Spiritual Depression: Cure #3

*The below transcript was generated and formatted by AI and may not accurately represent the recording.

Brothers and sisters in the Lord, it’s lovely to get together with family or old friends and reminisce about former days, isn’t it? It’s something really lovely. You have a family gathering, and you get together and you share those family stories that you tell every time you get together, and yet they never get old. And no one says, “Oh, I’ve heard this one before,” because everyone knows everyone’s heard this one before, and yet it’s lovely to tell the story nonetheless. Or maybe it’s with friends as you remember a trip together or a time when you shared in joy together. And those memories are very powerful in your relationship, aren’t they? They sort of renew joy. They renew gladness together. They renew the relationship.

I was speaking with Pastor Chris from the UK, and he was telling me he was catching up with an old friend, one of his old band friends, the only other one from the band who got saved. And he was saying they almost never get together. It’s the first time he’s gonna see him in about six or seven years. And he said, “And yet, every time we get together, we feel like it’s been a week, and we just sit and talk and love our relationship together.” And one of the big things they do is share memories. Memories are powerful. And memory is powerful for the sake of those who are spiritually depressed. And when we get as low as the psalmist in verse 10, when we get right to the brink of blaspheming the name of God, memory is one of the most powerful things to bring us back again to a right mind.

We’ve been thinking about these cures as a ladder, haven’t we? And we’ve had two rungs of the ladder so far. The first rung was that we must cry out to God. There’s no point running to the world. There’s no point running to friends and family unless, first and foremost, we seek God’s face, because our problem is a spiritual problem and we need God. Our second ladder, as we continued going up, was that we must not listen to subjective experience and feelings, though they feel very real, but we must look at objective truth as we find it in the word of God, as God’s character is declared to us. Not questioning God’s character, but stating and holding to what is revealed in the word of God. And our third rung of the ladder is that we must remember, ponder, and meditate upon the wondrous works of God by faith. Would you like me to say that again? We’re going to remember, ponder, meditate on God’s works by faith.

Now, if we’re going to do that, we need to understand what the writer, what Asaph means when he says, “I remember, I ponder, I meditate.” You’ll see it there in verses 11 and 12. “I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your works, and I will meditate on your mighty deeds.” What do those three words mean? Because they probably mean slightly different things to different people. When someone says to you, “You need to ponder something,” you go, “Well, I probably know what that means.” You know, it means to mentally think about something. To remember—that’s pretty straightforward, right? Just remember something that previously happened. It might not be simple to do, especially if our memory’s starting to fade, but we try our best. But to meditate—maybe that’s a little bit fuzzier. Maybe you’ve thought about it, but not really understanding.

Well, those three words in the Hebrew all have slightly nuanced different understandings, but they sort of form a whole unit. So the word to remember is to mentally consider something, to call to mind. So it might be to remember an event, but it might be just to call a truth to mind. It’s to bring back to the mind again something that you once knew. To ponder—the word in Hebrew is a little bit different than what we think of ponder. In fact, it’s actually really hard to find an English alternative, but it’s kind of like muttering to yourself. I don’t mean it in the negative sense, like when you tell one of your children off and they mutter under their breath at you. I mean in the sense of you’re pondering something so deeply, you’re thinking about something so deeply, and remember, this is following on from your memory—you’ve remembered something, and you’re now chewing on it, and it forces you to start talking to yourself. And maybe you’ve done this before, but you’re pondering something very deeply and you start just sort of quietly speaking out loud. Maybe husbands or wives, your spouse does this and you say, “What are you talking about?” And what do they say? “Oh, don’t worry. I was talking to myself.” It’s that type of notion where your internal dialogue begins to sort of bubble out a little bit. The word meditate, again, is very hard to capture. It can be used in a number of different ways, but I think the way Asaph’s using it here is the idea of the inner thoughts of the man flowing out, sort of coming out loudly. Some translations use the word here “talk,” and that’s a fair translation.

But when you put those three together, you begin to get quite an interesting picture of what he’s calling us to do. He’s calling us to think and remember and call to mind something we used to know, and to chew on that so that it begins to bubble up within us. And to chew on that until we begin overflowing with it, and talking with other people about it, and sharing about it, and speaking it out around us so that it’s not just something deep down inside of us, but it’s so much a part of us that it flows out around us. Spurgeon captures this quite well. He says, “Memory is a fit handmaid for faith. When faith has its seven years of famine, memory, like Joseph in Egypt, opens up her granaries. And holy talk, following meditation, has a consoling power in it for ourselves as well as for those who listen to us.” Hence its value for what Asaph is talking about. So we remember, it bubbles up and flows out, which consoles us and consoles those around us in our states of despair.

