Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness

by Edward T. Welch

Your goal has been to please,

tongue in cheek,

The angry person is always the last person to know that he or she is angry.

Will you turn to the true God, who is the holy and righteous judge, or will you form a vigilante party that meets in your name, for your sake, and for your glory?

When you dig deep, anger is about spiritual allegiances. Who will you trust? Our anger indicates that we really don’t trust God. Therefore, when we identify anger in our lives, we can’t simply say, “I am going to stop being angry.” Such a resolution is admirable, but it is a shortcut that is doomed to fail. Anger is ultimately about God. It shows that we don’t trust him, and it becomes an opportunity to know him better.

God’s anger is an expression of his love. If you don’t get angry, you don’t love. If you witness injustice and are unmoved, you do not love the victim. So if God hates dishonesty, he loves honesty. If he hates haughty eyes, he loves humility; a lying tongue, truthfulness; murderers, those who build others up; schemers and false witnesses, peacemaking.

‘In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment; but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,’ says the LORD, your Redeemer” (Isa. 54:8).

This sounds wonderful when it is applied to us, but it sounds like God could be a pushover as a judge when it comes to our enemies. We like mercy for ourselves and justice for others. To be merciful and just is a tricky combination. If you think about it without divine guidance, you will begin to think that mercy is unjust and justice is unmerciful.

Jesus never was angry because of what was done to him. Instead, he taught us to bless our enemies (Luke 6:27–31). He was only angry when leaders led others down a destructive path or money-changers shamed his Father’s temple. His secret was that he was passionate about his Father’s glory, not his own.

Anger is always a form of imitation. Either we are imitating the way mercy trumps anger in the character of Jesus, or we are mimicking the destructive anger of Satan (John 8:44). There are no other choices.

Your worst relationship with other people reveals your heart before God. If we don’t love others, we don’t love God. If we are angry with others, we are standing against God. With our complaining and grumbling, we have set up an implicit test for God: Will he give us what we want or not? We have made life about us, and when we do, we are doomed to a life of perpetual dissatisfaction.

You are listening to diabolic voices that question God’s love and power. You don’t believe that he will love you well or use his power to judge on your behalf. Wherever we find anger that isn’t handled quickly, we will find Satan masterminding division (Eph. 4:26–27).

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Prov. 13:12).

Hope is the future that reaches into the present. When you see nothing ahead of you in the future, there is no reason to get out of bed, love, or work now. Kill hope and you kill more than you anticipated. You thought it would make life less painful, but all attempts to kill hope kill both future hopes and present joys.

If you kill hope, you think you are protecting yourself, but, instead, you doom yourself to lifelessness. If you let hope gradually die without putting up a fight, you end up in the same place. It renders the present meaningless. Without hope, you feel like the walking dead.

other prophets were already prophesying about an exile that would come at the hands of a country from “beyond Damascus” (Amos 5:27). All indicators pointed to Assyria.

inappropriate anger, regardless of where it is directed, is ultimately against God. It is saying that God is not good, and that his judgments should be judged rather than trusted.

the triad of unmet expectations, anger, and self-pity. When they persist, they lead to thoughts of death.

We might believe that God loves us, but we aren’t so sure he will give us what we want. We want to be loved, and we also want to dictate the way and by whom we are loved. Jonah believed that God was gracious and compassionate, but he wanted love served up as judgment and destruction against his enemies.

Confession is when we acknowledge the against-God root of our behaviors.

Jonah tells us that good must be defined by God’s terms, not our own. Otherwise, we are standing in judgment of God.

On this side of the cross, misery persists but the scales are tipped in favor of joy. The King is seated; the celebration has begun in heaven; we could not be loved anymore than we are right now; and there are tastes of heaven available even now. There are realities present now that can sustain your hopes. Pray for eyes to see.

fear, like hopelessness, is reluctant to trust God for the future. God says that he will give you grace to handle the disappointments that lie ahead; your task is to live for him in the present.

fight against hopelessness is to take action in the present.

if you want vitality in the present, entrust your future to the Lord. If you want to have glimpses of hope for tomorrow, trust God now.

instead of thinking that you are oppressed by the expectations that others have draped over you, recognize that the heart chooses to live under the standards of others. Instead of thinking that you are distressed because people aren’t pleased with you, recognize that you have chosen a style of life in which you live for approval.

The fine print in this arrangement promises two things. First, other people will never satisfy. You can never measure up well enough, and you can never get enough of what you want from them. Second, you become a servant to whatever you trust in. If you trust in money, you will slavishly try to get it and worry when you can’t. If you trust in people, your life will be devoted to meeting their expectations.

When you are lukewarm toward God, or when you are not fixing your eyes on Jesus, then you can be sure that idolatry has taken root. If you are not worshipping the true God, you are worshipping something else.

If failure and shame fit your experience, then you most likely have people-gods. You want something from them, and they haven’t delivered.

Low self-worth and a sense of failure and shame do not simply arise because we feel bad about ourselves. We have also trusted in other people, and we think that they feel bad about us.

It is as if we are born with an innate ability to poll the world on hundreds of different measures, and on the ones most important to us, we rate average or worse. We fear that we are ordinary.

Life is not about my résumé; it is about ways to extend the fame of Jesus. And one way to do this is to say that God is more than enough.

Having received the love of Christ, we are willing to say to other people, “My desire to love you will outweigh my desire to be loved [honored, appreciated, respected] by you.”

If anger is a judgment we make about others, low self-worth seems to be a judgment we make about ourselves.

The principle is this: if you see a problem in your relationships with other people, you will find the identical problem in your relationship with God. If you are angry with others, you will find anger with God. If you don’t love others, you don’t love God. If you feel as if you can’t measure up to the expectations of yourself and others, then you feel as if you have not measured up to God’s standards either. What we call failure, shame, and not measuring up before other people, we call guilt before God.

For some reason, we like the old arrangement where we have to try to make it on our own. Perhaps the notion that we can’t bring anything to the table is too humbling for us.

The thought was so foreign that it seemed to be implanted by someone else.

When life is examined apart from God, thoughts of death make perfect sense. The writer of Ecclesiastes saw this; so did Nietzsche when he said that, for all practical purposes, God is dead. When God is dead, there is no purpose, no future. We are dead too.

If you have thoughts about suicide, its logic is clear and simple, but it is irrational.

You think that no one would care if you took your own life, but you are blind to the people who have tried to help, and you know that every suicide leaves a wake of mourners whose lives are forever changed.

You think that God doesn’t hear or care, but you also believe that his heaven is a pain-free paradise.

Like a child watching a scary movie, you shield your eyes but peek through your fingers.

Against all counsel, you persist in thinking about death and suicide. You choose individualism. Self-law.

What have you lost that is so precious to you? What do you believe you need that you don’t have? You will discover where you have placed your trust with these questions.

Death is the one place where religion still reigns over all discussions. And, most importantly, death means that you will meet God.

If you think suicide is a good or viable option, you don’t know God.

he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.

God’s promise is that he will never put us in a situation where we have no choice but to sin.

This promise means that depression cannot coerce you to sin.

From our perspective, there is only one thing that God could say that would cause us to listen: we want him to take away the pain. From God’s perspective, however, the most important thing he could give us is the power to trust and obey when we feel powerless. In the mind of God, sin is a much more serious problem than suffering. In ours, the order is reversed.