Kaleo San Diego Church
What To Do With Our Depression
Psalms 42:1-11: “To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah. As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? 3 My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’ 4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival. 5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation 6 and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the
One of the most convicting and liberating truths I’ve come believe as a Christian is that I was created and redeemed to know God, to love God and to enjoy God more than anything else this world or my heart could give me.
It is liberating because it affirms that I was built for joy and that desire is a good desire. But it is convicting because it reveals that my heart is fickle and doesn’t want to find my greatest joy in the One who made me.
He’s not one of many loves in my life, He is to be the One love that covers over and that all lesser loves rest upon. He’s not simply one joy of many joys in this life, but instead is to be my greatest joy, my greatest treasure, my greatest delight that is the fountain of all other delights in this life and the one to come. I was saved for a reason and that reason was for more than simply escaping His judgment. I was saved so that I could have Him and in having Him I would find what my heart was longing for in everything else.
When I came to see this truth, I was freed from the harmful thinking that to be a Christian meant that I couldn’t pursue joy and pleasure in this life. Not only was I freed from this error, I was shown that this pursuit of joy is what I’m made for!
Loving, enjoying, delighting, hungering, and thirsting are given to us so that we won’t rest until we find all of these emotions satisfied in Him. If we’re made to find our greatest satisfaction in Him, to do so will bring Him the most glory. In other words, God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him. Or you could say, we are most satisfied when God is most glorified in us.
Our pursuit of joy is not at odds with God’s glory, it actually glorifies Him. Our sins were forgiven so that what kept us from glorifying Him, enjoying Him, would be removed and we could live and be who we’re meant to be.
This is why when we speak of depression, and the sadness that comes with it, we’re essentially saying that it isn’t the way it is supposed to be. We were not made for depression. Our bodies can not run on the fuel and sadness that depression feeds upon. We lose ourselves and break down. God’s glory is diminished and our ability to share His glory with others is significantly hindered.
Two Reasons: Our good and Jesus’ glory.
So as we process through What to Do with Our Depression, we’re doing it for the sake of those who are experiencing this deep emotion, this unhappiness and dark cloud that doesn’t seem to lift, like the Psalmist so perfectly describes in this Psalm. And my hope is that we begin to experience more and more of the kind shalom that God’s Word promises us. Additionally, every one of us will go through some kind of spiritual depression in some form or another, with varying causes, and if we don’t know what to do when it comes we can easily stay there and not come out.
Also, there is another and more important reason we need to consider as we face the problem of depression, which is that it is a Kingdom problem. You see, in the Kingdom of God we are to be a people who have come to believe that the “joy of the Lord is their strength” (Neh. 8:10) and that the call to “rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4) is for all sons and daughters of the Father, not just the elite Christians.
The reason is an important one, as Martin Lloyd-Jones points out in his book Spiritual Depression: It’s Causes and Cures:
We are living in a pragmatic age. People today are not primarily interested in Truth but they are interested in results. The one question they ask is: Does it work? They are frantically seeking and searching for something that can help them…Nothing is more important, therefore, than that we should be delivered from this condition which gives other people, looking at us, the impression that to be a Christian means to be unhappy, to be sad, to be morbid, and that the Christian is one who ‘scorns delights and lives laborious days’…It behooves us, therefore, not only for our own sakes, but also for the sake of the Kingdom of God and the glory of the Christ in Whom we believe, to represent Him and His cause, His message and His power in such a way that men and women, far from being antagonized, will be drawn and attracted as they observe us, whatever our circumstances and condition.
Our salvation brings Him glory, our dependence brings Him glory, our restoration brings Him glory, and when His people come to find Him as their greatest joy, His glory is put on display for all others to see. They are all connected; our salvation, His glory, and the witness of the church are a symphony. They aren’t disconnected and are not to be pitted against each other in competition.
So, for this reason let’s look at three things: 1) The Experience of Spiritual Depression, 2) The Causes of Spiritual Depression, and 3) The Cures for Spiritual Depression.
