A friend recently lent me a book that I forever took to read (if at all), and I suspected his way of saying “time’s up” was suddenly reaching out again and asking me to review it in a group setting of Ugandan biblical counselors.
Like they say, the pressure was on. Yet I had fewer than 5 days to do so. I eventually reviewed it and almost regretted I hadn’t read it earlier.”
Image: 20th-century Welsh Protestant minister and medical doctor, Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones. Courtesy Truthforlife.org
Like they say, the pressure was on. Yet I had fewer than 5 days to do so. I eventually reviewed it and almost regretted I hadn’t read it earlier.”
That urgency finally got me resolved to finish this book from a dead British doctor from the 20th century, Martyn Lloyd Jones. Ah, the book title? – Spiritual Depression.
But first, I was caught off guard by his introduction; he seemed to shy away from the “depression” terminology we all swim in lately; his choice of word was “miserable.” His thesis in this book is that all God’s people, starting with the psalmists, faced depression and “expressed misery,” yet he still argued, “Miserable Christians are a bad advertisement to the gospel.”
Joy is a critical piece in our evangelism. Unhappy Christians are a poor advertisement to the gospel. Dr. Jones sees how we handle trouble as a means of evangelism. By his definition, if we are not pursuing the mind of Christ, we will all soon be depressed.
That shook my ground, because today, we tend to zero in on particular people who are vocal about their sadness as we quickly label them (or they label themselves) “depressed.”
Yet this seems a non-existent reality in Loyd Jones’s days and in the biblical framework. He states that every Christian on this side of heaven is miserable, a.k.a. depressed; they fight some sort of sadness. He lists multiple causes and cures for a miserable Christian. I will explore a few here with some comment on each.
- Unbelief
He points out right away that the ultimate cause of Christian misery is unbelief (without unbelief, he says, even the devil is powerless). He cites the psalmist who ends an interrogation of his downcast soul with the sentence, “Yet again shall I yet praise him.” (Ps 42)
Jones sees any self-assessment of our sadness not merely as a means towards mere self-expression or therapy but as a means of arriving at God; yet again, I shall praise him. God is the health of the psalmist’s countenance. Dr. Jones wouldn’t hesitate to say depressed people need God first, more than self-centered talk and therapy. - The best counselors are first the best counselees.
In all his assessment of depression, gauging from his personal examples, Dr. Loyd Jones demonstrates that the best counselor is always the best counselee, as in, people who have regularly taken God’s word to apply to their own soul wounds are often best placed to help others.
This I think also punches holes in the elevated modern idea of an expert sitting in front of you and dispensing all the methods they’ve never used to help you “get out of this.” - God transforms, not replaces, our temperament.
He talks about temperaments and says we need to understand ourselves and our personalities and appreciate that sometimes the manifestation of our troubles varies from person to person because of (but not solely) personality.
He emphasizes the need to know your extremes, as you remember God saves us “in” our personality but does not save us “from” our personality. Not all Christians should be identical. “Regeneration does not override personality.” he says
He, for example, says introverts should learn to differentiate between self-examination and self-introspection. The first is biblical; the other is not. He also highlights the danger of ignoring how the devil can manipulate all these, including our temperament too.
4. Naivety about spiritual warfare
Jones urges “miserable Christians” not to forget the existence of the devil and the reality of spiritual warfare. For he says our enemy can easily lie that what you are experiencing physically is spiritual or that what you are experiencing spiritually is physical. Implying care of the physical body (see Paul’s metaphor on physical exercise) while also remembering Psalm 51, for example, where “broken bones” (v. 8) are a result of David’s sin (and yet not always, as in Psalm 88)
- Genes and weariness
Jones also notes the reality of weakness due to physical weariness (for example, as seen in Elijah’s, 1 Kings 19), yet he also cites physical and health and genetic factors as seen in depression cases of men like Charles Spurgeon, whose genetic gout condition often led to his depression. - Half gospel, half living
Jones then cites Jesus’s example of a man “half healed” by Jesus in Mark 8 who sees “men walking as trees” and illustrates this by saying most Christians are like him; they have not embraced full spiritual sight, the whole gospel, or they have only caught bits of it, citing examples
7. “I don’t overthink spiritual things.”
Perhaps they were born in a Christian family; maybe they like Christian principles and good behavior, but they have never wrestled with the implications of all of Christ as presented in all of scripture. They like sanctification but not justification; they don’t want to “overthink spiritual things,” so they are often miserable; they are depressed.
- Feelings over truth
He says another group of Christians hold onto feelings more than conviction; they are more passionate about “what works” than “what is true.” He says if they don’t find a biblical balance, they too soon get depressed. - Limited power of your tongue
Dr. Jones highlights the need to talk to yourself during trouble, but he quickly adds, “Not too much, because we spend a lot of time with ourselves anyway.” A lot of self-talk for mental health exists today, so it was helpful for me to hear this because I realized confronting and defying my sadness with the gospel is different from propping myself up with motivations and slogans.
The psalmist talked to himself, “Why are you downcast, oh my soul?” but he did not listen to himself. In fact, he didn’t just “talk through his problems” he talked to the Lord about his problems. “Most of our problems arise from listening to ourselves, not talking to ourselves,” Jones says. - Unhappy & unSound doctrine
Dr. Jones also says most of us Christians are miserable because we are into church things and activities, but we are not yet spiritually “made new.” We have been to church, but we have not experienced the new birth; we are busy in ministry but not born again, rallying others but not regenerate, we lack the fundamentals; we say we are saved but do not know what we are saved from. Jones says some miserable Christians concentrate on sanctification before they have understood justification; they are big on “to-dos” and morality but have not understood what empowers it. They subscribe to salvation but never understand doctrine. He cites the Pharisees: ‘They knew what God had said but missed what he had revealed.
Jones thus argues that depressed Christians must be clear on certain first things in order to enjoy the Christian life. In order to beat their misery, their depression. Things like, if righteousness could be achieved by law, Christ died for nothing. Rightness with God. How are we saved? How does God accept us?
Without these questions, we are burying our heads in the sand of self-improvement. Jones also states that some Christians agree on righteousness, but disagree on how it is obtained. And that’s why they are depressed.
- Sin and self-perception
Others, he says, have never grappled with the nature of biblical sin; they only think of sin as “our acts” but not as our fallen nature, and so they grew up in church but have never grappled with sin.
He writes, “The trouble of a miserable Christian is that he has never been made truly miserable (depressed) by sin.” He cites Simeon’s words about Jesus in Luke 2 as the “cause of the rising and falling of many” and insists there is no rising in the gospel without falling—without recognizing sin spoiled everything, for starters.
In other words, we must see sin for what it is. There is an order. He says we can hear Christ preached every Sunday and yet still wonder why he wants to save us at all. Jones argues from Romans that those who haven’t come face-to-face with the law soon underestimate their salvation, which easily makes them miserable, a.k.a. depressed.
Dr. Jones goes on to explore other reasons why Christians get depressed, including discipline and false teaching, among others too extended to detail here.
But oh what a wonderful read it was!
