Spurgeon's Sorrows Quotes

“We plead not ourselves, but the promises of Jesus; not our strengths but His; our weaknesses yes, but His mercies. Our way of fighting is to hide behind Jesus who fights for us. Our hope is not the absence of our regret, or misery or doubt or lament, but the presence of Jesus.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“There comes a time in most of our lives in which we no longer have the strength to lift ourselves out or to pretend ourselves strong. Sometimes our minds want to break because life stomped on us and God didn’t stop it. Like”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“It is an act of faith and wisdom to be sad about sad things.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“In this fallen world, sadness is an act of sanity, our tears the testimony of the sane.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour.1”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Like other issues of mental health, we don't talk about depression. If we do, we either whisper as if the subject is scandalous or rebuke it as if it's a sin. No wonder many of us don't seek help; for when we do, those who try to help only add to the shame of it all”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“There comes a time in most of our lives in which we no longer have the strength to lift ourselves out or to pretend ourselves strong. Sometimes our minds want to break because life stomped on us and God didn’t stop it. Like a family who watches their loved one slip and fall onto the rocks on a mountainside vacation when all was supposed to be beautiful and fun; or like a parent whose child was mistreated or shot while at school. Charles and those who lost their loved ones that terrible day had to come to terms with suffering in a house of God while the word was preached and a prankster cackled. Questions fill our lungs. We mentally wheeze. We go numb. When on vacation or at school or at church, that kind of thing is not supposed to happen there. Even the knees of a Jesus-follower will buckle. Charles’ wife, Susannah, said of Charles at that time, “My beloved’s anguish was so deep and violent, that reason seemed to totter in her throne, and we sometimes feared that he would never preach again.”5 Though it cannot be said for all of us or for every person that we have loved, it remains true that, in this cherished case, Charles Spurgeon did preach again. But sorrows of many kinds haunted and hounded him for the rest of his life. His depression came, not only from circumstances, or from questions about whether or not he was consecrated to God, but also from the chemistry of his body. God gave to us a preacher who knew firsthand what it felt like for his reason to totter, not just once, but many times during his life and ministry. And somehow this fellow sufferer named Charles and his dear wife Susannah (who also suffered physically most of her adult life) still made a go of it, insisting to each other and to their generation that the sorrowing have a Savior. On that November morning, in weakness, Charles did what some of us are not yet able to do in our sorrows; he read the Bible. Perhaps it will comfort you to learn that for a while “the very sight of the Bible” made Charles cry.6 Many of us know what this feels like. But this Scripture passage, Philippians 2:9-11, “had such a power of comfort upon [his] distressed spirit.” And being found in human form, he [Jesus] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name (Phil. 2:8-9). From this Scripture, Charles set the larger story of his hope before us. The same Heavenly Father who picked up His son out of the muck, misery and mistreatment can do the same for us.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“How then do we tell the difference between the gift of sadness and the trauma of circumstantial depression? In his acclaimed book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon answers: “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance” while “depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”11”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Diagnostic words like “depression” are invitations, not destinations. Once you’ve spoken them, your travel with a person has begun, not ended.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“So, let’s remind ourselves at the outset: In itself, sadness or “grief is God's gift to us. It's how we get through."4 It is an act of faith and wisdom to be sad about sad things.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“These kinds of circumstances and bodily chemistry can steal the gifts of divine love too, as if all of God's love letters and picture albums are burning up in a fire just outside the door, a fire which we are helpless to stop. We sit there, helpless in the dark of divine absence, tied to this chair, present only to ash and wheeze, while all we hold dear seems lost forever. We even wonder if we're brought this all on ourselves. It's our fault. God is against us. We've forfeited God's help.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“When we use words that describe depression as a destination rather than an invitation we become prone to “drape over diverse sufferers a label that hides more than it reveals.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Diagnosing our circumstantial, biological and spiritual depressions offers aid. But diagnosis doesn’t end the challenge for us.