Depression, Joy, and “Preaching the Gospel to Myself”

Mike, praying God pours out His Spirit in you and fills you to overflowing with His goodness and mercy so that your joy is refreshed, and restored in Him.

I understand well your “funk”. I also understand well, how you feel when others attack what you believe and when words seem like clumsy chunks of clay in communicating what your heart knows and your mind understands as truth. I personally think Satan and his demons spend more time in an unseen realm between my words and another’s eyes and ears than any other place. Their job is to confuse, confound, distort and deceive. Ours is to be as clear and concise and honest and sincere as we know how to be. Sometimes our honesty and sincerity is unintentionally perceived by others (depending on their state of mind and emotions), as pious, angry, or combative. And when others respond to our words, or our sincerity, with statements that misrepresent what we thought we were saying, our hearts crumble and our minds spring into defensive mode. But when our emotions become the lead horse in our communication efforts, then no matter how we handle the reins, makes not a whit of difference until we give them back to the Lord and yield all we are to Him.

It is in that period of relinquishing that we find completeness and strength to face another day on this journey of life. I find my greatest joy in revisiting the miracles of hope He has shown me through His Word. I consider how relieved the nation of Israel felt when they crossed the Red Sea. I consider the joy David felt when God forgave him. I consider the joy Peter felt when Jesus met him and told him to feed His sheep. I spend time considering the glory of His presence in my life through the handiwork of His creation. I marvel that He would do so much for me, a sinner who once was at war with Him and His people, and I rest. I rest beside the still waters and cry and consider, Why am I cast down? My Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills. This is but a blink in eternity that I am enduring. And I recall Jesus words, “Get up and pray, so that you won’t enter into temptation.” Luke22:46b.

I am tempted every day to focus on me and mine rather than He and His. When I lose focus and take my eyes off Him, I fall prey every time to the “funk” and folly of circumstance. Meeting God and praying and talking it all out with Him does so much for me. Knowing that the saints before me fell prey to the abyss at times, reminds me once again that God cares in ways beyond my comprehension.

May the Most High God flood your soul today, my brother, and lift you out of the quagmire in which you find yourself. May He give you clear insight and understanding of the grand purpose He has for you…this day. And may He grant to others who find themselves in a temporary abyss, the joy they once found in His salvation–again and again. selahV

Mike, I can so relate. I often will present myself as “doing just fine” when in reality I am struggling to find joy in this life we call Christian.

You said, “…but even writing a brief glimmer of the reality of that Gospel truth (reminding myself today of what Christ accomplished through God’s loving plan) is enough to give a glimpse of light through a break in the clouds…”

Exactly! We need to constantly remind ourselves who we are in Christ and what He has done. Not always easy, but always needful.

Besides the scriptures, the best book help I have ever read is Spiritual Depression by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I keep re-reading it. Here is but one of many good passages.

To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say “Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?” And they hesitate. And then I say, “What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?” And so often people say, “I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.” And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, “Well, I don’t think I’ good enough,” but it’s a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, “I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,” you are deny God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you though you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn’t matter if you have almost entered into the debts of hell. It does not matter if you are guilt of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world.

From Spiritual Depression

‘Depression’ for me, following childbirth, was as close to hell as I ever wish to come. It was bio-chemically due to hormonal changes, but it was severe enough to trigger anxiety, another fearsome foe, which a young mother had never encountered.

I am sure that the suffering of depression is far greater than any physical suffering, and I know that it is something that those who are around you cannot understand,
but I think there must be some good work of God that depression does in us, to make more of us than we were able to be without that intervention.
I say this because it is true:
that for me, the deep suffering was needful to open a portal into grasping something in the gospel of the beatitudes, this:
that having borne in myself the experience of the deep suffering of depression, I would be more able to offer a hand of compassion to those whom I have judged, the ones who having been hurt themselves, lash out at others.
Sometimes an experience a deep suffering may create in us a more Christ-like ability to offer a hand of compassion to those ‘others’ when most would walk away from them. I believe this to be true. For me, it is.

As the others have said, I can certainly relate to this post. I find my funk comes in often in ministry when I fear something going wrong or that person coming towards me who always seems to have something negative to say. It seems as though one negative statement can undo anything good that happened earlier that day.

I often need to remind myself of Psalm 112:7 “He is not afraid of bad news; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.” It amazes me how easy it can be for me to lose my joy. It’s a constant battle to be reminded of the joy of my salvation, and everything that entails. It’s also encouraging to see I’m not alone in this as a pastor.

