Good morning Life Fellowship. I am excited to talk to you this morning about a topic that is very near and dear to my own heart and life. It is my hope today that if you are sitting out here and you are someone who knows what it is like to suffer from depression that you will be able to find some serenity and some peace today. I also would hope that if you are sitting here today and you have never experienced it then I hope that you never have to experience it. I also would hope though, that a message like this would help you to learn how to offer the compassion of Jesus to those who do, and to understand that it is not as simple as just saying, Hey, snap out of it. Get over it. Those statements are one of the things that can make people feel extra empty on the inside if they think about, Well, why is it that others just look at my state and think I should just get over it? The truth of the matter is if they could get over it they would get over it. The reason they don t is because they are struggling to do that. I have been thinking about a person who has absolutely influenced my life as a non-living mentor. By that I mean he is not living here in an earthly existence any longer. And that man is C. S. Lewis. He has been a great influence to many of us with his life, with his writings, with his scholarship, and his insight into the soul. You may not know that the great C. S. Lewis, who was a Cambridge and Oxford don, was also an atheist, who turned to agnosticism, and then to theism, and finally embraced Christ as his Savior. He would go on to write Mere Christianity, Chronicles of Narnia, A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain, and on and on. In his book, A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis dialogues his story; he just kind of notes what he felt after losing his wife. Now he didn t marry until later in his life. He was a professor, and Joy Davidman, who would become his wife, was living out in California. She read C. S. Lewis writings, and she was equally as bright as he was. It was said of both of them that they never forgot anything they read. Imagine the conversations at their table. And when C. S. Lewis got bored with his wife, he would go hang out with the Inklings at the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford. He would also hang out there with J. R. Tolkien. So talk about some good companionship - C. S. Lewis had it. Joy had ended up going through a divorce, and then connected with C. S. Lewis. She would move out to Oxford with her son, and while she was out there their platonic relationship grew into something more romantic and special. C. S. Lewis loved Joy and they ended up getting married. C. S. Lewis went into the marriage knowing that this relationship would be short lived. He knew that he would not get to spend a long time with Joy because she was dying of cancer. So he entered into the covenant of marriage with her, struggling with the fact that most likely Joy would die before he did. But they did experience wonderful seasons of their marriage. They made the most of their lives together. And it would probably be amazing how much better our Page 1 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
marriages would be if we realized we only had a few years to enjoy each other. We would ride the wheels off of our marital love with one another. We wouldn t take each other for granted the way we often do. We would be open to experiences. We would be juicing our time together. We would be striving to connect. And that is exactly the kind of marital love that C. S. Lewis and Joy had with one another. And then what ended up taking place was C. S. Lewis was taking Joy out of town to go to a place that she wanted to go with him, when unfortunately the cancer had grown too much. And as a result he would soon see his sweet Joy, whom he called, H, pass away. And her last words would be, I m at peace with God. Now Joy s last words might have been, I m at peace with God, but at that moment C. S. Lewis certainly wasn t at peace with God. Torment entered his soul, and he would write about the pain and the agony that he experienced. And being married had been like a dance that was stopped in the middle of the dance, taken away from him. The depression and the grief got so deep that he found himself not being able to shave, not having the motivation to even do the things that he needed to do. He isolated, not wanting to bump into people that would bring her name up, and the awkwardness that it would mean for him if someone did bring her up. While at the same token he didn t like if they didn t bring up her name either. He didn t have good photographs of her, so he lost all but a faint memory of her. This was the man who could remember every word he ever read; yet he struggled to remember her image clearly. And the photos were not sufficient. He suffered the agony of wondering if God had abandoned him. Where are you, God? He struggled with his pain and loss. And you see, here is something that I have considered as I prepared this message. It is possible for us to grasp the truth that can be helpful and it is this: suffering and depression are not always the same thing. It is possible to suffer without depression, but it is impossible to be depressed without suffering. When you are depressed you are suffering, but you could experience seasons of suffering and have not been depressed. C. S. Lewis, agonizing, would write his thoughts shortly after the loss of Joy, as he would begin to pen A Grief Observed. It was a short little book that you can read where he chronicles his love and his loss. And in A Grief Observed, he writes some words that maybe you have heard before: When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption. If you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be, or so it feels, welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, Page 2 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
