Let's start with a word of prayer. Lord God, we pray for Your help now as we are here because we want to help people. We want to help ourselves grow spiritually and progress and overcome problems. We want to help others and be wise counselors and exhort and encourage and build up, strengthen, edify. Lord, those words. They're so far out of our ability range. They're so superhuman. to build up someone's strength and impart spiritual strength to a weak person. Lord, that's just so supernatural. And so we pray for help. Please teach us, dear Lord, from Your Word. Because souls depend on it. Your people's joy depends on it, which means Your glory in the eyes of Your people depends on it. So we beseech You in the name of Your Son. Amen. Chapter eight. I skipped over chapter eight before because I wasn't done researching and I've been doing so much study the past few months on depression, really struggling to get a handle on it. And finally, this week, this past week, especially God, just everything started to come together and I realized my problem. My problem was I didn't listen to my own I was teaching on the importance of biblical terminology. I was using the world's terminology, the word depression, which is useless. It tells you nothing about the nature of the problem or the solution. All it tells you is that you're down, and that's it. And so I've been studying this week about what is the biblical terminology for depression, and everything started opening up. Introduce what I'm learning tonight, and then we'll we'll finish it up next time Given the 1300 percent increase in the use of SSRI antidepressant antidepressants over the past two decades Massive massive increase in the use of antidepressants you would expect a massive decrease in the instances of depression. You'd think if these things worked at all, we would have wiped depression out like smallpox. Studies have shown, however, no decrease in the occurrence of depression in the last 10 years. In fact, doctor visits for depression have skyrocketed in the last couple decades. The world's solutions absolutely are not working. Not working. So we need to take a different approach. Now, let's talk about the biblical terminology. The biblical words, I believe, for depression are despair, losing heart, being downcast and weariness. Actually, instead of downcast, you can say joylessness. The losing heart, despair, joylessness, and weariness. And I think a good idea is to urge the counselee to not use the word depression anymore. Just tell him, you know, from now until you're better, just just just don't use that word anymore. Use these words because and there's there's three benefits to using the biblical terminology. One is it's more precise. As usual, the world's term takes a lot of different pieces and just jumbles and throw them all together in one big, big disease depression. Whereas the biblical terminology deals with them individually because they're slightly different, each one of them. Secondly, when the problems are identified with biblical terms, it's so much easier for the council to find the solution. Because they can't look up depression in their Bible, they can look up these words, because these are biblical words, and they can study what Scripture says about them. And not just right now, but for the rest of their life. You teach them what losing heart means. and for the rest of their life. They'll be sitting twenty years from now. They'll be sitting in church one day and all of a sudden the sermon will be on a passage that talks about losing heart and their intent will go up and they'll say, aha, losing heart, I know what that is. And then the pastor's preaching and bam, there's a principle about how to avoid losing heart And they make the connection in their soul. And that can maybe prevent them from plunging into losing heart again. But if they just call it depression and they don't make the connection between depression and losing heart, then they'll miss that. So that's the second benefit is they can they can know how to find the solution. Third benefit of using the biblical terminology is in our culture, depression is so often thought of as a physical medical condition, mainly. And that obscures the issue, that obscures the spiritual issue. The biblical terms sound more spiritual. They don't sound medical. They sound like they really are connected to spiritual things, mostly. So that's a third benefit. And so if you can urge them to just not use the word depression when they're referring to their problem, pick the accurate word. Are they talking about losing heart? Are they talking about despair? Are they talking about joylessness? Are they talking about discouragement or weariness? All right. Now, let me just define these four real quick, and then I'll go over in detail each of the four by losing heart. What I mean is lack of motivation. Feelings of wanting to give up an apathy. Now. I did not get these, I just got to tell you, I didn't get these out of the DSM for the DSM for me to what that is, that's the DSM for is like the Bible. the psychology world Bible for diagnosing psychological problems. If you want to diagnose major depression or diagnose if you want to get insurance reimbursement for treating a psychological problem they have to present the symptoms as listed in the DSM for. So that's what they use the standard. If you go home and Google DSM for major depression or symptoms of depression or whatever, and it'll list. This is in order to diagnose somebody with depression, they have to have five of these items in this list and it'll be a list. And it's this same list that I'm giving you here. And I got to tell you, that is not. by design. Look up the DSM IV and put these in here, you know, squeeze them. I just did a regular word study in Scripture like I always do when I'm studying the Bible, and these are the definitions that came out. So this describes what the DSM IV calls depression, is described in these words. Lack of motivation, feeling of wanting to give up, and empathy. That's what the Greek word translated lose heart means. Wanting to give up, that's the word that when Jesus said, when Jesus gave this parable in Luke, to teach the disciples to always keep on praying and not give up, that's the same word. So it means to just, I don't have any motivation, I don't want to keep going, I just want to quit, I'm apathetic. despair, when I talk about despair, that's losing hope. It's when you don't have any feelings of pleasure in future blessings. So lack of hope, that's despair, that's what despair means. And we're going to go over each of these in detail, so don't worry if you don't catch everything. Third one, joylessness. That's sadness just deep sadness, really feeling low and inability to enjoy life, inability to enjoy present blessings, the things that are going on around you right now. You just can't enjoy them. You can't enjoy a good meal. You can't enjoy a sunrise. You can't do anything. You just you know, when you get like this, you you you just don't have the ability to enjoy life. And and so I'll call that joylessness. Or maybe inability to enjoy. And then and then the fourth one, That's weariness or discouragement. That's where there's no energy or delight in the task that God gives you. He gives you some work and it's burdensome. There's no joy in it. There's no energy for it. You can't get yourself moving. You can barely get out of bed. You don't care about anything and so you don't have any motivation to do anything. That's weariness or discouragement. Okay, so let's talk about each of these four. The Greek word for that, eg kakao, eg kakao, it appears six times in the New Testament. It refers to getting so discouraged that motivation drains away, apathy takes over the heart, a person feels like giving up. God designed us to live with Anxiety, a certain amount of distress and anxiety in our heart all the time. And to have that coexist with joy, he made us to have a tension between simultaneous anxiety and joy all the time. That's what we're supposed to have. Because we live in a fallen, evil world, the evils of our sin and the evils of this world should bug us, they should create some anxiety, they should. If they don't, something's wrong. And the expressions of the goodness of God and the beauty of God that we see should delight us and cause joy in us. The anxiety needs to be there to motivate us to action. For example, you're not going to have the passion that you really need to share the gospel or to do missions until you have a certain amount of anxiety over the lost going to hell, right? You need that to get you moving. We need to take action to deal with sins in our life, problems, and the thing that moves us to take action is our anxiety, and that's biblical, 2 Corinthians 11, 28. Paul had anxiety. He said, beside everything else, he'd lift all of his suffering, horrible suffering. Besides all that, I face the daily pressure of my concern for all the churches who is weak and I'm not weak. Who's led into sin? And I do not inwardly burn. So burning, inner burning, daily pressure, that's anxiety. That's a decidedly unpleasant description of and it's appropriate, it's not wrong, it's good, it's what the Christian is supposed to have. However, that anxiety should never get to the point of just running rampant and unrestrained in our hearts so that it causes us to lose heart. That distress over evil should never get to the point where it just takes over our whole inner man and dominates our thinking and our affections. It needs to be kept in check. And the thing that keeps it in check is our joy. Joy needs to keep it. And hope. Joy is enjoyment of present circumstances. Hope is enjoyment of future circumstances. And those keep it the proper size. Our anxiety is kept the proper size. So when your joy shrivels up and it doesn't have lots of power, and your hope shrivels up, then this takes off, this anxiety just takes over like a bunch of weeds in a garden. So, 2 Corinthians 6-9, Paul describes himself as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. What do you mean, Paul? Well, he's talking about that tension. You have the sorrow, you have the rejoicing, simultaneous, they're both there, but... His sorrow never overwhelmed his rejoicing. The joy is always greater than the sorrow, 2 Corinthians 4, 8. