As a new CF member and someone exploring their faith, i have taken great interest in the recover sections of this site, having suffered from depression also.
At the times when my overall mood has been the lowest (and i am sure a lot of people share this thought), i have had that overpowering feeling of worthlessness and being alone.
During the Alpha course that i am currently taking it has been drilled into us that God loves everyone and is with you every second of every day.
If that is so, how can these two exist together?
Surely omnipotence can trump any thoughts we have of disbelief in ourselves and that lonesome unloveable feeling, and yet it still stands.
Good question!!!! (not easily answered but I'll try and give you some direction.)
Truly depression is - our feeling world gone wrong - and us believing the feelings that we feel.
Understand that our feeling world is upside down because we are sick, bringing us horrible feelings and thoughts.
Such feelings and thoughts however are not really speaking The Eternal Truth of God - just the truth of your depression and nothing else.
For who wants to be forced to listen to misery lot all their lives - especially considering that The Truth sets you free from lying consequences?
So compared to the glorious truth of the Bible depression doesn't speak truth to our hearts - just a painful reality - caused by an illness in our heads!
For example - feeling completely unloved, isolated, lonely, without future, uncared for and so on.... the common language of depression - if believed by us who hear and feel all that - it will bring much more misery than our illness naturally does - yes - it drags us into deep and suicidal depression even in The End - if we keep listening to those lies. Indeed these horrible lies bring unhappiness and more unhappiness - and that IS the TRUTH - all depressed people know in their hearts - those hated lies, fired at our every senses, makes us feel so bad!
This is why we feel SO bad when we believe the lies of our depression - God's shows us the truth about the lies within - how much they hurt Him and us. (See the cross to realise the pain God suffers when we follow lying tongue.)
Honest God suffers depression when you do - moment after agonising moment - sitting next to you waiting for you to turn to Him - and be freed from those captivating lies and their misery - so in His loving truth you can receive Jesus' ability to cope with hellish agony!
So in other words, and for an example, when you hold on to the lie that God is not loving because you feel unlovingness -
then you are believing unlovingness - see the lie true in your feeling and thinking world? No wonder you feel so bad - for our Heavenly Father does -
yet - see the truth in action - now believe the truth that God loves you and - that this is true and not the lie you are feeling within - if you believe God's truth -
very soon you feel better than good - even if you are still depressed - usually far less than one hour of sitting tight - keeping the truth before your eyes, right through the pain of depressive misery.
Let's look at the above explanation from a person to person perspective -
Imagine this scenario - there you have a loved one with his arm around your neck hugging you close whispering words of love and encouragement into your ear, but you refuse to believe those words, and instead block your ears and heed a stranger screaming horrible abuse at you - how would your loved one feel? After a few minutes? A few hours? A few days? Many years? How much would such a loving heart hurt? Yet this is how it is for our Heavenly Father when we, His beloved children are hurting, but push Him and His help away, and instead heed and go along with freaky stranger who rapes and abuses us time and again! (Does this explain the pain?
For if we stick our hand in a fire and it hurts we pull it out - but in depression we are burned alive and yet we kindle the fire hotter and hotter believing its lies!
However even when you are very depressed, in loving truth, unlovingness can't get you, though - through your illness lying voice will try very hard to win you back -
heeding God's loving truth keeps you free forevermore in The End!
That's how it all works!
If you believe and hold on to the lies of your illness - the by misery corrupted perspective of yourself - then terrible suffering will descent upon you - for you have existence in lies and God wants to show you how much this hurts life, yours and His.
So please reject those inner lies and hold onto to His truth - even when you hurt bad - know it is because of illness - and don't believe the lies misery brings alive within - however bad it gets - then soon - misery will die and you will walk away from your misery - even if you still suffer from depression at times - as you are sick after all!
Please remember, our Heavenly Father suffers our depression with us - never believe otherwise -
for the hurt will simply continue - if you do, as believing lies brings much pain - that is the TRUTH and NOT a lie - the TRUTH that you believe lies and not the truth - and this is why everything keeps hurting
so bad inside - its like a knife cutting into your heart - lying agony!
I hope this makes sense?
Stand firm, let God's truth guide your thoughts and feelings, deliverance is for those who obey God's loving truth - Jesus Christ!
Rev 2:8b-11
8"... These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. 9I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. 10Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life. 11He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.
Also please understand that I don't lie when I say that serving lies pays a heavy price - even if they are the chosen people!
(An exercise for depressed people)
Let the following Words speak to your HEART - to those kings, leaders, yes free and slave within yourself - to you who keep serving and holding onto lies and pervert God's truth - Here is our Heavenly Father speaking the TRUTH about ALL that!
(Please meditate on each section and look what thoughts and feelings come up in your heart as you read it - know that God means THAT and THOSE things inside of you are to blame for your misery and need to be corrected!
(Hint - try replacing the words Lord/God/Holy One with The Truth.)
Isaiah 5
The Song of the Vineyard
(At first God made us!)
1 I will sing for the one I love
a song about his vineyard:
My loved one had a vineyard
on a fertile hillside.
2 He dug it up and cleared it of stones
and planted it with the choicest vines.
He built a watchtower in it
and cut out a winepress as well.
Then he looked for a crop of good grapes,
but it yielded only bad fruit.
3 "Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4 What more could have been done for my vineyard
than I have done for it?
When I looked for good grapes,
why did it yield only bad?
(The consequences of turning good to bad! - or getting sick and believing the lies you now feel.)
5 Now I will tell you
what I am going to do to my vineyard:
I will take away its hedge,
and it will be destroyed;
I will break down its wall,
and it will be trampled.
6 I will make it a wasteland,
neither pruned nor cultivated,
and briers and thorns will grow there.
I will command the clouds
not to rain on it."
7 The vineyard of the LORD Almighty
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are the garden of his delight.
And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed;
for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.
(Doing wrong has depression/punishment as reward because we treat ourselves unjustly.)
Woes and Judgments
8 Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
till no space is left
and you live alone in the land.
9 The LORD Almighty has declared in my hearing:
"Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants.
10 A ten-acre vineyard will produce only a bath of wine,
a homer of seed only an ephah of grain."
11 Woe to those who rise early in the morning
to run after their drinks,
who stay up late at night
till they are inflamed with wine.
12 They have harps and lyres at their banquets,
tambourines and flutes and wine,
but they have no regard for the deeds of the LORD,
no respect for the work of his hands.
13 Therefore my people will go into exile
for lack of understanding;
their men of rank will die of hunger
and their masses will be parched with thirst.
14 Therefore the grave enlarges its appetite
and opens its mouth without limit;
into it will descend their nobles and masses
with all their brawlers and revelers.
15 So man will be brought low
and mankind humbled,
the eyes of the arrogant humbled.
(Yet could we charge God with wrongdoing for being the truth - seeing we ourself shape the truth within with our unfaithfulness and unloving thoughts, feelings and deeds?)
16 But the LORD Almighty will be exalted by his justice,
and the holy God will show himself holy by his righteousness.
17 Then sheep will graze as in their own pasture;
lambs will feed among the ruins of the rich.
18 Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit,
and wickedness as with cart ropes,
19 to those who say, "Let God hurry,
let him hasten his work
so we may see it.
Let it approach,
let the plan of the Holy One of Israel come,
so we may know it."
20 Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
and clever in their own sight.
22 Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine
and champions at mixing drinks,
23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
but deny justice to the innocent.
24 Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw
and as dry grass sinks down in the flames,
so their roots will decay
and their flowers blow away like dust;
for they have rejected the law of the LORD Almighty
and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.
(For the truth is
unlovingness is cruel and brings all our inner enemies to plunder us!)
25 Therefore the LORD's anger burns against his people;
his hand is raised and he strikes them down.
The mountains shake,
and the dead bodies are like refuse in the streets.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
26 He lifts up a banner for the distant nations,
he whistles for those at the ends of the earth.
Here they come,
swiftly and speedily!
27 Not one of them grows tired or stumbles,
not one slumbers or sleeps;
not a belt is loosened at the waist,
not a sandal thong is broken.
28 Their arrows are sharp,
all their bows are strung;
their horses' hoofs seem like flint,
their chariot wheels like a whirlwind.
29 Their roar is like that of the lion,
they roar like young lions;
they growl as they seize their prey
and carry it off with no one to rescue.
30 In that day they will roar over it
like the roaring of the sea.
And if one looks at the land,
he will see darkness and distress;
even the light will be darkened by the clouds.