and what do you find - a door slammed in your face, and the sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. And after that - silence. Have you ever felt as though the door to God s presence has been doubly bolted shut and you cry Where are you? You see C. S. Lewis sounds like many of the people we meet in the Scriptures. I believe, as it relates to your emotions and my emotions, that it is important for us to go through a number of trials and a number of good experiences. When I got sober as a young man, I had practiced stuffing my emotions for so long that I literally didn t even know how to pick off my different feelings. And the reason was because I had lived between anxiety and being high. In other words if I wasn t on something, I was anxious. And then when I was anxious I would use something. And what ended up happening in my life was there were so many different emotions that we as humans can experience and I didn t know how to pick them off. One of the reasons why people who drink for 30 or 40 years, and then they get cleaned up look like little children emotionally is because they have stunted their growth all those years, and now they have to learn to mature and face life in a new way. I can remember coming in contact with different feelings. So try to imagine learning about different emotions and things as a new believer. I kind of knew how to explain it, but I did not how to understand the experience of it, because of the way I had lived my life. But here is what I believe though. I believe God wants us to be sober minded and alert in Him, and He wants us to feel life, and not anesthetize ourselves to it. And that means in order for us to understand beyond a mere academic definition of these words that we have to experience them through life situations. So that means that God will then allow some of us to experience depression, anxiety, worry and fear so that we can be familiar enough with what those emotions are, but to do them without sin. And we can see that we take them to lengths that are unhealthy for us, but He is texturizing us as individuals in our emotional base. And an emotionally healthy human being is one whose emotions correspond to the circumstances of life. But when our emotions are exaggerated beyond the circumstances, then our emotions aren t in a healthy state. That is to say if we are fearful that we are going to get shot today, but no one is pointing a gun at us, our emotions aren t corresponding to reality. But if someone is pointing a gun at us, we have every right to be fearful. Our emotion fits our reality. God allows us to get textured emotionally and He allows us to understand more than just in academic definitions. He wants us to be able to emote and create annexes of relationship. And when we can understand not only these feelings of angst, despair, discontent, jealousy, insecurity and all of these types of things that we can get a hint of, it Page 3 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
makes us more relatable. We can relate to people in that instead of sitting in our seats of judgment, when we understand joy, happiness, contentment and peace. So we go through all of this with Jesus as our moral exemplar. He is who we are to look to in order to find a sense of peace. I didn t intend to share with you as much as I did there about emotions, but coming back to depression now I would say that is one such emotion that we might go through. Did you know that 19.2 percent of adolescents, from 12 to 17 years of age, experience depression? Teen boys experience depression at 6.4 percent, but it is far more so for teen girls. As it relates to adults, a large percentage of them, 19 percent, will experience, or have experienced depression in the last year. According to the World Health Organization, 50 percent of those who have been diagnosed with depression have also been diagnosed with anxiety. And guess who fits into that happy category? Yours truly. Not only that, but 85 percent of people will experience depression at least one time in their lives. That is unbelievable, because that means that 85 percent of you here today are going to escape with just one period of depression, without being hammered by that. Can you imagine that? You might suffer, but clinical depression, hopelessness, despair, absolute emptiness, the future looking bleak is limited to only 15 percent. And of those 15 percent that experience it, some will never make their way out of it. They will hang by a thread, or they will take their life, because of their despair. It is no surprise then that a lot of the creative types like Cooper, whom Jason just talked about as a poet, or when we think about Leonardo Di Vinci and Vincent Van Gogh, they are some of the different people who have struggled with depression. Even Charles Haddon Spurgeon struggled with it deeply. And then there was Tommy Nelson, a pastor, who was so overworked that he didn t see it coming. He went on the radio and began to talk about how he needed to slow his life down, but then he ended up in an state of depression and despair. Maybe that is you this morning. Maybe you can identify with this poster LOST: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? I MISS HIM VERY MUCH Last seen a long time ago. Characteristics: Smiles a lot Has many friends Seen outside the house often Has many hobbies Enjoys living If spotted, please call 555-7713. Page 4 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
