conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Spiritual, Depression, Christian with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Christian Living?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Spiritual Depression'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Spiritual Depression
  That brings us to the third point'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Spiritual Depression
  That brings us to the third point. The trouble with this type of unhappy Christian is that he does not really believe the Scriptures. Have you thought of that? You say; 'My trouble is that terrible sin which I have committed'. Let me tell you in the Name of God that that is not your trouble. Your trouble is unbelief. You do not believe the Word of God. I am referring to the First Epistle of John and the first chapter where we read this; 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness'. That is a categorical statement made by God the Holy Spirit through His servant. There is no limit to it; there is no differentiation between sin and sin. I cannot see any qualification at all. Whatever your sin—it is as wide as that—it does not matter what it is, it does not matter what it was, 'if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness'. So if you do not believe that word, and if you go on dwelling on your sin, I say that you are not accepting the Word of God, you are not taking God at His word, you do not believe what He tells you and that is your real sin. You remember what happened to Peter once (see Acts 10). Peter had gone to the housetop to rest and there he suddenly went into a trance and saw a great sheet coming down from heaven with all sorts of four-footed beasts in it and he heard a voice saying to him, 'Rise, Peter, slay and eat'. Peter continued saying: 'Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean'. You remember what happened to him? The Voice of God from heaven came to him again and said: 'What God hath cleansed, that call thou not common (or unclean)'. 'Do you realize what you are doing?' said God in effect; 'you are persisting in calling common and unclean that which I have commanded you to slay and eat—"what God hath cleansed, that call thou not common".' That is precisely what I would say at this moment to anybody who may have been held in depression by the devil for a number of years over some particular sin, some unhappy past event in your life. I do not care what it is. What I say to you in the Name of God is this: 'What God hath cleansed—by the blood of His only Begotten Son—that call not thou common or unclean'. 'The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin' and all unrighteousness. Believe the Word of God, my friend. Do not go on praying frantically to be forgiven that sin. Believe God's Word. Do not ask Him for a message of forgiveness. He has given it to you. Your prayer may well be an expression of unbelief at that point. Believe Him and His Word.
  Another trouble with these people is that they do not seem to realize fully what our Lord did on the Cross on Calvary's Hill. They do believe in His sacrificial, atoning death, but they do not work out its implications. They have not fully grasped the doctrine. They know enough to be saved—I am speaking of Christians—but they are in a state of depression because they do not realize fully what this means. They forget that the angel announced to Joseph at the very beginning that He should 'save His people from their sins' (Matthew 1. 21). The angel did not say that He shall save from all sins except this one sin that you have committed. No! 'He shall save His people from their sins'. And listen to Peter saying the same thing: 'Who His own self bear our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes we are healed' (1 Peter 2. 24). There is no qualification there, no limit. Or listen to the words of the Apostle Paul when he says: 'He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin' (2 Corinthians 5. 21)' They were all put there, every one, there is no limit, there is nothing left. Ail the sins of His people are there, every one of them. Indeed, He said it Himself, did He not, on the Cross? He said: 'It is finished', absolutely finished. In what sense? It is finished in the sense that not only all the sins committed in the past were dealt with there, but all the sins that could ever be committed were also dealt with there. It is one sacrifice, once and forever. He would never come back to the Cross again. All the sins were dealt with there finally and completely, everything. Nothing was left undone—'It is finished'. What we remind one another of as we take the bread and the wine, and what we proclaim, is that completed finished work. There is nothing left undone, there is no, qualification concerning particular sins. All the sins of those who believe on Him, every one, have been dealt with and God has blotted them out as a thick cloud. All the sins you may ever commit have been dealt with there, so when you go to Him it is 'the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son' that is going to cleanse you.
  Ultimately it all comes to this, that the real cause of the trouble is failure to realize our union with Christ. Many seem to think that Christianity just means that we are delivered in the sense that our sins are forgiven. But that is only the beginning, but one aspect of it. Essentially salvation means union with Christ, being one with Christ. As we were one with Adam we are now one with Christ. We have been crucified with Christ—'I am crucified with Christ', says Paul. 'All that has happened to Him has happened to me. I am one with Him.' Read the fifth and sixth chapters of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The teaching is that we have died with Christ, have been buried with Christ, have risen with Christ, are seated in the heavenly places in Christ and with Christ. That is the teaching of the Scriptures. 'Ye are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God' (Colossians 3.3). The old man has been crucified and all that belonged to him. His sins have all been dealt with. You are buried with Christ, you are risen with Christ. 'Reckon ye yourselves then to be dead unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord' (Romans 6. 11).
