Depression, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Do not get so spiritual that you overlook that God's intentions for the world are good and don't just sit back and say well Jesus is enough. Yes, Jesus is enough but Jesus came to do something on earth and that is to bring salvation and restoration and blessing and I want to see that goodness at work in the world, in my life, in my family, in our church, in our community. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. St. Augustine once said that our deepest emotions often function like smoke from a fire. They can indicate what is going wrong in our hearts before we can even articulate it. In this new teaching series we began yesterday, Pastor J.D. shows us that the aim of the Bible's teaching on emotions isn't to suppress them or even manage them but to read them accurately, express them honestly, and allow the gospel to reshape them completely.

So let's rejoin Pastor J.D. as he addresses the first difficult emotion of depression. You are the most influential person in your life because you talk to yourself more than anybody else. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones said ultimately the aim of the scriptures is to teach you how to talk to yourself the right way because your emotions, listen to this, your emotions don't have brains. They can't think. They can't show faith. You have to show faith. You have to think for your emotions. You have to tell them what reality is and how they should feel. Here is a phrase that I want you to remember throughout this series.

We'll come back to it again and again. We must never feel our way into our beliefs. We have to instead believe our way into our feelings. You don't feel your way into your beliefs. You believe your way into your feelings. A lot of Christians get that we walk by faith and not by sight. What they don't get is that we walk by faith and not by feeling.

For many Christians what they feel is the most reliable indicator of what is true. I feel like God has forgotten me. I feel distant from him. Jeremiah says I feel all of those things but God's word tells me they are not true and I choose to believe his words even though I can't feel them right now. Luther, Luther used to call this drowning out the voices of despair with the louder voice of the gospel. At times he would physically shout at the devil. He would go to a quiet place and he would say no I am not abandoned and I have not been forsaken.

God's word tells me that and Jesus' death on the cross proves it. Maybe you ought to do that. Go somewhere where you're by yourself so people don't think you've lost your mind but you can physically shout God is good. My father is good and I call to mind right now his many acts of faithfulness that prove that.

Brothers and sisters if you cannot recall them have somebody do it for you. That's why Christian community is so important because see inevitably there's going to be times where I lose my way and I need somebody else to call to my mind the promises of God and the goodness of my heavenly father and remind me of those. That's the first thing Jeremiah does is he calls back to mind the goodness of God revealed in the acts of God. Number two, number two Jeremiah says I'm going to learn any lessons that God's trying to teach me. Now I want to be really really careful with this one because I do not want to imply that in whatever suffering you're going through the reason God has you in it is because he's got some grand lesson for you to learn and he's not going to let you out of it until you learn that lesson.

See folks there are many times that's just not true. In fact there is nothing in this story that indicates that Jeremiah's suffering was any kind of response to anything Jeremiah had done. Jeremiah had been a faithful prophet of God since he was a young man yet still even though there was no reason that Jeremiah was in this that came from Jeremiah's life look at what Jeremiah says verse 26. See it's good that you should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It's good for a man that he'd bear the yoke in his youth.

Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him. It is good because God often does his best work in us when we suffer even when we don't know why we are suffering. In fact here are a few things he might be doing.

Not always but he might be doing one of these. Sometimes in our suffering God's trying to take out some idol from our lives. Psalm 119 71. It was good for me to be afflicted because until I was afflicted I did not pay attention to your decrees.

Sometimes God uses suffering simply to get our attention. By the way if that happens you'll know exactly what he's trying to get attention about in your life. The Holy Spirit will always let you know. He won't let you sit in mystery.

He'll let you he'll bring it to mind immediately. Sometimes God might be just simply trying to humble you. 2 Samuel 16. David's been betrayed by his son. David's driven out from Israel as David was leaving in shame and defeat that he doesn't deserve. This jerk named Shimei just follows along behind him insulting him and pelting him with dirt and rocks. And one of David's mighty men is like I'm going to go over and relieve this guy of his head. And David said no.