I. The Experience of Spiritual Depression
Verses 1-2: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?”
The writer of this Psalm begins by using a panting a deer as a metaphor for his experience with depression. The reason for this is simple, deer don’t pant unless they can’t find the water they’re used to having. A deer doesn’t wait till it pants before it drinks, it begins to pant when it goes where it normally goes to satisfy its thirst only to find that it is dried up. A panting deer is dying of thirst.
The Psalmist’s experience is like the deer. He’s going to the place his thirst is normally quenched, but this time he finds His relationship with God dry. His thirst isn’t satisfied and it feels like he’s dying from it.
His soul is thirsting for his God. He doesn’t merely want a God, but He wants the living God and His soul feels like its parched and wilting away.
He asks when He will be able to appear before the face of God. He wants that same face-to-face intimacy that he once had and which is now only a memory to him.
Verse 3 says his tears have been his food day and night. He’s been weeping and his tears have multiplied because of the distance he feels between him and his God.
Verse 6 shows us that his very soul feels cast down. His thoughts were turned inward rather than outward to his God. When he looked outward he felt there was no answer.
Verse 7: “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.”
He feels like he’s drowning and that these deep agonies have come together into a storm where he’s overwhelmed by the suffocation of his soul.
He’s in turmoil and mourning, and the worst of all of this isn’t just the pain and suffering that he’s receiving form His enemy, it’s the relational pain and suffering he feels when he cries out to God and hears only silence from Him. As if God has rejected him. This is what it feels like to be truly alone. To be so lonely that the One who has always been there is now like a mist that has vanished.
This doesn’t mean that he’s lost his belief that His God exists. It doesn’t mean that he now believes God is no longer omnipresent. It means that his experience with his God has changed. He doesn’t feel the relational presence of his God. He can’t taste his God, he can no longer feel his God’s closeness, he can no longer hear the sound of his Father’s voice, and he can no longer see the smiling face of his God that used to brighten his soul.
His thoughts about God that used to bring him comfort and solace now only feel like they were a dream. He’s lost the reality of God in his life, not belief in God, but the very sense of Him dwelling in his heart and soul.
He’s feeling a spiritual thirst, a spiritual drying and drought, and a spiritual deadness and darkness.
When we look at the picture of this man, he looks as if he’s carrying the whole world on his back. He’s bent down, sad, troubled, confused, and he is weeping profusely. He’s worried about himself, worried about what’s happening, troubled about his enemies who are attacking him. Everything seems to be on top of him.
In other Psalms we see the reason for someone’s sense of loss of God is often due to their sin. For instance, last week when we spoke about guilt and shame we looked at Psalm 130 where the Psalmist is crying out from the depths because he, too, feels like he’s drowning, but he’s crying out for mercy because of his sin against his God.
But we don’t see this in this Psalm, do we? There are no confession, no admitting that he’s sinned against God. No regrets and cries out for mercy. It’s not guilt that is driving this distance and loss of presence. This has come upon him and it’s not because he’s done something necessarily wrong. And this will be our experience at times.
There may be times, like this Psalmist, where we’re being ridiculed, mocked, jeered, and suffering because of the sin of others. And the problem is compounded when our hearts feel as if God has all but abandoned us. When it feels like God has turned His face from us so that we no longer appear before Him.
This is important to know because usually the first thing we do when we feel this drought coming on is to blame someone or ourselves. We want to assign fault. So, we start to think it’s because we didn’t do something God wanted, or that we did something that displeased God.
This is why it’s so hard to admit our dryness and depression to one another because we’re afraid our friends will assign guilt to these same things so we keep them inside. We’re afraid that we’ll hear that we’ve done something wrong and that’s why this distance has come upon us.
There are plenty of times when we feel a drought because of foolishness and sin, but there are times when it comes upon us and we need to know that so that we don’t make the problem worse. This will happen to each of us in varying degrees. It will come upon all of us at some point in our journey with Christ. And if we’re not prepared to deal with it when it comes, this depression may go so deep it feels like we may never come out.