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed. So the anxiety is there, but you're struck down, but you're not destroyed. It doesn't take over because the joy holds it in check. So all that is the first category, that's losing heart, is when the joy shrivels up and it doesn't keep the anxiety in check and the anxiety just takes over. And that's when you lose all your motivation and everything. Now, number two, joylessness. Persistent, overwhelming feelings of sadness, trouble, discouraged mood, reflects an inability to enjoy the pleasures of life, the blessings of life in the present. Because even in the midst of suffering, you're mostly being blessed. Life is filled with millions of potential joys and pleasures, but you're not being blessed. The soul is not always capable of actually enjoying them. Ecclesiastes 519 I think is a fascinating verse when God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them to accept his lot and be happy in his work. This is a gift of God. So. He has to give you both the wealth and the possessions and the ability to actually enjoy the wealth and possessions, because if you just have one, if you just have the wealth and possessions without the ability to enjoy them, that is a curse. That is miserable. People commit suicide when they have rich people. People are so much money they can buy. They can indulge in any pleasure they want. And then they become suicidal because why? Because they have the all the riches and the pleasures and the possessions and not the ability to enjoy them. And that's misery. And so so you got to have both. Unless God grants both the gifts and the ability to enjoy the gift, then joy is not possible. And when that happens, when you get to a point where you can't enjoy pleasures of life, you just can't appreciate them, you can't enjoy them, then that's what I'm calling joylessness. The world calls it depression. I'm calling it joylessness. Incapable of... And when that happens, you lose interest in everything. You lose interest in all the pleasures of life. Psalm 102, 4. One of the hardest verses in the whole Bible for me to understand and relate to. He says, My heart is blighted and withered like grass. I forget to eat my food. Forget to eat my food. Now, I can't relate to that. I don't forget to eat my food. But when you're this low, when you're this down, this joyless, there's no pleasure in eating food. No pleasure in anything. So that's joylessness. That's what I mean by joylessness. Inability to enjoy things. OK, then the third one, despair. I told you that that's a lack of hope. That's when the sorrows in your life eclipse hope. Hope is a feeling of the feeling of happiness in the present because of some wonderful thing that's about to happen. Something that's in the future still so wonderful and it's so certain it's going to happen and you're so sure you're going to like it that you're actually already in an elevated mood. You're happier now even though nothing's happening. It's not happening yet. But you're leaving for this vacation tomorrow morning. You're so excited about it that you feel happy right now. That's hope. That's the meaning of hope. Hope is a feeling. It is not merely believing that something wonderful is going to happen tomorrow. That's not hope by itself. It's not merely thinking about this wonderful thing that's going to happen tomorrow. Hope is a feeling of happiness in an elevated mood that results from being so sure that this thing is going to happen and so sure that you're going to like it, that you actually feel good right now. Something good is coming in the future, but it doesn't bring a feeling of happiness to you right now, then it means you either don't really believe it's going to happen or you don't really believe it's going to be good enough to satisfy you and delight your heart. But hope is so often in Scripture, the essential ingredient for recovering from a downcast, despairing soul. When you get downcast, in fact, that word downcast, the word translated downcast in Psalm 42 and Psalm 43, shachach is the word. And it refers to just sadness, trouble, discouraged mood. And it's always connected to hope. It's always connected to a lack of hope. It's what it is. It's a lack of hope. Hope is always a solution. Psalm 42, 5. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God. Soul is downcast, it's disturbed, it's having this problem. Lack of hope. Psalm 42, 11. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God. Psalm 43, 5. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God. Lamentations 3, 20. I well remember my troubles and my soul is downcast within me, yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. So hope is always a solution to being downcast. So despair means lack of hope. Now, the fourth one. Weariness. Or we call it discouragement, because weariness is, you know, weariness, fatigue is not necessarily a bad thing. It's the human condition. It's not sinful. Jesus got tired. So we're not saying it's wrong to be fatigued or weary in the general sense. But there is a kind of weariness that's forbidden. Galatians 6 9. Let us not lose heart in doing good for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. Hebrews 12 3. Consider him who endured such opposition from simple men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart and growing weary is connected to losing heart. Revelation 2 3. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary. So so God designed us to get tired, but we were not to become weary to the point of discouragement so that we lose heart and give up when we get to that point so that, you know, no energy for the task that God has given you, no delight in his task. Then we've crossed the line into discouragement or weariness. So you can call that one discouragement, you can call it weariness, but that's that's the concept. You just don't delight in a task God has given you anymore. Your ministry doesn't excite you, and so you have no motivation to do it. All right, all that to define depression. I think depression is those four things just lumped together in a pile. Now, let's talk about the causes of those things. The most basic cause of depression is a blockage of joy, of the inflow of joy into one's life. And that's where this diagram comes in here. This, I'm going to reveal the mystery now. You wonder what this is? It's a river. It's a river. These are the headwaters coming out of these little streams that are tributaries coming into this one forming this river. See, you see it now? Doesn't it look like a river? There's three tributaries. Now, the water flowing in this river is joy. This is your life. This is the river is your life. And you have to be filled up with joy. You have you have to have joy. If you see somebody who's a At the bottom of the barrel, clinical, major depression, whatever you want to call it, is absolutely, completely downcast to where they can't get out of bed and they're paralyzed and disabled. They don't have water flowing. You've got to have this water of joy flowing in your life. And there are three places, three inputs of this joy that cause it to flow into your life, three tributaries. There's this one from the past, God's past goodness. When you think about God's past goodness and that causes the joy of gratitude in your heart, that's a source of joy that flows into the river. This middle one is present, God's present goodness. And this other one is God's future goodness. Think about his future goodness, present goodness, past goodness. Those are three different tributaries that flow in. And when we get down and discouraged or lose heart or any of these things, it's because typically one of these has a blockage. We're not getting a flow of joy from God's past goodness. We're not getting a flow of joy from God's future goodness. And this tributary is blocked off. If any one of these three, just one gets blocked off, you got this one flowing, this one flowing, but not this one flowing. If you don't have all three flowing, then what's going to happen is you will have such a low level, a low volume of water flowing that when the trouble comes into your life and rocks fall down and create a dam, there's not going to be enough of a flow to flow over that. If you have all three of these, in putting in, then that's the only time when you'll have enough flow of joy to where it'll flow right over the top of these rocks and you'll be OK. You'll be able to handle hardship. But you can't handle hardship if you only have one or two of these or zero flowing. You understand the diagram? Let's talk about each one of these, how that happens, how these get blocked off. First, we'll talk about the path. How does God's path goodness get blocked off? The answer in one word, ingratitude. People say, what causes depression? Huge cause, ingratitude. Because it blocks off the past tributary. You can't enjoy God's past goodness if you have ingratitude. Failure to notice God's past goodness. Failure to appreciate what's wonderful about God's past goodness. to see his past blessings for what they really were, gestures of love, failure to remember them, call them to mind, and failure to spend adequate time thinking about them. Those four failures result in a blockage of this. They result in ingratitude. And when you have ingratitude, this is blocked off. So you either don't recognize them to begin with, like you were saying, or you just don't appreciate them, or you don't remember them, or whatever, you take them for granted. Somehow, if you're not rejoicing, if there's not a flow of joy into your life from past blessings, then we've got to blockage here. Number two, this middle one. Well, actually, this one addresses both the middle and the future, the present and the future, and that is self-pity. We're talking about causes of depression, the aspects of depression, self-pity. I think this has got to be the most common, most pronounced cause of joylessness in a person's life, self-pity, which is not really a biblical word. If you want the biblical word, I think the biblical word is grumbling and inward grumbling. When a person is, and when I say inward grumbling, I'm saying not verbal. You just, in your own thoughts, you grumble to yourself. That's self-pity. When a person is distressed by circumstance And so, he verbalizes his distress to other people. That's complaining. When a person is distressed by circumstances and he verbalizes his distress to God, that's called a lament. It's a certain kind of prayer. It's called a lament, like the Book of Lamentation. If a person is distressed in circumstances and he turns his verbalization to himself, that's inner grumbling, and we'll call that self-pity. and it is extremely destructive, very destructive. Whenever the focus turns inward, mostly inward, mostly you're looking at yourself, joy is always going to be a casualty, big time casualty. Suffering invades your life and then rather than stepping back and looking at the big picture of God's sovereign purposes, you turn your attention inward on yourself, and you develop this woe is me perspective, even the world understands this, they call it pity party or whatever, and everyone realizes how destructive it is. The result of that is a tunnel vision that blocks out all vision of blessing. You can't see it. God's blessings are everywhere and you're blind and you can't see them at all. You can only see pain, pain, pain. Pain and all the other blessings, you can't see it. That's what self-pity does. Makes you blind to blessings. blessing blindness and that cuts off the stream, the center stream, present blessings. God is currently presently blessing you. It should be creating this input of joy into your life and it's not. Why? Because you're blind to it all. Because all you can see is the pain because of self-pity. It cuts off this one and it cuts off this one. It cuts off future blessing because normally future blessing flows through hope. But because hope is rejected by the soul when you're consumed with self-pity, that gets blocked off. And I say rejected. When you have self-pity, hope will try and bring you joy and you will reject it. You'll say, no, I will not look at this good thing. I will not. And here's why. Self-pity. always wants to justify its own existence, right? When you feel sorry for yourself, and I don't know if this embarrasses you, this embarrasses me. All I have to do is think about this, and it's so embarrassing, it's so ridiculous, and yet I do this. When I get caught up in self-pity, it's like a court case. I'm proving a court case. I deserve pity. I'm