Spiritual Depression

We frequently sing with gusto:

Happy day! happy day!

When Jesus washed my sins away.

He taught me how to watch and pray,

And live rejoicing every day;

Happy day! happy day!

When Jesus washed my sins away.

The hymn is a favourite one. Mature Christians as well as new converts are invigorated with its note of happy assurance. It is not our purpose to deprecate its use; to do so would only arouse a storm of protest! Yet is it not true that sometimes our hymnology soars to heights far above the average Christian's experience? We have but to ask ourselves, Am I always watchful and prayerful? Do I live rejoicing every day? to prove the point. As we all know, there are ups and downs in all our lives. Sometimes we are up on the mountain top; at other times we are down in the valley. In the interests of a balanced understanding of the ebb and flow of Christian experience we offer these brief comments.

A discerning writer has recently drawn attention to the danger of that kind of preaching which, with the best on intentions so glamourizes the Christian life as to lead the young convert to expect that henceforth his life will be trouble-free. He puts it like this: "It is possible so to play down the rougher side of the Christian life the daily chastening, the endless war with sin and Satan, the periodic walk in darkness - as to give the impression that normal Christian living is a perfect bed of roses, a state of affairs in which everything in the garden is lovely all the time, and problems no

longer exist.... This is to suggest that the world, the flesh, and the devil, will give a man no serious trouble once he is a Christian, nor will his circumstances and personal relationships ever be a problem to him; nor will he ever be a problem to himself. Such suggestions are mischievous, however, because they are false". The result is that young converts, after the early joy of the new life has passed, may become disillusioned and decide that the Christian life is not all that it is made out to be, or that they lack the right kind of "faith". Readers will find a most helpful treatment of this problem in the chapter entitled, "These Inward Trials" in the paperback Knowing God by J. I. Packer (Hodder and Stoughton, 80p) from which the above quotation is taken.

But it is not only young converts who are beset with problems of this kind. Mature Christians too are plagued with "inward trials" with which our heavenly Father disciplines His sons and daughters. This is all part of the larger subject of the place and purpose of suffering in Christian experience. There are many examples in Scripture of men and women of God whose godly characters were forged in, the furnace of suffering. The apostle Paul's "thorn in the flesh" is an outstanding example of this. There is a deep lesson for us all in his account of that distressing experience (2 Cor. 12:7-10).

I have been impressed when reading biographies of men greatly used of God in former days by references to periods of severe depression which sometimes overtook them in their service. Such experiences of "spiritual depression" are quite distinct from the ordinary despondency through which many of us pass from time to time. They seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of intense spiritual conflict, and are obviously used by God to cut away all self-reliance so that divine grace may flow freely from the empty vessel. I quote an example which came to my notice recently:

".... this is the mystery; I never seem to have loved God. I never did. Therefore I never believed, in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore I am only an honest heathen, a proselyte of the temple. And yet to be so employed of God, and so hedged in that I can go neither forward nor backward.... I have no direct witness, I cannot even say that I am a child of God". Who wrote that? Some timid half-believer? No! They are the words of John Wesley, addressed in cypher to his brother Charles. Superficial Christians will be perplexed that such words came from a man so eminently used by God. Men of God will understand. To such Isaiah's words are pertinent (50:10):

"...he that walketh in darkness, and hath no light, let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon His God".

unknown | Sept 1977
Comment By Torchlight