And so as we think about this practice of remembering, of pondering or chewing, and of meditating and overflowing with the subject that we’re thinking about, what are we to think about? What are we to call to mind? What are we to remember? And Asaph remembers three things. He says, “I will remember, I will ponder, I will meditate,” and these are the three things that I will do that about.

God’s Works Are Holy

And the first thing is, I will remember, ponder, and meditate on the fact that God’s works are holy. Why? Why does he go there? Now, remember, where has he been? He has believed the lie that God is not good. He has questioned the character of God. He has begun to doubt that God is good. And then ultimately, after questioning God’s ways, God’s works, he has been brought to the point where he has blasphemed God. So that’s where he was, and we’re seeing him come out of that now, and he says, “I will remember that God’s works are holy.” Why? Because spiritual depression, or people with spiritual depression, I should say, are tempted to judge God by sight and to believe that God’s ways are evil, that God and his ways are evil, that he causes evil for me.

A great example of this in the scriptures is Ruth. Remember the story of Ruth? She goes away, her husband dies, her sons die. She comes back. Ruth and Naomi come back. I shouldn’t say Ruth, sorry, it’s Naomi I’m thinking of. They come back, and as they come back, what does Naomi say? “God has caused calamity for me. God has done evil to me.” That’s what she says. We looked at it in a sermon a while ago, and we talked about the fact that on one hand she’s partially right because God’s sovereign, but on the other hand, she’s completely wrong because God never does evil. But spiritually depressed people are tempted to start believing that God actually does evil to them. And what Asaph remembers is that all of God’s ways are holy.

You know, and so we think of passages like Exodus. In Exodus 15:11, in the Song of Moses, Moses says, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” Who is like you? You are majestic in holiness. We can think of Isaiah 6, right? Where the angels, the cherubim around the throne of God cry out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” Not just “holy is the Lord,” “holy, holy, holy.” Not just “holy, holy,” but He’s “holy, holy, holy.” It’s His very being. That means since God is holy, He cannot do evil. He cannot sin, because holy beings, completely holy beings cannot sin. Because if they sin, what do they cease to be? Holy. We lost our holiness when we rebelled in the garden. We were corrupted, which meant by nature we were no longer holy. This is why we are being sanctified, which means to be made holy, right? Because we’re lacking holiness because of our sin. A holy being can never do sin. He can never do evil, which means He’s never the author of sin or evil in our lives.

Now, granted, you might have some questions at that point. You might ask yourself, “Well, what about the sovereignty of God, Logan? Because you’ve told us many times that God controls everything.” And that’s a legitimate question, but it’s not a legitimate question for now. Because when you’re spiritually depressed, theological musings will never get you out of a hole. What will is objective truth. There’s a time for considering the holiness of God in light of His sovereignty, but what you need to begin with when you’re spiritually depressed is the fact that God is holy, and therefore, whatever has happened in my life, whatever it is, cannot be evil from God’s hand. Other people may intend evil against me. Other people may harm me, but my God will never harm me. My God will never cause evil against me.

One commentator, William Plumer, he says on this point, “His way”—that is God—“God’s way is in holiness. Oh, what matter of rejoicing is this. The opposite thought would drive the saints to despair.” That’s true, isn’t it? Imagine a hypothetical world where God does evil and there’s no higher being you can go to. You see, when people do evil to us, and let’s start at the bottom, when a sibling is mean to us, we can go to our parents, can’t we? If our parents cause us harm, we can go to an elder or we can go to the police. If the police do us harm, we can go to the police commissioner. But what happens if God does you harm? Who do you appeal to? Because God’s the highest authority, and in a hypothetical world where a god is arbitrary and can do evil, that is a terrifying world to live in. That will leave you in utter despair because every single thing that happens in your life, you will be forced to conclude that God is doing it because He hates you. But if God is holy, the opposite conclusion is true. Since God is holy, since God is holy, this is a matter of rejoicing. You may not see His way—when you think about the words of verse 19, “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were unseen”—you may not see His way, but you know His way is holiness. And so you remember and you ponder and you meditate upon the fact that every single thing God does is perfect, sinless, and never evil.

