Sermon Tone Analysis

When God’s Servant is Depressed

Jeremiah 20:7-18

 

Dr.

Tim LaHaye claims to have asked over one hundred thousand people among his audiences if there were any who have never been depressed.

Among one hundred thousand people so questioned not one has ever responded to his query by stating “I have never been depressed.”

It would actually appear that those who live in pleasant surroundings are most susceptible to being depressed.

Someone has said that a pessimist is someone who has to live with a constant optimist.

Depression is both ancient and universal.

The Psalmist implored:

 

Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

[*Psalm 42:5*]

 

Hippocrates, the ancient physician, wrote a treatise on melancholy.

Winston Churchill, during the Battle of Britain, was a bastion of strength, but at the same time he underwent severe bouts of depression.

Edgar Allan Poe is said to have been depressed for four days after writing The Pit and the Pendulum.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, recalls that the bloodthirsty dictator was the victim of deep and dark depression.

Charles Spurgeon, arguably the greatest preacher in Christendom since apostolic days, knew weeks on end of darkness and melancholy.

Depression knows neither moral boundaries nor social distinction; all alike are subject to bouts of melancholy.

A few years back we heard a great deal about the Moral Majority in the media.

When you leaf through the Bible you meet the “Miserable Majority.”

So many of God’s greatest servants were, at critical moments in their lives, depressed.

Moses asked God to take his life.

Job pleaded with the Lord, “Kill me!”  Elijah desired death by God’s hand.

Jonah wanted God to do away with him.

And Saul, king of Israel, did destroy himself and many of those around him by reason of his fits of depression.

I suggest that in *Jeremiah Twenty* is found the most miserable description of all of the effects of depression.

Jeremiah had hit rock bottom.

His experience should be helpful to each of us who must deal intermittently and periodically with depression.

I am encouraged by the very degree of Jeremiah’s discouragement.

The very fact that Jeremiah’s experience is unveiled in the Bible and that God could accept him and use him in spite of his depression, is a redemptive encouragement to anyone experiencing depression.

I testify that this account has encouraged me at critical moments.

The Reason God’s People May Experience Depression — I shall not exhaustively explore reasons for depression as this is not a psychological treatise; but from the text we see that depression results when we imagine ourselves victims of divine deceit.

In *verse seven*, Jeremiah reveals unremitting pain and deep disappointment by crying out: O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed.

I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me.

What could have happened to bring Jeremiah to this point that he believed himself a victim of divine deceit?

He had just spent time in the stocks for the crime of preaching the mind of God.

He had just been punished as result of righteous teaching.

He had experienced yet another confrontation with the power structure of the nation who refused to do right and who refused to heed the warnings of God.

Psychologists tell us that one element in virtually all types of depression is a sense of disappointment.

Jeremiah had certainly experienced one of the greatest disappointments of all.

He looked up to Heaven and cried out: “God, You Yourself have deceived me!”

He was so disappointed that he used incredibly strong language, some of the most exceptional language to be found in the entire Old Testament.

His literal words are: “You raped me.”

In another place he pointed his finger to heaven and charged God with deceit in this way: Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable?

Will You be to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails?

[*Jeremiah 15:18*].

Jeremiah lived in Judah, a semiarid land dotted with watercourses which from a distance promise refreshment and relief to the weary traveller.

Upon closer inspection, however, many of these brooks and streams would prove to be waterless … mere wadis which though gushing with water periodically were usually dry and dusty, arid and parched.

Such conditions are difficult for us to imagine, living as we do in a land blessed with an abundance of water as is true for Canada.

The weary prophet charges God with being like such a wadi, promising much from afar but proving a disappointment nearby.

When God called Jeremiah He had informed him:

 

My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken Me,

the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns,

broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

[*Jeremiah 2:13*]

 

Now, Jeremiah charges that he has invested two decades – and to no avail; the people are no nearer God than when he started and God is no nearer than when Jeremiah began.

The Babylonians are still on the march.

The people are still playing church.

The politicians and religionists were still in control of daily life and conspiring to exclude God from that life.

Jeremiah is himself hurting, the butt of ridicule and cruel calumny.

This last matter points to another reason God’s people may experience depression: they experience repeated rejection.

Hear his plaintive cry.

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…  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"  [*verses seven**, **eight* and *ten*].

Jeremiah had experienced the cruellest form of rejection – mockery and ridicule.

He had preached with a heart of love and the people had rejected him with biting mockery and with cruel vindictiveness.

The old saw says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

It is a lie!

            Too often have I comforted the child cruelly taunted by playmates or classmates to ever repeat such foolishness.

Too often have I comforted the spouse left torn and emotionally bruised for life by unkind remarks, whether thoughtless or deliberate.

Too often have I been on the receiving end of such injurious statements to ever dismiss in a cavalier fashion the pain resulting from words.

Sticks and stones may break my bones … and words can wound deeper still and injure for a lifetime.

More difficult perhaps than imprisonment and deprivation was the rejection and ridicule which the prophet experienced.

Because his message was one of confrontation and because he was a prophet dispatched to warn of impending judgement, Jeremiah was ridiculed by those who heard him.

He could hear them whispering mockingly as he passed by: Terror on every side.

The warnings were turned into taunts and jeers and he received the painful nickname: Terror on every side [bybiS;mi rwgOm;].

Unknown people pointed behind his back and scoffed at his message.

Few can ever know the pain of the pastor’s heart when the message he brings is scorned and when those who have heard his pleas rush headlong toward disaster and confrontation with divine judgement.

I have too often left the pulpit crushed and broken in spirit because of the hard looks on the face of those who heard but refused to heed.

Even those whom Jeremiah had called friends were now waiting for him to slip.

Those friends, called men of peace by the prophet of God, were those whom the prophet had greeted by name as he met them in the streets, those whom he had greeted with a wish for their peace.

It is painful enough when those we do not know laugh at us and when those with whom we are unacquainted ridicule us for our message and for our identification with righteousness; but when even our close friends mock us and deride our words we are wounded more deeply than any mere visual inspection could ever reveal.

When friends reject our pleas and refuse our warnings, entering into the contemptuous and disdainful mockery, we experience a pain unlike anything we might ever have imagined.

The Response Of God’s People To Depression — How do God’s people respond to depression?

I suppose there are as many responses as there are members of the Body of Christ.

However, certain repeated strains appear when God’s people are depressed.

First appears a retreat from service.

Jeremiah spoke of this response in *verse nine* when he determined: "I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name."

However, the prophet soon discovered His Word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones.

I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.

“How can I speak of God, how can I speak of His mercy, how can I speak of His grace, when I hurt so deeply that I cannot even express my pain?”

The first response to depression is to distance ourselves from God, the one source to lift us from depression.

Again, the depressed individual is seized with black bitterness.