This post is adapted from an episode of “Mondays with Mark” on Facebook Live. Click here to watch the entire video.
I want to follow up on the subject of dealing with depression in ministry. Every time I bring it up on the podcast, it gets a lot of attention because it’s right where pastors are living.
I believe Satan’s No. 1 weapon to use against pastors in spiritual warfare is depression – discouragement, anxiety, all those emotional things that a few decades ago a pastor would seldom ever acknowledge or admit.
But, you know, if you don’t acknowledge or admit that Satan’s attacking you in a certain way, it’s much more difficult to fight it.
One of the places I’ve received so much help has been a book called Revitalize by Andy Davis, senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. He has a chapter on depression that has been really life-changing for me in understanding how to deal with my own depression.
You know, Satan knows where we are weakest. And we spend our time with people in crisis, right? And if you are a caring person, you’re going to be hurting along with them. You’ve also got people who have all kinds of opinions about everything. It really doesn’t matter what decisions you make, there is always going to be somebody in the congregation who’s going to oppose it. And then, losing church members is hurtful, even if they just move away because they get another job, it’s a loss to lose them.
Satan wants to wear you down. He wants to discourage you in every way he can. He wants your church to be in decline and to close because he wants to rob God of His glory. He’s going to attack you, your children, your wife, your finances, your health, your emotions.
Jesus put Satan on notice at Caesarea Philippi that hell has no defense against the Church. Satan also knows that if a believer is fully armed-up with the armor of God, he has no weapon that can penetrate – unless he can get you so discouraged that you never storm the gates of hell and never put on the full armor of God.
There have been many times in my life when I have been so distraught with depression that I wasn’t about to storm the gates of hell. I didn’t put on the armor of God. I just wanted to curl up in a fetal position and make everything go away.
Some of the greatest men in all the Bible were men who struggled with depression. Elijah called down fire from heaven, right? I mean, he’s like a superhero in the Old Testament. But one woman, Jezebel, gets after him and he runs off to hide in a cave. In more modern times, the missionary Adoniram Judson became so despondent he went and dug his own grave. Some of us have become so discouraged we’ve spiritually and mentally dug our own grave, ready to quit.
Martin Lloyd Jones, who was a physician and pastor, wrote a wonderful book called Spiritual Depression, in which he says some of us have a predisposition to clinical depression. If you’re wired that way, you have to be aware that this is a very vulnerable place for you. In my nearly 50 years of experience in ministry, I’ve seen many of my brothers fall, and I am convinced that before their moral failure many of them were dealing with depression. Depression is a very risky place, and it doesn’t just affect you. It affects your wife, your children, and your church.
So what do you do about it? Well, I think that, first and foremost, you have to battle for your joy. The apostle Paul did not say “I ran the good run” or “I walked the good walk” or “I sang the good song” or “I danced the good dance.” He said “I fought the good fight.”
You gotta battle for your joy. You gotta battle for your marriage. You gotta battle for your children. You gotta battle for your church. You gotta battle for the gospel. You gotta battle for the glory of God. And you can’t do battle unless you put the armor on.
Know that you don’t need to let your heart be troubled. Jesus said, “You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house, there are many rooms and I go and prepare a place for you and I will come again. And where I am, you will be also.”
In those darkest moments, know there’ll come a moment when Satan will never bother you again. You’ll never have a depressive thought. You’ll never have a temptation. When we get to heaven, we’re going to worship God in perfection. And you sometimes you just have to wait for the hope of future glory.
Depression is losing hope. The solution to depression is to regain hope – and we can find it in Him. Don’t go through this alone. Talk to somebody. Email us at replant@namb.net. We’d be glad to talk with you.
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Published January 30, 2025