his sister at supper time every night? “We will talk about that tomorrow.” What are we going to do about this situation? Are you going to take the job, or keep your job? “We will talk about that next week.”
There are ten issues in your life unresolved, including, “The pressure on my life right now—is it from God? Is it from the enemy?” “Well, let us not talk about that right now. Watch television.”
You turn on the television for another twelve hours of television stupor, only to wake up and find that the issues are still unresolved and you are in depression.
If you have not noticed the salutary effect of turning off the television, going to your room, making three decisions, making those terrible phone calls that turn out not to be so terrible, and doing the nine things you are supposed to do, then notice that suddenly you feel good.
By your own lack of discipline, the devil stands on you and says, “You are getting sleepy. Do not do anything. Sit still and be passive.” You say, “This must be the easy way, right?” He hypnotizes us to a point of depression.
The second area is how the enemy would jump on areas that are out of control in our lives. The enemy notices these things; so does everybody else. They are often a source of depression.
For Christians who love the Lord, perhaps the one thing that gets out of control most is self-examination and introspection. Christians, in a time of trial, are notorious for beating themselves up first and excusing the devil.
This is why depression more often than not attacks people with a melancholy temperament—an introspective, inward-looking temperament.
There are four classic types of temperament, and there is this one type called the melancholy temperament. That is the person who is inward, a little shy, and examines everything they do. They are so careful about everything they do that they are prone to depression.
Whatever your temperament is—whether outgoing and gregarious, strong in temperament, melancholy and artistic and inward-thinking, or just old sloppy phlegmatic—whatever your temperament is, it is your temperament from God. The point is that we need to have our temperaments controlled by the Holy Spirit.
This melancholy temperament is the most common temperament of great men of God. This is Jeremiah. This is Elijah. This is Paul. They were deep thinkers, introspective, examining themselves.
Of course, Paul learned the lesson that you cannot spend all your time examining yourself. There is a difference between self-examination, which the Bible tells us to do, and introspection.
Self-examination takes an objective look at yourself under the light of God to determine where you stand. “Let a man examine himself,” the Bible says. Introspection is when you make a career out of it.
For many people, introspection totally runs away with them. This is always coupled with a runaway conscience, or an oversensitive conscience. Thank God we have consciences. If you realize you have not prayed in three weeks and your conscience is pricked right now, that is because God is convicting you.
But some people have oversensitive consciences that paralyze them from being normal. There is a degree of normalcy in which God does not spend every moment of your waking hour pointing out things you are doing wrong. But we spend all our time doing that to ourselves.
We examine all the things we did yesterday, and that is all we need to paralyze us from doing anything today. Then, in a meeting, it is time to break bread and we have an open time of worship. You think, “Oh, I want to worship God. I read that psalm last night. The glory of the Lord is going through my head. I think I will say it.”
Then you say, “It must be me. Well, let us see, is it me? Is it God? I am not sure. Anyway, I was mean to my wife coming to the meeting, so this disqualifies me. Last time I shared, it was out of order.”
You talk yourself out of a simple act of obedience through this hamster-cage wheel of introspection, where you are running around all the time, pawing and considering your insides, and going nowhere. This is runaway temperament.
Unless you grab hold of that and say, “By the grace of God, I am what I am. If God has me examine myself under the light of the Holy Spirit, I will respond; but I will not always walk around feeling guilty. I will not always walk around feeling condemned, because I know that is not the will of God for me,” the enemy will paralyze you.
When you are paralyzed, you see everybody who is not paralyzed, and it condemns you. Then you are depressed. “How come a brand-new Christian sings a song in the assembly, and I have operatic training, but I cannot say, ‘Could we sing number 102?’” There is something there that we have to break through.
Another area that gets out of control is when our feelings get out of control. We are to have a balance in our lives of objectivity and subjectivity. We are to have feelings; thank God we do have feelings. Sometimes, however, they get out of control.
