Spiritual Depression
Spiritual depression
Psalm 42-43
Today, we’re going to spend some time in Psalms 42-43 where we’ll be looking at the spiritual condition that Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones writes about in his book called ‘Spiritual depression: its causes and cure’
For some of us, this will be new for us
But for others of us, we will be familiar with those dark nights of the soul, when the wrong seems oft’ so strong, hopelessness and despair seem to linger, and the darkness just will not lift
Like a bad smell that just won’t go away
I have three headings for us
You know how the weather app on the iPhone will say, ‘13 degrees: Feels like 7 degrees’
Well, spiritual depression, that’s the big heading
It feels like …
- Dryness
- Drowning
- Disheartened
And we start with the first one: dryness.
Like any relationship, there will be times in our relationship with God where things start to feel a little stale and dry
Distance begins to grow
You feel like you’re missing each other
It’s no different for the Psalmist in the 42nd psalm, who writes this song or prayer for God’s people, to be sung and prayed in times of spiritual dryness.
The Psalmist starts this way
1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.
The Psalmist longs for God, is thirsty for God
It’s a picture of the deep restlessness Augustine describes when he said
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
We try.
We search the world looking for something to quench our thirst, fill the deep longing, satisfy the yearning for more that’s there in all of us.
But we’re left with the perpetual disappointment of not having found what we’re searching for
C.S. Lewis describes the endless search for more this way
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
The one thing the Psalmist longs for more than anything else is God.
It can go either way, but as you know, distance often makes the heart grow fonder.
If you remember from last week, Kezia went to hospital for a minor procedure
Anyway, it was supposed to be just for the day, but it ended up being an overnight stay
But oh, how the kids missed Kez!
It didn’t matter how many video calls we had with Mum post-surgery
How many times I reassured them that we’d go to the hospital and see mum first thing tomorrow
Or how much fun we had
I mean, we had the best day. We visited the art gallery and the library. We even had Yo-Chi!
But all the kids wanted was their Mum
Towards the end of the day, Charlie was curled up on the couch and with tears in her eyes, she said, ‘I want mummy’
And it’s the same with the Psalmist
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
It’d been a while since he’d met God
For whatever reason, he is far away from home in Jerusalem, where the temple is
He goes on
4 These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.
The sights, the sounds, the smells
To hear the shouts of joy
To bump shoulders with God’s people
To smell the fragrance of the morning and evening sacrifice
There’s something in the physical senses, being able to taste, touch, see, feel, hear
It was there that the Psalmist felt that God was close, like he was near.
But it seems that living off the fumes of the past doesn’t help
In fact, this nostalgic hanging onto the past, only makes the Psalmist even more thirsty for God
See there in
3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
More than anything else, the one thing we need, that we’re all desperate for, that we can’t live without, is to feel God’s presence.
It’s not enough to know right things about God
The Psalmist wants to feel God, to see God’s reality in the everyday things of life, where it really counts
Christianity has always been a subjective, experiential faith
There is a depth and intimacy when you know God, as opposed to when you only know about God
Jonathan Edwards describes the difference in his famous sermon, A Divine and Supernatural Light
It’s said that
There are two ways to know that honey is sweet. You know it with the rational mind, and you can also know it with the sensing tongue. You can know that honey is sweet because people tell you about it and you believe them, but then you actually taste the sweetness of honey yourself, you know fully, mentally as well as experientially. When you move from just mentally knowing about the sweetness of honey to directly tasting it, you may say something like this: I knew it was sweet, but I really didn’t realise what that meant. I knew but I didn’t know.
There is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and graciousness of God in the heart.
When was the last time you tasted the sweetness of God?
Because as the Psalmist shows us, once you do, all you want to do is to get back there.
To experience it again.
I’m like that with food places
When I find something I like, I keep going back again and again and again
There’s this Thai restaurant in Glebe called Khao Homm
The first time I was introduced to it, I must’ve went there 4 times that week
I just wanted to taste the taste again, to smell the smells
It’s less so today, but how much more to have tasted the sweetness of God
The Psalmist wants to get back there again
How long since you’ve tasted the sweetness of God?
Or maybe for you, a better question is, have you ever tasted the sweetness of God?
It’s the one thing you must try.
That’s point one.
Point two now: Drowning.
I wonder if you know the saying, ‘When it rains, it pours.’?
Well, that’s the Psalmist’s experience here
It’s not enough that he’s experiencing spiritual dryness
That was just the beginning
See there
6 My soul is downcast within me … 7 Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.
The Psalmist seems to be describing the experience of being in the deep ocean, as fierce, towering waves monster over you, one after another
Just as you come up for air, another one breaks over your head
This is what life is like for the Psalmist.
And it’s an experience that many of us, I think, can resonate with
When life seems to hit you all at once
Maybe you have a flat tyre, which means you’re late for an important meeting, and as a result you lose your job, and you can no longer pay rent, so you need to move house, which means new schools for the kids, so on and so on
One after the other, life hits you again and again and again
It’s relentless
Two things to say here.
