All Sermons

Recorded in Sydney, Australia at the 1998 Banner of Truth Conference 

How to Overcome Depression By Martin Holdt

Yeah, Murray did suggest yesterday that I should try to condense what I shared with the ministers
on Monday at the lunch hour meeting in a half an hour.
It may be a bit difficult. I will try to give you the gist of what I shared then in 30 minutes.
I know that some of you probably want to go.
So let me attempt that, and then if others want to stay on a bit longer to perhaps ask questions,
you are welcome to do that. Think at the outset, let me just put your mind to rest.
I don't want you to assume that because you hear that you're identifying yourself as a
depressed pastor, although I wouldn't be surprised if you were built that way because
we who are in the ministry know too well how, to use the doctor's phrase,
the tyranny of circumstances sometimes gets the better of us too, and we find ourselves exactly
where so many of our colleagues in the ministry, both now and in the past, have found themselves,
when you get great prophets like Elijah finding themselves, as Dr W.A. Criswell called it,
in the state of Juniperitis, which was just another phrase coined to refer to ministerial depression,
then it isn't surprising because things happen to us, and sometimes things upset us far more
than they do others because of the nature of our work and the nature of our calling,
but it's a fact, it's a fact of life, and we who are ministers are not immune to depression.
Let me begin as I think many of us are a bit loathe to do, but I'll do it deliberately because
I want to identify with those of you who may have been through it, are going through it,
and if you haven't, who knows, it may yet happen to you, but God forbid.
Begin by just sharing with you briefly my own personal testimony. I tried to help people in
a state of depression for many years, couldn't understand why none of them ever came out of it,
notwithstanding the fact that I would refer to the doctor's book, Depression Its Causes and
Its Cure, give it to them to read, talk to them and even preached about it, and it didn't seem
to help anybody, notwithstanding the fervor, the conviction and all that came with it in the pulpit
until God in his sovereignty and I believe now in his kindness brought me into a condition of
depression, which I never want to go back to. I hated it for the five and a half years that it
lasted, but I'm thankful for it, and it was an education to the mind, to the soul, and I thank
God for bringing me out of it, but during the years, the five and a half years that I was
depressed, I experienced everything that six different counsellors brought to my attention
when in desperation I went to them in the hopes that something they said would be something that
I could cling to as a means of getting me out of this. Herbert Carson, to whom I am burdened by
heart, said, well look, I've also been there, just give it time and you'll come out. Well, he was
right, but it didn't help me at that time. Dear Brother Errol Hulse thought that he would take
another tack and he suggested it was the devil, and well, I try to deal with that, and although
I do believe that he was right to a point, it wasn't, it didn't quite help. Another dear brother
who's now gone to be with the Lord suggested it was a guilt complex, and I had that because here
I was a depressed man going into the pulpit every Sunday to preach, finding my greatest relief in
the pulpit, and yet when I stepped out of the pulpit, the big black cloud of depression descended
and followed me into the house where the kids would ask Mother what's wrong with Dad,
and one day my own wife burst into tears in the main bedroom and looked at me
with my long drawn face and said, sometimes I think that God must be cruel.
Another one suggested it's midlife crisis, well, I try to look at that and deal with that,
but that didn't help either, and then there were another two, they tried the tricks of the
ministerial trade on me as well, but nothing that they said seemed to help, and all were very
sensitive, all were very compassionate, all were loving, and I'm not for a moment discrediting
what they genuinely sincerely tried to say. The fact of the matter is it didn't help,
and it lingered on and on and on, and I can spin out the symptoms from personal experience. You
want to go to bed, you want to switch off, and when you wake up in the morning you sorrow you,
then you can understand exactly why Elijah once said, Lord, just give me the divine euthanasia
and that'll solve it all. But I knew that that wouldn't help, and wondered whether I had to live
with this like William Cooper had to live with these for the rest of his life. And this is
precisely where my practice, as is yours, of expository preaching book by book was used of God
eventually to bring me to the point where I began to see light at the end of the tunnel. I'd been
going through the Gospel of Luke, and just as I came to chapter 24, my sister, to whom I'm very
close, and who knew where the congregation didn't know, who knew what was going on, suggested to me
that I should see a Christian psychiatrist. The suggestion was to me appalling me, a minister,
a psychiatrist. Under no circumstances would I do that. But I'd got so desperate that I decided to
contact one who was a Christian, an evangelical, happened to be the brother-in-law of one of the
members of my church. I confessed that I was very, very embarrassed, so when I called him I said,
I'd like to come and see you about some pastoral problems and a little bit of personal depression.
