The Secret Benefit of Depression
Allow the weight of your depression to dash you upon the Rock of Ages. Press into Christ. Let the sadness press you toward Him. Abandon everything but hope in Jesus. Run into His arms because there is nothing good anywhere else. You have been given clarity that very few people have. You understand that there is nothing good anywhere without God.
I have noticed a world of difference between visiting the depressed and visiting the physically sick. The physically sick will chat with you and will enjoy a prayer at the end of your conversation about their illness and the medical plan to take care of it. The depressed, on the other hand, want to talk to you about God. They weep over their sins. They look to the words of the pastor as if life were in them. Their eyes contain tear-filled expectations, simultaneously expressing grief and hope.
If we evaluate these types of sicknesses—mental and physical—it is easy to see that one type lends itself to an openness to the Lord. Of course, as Lewis says, “God shouts to us in our pains.” We hear God, like Job, when we physically suffer. But mental pain (that is, depression) makes us alert to God in a heightened way.
If you have cancer, you will think about death. You will worry. You will ask your pastor to pray. You will turn to doctors and hope that they can fix you. Cancer can be a gift, which is why John Piper says, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.”
But when you are depressed, and the depression does not lift, you are backed into the corner of hell. Behind you are the flames, and no doctor extends a hand to help. There are none to pull you from the flames but Christ.
Your conscience is burdened with the feeling that you are to blame for your predicament. The guilt weighs upon you like a thousand-pound weight. Every thought is another burden added to the weight, increasing the pain until it becomes unbearable.
This pain vents itself in cries of desperation, “God, please help me!” When He does not answer, the weight pushes you through the floor.
People with cancer know nothing of this desperation. People with cancer want to live, but people with depression want to die.
We wonder how Paul was able to say, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” We marvel at the humility of John: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The Psalmist outshines our spirituality on its best day when he says, “There is nothing on earth I desire besides You.” How are these people able to say such glitteringly spiritual things?
They walked through the valley of the shadow of death. They have experienced life without God. Like the title of Martin Lloyd Jones’s book, they have tasted Spiritual Depression.
It is staggering to see how many people are depressed today. Someone recently told me that, on average, Americans are more suicidal than those interned at the Nazi concentration camps. Could this be a grace, a gift of God?
I just heard a pastor say that revival always occurs when a society loses the most hope. When people look around and say to one another, “There is no hope left for us!” The eagles of Christ’s mercy swoop down with healing in their wings.
When we are depressed, we sprint toward the medicine cabinet. When we do not feel well, we turn to the bottle. When anxiety strikes, we open the refrigerator. Like a doctor striking our knee, we have instant responses to depression—and they are always to mask it.
But what if our depression is actually preparation? What if the Lord is preparing our hearts to be humble and meek, like His?
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The Normal is King
All of our hearts are shaped by the habits we’ve formed over years, for good or for ill. Consequently, it’s not the sudden, grand gestures of repentance and change that have the greatest impact. But the long, well worn, ordinary habits of weekly gathered worship, personal prayer and real engagement with the Bible that God uses to shape us. These are the habits God moulds our hearts with.
A post from Chris Roberts:
In the New Testament, there’s a significant word used in connection with Jesus Christ. We’re told about his ‘customs’ (ethos). The word describes an action prescribed by long standing patterns or law. In everyday language, we might talk about someone’s ‘habits’.
In the Gospels, we discover that Jesus was a man with very strong habits. Just as his earthly parents had followed the habit of going to the temple every year (Luke 2:42), Jesus was in the habit of going to the Mount of Olives in prayer (Luke 22:39), going to the Synagogue on the Sabbath day (Luke 4:16) and teaching (Mark 10:1). These were his established, personal customs. The disciples noticed what Jesus did and where he did it. They saw how Jesus engaged in life with die-hard regularity. These patterns, established over time, became synonymous with the person himself. Jesus didn’t just live in his world, he in-habited it.
It is useful to recognise Christ’s habits and then compare them with ours.
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Sex and the Single Evangelical
Written by David J. Ayers |
Monday, October 31, 2022
Given all we know about the impact of commitment and social support, teaching young people to prioritize church attendance and to keep religion central in their daily lives will most likely help them to be more faithful to their churches’ sexual teachings.Evangelicals share something in common with every other branch of conservative Christianity. They hold to a simple view of sex outside of marriage, rooted in many centuries of historical teaching and what appear to be the plain teachings of the Bible, especially the New Testament—don’t.
Yet most self-identified Evangelicals1 engage in premarital sex. And doing so has become increasingly morally acceptable among them, regardless of what their churches teach. We have seen a long trend toward greater liberalization of sexual ethics among Evangelical laypersons over the past several decades, underscored in recent years by several prominent Evangelical leaders breaking ranks to embrace progressive views on sex.