God’s Works Are Mighty

The second thing Asaph wants to remember, ponder, and meditate upon is that God’s works are mighty. Why mighty? Because spiritual depression tempts us to judge by sight and to believe that God is powerless to help us, that God can’t do anything, that God’s weak. We quickly become like Israel on the way out of Egypt. You know, Israel’s seen the mighty works of God, the ten plagues, the blood, the frogs, the flies, the gnats, the boils, one after another, leading up to the death of every oldest son in the nation. They’ve seen it all. They’ve pillaged the Egyptians on the way out. They’re carrying the silver and gold of Egypt in their hands. And they get to the sea and they cry out, “Moses, why did you lead us here? It would’ve been better to die in Egypt.” They say, “Where is God? We’re doomed. There’s nothing that can be done for us because there’s a sea on this side, and behind us are the Egyptians coming to kill us.” What have they come to believe? They’ve come to believe that God can’t help them, that God can’t save them. And God turns up and He says to them, effectively, “What’s the matter with you people? Is my arm too small to save you? Stand and watch the deliverance of God.”

Or we can be like Elisha’s servant. Remember that story? I love the story. Elisha gets up in the morning with his servant and they walk outside. You know, they’ve had their breakfast, they’ve had their morning coffee, and they walk outside and lo and behold, the entire town is surrounded by a great army. And you have to picture the scene, right? Elisha’s got a smug look on his face. He’s got no concerns whatsoever. And the servant is fretting and shaking, and he looks up at his master and he’s thinking, “I don’t know what he’s seeing.” And he cries out, “Elisha, what are we gonna do? We’re surrounded.” And Elisha says, “Lord, open up his eyes. He’s blind. He’s looking by sight. Open up his eyes to truly see.” And the Lord opens his eyes, and what does he see? A great host of fiery chariots of the Lord all around Elisha. Why is Elisha not scared? Because he knows God can save. He knows God can help. He has no doubt about the mighty power of God. But we’re so often like the servant, looking at the chariots of depression and the swords of our enemies, and we think to ourselves, “This problem, this pain, this affliction is too great. Yes, God helps people, but this time it’s too big.” This is a one-off.

Asaph remembers God’s works of wonders. He says, “What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders. You have made known your might among the peoples.” You know, it’s a message all the way through the Book of Isaiah. You know, it starts in chapter 40, and this question gets asked, I think, some five times. Who can compare with the Lord? Who can compare with the Lord? Over and over and over again. And you know the answer. No one. No one. And the Lord himself in Isaiah 44 says, “I know of no other rock but me.” There is but one God. The world has many gods. The religions have many gods, but there is only one God, only one Lord. He who made the heavens and the Earth, brothers and sisters. And that God, that holy God, is the God who helps His people.

You know, the funny thing is even the pagans acknowledge this. In the Book of Daniel, there are three moments with three different kings where they’re forced to acknowledge that the Lord is the one true God. Daniel in the lions’ den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire, and finally the writing on the wall. And every time, the pagan king must declare, “There is no God like the God of Daniel. There is no God like the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Everyone must worship Him. Everyone must pray to Daniel’s God.” Nebuchadnezzar says. Or Darius, is it? Either one. The pagan kings have to acknowledge when they come face to face with the truth that there is only one God in all the heavens and the Earth.

And let me just pause and ask you that. Do you believe that? Because if you don’t believe that, if you believe that God is just one God of many and you can just take it and leave it, then where is your hope? I mean, look, if there are multiple different gods and all the different gods are real and you can just pick whatever god you want, what hope is there in your suffering? You go, “Well, you know what? Do you know what you’re gonna have to do? You’re gonna have to worship all gods.” Because one god’ll have a strength, one god’ll have a weakness, and this god’s good over in that way, and that god’s good over there, and I need this god here. And this is what the people of the world do. I need a little bit of Baal, I need a little bit of Ashtoreth, I need a little bit of Yahweh, I need a little bit of pagan worship, I need a little bit of incense offering. Because there’s no hope, there’s no comfort, there’s no assurance unless there is one God of gods, one Lord of lords. And the Lord our God, the creator of the heaven and Earth says, “I know of no other rock but me.” Code language for, “I’m the only God.” All other gods are the imaginations of men and women, and the idols of our hands.

And, you know, if you acknowledge that, you can be like Moses’ father-in-law. Remember when we looked at leadership, we talked about Moses’ father-in-law? And he comes to Moses, and Moses tells him about the mighty works of the Lord in Egypt. What does Moses’ father-in-law say? He says, “Now I know,” after hearing what the Lord has done, “Now I know that there is no god but Yahweh.” What does he do? He becomes a believer. He becomes a Christian, for lack of better terminology. He puts his faith in Yahweh. And we’re seeing here before us the Lord our God who made the heavens and the Earth, who was mighty to save, mighty to help, and the question confronting us is will we acknowledge there is no Lord but the God of the Bible? Because here’s the thing, if you do, there is hope for salvation, and there is hope in your hour of need. Because you don’t need to climb yourself out of a pit of despair based off your own strength and effort. You look to the Lord as able to do all things. And so when the waves of spiritual depression roll over you, you look to a God of all power for help. And it reminds us that though sight says, “God is weak, He cannot help me,” faith says, “However bad it is, God is in control, and He has the power to deliver me from despair.” It’s filled with hope and not anxiety.