Nothing can be more horrifying than if you are a parent and you have seen one of your children slip into a state where their smile has gone away, and despair has seeped into the life of your child. Maybe you are out there as a suffering parent with a child. If that is you I want to tell you from the depth of my being that I am so sorry. And we want to know how we can be there for you. Maybe you are someone watching a spouse who just agonizes day after day with depression and you can see emptiness when you look into their eyes. And you wish you could help them, but you know it is going to take a deep work of God. So as we get ready to consider depression I would invite you to turn to Psalm 42. You might find it of interest to know that originally in the manuscripts Psalm 42 and 43 are one Psalm. The divisions of chapters were done later by Bishop Stephen Langton hundreds and hundreds of years after we had the Scriptures in place. Now we don t necessarily know who the author, or authors, were of Psalm 42 and 43, but you can see the heading says Sons of Korah. Sometimes people struggle being certain about who the author is because it is hard to know. You are just reading these verses and sometimes people have just kind of added that tag line. But frankly it doesn t really matter to me. I know it was a psalmist, and I know there were different psalmists, and I know that David wrote many of the psalms. We do have an idea about the timing because the psalmist that is suffering from depression here is a Levite worshiper who is away from Jerusalem. He is sort of in this captivity and he longs to get back to the sanctuary to worship again. So that would tell us something about the timing because if the sanctuary, or the temple, is there it would probably be pre-exilic. Pre-exilic means before the exiles that took place in 722 BC with the North and the Assyrians, and then in 586 BC with the Babylonians taking God s people into captivity. What ties these two chapters together is the verses that say, Why are you cast down, O my soul. We see that refrain two times in Psalm 42, and then in verse 5 of Psalm 43 we see the refrain repeated again. And we can see how they put these two Psalms together as Psalm 43 kind of goes along and talks about trust, but we can also see how they nicely can be looked at piecemealed or separate. Before we just jump in I want to read you a quote Charles Spurgeon gave us: I find myself frequently depressed, perhaps more so than any other person here. And I find no better cure for that depression than to trust in the Lord with all my heart, and seek to realize afresh the power of the peace speaking blood of Jesus and His infinite love in dying upon the cross to put away all my transgression. So it was in cross mediation that Spurgeon found peace. Page 5 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
C. S. Lewis also said what he found helpful to him was to just praise God. The hardest thing though about being depressed is you will feel like you don t have the energy to even speak when it is bad, or even to sing. But one of the things you have to do if you are struggling with depression is just get yourself busy, just start doing something. Otherwise you will get sucked into that rabbit hole and it is easy to do that. Again, if 15 percent of the people suffer with it only once in their lives, the other 85 percent of people may suffer with it chronically or seasonally. And there are several different types of depression. There is chronic depression, post-partum depression, seasonal depression, spousal depression and teen depression. (Laughter.) So let s take a look at Psalm 42. This is a lament psalm. There are different types of Psalms. Psalm 42 also picks up Book Two of the Psalms. Psalms is categorized into different books; I believe there are five of them. And Book Two begins with Psalm 42. If you were reading Psalms in Hebrew you would be able to see the change from Yahweh in Chapters 1 through 41, and now it shifts into His other name that you are going to see where He is referred to as God. Psalm 42 and verse 1 says, As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. Well, that s one good thing because in a state of despair we need to recognize our spiritual thirst for God. All of us are meant to live for God. All of us have souls that are to be thirsty for God, but we can so starve our soul that we won t feel hungry for God, that we won t feel thirsty for God. And we will think that we are okay on our own because we don t feel the pangs of hunger. But in the same way I can tell you as a person who has done a 40 day fast and knows what it is like to not eat for six weeks, I understood there were seasons in that where I didn t feel hunger at all. I was on a spiritual high like I can t express. But I also know other times where I felt like I was starving to death; where I was really hungry. And I was very hungry, having pangs of hunger but I gave that up to seek and chase God. I also found out that it was possible to be really hungry after not having a meal in four weeks but still being able to feel great. And that is fine when we are seeking God because man doesn t live on bread alone, but by every word that precedes out of the mouth of God, but we do have to eat at some point. And we can t do that way with our souls either, because we will go through life anesthetized to the fact that our souls are meant to hunger and thirst for God. So are we thirsting for God? The Psalmist says he is. He says in verse 2, My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. He is the one who is alive. He is the one who is the life giving God and the psalmist wants God to be poured into his soul. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? In other words he feels isolated from God and he wants to go Page 6 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