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“It is not easy to tell how another ought to feel and how another ought to act,” he said. We are different, each one of us; but I am sure there is one thing in which we are all brought to unite in times of deep sorrow, namely, in a sense of helplessness.3”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Some of you may be in great distress of mind, a distress out of which no fellow-creature can deliver you. You are poor nervous people at whom others often laugh. I can assure you that God will not laugh at you; he knows all about that sad complaint of yours, so I urge you to go to him, for the experience of many of us has taught us that, “the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“[C]arrying promises such as these [from Scripture] enable us to hear what God's voice sounds like amid the torrent of competing voices that thrash the boarded up windows of our minds. We hear His strong and tender voice of love, presence, purpose, and truth for us in Jesus. We lean by faith upon those promise words of our heavenly and tender Father, as Jesus did when the ancient fiend tempted Him in the wilderness. While the hissing serpent whispered thoughts to undo Him, the Savior responded, 'It is written.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“And no one should think that life-giving nutrients are absent with such a seemingly sparse diet in the barren time. On the contrary, the sad-ridden and gracious-held in Jesus often testify to us regarding the surprising nourishment given with a few bits of daily bread. Day by day the strength finds them and carries them, though they know not how or when the carrying came.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Sorrow teaches us to resist trite views of what maturity in Jesus looks like: Faith is not frownless. Maturity is not painless. Disheveled and bedridden amid the jittery and unanswered; this is no necessary sign of wickedness. It is the presence of Jesus and not the absence of glee that designates the situation and provides our hope. Spurgeon says it this way: 'Depression of spirit is no index of declining grace; the very loss of joy and the absence of assurance may be accompanied by the greatest advancement in the spiritual life... we do not want rain all the days of the week, and all the weeks of the year; but if rain comes sometimes, it makes the fields feel fertile, and fills the waterbrooks”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“If we offer only prayer and sermon to aid the mental suffering of our neighbors, we underestimate the body-soul need and the many gifts in nature that God has mercifully provided.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Without metaphor, depression often exposes the inexperience of our vocabulary”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“In short, try to remember this. Diagnostic words like 'depression' are invitations, not destinations. Once you've spoken them, your travel with a person has begun, not ended”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Depression can so vandalize our joy and our sense of God that no promise of His can comfort us in the moment, no matter how true or kindly spoken.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“When your house has been made to shake, it has caused you to see whether it was founded upon a rock.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Take comfort from how Charles puts it. Perhaps you are not well, or you have had an illness that has tolled much upon your nervous system, and you are depressed; and therefore it is that you think that grace is leaving you, but it will not. Your spiritual life does not depend upon nature, else it might expire; it depends upon grace, and grace will never cease to shine till it lights you into glory.25”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Contrary to those who tell us that we do not have enough faith or that we are condemned because of our inability to smile more, “Depression of spirit is no index of declining grace.”24 It is Christ and not the absence of depression that saves us. So, we declare this truth. Our sense of God’s absence does not mean that He is so. Though our bodily gloom allows us no feeling of His tender touch, He holds on to us still. Our feelings of Him do not save us. He does.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Grace Relieves But Does Not Always Cure Depression But isn’t following Jesus supposed to change all of this? Isn’t Jesus supposed to heal our diseases? Many of us feel that if we were more true to Jesus we wouldn’t struggle this way. Others actually tell us earnestly that our salvation in Jesus is threatened and put into question. But just as a man with asthma or a woman born mute will likely remain this way even though they love Jesus, so our mental disorders and melancholy inclinations often remain with us too. Conversion to Jesus isn’t heaven, but its foretaste. This side of heaven, grace secures us but doesn’t cure us. “There are lines of weakness in the creature which even grace does not efface.”22 Though substantial healing can come, Charles reminds us that often it waits till heaven to complete its full work.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Sometimes God’s promises ease our burden of mind. They “create in us an elevation of spirit, a life above visible surroundings, a calm and heavenly frame of mind.”6 They exist like soldiers of realistic hope who overtake our captors, cut the tapes and ropes that bind us, remove the blindfold, look us full in the eyes and tell us, “We’ve come to take you home.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“It is hardly necessary to say that Christianity undistorted, and preached in its just proportions, is calculated to prevent, not cause, insanity. The exciting cause of religious melancholia is sometimes to be traced to fiery denunciations of a well-meaning but injudicious preacher.”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“Perhaps you are not well, or you have had an illness that has tolled much upon your nervous system, and you are depressed; and therefore it is that you think that grace is leaving you, but it will not. Your spiritual life does not depend upon nature, else it might expire; it depends upon grace, and grace will never cease to shine till it lights you into glory.25”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression

“would not blame all those who are much given to fear, for in some it is rather their disease than their sin, and more their misfortune than their fault.1”
― Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression