Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness

by Edward T. Welch

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Sin can certainly be a cause of depression, but you must be careful about connecting the dots between the two. If you are being honest, you will always find sin in your life. Everyone does. That doesn’t mean that sin caused your depression.

So depression does not necessarily have a spiritual cause if, by spiritual, we mean that it is caused by our own sin. But there is a broader meaning to the word spiritual, and, in this sense, your depression is always and profoundly spiritual. Spiritual can refer to the very center of our being where our basic allegiances are worked out. Who is God? Do we trust him? Why is he allowing this to happen to me? How can I trust him when he seems so remote and unresponsive? These are spiritual questions that, in many

You can be assured of this: God really does speak in our suffering, and we have good reason to believe that the words he says are good and powerful enough to lighten our pain. If

God is over all things, and nothing happens apart from his knowledge and will. By the time suffering or depression comes to our doorstep, God did it. To believe anything else is to opt for a universe that is random and out of control, without a guiding hand bringing all things to a purposeful and awe-inspiring conclusion.

you don’t have to know the exact cause of suffering in order to find hope and comfort.

But all suffering is intended to train us to fix our eyes on the true God. Therefore, depression, regardless of the causes, is a time to answer the deepest and most important of all questions: Whom will I trust? Whom will I worship?

There are paradoxes in most depression. You loathe the isolation of depression, but you avoid other people. You want help, but you don’t always listen. You believe there is a God, but you feel like an atheist.

Yes. This exactly!

Martin Luther said that the cross alone is our theology. At the cross we see that God took the suffering and judgment on himself.

Now you can see why liturgical prayers might be very useful. When you try to call out to the Lord, you have no words. You don’t have words to describe your experience; you don’t have words to bless God; and you don’t even know what to request. This would seem to doom you to silence if it weren’t for the fact that God is pleased to communicate with his people. He delights in teaching us how to call out to him.

Hope, as you will find, is a skill that takes practice. There is no verse, pill, or possession that will make it magically appear. Reciting psalms that you have claimed as your own is part of that practice.

Faith feels many different ways. It can be buoyant; it can be depressed and lifeless. Feelings don’t define faith.

Faith is not the presence of warm religious feeling. It’s the knowledge that you walk before the God who hears.

Lies don’t just impose themselves on our hearts. Instead, Satan’s lies come to us after the seeds already exist. He is the counselor who endorses the lies we already suspect are true. He is the false witness who is quick to confirm our false interpretation.

Rather than fight us where we have strong faith and certainty and lies will seem silly and obvious, Satan looks for faith that is weak in the hopes that we will meekly surrender. It begins when we harbor doubts.

Remember that you have an enemy. Follow the lead of wise people who begin each day by actually saying, “Today, I must be alert that I have an enemy.” Ask others to remind you, and be quick to remind others.

As long as you struggle with depression, you will have to be particularly alert to it. Your goal isn’t to overcome it; your goal is to engage it with a growing knowledge of Jesus Christ.

If Jesus learned obedience through suffering, we will too. A path without hardships should cause us to wonder if we really belong to God.

suffering does not oppose love; it is a result of it (Heb. 12:8). We are under the mistaken impression that divine love cannot coexist with human pain. Such thinking is one of Satan’s most effective strategies.

Love produces hope. If we, in our misery, are absolutely persuaded of God’s love, we will be confident that he will deliver us.

God’s love inspires both an eagerness to be with him and a confidence that he is true to his word, so we know he will come. It is these two—eagerness and confidence—that combine to form hope.

Depression feels like a state of not-thinking, but it is also a place of insight because you see that the stage was really just a stage. What seemed meaningful and real a few years ago has turned out to be a façade.

Depression says, “You will not find meaning in what you are doing,” and depression is right. What it doesn’t tell you is, “Keep looking, you will find it. You are a creature with a royal purpose.” For this, you need to listen to others who have gone this way before. They urge you to continue and point the way.

Tell your Heavenly Father that you are like a prodigal child who keeps looking for self-oriented purposes rather than God-oriented ones.

Put it this way: at the cross, Christ has taken your story of misery upon himself and he has given you his story of resurrection and hope. We are given the successes of Christ, the record of Christ, and the love that Jesus enjoys from the Father. When you put your faith in Jesus, everything changes. What some people think is just a ticket into heaven is much, much more.

there are prodigal yearnings within each of us. We want to find our own way. Even though we get hopelessly lost, there is something in us that prefers aimless wandering to child-like imitation and obedience. The cross is God’s pursuit of wayward children. It is the invitation back to the family.

[Screwtape warns Wormwood] Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s [God’s] will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.4

Depression says, “Surrender.” The message is relentless, and many comply because even when you know that there is a purpose to your suffering, the battle seems too long. “I can’t tell you how tired I am of character building experiences,” says an author who has been through it a number of times.1 If depression’s assault only touched one part of your life, you might put up a fight. But when it gains access to every sector, and even the smallest step is oppressive, “surrender” seems inevitable. You can postpone it but not avoid it.