having a bad day. I'm really having it rough. And I can prove it. And all I'm gathering evidence that I'm having this rough day and everybody should feel sorry for me, or at least I should feel sorry for myself. And I maybe don't verbalize it. I don't say it, but I'm just like noticing. See, that went wrong. Then that went wrong. Yeah, then there were 50 blessings, but then that went wrong. And by the time my wife gets home, I was like, five things went wrong the whole day. It's just everything's against me. I'm just I can't believe I shouldn't have gotten out of bed. And everything went wrong. Five things went wrong. A thousand things went right. But five went wrong. And I'm blind to that thousand. Why? Because I'm building my case about how troubled I am. And so Whenever something presents itself as, hey, here's a here's actually some counter evidence. Here's here's a here's a cause for rejoicing. Nope. I'm not going to consider that. I don't look at that. I'm going to think about that. Because I'm building my case. And so we ignore all the causes of blessing. We refuse to see them both present and future. And so we cut we block off both of these tributaries with self-pity. We're like Jacob in Genesis 3735 who refused to be comforted. Refused to be comforted the self-pitying soul. When comfort, you try and talk to a person like this about blessing, be thankful, count your blessings, look at the bright side, look at this good, look at that good thing, look at this, just bounces off their skull like off a brick wall. They will not, they refuse to be comforted. Their heart won't let them receive comfort from God. Refusal to be comforted is an amazing thing. It's so ironic because the really, when you're at the pit of despair, and you've lost heart and you're miserable, depressed, can't move. When you're like that, you want more than anything in the world to feel better. I've had people come up to me even after the class, you know, while we've been doing these classes, and come up and just tears streaming down. They want so bad to come out of this darkness and feel better. They want that more than anything. And yet, at the same time, there's something inside the soul that is refusing comfort. Refusing to be comforted. No. No. So it's important at the outset to teach the counselee not to reject, not to have an attitude in their life that rejects what God is doing and rejects suffering. When we think of suffering as typically people who are discouraged, we think of suffering as an intolerable intrusion into their life. It's an intolerable intrusion into their life. This is just wrong. I shouldn't be suffering. And so they're always discouraged because there's always suffering. Suffering, you need to teach them some principles about suffering. Suffering is the norm, you should think of it as the norm for the Christian life, and God promises that He will only do us good through our suffering, and it's a glorious privilege to suffer while in His service, because we're suffering in His name. And you're always in His service as a Christian, so all suffering is for His name, so suffering is a wonderful thing. You need to teach them about suffering so they don't have an attitude of rejecting suffering. You need to welcome it and embrace it. So, so let's talk about how to recover from depression. The first principle is what we're just talking about, the willingness, the willingness to be comforted. I was studying about Elijah this week and. You know, Elijah, I was asking the leaders, give me some examples of somebody who's got self-pity and Elijah always comes up. He seems like he's such a poster child for self-pity because he actually prays. He gets so discouraged in First Kings 19. They actually praise for death. Kill me, God, I can't do it. And, you know, it's he's having a tough time. The queen is trying to kill him. He's running for his life. Kind of ironic, though, that he's running for his life. The trouble in his life is that his life is threatened, and so he asks God to kill him. But anyway, our sorrow is not always totally rational. But 1 Kings 19, for I have had enough, Lord, he said, Take my life. And verse five, then he laid down under the tree and fell asleep. All at once, an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat. And he looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread over hot coals and a jar of water. And he ate and drank, and he lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you. And he got up and he ate and drank. Strengthened by that food he traveled 40 days and 40 nights until he reached Horeb the mountain of God. Can you imagine a really depressed person getting up and traveling for 40 straight days through the night to go somewhere? That's a lot of energy for a depressed person, isn't it? His depression was cured by food and sleep. And I think one of the things this does is it highlights in our mind that There is a very real physical component to being discouraged. If you are weak physically for any reason, that's going to contribute to spiritual losing heart. And that's what happened with Elijah. He was just physically exhausted. He just he needed so much sleep. He finally just falls asleep. He gets his food. He falls asleep, wakes up, eats, falls back asleep like a baby. And and the angel feeds him twice. He just needed, his body just needed so much nourishment. And I don't think the physical component, just because we've established that discouragement, losing heart, all these things are spiritual issues, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there also is a physical component that must not be ignored. Any physical weakness will contribute to susceptibility to the spiritual problems. So go ahead and address the physical things. If a person's not getting enough sleep, try and get them some sleep. Nourishment, healthy food, low thyroid is a problem. Lots and lots, especially women, have low thyroid and it just contributes to depression. It makes them so prone to to discouragement, hormonal changes, low blood sugar, all kinds of things like that. But the thing that stands out to me about Elijah is, you know, he's so down. He's actually, he's not really suicidal, but he's asking God to take his life. I mean, he wants to die. That's pretty down. And yet God comes, gives him what he needs, which in his case was some food and some sleep and some rest and all that, and then a task. And man, he's good. He's good to go. He was willing to receive comfort from God. He didn't get to the point where he didn't fall into self-pity. I don't think Elijah is an example of self-pity. I don't think he's fallen into self-pity because he's not the point where he's refusing to be comforted. He's willing to be comforted. And I think that's the first thing that you teach somebody who's struggling about how to recover is you've got to get them to the point of first explaining this principle that it's ironic that even though they really, really want to get better, there's something in us that resists comfort when we're discouraged. And we have to overcome that. We have to get to the point of willingness to let go of our sorrow. So that's step one. OK, step two. point them to God. The next steps are just trying to unclog each of these three. So let's try and unclog the past. Point them to God's blessings in the past. Tell them to just think them through. The writer of Psalm 77 Classic case of real discouragement, depression and refusing to be comforted, even to the point of causing insomnia. He says God was holding his eyelids open at night. That's the way it feels when you can't sleep. So and then he found the cure. He was so despondent and then he found a cure. Psalm 77, too. In the day of my trouble, I sought the Lord in the night. My hand was stretched out with weariness. My soul refused to be comforted, comforted. You have held my eyelids open. I am so troubled I cannot speak." I mean, that's how bad it was for him. He couldn't even open his mouth and talk. He was so discouraged. Then he found, in verse 11, he finds a solution. I shall remember the deeds of the Lord. Surely I will remember your wonders of old. I will meditate on all your work and muse on your deeds. I'm just going to think about Blessings think about past goodness. And. And that's that's how he recovered. So urge the counselee to. set up a routine of remembering past blessings. And one of the things that I do in my that I've done in my life when I've been trying to stimulate this is a friend of mine told me that this would be a good practice. I started doing it. He said every night before bed, kneel down the floor and from your bed and thank God Don't pray about anything else. Just thank God for his goodness and kindness that day. And he said, you got to kneel down, because if you try and lay down and say, I'll just thank God while I'm laying down, it doesn't work. And he's right. It doesn't. I tried it. It goes, my mind lasts like five seconds and I'm distracted. I can't do it. But but if you there's something about being on your knees or it helps you remember. Oh, yeah, I'm praying So so you get on your knees your bed and you just say you just think through the day Hey God, you woke me up this morning. You gave me breath. You made my heartbeat. You gave me food You gave me that meal. You gave me this thing you do this blessing with my kids my wife my this that You did he taught me some things you just and you just recount each of the things and it's amazing when you do that How many of those things you know, you think for a while what else but oh, yeah, I He did this. And he answered this prayer, and he did this. And so many things come into your mind that you just forgot. You would have forgotten forever. At least I would. And, and, you know, I do that. And I was like, that's right. She did that. I just took it for granted. I didn't even think I prayed for it. You did it. And then I didn't even think I didn't. I didn't give it another thought. And just teach them to establish a habit of enjoying past goodness. And then once in a while, Do, you know, you get to the end of the week, do it for the whole week. You know, the big high points of the week, the real good ones. Just remind yourself once again, just savor them in your mouth like candy, you know. These things that God did during this week. And then once in a while, maybe go for a whole month or a year. Just get a piece of paper and a pen, go off to a quiet place and just go over the past year. And then even go further than that, your lifetime. And further than that, human history, all the way back to creation, things that are recorded in Scripture. That's what the psalmist did in Psalm 77. He just goes through the history of Israel, of God's deeds. And just call to mind all these wonderful things that God did. So that there's this continual flow. Teach the counselee to do that, and we can get rid of this blockage right here. And this will start to flow. That's past. That's past goodness. Let me throw in one other thing here, because this one's short. And that is, teach the counselee to turn their focus on God. This is how they fight against self-pity. You fight against self-pity by turning your attention off of self onto God. Think about God. What I've been doing in my life with this is if I start to find myself drifting into self-pity, then I resolve, OK, I am going to think five thoughts about the goodness of God for every one thought I think about my