Why Am I So Afraid?

Tonight we are going to talk about 2 areas that I have struggled with the most in my life and those 2 issues are depression and anxiety. For me, tonight is like revisiting an old neighborhood that I used to live in because there is this feeling of familiarity. I will admit that depression is something that is a continual struggle in my life. I’ve suffered with it for well over a decade of my life and I would consider it the thorn in my flesh, to use the words of Paul, if I were to have one. I have described my battle with depression as this feeling of a vulture flying over me: sometimes its right on top of me and other times it is so high I can hardly see it but the shadow of it is always there and I always think that it could return at any moment and I’ll share some more of my story before we dive into our verses for tonight just so you can see where I’m coming from. Let me just start by saying that I absolutely empathize with your generation and the hurt that I am sure many of you are dealing with. Let me also say that I understand that depression and anxiety are complicated issues and that very few cases ever look the same. I also understand that what we are going to go through tonight may be triggering for some of you and know that as we are talking about this tonight, if something hits home, it’s ok to let those emotions out and know that we love you all so much. Everything about this week has been spoken out of love for you. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that your generation is a depressed and anxious generation. In 2019, the CDC stated that 37% of high schoolers said they had experienced such persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year that they couldn’t participate in their regular activities. And from that same study, about 1 in 6 students reported making a suicide plan in the past year. Between 2007 and 2017, the rate of depression for teenagers increased by 57%. In 2019, the CDC said that 15.1% of teenagers had a major depressive episode, 36.7% had experienced feelings of hopelessness or sadness, 19% considered suicide as a viable option, 15.7% made a plan to commit suicide, 8.9% attempted suicide, and 2.5% made an attempt that required medical treatment. These were pre-covid numbers by the way. I’m not going to try and minimize what you all are struggling with. I know that there are some of you in here who are a part of that number so what I want to do tonight is not give a medical explanation to what you all are going through but I want to show you that God has not abandoned you. Even as you may be battling depression and anxiety, I want you to know that God is near the brokenhearted. You are not going through this fight alone. I’ll tell you a little bit about my struggles and then we will dive into Psalm 42.