“But one thing (the main thing) he said in Desiring God does resonate, even if I still struggle with how exactly to live that out. ”

How do I live that out?

Well, I think we all live it out as sinners…and saints. We are declared righteous for Jesus’ sake, we take that on faith. We live as broken people in a broken world…that is pretty much fact.

We all have dual natures. This is the great thing about the small congregation that I’m a member of. We realize that. There’s no (not much) phoniness. We realize that so often we ‘don’t desire God’.

But through it all, the ups and downs of our faith and life…He desires us.

Mike: You have written a brilliant, inspiring, and helpful blog. The night I was converted, Dec.7,1957, I cried tears of joy for the first time in my life. that is one reason why I can appreciate C.S. Lewi’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Then in the Fall of 72, when the Lord visited me one morning, while getting ready for school, I cried tears of joy for a solid half hour. Then during the week of the loss of my mother and family (Oct.29-Nov.3), in the midst of the most intense grief, there was the strangest sense of joy at the same time and the feeling of some one standing at my shoulder. Fast forward to the Spring of 73, one night in my sleep, I dreamed that my wife and I were standing in a semi-circle around the Lord Jesus. He looked like the pictures you see of Jesus as a youth of 12-13 years standing in the midst of the Scribes in the Temple, answering their questions. Any way, I dreamed that we were telling Him about our losses like the tragedy of the murder-suicide of my mother and her family in St. Louis, Mo.(According to the police dept., my step-father shot my two half sisters, my mother, set the house afire, and then shot himself), and He was telling us how He saw those same sad events. And we were laughing. It wasn’t a sick laughter; it was a healthy laughter, like we had heard the only thing that could ever explain satisfactorily such evils. Whatever the explanation, and I do not know what our Lord said, I thought, “This is the Lord what am I doing standing here talking to Him!” With that I dove at His feet, and when I did I woke up. One awakening that I did not want. Now as to seeing the Lord. I saw him with my eyes wide open, the night I was converted (whether it was a vision or a hallucination, I cannot say, but it sure worked in my case, later on that night), in the dream as a youth of 12-13, wearing a white robe, and beardless (in the vision He had on blue and red robe and had a beard and had a hand raised like He was knocking at a door. He was looking at me. In another seeing, in a dream, he wore a green and white robe. You might think that I would care a lot about pictures, statues, etc., but I care nothing for them…being a Baptist minsiter and an iconoclast when it comes to have pictures, statues, or anything of that nature in a church (put them in a museum). The greatest experience of the Lord stressed His invisibility. The morning at the semianry before the tragic loss of my family, the Lord was there in the bedroom, when I awoke. I saw nothing, heard nothing, but I surely did feel like He was there. I cried tears of joy for a solid half hour, while getting ready for class. The Lord could not have been any more real, if He had stood before me in the flesh.

Now as to these 15 years. It was on Dec.29, 1996. The church sang happy birthday to me (my 46th birthday was to be the next day), then sent my wife and I outside and fired me. It was effective 4/1/97. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but outside of a 3 month interim in 2001, I have had no church since then. I have supplied. O yes, the moderator of the meeting said to me, “Well, we could find nothing wrong with you, but we fired you anyway.”(they had had me followed). They had fired or run off every pastor they had had for 40 years (ever since 1955. The first fellow had been there 29 years. He grieved himself to death and died. By the way I had members who had been there during his pastorate who told me that I preached a lot like him and even used the same terms (Sovereign Grace). I had served 12.5 years. I sought to be faithful, because I loved the work of ministry. It is still a grief, but there are times of joy. This past Sunday, Mother’s Day, my daughter (from my first marriage whom my wife raised from age 9 until she left home at the age of 18 to go to college and actually moved out of her home after her second year of college) came to church, sat with me, then went home and ate with us (my wife is now unable for the most part to attend church due to scoliosis), a meal of barbecue obtained from a local barbecue place by me. She then did some repairs on the mobil home which we rent. She said something about praying about the visit, and it meant so much to me that I can hardly express how it made me feel in my heart. There is a joy deeper than can be expressed.
Mike, this blog of yours, is worthwhile, truly worthwhile. God bless you for it.

Thanks for ministering to me this morning, Mike. I loved the Stuart Smalley quote. The gospel tells us just the opposite!

“I’m NOT good enough, I’m NOT smart enough, and dog gone it people DO NOT like me.”

The good news of Stuart Smalley is not the good news of the Bible. We wandering saints too often want to exchange the Smalley gospel for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

May we continue to preach the true gospel to ourselves every single day.