God's Cure for Depression Psalm 42 / 43

You ought to go to the beach on Long Island in November. The contrast with summertime is striking! Instead of warm hummocks of golden sand, the beach is gray, and flat, and cold. The gentle sea breeze is no longer - an icy winter wind sweeps over the desolate dunes. Everything is still and lifeless.

The surf pounds the shore as always, but it isn’t inviting like it was in July. The water is the color of steel, and just as cold. The spray turns into icy needles, driven by that wicked wind. The sky, so blue and vibrant in the summer, is dark and threatening.

The beach houses are boarded up and shuttered. The picnic tables are stacked end on end in rows like silent soldiers on parade. No more lifeguards, no more laughter. No more sandpipers running along the shore; no more children splashing in the surf. All is desolate.

Life’s a beach, the bumper sticker says, and that’s true. It’s just that sometimes, it seems like it’s November on the beach of life. Maybe winter has come to your beach today.

Depression is a pretty big subject - enough to supply us with sermons for a month of Sundays. I’m no expert on depression, but I do know that depression is one of the most common experiences of life, whether you’re living in the 10 th century B.C., or in the 20th Century A.D. An article in J.A.M.A. stated “More human suffering has resulted from depression than from any other single disease affecting mankind.”

Depression is like a paralysis of the soul. It colors your thoughts gray, and in the process, it sucks the joy out of living. When you’re depressed, you don’t think right, so you don’t live right.

Depression can be caused by many things. There are physical causes: ranging from simple things like lack of sleep and improper diet, to more complex factors like glandular disorders, chemical and hormonal imbalances, pre-menstrual syndrome, low blood sugar, and the side effects of certain drugs.

Much depression is caused by physical factors, but far more of it is caused by psychological factors. One of the most common causes of depression lies in the area of unmet expectations. People who have unrealistically high expectations for themselves, or who are trying to live up to the expectations of others, are prone to depression. When they can’t meet those expectations, they become discouraged and defeated.

We are rapidly approaching the holiday season. You wish I hadn’t said that! This is a time of year when the suicide rate increases, and psychiatrists are besieged with people who are suffering from depression. Why? Because of their unmet expectations concerning the holiday season. People place such impossibly high expectations on themselves and their families at this time of year, that they can’t possibly live up to them. They become depressed when the holidays don’t seem to turn out as wonderfully as they were hoping they would.

Another common psychological cause of depression is anger. We are hearing more and more today from the victims of child abuse. These are people who went through devastating experiences as children, many times at the hands of the parents who were supposed to be loving them and caring for them.

You would expect the victims of abuse to react with anger and outrage at what they experienced, but most of them don’t. Because they feel a confusing mixture of love and hatred toward their abusive parents, they submerge their anger in silence. Then they begin to feel guilty about harboring such deep hatred toward a parent or another family member, so they repress it - they just keep it all in. They lock a manhole cover over those emotions, and they seethe and bubble below the surface in the unconscious mind.

People may succeed in masking their anger with silence, but soon their silence turns into depression. The sad truth is that many people suffer from deep depression because they have unresolved anger in their lives. It’s almost as if they have turned that unresolved anger inward against themselves. They become depressed because of this great unresolved hurt in their life.

Unmet expectations and unresolved anger are just two of the more common psychological causes of depression, and there are many more.

But today I want you to consider that there are some spiritual causes of depression which are not mentioned much in the psychological literature, but which are mentioned in the Bible. And when you look at these causes, you begin to see that they can have some pretty strong linkage with the other causes of depression that we’ve talked about.

The Word of God is very honest in its appraisal of people. When you look at the main characters of the Bible, you find that they were people like yourself. They had their good days and they had their bad days. God doesn’t paint them for us in an idealistic way - He shows them warts and all. Many of them underwent times of depression, in spite of the fact that they were men and women of faith. People like Paul and Abraham, David and Job knew what it was to be depressed. There’s no sense in us going through life pretending to be spiritually immune from depression if it could strike spiritual giants like these.

I want to zero in on three people in particular to illustrate three spiritual causes of depression. They are Elijah, Jonah, and Peter.