No I know what he's doing. It's not fair but I just feel like God is trying to humble me right now and so I'm just going to sit here and take it and I'm going to trust God to vindicate me. There are times where I'm like yes what is happening is not fair that criticism is not fair but I think God is probably trying to humble me and teach me to trust more than him and so it's good for a man to sit silently and just wait on the vindication of God. Sometimes God uses times of waiting to prepare you for ministry.

I've pointed out to you before that times of waiting in scripture after you feel called by God are so common I would call them standard. God calls Moses to deliver the children of Israel. Moses doesn't go out and deliver the children of Israel. Instead he gets sent to the desert for 40 years and then God has him deliver the children of Israel. Paul gets called to be Jesus's apostle to the Gentiles. That happens in Acts 9. He's not actually commissioned as a missionary until Acts 13. Scholars say there is a minimum a minimum of 17 years between Acts 9 and Acts 13 where Paul is waiting on God to put him into the thing God told him he was going to have him do.

Waiting. One of the best ones and one of the ones most encouraging to me is from the life of David. I mean here David is a shepherd boy gets taken out of the pasture and anointed with oil. You're going to be the next king. Where does David go? Does he go back to the palace to try on robes? Does he do a you know an interview with a magazine? Go out to fight Goliath?

No. In fact it's really interesting if you read the story in your Bible you'll see that right after the verse where it concludes you know David's call there's a little white space and then the next verse changes the subject and starts talking about somebody else. And I'm reading that thinking what happened in that white space?

Scholars say that white space was about seven years long. So here's David. I got oil in my head says I'm going to be king and where do I go? Back to the pasture.

I got the anointing to be king and I'm going to walk around and follow sheep for the next seven years. Yet we know we know now that that was where God did some of his best work in David. That was where David developed the courage to be able to face the lion and the bear. It's where he probably wrote the 23rd Psalm the most famous worship song in all of Christian history. In that white space of your life that white space of inactivity is where God does his best work.

Some of you are in a white space right now and you're like God it just seems silent. It seems like there's nothing that's happening and God's like I'm doing my best work and you you can trust that I'm working in your white spaces just like I was working in Paul's and David's and Moses's. It's good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Sometimes through pain God has given you the ability to relate to others who are going to walk through the same kinds of pain that you could not relate to if you hadn't walked through it yourself.

Charles Spurgeon who again told his congregation he was confident he'd spent more days in depression than any of them told his congregation I would gladly go into the depths of depression a hundred times if it might help me learn how to cheer a downcast spirit in depression that I might better know how to speak a word in season to the weary. That's the same thing the Apostle Paul said. The Apostle Paul said God let me suffer. God broke me so that I could comfort others with the comfort wherewith I have been comforted. 2 Corinthians. God let me taste the salvation of Jesus from the depths of the pit so I could help you when you were in that pit and I could say from first-hand experience God is good and you can trust him there. Reminds me of that statement by A.W.

Tozer. In order for God to use you greatly when God calls a person a man or a woman and wants to use them greatly he will often first wound them deeply. Some of you have experienced that recently. God has let you walk through some painful chapter. You've gotten divorced. Somebody cheated on you. You've gotten diagnosed with cancer. You lost a child or you lost a parent. You've been diagnosed with some disease that you don't see an end to. You've walked through the pain and the tragedy and the mistake of abortion.

All so you could minister to people in those same situations. You see sometimes the good lesson that God is trying to teach is not even in you. It's just through you and somebody else and God wants you to be able to testify to it. I think I told you a couple weeks ago or a few months ago about these cardboard testimonies. Basically what you do is you play a worship song and a group of people come across the stage and they have a piece of cardboard and on the front and on the front of the piece of cardboard is a one word description of their life before Christ or one sentence description and on the back when they flip it over is a one word or one sentence description of their life after meeting Christ.

Best one of those I've ever seen. A woman comes up on stage standing next to a middle-aged man and she flips her card over and it says diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. The man flips his card over and says I was the doctor who diagnosed her.