A trauma in our lives may release some feeling that we no longer can handle. It may be a change of job, children growing up, or a death in the family. These are highlighted examples of things that happen many times to us in lesser ways.
Sometimes we suddenly find our anger popping up all the time. “What has happened? I am losing control of my anger.” The more we think about it, the more we lose control, and then we just run away from it.
Everybody here has mood swings. Sometimes you are up, and sometimes you are down. Everybody has feelings, but are we controlled by our feelings? That is the whole point.
If we are controlled by our feelings, here again is an area where the enemy will get us. Some people have great mood swings—very happy and then very depressed. That person is going to have to learn, under obedience to the Holy Spirit, how to walk a steady walk regardless of how they feel.
Other people have a more normal range of ups and downs. They also have to know themselves. Through Christ, we come to understand ourselves. We see why we swing up and down; we see physical reasons in our lives why we go up and down.
Hopefully, your spouse does too, if you are married. Sometimes, after you have been married long enough, he takes off on the warpath, and you say, “Well, there he goes. He does it every time he gets his paycheck. I know what is going to happen.”
The more we understand, the less we have to live under the tyranny of our feelings. Sometimes they run away from us and have to be reined back in. There is this fruit of the Spirit called self-control. It is our possession in the Holy Spirit.
Although at times we may have an outburst of anger or something that pops out of us, basically we should have our feelings in control and not running away.
An area that goes right along with this is when our desires get out of control. If we took a poll of what depresses people the most, even among Christians, one of the big ones would be eating.
People are down in the dumps and depressed all the time, and half of it is because they feel lousy about themselves. They know they are overweight, they are trying to stop, but they have been dieting for six years and are gaining three pounds a year on average.
I am not exactly sure what to tell you about this whole matter of dieting and self-discipline, but in our bountiful society this is a major problem. There may be demonic influences of gluttony and all sorts of things around to give us a heyday in this matter, but still, it comes down to a basic matter of control.
When our desires run out of control, all the enemy has to say is, “Turn sideways and look in the mirror,” and you are gone. That is it. You are depressed.
Perhaps you take the whole thing too seriously. If you are not going to do anything about losing weight right now, why are you going to be all convicted, depressed, and condemned about it?
This is such a problem that I do not even know whether the enemy has to poke anything. He just lets you poke yourself. Yet such depression comes on God’s people, and it just is not right.
God wants to get us in control and teach us the lessons of self-control in our lives. But at the same time, we can put such relentless pressure on ourselves.
I know people who go to a place where they are supposed to have a feast. They go to a wedding and pick only shrimp out of a beautiful buffet table. Then they go home and eat half a gallon of ice cream. They wanted to look good at the wedding, like they were just picking out shrimp. It is a pathetic thing to do.
They live under this tyranny day and night: “Eating, eating, eating. I feel so bad. I am so big. My desires are out of control.” There is something God wants to do. One thing He surely wants to do is cut off the influence of the enemy, who constantly comes and says, “You see, you are a total loser.”
There are other runaway desires. Somebody gets the thought in their head, “I am unloved. I need to be loved. I am so frustrated in my life. I am just so tired of it. I have to be loved.” They let it run away, run away. The more they think about it, the bigger it gets.
Now their parents not only do not love them; they hate them. Their friends do not care about them because they did not call back one night when their phone broke down. “No, nobody loves me.” The whole thing is blown out of proportion.
This whole thing—“I have to be loved”—runs away with people. The enemy just shoots them down and lets them go across the screen. Now there they are, all depressed.
When somebody is in this kind of thing, they have their vacuum cleaner on full power, sucking in somebody to love them and never becoming satisfied. Trying to drink in love is enough to be sad. It is just like the woman at the well: just go hungry and thirsty.
Emotions and desires can run away. Runaway desires are really lusts; that is what the Bible calls them. They run away and cause condemnation and depression in the Christian’s life, because the person has such an impossible definition of love that they could never be fulfilled by the best husband, wife, or whatever.
They cannot be satisfied even with God’s provision for them now, which, by the way, everybody has. Rather, they run looking for something that cannot be found.
