'Spiritual Depression' Happens to Us All

If you've been a believer for any amount of time, you're familiar with the feeling.

It's like your...off, somehow. You're not connecting with God for some reason, even after you've asked Him to search your heart and reveal to you any unconfessed or secret sin. You are praying your guts out. You read your Scriptures hoping to feel real again.  Your relationships with people may be going well, but you don't feel connected to anyone. There's no reason to be in a desert but you are anyway.

And you are not alone. Not by a long shot.

It is spiritual depression, the subject of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' classic, "Spiritual Depression: It's Causes and Cure." And it will affect us all at one point or another. Actually, probably several points. 

A few months ago I realized something in me was...off. I couldn't explain it or understand it. It felt familiar but not. I kept thinking I had done something to get myself into this desert. There seemed to be no reason for feeling in a funk. My first sign of hope came from Scripture, specifically from the transcript of Christ's temptation in the desert in Luke 4. I noticed Jesus was "led by the Spirit in the desert." He didn't do anything to get himself there. The Holy Spirit led the Lord Himself into the desert for a specific purpose. Much of my spiritual journey in this season is shared in my recent sermon over Luke 4:1-15 at NBC this past July. 

I began to learn I was not alone in facing spiritual depression. "The fact remains," writes Lloyd-Jones, "that there are large numbers of Christian people who give the impression of being unhappy. They are cast down, their souls are 'disquieted within them', and it is because of that" the late London minister calls attention to the subject in this collection of hard-hitting, refreshing sermons.

This book has been an oasis for me.  I especially appreciate that Lloyd-Jones distinguishes that there are certain personalities who are hard on themselves, given to unhealthy instrospection. This kind of insight pervades the book. He writes,

"Some of us by nature, and by the very type to which we belong, are more given to this spiritual disease called spiritual depression than others. We belong to the same company as Jeremiah, and John the Baptist and Paul and Luther and many others. A great company! Yes, but you cannot belong to it without being unusually subject to this particular type of trial." 

Further:

"You cannot isolate the spiritual from the physical for we are body, mind and spirit. The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures." 

Lloyd-Jones defines in his book an important and vital issue most Christians face but never really define or defeat because they are blinded to it. I'm thankful for this volume and give it the highest recommendation I can.