We’re covering the topic of depression in our Sunday morning equipping class, and it’s a broad term with many layers to it, making it challenging to define, discern, and deal with.
But here’s an attempt at a definition: depression is a prolonged and unremitting feeling of sadness accompanied by a sense of hopelessness and purposeless such that one is unable and unwilling to function normally. The level of inner-pain will differ among individuals, but the baseline gripping sadness is present in all depressed persons.
So, faced with someone who is truly depressed, how can we help them? For the purposes of this post, I want to share a concise biblical method that will help that depressed person in your life.
The method comes from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s sermon “Mind, Heart and Will,” which is from his book, Spiritual Depression. The main point is simple: what you receive with the mind, engages the affections, and moves the will to act…mind to heart to will.
For the depressed Christian, the process works in this fashion. He is feeling profound sorrow and rehearsing sorrow-aggravating thoughts in the echo chamber of his mind. He is listening to himself when he needs to rehearse gospel-truths. He needs to dwell on God’s sovereignty, wisdom, and love (Rom 8:28-39, for example; cf. Phil 4:8). As he dwells on these truths by faith, he will (he must!) let them richly dwell within his heart so that his affections for Christ are enflamed. His sadness isn’t gone, but a superior delight in Christ fills his soul. That in turn inclines him to desire and do what God calls him to (Phil 4:9; Col 3:16; cf. Phil 3:12-13), and as the person implements this process, his depression will lighten, even if it’s by only a few degrees at time. The Spirit promises to work the miracle of change by this method (2 Cor 3:18).
To put this process as simply as possible – the love of God received in the gospel by faith changes the heart to seek after God’s will.
Depression, as with all spiritual issues, must be dealt with from the inside out, using God’s word and exercising the open-handed surrender of the soul to Christ that is faith. So, when dealing with a depressed believer, give the Word repeatedly. Make the person deal with Scripture. A soul’s misery cannot be properly dealt with by good deeds, by avoiding “big” sins, or by physical therapies like diet, sleep, and exercise. Let the person ponder the glories of Christ, let those glories engage the emotions, and let them direct the will to a new purpose, the only one that will satisfy and fill us with joy – to live for God’s glory.