Another thing that runs away is fear. Fear is an emotion that begins to run away with people. You lose the reins, and the next thing you know people are afraid and falling back and back and back into a fear that is totally crippling and paralyzing.
Think of the poor disciples in the boat. Jesus was asleep, the storm came up, and the next thing you know they were pushing the panic button: “We are going to perish, Lord! Do You not care? We are going to perish!”
Jesus rebuked their lack of faith and stilled the water. So many times in our lives, we are pushing panic buttons of fear—things that are going to happen that never happen, bad dreams that we are extrapolating on the board of our disastrous lives that never come about.
The enemy jumps all over somebody who is fearful and makes them fearful of the night, fearful of flying, fearful of driving, and fearful of staying home, until they are so totally bound that fear itself seems to possess them.
The gospel says that we have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the Spirit of adoption. Paul had to say to Timothy, who had perhaps become fearful in light of Paul’s imprisonment and the rough times in Ephesus, “Do not get bound up by that spirit of fear. You have the power of love and good discipline in your life. Stir up that gift and serve the Lord.”
One other thing that can run away is more subtle: when the momentum of our lives is beyond the grace that we have. It brings us onto a collision course.
I think of those old movies with Laurel and Hardy, where Laurel is driving the car downhill. He steps on the brakes, and the brakes fall through the floorboard. He pulls up on the steering wheel, and the steering wheel comes off. Then the tires fall off one by one. It is a collision course.
We can get a momentum in our lives that is going so fast and so far beyond our vision. The Scriptures say that without a vision the people become unrestrained. Life just runs away: “I am doing so much, and I am getting nowhere. I am on a collision course. I cannot stop.”
You become depressed when you realize you are in a momentum that you cannot stop without great cost. It seems like you cannot jump off, yet you know you are going nowhere and it is futile.
Sometimes in fellowship life, we get into such a momentum of good works and different things that it is way beyond the life we are capable of. The next thing we find is that we are all drowned. We wanted to be instant super saints, proceeded on that course, and now we are depressed.
In 1 Timothy 3, Paul admonishes Timothy not to appoint a novice, a young Christian, lest he become puffed up and fall into the condemnation of the devil. This can mean one of two things.
Either the man becomes proud of his position and incurs the same condemnation that the devil incurred by his pride and fall, or he becomes puffed up because of his position and later, when he crashes, he falls into a sense of self-condemnation. It is hard ever to bring him out.
Whichever interpretation you hold, the condemnation of the devil can result from pushing forward beyond what we are capable of handling. It can lead us into such a crash.
Have you ever seen people who finally crashed on some momentum like that? It took them a year, two years, or three years before they could stand up again and begin to follow the Lord and serve. It is a tragedy. During those years, there can be years of depression, loss, regret, and perhaps bitterness.
The third area where the enemy can bring us into depression is uncovered areas of our lives.
First, we are a target for the enemy if there is sin in our lives, the Spirit has convicted us of that sin, and yet we have not dealt with it. It becomes an uncovered area in our lives, and surely we are going to be depressed.
We lose our sense of relationship with the Lord, our sense of the joy of the Lord, and the joy of our salvation when there is sin in our lives that is undealt with. As simple as this truth is, it is a great problem for Christians.
If the light of God shines on sinfulness in our lives, we need to turn from it and deal with it in order to continue to walk with God. Otherwise, we begin to feel the depression and discouragement of a life that is not moving forward with the Lord.
A second uncovered area is unforgiveness. When we allow unforgiveness to build up in our lives, it cuts us off from the sense of free-flowing relationship with our Lord and with our brothers and sisters. Again, we can fall into depression.
Even this happens when saints are serving the Lord. They begin to resent one another and the way they do things. They build up a backlog of things—not necessarily things that someone did wrong, but things that they do not like about the way someone does something.