Elijah was one of the most important people in the whole BIble. He was sort of a representative of all of the OT prophets. When you think of a prophet, you think of Elijah - he was the prototype. At the Transfiguration, when Jesus Christ appeared in all his glory before his disciples, two men appeared with him. They were Moses and Elijah. Think about that. The Lord could have chosen anybody from the OT - he could have chosen Abraham, or Jacob, or Joseph, or David, or Solomon, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah. But Elijah was one of the two people he chose to appear on that special occasion.

During his earthly ministry, when Jesus performed miracles and cast out demons, some people thought that he was the prophet Elijah resurrected from the dead. That’s how highly they thought of Elijah!

Elijah was a man whose spiritual life was robust and strong. The Lord used him in mighty ways, to do mighty things. And he did this at a time when the nation Israel was going backwards spiritually. Elijah stood out like a beacon, like a lighthouse, calling the people back to repentance.

Yet, for all that, Elijah experienced a time of deep depression in his life when he wanted to simply lay down and die. It’s recorded for us in 1 Kings 19. Elijah had, literally, just come off the greatest spiritual mountain-top experience of his whole life. He had challenged a wicked and powerful king. He had gone one-on-one with 450 false prophets and defeated them all. He had shown the people of Israel who was really the Lord. And now he was exhausted.

1 Kings 19:1 Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.” Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

Elijah was depressed. All the recent spiritual activity had depleted him. His ministry gas tank was on empty. He was exhausted, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

His depression was caused by spiritual stress. We need to understand that ministry takes spiritual energy. Whether you are witnessing to a friend, or trying to raise your kids according to God’s principles, or teaching a Sunday School class, or leading a Bible study, ministry takes energy.

You may think that just because you are involved in the Lord’s work, you can go on giving and giving without pausing to replenish your own reservoir of spiritual energy. You can’t. Many is the pastor, many is the missionary, who has crashed and burned because he has ignored that rule.

Elijah was running on empty and God knew it. That’s why he took him out on the backside of the desert. The first thing Elijah needed was sleep. The second thing he needed was food. The third thing he needed was to have a fresh encounter with God. That was the key to getting Elijah back on his feet.

You cannot continue effectively in ministry unless you are meeting regularly with God. The spiritual stress of ministry is too great - you’ll end up depressed and defeated, and quite possibly disgraced, if you ignore this principle.

God met with Elijah, and in the meeting, restored Elijah’s perspective on life. He filled him with hope and courage again. And he got him back on track in his own effectiveness as a servant of God.

The second spiritual cause of depression is sin. Following the crucifixion of Jesus, we find the apostle Peter depressed because he had sinned. Through the events of that momentous week, Peter had not been following Jesus as closely as he should have been. He had been sleeping instead of praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He had denied his Lord in the courtyard of Ananias. He had deserted Jesus in his hour of greatest need. As Jesus hung dying on the cross, Peter wasn’t even there. He had sinned.

So it’s not surprising that Peter was depressed. He regarded himself as a total failure. The Bible says that he wept bitterly. Although he was glad that Jesus had risen from the dead, his joy was muted, because Peter thought that now, in all likelihood, he was unusable to the Lord. All that was left for him was to go back to the fishing boats again. He couldn’t believe that Jesus could ever forgive him for what he had done, much less have any future plans for him.

Sin is the greatest demotivator in the spiritual life. If you are harboring sin in your life, you will experience a depression of the soul. Listen to the words of David in Psalm 32, as he recalls how he felt after he had sinned with Bathsheba:

“When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

Depression, which was caused by their own sin, had wrongly skewed both David’s and Peter’s outlook on life. They needed to be restored. In Peter’s case, that restoration came when the Lord met him in John 21 on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus asked him three times “Peter, do you love me?” And each time, Peter answered “Lord, you know I love you.” And Jesus replied “Feed my sheep.”

Jesus was telling Peter, “Look. Just because you sinned doesn’t mean that I can’t use you. You’ve repented. You love me. You want to follow me. That’s the kind of person I’m looking for. I can use you to feed my sheep.” And we know that that’s what the Lord used Peter to do.

