Sermon Tone Analysis

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.