As Spurgeon put it, “Who will not be strong in faith when there is such a strong arm to lean upon? Shall our trust be doubtful when His power is beyond question?” It’s a great question, isn’t it? Who will not be strong in faith when there’s such a strong arm to lean upon? And we see this with our children, don’t we? I’ve noticed this massively, the difference between brand-new foster children that we’ve taken in versus my own children. When you have your own child and you raise it from birth, they do not doubt your ability to hold them, do they? They just sit in your arm. In fact, they become dead weights. They don’t even help hold on, they just literally sit there because they’re like, “Well, Dad’s big enough to carry me. This is not a problem.” When you get a child that does not know you and does not trust you, they cling to you or they push you away and they don’t want you to hold them. Why? Because they don’t know if you’re trustworthy. But when you have tested the arms of a father, you rest safely in them, don’t you? And when we’ve tested the arms of our Father in heaven, we find a place of absolute security, absolute safety. And so he remembers and ponders and meditates upon the holy works and the mighty works of God.

God’s Works Are Redemptive

But then he also turns and considers that God’s works are redemptive. You know, spiritual depression will tempt us to believe that what’s happening for me right now is ultimately for my destruction. Why? Because God’s evil and because God’s powerless, and so what’s happening in my life will ultimately consume me, kill me, and send me to hell. It’s the ultimate pit of spiritual despair. It’s what happens when we blaspheme God. We come to the point of concluding effectively that it’s too late for us, that we’re lost. It reminds me of the moment when Jesus says to Peter, “Behold, Peter, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you.” Now, when Jesus says, “Satan wants to sift you like wheat,” children, you may not understand what he means by that, but if you get a sieve, like you put pasta or something in a sieve and drain the water out. So you get a sieve and you put wheat on it and you shake it, and the good wheat stays at the top and everything else falls down. Or the other way around, the good wheat falls through and the chaff remains on top. And what Satan wants to do is to take Peter and put him on a sieve and squish him until Peter pops through and his faith stays at the top. Spiritual depression causes us to believe that it’s God doing that, that God is, metaphorically speaking, taking us and wringing us like a towel and squeezing every drop of faith out of us. “I’m gonna squeeze him and squeeze him until I’ve finally shown everybody that he’s a phony.” That’s what we come to believe. And what we need to understand with Asaph is that God’s works are always redemptive. They’re always redemptive. They’re always aimed towards the salvation of his people.

This is why Asaph says, “You, with your arm, redeemed your people,” saved them out of Egypt, the children of Jacob and Joseph. Now, we know the redemption story. We’ve talked about it already, the way that the Lord comes in and picks up his people from Egypt and just carries them out, defeating all of the gods, defeating all of the enemies of Egypt. But why does he pick on Jacob and Joseph? I mean, Jacob had twelve sons, and Joseph had two sons that became Jacob’s sons in Joseph’s place. So why does Asaph particularly pick on Jacob and Joseph and their children? Think about the lives of Jacob and Joseph. At one point in Jacob’s life, he weeps and weeps and weeps and weeps, and his sons come to him to console him, and he says, “I will weep until I die. I refuse to be comforted. I refuse to be consoled. This is it for me. My son is dead.” Or to say it differently, “Just kill me.” And Jacob’s life is one filled with turmoil and despair. Through most of his life, a heavy hand is upon him. Well, but think about Joseph: sold into slavery, thrown into a prison, rejected by his brothers, cast out from his family, a life of despair and misery. And yet, what does Joseph acknowledge when his brothers return? “You meant it for evil. God meant it for good.” Now, you need to hear that. He doesn’t say, “You meant it for evil, but God turned it into good.” It’s not just that the Lord sort of came and took what the brothers were doing and said, “Well, I don’t like it, but I’m gonna make it become good for you.” No, no. He intended it for good to save his people from famine, and for the upbuilding of Joseph. And so when Asaph says Jacob and Joseph’s sons, he’s saying sons of suffering, sons of sorrow, sons of misery. They are the ones that the Lord redeems.