He was more perceptive, he said, let's forget about the others, let's talk about your depression.
And the Sunday before I went to see him, I had been preaching on the Emmaus Road experience,
and it was a revelation to me, and I believe it was God-given, because I discovered in this
particular passage the cause, the fact, the cause, and the cure. It's as simple as that.
And when I told him what I did, and he listened, his face brightened up, and he said, may I use
what you're telling me? I said, on one condition, you let me use what you're telling me.
And I married the two, went home, and trusted God to send me my first test case,
and guinea pig, and the lady came. And she wasn't from my church, she'd never been sat in the pews
where I ministered, and she had burdened her heart, and it was one big knotty mess of a family
problem with all sorts of lines to it. And when I listened, I thought, it's impossible to see this
woman come out of her condition. And I need to watch my time, I've got 20 minutes left, but
impossible to see her come out of her condition. And then I shared with her briefly what I'm going
to share with you, or shall I rather say more extensively with her than I'm going to share with
you today. And then I asked her to come back to me in two weeks once she had done the things I
had suggested she should do. She insisted on coming back in a week's time. I wanted to work
on it for longer than that. A woman will always have her way, so she came back in a week's time.
And when a week later she stood at the door, when the doorbell rang and I went through there,
she stood with a bowl of strawberries. And her first words to me was, it's a miracle.
After years and years of depression, I'm out. Now, I haven't come to you this afternoon with some
kind of simple solution to the problem. And at the outset, I want to tell you that I recognize
the fact that there are more causes to depression than we can possibly appreciate. There may be
genetic causes. There may be just a matter of body chemistry, a woman with hormonal problems.
There's nothing I can do about it. You need the GP for that. You need a medical specialist for
that. And we ought to respect that. And we ought to be the first people to recognize that when we
can and to pass the buck to those who can help and to those who are decent and godly and Christian.
So I'm not coming here with a sort of a simple solution to depression. But what I am coming with
is a deep conviction that perhaps we have not addressed the issue as we should have and ought
to have. Now, it's a sickness in our time. And I need to impress upon you the importance of
your ministry to depressors. And that's why I'm glad that you're here. Because if a little bit
of what I share with you is going to help you to help others, it's going to make the world
of difference to people in your church and beyond that. A Dutch reform minister has written an
Afrikaans book in our country which won a news agency prize. And the translation of the title
is Depression, the Sickness About Time. It is so in South Africa. I think it must be so in many
other parts of the world. It is a sickness. And there's a very good reason for that sickness.
The reason for the sickness is that people are being bombarded with things that are
filtrating through their minds which understandably are causing them to be depressed.
And that needs to be dealt with. The scripture refers to it. I've mentioned Elijah. There was
Jonah. David in the Psalms highlights the problem. You come into history, William Cooper.
Was it oppressive? Can't doubt that fact. And some Christians have come to me when I've talked about
it, somewhat irate at the fact that I should even sympathize with people who've got depression
because they feel that it's just a sin. Confess it. Get it over with.
Or as some overenthusiastic charismatics would have it, it's all the devil, the demon of
depression, and exorcise the whole thing and hunky-dory you five. It's all good and well if
that were possible. But the problem lingers on. Let's look at these three things very briefly.
Number one, in Luke chapter 24 from verse 13, the condition is there, verse 17,
they stood still, their faces downcast. That's the condition in which Jesus found them.
I needn't talk about that. Number two, the calls. It's very interesting that Jesus
asks them what is bothering them, and they give a brief reply, and then he continues to probe.
He says, what things? Now, I've just been reading en route here,
William Still's marvelous little book, I think it's called The Work of a Pastor, and I was
very encouraged to see him say to younger pastors, you must allow your people to talk.
And there is a ministry of listening. And Jesus here, who is omniscient, who knows all things
inside out, knows people, knows people's minds, knows the thinking of these people, still in a
post-resurrection experience, says to them, what things? Talk it out, men, come out with it.
We tend far too quickly to come to conclusions, that we know exactly what's wrong with a person,
and haven't you been where I have been before, where you come out with the answer too quickly?
I need to find yourself embarrassed because you've spoken too soon. You didn't know enough,
you didn't have enough data. Jesus got them to talk, not for his sake in that particular instance,
but for their own, and for ours, now that we have the thing on record. But in their reply,
they come out with a cause in one simple sentence, verse 21,
we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel, and it didn't work out that way.
