Sermon Tone Analysis
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! Defeating Depression
Rejection Hurts....
It can come from family... peers... work.
And if we experience it repeatedly, it can cause us, no matter how dedicated, to become depressed.
O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived;
You overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long:
everyone mocks me.
Whenever I speak, I cry out
proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me
insult and reproach all day long.
But if I say, "I will not mention him
or speak any more in his name,"
his word is in my heart like a burning fire,
shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.
I hear many whispering,
"Terror on every side!
Report him!
Let's report him!"
All my Friends
are waiting for me to slip, saying,
"Perhaps he will be deceived;
then we will prevail over him
and take our revenge on him."
Cursed be the day I was born!
May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!
Cursed be the man who brought my father the news,
who made him very glad, saying,
"A child is born to you—a son!"
May that man be like the towns
the Lord overthrew without pity.
May he hear wailing in the morning,
a battle cry at noon.
For he did not kill me in the womb,
with my mother as my grave,
her womb enlarged forever.
Why did I ever come out of the womb
to see trouble and sorrow
and to end my days in shame?
But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior;
so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.
They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced;
their honor will never be forgotten.
O Lord Almighty, you who examine the righteous
and probe the heart and mind,
let me see your vengeance upon them,
for to you I have committed my cause.
Jeremiah 20:7-10, 14-18, 11-12
Christians don't get depressed.
Do you believe that?
A popular speaker has asked more than 100,000 Christians across America this question: "Is there anyone present who has never, ever, been depressed?"
And the answer?
Through all his speaking engagements, not one single person responded.
"Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down ~/ Standing in the need of prayer," the old spiritual goes.
Do Christians get depressed?
Of course they do.
And they always have.
From the writer of old spirituals to the spiritual giants of the Bible, Christians have struggled with depression.
It is both an ancient and a universal problem.
And very few people, Christian or no, have escaped its numbing effects.
There are several types of depression.
Some people suffer from a chronic sort of depression, a clinical one caused by a malfunction of our brain's chemicals.
Thankfully, modern medicine can now treat this sort of chemical disorder.
But the type of depression the rest of us suffer is the type the psalmist knew: "Oh, my soul, why art thou cast down within me?" he asked.
History is littered with great people who have battled depression.
Hippocrates described a state of mind 2400 years ago that he called "melancholy."
Winston Churchill, the great statesman who led Britain during some of its crucial, modern times, suffered personally with a desperate "dragon of depression" that he feared would slay him.
But surely, the great spiritual leaders never had trouble with depression, did they?
The easier question, after a close look at the Old Testament, might be to ask which leaders didn't!
In reality, these strong Old Testament characters could easily be called the "miserable majority" when it came to depression.
Moses, Elijah, Jonah—the list reads like a roll call of fame.
Some of God's mightiest heroes who have proven themselves to be the most committed among us have struggled with periods of dark, desperate depression.
Read Numbers 11 and hear Moses cry out, "God, I wish You'd kill me!
I can't bear leading these people any longer!
All they do is grumble about how good the food was back in Egypt Please just kill me!" Look at 1 Kings 19:4—Elijah, after his confrontation with the prophets on Mt.
Carmel, rushes into the wilderness and cries, "God, just kill me!
I've had it with this business of being a prophet!" Refer to the fourth chapter of Jonah where the prophet, strangely enough, is depressed because his "revival" was a big success.
He didn't like God giving all those sinful Assyrians a second chance and asked God to just take his life.
The more we look, the more we realize that depression is no respecter of persons.
!! The Depressed Prophet
But the worst case of all seems to be that of Jeremiah.
From the chronicle he left us, his discouragement seems to be the rock-bottom depression of all time.
Yet this is the prophet who was most often quoted by Jesus.
No man in history could have possibly served God with greater integrity in more difficult circumstances with more complete surrender and undivided loyalty than the prophet Jeremiah.
And yet this man was terribly, terribly depressed, as Jeremiah 20 shows us.
Jeremiah's book reads like a diary, the intimate papers or memoirs of a man called by God to prophesy.
It's as if we are looking over his shoulder as he wrote about his innermost feelings.
He seems to be writing to no audience but himself and God.
And that perspective is very unusual, because it's something we don't get to do with any other prophet in the Bible.
And maybe such an intimate angle is what makes Jeremiah's case so vitally alive, so vitally appropriate as we look for ways to defeat this devastating condition of depression.
!! The Reasons Why God's People Are Depressed
First, Jeremiah's "diary" can help us answer /why/ we as God's men and women can succumb to depression.
There are several viable reasons it can happen to any of us.
Jeremiah's prayers in verse 7 of chapter 20 are almost painful to read, they are so open and personal, and seem so close to blasphemy.
Jeremiah cried, "O Lord, you have deceived me...
You overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me."
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