Can a Christian even be depressed?
I spoke to a Christian last week who wondered if a Christian can even be depressed. His friend, who claimed to be a Christian, was depressed, and he questioned whether that was even possible if you’re truly a Christian. Because if you have God with you, that shouldn’t happen, right? So he also doubted if his friend was really a true Christian.
Good question! Because let’s be honest, imagine someone says the following:
I’m completely exhausted from sorrow. Every night, my pillow gets wet, my bed is soaked with my tears. My eyes are dull from grief. I can barely see anymore.
I curse the day I was born, the day my mother brought me into the world.
Lord, just let me die now, because life no longer matters to me.
He traveled a day’s journey into the wilderness. There he sat down under a shrub and prayed that he might die. He said, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”
That sounds pretty depressive, doesn’t it?
The people who said that were David (Psalm 6:7), Elijah (1 Kings 19:4), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 20:14), and Jonah (Jonah 4:3).
- David was one of the most prominent figures in the Old Testament. He was the youngest son of Jesse and was chosen by God to be king of Israel.
- Jeremiah was an important prophet in the Old Testament. He served as God’s messenger during one of the most difficult periods in the history of Judah.
- Jonah was a prophet in the Old Testament. He was called by God to bring a message of repentance to the people of Nineveh, a large and godless city in the Assyrian Empire.
- Elijah (Eliyahu, meaning “My God is the Lord”) was one of the greatest prophets in the Old Testament.
These were truly “men of God!”… and when you read what they said… it really sounds quite depressive to me. So yes, even real men of God can think, experience, feel, and say such things.
And all of these men trusted in God.
Lastly, he also asked why (not if, but why) a Christian can become depressed. For that, we took a passage from Genesis 3… We ate “the apple,” and there are consequences attached to that:
To the woman He said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbirth; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam He said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you, and you will eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, until you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:16-19)
In other words, Christians also bear the consequences of our fallen world, the consequences of the “apple” with its thorns and thistles. Whether it’s depression (after all, our brain is our largest organ, and organs can become ill), a broken leg, a difficult job, financial worries, or anything else, we too experience these thorns and thistles.
How David, Elijah, Jeremiah, and Jonah came through their dark seasons is another matter that we explored more deeply in another conversation. But it is clear that a true Christian can indeed struggle with depression.