  IN these days men and women are ready to be interested in anything that is attractive. We are living in an age of advertisements and people are ready to believe anything that is said to them. They believe advertisements, they believe what they are told, and so it follows that were they to see something in Christian people that gave the impression that such people were living a life of joy and happiness and triumph, they would crowd in and would be anxious to discover the secret of such successful living. It is not an unfair deduction to make, therefore, that what accounts for the masses being outside is the condition of those who are inside. So often we give the impression that we are dejected and depressed; indeed, some would almost give the impression that to become a Christian means that you face many problems that never worried you before. So, looking at things superficially the man of the world comes to the conclusion that you find happier people outside the Church than inside the Church. He is quite wrong, of course, but we must recognize that some of us at any rate have to plead guilty to the charge, that far too often because we suffer from spiritual depression, and are more or less miserable Christians, we grossly and grievously misrepresent the gospel of Redeeming Grace.
  Now all this, of course, is due to the fact that we are confronted by a very powerful adversary. The fact is that the moment we become Christian we become subjected to the most subtle and powerful assaults of one who is described in the Bible as 'the prince of the power of the air', 'the spirit who now ruleth in the children of disobedience', 'the god of this world', 'Satan', the 'Devil'. And as we go on with our study and consider the way in which the devil is able to come to us and to attack us, and the subtle way in which he deludes and leads us astray without our realizing it at all, we begin to understand why so many fail. And, of course, he is most subtle and most dangerous when he comes as 'an angel of light' and as a would-be friend of the Church and one who is interested in the gospel and in its propagation. According to the Scriptures he does that (2 Corinthians 11), and it is at that point that he is most subtle of all. Not only is he powerful, he is subtle, and as we continue to consider these various forms and manifestations of depression that will become more and more clear.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But that perhaps is not the greatest temptation. The greatest is the one I am going to put in the form of my second negative injunction. Do not resign yourself to it. While there are people who hand in their resignations and say, 'I am quitting', that is not so with the majority. The danger of the majority at this point is just to resign themselves to it and to lose heart and to lose hope. They will go on, but they go on in this hopeless, dragging condition. To put it more particularly, the danger at this point is to say something like this: 'Well, I have lost that something which I had, and obviously I shall not get it back again. But I am going on, and out of loyalty I will go on, as a sheer duty. I have lost the enjoyment I once had, that is gone and it is undoubtedly gone for ever. I just have to put up with it, I will resign myself to my fate, I won't be a quitter, I won't turn my back on it, I will go on, though I go on feeling rather hopeless about it all, just shuffling down the road, not walking with hope as I once did, but keeping on as best I can'. That is the spirit of resignation, stoicism if you like, putting up with it.
  Now that is the greatest danger of all; and again, I suggest, it is something which is dangerous not only on the spiritual level, about which we are most concerned, but also on every level in life. We can work like that in our profession, we can live our lives like that, in a sense. We are really saying to ourselves: 'The golden hours have gone, the great days belong to the past I may never know that again but I will just keep on'. There is something, of course, which seems wonderful about this, something that seems heroic about it. But you notice that I put it as a negative. Indeed I say that it is a temptation of the devil. If he can get God's people to losehope, he will be content indeed. And as I see things today, this is perhaps the greatest danger of all confronting the Christian Church, the danger of doing a thing in a formal spirit and as a matter of duty. Going on, it is true, but wearily trudging along instead of walking as we ought to walk.
  That brings me to my third and last negative, and this again you will recognise as a very dangerous thing. This third danger is, that when we thus become weary and tired, we will resort to artificial stimulants. You know the temptation. It has been the ruin of many a man who has built up a profession or a business and then gets into this weary state. He is conscious that he has not the vigour and the vim that he once had, and he does not feel, as the phrase puts it, on top of his job. He does not know what to do about it himself and then somebody suggests to him that what he needs is some kind of a tonic. The whole danger in connection with the drinking of alcohol comes in at that point. Many a man has ended as a drunkard who started by taking a little alcohol to help him to carry on; and people take to drugs and various other things in precisely the same way.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Many a man has ended as a drunkard who started by taking a little alcohol to help him to carry on; and people take to drugs and various other things in precisely the same way. The greatest is the one I am going to put in the form of my second negative injunction. Do not resign yourself to it. While there are people who hand in their resignations and say, 'I am quitting', that is not so with the majority. The danger of the majority at this point is just to resign themselves to it and to lose heart and to lose hope. They will go on, but they go on in this hopeless, dragging condition. To put it more particularly, the danger at this point is to say something like this: 'Well, I have lost that something which I had, and obviously I shall not get it back again. But I am going on, and out of loyalty I will go on, as a sheer duty. I have lost the enjoyment I once had, that is gone and it is undoubtedly gone for ever. I just have to put up with it, I will resign myself to my fate, I won't be a quitter, I won't turn my back on it, I will go on, though I go on feeling rather hopeless about it all, just shuffling down the road, not walking with hope as I once did, but keeping on as best I can'. That is the spirit of resignation, stoicism if you like, putting up with it.
