What Does Christian Hedonism Offer the Depressed?
00:00:00.000 | In episode 19 we talked about times when God withdraws his presence from the
00:00:08.820 | Christian, and Pastor John, there you talked about Micah 7, verses 8 and 9 in
00:00:12.920 | that context. I think it's worth revisiting this theme to ask the
00:00:16.500 | question, what does Christian hedonism have to offer a depressed Christian?
00:00:21.780 | Besides that Micah 7, 8, and 9 text, there's another beautiful text for people in
00:00:28.920 | darkness. In Psalm 139, that's the psalm, "Where shall I flee from your presence?"
00:00:34.340 | And in verse 9 it says, "If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the
00:00:39.060 | uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right
00:00:43.400 | hand shall hold me." And then it says this, "If I say, surely darkness shall cover me."
00:00:50.320 | Now notice it doesn't say, "If darkness covers me." It says, "If I say." So this is a
00:00:55.640 | person who is despairing and speaking to themselves darkness. "If I say, surely
00:01:02.400 | darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night, even the darkness is
00:01:07.640 | not dark to you. The light is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with
00:01:13.360 | you." I think that's picturing a person who is on the brink of despair and is
00:01:19.680 | saying, "Darkness is all over me. It's just covering me. I don't see any light." And
00:01:24.360 | what it's calling us to do is say, "In that experience, in that very moment,
00:01:30.080 | feeling all of that desertion and all of that darkness, we say, 'This darkness is
00:01:36.800 | not dark to my God. He sees me. He knows me. He's with me. And though I can't see
00:01:45.560 | Him, He can see me and there's nothing dark about my light to Him." So I would
00:01:51.400 | say we learn these things from the precious Word of God and we preach them
00:01:56.280 | to ourselves, even though the very moment of preaching, there is almost no feeling
00:02:02.760 | for them. We assert them as true. We throw them in the devil's face. We stick him
00:02:08.360 | with the sword of the Spirit and then, like I said with regard to Psalm 40, we
00:02:14.120 | wait. We wait for the Lord. One more thing. This is a really, really
00:02:20.720 | crucial pastoral issue when it comes to dying. There's a young woman in our
00:02:24.760 | church who died. She's about 40 some years ago. She had four kids. She got
00:02:29.040 | cancer and her death was just horrible. I mean, there was nothing beautiful about
00:02:33.760 | it. It was just horrible. She basically choked on her own vomit at the end and
00:02:38.720 | everybody around her would just say, "God, please, God, please have mercy and take
00:02:45.280 | her." She had made a video for our church and we did the funeral and
00:02:51.200 | everybody wanted some explanation or some word from the pastor about saying
00:02:57.480 | something about her suffering at the end because usually we think of suffering as
00:03:02.680 | having a sanctifying effect. "Well, she's going to die in ten minutes. There's no
00:03:08.280 | life to be sanctified here. She's going to die." And what I said was the incredible
00:03:15.960 | triumph of her death is that she didn't curse God. In other words, she had no
00:03:27.160 | physical, emotional, mental wherewithal to sing a song. She's throwing up her own
00:03:34.600 | blood and guts and all she could do was hold on and not curse him and she
00:03:42.840 | didn't. She just held on to him. So I think there are some moments of darkness
00:03:47.840 | where the most beautiful triumph is when Satan is probably screaming in your ear,
00:03:54.640 | "This is your God so much for your merciful God," and you just look back at
00:04:00.160 | him and say, "I'm not going to curse my God." I think that's what Job basically said to his
00:04:05.800 | wife, you know, when she said, "Curse God and die," he just said, "Look, we're going to
00:04:10.000 | receive evil and good at the hand of the Lord. We're not going to curse him."
00:04:14.000 | That is a powerful testimony. Pastor John, thank you, and thank you for listening to
00:04:18.840 | this podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please send it to us via
00:04:21.840 | email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and
00:04:25.960 | your hometown. You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper
00:04:29.200 | online at desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
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