For some of you, it has come upon you and you can’t discern why, you can’t find the cause, you can only describe the experience like the Psalmist. Maybe something happened to you and when you went to God you felt distance and it freaked you out so much because no one told you how to deal with it that you’ve stayed there and haven’t been able to get out. You feel dry, your soul feels parched, and God feels like a dry riverbed. You feel like you’re being swallowed by the sea of your emotions; your arms are weary and you’re about to stop fighting. What started out as a feeling of distance, turned into a feeling of alienation from God and it’s been so long you wonder if He ever loved you and if you ever really knew him.
Either way, we need to be able to talk about this as God’s people or we’ll just be another moralistic church that quickly dismisses these experiences by placing blame and moving on. So we need to not only discuss it, but also see if we can discern how we got here in the first place. What are the reasons, what are the causes?
II. The Causes of Spiritual Depression
When we talk about causes for our drought we have to admit that sometimes it is simply mysterious and we don’t know. But there are some causes that generally cause or contribute to this experience. When we look at this Psalm we see a few.
1) Believing the lies of liars
One of the ways we can slip into distance with our God that turns into depression is by believing the lies of the liars. When we are attacked outwardly it is easy, when we feel as if God isn’t rescuing us from their attacks, to believe their charges.
You know how it works, someone attacks your character, attacks your reputation, or threatens you emotionally and you cry out to God and ask Him to stop their attacks and protect you from them and instead the attacks seem to get worse instead of better.
What happens is that our thoughts turn inward and instead of dealing with the attacks, we begin to attack ourselves. We begin to believe their claims, believe their threats, and we start to see ourselves just as they describe us. Because we feel like God is abandoning us, we begin to think maybe He doesn’t love us, He’s not for us. Or maybe we even think that the suffering or attacks are because we deserve them.
We become blind and our hearts begin to say, “Where is your God?” just like the enemies of this Psalmist. Twice his enemy taunts him with this question. Every attack upon our belief and trust in the living God, everything that would keep us from seeing the beauty of Jesus, everything that would keep us from believing the Gospel is a lie form the Liar.
This is what Satan does, this is what he wants, this is his mission, to keep us from seeing our God. 2 Corinthians 4 says this:
2 Corinthians 4:3-4: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
He speaks about those who can not see Jesus at all, but we have to admit that this attack, to keep us from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, is the same attack used upon believers. Satan’s tactics are the same. He wants us blind, and for those who can see, he wants to obscure Jesus’ glory, he wants to dim the light of the gospel so that it’s fuzzy and indefinable.
In other Psalms, the enemies are after the life of the Psalmist who cries out because he’s in physical danger. But the attacks of this enemy are spiritual. “Where is your God?” And this cuts him so deep, like a sword to his bones, he even begins to say, “Why have you forgotten me?”
What he’s feeling doesn’t fit with what he knows about a good and loving God. He begins to question whether or not God is really for him, and maybe whether or not God is really good.
The questions of our hearts go like this: If He’s our God, and He’s really good, and He’s really for us, and if He’s really like what He says He is, why is this happening to us?
This is a question from our own hearts. It is an attack from within ourselves.
2) Isolation
Verse 4: “How I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.”
Verse 6: “I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.”
Whether he was taken away in captivity or he fled from his attackers, the Psalmist is no longer with God’s people singing shouts of joy and songs of praise, keeping the festivals with his brothers and sisters. We’re not sure why, but here he is and he’s saddened that he’s lost his community.
He hasn’t lost his God, his God is still his God, but he’s lost his God in the way he would enjoy God with others. He’s away from the
You can have individual times of prayer, individual bible study, individual times of worship, but it’s not the same as joining with your family and celebrating your God together. We need both; we’re built for both.
We’re not built for spiritual isolation. We’re created for spiritual community. Our God is a triune God. He is a God-in-community. He created us to be image bearers of Him, so He made us a people-in-community. Just as the Trinity loves, enjoys, and glorifies one another, so we’re to love, enjoy and glorify our God together.
