Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness (20 page)

If you can’t immediately find guilt in your life, here are some questions that may bring it to the surface:

If you saw God face to face today, is there anything you would be ashamed of?

If all your private thoughts were advertised, would you want to hide?

What would it be like if you were certain that you were forgiven for all your sins? Would life feel any different to you?

What would it be like if you knew that your Heavenly Father accepted you with enthusiasm?

The only time anyone ever talks about guilt is during a Sunday sermon. It is not part of our normal discussions. We are not accustomed to looking for it. But be patient; you will find it.

There are a number of reasons why we can feel guilty.

1. We feel guilty because we
   should
   feel guilty. We love sin more than God, and we plan to keep on sinning. Occasionally, we throw in the “I’m only human” rationale.
   
2. We feel guilty because we don’t confess our sin to God.
   

   Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the L
   ORD
   ”—and you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Ps. 32:5)
   

3. We feel guilty because there are still consequences to past sin. For example, a family member was severely injured by your drunk driving, and you see that person every day. Assuming
   that there has been confession and appropriate restitution, this is more accurately sadness than it is guilt before God.
   
4. We feel guilty, but what we are really feeling is a sense of uncleanness because we have been victimized by someone else. Sometimes the experience of being unclean from our own sin and being unclean from the sin of others is hard to distinguish. They are, however, very different.
   
5. We feel guilty because we think we must do something to be forgiven.
   

This last type of guilt is especially relevant to depression.

The story of the cross is also called the gospel, which simply means that it is good news. What makes it good news is that there is forgiveness of sins. It is given through faith in Jesus rather than through our own good works. That is why you have heard the call to trust over and over. If our lives are going to have any bedrock, it will be our faith or trust in what God has done through Jesus.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes ... . For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. (Rom. 1:16–17)

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” (Isa. 30:15)

All of this is unmistakably divine. No one could invent such a one-sided arrangement. We sin against God—that is what we bring to the table. God pursues us, sends his Son to suffer the death penalty, adopts us, gives us the righteousness of Jesus, changes us to look more and more like him, and loves us through eternity. He simply tells us to trust in him rather than in ourselves.

You would think that once we heard this good news, we would embrace it with all our hearts. We have found the pearl of great price. We have been given the greatest and most costly gift, and the Giver delights in giving it because of his love for us. Eureka! This is the treasure we have been waiting for. Everything else we pursued and temporarily adored was a mere counterfeit of this amazing gift. Considering what we have received, we could never pursue them again.

This is what you would
think
our response would be, but there are times we surprise even ourselves. For some reason, we like the old arrangement where we have to try to make it on our own. Perhaps the notion that we can’t bring anything to the table is too humbling for us. After all, only a child acknowledges being needy, and that is what the gospel requires us to do. We are required to say, “I need Jesus.” So we lobby for something other than the gospel.

This anti-gospel is called legalism, works righteousness, or living under the law. It simply means that we trust in Christ
and
something we do. In the New Testament, circumcision was the deed that was added. Today we have dropped circumcision, but our creative alternatives know no bounds. We have added hundreds of other activities, some of which can sound quite pious. For example, in medieval times, people would whip themselves to show their sorrow for sin. Today, anorectics starve themselves; others just stagger in self-loathing.

It sounds religious and contrite until you really think about it. Then you realize that when you add
anything
to what Christ has done, it diminishes the glory of God. It is a rejection of God’s gift as sufficient. We can try to excuse ourselves and say that the gospel seems too good to be true. But no matter what we say, when we add something to the gospel we are minimizing the completeness of God’s work, and we are essentially trying to share the glory with God by bringing our own gift.

Legalism is more common than you think. It is another one of those human instincts that you will find lodged in every heart.

Have you ever said, “I just can’t forgive myself’?

Is your life one long, “If only ...”?

Have others called you driven?

Are you burdened by past sins?

Do you believe that God is chronically disappointed in you?

Do you believe that God likes you more when you are really good?

Do you make deals with God: “If you ... I will ...”?

Can you hear within these questions the conviction that your relationship with God rests more with you than with him?

Now consider what you might add to the gospel. Life is found in God + ________.

Serving in church

Reading my Bible

Not being too mean

Being relatively honest

Not getting drunk

Being sexually careful

Notice that these are good things. What makes them ugly are the motives that drive them. If you do these things to find favor before God, they are worthless. When they become activities in which we trust, they are abominations because they replace God.

We make these additions to the gospel because they allow us to feel good about ourselves
apart
from God. They also give us a basis for judging others. If we have successfully gone through a day and measured up to our new law, we are a success (however temporarily). And we are now entitled to judge others who don’t measure up.

Even God himself doesn’t escape our judgment. “I have been a good daughter even though I have had to live with a messed-up father. Why is God doing this to me?” If we have done the right thing, we feel we have a right to get something in return, and we can become angry or depressed when we don’t get it.