It can build up a wall between people and cause you to be depressed. Here you are living, ministering, and fellowshipping with somebody whose way of doing things you do not like. The air is never cleared. There is never a real sitting down. The thing just builds up.
A sense of unforgiveness begins to set in, and how the enemy uses that to divide the body of Christ—not just to cause personal depression.
A third area in which we become uncovered and open to depression is independence from body life. We may be serving the Lord and running around a hundred miles an hour, but we are not knit together with the body.
If the enemy can cut off the saints at the pass and isolate them, then he can attack them and attack them. They have no help in the body. They have nobody to stir them up, nobody to encourage them, nobody to help them through.
They become isolated and alone, targets of the enemy. Within a very short time, they can become disillusioned, discouraged, unbelieving, and critical. Somebody serving God just last month, now cut off and isolated from the body, becomes critical and judges everything as wrong.
Amazing how the enemy can do this. In the end, depression sets in.
When we are serving God and out in the open, we are not immune from attacks. Even while serving the Lord in fellowship, in ministry, or teaching children, we can be brought into depression.
Galatians 6:9 says, “Do not grow weary in doing good.” Yet the saints become weary when it seems that we are getting nowhere and we are continually serving, serving, serving, and all there are are problems, problems, problems.
They begin to give up and become depressed. Sometimes in our Christian lives, we feel as though we are going nowhere. We become depressed and weary. We want to quit, think about giving in, or resign ourselves to some sort of halfhearted service, which can never be right.
Elijah must have grown weary in well-doing, feeling that he was all alone and that nobody was left. “What good is it to serve anymore?” Depressed and alone, he wanted God just to take his life. We can fall into the same sort of problem.
Another subtle danger in serving is impatience and lack of contentment. Philippians 4 gives us the positive side.
But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned before, but you lacked opportunity.
Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.
I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.
I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.
Sometimes we are serving the Lord together and busy in fellowship, but we become impatient. We start to push. We lack contentment.
This does not mean that we are not to hunger to see something more happen among God’s people. But when we start to push and become impatient, perhaps our own desire to see great numbers causes us to despise the small things that are going on in our midst. That leaves us open to deep depression.
Some of the people who follow the greatest times of darkness and depression are God’s servants. They become so depressed by reversals of outward circumstances because they are ambitious, lack contentment, and do not know how to move with the times and seasons.
Paul is saying more than that he knows how to live with a lot of money and get along on scraps. He knows how to live in spiritual times of great harvest as well as spiritual times of leanness, and still be content in the faithfulness of the Lord.
The last thing I want to say about serving the Lord, where we can find ourselves falling into depression, is when we are serving Him and things go wrong. Hebrews 12 speaks about the Lord’s discipline in our lives.
The writer of Hebrews says that there are three wrong attitudes we can have toward discipline, chastening, or problems that are happening in our fellowship, in our service, or in our personal Christian lives.
Hebrews 12:5 says:
My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
Nor faint when you are reproved by Him.
The first wrong attitude is to regard lightly, or despise, the discipline of the Lord. When problems come up, we do not take them seriously. We just overlook them, try to run over them, regard them as small or unnecessary things, and begin to despise rather than seek the Lord concerning what the problem is.
The second wrong attitude is to faint when we are reproved. Some people know they can get their way if they simply faint. They stop breathing, get a little woozy, and fall down. When problems come while we are serving God, rather than face discipline, we faint and pretend we are too weak to be disciplined.
Of course, God knows that our fainting spells are fake, but many times we do not. We are always fainting.
Hebrews 12:15 says:
See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.
In a time of trouble in our Christian lives, rather than taking the grace of God to get through the thing, a root of bitterness begins to form in our lives. We become bitter at God, at God’s people, and at the work of God. Then we become depressed.
Bitterness, like a root, can get around and choke out the very life that we have.
Now I want to go back to Psalm 42 and state a few simple things about how to get out, so nobody will be overly depressed. Johannes can come tomorrow and give further practical insight into this matter.