I was an atheist. Then he flips his card over and on the back of it it says through her joy in the midst of suffering I came to faith in Christ. Then she flips over her card and it just says worth it. What Jeremiah is saying is I'm confident that there's going to come a time when I'm going to flip the card over on this chapter of my life and it's going to say a big old profound worth it. It is good for a man to sit and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Number three he says I'm going to realize that God's plans are ultimately for good and for blessing.

All right hang with me here. There are two different extremes that different kinds of Christians gravitate toward in the midst of suffering based on your church background. Some in the midst of suffering say well Jesus told us there'd always be tribulation in the world and we'd have tribulation and that we would carry his cross which means it ain't no use praying for things to get better. We should only expect pain and misery and disappointment but God's going to help us get through it.

People who lean this way usually identify as reformed and they love deep theology books. Others of you are like nope God has appointed us to walk in blessing like story Joseph. You might be in prison now but God's got a palace for you right around the corner so you just hang on.

You're in that unjust prison right now but pretty soon you're going to be the king of Egypt. You just hang on and wait for that blessing. All right those of you who grew up in more charismatic churches sometimes tend to gravitate toward those answers.

Here's the thing all right both answers are partially correct and both answers are incomplete by themselves. Notice how Jeremiah takes both sides of them here. Watch this Jeremiah says the Lord is my portion says my soul therefore I will hope in him. That word portion is a reference to the allotment of land that each family got when they were given the promised land. God gave to each of the different families a section of the land and they passed it down from generation to generation and that was their portion and Jeremiah was like I ain't got no more land.

The Babylonians stole it all. I've got nothing left but you know what God is my portion. In fact think of God's blessing like a pie and maybe you got one piece that represents a good marriage and one piece represents a good job and one piece represents good health. Jeremiah says God is the best piece of his own pie and I don't want to lose any of those blessings but if I lose them all as long as I retain God and God is my portion God's better than the whole pie because God is the best part of a blessing. So God is my portion and if I have that I can have joy even if I don't have anything else. All right but then he says watch this verse 32 I'm also confident that though God caused grief he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast fatherly love. Y'all let's be clear Jeremiah wanted deliverance from prison. He wanted vindication in the eyes of the people. Jeremiah wanted reunion with his loved ones and restoration and salvation for his people and he says I am convinced that God's going to change things in the days to come.

Why does he think that? He thinks that because he knows that God is a father of goodness and blessing. Y'all in the account of the creation one of the most predominant words in Genesis 1 is the word bless.

God created the world to bless it which means he wanted it to flourish and prosper and not to suffer. When God gave Abraham his promise to bring salvation to the earth he expressed that promise in terms of restored blessing. He said Abraham I'm going to bless you.

I'm going to bless you and I'm going to use you to be a blessing to all the nations and all the families of the earth. So we have every reason to look for as God's people. We have every reason to look for blessing and restoration in our lives now because that's the kind of father we have. Psalm 27 13 King David said I'm confident I will look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. That's the key phrase in that verse. In the land of the living I'm going to see God's goodness. In other words I get that heaven's going to be awesome and I get we're just going to like roll around in the goodness of God up there but I'm convinced I'm actually going to see it now. In fact he goes on in Psalm 30 to say God can the dead praise you?

I'm sure they can praise you in heaven but can they praise you now? I want to tell my generation now about your goodness and I want to be able to demonstrate it through instances in my life where your goodness and your restoration have broken through. Writer Psalm 88 in fact says it a little brazenly. He says God does not just work wonders for the dead. In other words it's not just in the sweep by and by that we experience God's goodness.

We experience it right now. So do not get so spiritual that you overlook that God's intentions for the world are good and don't just sit back and say well Jesus is enough. Yes Jesus is enough but Jesus came to do something on earth and that is to bring salvation and restoration and blessing and I want to see that goodness at work in the world now. I want to see it in my days, in my life, in my family, in our church, in our community.