And you can all narrow it down to this, they, it was failed expectations, they pinned their
highest hopes on Jesus's Messiah, what he would do, what he would do to level the ground with
the Romans, what he would do to sort out the problem and prefer the Jews in their oppression,
what he would do for Israel, given the fact that the disciples in Acts chapter 1 asked Jesus,
will you at this time restore Israel? And undoubtedly that was their hope,
and it all ended in what they considered to be the tragedy of Golgotha.
Failed expectations. Let's come to the minister quickly.
The minister often finds himself in the slough of despondency, to use Bunyan's term,
precisely because of that. You had such hopes, you pinned hopes on your eldership,
on your leadership, on the church of which you're the minister. It didn't turn out that way. On the
church as a whole, it didn't work out that way, particularly those who were young. You expected
better, it didn't turn out that way. And it's aggravated when you hear about your colleague
down the road or on the other side of the city doing so well, and you wonder what's wrong with
you. You thought things would go so much better. And it's aggravated when people from amongst your
own leadership or your own membership come to complain about things. Pastoral things ever get
any better than that. And you shattered. You shattered because you don't have the kind of
ministerial support that you expected from your colleagues. They seem to turn a blind eye to
the bad patch that you were going through, as if to go through a bad patch is the end of the world.
If the great Charles Haddon Spurgeon himself spoke about not only Christians, but churches having
their four seasons, autumn, winter, spring, and summer, then surely there's nothing wrong
with a minister having his autumn and his winter, if that is God's appointment for him,
for a period of time. But these things all amount to, I had hoped didn't work out that way.
I'd hoped that things would go better with my family, my children. People are looking up to me.
My children are turning out to be the kind of PKs, pastors, kids I didn't want them to be.
What are people saying about me? Because my children are not believing.
My children who are about to leave home or have left home
seem to be walking the prodigal's road, failed expectations.
And your ministry just doesn't seem to be yielding the dividends that you wanted it to.
What now? I had hoped but.
Then our Lord, rather brilliantly, helps them to resolve the problem.
And I should have mentioned one of the important causes too in the we had hoped thing is the
if only syndrome. And you sit and you think if only I'd have done this, and if only that,
if only I hadn't come, if only I'd have accepted the other call, if only, if only, if only, if only.
And you dwell on it, and you sleep with it, and you wake up with it,
and you eat it for breakfast, and for lunch, and for supper, the if onlys.
What's the cure? Well, if you go down to verse 25,
when they'd finished talking, Jesus said to them, how foolish you are, how slow of heart
to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Did not that Christ have to suffer these things and
then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what
was said in all the scriptures concerning himself. Now, if you look at the Greek word
here translated foolish, you might not object to the word foolish, but there's far more to it
than meets the eye. It does mean foolish, but it means much more than foolish.
The literal meaning is without mind, without mind. How without mind you are? What is he saying?
He's saying, I need to put your thinking right. You need to think again about the
very thing that has dashed your hopes. You need to look at it again. You need to consider it in
the light of God's purposes and God's sovereignty. You need to do that. And he proceeds to do it for
them. And he does it so effectively that later in the passage, once he has dealt with it, verse 33,
they got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. It seems to me that they'd walked away from
Jerusalem, probably never wanting to go back there because of all that had happened. And
now they go back again. So when our Lord says how without mind you are and how slow of heart
to believe, he is in effect telling them you need your minds sorted out on the matter.
Now we know, and it's hardly necessary for me to say at a conference like this, that
one of the things that we pitch our ministry against is a kind of a mindless Christianity
where you surrender your thinking to a subject of emotions and experiences,
all in the name of being baptized in the Spirit. And then it suddenly becomes a solution to all
problems. We're not anti-emotion. We're all for it. But in the right order, a well-informed mind
informed by biblical truth in the power of the Holy Spirit sparks off deep, healthy emotions of
joy and happiness and peace. And it deals with depression as well. It does.
And we don't realize how much we've become the victim of a jumble of thoughts and facts that
spill over into our minds from the media, from the world, from things that even Christians say
that are all together, and if not all together, then largely negative.
I don't want you to think that I'm coming here with a kind of a rehashed Norman Vincent
Peel, the power of positive thinking. But I do think that there are times when we have thrown
the baby out of the bathwater. Norman Vincent Peel is no biblical place for the things that
he churns out. And his books appeal to all and sundry. But I do believe that we might have
looked right past, not all of us, but many of us have looked right past,
the New Testament's appeal to the mind and what to do with the mind.
It's amazing for me to think back of how naive I'd been for so long because there were verses
in scripture that took on a new meaning, such as Romans 12 verse 2. Do not be conformed to
this world, but be renewed by the transforming of your mind. You, in the totality of your being,
your emotions, your feeling, your living, your everything, be transformed by the renewing of
your mind. And how else other than informing your mind and then informing your mind in such a way
that the truth of God and the truth of God's sovereignty, to use the example that we're going
to refer to in a moment, is applied to your particular pastoral congregational situation.