The first is that when we find ourselves in a difficult season like this, we often hold on to the hope that after this one, it’ll all be over soon
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel
If I just get through this, hold on a little while longer, then we’ll have some reprieve, everything will go back to how it was before, we’ll turn the corner, hit the open sea where it’ll be calm and pleasant
But what we see here is that this is a fallacy
Because sometimes, there is no reprieve waiting on the other side
Or at the very least, the reprieve is short-lived
What happens instead is another wave hits, and another one, and another one
That’s the experience of the Psalmist as he finds himself drowning as a result of the relentless barrage of life circumstances that leaves the Psalmist feeling hopelessly overwhelmed, like he can’t cope
If you continue reading the psalm, we see that the psalmist’s situation hasn’t really improved at all
If anything, things seem to get worse
See there in
9 I say to God my Rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” 10 My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
I say this, not because I want to scare you, so that you constantly live in fear of what’s waiting for you just around the corner
But I think it’s important that we expose the lie, that ‘If I just … then I’ll be …’
Happy
Safe
Content
Secure
No longer struggle
It just doesn’t work that way
A change of circumstances isn’t usually the solution to our problems
If I just had a different boss
If I was at a different church
If my husband was different
If I was working a different job
Sometimes, God leaves us right where we are to show us that a change in circumstance isn’t going to fix everything, and it isn’t what we should ultimately put our hope in
Instead, we should put our hope in God.
And here’s the second thing to say here.
Isn’t it interesting that the Psalmist says there in
7 Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and (your) breakers have swept over me.
The waves that sweep over the Psalmist and threaten to overwhelm and finally sink him, aren’t just any old waves
They’re God’s waves
He’s sent them
He appointed them
And that’s why our hope shouldn’t be in that we would no longer need to face the waves, for waves will keep coming, such is life in a fallen world, but our hope needs to be in the God who commands the wind and the waves
The LORD who says about himself, in Job 38,
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb … 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?
The Psalmist’s comfort in life and death are that the waves and breakers aren’t random
They’re not accidents
He’s not at the behest of human will and desires
No.
He’s in the hands of the God who commands the wind and waves and says to them, ‘I permit you to come this far and no more’
There is great comfort in the fact that these waves, although they are relentless and many, they are ultimately God’s waves.
And I love what the psalmist does next.
See, it’d be easy for the psalmist to be swallowed up by what’s happening to him and play the victim of his sad and sorry circumstances
To wallow in his miserable situation
‘Woe is me!’
To feel sorry for himself
Why does this always happen to me?
Why is everyone always against me?
Nobody loves me
No one cares about me
I know this is my tendency.
But the Psalmist does something in his despair and depression that is quite surprising
Instead of laying down in defeat, he gets up and starts to fight
Remember how the psalmist said earlier in
3 My tears have been my food day and night
Now, the psalmist seems to re-interpret his circumstances through the lens of God’s divine providence
See there in
8 By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life.
This is true reality
This is the true story of the world
This is what’s really going on
Instead of bitter tears being his constant companion, it is God’s love and song that are his closest friend
How differently the Psalmist experiences the dark times when he puts on the glasses of God’s divine sovereign care and looks through them to his circumstances
It changes everything.
At the very heart of his book on Spiritual Depression, Lloyd Jones impresses on readers the importance of talking back to one’s despair
The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self … Have you realised that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday …
He goes on to say this.
The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.
His point is that we must learn to challenge our feelings.
Not simply receive them and accept them as ultimate reality
We need to ask ourselves, ‘Is there an alternative explanation for this?’
Because maybe our assumptions are just assumptions, our speculations are just speculations, our preferences are just our preferences, and our hypothesis is just a hypothesis
It is very possible that our interpretation of events, the way we feel about things, isn’t the only way to see a particular situation
Have you learnt how to talk to yourself?
Do you know that just because we feel a certain way, doesn’t mean that how we feel is the way it is, or the way it needs to be?
Like the psalmist, we need to learn how to preach to ourselves when we feel like we’re drowning because of life’s waves and breakers
That’s point two.
The last one now. Spiritual depression feels like disheartened.
For this, we turn to the next chapter, Psalm 43.
Here, we find that the Psalmist is losing heart.
See there.
1 Vindicate me, my God, and plead my cause against an unfaithful nation. Rescue me from those who are deceitful and wicked.
The Psalmist cries for vindication and rescue
The first thing to notice here is that the Psalmist is praying to God now.
Before, he was more introspective, inward looking
Yes, he was pouring out his heart
His despair
His longing
His yearning
But it was all addressed to himself
What’s going on in me?
What am I feeling?
Why am I downcast, O my soul?
But now, he gets out of that death spiral of ruminating on his own thoughts
The ‘what ifs …’
The catastrophising, thinking only of worst case scenarios
The paranoia
Seeing things only from our own perspective that of course we’re convinced is the only way of seeing things
She did this because she’s mean
It’s her fault
This always happens to me
Everyone is against me
The Psalmist stops listening and he starts talking
Instead of looking inwards, he leaves the dungeon of despair and self-pity, and instead, he looks upwards to God
One thing that I find impressive about the Psalmist is that even in times of spiritual dryness, despair, drowning, when he’s feeling dishearted, the Psalmist doesn’t stop coming to God
The Psalmist will knock and ask and seek as long as it takes, if that’s what it takes, until he gets a response from God
The Psalmist is in a wrestle with God.
