The fact is that in a consumeristic culture like this one—a culture in which the customer is always right—too many people leave too many churches too easily. It’s unlikely that any of us is above the temptation to depart for poor reasons and to leave behind us a trail of hurt and confusion. So before you make that decision, pray for the people of the church and diligently serve them. Ask God for wisdom and ask others for guidance. And then, only then, leave with confidence that your departure is God’s will. 

Every one of us has become familiar with the pattern. Every one of us has seen church members becoming dissatisfied and then disgruntled, missing church occasionally and then consistently. Every one of us has seen the pattern and begun to dread the nearly-inevitable conclusion. This is especially discouraging when the reason for the departure is not an area of essential theological disagreement but something much more common and much less important—hurt feelings, petty squabbles, matters of preference.
This pattern is so common that we should all assume we ourselves may at some time fall into it. This being the case, what should you do when you begin feeling discontent at your church? What should you do when you feel that yearning to pick up and move on? What should you do when you find yourself eager to slip out of one church and into another? I’d like to offer just a few suggestions that I hope you’ll consider and put into practice.
Pray through the directory. Find yourself a copy of the church directory and commit to praying through the entire thing at least once. Pray for each person or each family by name. Pray what the Bible models and pray what the Spirit prompts. Prayer is one of our core responsibilities toward one another and has a way of stirring up our affections. As you pray for those people may it remind you that you’re not just walking away from a club or institution, but from a community—a family, even.
Commit to serving. The temptation when disgruntled is always to stop serving—to remove yourself from whatever ministries you’ve been involved with. Before you leave, recommit to serving others for a period of time—several months at least. Love tends to grow cold when we stop loving others and it tends to be rekindled when we start loving again. Plus, it’s as we serve that the Lord reminds us that he has gifted us specifically so we can use his gifts to bless our fellow Christians.
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Mark 15:33-47 shows us the cross of Christ. The darkness of sin overcame Jesus on the cross, and he felt it. Verse 34 says Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark includes both the Aramaic version Jesus actually spoke and the Greek translation for his readers. According to verse 35, some thought he was calling for Elijah. The Aramaic words misheard certainly could sound like it, and in Jewish thought, Elijah, who had not died but had been lifted into heaven, would come back to help God’s people. In verse 36, they took sour wine to him, fulfilling the prophecy of Psalm 69:21, “for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” This isn’t the wine with myrrh offered to Jesus on the way to the cross. This wasn’t meant dull his pain but to prolong his life, to see if Elijah would come. But Elijah wasn’t coming. He wasn’t crying out for Elijah anyway. He was crying out for another reason—not for someone to save him but to show the kind of salvation he was securing.
His cry was the first verse of Psalm 22. Why that Psalm? Because there, the Psalmist David laments the feeling of forsakenness. The first two verses say, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.” Do you know that feeling? Have you felt forsaken? Have you felt abandoned? On the cross, that’s how Jesus felt as the darkness came over him. He wants us to know he identifies with us. His cry is our cry because our cry is his cry. Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly, says this.

New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham notes that while Psalm 22:1 was originally written in Hebrew, Jesus spoke it in Aramaic and thus was personally appropriating it. Jesus wasn’t simply repeating David’s experience of a thousand years earlier as a convenient parallel expression. Rather, every anguished Psalm 22:1 cry across the millenia was being recapitulated and fulfilled and deepened in Jesus. His was the true Psalm 22:1 of which ours are the shadows. As the people of God, all our feelings of forsakenness funneled through an actual human heart in a single moment of anguished horror on Calvary, an actual forsakenness…The world’s Light was going out.

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Written by Derek J. Brown |
Sunday, October 23, 2022
A growing understanding of the gospel is the most important component in our battle with unhealthy introspection. We need to understand what God has done for us in Christ, so that we will look to Christ and his completed work for us, instead of constantly looking to ourselves.

The following is a response to an email I received a while ago.  A dear brother contacted me and asked me if I could expand on an entry I had posted. Specifically, he wanted to know if and how the Lord had helped me make progress in dealing with unhealthy introspective tendencies and spiritual depression. Below is the letter with a few slight edits for clarity.
Dear Friend,
Thank you again for your email. An inclination toward severe introspection and spiritual depression is something that has affected me since early in my Christian life, and I still find myself battling introspective tendencies and spiritual depression.
When I first came to Christ, I noticed immediately that I tended toward a severe examination of my inner life—my motives, my affections for God and for others, my faith in Christ, my holiness. Far from bringing me peace and assurance in my relationship with Christ, this propensity to question every inner-working of my heart instead brought much doubt, confusion and, inevitably, depression.
Yet, I can say that, by God’s grace, I have made significant progress in this area. As I reflect on the past several years, I can see specific means of grace that God has used to help me turn from an unhealthy preoccupation with self and sin—with the depression that inevitably follows—to a growing focus on the gospel and others. The following are several disciplines I have found to be particularly helpful in my fight against what Martin Lloyd Jones calls “morbid introspection” and the resultant spiritual depression.
A few words, first, about the following points. First, it is important to remember that overcoming introspective tendencies does not mean that we are to disregard all forms of self-examination. Sober-minded, thoughtful, doctrinally informed self-examination is required for believers (2 Cor. 13:5), and is, when conducted correctly, a means of real joy and peace.
Second, the following list includes those things I have found to be beneficial to me. It is a personal list. I hope and trust that much of what I offer here is grounded in Scripture. Nevertheless, it will be important for you to not receive this as an infallible map to spiritual health but rather as helpful suggestions as you continue to walk daily with the Lord, learning from his Word and from other counselors.
The first point (a robust understanding of the gospel), however, lays the foundation for everything else. Without this important point, our battle against morbid introspection and depression will malfunction at a fundamental level. With those two cautions in mind, let’s turn to considering the following points.
1. We need a robust understanding of the gospel.
I put this first because it is the most important. I have found that my tendency toward severe introspection is compounded to the degree that I am not seeing the gospel in all its beauty and doctrinal fullness. Specifically, this has meant understanding and embracing the important doctrines of justification, sanctification, and indwelling sin.
Justification: Scripture teaches that justification is the act of God by which he declares us wholly forgiven and righteous in his sight and on the basis of Christ’s perfect life and substitutionary death on the cross (Rom. 3:21-26; 5:1; 8:1), not upon any work that we have done or will do (Rom. 4:5; II Tim. 1:9; Tit. 3:4-7).
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