Frankly I'm tired of people who try to be more spiritual than the Bible. Though Jesus sometimes causes grief I know ultimately he shows compassion. The arc of history and the arc of my life is long but it bends towards Jesus and his mercy and compassion in my life. So that leads me to number four, Jeremiah's last thing. Jeremiah says in light of this you should get up tomorrow and look for the goodness of God. You should get up tomorrow and look for the goodness of God because the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

Oh his mercies never come to an end. They're brand new every morning like the sun rising in the eastern sky. Great is your faithfulness. Now don't you love that image of the new morning? God's mercies and his faithfulness are like the sun that rises new every morning washing away the shadows and the darkness of the night.

Today this day may feel like a terribly dark, terribly dark, never ending night of mistakes and despair. But God's mercies are going to come up brand new tomorrow morning as certain and as bright as the sun. I used to cling to this verse, I still cling to this verse, when I'd have one of those days where I just really struggled with some sin and I just felt knocked down and defeated again by mistake after mistake and I just kind of in my heart I'd be thinking surely God has given up on me and then I'd remember this verse and be like no tomorrow is a brand new day and that sun of God's mercies is going to rise in my life as if there had been no night as if it was the first day that I'd ever lived. It's going to be unaffected by the darkness of the previous day and God's going to be ready tomorrow morning to begin a new gracious work in me that very day. Some of you might feel like you have messed up so bad there is no more plan for you but I'm telling you the darkness of this day is over and tomorrow morning God's mercies, this morning, God's mercies are going to rise like the new sun in your life. It's like a friend of mine says if you're not dead God's not done.

He is not done with you. His mercies are brand new this morning and they will be new again tomorrow morning. You see for those whose depression has a primarily spiritual root cause this is the hope that drives depression away. Your emotions might be telling you that there's nothing ahead but darkness and despair. But see brothers and sisters you must call to mind that Jesus got out of the grave which means that he's got good plans for you.

He's got good plans for your family. It means that ultimately your story is going to end in victory and not in defeat and you got to proclaim that glorious gospel to yourself. You've got to teach yourself to think that way. You've got to not feel your way in your beliefs.

