Dr. Jay E. Adams, Professor of Practical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, provides a regular column or page for THE OUTLOOK on “From a Counselor‘s Desk.”
In addition to his teaching at Westminster and authoring several books, Dr. Adams serves as a Counselor at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation at Hatboro, Pennsylvania.
How do I overcome depression? At times I find myself so deeply depressed that I cannot do my regular housework and chores. I am a Christian and I know that sitting and feeling sorry for myself is not pleasing to God. I have tried, but I do not know what to do free myself from this debilitating problem. Can you help me?
The letter above is a composite of many such that I receive in the mail. It represents a far too typical problem among Christians today. Yet the solution to the problem is not so difficult as at first it might seem. Particularly vulnerable to depression are housewives, preachers, and all of those who must set and keep their own schedules. You see, depression is a problem that involves self-discipline, something we know little about in our modern world. A man whose work is structured for him, so that he must produce just so much from 8-12 and then after lunch so much more from 1–5, rarely suffers from depression. Stir together in one pot a problem (sickness, disappointment, guilt over a sin), the failure to handle the problem God‘s way, a tendency to follow feelings, the failure to assume the responsibilities that one has before God and his neighbor, and indulgence in pity parties and you have all of the ingredients for the thick stew of depression.
David looked at depression (“Day and night thy hand was heavy upon me,” Psalm 32:4) as a merciful warning sign from God that was intended to lead him to repentance and a consequent change of attitude and behavior. The guilt that underlies depression comes from the failure to handle the problem God‘s way, I have said. Therefore, the failure to heed this warning, or to try to silence it by shock treatments or anti-depressants or by home brew is an additional failure that only compounds guilt and the bad feelings that stem from it. As a result depression grows in a cyclical manner.
A good place to begin, when considering the dynamic that underlies depression, is to take heed to the words of Paul in the second couplet of II Corinthians 4:8: “We arc afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexecl, but not driven to despair.” There were many times when things got hard to take; there were situations when Paul did not know what to do next. But in them, God enabled him to handle these difficulties in such a way that he did not despair; he did not become depressed. He was down, but not out. The depressed person is both down and out.
Now it is important to understand that there is a vast difference between being disappointed, perplexed, confused, or down physically and being depressed. We all get down, we all are blue, from time to time, we all become discouraged. That is not depression. Depression comes when we fail to handle the blues, or the disappointment, or the perplexity God’s way. It comes when we allow a bad feeling to hinder us from carrying out our regular duties. When we fail to do these, we are guilty and we then feel worse since the guilt triggers additional bad feelings of its own that make us feel less like doing our work, ad infinitum. So long as we continue to follow the feelings that indicate that we “can‘t” do this or that, we don’t, and we continue to drop deeper and deeper into depression, doing less and less until at last we arc doing nothing but lying around on the couch, popping chocolates and watching TV.
You see, depression comes from handling a situation, in which we feel bad, wrongly. The original bad feeling may come from our own sin or it may come merely from the fact that after having Au for four days we must now go back to do work that has piled up when we felt neither physically nor otherwise, like doing so (“Oh look at the clothes” or “I’ll never get those papers graded”). If, instead of doing what God requires of us as fully as we are physically able to, we indulge ourselves in following the feeling, we have started down the dismal path of depression. The key of warding off depression then is this: Do not follow your feelings when you know that you have a responsibility to fulfill. Instead, you must act against your feelings to do what YOU know God wants you to do, WHETHER YOU FEEL LI KE IT OR NOT. Likewise, that is the secret to turning around the course of depression once it has begun. There is no other way.
To put it simply. do those chores anyway—clean the house, start making those meals again even though you may have told yourself that you can’t, also get up and see your husband off to work. And then, he sure to schedule your life in the future, and stick to the schedule. You are made in the image of the living God; He is a God who schedules. Jesus came in the “fullness of time, on schedule, the prophecies were fulfilled according to schedule, Christ died when His hour had come. If God works by schedule, who do you think that you arc that you can do without one?
And, if you develop the habit of scheduling your work and discipline yourself to stick to the schedule no matter how you feel, you will have no time for pity parties—hanging on the phone with a crony talking about how bad things arc or spending all morning over coffee complaining when you ought to be at home working. The coffee should come at the end of the chore; it must never replace it.
So, here is what you must do if you are depressed. Confess your sin of failing to handle whatever problem(s) you are facing God’s way. Begin to do again whatever responsibilties you have shirked, regardless of how you feel. And deal biblically with any particular sin that may have triggered the bad feeling originally (the feeling may not have originated in sin however). Avoid pity parties and gripe grounds. To stay out of depression in the future, schedule your work, then follow your schedule, no matter how you feel.