Scripture Reference: Psalm 42
The Despair of the Psalmist – Continued
The important thought about your depression is not that you get out of it but what you get out of it. What do you learn from it? If your heart genuinely desires God, then the experience that could tear you down will actually build you up! (Romans 8:28). The darkness of depression eventually can become the most fruitful time of your life.
I heard that plants do not grow in the daytime but at night. They receive the supply of the sun and the atmosphere in the daytime, and at night they expand and grow. This is also true of individuals. Your most significant growth is not when all is rosy. We do not grow in the sunlight but rather in the darkness of life. Everybody desires the “mountain-top” experiences, but our real growth happens down below, in the valleys.
So, what can a Christian do amid despair? The victorious Christian life is not without struggle. The apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 reminded us that we are in a spiritual warfare, a serious business. Many of God’s greatest leaders have fought with depression, and God was able to use that depression. Martin Luther, the founder of the Reformation, was known to have deep fits of depression. Nothing would help, even when he was able to translate the Bible into German. Listen to his own words:
“For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all of my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and by blasphemy of God.”
Does that sound to you like a hero of the faith? Depressed. Discouraged. Yet, Luther also confessed that depression was beneficial, for he said without those experiences no one can understand scriptural faith and the fear and love of God. In other words, if we never were depressed we would never realize God could help us with it. It can become a precious opportunity for us to discover God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, extolled as one of the greatest preachers of all time, was often “down in the pits.” In the latter years of his life he spent months at a time on the French Riviera to escape from the pressures that complicated his life, and most of the time he was physically and emotionally in despair. Spurgeon wrote a letter to his church after being gone several months. Part of it went:
“The furnace still glows around me. Since I last preached to you I have been brought very low. My flesh has been tortured with pain and my spirit has been prostrate with depression. With some difficulty I write these lines in my bed, mingling them with the groans of pain and the songs of hope. I am as a potter’s vessel when it is utterly broken, useless and laid aside. Nights of watching and days of weeping have been mine, but I hope the cloud is passing. There are dungeons, beneath the castle of despair.”
He often found himself in those dungeons.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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