own problems. Or maybe you're depressed about your own sin. That's a really tough one. Sometimes people get discouraged and despondent because there's sin in their life. And you can't come along and say, oh, well, it's not that bad, you know, or you shouldn't be upset because we should be upset about our sin. Right. But but what you can do is say, OK, go ahead and think about your sin. Be sad about your sin. But for every one thought you think about your own sin or your own hardship, your own trouble, whatever yourself, your own situation, five thoughts about God. Because our problem isn't that we think about our troubles. We should think about our troubles. Our problem is we obsess about our troubles and they take over our thought life and they don't stay in their proper size. So one thought about yourself, five about God. So a problem comes in my life, a discouraging thought comes into my mind. And I think, OK, that's discouraging. OK, now I thought about that. Now I need five. What are five wonderful truths about God? Number one, God is patient. He's patient. That's a wonderful thing. And then take just a few moments and actually think about his patience. What are the ramifications of his patience? Why is that wonderful? That really is wonderful. And just think about God's patience. Number two, God is powerful. Just think about his power and what's so great about that. Number three, What else is true about God? Well, let's see. God is kind. You think about His kindness. Number four, God is... What? What else is God? Okay, faithful. God is faithful. He's reliable. God is just. And you just you go and think about each one of those five things. And by the time you're done with those five things. You look at your one little thing that you were discouraged about and it's like, OK, well, that's. Bad, but it's a little. You know, it's a little. I have a God who loves me, who's made promises to me, who is faithful and powerful and kind and just and merciful and patient. And that will keep you from. Falling into the self-pity where self-pity takes over. OK, so train them to urge them to think five thoughts about God for every one of themselves and then urge them to establish a habit, a routine of enjoying past goodness so they can have this this this tributary unclogged. Any questions on any of that? Right, right. Yeah, it's a matter of growing up and realizing you don't always get your way. But it's more than just, well, life's tough. You don't always get your way. It's his way is so much so good. And he always does get his way. And self-pity is ridiculous because it wants to elevate my way up here with his. And there's no reason for it. My way isn't even good. And his is, you know, so. Well, let's pick it up now in Psalm 73. Psalm 73, and you may want to turn there because we'll be there a little while. Psalm 73, written by Asaph, Asaph could feel himself beginning to slip into despair. You ever felt that? You're starting to become depressed, you can just feel yourself sort of sliding into the darkness? He could feel that. And when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, and then considered all his suffering and hardship, he started to stumble into thoughts of self-pity. And one of the things about self-pity, it's always marked by exaggeration. You exaggerate your suffering. Psalm 73 3 for I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles surely in vain. I have kept my heart pure in vain. I washed my hands in innocence and have been punished every morning. So exaggeration the wicked have no struggles whatsoever and for me I have been in vain for me. Oh my God I have zero benefit from following Christ. following God, no benefit at all. I mean, both of those are ridiculous exaggerations, and Asaph knew it, and so he kept his mouth shut. He knew what he was thinking was ridiculous, and so he didn't say it. Look at verse 15. If I had said, I will speak thus, I would have betrayed your children. He's talking to God here. So he resists the temptation to verbalize his thoughts, and he knew it would be a betrayal of God's people because complaining harms everybody who hears it. Complaining harms everybody who hears it, even if the only person who hears it is you. And that's where we get to the inner grumbling. And this is an interesting grammatical thing. The verbs in verse 21 are in a Hebrew grammatical form that is reflexive. It's called the hit pile form and it's reflexive, which it means it's action acted upon oneself. You are both the actor and the recipient of the action. And so a literal translation of verse 21 would be my heart embittered itself and my insides pierced themselves, stabbed themselves. So inner turmoil. And anxiety is something that the heart inflicts upon itself. Runaway thoughts of complaining, self-pity, ingratitude are like the heart taking a knife and just stabbing itself over and over. And if you do that, if a person repeatedly bludgeons his heart with a hammer, he shouldn't be surprised that afterward he's in pain. That's what happens when you bludgeon yourself with a hammer. When we grumble to ourselves, we do damage to our heart. We do spiritual damage. So, again, you can reassure the counselee, it's appropriate to pour out your distress to God in prayer, but urge the counselee, when you're finished doing that, be finished. Be finished with your complaint. Don't keep grumbling to yourself. Tell the counselee, resolve to to never dwell on your suffering. If you're going to talk about it, be talking to God. Be talking to God. Not to anyone else and not to yourself. Unless it requires something that, you know, you need to take action. If you have to do something that requires some action, then you have to think something through. I understand that. But if it's not something like that, then only talk to God about it and then be done talking about it. And that will help with the problem of exaggeration, because we tend to not be quite so quick to exaggerate when we're talking to God. When we're talking to ourselves, we're talking to other people, we're exaggerating all over the place. Oh man, it's the worst day of my life. This thing has happened, and that thing, and everything's going wrong, and I have it so bad, and nothing good has happened, and blah, blah, blah. But when you're talking to God, you know, you say, oh God, nothing, well not, obviously you're blessing me, and I understand that, but I, you know, respectfully, this seems, you know, and I don't know about you, but I just tend to be a little bit slower to exaggerate my problems when I'm talking to God who knows everything. So, obviously, this is a little easier said than done, because when your flesh has a complaint, it just insists on being heard every minute. It just wants to voice its complaint. And there are times when your flesh, and when I say flesh, that's the part of you that sins. The part of a Christian that still sins, that's prone to sin, that's connected to this world and sins, influenced by the world, that's your flesh. And there are times when your flesh talks to you, and there are other times when you talk to your flesh. There's sometimes your flesh is telling you what's going on, and there's other times when you're telling it what's going on. And that inner dialogue, talking to yourself, talking to your flesh, talking to your own soul. Scripture mentions that a few times. Psalm 14, 1, the fool says in his heart there is no God. He's talking to himself. Psalm 10, 6, the wicked man says in his heart, I shall not be moved throughout all generations. I shall not meet adversity. Proud inner talk. Verse eleven in that same psalm, he says in his heart, God has forgotten. He's hidden his face. He won't see it. So that's the flesh talking. And what we need to do is silence the flesh. And the way you silence the flesh is by shouting it down, preaching to it. When the psalmist fell into despair, Instead of listening to the grumblings of his soul, he preached to his soul. Psalm 42 5. Why are you downcast? Oh, my soul. Why disturb within me? Why so disturbed with me? Put your hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, my Savior and my God. And that happens again two more times in the psalm and then again in the next song. So the first thing we need to learn is thing that the psalmist learn to take ourselves. This is a quotation from Martin Lloyd-Jones. He says, The first thing that we have to learn is what psalmist learned. We must learn to take ourselves in hand. This man was not content to just lie down and commiserate with himself. He talks to himself. This man turns to himself and says, Why aren't you downcast, O my soul? Why aren't you disquieted within me? He's talking to himself. He's addressing himself. We must talk to ourselves instead of allowing ourselves to talk to us. Do you realize what that means? I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression is in a sense this, that we allow ourself to talk to us instead of talking to ourself. 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? That's an insightful statement right there. Most of your unhappiness is due to the fact that you're 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. They start talking to you, and they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Someone is talking. Who is talking to you? Yourself is talking to you. Now, this man's solution was this. Instead of allowing himself to talk to himself, he starts talking to himself. Why art thou downcast, O my soul? His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, self, listen for a moment. I will speak to you. You have to take yourself in hand, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul, why are you downcast? What business do you have to be disquieted? 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 and on this note, defy yourself and defy other people and defy the devil in the whole world and say with this man, for I shall yet praise him, my God and my Savior. So that whole quotation comes out of Martin Lloyd's Lloyd-Jones book, Spiritual Depression, and I think it's insightful. Demand an accounting from your soul. That's what the psalmist does in Psalm 42 and Psalm 43. Demand an accounting, require an explanation for this grumbling soul. You know, I think about an axe member when they had the riot and they said the city councilman or whatever comes out and says, stop writing, stop writing, because if you keep writing, we're going to have to give an account to the governor. We're not going to have an explanation for why we're doing this. And I think of that when I think of this demand and the explanation from your soul. OK, what's the grumbling about here? You tell me all what right you have to be grumbling. However. You got to really be careful here, because you don't want the counselee to be content with just rebuking himself, because the counselee can go to town on that. Just beaten up on himself and all kinds of self-loathing and just push himself even further down. So that's not the goal. It's not just rebuking yourself, that just perpetuates more of a self-focus, which is the opposite of what we want to accomplish. And that's the opposite of what the psalmist did. What did the psalmist do? First, he spoke to his soul. Then he directed his soul to where? To God. He pointed his soul to God. The solution to self-pity is always to turn attention away from self onto God. You don't just keep beating up on yourself. You point to God. I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God." Put your hope in God. That's the solution to self-pity. Teach the counselee that five-to-one principle. Five thoughts about God for every one thought about self. Five thoughts about God for every one thought about self. Alright. Okay, next. Enjoy God's presence. Teach the counselee to enjoy God's presence. Asaph, whose feet began to slip, remember in Psalm 73, back to Psalm 73. He recovered from that near miss with despair by first by backing up and considering the big picture of what God was doing, the long term focus of eternity in verses 16 to 20, and then by focusing his attention on appreciating the incredible benefits of the presence of God in verses 23 to 28. Listen to this. This is how he kept himself from sliding into the dark depression. He said, verse 23, Yet I am always with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me up into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Those who are far from you will perish. You destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me, the nearness of God is my good." Literally is what that is. The nearness of God is my good. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge. I will tell of all your deeds. So joy is always available to the believer through enjoyment of the presence of God. And I believe that this is the most important principle for helping a depressed person. Nothing is going to be more important. Nothing has helped me more. than this. Enjoying the presence of God on rare occasions, God might withdraw his presence in a temporary discipline. However, usually that's not the case. Most of the time when a person is not experiencing joy from the presence of God, it's not because God has withdrawn or turned his face away. It's because that they're not they're not taking advantage of the experience of God's presence that is actually available at that moment. And I mentioned some possible reasons for that last time. It could be sin in their life. They're hanging on to some cherished idol and they're forfeiting the grace of God. Jonah 2 8 or they're failing to interpret God's gestures of love. All the blessings of life that we're surrounded by. They're just not interpreting that for what they are. Gestures of God's love. They're failing to understand all the glimmers of joy and ability to enjoy the pleasures of life as gestures of God's love. Lack of wholeheartedness in seeking His presence. Lack of willingness to believe what He says about forgiveness. Distraction from God because of self-pity. Listening to yourself instead of preaching to yourself. Dwelling on hardship. Preferring some other source of comfort rather than waiting for God. All those can be possible things that keep a person from experiencing the presence of God and the joy that comes from it. And if you want more on that, you can go through that series, the sermon series, Loving God with All Your Heart. Urge the counselee to have a planned statement, mental statement memorized that he can say each time he begins to have feelings of despair because Those feelings of despair are relentless. They'll come a thousand times a day. And so it's good to repeat a sentence like this a thousand times a day every time you feel it. And here's what I tell myself. When I start to feel the darkness come, I say, Daryl, it is not necessary for me to feel discouraged right now. It's not necessary. You don't have to. God is right here. He's right here. Where can I flee from your presence? Where can I go from someone? Thirty nine. If I go up to heaven, you're there in the depths. You're there. He's right wherever you are. He's right here. God's right here. He's here and I have his favor, I'm a Christian, I'm in Christ, I have his favor. And if I seek him. You know, sometimes you have more, a greater experience of his presence available to you or a lesser one available at a particular moment. But whichever it is, big or small, there's enough available to you right now to satisfy your soul enough so that you will have more joy than sorrow. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That's the case for a Christian. So I tell myself, You don't have to slide into darkness right now. There is joy available because there is fellowship with God available. It's there. He's here. It's available. Enough of it is available for you right now to unclog the flow from present blessing, His presence with you right now. So help them just have a ready response in their mind. OK, so that's fellowship with God. Next one. Anticipate future blessings. Let's try and unclog this one through hope, hoping in God's promises. And that's what got Jeremiah out of his funk in Jeremiah three. When I described the horrible clinical depression, deep, major depression in Jeremiah three, the thing that turned him around in verse 21 was hope. Verse 20. My soul is downcast within me. Verse 21. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Depression is lack of hope, despair is hopelessness, and he reversed his despair and suddenly has hope for the first time, verse 21, by calling something to mind. You ever notice that the effect that trials and pain and suffering has on your heart, the way it hits your heart, depends on your view of the future. You got something really great coming in the future that you're looking forward to, they don't hurt near as much. If you don't have anything good coming in the future, then all you have to do is stub your toe and you're going to want to commit suicide. Right? We talked about that before. So despair is not a chemical imbalance. It is a hope imbalance. It is not your brain leaking serotonin. It is your spirit leaking hope. So the great news is even in the depths of depression, Jeremiah was able to find hope by calling something to mind. So what was it? What specific thing did Jeremiah think of that God might do? What light did he see at the end of this long, dark, miserable tunnel? And how about you, your counselee? How can you find hope like he did? Because if you do see light at the end of the tunnel. Then you're OK, I mean, you're automatically going to have hope that you'll come out of your depression, that's easy if you see the light coming at the end of the tunnel, that's easy. The problem is, what do you do when there is no light at the end of the tunnel? That's what depressed people, people who are really in despair, that's what despair is. No light at the end of the tunnel. They can't even imagine light at the end of the tunnel. So then what? In your wildest dreams, you cannot imagine anything God might do tomorrow or next week to make your situation any better. All your hope is gone. Then what? This is where we can learn from Jeremiah, because for him there was no light at the end of the tunnel. He could not think of anything that would be on the horizon that might happen to change his circumstances. What encouraged him and restored his hope was not something he could see coming. It was a specific thing that he called to mind. He says, Yet this I call to mind, therefore I have hope. And this is so important because there are many who would say that When somebody is suffering horribly, that's not the time to be teaching them doctrine. Biblical principles. You need to be there for them, let them cry on your shoulder, just sympathize with them, give them a hug, don't try and preach to them, don't try and tell them information. A shoulder to cry on is a wonderful thing, but by itself, it's incomplete. Jeremiah was brought from a state of clinical depression to being filled with real hope, not through somebody's sympathy alone, but by calling to mind a particular truth about God. What truth was that? Well, here it comes. Verse 21. Yet this I call to mind, therefore I have hope. Verse 22. Because of the Lord's great love, we're not consumed. He called to mind something about the amazing character of God's love. Just thinking about God's love made Jeremiah realize that blessing is around the corner. It is. You don't have to see a light at the end of the tunnel. You just need to consider the nature of the God who is at the end of the tunnel. See that? You have to think about the fact, know that there's a God at the end of that tunnel and He's the God of light. You don't have to see that light. I told you before about the child who has two uncles that come every Christmas, the same two uncles. They always visit at Christmastime. One of them is great at picking out gifts. The other is terrible at picking out gifts. And the one who is terrible, that second uncle, you know, he'll get you...it's every time. It's new tube socks or some dumb thing and something that you just don't...it's no fun and you know you're never going to like it and everything But the first uncle is the opposite. Every time he comes, it's the greatest gift. And the thing is, it's your favorite gift every Christmas, and it's never something that you ask for. You don't even think to put it on your list. He's so creative. He's so good at thinking of what you'll like. He's better than you at thinking of what you'll like. And he comes up with stuff you didn't even think of, and it's your favorite gift of all your gifts every Christmas. Now, you've got those two uncles. When they pull up to your door when they arrive for Christmas for their visit, you see that first uncle, the guy who's good at picking out the gifts, you see him pull up and start gathering the stuff out of his trunk? It's just boxes wrapped with paper. They look just like the boxes the other uncle's getting, but you don't have to see inside the box before you feel excited. You're jumping up and down. You're giddy. You're happy. You can't wait. You're looking at the gifts under the tree and you're all excited. Why? Because you can't even get a glimpse in there. You don't have to get a glimpse inside the box if you know for sure that the giver is generous and good at giving gifts, good gifts. Right? All you have to do is see the giver and you're excited. And so for Jeremiah, God was like that first uncle. He just looked at him and he got excited. He didn't know what's in the box. He just knows there's a box. There's a gift. And it's going to be good. So he got to thinking about God's love. But God's love by itself is kind of general. That's too general. And it's not very comforting to think in terms that are too general. So Jeremiah gets more specific. The thing that turned Jeremiah's despair into hope was contemplating not just the fact that God was loving, but the fact that by nature, his love is creative. He never runs out of ideas. Verse 22, for his compassions never failed. Verse 23, they're new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. God's nature is such that He's going to think of a way to show you new kindness, new tenderness, new love, new blessing in a way that's brand new every morning. Every morning, he's not going to run out of ideas. In fact, this is one of the reasons why God made mornings. You know, he didn't have to do that when he was creating the earth. He didn't have to come up with a cycle of dark light, dark light, dark light every 24 hours starting over. The reason there's such a thing as days, the reason there's such a thing as mornings where conk out for eight hours and then wake up to a new segment of time every day is because God is a God of new beginnings and fresh starts, and he built that even into the creation. This is a part of the nature of his