He says a bit later, ‘God you are my stronghold’
But he’s not saying this as a ‘This is what I believe’ statement
No.
I think it’s quite the opposite.
It’s more
God, you’re my ‘stronghold’, aren’t you?
That’s what you promised you’d be, right?
Where are you God?
Why do the wicked say malicious things about me and you do nothing?
See there
2 You are God my stronghold. Why have you rejected me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?
But again, I love this.
Because the Psalmist only does this because he isn’t content with the status quo
The way things are now aren’t how they should be
The Psalmist won’t be content until he sees God’s face again
And so, he lays out his request before God
3 Send me your light and your faithful care, let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. 4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.
The Psalmist is praying that God would shift his heart
Give me a new perspective
Re-orient my attitudes
Help me to see what you see
Restore to me the joy of my salvation
It’s often in the wrestle, those dark nights of the soul, crying out to God, day and night in his presence, that God helps us to see things from his vantage point
It’s in prayer, as the Psalmist goes to the temple, where God dwells, that God meets with his people in their anguish and despair
In another place, in Psalm 73, we see the Psalmist is in another wrestle with God
This time, it’s not because of the things people are saying, but because the wicked prosper
They seem to go from strength to strength, while God’s people, the righteous, well, they are plagued by many ills and troubles
How is that fair?
Shouldn’t it be that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people?
That’s how things are supposed to work, isn’t it?
I mean, I prayed
I did the right thing
I stayed
I go to church
I’m a Christian
And this is what I get, God?!
It gets pretty bad.
In anger, the Psalmist cries out in desperation
13 Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. 14 All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments.
Do you hear what he’s saying?
What’s the point of being a Christian if this is what you get?
Well, if you know Psalm 73, it ends well
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
But how does the Psalmist get there?
What’s happened?
See again in Psalm 73
16 When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply 17 till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.
The Psalmist comes to God’s holy mountain, where God dwells, and meets with God, face to face.
God, why is it this way?
God, why not?
God, why now?
And that’s when everything changes for the Psalmist.
In times of despair, discouragement, disappointment, when we’re feeling dry, it’s as we come face to face with God, that a shift happens in our heart
It’s the same for the Christian today
It’s as we meet with God that everything changes for us in times when we are disillusioned with God, life, church, and others
And where can we find God today?
Is it at a physical place, God’s holy mountain, where God dwells?
No.
John 1 says
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
In Jesus, we meet God.
And I would be even more specific
It’s in Jesus’ work on the cross that we must go
That’s where God meets us in times of darkness and our deep anguish, and he says,
Look! Look at my Son on the cross! See there my love for you. See there my commitment for you. See him there, forsaken, and know that I will never leave you nor forsake you. Know that although you do not understand and can’t make sense of what I am doing, why this and not that, you know that I will only ever do what is good for you and one day I will make it plain
It’s in face-to-face meeting with Jesus that maybe we begin to see things from God’s point of view
Or maybe we still don’t understand, but we are resolute in trusting in the One whose ways are higher than our ways, and whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts
The thing that ties the two Psalms 42 and 43 together is the refrain that the Psalmist repeats again and again and again
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
It’s not that everything has been resolved for the Psalmist
God hasn’t fixed all his problems or made the difficult things, the hard things, disappear
He hasn’t given him a new set of circumstances
He hasn’t yet relieved him from all his troubles
The Psalmist still hasn’t yet seen God’s deliverance and rescue
But that’s not what he was expecting when he came to the sanctuary of God.
He wasn’t looking for a change of circumstances but a change of heart.
He’s come for God.
And now, even if nothing about his situation changes, still, he will put his hope in God and wait patiently for the day when his mourning will turn to dancing, and he will praise God again.
See, hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?
No.
As one writer puts it,
Hope is an expectant waiting for God to act. Tell yourself that your day of praise will certainly come, though in God’s time, not yours.
In times of spiritual depression, whether it be dryness, drowning, or when we’re feeling disheartened
Everything might be falling apart around us
A thousand may fall at our side
Those we trusted in, betray us
The evil seems oft so strong
Nothing is going right
Our dreams are still unfulfilled
We still don’t understand why God does what he does
We have this hope, sure and steady
With the Psalmist, it’s time for God’s people to rise up
The revolution has begun
It’s our time to fight back and start to crawl out of our despair
And that’s important to say
It is often a crawl
One step at a time
Two steps forward, one step back
My dear brothers and sisters, I don’t know where God has you this evening, but with the Psalmist, together, we cry out, even from the depths of our despair,
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
Let’s pray.
Discussion questions:
- What struck you the most from the sermon?
- Have you ever experienced a spiritual depression? What happened?
- How does putting the lens of God's sovereign care change the way you face your constant struggles?
- How does the gospel propel you to come to God and wrestle with God amid your despair, rather than hide from God?