My Story

On paper, I have been given a very good life. I have been given an amazing family, a nice home, I’ve never had to wonder where the next meal will come from or if the bills will be paid, I have grown up in the church and have heard the Gospel my entire life, so one might think that I would not have anything to feel deep distress and sadness over. If anything, I am evidence that someone can have everything but feel like nothing at the same time. I can’t remember when the first feeling of depression came on but I remember in middle school I started to feel like something was off. I was bullied basically my whole time in middle school. It was around that time that I started to see myself as what these people were calling me. I noticed that I was short, that I was stubby and rounder than I would like, that I was really pale and all of this made me start thinking, “I’m not attractive, I’m not someone that people like.” I was desperate for peoples approval. I was desperate for attention but most importantly, I was desperate for love. I wanted people to love me, I wanted the feeling that I was someone that other people thought about but I wasn’t getting it. By the time I left that school and started going to a public high school, the same worries followed me. To be honest, back then I didn’t know that I was depressed because I didn’t know that word existed. As I went through high school, I was seen as the Christian kid or Mrs. Bassett’s son because my mom was a teacher there but I never felt like the Christian kid because my heart was just being torn apart. I felt so alone and even though I had some pretty good friends and I was always cracking jokes and acting like things didn’t bother me, deep down I knew something was wrong. When I got to my senior year of high school, I started to lose weight and I had a major growth spurt but I still looked at myself as something that no one wanted. The physical may have started to look better but the inward struggles started to look worse. I saw going to college as this great moment to rebound. I was starting a new life away from all these old influences but depression didn’t go away the moment I walked onto Liberty’s campus. I had a new address but the same problems. My first semester I actually functioned pretty well. The newness of it all helped I think but by the end of my second semester, I started falling apart. An empty room opened up in my dorm and I moved into it because I liked the idea of having my own space but this was one of the worst things that I could have done. I wasn’t sleeping at night so I started taking sleeping pills and my anxiety was out of control so I would take sleeping pills during the day just so I could function but unless you could see inside of me, you probably couldn’t tell. Over time, I became addicted to taking all of this melatonin and sleeping supplements and I never really stopped to think that I had much of a problem. It was during this second semester of freshman year that I experienced my first real heartbreak. There was this girl, and anytime a story starts like that, you know its gonna get bad. We had gone out a few times, I had met her family, we had all these plans and things were great but Valentine’s Day comes and suddenly she says that things had changed and we couldn’t hang out like we used to. A couple days later and she’s dating someone else. What did I do? I started isolating myself more, taking more sleeping pills, and acted like nothing was wrong. I realized that I had a problem the night that a few friends of mine went over to another friends house to watch Pitch Perfect I think and I was the friend with the car so I always drove but I had taken so many sleeping pills by that point in the day that I couldn’t drive us home. I do not remember how we got back to campus. I don’t even remember getting in my car. I remember falling asleep in the passengers seat and hearing my friend say, “Guys, Brady’s asleep, we need to take him home.” I woke up when we got to my dorm and I felt so awful that these friends had to do this for me, that they would have to walk alone in the dark almost a mile back to their dorm because I hated myself. One night I was walking home late from the library and this guy who I don’t even remember the name of but we knew each other a little bit walked with me and completely out of the blue he said to me, “I really see Jesus in you.” And I remember thinking, “I’m glad that you do because I sure don’t.” Right after that happened though, something came into my head and it was the thought: Brady, why am I so afraid to live when Christ so willingly died so that I could.” My sophomore year comes and everything changes. From sophomore year to the end of my college days, I can’t remember having depression like that. I would have a few days here and there as Lora could testify to but it seemed like that deep heaviness was gone but it didn’t last forever. Lora and I got married and for someone who fought so long to be loved, you would think that the old struggles would disappear but they didn’t. They just started to look different. My first year in Georgia went really well. My ministry was growing and I felt like I was doing better but something happened after that first year. To really get to the point, basically my old pastor told me that everything that I was doing was wrong and that I either needed to do exactly what they wanted me to do or I could leave. They wanted me to teach some curriculum that I just didn’t feel good about and over time, things just got gradually worse. I became so depressed that I physically could not do anything. I would go to work, have a meeting with my senior pastor, and go to the other building to cry. If my senior pastor left me an email before I left for the day saying that we needed to talk tomorrow, I would just become too anxious to function because he would either chew me out or tell me something that didn’t really need a meeting for. I felt trapped and I was making myself sick. For 2 years I stayed there and hated so much of it. Once Benji was born, I started feeling even worse because here I was with this new baby and I was 24 and I felt like I had to keep working there to support my family but I was reaching a limit. It got to a point where I almost quit the ministry altogether because I felt like God was not getting me out of there. I knew He was sovereign, I knew He heard my prayer, and I remember praying one day in my crying spot in the other building and I was shouting almost, “God you promised! You promised that if I asked I would find, if I sought you I would find you, if I knocked you would open the door and you haven’t done it!” But God knew what He was doing. He was working according to His timing and not to mine and I am so grateful that He did because if He was working on my timing, it wouldn’t have brought us here. Now I’m not saying that I haven’t been depressed since we moved here because there have been some bad weeks here and there. But God has been faithful. He has continued to stand by me even when I couldn’t physically stand on my own. I have learned over the years that the more I lean on Him, the stronger I discover Him to be. With the time that we have left, I want us to look at what the Bible has to say about depression and anxiety because God’s Word is not silent on these two matters. Turn in your Bibles to Psalm 42:3-11 “My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go morning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, ‘where is your God?’ Why are you cast down, o my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.”

Depression and the Psalms

What can we gather from these verses? I think that it is worth stressing that their is both a physical and spiritual aspect of depression. Not every depression is physical and not every depression is spiritual. In order to know which one we are dealing with, we need to make an honest assessment about ourselves. If it is a spiritual depression, we need to find the root of it and if it is a physical depression, we should talk to a doctor on how to address that. Maybe it means exercise or counseling or some other element. What I want to try and do is address both from the same angle and talk about what I think is beneficial for us based off of what we learn from Psalm 42 and the Bible as a whole. One thing that I want to get out of the way quickly is the fact that you can be a Christian and be depressed. Depression is a mental illness and just as Christians are not guaranteed protection from physical illnesses in this lifetime, there is no reason to assume that a Christian would be completely protected from mental illness in this lifetime. Now this certainly does not mean that a true saving faith in Christ does not change elements of one’s physical and mental illness because when our eyes are most clearly set on Christ, that perspective allows us to go through our dark valleys differently. We are able to go through these dark times and say, “God all I see is dark right now but I know you are the Light of the World and as long as my heart is set on you, I know that this darkness will one day lift.” So, absolutely a Christian can be depressed. R.T. Kendall wrote, “A Christian can be depressed. Both Job and Jeremiah cursed the day of their birth. Many of the psalms reflect a man who was in a depression to some degree. But there is a way forward.” Let’s talk about that way forward. I don’t want to necessarily talk about the causes of depression but I want to address how we can handle it when it comes and we can learn these lessons from Psalm 42.