love. Zephaniah 3.5. The Lord is righteous. He does no wrong. Morning by morning, he dispenses his justice, and every new day he does not fail. So that's something that's true about God. Jeremiah calls that to mind. He thinks about the creativity of God in blessing his people. And it just occurs to him that God has something coming around the corner that's going to be satisfying and joy producing. Notice, Jeremiah was not comforted by minimizing his suffering. He didn't say, well, I have hope because at least things aren't as bad as it could be. You know, it could be worse. At least this didn't happen. He didn't say that. He didn't say, well, at least I have my health or at least anything. He was comforted in the midst of his anguish by turning his attention away from him, away from his circumstances and onto the character of God from whom flows an exhaustible fountain of creative kindness. And he says to himself in verse 24, the Lord is my portion. Therefore, I will wait for him. Now, that idea of a portion that comes from Numbers 18, that's an important principle for you to teach any counselee who's struggling when you get to this point in Lamentations 3. You have to be able to explain portion. That's a big concept in Scripture. And let me just give a quick explanation. In Numbers 18, God is divvying up all the inheritance for all the Israelites, the twelve tribes. So He says, OK, here's what you get. You guys get, you know, this tribe number one, you get this portion, tribe number two, you get that. He divided up all the land into eleven segments, eleven portions. So He gives the first tribe, here's your portion, second, there's your portion, there's your portion, there's your portion, your portion, your portion. And He goes through the first eleven tribes and everything's gone, everything's given away. And there sits tribe number twelve, Levi. And he's, you know, he's like, excuse me, and it's all gone. It's all given away. And Levi is like, well, where's my portion? And you know what God says? I'm your portion. How do you like that? I'll just be your portion. So tribe number one, how are they going to get by? How are they going to have food? Well, their portion, their little section of land will supply them with food and supply them with a place to live and all that. How is Levi going to get by? God will supply them with food. God will supply them with a place to live. And he does that through the tithe. All the eleven tribes take ten percent and give it to Levi. So how much does that equal? 10% from 11 tribes, 110%. Levi gets more than anybody else. They all get 90 each. Levi gets 110. That's the way it is in God is your portion. So if you understand what portion is, if you want to know what it means, it would be like if I were going to take the youth group up on a camping trip or something and it's a survival weekend and I say, I give some meager supplies to each kid, and I say, OK, I've taught you how to survive in the wilderness, now here's your little supply, and you go off and find a camp and you make it through the night. Here's your kit, here's your kit, here's your kit, here's your kit, and I get to my little son and he's like, where's my kit, Dad? And I say, I'm your kit, you stay with me. That's what God means when he says, I'm your portion. If the CEO of the richest company in a corporation in the world is handing out bonuses and you get a bonus, bonus, bonus, bonus, and then you've got one favorite employee and where's my bonus? He says, I'm your bonus. I will take it. You know, you don't worry about it. I'll take care of it. That's what God is saying here. So Jeremiah had lost everything. He's depressed. He's in the end of his rope. He couldn't even imagine what God could do to make things better. But then that darkness lifts and he's filled with hope because he began to think about the nature of God's love, his creative love, like that first uncle. And so his response is to say, the Lord is my portion. I don't need anything else. The Lord's enough. And so I'm not going to look for anything else. I'm just going to wait. When he brings it, he'll bring it at the right time. When he brings it, it will be enough. I'm just going to wait. I'm just content to wait. If a Christian is depressed, tell them to take what little energy they have and use it to think about the goodness of God. Because he has infinite resources. OK. It's a lot easier to gain hope from physical things than spiritual unseen things. And so this is hard. It's hard to get your hope from thinking about the nature of God when you're not sure if He's going to give something that's tangible. That's why 1 Peter 1.13 says, Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed, because temporal pleasures may ultimately disappoint, but the final solution in the end, the second coming of Christ, is the ultimate object of our hope. So point them to that and His very great and precious promises in 2 Peter 1.4. I love this quotation, John Piper put it up on his Facebook the other day. He said, put your ear to the ground of God's word and listen to the rumble of his faithfulness coming. Not good. OK, next principle, enjoy ministry twice in second Corinthians four, Paul says that he doesn't get discouraged or lose heart. Remember, those are some of our words defining depression. He's saying, I don't get depressed. I don't get depressed, even though Paul was hard-pressed on every side, perplexed and struck down. He's really having a tough time, and yet he doesn't get depressed. How is that possible? How does he manage to endure hardship without getting depressed? Answer, he derived joy from his ministry. 2 Timothy 4.16, Therefore, given the undiminished, untarnished glory of the new covenant, and that's my interpretation of the therefore, that's what he's referring to in the therefore, given all the glory of the New Covenant. Since through God's mercy, we have this ministry, the ministry of the New Covenant, we do not lose heart. The reason he didn't lose heart, the reason he didn't become depressed was because of his ministry that was connected to the New Covenant. If God calls you to do some task that may turn out to be a flop, then you're going to lose heart when things start looking bad. But if you are part of a task that is something that is guaranteed to be a huge, glorious success, then you're not gonna lose heart. So you think about the guaranteed success of the gospel, the work of the gospel. Encouragement comes from ministry, from serving in ministry. And we're all called to ministry, we're all called basically to the same ministry, to various aspects of the same ministry, that is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. So your calling in the church represents your role in this ministry, whatever task you end up doing in the church, that's your role in this big ministry. So your role in the church is your calling. The less a person thinks about his life in terms of calling, the less encouraged he's going to be by the fact that your calling is a guaranteed success. It's a guaranteed success, but if you don't think about it, you don't think much about calling at all, then you're not going to be very encouraged. So you need to train the counselor to think a lot about calling. God has promised a grand success to every Christian if we persevere. That's the point of Galatians 6 9, which says, Let us not become weary. That's one of our words for depression there. Let's not become weary in doing good. For at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. If we hang in there, we will reap. And that's the same point that Paul's making in 2 Corinthians 4, where he says, I don't get depressed because I know I'm going to reap. There's going to be a great harvest. There's going to be success in ministry. And someone might read that and say, oh, that's great if you're Paul. You know, you're going to get encouraged about the big harvest if you're the Apostle Paul, but I'm not Paul. I'm weak and lame and inept. And my contribution, it's sorry, it probably does more harm than good. I'm just a nobody. I'm a joke, you know, and inadequate. The thing that's amazing, Paul also lamented his inadequacy. So if you think you're inadequate, then I got to agree. I got to agree. Yeah, I think you probably are. But so was Paul. So we're in good company. 2 Corinthians 2.16, he says, who's adequate for this? No, none of us are adequate for this. But now here's the amazing thing. It's actually our very inadequacy that makes us just right for this task. 2 Corinthians 4, 7. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. You see, we have to be inadequate. This whole thing is not going to work unless we're inadequate. Unless we're clay, we're dirt, pots. That's what makes it all work, because that's what makes people see that this treasure that we're presenting is not from us. When they look at us, they have to see weakness and adequacy in order for Christ to be glorified. So I hope that Council Lee thinks through all the various aspects of his calling, ministries at church, role in the family, role in the world, and the breathtaking importance of those things because of the fact that God has promised to use them in his kingdom. So it's an outward focus. When you have a ministry and you focus on ministry and serving and giving, that tends to push your focus outward. Now, it doesn't automatically do that. There are people who can serve and serve and serve and the whole time they're thinking, I hope people are appreciating this. This is hard work. This is cumbersome. This is hard. This is burdensome. This is this. Woe is me. And it's just a lot of self-pity the whole time. So it's not automatically an outward focus just because you're serving, just because you're giving. However, if you're serving is an outward focus, It will alleviate the problem of joylessness. It'll solve the problem of depression because it'll get rid of the problem of self-pity. Okay. Next principle, persevere. Teach them to persevere. People who are losing heart, that part of the definition of losing heart is tempted to give up. They just feel like giving up. Depressed people, they just want to give up. Giving up, there's different ways to give up. You can give up by just like giving up the faith altogether, departing from the faith and leaving Christianity. You can give up by committing suicide. You can give up by just checking out of life and staying in bed all day. Just locking yourself in your room and, you know, just separating from the world for a while. A lot of ways to give up. The severely discouraged person It feels like they don't have any choice but to give up. They can't keep going. But that's never the case. It's never the case. Whenever you're counseling, and I don't care if it's a depression person or any problem, any sin problem, any kind of problem, where Scripture calls the person to do something, when you're counseling, you're always going to run into people who say, I can't. I can't. I can't. It's too hard. I just can't do it. I have to get a divorce. I can't stay in this marriage. I can't love my wife. I can't love that woman. I can't love that man. I can't do this thing. I can't do that thing. I can't. That's just dead wrong. It's never true for a Christian. Philippians 4.13, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I hope you haven't lost your appreciation for that verse because of how it's so often misused. People want to use it to say they can