Jesus went on to say to them, for example, in verse 26, did not the Christ have to suffer
these things and then enter his glory? What had happened was not a disaster as you think it is.
It is part and parcel of the will and the plan of God. It's part of the purpose of God.
The sovereignty of God is wonderful, but is it as wonderful to the pastor as it ought to be?
We communicate the truth to people and tell them how wonderful it is,
but how extensively do we apply the truth of God's sovereignty to ourselves?
There are many other things that we need to tell ourselves,
but the scripture has it all.
It's misinformation that all too often leads to depression, bad information.
Elijah is a typical case. He thinks and says, I only am left. God puts him right and says,
you're not. Multiply that by 7,000 and then you will realize that you're not the only one.
Philippians chapter 4 verse 8 and 9, the apostle Paul makes Christian thinking an obligation and
that is a discipline, a discipline. Brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever
is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent
or praise worthy, think on these things. You have a duty to do that and then he immediately
goes on in verse 9, which all too often is left out, immediately goes on into verse 9
to tell his readers how he did it. He says, whatever you have learned or received or heard
from me or seen in me put into practice and the God of peace will be with you.
Now, interesting isn't it that he was writing to the Philippians where
in Philippi things went awfully wrong. A case of poor justice,
a maladministration of justice, Paul and Silas get landed into prison and don't think for a moment
that when they landed in prison, their feet in the stocks, their backs lacerated from the Roman whip,
hurting and aching, that they did what Madeleine Carruthers suggested in his book,
From Prison to Praise. Just turn on the praises and it'll all happen. Well, I'll sometimes try
that it doesn't happen. And in any case, I don't feel like praising when I don't feel like doing
it, but there is a way to get there. And the apostle Paul says, do what I did. I don't know
what they did in the cell, but I've good reason to believe in the light of what he said that he
and Silas sat down together and did a good amount of thinking about things that were true, things
that were noble, whatever was right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about such things. You
have a duty to do so. You have a duty to sit down and to do that. In fact, relating to a little idea
as to what they did when he says in chapter one, verse 13, as a result, it has become clear
throughout the whole palace that and to everyone that I'm in chains for Christ or rather verse 12.
Verse 12, I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance
the gospel. I want you to know with your minds. I've thought this through.
So you think it through too and know it and believe it and hold onto it.
As a man thinks in his heart so easy.
I find it very interesting to discover that the world is finding out these things, but
there's nothing new under the sun. And I have a cutting here from the New York Daily News,
which is a reference to a university in Texas and the American Psychological
Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas in Dallas.
They cite a case here of somebody who consulted highly recommended doctors,
including a leading authority on depression at the National Institutes of Health. Two psychiatrists
said her intense depression could only be helped by electroshock therapy. Shaken and scared,
she refused. Her doctors prescribed enough antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, and other
drugs to fill her medicine tablet. The side effects from the medications weight gain, drowsiness,
sexual unresponsiveness often interfered even more than the depression with her ability to
function normally. Nothing dispelled the dirty, grey mist of depression. It was a pain that never
went away. The only way I could think to end it was to kill myself. But then, thank God, she landed
up in that particular department and they had changed their whole approach to depression. They
used cognitive therapy. And she mentions here that in cognitive therapy, or the article does,
depression is considered primarily, listen to this from the secular press, a thinking disorder.
The treatment involves counseling and written assignments designed to correct the distorted
thoughts that produce hopelessness and despair. And when she, this lady,
learned that depression was largely the result of pessimistic views about herself,
her life and her future, everything changed. And she later said life didn't improve after
she started cognitive therapy. In a brief period, her mother died unexpectedly,
a long-time relationship collapsed, the company where she had worked for six years folded. But
much to her surprise, she has never been happier. Sometimes it seems as if it's just a matter of
seeing the glass half full instead of half empty, but I wasted a lot of my life coming to that
conclusion. Well, I think we're much better off than the world is. I think here we have the sum
total of God's truth to help us. And the Bible is not irrelevant. The Bible is the most relevant
document in the world. It deals with fundamental issues of life, of ministry, of serving Christ,
of what it's all about, of a sovereign God, of the head of the church, the head of the church
who has never let us down and will never forsake us and will never leave us in the lurch,
who is directing all our affairs according to his own grand, great design and will.