Address Yourself

The first thing that we need to do is address ourselves and address our situations. We need to ask ourselves some tough questions. If you look at Psalm 42:5 and 11, this is exactly what the Psalmist does. He asks the question, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” If you are going through depression, you need to ask yourself, “Why am I?” In 1954, Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached a series of sermons that would later become his best-selling book: Spiritual Depression and during that opening sermon he said, “You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul, ‘Why are you cast down’- what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn to yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘hope thou in God’- instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way.” We need to preach to ourselves. We need to say, “Self, what is the cause of this? Why am I responding in this way?” Because until you address the problem, you are only going to spiral into a deeper and darker depression. If all you do is say woe is me, you’re always going to look for solutions inside of you instead of looking outwards.

Remember who God is and what He has done

What should we do once we address ourselves? We need to remember who God is and what He has already done. What is the answer to the Psalmists question in verse 5-6? “Hope in God; for I shall praise Him, my salvation and my God.” As I have gone through my battles with depression, one of the greatest comforts comes from knowing who God is and thinking back to what He has done. I may not always see what the Lord is doing but I am often able to look back and see what He has done to get me to where I am today. Who God is, is who He has always been. God is the God of our salvation. If we can trust God with our eternal lives, we can certainly trust Him with our physical lives. Your sorrows are not more powerful than our God. God is sovereign over all things and His sovereignty has been the pillow that I have laid my head on every night. The Lord gives us a great reminder of His sovereignty and love for us in Isaiah 43:1-5. He is writing to the people of Israel but it is certainly applicable to all of the Lord’s followers. God says, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.” Do you hear what the Lord is saying to us? He isn’t saying, “Follow me and you will never suffer.” No, He is saying, “Even as you walk through these waters, I will be with you every step of the way. Even as you go through rivers, you will not be overwhelmed. Even as you go through the furnace of affliction and the fires of despair, you will not be consumed.” Why? “For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, Your Savior and you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.” The people of God are not exempt from sorrows but they are able to suffer differently when their eyes are set on the God who is always there. Philipp Melanchton said, “Many in the church have enormous sorrows—some more, some less severe. Also let us all learn that the will of God is that we would not succumb to such sorrows but that we rouse ourselves in faith and hope. And it is necessary to lean on this faith and hope, not on our righteousness or dignity, but on the mercy of God alone revealed in the promises.” David writes in Psalm 56:8-9 “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book? Then my enemies will turn back in the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me.” Depression does not mean that God is against you. If you have been saved by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, there is absolutely nothing that God holds against you. He isn’t pouring out His wrath upon you. He may be leading you through discipline but it is always done in love. Richard Sibbes writes, “It is a pitiful state when body, soul, and conscience all are depressed, but even now let a Christian look to God’s nature and promises. Though he cannot live by sight, yet let him live much by faith.”

The solution to depression is never less of God

The next thing I want you to know is that the solution to depression is never less of God. The answer to suffering is never to increase sin. If the darkness does not lift, know for certain that light will come from the One who is always there. Charles Spurgeon, a man who was no stranger to depression, writes, “If every evil be let loose from Pandora’s box, yet is there hope at the bottom. This is the grace that swims, though the waves roar and be troubled. God is unchangeable, and therefore his grace is the ground for unshaken hope. If everything be dark, yet the day will come, and meanwhile hope carries stars in her eyes.” As we have gone through our series in Philippians, we have talked a lot about what we treasure the most and we have constantly come back to the fact that the greater your heart is set on Christ, the greater satisfaction you will find in Him. Understand this, if Christ is everything, you will be content with nothing because you will possess all things that you really need, but if Christ is nothing, it doesn’t matter if you have everything because you will ultimately not possess that which you truly need.

God knows what it means to suffer

One last word of encouragement is God knows what it means to suffer. He is not indifferent towards your pain, He is not unkind towards your sufferings, He is never unloving to you in your afflictions. Jesus Christ, God over all, knows what it is like to suffer. Christ lived His life on earth as a man of sorrows. He bore the wrath of God on our behalf and drank the cup of God’s wrath dry. No one has ever suffered like Jesus of Nazareth and He suffered all these things willingly so that you and I would be saved. Thomas Watson said, “Christ died for our preferment; He suffered that we might reign. He hung on the cross that we might sit on the throne; His crucifixion is our coronation.” I have shared this numerous times but when it comes to the problem of pain, the suffering in our lives, the cross is the clearest indication that God sees our pain and is willing to do something about it and the empty tomb is our clearest sign that He did do something about it. The cross is our sign that God loves us so much that He would choose death so that we might live and the empty tomb is our clearest sign that death has been defeated by death and that God is more than able to do something about our problems! God is no stranger to suffering and He is with us when we are in the valley and He is with us when we are on the mountaintop. With the time that we have left, which isn’t much, let’s talk a little about anxiety.