do things that God hasn't even promised we can do. I can do all things through Christ's strength. Some Olympic athlete, I'm going to win, I'm going to get the gold medal because I can do all things through Christ's strength. What about the guy that gets the silver medal? Why can't he do all things through grace? It's not talking about those things. People misuse it. They take it out of context, trying to apply it to things it's not meant to apply to. And so we hear that and we dismiss the whole verse and kind of just throw it off as, well, that's verses, that's the out of context verse. Well, let's put it in context and see if we can appreciate what it means. In context, he's talking about a spiritual matter, contentment. One of the really hard ones like contentment and contentment seems impossible. But Paul says, no, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, that all things that you can do through Christ who strengthens you is everything God requires of you. Spiritual things, godliness, everything he commands you can do through Christ who strengthens you. Can you love your spouse? Yes, you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. Can you do what God calls you to do, even when you're at the pit of despair? Yes! It doesn't feel like you can, but you can. People have to know this. 1 Corinthians 10, 13, No temptation has seized you except that which is common to man. And God is faithful and will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. Always provide a way out. There's never a time when God requires something of you and you can't do it. Never, ever. And that's so important for them to understand, because if you think there's even the tiniest possibility that maybe you can't Then when you feel like you can't, you'll think, I can't, right? You have to understand 100% absolutely positive, you can. You can. So if you don't, it's not I can't, it's I won't. They need to understand that. And that will help them persevere to just hang in there and not give up. Because all these remedies that I'm giving for discouragement and despair and everything, I think in the long run, they'll help, but they might not help immediately. They might still be down tomorrow, even if you give them all this stuff, they might still be down tomorrow. And however long it takes for the joy to return, they need to just persevere through suffering. There comes a time when you just need to say, OK, I'm just going to keep plugging away. And one of the things that helps with plugging away and persevering is expanding the scope back out to a long term perspective. When you're depressed, Suffering has a way of shrinking down your perspective to the immediate. And the long-term future means nothing to you. You can't see it. Everything's just the moment. And so the flow of joy from the future blessing gets clogged because you can't see into the future. You're just thinking short-term. And so what happens then is when a person is really despondent and in despair, they can't see the value of anything that they're doing. They can't get themselves to wash the dishes. Why should I wash the dishes? I can't think of a reason to wash the dishes. I'm just going to leave them in the sink. I can't see any reason to make the bed. I can't see any reason to even get dressed. I can't see any reason to get out of bed. I can't see. I'm not going to do anything because I can't see any reason to do it. That's the way you feel when you're depressed, right? The future just becomes dark. You can't see it and so all you see is the immediate and there's no reason to do anything. So they become unproductive, because they're not doing anything, and then they get even more depressed. They walk around the house, they're in their pajamas, and their bed's a mess, and their dishes are piling up, and they say, I'm a failure, and they feel even worse, right? So it feeds on itself. Help them understand that the really important things, the really big, big, great things in life are generally not accomplished in an afternoon, right? Nobody does anything really great in an afternoon. The great things in life are done by tiny increments over long periods of time, and none of those increments by themselves seem important when you're doing something great. Now, if you are in your right mind and you can back up and see the whole picture, then you can see how this little increment fits in. When you're discouraged, you can't do that. When that happens, a discouraged person becomes like a teenager who lifts weights. One day he lifts weights and then he gets in the mirror and he's looking in the mirror and he's like, I don't see him getting anywhere, you know, and he's discouraged. He doesn't see any change after one day of lifting weights and he doesn't realize if he wants big muscles, you've got to do that every day for years, right? Every single day that you do it, never once are you ever going to look in the mirror and see a difference from yesterday. Ever! It's never going to happen. The day will come when you'll look in the mirror and say, wow, there's a big difference from last year. But never there's a big difference from yesterday. And so a lot of times discouraged people spiritually are like the teenager is with his muscles. They try something, they go to a conference, They pick up their Bible, they read their Bible, they memorize a verse, they do whatever. And it's like, I don't feel any different. I'm not getting anywhere. This isn't helping. And they're easily discouraged because they don't see any spiritual muscles after one week. They might start a new ministry, get all excited about it. A couple of weeks, they don't see any fruit, so they lose interest. So urge the counselee to establish a routine, an easy, doable, routine. And depending on how discouraged they are, you're going to make it really, really easy. It might just be five minutes for some people. So you get a homemaker discouraged, despondent, depressed. You can't stay on top of her housework. She's snowed under. Can't keep up. Say, OK, let's try this. Pick a five minute segment of your day. A five minute segment. And I'm talking about a five-minute segment that is not typically devoted to housework. You're doing your housework at a different time. This is five minutes of your day, every day, that isn't usually done. You're not usually doing housework. And just devote that five minutes to chipping away at some large, hard task. Something, the kind of thing you put off, or you need to get doing it, you're not doing it, whatever. Just five minutes, no more. You get going, you get to the end of your five minutes, stop. Wherever you are, just stop. and chip away at it. And if they can do that over a period of weeks, they're going to see a marked improvement of what they're getting done. It's amazing how many things you can accomplish. If you do five minutes every day, you can chip away at some big things over a period of weeks. And what will happen if she'll do that is she'll start to gain a sense of accomplishment. Like, I'm doing something here. Things are changing. I'm getting some stuff done. I polished off that task. It's amazing if you do something every day. I was reading, I think it's in John Piper's book, Brothers Were Not Professionals. He talks about the importance of reading. And it was good for me because I'm such a terrible reader. I've got so many things I should have read and I have never read. You'd probably fire me if you found out all the stuff I haven't read that I should have read. But anyway, all the classics and stuff, I've never read it. And so I feel guilty about that. He said if you just read 20 minutes a day, and you're a slow reader He says in one year you will have read and he lists off like all of John Calvin's Institutes and this book and this book and this book and all these books that I've for years thought Oh, I should you know someday do that could read them all in one year. It's just 20 minutes a day It's just amazing how you can chip away at a task. So you can do this with somebody who's in debt. A lot of times people are depressed because of debt. They get so hopelessly into debt, it just piles up and finally they just give up. With a debt, if you pay more each month than the interest that accrues, then you're chipping away at the debt. It might be 20 years before you get it paid off, but it's getting less instead of getting more. And so you help them, you say once a week, say no to a Starbucks or say no, you know, put the magazine at the grocery store back on the rack and don't buy it and take that $5 and put it in an envelope. Not every time you go to Starbucks, not every time, just one time a week, one time a week, just take that $5, put it in an envelope. And at the end of the month, you get 20 or $30 in the envelope and you put that towards this debt. If you do that, Even if it's not $20 or $30, even if it's just $10 a month, then if you've got a credit card with 18% interest after 20 years, you will have $23,000 less debt, $10 a month. So that's $2 a week. help them establish a routine to chip away at tasks. And that helps, the thing about a routine is it helps a person who can't see the future, they can't see why anything is worth doing. If you just get them to trust this routine, I set this routine for a reason, it is worth doing, there is a reward out there, I can't see it, I can't think of it right now, just trust the routine, just trust the routine, then they'll have a reason to go ahead and do something even if they can't see the benefit. So a routine really helps. And it also helps because it gets them moving. If you're a depressed person, getting them moving is really big. You just get them moving, get them doing something. Laziness, according to the book of Proverbs, has a way of feeding on itself so that tasks become harder and harder and harder the lazier you are. Like, for example, Proverbs, I think it's 15, verse 19, says, The way of the sluggard is blocked with thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway. If you're a sluggard, everything is, your path is blocked. Everywhere you look is blocked. Everything is harder. Everything in life is harder when you're a sluggard. So you're supposed to, a teenager is supposed to clean his room and he flakes out and just sits on the couch and plays video games for three hours in a row. And now he's been lazy and that laziness just set up a whole bunch of thorns around him. So now, The thought of getting up and cleaning his room is just impossible because he's just like, just a slog through these thorns. Everything in life is harder after you've been lazy. Isn't that true? You allow yourself to give in to a little bit of laziness, next thing you know, I can't get myself to do anything. I don't feel like doing anything. But diligence, if you work, then, you know, you're working hard, you're working up a sweat, and then you got this other task, oh, let's tackle that too. And you've got, it's not that hard. The way of the upright is a highway. The way the sluggard is blocked with thorns and it gets harder, everything gets harder and harder and harder and harder and it feeds on itself until finally you get to, I forget which proverb but that one, it always makes me laugh, it says, the sluggard buries his hand in the dish and he's too lazy to bring it back to his mouth. That's lazy, right? It's like I get this food, and you're just looking at it. That's pretty lazy. He's making fun of the sluggard, but that's what we do to ourselves when we make ourselves lazy. So if you get the person moving, then that will help. The more they slow down, the more they'll get stuck. And then finally, in that point, help them focus on heaven. Perseverance is the opposite of giving up. Hebrews 12 is a great chapter for perseverance. First three verses, three times that word perseverance, who is mentioned, it's translated endured, but it's the same word. Let us run with perseverance, the race. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus who endured, persevered. And the cross, consider him who endured such opposition. So it's all about perseverance. And the key is to fix your eyes on Christ, to think about what he endured, think about his endurance. And how did he endure? How did he endure the cross? How did he manage to persevere through that? What does it say? For the joy set before him. He looked ahead to his joy, looked ahead to his reward. That's what made him persevere. That's our example. So, teach the person to look ahead to reward. That's the whole point of chapter 11, too. You just go back up to chapter 11. You've got all these godly people in chapter 11, which is horrible suffering. They're tortured, refused to be released, faced jeers and flogging, were chained and put into prison, stones sawed into. put to death by the sword, went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, mistreated, wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground, and yet they persevered. They didn't give up. Why? Because they, verse 35, they wanted to obtain a better resurrection. They were looking forward to the reward. Moses chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time because he regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as a better, greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward. Verse 25 and 26. So that's our great hope, the promise of heaven. Have the counselee listen to Johnny Eric Santata's book on heaven. Get the audio book if they're too depressed to read or have them read that book. Read a good book on heaven. Memorize some scripture on heaven. Think about heaven. Listen to some sermons on heaven. And then put your suffering into perspective. I always like verse four. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. That helps me. I don't know if that would help everybody. It's kind of a rebuke. For some reason it helps me. It just kind of shakes me out of self-pity. It's like the writer of Hebrews is saying, Daryl, why are you discouraged? You're not even bleeding. I don't see a crown of thorns on your head. I don't see any spear in your side. You're not being sawed in half. You're not being stoned. You're not being flogged. I don't see any drops of blood sweating out of your forehead. You know, there's no dead bodies lying around. You'd hardly resist it at all at this point. So you consider the sufferings of Christ and it can help keep you from exaggerating your suffering. OK, one last thing I want to say about suicide. Because depressed people are very often suicidal and a class on counseling, you know, suicide is an issue. What do you do with someone who's suicidal? This is important because a lot of you, you're going to face people who are suicidal and most people, when they counsel someone suicidal, that's when they say, oh, I'm not qualified for this. I'm going to hand them off to a pro because I don't want someone's death on my hands. You know, and some people are very reluctant to counsel a suicidal person because they say, man, if I do the wrong thing and they kill themselves, then what am I going to do? So they pass them off to someone in the world that doesn't even have the wisdom of God to help the person. Oh, God, forgive us for doing that. Look, you can counsel a suicidal person. A suicidal person doesn't have any problem that Scripture doesn't address. And if they commit suicide, it's not your fault. unless you could have helped them with God's Word and you didn't and you passed it off to some worldly person. So let's talk about suicide. Depressed people are very often suicidal. It's very natural when you're depressed to think about dying. Like the guy that I read the quote at the beginning, he talked about dying all day long. And the thoughts revolve around a desire to end the pain so that they don't have to suffer anymore, which is natural. You know, it's interesting to tell the councilee, and this might come as a shock to you, but those are not necessarily sinful thoughts. They're not necessarily even bad thoughts to have. It's alright to think about dying. We're Christians, we should think about dying. Paul had thoughts like that. Anybody know the main theme of the book of Philippians? Joy, yeah, right away, joy. That's the book about joy. Philippians is a thank you note. It's a thank you letter. It's why it doesn't follow the same pattern as Galatians and Ephesians. It's just a thank you note to the Philippian church for the gifts that they sent. They were so gracious. And Paul says, thank you. And he wants to express joy and encouragement. And yet in this book of joy, this thank you note of joy, there's a major section in the first chapter devoted to Paul's desire to die. You ever written about your desire to die in a thank you note? So that's kind of a morbid thinking. Well, it's actually not morbid when you look at what he says about it. It's actually quite uplifting. Verse 23, he says, I desire to depart. That means die. And be with Christ, which is better by far. He says, I want to die. Being with Christ would be so much better than going through all this suffering. You know, languishing in these prisons, being on a sinking ship again and again under a pile of rocks at the business end of a whip. I'd just rather be in heaven. There's nothing sinful about that. That's perfectly OK. That's a great way to think. He wanted to die. But in the same verse, he says this. He says, but I'm torn. I'm torn. Torn? Why are you torn? What's there to be torn about? Whips and prison and stonings compared to heaven and you're torn? Why are you torn, Paul? He's torn because of verse 21. To live is Christ. For me, to live is Christ. Paul realized that his life was an opportunity to represent Christ and serve him in this world. That's his only opportunity to serve Christ in this world, is this life. It's our only chance to bear the marks of Christ on our bodies and endure suffering for his name. This life, that's our only shot at that. It's our only chance. Now is our only opportunity to sacrificially serve God's people in their time of need. And Paul loved, loved being the flesh and bone delivery system of God's love to his people. He loved that. And this life is your only shot at that, only chance to do that. This life is our only opportunity to fill up in our flesh what's lacking in regards of Christ's suffering. We desire to die and be with Christ, which would be better by far, but It's more necessary for God's people that we remain because we can serve them, we can show God's love to them as long as God grants us breath. So from a selfish perspective, then the idea of whether to live or die, it's the easiest choice in the world. Go ahead and go for the relief, die. But when the kingdom of God is taken into consideration, when your love for the church is taken into consideration, it's not an easy choice. Both options are extremely appealing. Go to be with Christ is appealing. Stay on earth and suffer on his behalf and bring him great glory by loving his people and delivering his love to his people. That's very appealing. Paul thinks it over. One of the options emerges to him as more appealing. Verse 25, "...convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again, your joy in Christ will overflow on account of me." I've weighed it, and you know what? I want to die, I want to die, but you know what I'd rather do? Stay here and bring you joy. Those who suffer from joylessness can get so focused on finding joy for themselves that they lose sight of the most effective way to get joy for themselves, and that is making other people happy in Christ. So it's ironic. When a person devotes himself to making others happy in Christ, he takes the focus off of himself, eliminates self-pity, and opens up the floodgate of possibility for joy to come to him because, Jesus said, fullness of joy, the greatest joy comes through loving the church in John 15. So suicidal thoughts? Don't worry about it. They're great. Nothing wrong with suicidal thoughts as long as you think of them from a kingdom perspective. That's how you fight suicidal thoughts. You tell a person who's suicidal, they say, oh, I'm suicidal because I feel worthless. And then you try and tell them, you're not worthless. You're priceless. You're precious. You're this. You're great. You're wonderful. And that's not going to convince them. They know that's not true. You're not going to convince a suicidal person to not commit suicide because how wonderful they are. You're going to convince them not to commit suicide because when you show them that it's better to remain. OK. Interesting thing that I just read yesterday, getting the focus on to loving, getting joy, restoring joy through loving the church, unclogging this present blessing through loving the church. Jesus said that's where in John 15, fullness of joy comes and doing that. can be hard if the person is on antidepressants. I just read this article, and this article wasn't from a Christian source. This was from Psychology Today magazine. Psychology Today magazine had an article about the fact that new studies are showing that when people are on antidepressants, they have a hard time feeling love for people. We've known for years that it causes sexual dysfunctions, but not just sexual, also just the emotional side, where you'll have a couple that are dating, one of them gets depressed, they're still very much in love, the person gets on antidepressants, and even if they recover from their depression, as long as they're on those antidepressants, is somehow they don't feel the love for the person anymore and they break up. That happens again and again and again and researchers who noticed that started to begin to look into the physiological side of that. That's what the article is about but it's just interesting. You lose your ability to feel love for people when you're on an antidepressant. That is a problem if you're trying to recover from depression. The main way to recover from depression, joylessness, is to get joy, right? And the main way, the most important way, the greatest way of all the ways to get joy is through loving people. And so if you're on a medicine that makes it hard for you to feel love for people, you're on a medicine that's going to make it hard to gain the joy that you need. So anti-depressants are depressants in that sense. It's a tough thing. So, all right, let's close in prayer. Father, we commit this study to you. We just commit to you these people that we are going to in the future be counseling who are suicidal, depressed, discouraged. It scares us to think that to some degree their fate is in our hands, but we trust Your Word. And we know that the principles that You said will bring us joy and that will restore hope will. And we can't dictate the timing of it, and sometimes we just need to wait. But Lord, let us and our counselees trust enough to be willing to wait. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.