Perseverance is only relevant in difficulties, and we are, in fact, very difficult people for God to deal with. Our Creator God has created us for himself, and we respond too often with indifference or a quest for adolescent independence. Put even more personally, we are his beloved, but, in the face of God’s unexplainable and lavish love, we pursue other lovers who ultimately abandon us. In this context, God reveals his perseverance with us.

All teaching on perseverance, patience, and endurance finds its source in the character of God. Just as we love because he is love and he loved us before we knew him, so we persevere because he is perseverance and he has persevered with us throughout history.

Now consider another woman who has experienced deep depression. Her testimony is that she believes God is good, whether depression leaves or returns. She has learned to persevere in troubles and find contentment in God in the midst of them. That is a glorious testimony.

Perseverance isn’t flashy. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It looks like putting one foot in front of another. But beneath the surface, where few can see the glory, is something very profound (Rev. 2:2, 19). You are becoming more like God. God sees it, and

The essence of persevering is trusting or obeying because of Jesus.

What you thought was a path of life now looks more like a battlefield. Satan’s strategy is to wear you down. You remember the cross one day, and Satan is content to wait for tomorrow. If he can’t outfight you (because God fights for you), he tries to outwait you. Perseverance is what you need in prolonged wars.

Martin Luther called depression anfechtungen, which means “to be fought at.”

Wise counsel tells us that we must talk to depression—fight it— rather than merely listen to it. What we often hear from depression is, “God doesn’t care”—if, indeed, we hear God’s name at all. What we say to it is, “Put your hope in God.”

Your hope is that God hears, that he finds great worth in perseverance, that he rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6), that he blesses those who persevere (James 1:12), that he is faithful to all his promises. Your hope comes when you begin to fix your eyes on Jesus, the One who is invisible (Heb. 11:27).

Remember that God gives you other people so that you do not fight alone. When you feel thoroughly exhausted, call for help. The church functions like a tag-team wrestling match. Just get to the ropes and touch the other person’s hand. Their perseverance can carry you.

Pain is usually tied to something that happened to us. Does this matter anymore? Does it matter to God? God’s sovereign control over history and our own personal stories make past situations more important, not less. What happened to us was not a series of random, unrelated events.

Why is it that some people who experience these circumstances spiral into depression and others don’t? It is because these circumstances do not cause depression by themselves. They are usually necessary to the depressive cycle, but they are not sufficient—that is, they can’t make you depressed all on their own. These circumstances must also connect with an internal system of beliefs or an interpretive lens that will then plunge you down into depression.

Some people avoid the deeper reaches of depression because they are constitutionally steady; others because their beliefs and confidence in God catch them before they fall too far.

Not only do we have to fight against our own sin; we also have to fight against aspects of the culture that applaud our sinful tendencies rather than rebuke them.

in view of God’s sovereign control, God will accomplish his purposes in our lives even when we make decisions we later regret.

What happens when people are raised on a steady diet of “You are great, you can do anything, you deserve it, you are the best, you can get what you want”? Sooner or later they find that they are not great, they can’t do everything, they are not the best, and they can’t control it all. Depression and denial are the only two options left.

The antidote for boredom is joy. It comes when our hopes are fixed on something eternally wonderful and beautiful. Augustine rightly identified the ultimate object of joy as God. True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God, who are the truth ... Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy.7 According to Augustine, true joy is the delight in the supreme beauty, goodness, and truth that are the attributes of God, of which traces may be found in the good and beautiful things of this world.

We are trying to carefully dissect depression. We are listening to it, hoping for clues about how it began and how it can be relieved. This led us first to highlight a number of causes that come at us. Satan, other people, death, and culture often play a part. The next step is to complete the loop and consider those things that come out of us.

Things don’t simply happen to us. When they do, we respond with an immediate interpretation of their meaning and significance. We filter the event through our view of God, others, and ourselves that we have been developing throughout our lives.

Your story, your interpretations, your motivations, and your beliefs come out of your heart. This is the center of your life. The heart oversees the “whys.” Why work? Why play? Why love? It is the defining feature of humanness.

We crave autonomy. Autonomy is closely linked to arrogance. They are both expressions of human pride, but autonomy suggests that we want to be separate from more than over. We want to establish the rules rather than submit to the lordship of the living God. This was the essence of Adam’s original sin. We want to interpret the world according to our system of thought. We want to establish our own parallel universe, separate from God’s.

Many depressed people have been hurt and rejected by others. They feel as though basic relational needs have not been met, and they will be stuck in depression until they are. Rejection from parents, spouses, or friends has left a profound emptiness that feels like an emotional handicap. What does this have to do with the heart? Consider first the example of Jesus. He is God, but he was truly human. If anything is clear from his life, he didn’t get love from people, he never prayed that he would know the love of other people, and he didn’t seem emotionally undone by rejection and misunderstanding. Rather, his deepest needs, as noted in his prayers, were for the glory of his Father to be revealed and for his spiritual children to be protected from the evil one and united in love (John 17).