back to the sanctuary. He wants to do what he was created to do as a Levite worshipper, and to lead the procession in worship. Verse 3, My tears have been my food day and night. Tears have been his sustenance. Tears have flowed down his face frequently. He is crushed to his core. He agonizes. He weeps. It is hard to not think about this, While they say to me all the day long, Where is your God? So the psalmist is obviously giving us a clue as to what is causing his depression. Maybe your depression is being caused by marital struggles, loss of a job, wondering if you are going to find a job, fighting a disease, struggling with mental illness of some sort, worries about the state of your children, the loss of a loved one or who knows what else it might be. But this psalmist was being persecuted for his faith. Where is your God? Those who were looking at him were saying, Where is your God? So this tells us something about him. I mean he is really legit. He is thirsting for God. He is living for God. He wants to get back and worship. Not only that but the people around him know that this is a person of faith. He has not been living undercover in his faith. He is willing to tell them that he believes. He is willing to talk about it. And he is paying a high price for it. He is being blasted, and they are blasting his God. Does your God really exist? He needs to show Himself. Where is He? And maybe one of the reasons we never hear that, or we can t relate to what the psalmist is saying, is because we are living in God s secret service, believing that God wants us undercover for Him. But when we do come out of the closet for Jesus, so to speak, and let people know, we might hear people asking, Where is your God? And why this? And why that? The psalmist hated that people looked at him and it seemed as if he had been abandoned. It was like they were asking, Why doesn t God come to your rescue? Where is He? Verse 4, These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise. So the psalmist excites himself while he is lonely and cut off from the community by thinking about how it used to be where shouts of gladness were going up to God, and they were freely worshipping in Jerusalem. They were lifting God s name up in excitement and joy being in the context of sacred community, instead of listening to ridicule and put downs. It is like the person who feels oppressed in their job and who wish they could work in a context with people who believe and love God. They just would love to be in a better setting, and be relieved of their angst that is unbelievable at times. Verse 5, Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? So he starts to talk to himself. And that is good because we need to get to the core Page 7 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
of what is bothering us, of what is causing our angst. We need to do some self-talk from time to time. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God. So in other words it is not that he can t praise God alone, but praising God in community with others, and praising God where he is not just getting blasted all the time, that is what he is hoping for. And he says he shall do that again. He is confident. And that is good when in our depression we can find that confident spot to go forth and not lose hope, but to hang on and stay strong. My soul is cast down within me. So what do we do? Therefore I remember you. He acknowledges that his soul is cast down. He is empty, but he remembers God and he will hope in Him, and he will again praise Him. From the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. Now this is the location where the psalmist is in. This would kind of be like in the Dan region near Syria. For those of you who have been with me in Israel, this is the location that he is experiencing, north of Galilee and up near Syria. Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls. Whose waterfalls? God s. All your breakers and your waves have gone over me. So there were waterfalls in the region where he was located and he is obviously metaphorically speaking of the waves comparing them to the taunts and the shouts of where is your God. He was saying the taunts were like waves going over him drowning out the sounds he so longs to hear of glad shouts of praise and worship. Verse 8, By day the Lord commands His steadfast love, and at night His song is with me. So he tells us of his tears both day and night, and then he tells us some of the solutions he has found about day and night. He remembers God s covenant love, that he is loved by God even though God is the one allowing him to be hammered by these waves, these taunts, these shouts. He is still trusting in the good character of God, and that God will see him through. And then what does he say about night? He says, At night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I love this because he is not giving up on God. He is still hoping in God and he is still singing to God. He is praying to God and he is hoping in God. He is recognizing that he is loved by God. And when those type of features are a part of our lives that is exactly the type of things that we need to work our way out of the dark night of the soul. Verse 9, I say to God, my rock: Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? Now notice how wishy-washy he is. Depression is like that. Despair is like that. We go in and out of feeling hope and then losing sight of hope and feeling despair. Listen, I can tell when someone is Page 8 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
depressed or struggling deeply then they are having a hard time getting off the conversation of their pain. It is like the pain keeps acting up and for some reason they go back to that. And when someone keeps returning to something over and over and over again, we need to figure out how to love them and help them so that they can learn how to heal that pain. That repetition is a clue that something is going on. The inconsistency, the double minded, is a sign that someone is in despair. Verse 10, As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, Where is your God? He hears it again and again and again. Then he asks himself again, Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? So in other words he feels pain from the outside, but then the turmoil is also happening on the inside. So much for sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. These words hurt; these words create agony in him. These are relational wounds. And the hardest wounds to heal from are relational wounds. Most of us would rather have to fight off some disease than to fight off having all of humanity against us with their words that drive us into the ground. Relational wounds can create such despair. And these are human beings criticizing him and criticizing God. And people can hurt people. So these relational wounds are deep causing turmoil. What does the psalmist do? He wraps up the chapter hoping in God. Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God. And if you want to read Psalm 43 as a continuance of Psalm 42, you will see what he is experiencing with rejection and how he still needs to learn to trust. And he ends verse 5 of Psalm 43 in the same way he ended verse 11 of Psalm 42, Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? So we step back and now we are going to quickly ask how we can deal with despair. What do we do? First, if you are depressed or suspect that you are, acknowledge it. The psalmist said on three occasions in these two Psalms - Why are you cast down, O my soul? If you are cast down in your spirit you need to acknowledge it. Don t walk around acting like everything is okay. If you find yourself isolating from people, sleeping more, or eating less, or eating too much, or starting to use more sleeping pills and other substances, or thinking about escape by drinking or drugs, pay attention to what is going on. Secondly, if you are depressed, diagnose the nature of your depression. The psalmist did. He knew that it was coming from the external threats. He knew what the cause of it was. Something that can happen is some of us can struggle when we start getting older with our serotonin and not getting enough of it. So it might not be that the circumstances outside are bad; it could just be that your brain is not getting enough Page 9 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
serotonin and dopamine. Now I believe medication should always be a last resort. We should first examine our heart and check out other things, but it could be that you are not getting enough serotonin and dopamine. And thank God that scientifically there are tools that can help us. We are mutating to death. Our children have a hundred more mutations that we do. So thank God that we have modern day science to help come along side us. Nothing is worse in the church than someone making someone else feel simple for getting on medication. I would have done that early as a Christian. But by the way I am now on an anti-depression medication and have been on it for three years. How about that? And when I try to get off of the medication, the anxiety starts again. I will continue to try again, but if my body is not naturally producing enough serotonin, then someone saying to me that I don t have enough faith is not going to help my problem. We have had someone leave the church before because I had a cold for three weeks, and I asked for people to pray for me. This person told me that I obviously didn t have enough faith in God and he left the church. So that is pressure. I am not even supposed to have a long cold? But listen to this. My eyes started going bad when I was in seminary and reading all the time. Now imagine if I went to get my eyes checked and the doctor there told me to look at the eye chart. And the doctor asked me to read it and I couldn t see Line 4. What if the doctor told me I needed to have more faith and then I would be able to see Line 4. And he told me to go home and pray and come back the next week. So I pray that week and I go back to the doctor and Line 4 still looks the same, and I can t read Line 4. What if the doctor tells me my faith is too small? But that is what many do to people as it relates to mental illness in the church. Or people who need medication. We tell them to do this, or do this, and we don t understand that they can t help it. And if we don t have the dopamine and the serotonin that is necessary to our bodies we are going to be depressed. It could be that you are beating yourself up, and everyone around you, and it is not because of sin. It is because our brains are mutating to death. And thank God for science. Christianity and science aren t opposed. I got glasses, folks, and guess what, it made all the difference in the world. And I have some more dopamine and serotonin helping me. I had a counsellor tell me, Bobby, if someone is drowning out in the middle of the lake an antidepressant isn t going to keep them from drowning; they still have to swim, but it allows them to at least make their way safely to shore. So consider seeking medical professional help if you need it. Now I am now telling you to all run out and get on antidepressants because that is not what I am saying. Page 10 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
Third, if you are depressed learn to speak a positive narrative over your life. The psalmist said, My soul is cast down, but then he also says, Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. And he starts getting a positive narrative. We create our narrative. The circumstances are there, and we create our narrative by how we want to look at things. And if we look at things in a positive way it is going to help us emotionally. If we are constant cynics looking at the glass half empty, we are going to be depressed. In fact I can tell you one way to work our way out of depression is through gratitude. Start getting thankful. Get out of the pity party and start trusting and claiming God s promises. You will not believe the difference it will make in your life. Fourth, if you are depressed search out your desires and find a way to thirst for God above all. In other words, what helped the psalmist to stay strong, to speak a positive narrative, was he was able to search his desires. And his desire was to be close to God. And I believe we can find our way out of depression quicker if our desire is Him. See, we need to look at our desires when we are depressed because we might have a greater desire for a stronger marriage than a stronger relationship with God. We might have a greater desire for a big bank account, or that right job, or to look a certain way, so we need to search out our desires. We need to ask God to sanctify them and to help our core desire to