The recent, highly public defection of a superstar of the “sexual purity” movement, Josh Harris, is a dramatic case in point. Starting with the repudiation of his own best-selling books promoting courtship practices that promoted abstinence until marriage, on to pursuing his own “amicable” divorce, and then rejecting Christianity entirely—all on social media—Harris has become a poster-child for the “new” Evangelical sexual ethic. Unique, perhaps, only in indicating that his views are no longer Christian (rather than the more typical attempt to claim that Christianity allows for pre-marital sex), Harris is indicative of a larger shift away from traditional stances on sex within Evangelical circles.
For example, in the General Social Survey (GSS), in 2014 through 2018 combined, only 37% of “fundamentalist2 adults said that sex outside marriage was “always wrong,” while 41% said it was “not wrong at all.” From 1974 to 1978, the same percentages were 44% and 27%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the GSS shows that among never-married fundamentalist adults between 2008 and 2018, 86% of females and 82% of males had at least one opposite-sex sexual partner since age 18, while 57% and 65%, respectively, had three or more. These percentages were even higher for those under 30.
In my recent book, Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction, I looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which provides a lot more detail on sexual activity and includes a larger number of respondents.3 In this article, and in the corresponding research brief, I incorporate the most recent NSFG cycle released in December 2018 to further explore the sexual practices of young, never-married Evangelicals, combining the surveys for 2013-15 and 2015-17. I summarize my findings below.
The following figures compare the percentages of never-married respondents in these NSFG cycles, by gender and in two age groups and five major religious affiliation categories, who have ever engaged in sexual intercourse, as well as those who have ever engaged in any sexual activity (vaginal, oral or anal) with an opposite-sex partner.
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Evangelicals and Progressives: The Great Divide
As the reader probably has noticed, there is now a great divide between Evangelicals and Progressives. Can that divide be bridged? It is impossible to know, though it doesn’t appear likely at this time. Our understanding of God and His word are very different.
In our book, A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard and the Christian Life, the Epilogue, “Fear of Flying,” was included to help the readers understand how those in cults and high-demand authoritarian groups can feel trapped. They have been given a view of God as a malevolent being that is on the lookout for them to step out of line – whereupon He will happily crush them. Many of these people give up or “deconstruct” their abusive faith and opt for atheism or agnosticism. “Joshua Harris – Kissing WHAT Faith Goodbye?” was one who followed that path.
Still, others adopt a faith system that gives them what they believe is greater personal control over their lives – and so they cast off their harsh view of what they thought was the Biblical God and embrace Wicca or some other New Age belief. Many cultists and some former Evangelicals fall into this camp.
We have helped many that have left such groups unwind their false beliefs and embrace grace. It takes time, patience, and availability. There will be many questions the person has to sort through, and it may be some time to begin to trust the word of God again to discern what is true from what is false. Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s book, Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear tells, her story of growing up under the authoritarianism of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles.1 Jinger’s transition did not cause her to abandon the Christian faith and the Bible. She instead learned to recognize false teaching, legalism, and authoritarianism and gain a spiritually healthy understanding of the biblical faith.
Many people who leave authoritarian groups or churches are rejecting the very dark view of God they were taught and shifting toward progressivism. Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and others made that trek – and have taken many with them – over a relatively short period of time. Richard Rohr has been the pied piper for many of them. Progressives give a nod to the Bible but adopt what they view as a kinder, more inclusive idea of Jesus –while ignoring or outright rejecting His exclusive claims. As sociologist and professor of sociology at Baylor University, George Yancey points out:
It’s not surprising that the image of Jesus for progressive Christians differs from the image of Jesus for conservative Christians. For progressive Christians, Jesus is the model of inclusion and tolerance. For example, one progressive Christian drew a cartoon of Jesus saying, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.” Progressive Christians focus on the actions and teachings of Jesus that reinforce their values of tolerance and inclusion, which they see as examples of love.
For conservative Christians, Jesus is interpreted through a traditional historical framework. They have less of a problem interpreting Jesus as teaching an “intolerant” faith that excludes from salvation those who don’t follow him. Both progressive and conservative Christians affirm the majesty of Christ, but they greatly differ on what values they see emerging from his life and ministry.2
For Progressives, determining the meaning of Scripture has little to do with what God has said in the historical-grammatical context. They judge and understand scripture by the individual’s personal “social values.” One consequence is that Biblical justice is abandoned and replaced with Marxism’s Social Justice.
For one example, Martin Luther King’s maxim of judging someone by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is rejected by Progressives today, replaced by completely judging people by their skin color and according to their loyalty to all progressive issues.
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