To overcome spiritual depression, I want to say five things from this psalm and from the Scriptures. Once we have boxed ourselves in through a weakness, a runaway emotion or desire, or an uncovered area in our lives, the enemy grabs hold of us and brings us down.
Sometimes, beyond all of that, there is the mystery of sudden depression that hits us as if from nowhere. It seems unprovoked. There is no uncovering that we know of, no sin in our lives, and it is not exactly a dealing of God. Suddenly depression falls upon us.
Sometimes it falls at the same time on all God’s people in a particular local place. This is no accident. This is demonic activity against the progress of God’s kingdom and His will.
When we are depressed, the first thing we have to do is want to get out. Believe it or not, sometimes the hardest thing for a person who is depressed to do is to want to get out.
There is something very strange about the dark side of depression. On the one hand, it is terrible, and we see its destructive work in our lives. On the other hand, there is something sweet about it—something we like to hold onto.
It has manipulative power. It has leverage in our lives. There is a whole dark side to this thing that we sometimes do not immediately throw away. We like to look at it for a little while. We love self-pity in there: “Wow, I like that.”
Until we throw down this thing and say, “I do not want this. I refuse it,” we will not get very far. This is what Paul calls in Timothy the fight of faith: “Fight the good fight, keeping faith and a good conscience.”
You can help a depressed person with all kinds of ointments and salves, but until they want to really be restored, there is not much that can be done. You need to want to get out.
The second thing is to believe in the power of God that gets you out. It is not your power to get out. Groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as good as they are, can fall short when they lead you to believe that it is your power that can get you out. But to believe that God can get you out is what David calls hope.
David says in Psalm 42:5:
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.
David firmly believes that as he looks for God’s countenance, somehow it will lift his countenance. It is hope. It is the beginning point. Again, in Psalm 42:11, he says, “Hope in God.” With true belief, he casts his eyes on the Lord for deliverance and health.
Thirdly, as David does here, you have to talk to yourself. You have to get hold of yourself. You have to get hold of your runaway desires, your runaway thoughts, and whatever lie is lurking down inside.
How do you do that? You talk to yourself. You might say, “Well, that is kind of stupid. I thought you told me not to examine myself or be introspective. Is talking to yourself not being introspective?” No. Let me explain.
Most of the time, we let ourselves talk to us. I am talking about you talking to yourself by the power of the Word of God.
Notice how David is doing this. Finally, after a state of depression, he is mumbling around. He says, “These things I remember, and I pour out my soul within me.” That is himself talking: “Oh, this is miserable. Oh, I just wish—oh, my heart is panting.”
Finally, he talks to himself: “Why are you cast down? Oh, cut that out. Why are you disquieted? Do you not believe in God? I do believe in God. I like myself, idiot. Now cut that out, self.”
“You serve the living God. You move forward by faith, not by your feelings, by pity, or by all the problems you have. You got that straight, self? Stand at attention.”
David was violent with himself. He did not give himself an excuse: “Oh, now, poor person. Oh, this is too bad. God has been so mean to you. Is this not terrible?” That is what his self was saying. But then he spoke to himself, and this was the means of deliverance in his life.
After talking to yourself, follow it up by dealing with yourself. If you have sin to put down, put it down. If you have a letter to write saying, “Dear John,” write it. If you have something to confess or restitution to make, do it.
“Oh, but I am afraid. What will happen if—?” There you go again. Talk to yourself, and then do whatever is necessary to deal with yourself in the matter.
Whether it is fear or sin, take care of it. Whether it is an issue, resolve the issue. If this thing upon you is the discipline of God, submit yourself immediately under the mighty hand of God.
Even if God leads you through two months of discipline, you do not have to be depressed in the midst of discipline. You can actually know the joy of walking with God in the midst of it. The issue is resolved; you have dealt with yourself. That brings you out of this state of depression.
Hebrews 12 gives some simple exhortation about dealing with ourselves. This whole passage about the discipline of the Lord is cast in the sense that if we are going to deal with ourselves, it is time to get back into the race and run.