The enemy would have you believe that, because of some past sin in your life, you are now useless to God. He wants you to wallow in a depression caused by that sin. He wants to keep you on the sidelines in the great battle between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of darkness. He wants you to think that you’re no good, that you’re useless, that you’ve blown it, that you’ve lost your opportunity to serve God.

He doesn’t want you to know about God’s forgiveness, about God’s restoration. He doesn’t want you to know that God can take you in your brokenness and make you more effective than you were before.

Spiritual stress can cause depression. Sin can cause depression. And self-centeredness can cause depression.

Jonah was a man who had plans of his own. When God called him to go to Nineveh to preach, he took off in the opposite direction. It was only through a remarkable series of events, which involved a storm, a fish, and a prayer, that God was able to get Jonah where he wanted him to be.

Jonah conducted an evangelistic campaign in Nineveh sometime in the eighth century BC. The results were remarkable.

The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.

Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

You would think that Jonah would have been overjoyed at this response. But he wasn’t.

Jonah 4:1 But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Do you hear what he’s saying? He’s saying “Thanks a lot God. Why did you have to bring me through all those horrible experiences, just to help you do something that you were planning to do all along anyway? How inconsiderate of you, God, to disrupt my life, my agenda, my comfort, to bring me here to Nineveh to accomplish something which you could have done all along by yourself.”

What a selfish attitude he had! Jonah measured everything in terms of what it meant for himself, instead of measuring it in terms of what it meant for God’s glory. He was more concerned with his own plans than with God’s program.

You know, it’s easy for a Christian to become like Jonah. Instead of getting excited about the things that make God excited - lost souls coming to the Savior, church growth, people being ministered to - they see everything in selfish terms.

I recently heard of a church which had called a youth pastor. He arrived at the church and was already involved in ministry with the youth group. The church had scheduled a special installation service for him on a particular Sunday morning. But on the Saturday night before, unknown to the youth pastor, some of the kids had gotten rambunctious and had thrown some rolls of toilet paper around outside the church after the youth meeting. They were acting like typical teenagers, in other words.

Well, when the members of the church drove in the next morning and saw gobs of wet toilet paper on the bushes and in the parking lot, all hell broke loose. The chairman of the board of trustees almost blew his gasket. Many people skipped Sunday School in order to have an emergency meeting of concerned members to discuss what could be done about the youth group. Needless to say, there weren’t many smiling faces at the installation service for that youth pastor!

That’s the kind of thing that happens when Christians start getting self-centered. The people in that church who went on the warpath over some gobs of wet toilet paper were people who really didn’t give a damn about the youth group. They could care less that the youth group was attracting teenagers to hear the gospel. No. All they cared about was how their bushes looked and how their parking lot looked, so that they could feel good about themselves when they drove in on Sunday morning to worship God.

You know, it’s easy to get like that. It’s easy to forget about what God wants because you’re so busy focusing on what you want. You must never forget that God loves people. He doesn’t love programs. He doesn’t love buildings. He doesn’t love equipment. He doesn’t love reputations. It isn’t going to matter to God whether there’s toilet paper on the bushes, or coffee stains on the carpet, or one of the folding chairs breaks because a fat lady sits on it. But it does matter to him that a soul spends eternity in hell because a church doesn’t care enough to welcome that person in, warts and all. And it does matter to him if you as a Christian develop an attitude that communicates Don’t Mess with My Stuff.

That kind of self-centered attitude breeds depression. The prophet Jonah regarded God and God’s program as an irritation to him. His heart was not beating with God’s heart. His heart was not broken by the things that break God’s heart. He was totally wrapped up in himself. That’s why we find him at the end of the book in a depression.

Spiritual stress causes depression. Sin causes depression. And self-centeredness causes depression. What’s the cure?

The cure is to meet with God. In Psalms 42 & 43, the Psalmist begins by saying

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

And he keeps coming back to the refrain:

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

He doesn’t deny depression. Throughout these Psalms, there is an up and down progression, from depression and discouragement, to hope and praise.

And that’s the way life often is. We do get depressed. We do have bad days. But as long as we have a relationship with God, we don’t have stay there. If we make it our goal to meet with God in His Word and in prayer, our perspective on life will be restored, our effectiveness in His service will be re-established.

Psalm 121:1 I lift up my eyes to the hills— where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.