One of the great dangers of living in our culture is the false notion that we can be perfectly healthy Christians, flourishing and thriving by ourselves. There simply is no such thing. We are a family. We are a body. We are a community of His people, where He dwells among us.
When trouble comes, unlike that Psalmist who may have had community taken from him and is broken hearted because he misses it, we often remove ourselves and isolate ourselves from one another. This is a sure way to slip into a spiritual drought that leads to depression.
This Psalmist longs for the feasts, the festivals that God’s people enjoyed together. They would come together from all over and they would read God’s Word and remember the exodus when God saved them from slavery and passed over them by the blood of the lamb.
They would celebrate their freedom together by worshipping their God and reminding one another that they were His people, that He was their God, and that they are free from their captors. They would recommit themselves to Him as they were reminded of how He was committed to them. Then they would eat and feast together.
That’s what we do when we gather together in community. We are coming together as a word-formed people who remember that we’ve been set free from slavery and that our enemy has been defeated and we are free because of the blood of the lamb and God’s promise to be our God. So we come and celebrate in worship, celebrate by reading the word, and celebrate this slain lamb by taking communion every week.
Then we go and feast like we’re doing today at the beach as we welcome others into God’s community.
80% of Americans who claim to be Christian think that you can have a thriving relationship with God on your own and that you don’t need to join a community.
How are you going to fight against your heart that is deceptive and wicked? How are you going to remind yourself of the promises of God when you feel like God has abandoned you? How are you going to get out of your drought when you’ve begun to believe the lies of the Liar?
Just as you can’t stay warm by yourself in the cold, so your heart needs to be warmed by others who can fight with you and for you by the power of the Spirit as we remind each other of the beauty and glory, the freedom and victory that has been won for us by the blood of the Lamb, the Son of God.
When we are isolated, we’re not just attacked emotionally we’re attacked socially.
The third cause for spiritual depression is physical.
3) Physical Distress
Verse 3: “My tears have been my food day and night”
He’s saying that he’s not eating. This spiritual drought has caused him to lose his appetite. He doesn’t want to eat. In fact, the only food he has is his tears. He’s crying so much that he has no desire for food. There is a deeper thirst, a deeper hunger that needs to be fed.
Also, he’s crying day and night. He’s not sleeping. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep. Sound familiar? Have you ever been so traumatized emotionally or spiritually that the things that you need and normally desire are lost?
When a drought turns into a depression, we can’t ignore the fact there is a physical side to all of this. It’s not just emotional, it’s not just social, it’s physical as well. And if we try and ignore the physical effects we’ll only add to our spiritual depression.
We are whole people. We have a soul and a body that have been joined together. And we read through our physical senses, we feel through our physical senses, and we sing and worship, laugh and cry by our physical bodies.
John Piper says this:
What we should be clear about, though, is that the condition of our bodies makes a difference in the capacity of our minds to think clearly and of our souls to see the beauty of hope-giving truth.
As I was preparing this week for the message I was reading the book I mentioned earlier by Martin Lloyd-Jones and he says this about how the physical affects us spiritually:
Does someone hold the view that as long as you are a Christian it does not matter what the condition of your body is? Well, you will soon be disillusioned if you believe that. Physical conditions play their part in all this…There are certain physical ailments which tend to promote depression…take the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon—one of the truly great preachers of all time. The great man was subject to spiritual depression…He had to face this problem of spiritual depression in a most acute form…And there are many, I find, who come to talk to me about these matters, in whose case it seems quite clear to me that the cause is mainly physical. Into this group, speaking generally, you can put tiredness, overstrain, illness, any form of illness. You cannot isolate the spiritual from the physical…The greatest and the best Christians are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.
It may be that the emotional and social deprivation of the Psalmist has caused his physical deprivation, but now he has to treat his physical condition too or it will be more difficult to get out of his spiritual depression.
And let me be clear, though I confess I’m not a medical doctor or a trained psychiatrist, anti-depressants are not the decisive savior; Christ is. They should not be the first solution to spiritual darkness. In fact, our culture is handing them out like candy and we’re not seeing a removal of depression. In fact, an article in the Washington Post in May of 2002 puts it like this:
After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression: Antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft work. And so do sugar pills. A new analysis has found that in the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades, sugar pills have done as well—or better than—antidepressants.