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith.
The sin that so easily entangles us, and is always at the source of depression, is unbelief. In the end, it is always unbelief.
We do not believe God loves us anymore. We do not believe God really forgave our sins. We do not believe God can control our appetites and desires. We do not believe God really loves us. We believe God gave us a raw deal when we are working so hard and getting nowhere. We believe God is mean to us because we are sick and ill. All of it is unbelief.
We release ourselves from the sin that so easily entangles us in unbelief. We stand up, and it says, “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith.” That is dealing with yourself. Get up and run the race. That is faith.
Hebrews 12:12-13 gives practical exhortation:
Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
How do you do that? Exercise. In Hebrews 12:1-2, we see that He wants us to run the race. In Hebrews 12:12-13, He wants us to get into the gymnasium and do a little therapy.
Where our muscles have gotten weak and our legs are weak, He says, “Strengthen.” Begin to exercise the will of God in your life. It is a matter of moving from passivity, which is underneath all depression, and moving out in an attitude of faith and decision-making based on trust in God.
It is moving out. It is running a race. It is strengthening the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble. Make straight paths for your feet, and as you start to walk properly, you find a healing process going on in your life.
This is aggressive faith. This is not passivity. This is no longer lying around in the pigsty, moaning about the fact that you used to be able to eat such luscious meals back home. You get up and do something. You take hold of yourself.
You begin to exercise. You say, “Oh, I am so undisciplined. I will never be able to make it.” God says, “Just forget all that. Forget all that. Pray today.” “Oh, but I will never be able to pray tomorrow.” He says, “I will remind you tomorrow. Pray today.”
We try to set up a year plan: “Okay, I am going to read the Bible by July 2, and we are doing the family—” No. Begin to walk and strengthen these weak areas. These are the weak areas that the enemy has always attacked.
By God’s grace, the testimony of many Christians is that the areas in which they were weakest when they came to the Lord are now areas in which they have found God’s grace to be real strength. It is a miracle what God can do in our lives.
Having dealt with ourselves, the last thing is in 1 Corinthians 15:58:
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.
That is right: steadfast, immovable. “I love God. I am going to serve God. I am going to do the will of God. I am going to straighten this thing out by the grace of God. I know He has forgiven me. I trust God. I know God has accepted me.”
You start saying things like that and living out of those things, and you find yourself steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.
I believe that the Lord can lead anybody out of depression. He is such a powerful God.
I know this is a simple analysis. Again, I am not a psychologist. But if it provokes something in your life where you see an area in which the enemy grabs hold of you, then by God’s grace, deal with it.
Talk to yourself. Do not put up with yourself talking to you anymore. Let us have the victory in Jesus’ name, to testify as trophies of His great power and love.
Tomorrow, Brother Johannes will begin by sharing some exhortations concerning overcoming depression. Then we will have a time for questions and answers.
What I would like you to do is write out questions and hand them to me tonight or tomorrow morning. If you bring them up here to the front, I will collect them and sort them out. Johannes and I will drag Steve and Hosea and Ernie—and everybody in here—into trying to answer some of these.
Perhaps you will get fellowship on some of these questions. But I would like written questions so that we can deal with the ones that we feel would be most helpful for everybody tomorrow.
The glory and the lifter of our heads is none other than You, Lord. So many times in our lives, when it seemed we were hopeless, at the end of ourselves, passive, with our heads in the ground, despondent, despairing, and self-condemned, You came in.
By the power of Your gospel, You forgave us, breathed acceptance and love upon us, and gave us such a sense of deliverance that You put our feet on a rock and gave us a new song to sing. It has happened so many times.
Yet still the enemy persists in our lives. We long for the day when we can say with our Lord, “He finds nothing in me.”
So through this, may this simple time be a way of exposing his devices, but more importantly, helping us to see our resource in the Lord Jesus.
Oh, Lord, give us the grace of God to stand up from wherever we are and take hold of our great salvation and the victory which is in Christ’s name. Amen.