One of my favorite conference moments to date has been an interaction between John MacArthur and John Piper. The details are a bit hazy, but if memory serves me correct, they were participating in a panel discussion and the moderator asked them about depression. Piper described some of the darkest hours of his life and ministry, saying that for a long period of time—months or years—he wept every day. Then it was MacArthur’s turn to speak and he said, “I’ve never been depressed for a day in my life.” It was a practical statement, I think, devoid of any kind of judgment. It was simply the truth. I may not remember it perfectly, but it happened something like that. And it set in stark contrast how two men, both used mightily by the Lord, can have such different experiences and such different dispositions.

Christians get depressed too. This statement may seem a wee bit trite, but it’s an important message and one Christians need to hear. Too many people have been taught that Christians—true Christians, good Christians, real Christians—don’t get depressed or that depression is always the outworking of serious sin. This heaps guilt and anguish upon those who are already suffering mental or emotional pain. Is my depression a result of a sin I’ve committed against God? Is there a sin I need to confess to make it all go away? Am I even a Christian? With the anguish comes stigma so that those who suffer so often suffer in silence, afraid and ashamed to admit what they are going through. Many Christians sympathize with physical pain but roll their eyes at emotional pain.

Here is a wise word from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, from his work Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure. It will help to know that the biblical context for what he is writing here is Psalm 42.

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. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized 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 problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience.

 

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 priase Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.