We let slip these things. We dwell on the things that Satan fuels our minds with and they get us
down. And all that was ever said to me by my beloved brothers was true to a point,
but I couldn't take it further. And when you then begin to think as you are meant to think,
I believe things begin to change.
I'm just trying to think where to go from here. For example,
for example, let me come to the psychiatrist and just to the little bit of practical advice that
he gave me and which I used and I married it to those parts of scripture that some of which I've
shared with you this afternoon. And I worked out what I would call a simple biblical therapy for
people who are depressed and for myself. And I don't want to sound a pragmatist,
but if it works, it does work. And if it's meant to work God's way, then why not accept it?
And why not teach people that? From his perspective, he told me something that is
so mundane that I never, that I could hardly believe that I couldn't, that I didn't realize
that what he was saying was something that happens in everyday life. He pointed out to me,
to put it to you really simply, that because the brain is connected to the sympathetic
nervous system, whatever goes into your brain is going to affect your feelings.
If good news comes to your brain, you're going to feel good. Bad news comes to your brain,
you're going to feel bad. People who feel elated and about something normally feel that way,
unless it's a drug that they've taken, because something good has been communicated to them.
When you preach the gospel, the glory of the gospel is intended to produce joy.
When the penny drops that God in Christ is reconciling sinners to himself, and I'm included.
Well, when your thinking goes awry, your feelings are bound to be affected.
So he suggested to me that just as people discipline themselves to do any, any, any,
other things, we as Christians ought to get to the stage where we begin to discipline ourselves to
think properly. And it doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. He gave me a simple exercise.
He said, now go home and take your ministry and target the very thing that has depressed you for,
there were a few things for five and a half years, and apply biblical truth to it. Take
a notepad, write it down. The good things, the things that God is saying, the things seen in
a biblical divine perspective, the things that encourage and comfort. He then told me that I
should for three times a day for five minutes write it down. He told me that because we are
creatures of habit, we tend to think so habitually about certain things that, and it's true about you
and me. We go to sleep with our problems. We wake up with our problems. We wake up at night with
our problems. We live with our problems throughout the day. And there are times when we think we
can't think any other way about them. Or reverse. The message is continued on the second side of
this cassette. He said, do this for a few weeks. He said, when you do it, your first reaction is
going to be because you're a Christian, but that's not me. I'm a hypocrite. He pointed out, that's
not the truth. However you feel about it, the question is, is it true?
Philippians 4 verse 8 and 9. Then you have to look at the truth, imbibe it, believe it,
and discipline yourself to thinking that way. And keep on doing that. He warned me, he said,
that in the first week you might find that your rate of improvement will be nothing more than
naught to 30 percent. But if you persist in teaching yourself to think soundly,
God's thoughts towards him, when you get to the second week, you will begin to emerge and
hopefully cross the 30 percent mark beyond 50 percent. And by the time you get to the third
week on average, you may find yourself freed because of poor thinking about where you are,
how people have treated you, what they have said of you, who has said it, how it has affected your
family. And when you think the way God thinks, you may find yourself a liberated man, and then
proceed and teach others the same. And he was right. He was right. I really believe that there
does come a time when we need to spoon feed people because they are babes and lambs and teach
them. I mean, meditation, what is meditation all about? It's the last art today. Meditation is
deciding, I'm stopping, I'm not prepared just to think the lazy way. And the lazy way to think is
to think the way I want to think about it. The right way is to think the way I know and believe
God wants me to think about it. And when, in my regular discipline reading of scripture,
I take to mind and heart the things that God is saying to me about myself, about my calling,
about my ministry, about my life, and I make that a habit, I'll become a little bit more
like the Puritans, who also lived in volatile times, but they handled it. Too many reformed
Christians have surrendered their minds to outside influences, both Christian and other.
No wonder they're so down in the dumps. But when you are captivated by God's truth and teach your
mind to think God's way, then you're bound to feel it. You're bound to feel it. Not that you're
not going to feel like Lot vexed with a filthy conversation of the wicked, nor that you're not
going to feel as Jesus did, weeping with compassion over the sins and the waywardness of the crowds
and of the people, nor that you're not going to break your heart over the burdens of the church.
But that will not be all that there is to life. There will be so much more than that.
There will also be all the things that will be absolutely paramount in your thinking.
And that is this, that at the end of the day, the lines have fallen to you upon pleasant places.
When you look past all the other things that the devil would like to put before you,
and when you see so clearly the traces of God's providence in your life, even when the night is
dark, and when you discover, Samuel Rutherford did, that in the darkest cellar you will find
the sweetest wine. Brothers, I've gone over the mop, but that's it. And I hope you can make sense
of that. And I've gone over the half hour, but thank you.