You got to believe your way into those feelings. You should call to mind that it is by grace that you were saved through faith and nothing of yourself. That was the gift of God and that means that God has preordained good works for you to go and walk in them. If it was not your goodness that made him call you it's not your goodness that's going to sustain you. You have to call to mind that you were saved for a purpose and that purpose was to bring blessing to others to cause happiness to others and not cause pain. The fact that you came to know God was not an accident. God called you and he called you for a purpose. David said you knew me and you knit me together in my mother's womb for that purpose and before I'd ever seen the light of day you had written down all these good works that you intended for me to accomplish in a book and those thoughts that book that idea that all my days have been laid out according to your plan for blessing those thoughts are precious to me and they drive away the darkness of doubt and despair. You might feel like Jeremiah like you have been forsaken but this you must call to mind the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases his mercies have never come to an end and never will they're new every morning great is your faithfulness oh God for many of you this could be a watershed moment in your life because up until now your emotions have dictated reality to you but like I said your emotions can't show faith they don't have a brain you have to show faith which brings me to these three chairs up here I read a book several years ago by a guy named Watchman Nee who was a Chinese Christian who lived through all kinds of suffering darkness and despair and he said is it really Christian happiness you got to think of it like three men that are walking on a wall let this these three chairs represent a wall he said in the first place you're going to have fact fact is the first guy on the wall he said behind fact you've got faith and then behind faith you got feeling he said now here's the thing when faith has its eyes on fact fact does who God is fact of what Jesus has done and feeling keeps his eyes on faith then all three are able to walk on the wall just fine fact faith feeling he says but the moment that faith turns around and starts to look at feeling then both faith and feeling will fall off the wall he's saying the same thing Jeremiah is saying in the midst of my feelings I call to mind the goodness of God I call to mind the goodness of God based on the facts of who Jesus is and what he has done for me on the cross it may not naturally arise out of my circumstances but it arises out of the Bible that Jesus is sealed with his blood and proven with his resurrection and I'm not going to feel my way into my beliefs I'm going to put my faith in the fact of who Jesus is and what he's done and let my feelings I'm going to teach them to follow this faith in these facts I'm not going to feel my way into beliefs I'm going to believe my way into my feelings so again Jeremiah says get up and look for the goodness of God which brings one final question one final question some of you say well how do you know how do you know God has steadfast love for you in fact you might wonder you might say I I don't know that I'm not gonna like fill with mistakes I feel like God has plenty of reasons to cash me aside and maybe he's punishing me for some of my past sins great question I'm so glad you asked here's how you know reread this chapter again but put this chapter in the mouth of Jesus wasn't Jesus the one who experienced real exile wasn't Jesus really the one who was driven from Jerusalem with a whip away from God's people away from the presence of the father he loved driven to a cross wasn't Jesus the one whose body God tore like a bear the one into whom God drove and shot the arrows of his wrath wasn't Jesus the one who literally drank wormwood by the way the new testament word for wormwood is gall Matthew 27 34 when Jesus went to the cross he was given a sponge with vinegar mixed with gall Jesus literally fulfilled what Jeremiah was talking about in Lamentations 3 Jesus drank the gall the bitterness of God's wrath in our place he drank the cup of God's wrath to the dregs so that not a single drop will be left for me and so that when I get up in the morning I don't have to drink on the cup of God's wrath because there's an overflowing cup of goodness and mercy that follows me all the days of my life in other words in other words Jesus lived in the darkness of Lamentations 3 1 through 20 so I could experience the light and the blessing of verses 21 through 33 Jesus went into the depths of depression so that I could crawl out of it so now you see now you see when darkness seems to hide his face I can rest on his unchanging grace and every high and stormy gale my anchor holds within the veil on Christ the solid rock I stand all other grounds is sinking sand all the other see every emotion I have is sinking ground every circumstance I have is transient and changing but who Christ is and what he did that's a solid rock and I'm going to put my faith in that solid rock and I'm going to hold on to it in the midst of a life that may feel like an a to z of suffering so once again friends you get up tomorrow you get up and look for God's mercy God's not dead the wrong shall fail the right prevail with peace on earth goodwill to man Charles Spurgeon one last time I find no better cure for my depression than to trust in the Lord simply with all my heart and seek to realize afresh the power of the peace-speaking blood of Jesus and his infinite love and dying upon the cross to put away all my transgressions my faith is found a resting place not in device or creed I trust in him I trust in trust in the fact of who he is and I'll let my feelings follow that one day the steadfast love of the Lord is never ending you're listening to summit life the bible teaching ministry of jd greer and if you happen to join us late you can listen again online at jdgrier.com jd tell us about this new series smoke from a fire you've shared a bit in our teaching so far but what exactly do you mean by that phrase that phrase actually comes from saint augustin where he said that our emotions he said those are like smoke that are that is arising from the fire and if we follow us this trail of smoke back down to the fire we can see the altars that we're worshiping at so it's actually an indication it's an indicator light of what's actually going on in your heart so rather than just trying to suppress your emotion or deal with your emotion I need to be less sad less worried you've got to actually figure out what is it that is the fire that indicates the altar you're worshiping at that's creating that emotion we have a new devotional book that I'm really excited about because it's a great a great tool to help you actually do this it's called smoke from a fire just like our series and I think it'll make a great accompaniment to you as you as you listen to and study and ponder these things ask for the 10-day devotional and scripture guide when you give today at the suggested level of 35 or more it's our way of saying thanks because your financial support makes this ministry possible and it helps people around the world dive deeper into the gospel message with us every day donate and ask for your copy when you call eight six six three three five fifty two twenty that's eight six six three three five fifty two twenty or you can request the new workbook resource online at jdgrier.com i'm molly vinovich inviting you to join us again thursday when we move on to another emotion that i'm sure none of you struggle with you'll have to come back then to see what it is we'll see you thursday here on summit life with jd greer today's program was produced and sponsored by jd greer ministries