You can think of the words of the apostles in the New Testament, “We must enter the Kingdom of God through tribulation.” Not through comfort, not through happiness, not through rejoicing, not through gladness. Through suffering, through sorrow, through pain, through affliction. Because God uses the very sorrow we carry in our hearts to lead us home. And if it was good enough for the man of sorrows, for the teacher, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is it not also good for us to be redeemed through suffering? You know, our sight says to us that God causes these things for our destruction, to destroy us. But by faith, we come to see that all of this, the very depression I suffer under, is all for the sake of becoming made in the image of the Son of God. Think about Romans 8:28 and 29. We are predestined to be conformed into the image of His Son, verse 29, right? Verse 28 says, “All things work together for good.” All things work together for good. One of the most abused texts of the Bible, stuck on infinite number of fridge magnets around the world. “Hey, God’s got a good plan for my life.” And you can say with that person, “Hallelujah, suffering. Sorrow, depression, the death of a loved one, all of it, and the happy times too. All for my good.” And what is my good? Being made into the image of His Son. Being made into the image of Christ.

You know, brothers and sisters, when spiritual depression brings us really low, we need to shut our physical eyes. We need to shut our physical eyes. Sometimes you need to do this physically when you’re spiritually depressed. You need to shut down your physical senses and open up your eyes of faith. You need to remember, you need to ponder, you need to meditate upon the works of the living God. You need to ask yourself the question, how has God acted in the past? And let it flow out of you. Sometimes you need to speak against reason. Sometimes you need to speak better than what you feel. Declaring what is true even when you don’t feel it, even when you don’t experience it, because the Bible says it. Martin Luther commenting on this chapter—he was a man of sorrows indeed—he said, “All things done in the past become wonderful in the present day through faith. Faith enlightens the blind, strengthens the lame, and causes the deaf to hear.” Plumer again says, “The annals of false gods are filled with fables and follies and vagaries. The record of Yahweh’s doing is the true history of the universe, every part of which teems with wonder and marvel and wondrous works.”

Brothers and sisters, this is our God. And He is mighty to save. And He is holy in all His doings. And all His doings are for redemption. And so if you’re someone that struggles with spiritual depression, you must learn to remember by faith and not judge by sight. When the clouds are dark above your head, you must learn to remember by faith and not look with your physical senses. And if you’re someone that doesn’t struggle with depression and you have the joy of walking alongside others, your job is to tell the old, old story. Remember the old hymn? Tell the old, old story of a Jesus who died for me, you know? You need to tell the sufferer the truth. Let me tell you about the God of the Bible. Let me tell you about the glory of God. Let me tell you about His holiness. Don’t give them stories of the time you fell over and broke your leg and everything worked out marvelously. Tell them of the goodness of God. Tell them of the mighty hand of God. Tell them of the redemptive purposes of God. And know the works of God, brothers and sisters.

And that goes for all of us, doesn’t it? There’s no hope in this unless we’re able to remember the works of God. I mean, you imagine if Asaph says, “I will remember your wonders. I will ponder all your work. I will meditate on your mighty deeds, but unfortunately I can’t remember any of them.” That would’ve been a sad way to end the psalm, wouldn’t it? “I guess that’s it. Sorry, guys. I knew it once. I read it once a long time ago, but, ah, it’s gone.” And yet we can be like that. We must know the works of God for ourselves. We must be intimate with the ways of God today in our own lives and through history. And let me ask you, is there any greater past work that you can look back to than the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ? I mean, the redemption of Egypt was a marvelous thing. The redemption of Israel out of Egypt was a marvelous work. But it pales in significance compared to the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ, compared to the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. And yet if you consider that event, a man hanging on a tree, nailed to a cross, dying in misery and pain. When you look at that by sight, what do you see? You see weakness, you see evil, and you see destruction, right? When you look at the cross, like the Pharisees look at the cross, what do you do? You shake your head in scorn and you say, “Pah, so much for your God.” And if you’re a Roman, what do you say? “He’s just a criminal like everybody else.” But when you look by faith, what do you see? Here is the holiness of God poured out upon the Holy One in perfect justice upon an undeserved sacrifice. Here is power on display, that one man could carry the world’s sin upon His shoulders, that one man could bear the eternal wrath of hell and God for me and for every sinner that would trust in Him. And here is redemption. Here is salvation. It’s the mightiest display. It’s the mightiest past event of the holiness of God, the mightiness of God, and the redemption of God being played out in the world.

And all of this shows us what you might call the grand divine syllogism. The grand divine syllogism, which goes something like this: Because God is holy, and because God is mighty, God will redeem me. It’s the opposite of the lie of the devil. God’s evil, God’s weak, and so you’re destroyed. But faith says because God is holy and God is mighty, God will redeem me. Brothers and sisters, let us look, let us look and ponder and speak to one another often of the mighty works of God. Amen.