be a thirst for Him. If we are thirsting for other things more than God, that is called idolatry. Fifth, if you are depressed remember God and His faithful character. And that is what the psalmist would do. He said he would remember God and His faithfulness. So when we are depressed we need to take out a journal and start writing down all the Biblical qualities you know about God s faithfulness. And then start singing those qualities to Him. Start saying those qualities to Him. Start believing those qualities. Sixth, if you are depressed know that you are unconditionally loved by God. We have to steep in that because we can go through certain circumstances and our amygdala gets high-jacked. See, some people have struggled to get a secure bond with God, and a secure bond with others, because every time they enter into a similar situation they freak out. They always act the same way and it is predictable. That is because there is trauma there, and the trauma needs to be healed. The way it is healed is through validation, comfort, and re-direction. That is what neuroscientists and counsellors will tell us. What does the psalmist do in that way? He is being taunted by people; his amygdala gets high-jacked when he thinks about it but what he does is he allows God to assuage his angst by thinking about God s love for him, by remembering God s covenantal love for him. He then realizes he is loved by God. Sometimes we need to just sit still and let God love us, to sit in His love, to think about what it means that a holy God who is perfect and righteous loves us. And He loves us regardless of what we have done. He is not asking for us to perform for Him; rather Jesus came and performed the Page 11 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
Law on our behalf. He loves us as we are, but He wants us to re-shape our lives and make us more like Jesus. Seventh, if you are depressed sing your way out of the blues. That is what the psalmist says, At night His song is with me. We need to sing our way out of the blues. I know you may not feel like singing, but just do it. There is a statement that is said in AA: Fake it till you make it. Everyone going to AA is not feeling like staying clean. They feel like hammering down some whisky and getting inebriated. They hate the way that they are feeling, but they need to fake it till they make it. They need to do the right thing and then the reward will come. So we need to sing, sing, sing and praise God. Just take those words you wrote down in your journal about God s qualities and sing. Now don t be surprised by the emotional roller coaster you find yourself on as I alluded to earlier. Remember that is what is going on when we read the context of Psalm 42. He is in, he is out, he is in, he is out. He is up, he is down and that is the normal part of the grief and the depression process. Don t come to church today, leave on a spiritual buzz, and then think you are all better now, because tonight you may be feeling empty again. I told my wife that I don t understand it, but sometimes between 7 and 9 at night I feel a little empty. And my daughter said she gets it because it happens to her between 7 and 9 at night also. So pray for us between 7 and 9 each night, two hours, nonstop. (Laughter.) Now maybe it is just because it is getting dark outside. I do know that my will gets weaker as the day goes on. I wake up with all these strong commitments about praying this much, doing this and that, not eating the wrong things, and by the end of the night I may have a big Cold Stone in my hand. I weaken as the day goes on. Finally, if you are depressed refuse to lose hope in God. Just refuse to do it because that is when we start hanging by ropes, folks. I am telling you that if we will remember these things and focus on these things, if we will apply these things, God will meet us and He will work in us. See, there are things to learn about our hearts during depression. We learn how we struggle to trust in Him, or how we get attached to eternal circumstances for our internal joy. And sometimes God strips things away from us in order for Him to become our ultimate. There is much learning to be done. I want to conclude by telling you about another person that has had a big impact on my life, and I am sure many of you as well. He grew up in India and as a young man he was depressed. He struggled with a horrible relationship with his father, as his father would beat him. He also struggled in school. And eventually he ended up taking poison trying to kill himself. He started vomiting the poison and he was rushed to a hospital. And while he was in the hospital an individual by the name of Fred came to visit him. Fred was from Youth for Christ, and he began to talk to him. He had with him a Page 12 of 13 pages 7/1/2018
Bible verse from the book of John. Fred handed the verse to this young man s mother and told her to read it to him. So while he laid in that hospital bed being spared from the throes of death, Robbie Zacharias heard his mother read from the book of John, Because I live, you also shall live. And Robbie Zacharias life was changed forever. This great India man went on to become, and is, one of the greatest Christian apologists and defenders of our faith today. God led him out of depression because Jesus lived so he could live. And on a cross Jesus felt what the psalmist felt, Why hast thou forsaken me, yet by faith Jesus committed His spirit to God. Will you commit yourself to Jesus? This is a way that we can deal with depression. Lord, we thank you for your word. Use it to strengthen us, to comfort us, to transform us. We love your great name. I pray for my brothers and sisters who might struggle from depression. Please help them to see the darkness lift. Help them to know that sometimes you test us in such a way that you want us to know that we need to be willing to love you even if the clouds don t lift. In Jesus name. Amen.. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 13 of 13 pages 7/1/2018