  Now that is the greatest danger of all; and again, I suggest, it is something which is dangerous not only on the spiritual level, about which we are most concerned, but also on every level in life. We can work like that in our profession, we can live our lives like that, in a sense. We are really saying to ourselves: 'The golden hours have gone, the great days belong to the past I may never know that again but I will just keep on'. There is something, of course, which seems wonderful about this, something that seems heroic about it. But you notice that I put it as a negative. Indeed I say that it is a temptation of the devil. If he can get God's people to losehope, he will be content indeed. And as I see things today, this is perhaps the greatest danger of all confronting the Christian Church, the danger of doing a thing in a formal spirit and as a matter of duty. Going on, it is true, but wearily trudging along instead of walking as we ought to walk.
  That brings me to my third and last negative, and this again you will recognise as a very dangerous thing. This third danger is, that when we thus become weary and tired, we will resort to artificial stimulants. You know the temptation. It has been the ruin of many a man who has built up a profession or a business and then gets into this weary state. He is conscious that he has not the vigour and the vim that he once had, and he does not feel, as the phrase puts it, on top of his job. He does not know what to do about it himself and then somebody suggests to him that what he needs is some kind of a tonic. The whole danger in connection with the drinking of alcohol comes in at that point.But that perhaps is not the greatest temptation.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: What else? I must do exactly what He tells me. I must avoid things that would hamper. To use my illustration, I must not eat too much, I must not get into an atmosphere that is bad for me, I must not expose myself to chills if I want to be well. In the same way, if we do not keep the spiritual rules we may pray endlessly for power but we shall never get it. There are no short cuts in the Christian life. If in the midst of persecution we want to feel as Paul felt, we must live as Paul lived. I must do what He tells me, both to do and not to do. I must read the Bible, I must exercise, I must practise the Christian life, I must live the Christian life in all its fullness. In other words I must implement what Paul has been teaching in verses eight and nine. This, as I understand it, is the New Testament doctrine of abiding in Christ. Now the word 'abiding' makes people become sentimental. They think of abiding as something passive and clinging, but to abide in Christ is to do what He tells you, positively, and to pray without ceasing. Abiding is a tremendously active thing.
  That is the romance of the Christian life. Nowhere does one experience it more than in a Christian pulpit. There is certainly romance in preaching. I often say that the most romantic place on earth is the pulpit. I ascend the pulpit stairs Sunday after Sunday; I never know what is going to happen. I confess that sometimes for various reasons I come expecting nothing; but suddenly the power is given. At other times I think I have a great deal because of my preparation; but, alas, I find there is no power in it. Thank God it is like that. I do my utmost, but He controls the supply and the power, He infuses it. He is the heavenly physician and He knows every variation in my condition. He sees my complexion, He feels my pulse. He knows my inadequate preaching, He knows everything. 'That is it,' says Paul, 'and therefore I am able for all things through the One who is constantly infusing strength into me.'
  That, then, is the prescription. Do not agonize in prayer beseeching Him for power. Do what He has told you to do. Live the Christian life. Pray, and meditate upon Him. Spend time with Him and ask Him to manifest Himself to you. And as long as you do that you can leave the rest to Him. He will give you strength—'as thy days so shall thy strength be'. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and according to our need so will be our supply. Do that and you will be able to say with the apostle: 'I am able (made strong) for all things through the One who is constantly infusing strength into me'.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: What else? I must do exactly what He tells me. I must avoid things that would hamper. To use my illustration, I must not eat too much, I must not get into an atmosphere that is bad for me, I must not expose myself to chills if I want to be well. In the same way, if we do not keep the spiritual rules we may pray endlessly for power but we shall never get it. There are no short cuts in the Christian life. If in the midst of persecution we want to feel as Paul felt, we must live as Paul lived. I must do what He tells me, both to do and not to do. I must read the Bible, I must exercise, I must practise the Christian life, I must live the Christian life in all its fullness. In other words I must implement what Paul has been teaching in verses eight and nine. This, as I understand it, is the New Testament doctrine of abiding in Christ. Now the word 'abiding' makes people become sentimental. They think of abiding as something passive and clinging, but to abide in Christ is to do what He tells you, positively, and to pray without ceasing. Abiding is a tremendously active thing.
  That is the romance of the Christian life. Nowhere does one experience it more than in a Christian pulpit. There is certainly romance in preaching. I often say that the most romantic place on earth is the pulpit. I ascend the pulpit stairs Sunday after Sunday; I never know what is going to happen. I confess that sometimes for various reasons I come expecting nothing; but suddenly the power is given. At other times I think I have a great deal because of my preparation; but, alas, I find there is no power in it. Thank God it is like that. I do my utmost, but He controls the supply and the power, He infuses it. He is the heavenly physician and He knows every variation in my condition. He sees my complexion, He feels my pulse. He knows my inadequate preaching, He knows everything. 'That is it,' says Paul, 'and therefore I am able for all things through the One who is constantly infusing strength into me.'
  That, then, is the prescription. Do not agonize in prayer beseeching Him for power. Do what He has told you to do. Live the Christian life. Pray, and meditate upon Him. Spend time with Him and ask Him to manifest Himself to you. And as long as you do that you can leave the rest to Him. He will give you strength—'as thy days so shall thy strength be'. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and according to our need so will be our supply.