So I’m in no rush to say to anyone, run out and get medicated. However, there may be times when the depression is so acute that the physiological help that medication brings may help them to process the spiritual needs they have.
Ed Welch, in his book Blame It on the Brain, is no fan of medicating every spiritual and emotional problem but is willing to employ medication in cases where the depression is debilitating. He says this:
If the person is not taking mediation but is considering it, I typically suggest that he or she postpone that decision for a period of time. During that time, I consider the possible causes, and together we ask God to teach us about both ourselves and him so that we can grow in faith in the midst of hardship. If the depression persists, I might let the person know that medication is an option to deal with some of the physical symptoms.
This, I think, is good caution. And I also believe that when someone in our midst is suffering from this, instead of belittling them and guilting them if they’ve chosen medication, we pray for them, help them, and together seek God’s grace.
Too many churches are legalistic about this because they don’t understand that your physical body can affect your spiritual health.
In Piper’s book called When I Don’t Desire God he says this quite well:
…if someone is reading this book is on medication, or is thinking about it, I do not condemn you for that, nor does the Bible. It may or may not be the best course of action. I commend you to the wisdom of a God-centered, Bible-saturated medical doctor. If there was imperfection in the choice to use medication, the imputed righteousness of Christ will swallow it up as you rest in him.
This means that post-partum depression; physical suffering that turns to depression from cancer, chronic pain, etc.; or some form of chemical imbalance that can trigger depression needs to be handled graciously, carefully, and lovingly by the people of God. We should be their advocate, their champions in prayer, and we should so fight for their souls that as we walk with them we come to learn about suffering in ways they can teach us.
There are people who run straight to medication because they think every form of depression is always physical.
There are people who run straight after the moral cause because they think every form of depression is due to the sin-actions of the individual. They tell you simply toughen up, read your bible and repent.
And there are some who, instead of blaming the physical or moral, blame it all on emotional and psychological. If you’re discouraged and depressed, their answer is to simply listen and encourage, listen and support, and listen some more and accept you.
The Scripture says that you are an emotional being so yes you need friends, yes you need social acceptance, and you have a physical aspect so you need rest and need to take care of your body, but you are a spiritual being as well and because you are also spiritual you need truth. In the community of God’s people, we need to remind each other of the truth of Jesus. Listening and support are good and helpful, but at some point you need to speak to the person you love and bring the truth to them with the confidence that the Spirit can apply that truth to their broken and weary hearts.
We need all of these things. We need the communal and social, we need the physical, we need to listen and we need to speak.
So what do we do with our depression? That is the question we’re trying to answer in this message. What is our part? What can we do?
III. The Cures for Spiritual Depression
1) Pour out your soul to God
Verse 4: “I pour out my soul”
This entire Psalm is a Maskill as it says it verse one. It is a song that is supposed to teach us. And the lesson is learned through the experience of the Psalmist who had to live through this soul-wrenching time.
In other words, the Psalm, the prayer, the song is the way He’s pouring out his soul to God.
He is struggling, he doesn’t feel God, he doesn’t sense God’s presence in his heart or life, and he’s utterly dry and dying of spiritual thirst. And yet, this confession of His distance is given to God. He’s admitting all of this to the God he feels so far from. He’s pouring out His emotions, his grief to God.
His heart poured out, though he’s confused and doesn’t understand, becomes a song that we can sing, poetry we can read, and comfort to the saints of God who find themselves in the same place. God uses his suffering and drought to bring peace and comfort to those who feel what he feels.
Even if we get nothing out of our communal worship, don’t stop. If we get nothing out reading God’s word, don’t stop. If we get nothing out of prayer, keep praying. Talk to God and tell him that you don’t feel anything, that you feel distant.
If you feel that God is absent, talk to Him about His absence in your heart. Tell Him. Pour yourself out to Him. Tell Him that you miss Him. Tell Him that you miss His presence and that you want it back again.