Anxiety and Matthew 6

There are a lot of similarities between anxiety and depression so we won’t spend too much time on this. We are often people that like to worry and when we aren’t worrying about something, we are worried about why we aren’t worried. Despite this, Christians should be the least worried people in the world because we serve a God who is sovereign over all things and is seated upon the throne! Jesus says in Matthew 6:25-34,

Matthew 6:25–34 ESV

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

What is the antidote to worry? The answer is to seek first the Kingdom of God and to look to the righteousness of God first and when you do that, all other things will begin to fall into place. R.C. Sproul said, “Jesus does not tell us to forget about our concerns but rather to focus our concern and thoughts on His Father’s kingdom. All the things that are added to us will be the consequence of our focusing our desires on His kingdom.” If our eyes are set on God and the things that He is doing, then we will see a God that is not caught off guard or worried about the state of the universe. God is not losing sleep at night with what is happening in the world and if we trust Him to take care of our greatest spiritual need, we can trust Him to take care of that which we truly need in our physical lives. Steven Lawson writes, “It is worth asking yourself: what is there in my life that causes me a sense of panic, either low-level or almost paralyzing? Realize that God is not worried. There is no panic in heaven, but only plans to work out his good purposes in your life. There is no need to worry. There is no excuse for worry. Do not worry is both a command to trust the Lord and an invitation to enjoy peace with the Lord.” One of my favorite verses from Scripture is Luke 12:32. Jesus says, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Here we see the Good Shepherd’s heart for His sheep. God understands that we are prone to worry about our lives but He says, “Why are you so afraid? There is nothing to be afraid of and there is nothing that you can sacrifice that I will not make up for. I haven’t just given you comfort, I have given you a kingdom! We as Christians don’t just come into the family of God with a Heavenly Father who could care less if we were there or not. No, it is the Father’s pleasure to give us the Kingdom! J.C. Ryle said, “Believers are tenderly loved by God the Father. He does not receive them grudgingly, unwillingly, and coldly. He rejoices over them as members of His beloved Son in whom he is well pleased. He regards them as his dear children in Christ. He sees no spot in them. Even now, when He looks down on them from heaven, in the midst of their infirmities, He is well pleased, and hereafter, when presented before His glory, He will welcome them with exceeding joy.” You are not a burden to your Heavenly Father. Your prayers and your worries are not bumming Him out. There is a big difference between you going through seasons of doubt and unbelief. Doubt is not a sin; unbelief is. Seasons of doubt, seasons of anxiety are not signs that God doesn’t love you or is capable of using you. In Luke 7, John the Baptist is in prison and he sends his disciples to Jesus and he asks them this question, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Why does he ask this? Because John had seen what had happened at Christ’s baptism but when he was feeling the pressure of prison, he started to get really discouraged because even he thought that the Messiah would come and make all things right in that very moment and John would go free. But that doesn’t happen. Jesus instead does a bunch of miracles and then sends them back to John and he says, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” Now what Jesus is doing there is He is actually quoting verses from Isaiah 35 and Isaiah 61 with Isaiah 61:1 mentioning that the Messiah is sent to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound” but Jesus never mentions that. In fact, I’m sure that as John is waiting and listening to his discples recount what Jesus did, he is hoping that he mentions that last part but it doesn’t come. But I think a lot like Job, John was fine with what happened and what he heard. Why because deep down he knew who the Lord was and what He was doing. John learned that Jesus was a different type of Messiah than what the world expected. John had doubts but Jesus says this in Luke 7:28, “I tell you, among those born of women none is greater than John the Baptist.” Doubts and all, the greatest man to ever live in the eyes of Jesus is John. Bring your doubts and know that you are someone that is dearly beloved and has been for all eternity. If Christ is willing to endure suffering, shame, and death on our behalf, what is left for us to worry about? I know that can be hard to say but remember what I said earlier: God’s sovereignty over all things is the pillow that we lay our head upon each night. Tomorrow may not come but it is not our responsibility to worry about whether it will or not. Our responsibility is to seek for the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and trust that He will have all the pieces fall into place exactly as He wills. If God is not worried about what tomorrow will bring; His followers have no reason to worry about it either. If you are dealing with depression or with anxiety, please come and talk to us. We are the Body of Christ and one part of the Body should never let another part fall into disrepair. We are going to sing this last song together and if you need someone to talk to, find a leader or find a friend. Or if you just want to pray and be alone with God, feel free to do that. Remember it doesn’t matter what other people do or think when it comes to your relationship and worship of God. If you want to cry at the front of the stage and pour out your heart to the Lord, go for it. The Lord hears every cry and every sob that you have ever had. He sees you where you are but thankfully He never leaves us as we are. He is near the brokenhearted and He saves the crushed in spirit. While we may go through afflictions now, the Lord will one day deliver His people from every one of them. Trust the Lord and trust in His timing. Let’s pray and then we will worship together.