You could feel it coming and now you’re in it. Your days are drudgery. Your nights are restless. You wonder when you last ate a complete meal. People, even friends and family, are a burden. You want to hide—in your house, in your room or in your bed. If only you could block out the emotional pain, the dread, the shame, the resentment. And you are stuck, powerless and hopeless.
It is within such a space, a space called depression, that depression lies to you. Depression’s lies uncover its ravenous nature, its desire to devour you, to swallow you whole; to—in the darkness—bind you.
It’s best to catch a lie before it takes hold. Perhaps unmasking three lies in this blog will help you escape the grasp of depression.
1) First, depression keeps you in its hold with the lie that all depression is sin.
Depression is a condition of emotional exhaustion. The key questions are why and how we get exhausted. Since God has made each of us body and soul, the inception of depression can be either, but the experience of depression will always involve both body and soul.
Consider the relationship between physical exhaustion and emotional exhaustion. Where there is physical illness, we often find emotional exhaustion. We observe this source of depression in some post-partum women, patients with chronic illnesses, extensive injury and probably in some neurochemistry that nobody understands sufficiently. In such cases coming out of depression includes caring for our bodies (medical care, sleep, good food, rest) within a biblical perspective on our suffering.
Grief can trigger depression. Grief is often appropriate and right – and exhausting. It requires laborious emotional work to enter, accept and walk through grief. David is responding primarily to the grief of relational loss—of exclusion and persecution—in Psalm 42. As Jesus considered His approaching suffering in Gethsemane, He cried, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death…”
Your depression can be simple emotional exhaustion. Be aware, however, that emotional exhaustion can become the occasion for sin. Physical suffering can tempt a sinful demand for justification, and faithless attempts to control or blame or to seek our own comfort.
Understanding the physical elements of depression frees us to wise discernment and a trusting response to depression.
“Therefore, those also who suffer according to the will of God shall entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right.” — 1 Peter 4:19
2) Second, depression keeps you in its hold with the lie that the way you feel has the right to rule in your heart.
A rich theology of emotions helps us respond to depression in the light and life of Christ and His good news! God created us to feel, to experience life with Him, with others and with His creation. Our inner selves produce emotions in response to life experiences: And emotions rise like aromas into our inner awareness (called the conscience). A sinless conscience perceives and sorts emotions properly. But when the conscience is blinded by “a darkened heart” (Ephesians 4:17ff), emotions are mishandled. We either suppress them, locking them beneath the surface of awareness or we release them to rule our thoughts and behavior. Suppressed emotions rule covertly. Released emotions rule overtly. But emotions are not created to rule at all. They are messengers that reveal our deepest condition. They are not the condition itself. So, notice your emotions and then speak truth to them. Gospel truth has a unique authority to array your emotions in their proper place and proportion in your life.
Notice how David does this in Psalm 42: “Why are you in despair, o my soul? and Why have you become downcast within me?” Apparently, David recognized an emotion of despair rising within him. He asks the right question: “Where is this coming from?” His conscience begins to diagnose his heart by noticing his emotions. Then he speaks truth to his inner self: “Hope in God, for I will yet praise Him.” David’s trust in God, enables him to order his emotions in line with God’s promises.
This is helpful when feelings of depression (despair) enter your heart. You don’t have to accept their dominance. Instead, diagnose your emotions in light of the gospel. Some emotions are valid, to be borne with endurance and hope (Romans 5:1-5). In other cases, your emotions will reveal your need of deeper repentance and growing trust.
3) Third, depression keeps you in its hold with the lie that there’s no way out.
It tells you that nothing will change, that your depression is permanent. Depression, by nature, wants to fill the room of your inner self. And when it does, depression is all you see. Asaph, who wrote Psalm 77, experienced the feeling of being trapped in depression:
“Will the Lord reject forever? And will He never be favorable again?
Has His lovingkindness ceased forever? Has His promise come to an end forever?”
Those who are captive to depression need light from the outside, from Christ Himself. In his depression Asaph turns His thoughts to the Lord and His redemptive works:
“I will meditate on all Your work and muse on Your deeds.
Your way, O God, is holy;
What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders.”
Asaph recounts the exodus from Egypt; how the apparent hopelessness of Israel’s situation ushed in God’s “paths in the mighty waters.” For we who trust in the God of the Exodus, there is rescue. We will be brought through. How does Christ enter with us into our dungeons of depression? He becomes our company and grants us hidden strength there. Sometimes He “makes [us] lie down in green pastures and leads [us] beside still waters.” He calls us to rest, to get well, to eat, to exercise. Sometimes He enters our darkness with His word. His voice in scripture gives fresh perspective and power for one step, the next step, toward the light as He Himself is in the light. And sometimes He enters our darkness with the light of a friend, a brother or sister in Christ. Their voice, their presence, their faith gives insight and power to take those first steps out of darkness into Christ’s glorious light.
When we accept the lies depression tells, we are trapped. How good to know that our Jesus sees us stuck in the mire of depression and hears our prayers. So that with David we can say:
I waited intently for the Lord; and He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay.
And He set my feet upon a rock, making my footsteps firm.
He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.