Instead of ignoring the things that are good for you in the midst of your depression, seek them out. Who knows, God may use this time to write a beautiful song, if not in this life, most definitely in the one to come when all depression is cast into the pits of hell and the distance you feel now will be destroyed and you will see Him face to face.
2) Try to find where you’re placing your hope
In verse 5 and 11 he says to himself, “hope in God…”
He’s asking himself why he’s so cast down and then reminding himself to find his hope. He’s looking for where his hopes have gone. He’s searching his own soul and questioning his own soul to discover what he’s put his hope in.
Even though spiritual droughts can come without you sinning and causing it, they can be aggravated by running to hopes that will ultimately fail you. Spiritual droughts uncover false lovers of your heart. False hopes that can not come through.
I think one of the reasons God allows us to experience this drought is so that we will discover where we’ve placed our hopes and security.
There have been some things over the last three weeks that have been particularly difficult for me to get my head around. And I’ve questioned why it’s all happening and even found myself frustrated at all of it.
But I’ve found that through it, though I may not have asked for it, God is using it to show me where my false lovers have been. My false hopes.
You see, we all struggle in some ways with false hopes that have become our idols. It can be approval, control, power, comfort, pleasure or respect. And these things we come to make covenant with in that they promise us that if we get them, we’ll have hope, we’ll have security, we’ll feel accepted and approved. And if we lose them, we’ll feel cursed and lost.
When God blocks us from getting our false-hopes and lovers, we can even feel angry at him because we feel like he’s keeping us from what we need. When in fact, God is lovingly showing us that the one thing we need is Him.
He wants our hopes to be relocated. This is what the Psalmist is doing. He’s calling himself to place his hope again in the only One who can sustain his heart and bring living water to his thirsting soul.
3) Preach the Gospel to yourself
Verse 5: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation”
Verse 11: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”
He’s not speaking to God or God’s people in these passages; he’s speaking to himself.
One of the chief ways you can be effective at defending yourself against oncoming depression and getting yourself out of depression is by learning to preach the Gospel to yourself.
We should not only be preached to, we should become preachers and preach the gospel to ourselves constantly. When I wake up, when I’m driving, when I’m going into a meeting, when I’m gathering with God’s people, when I’m feeling hurt or when I’ve hurt someone, whenever, at all times I have to become a preacher to myself.
Lloyd-Jones says this:
Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment in Psalm 42 was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, the starts talking to himself. “Why are you case down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you.”
After listening to his heart he now turns and tells his heart to shut up and listen! In times of spiritual drought we have to start preaching, start speaking, start talking to ourselves. Grab your soul by its shoulders and start preaching the Gospel to it.
And what did he preach to himself? He preaches The Gospel of God’s salvation.
He says, “Hope in God, for I will again praise Him.” He may not fully feel it, but he’s starting to. He’s beginning to see the break of dawn as the Gospel opens his eyes.
We can preach this same Gospel, and we do so with the knowledge of what Christ has done.
When we feel this depression we feel like we’re failures and like God has abandoned us.
How do we know this isn’t true? How can we trust that he has saved us and we’ll praise Him again? How do we know he’s for us and we’ve not failed in His eyes? How do we know he hasn’t abandoned us?
You open God’s word and you see the One who was truly abandoned. You see the One who truly thirsted, on a cross. You see the one who was treated like an utter failure for us.
When we read the account of Jesus we see Him crying out, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” When we read the Gospel we see His enemies taunting Him by asking Him where His God is. They mocked Him and said, “If He’s your God why doesn’t he come to save you?”
Don’t you see that Jesus experienced not only God’s presence, He lost God Himself. His Father. He felt a drought and thirst that was so overwhelming he thought He’d die just from the loss of this relationship. Why?
So that in spite of your failures and inadequacy, He’ll never leave you nor forsake you. He’ll always be with you. He promises that He’ll keep His promise and proved it on the cross so you don’t ever have to believe again that He’s abandoned you.
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