With this in mind, add some other signs of legalism.

“After all I have done, this is the thanks I get?”

“Life isn’t fair.”

There are small, short-lived payoffs to legalism, but the emotional cornerstone of legalism is a lack of joy (Gal. 4:15). Could you expect anything else? If you believe that your most important relationship is dependent on appeasing an angry or irritated God, no matter how much you do, you will never be sure it is enough.

In reality, whatever good deeds we do are intended to be a
response
to what God has done, not a cause of it. God’s grace and love to us
precede
our own good works. He loved us before we loved him or even acknowledged him. Given this fact, why do we now think that we can earn his approval?

Jane had an abortion ten years ago and has been depressed ever since. She still feels guilty about what she has done. Her friends have been faithful in loving her and speaking about forgiveness of sins, and she knows the truth of the cross, but it doesn’t seem to matter. It is as if her guilt is a resistant virus that is immune to the gospel.

Legalism explains Jane’s distress. She has all the earmarks of following the anti-gospel. If the gospel she believed was Christ alone, her sorrow over sin would be increasingly displaced by thankfulness.
But to Jane, the gospel doesn’t even seem relevant. And when the gospel isn’t relevant, the anti-gospel has taken its place. Her anti-gospel is that life and forgiveness come through Christ
plus
not having an abortion.

Having violated her beliefs and standards, she “had to” be punished. She could not reverse the consequences of her abortion, so she decided that her self-imposed punishment would be grief, and it would be long and severe. Perhaps, after an unspecified period of suffering, she would allow herself to be forgiven.

But how severe must her penance be? And how long? Multiple suicide attempts and daily reflection on her past actions were not judged to be enough. So she continued in her grief, hoping that one day she would wake up and find that her penance had finally satisfied God’s justice.

“Tell me, you who want to be under the law,” wrote Paul to the church. The gospel becomes a new self-imposed law when we add anything to what Christ has done, and Paul says that we actually prefer this arrangement.

Leaving entrenched legalism is a straightforward process, but you should expect to leave many times. It won’t happen all at once. In Paul’s book to the churches in Galatia, he marshals a number of arguments to persuade people of the truth of Christ and the error of legalism.

• He expresses his personal astonishment that people would turn from the grace of Christ (Gal. 1:6).
  
• He establishes his own credentials to speak with authority (Gal. 1:11–2:14).
  
• He cites Abraham as an example of how we are first given promises we receive by faith, and only then are
  we given rules for living. These are responses to this grace (Gal. 3:1–25).
  
• He cites how God chose Isaac, Abraham’s son by God’s promise, rather than Ishmael, Abraham’s son by a man-made plan (Gal. 4:21–31).
  
• He reminds us that it is only grace that keeps us from racism and other forms of pride. Otherwise, we judge by laws we think we have kept and others have not. If we add our works to the grace of God, we will no longer be one people unified by Christ, but one small clique that thinks it is better than the others (Gal. 3:26–29).
  
• He keeps emphasizing that he wants us to be free, and freedom can only be found when we acknowledge that Christ has done it all (Gal. 5:1–5).
  

Paul summarizes his teaching against legalism with this familiar exhortation: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Gal. 5:6). If this is true (and it is) we as legalists should respond by saying, “Lord, forgive me.” We had been counting on something we could accomplish ourselves rather than relying on the grace of God. We were actually proud enough to think we could please God on our own merits. To think so, we must have had a very superficial understanding of sin.

Jane felt guilty because she had an abortion, but what about the unbelief and other sins she commits daily? While she was maximizing the sin of abortion, placing it beyond the scope of forgiveness and punishing herself instead, she was minimizing all of her other sins. She was doing nothing to punish herself for them. If she is going to try to earn favor with God by human effort, she is obligated to keep
all
the law (Gal. 5:3), and that, of course, is impossible.

The only way out is for Jane to say, “Lord, forgive me”—not because of her abortion (she has confessed that thousands of times),
but because of her attempts to deal with sin by human effort rather than faith. Then she should stay in the shadow of the cross, remember daily that she stands before God because of his grace and not her effort, and then get on with the wonderful task of loving other people.

In Jane’s case, legalism was the cause of her depression. If it is not one of the
causes
of your depression, you can be sure that it will be
revealed
by it. When you see it, be hopeful. You know that you are on the right track when you see your legalism. When it is dealt with, joy is within reach. The people of Galatia were going through severe hardships, but it was their legalism that robbed them of their joy. And it was their returning to the heart of the gospel that recovered their joy.

For another biography, read Philippians 3:4–11. Paul looks back on his life and his many good accomplishments and tells us that he considers them worthless compared to what Christ has given him through faith.

Where do you see your own legalism?

Anna was shocked when the thought of suicide entered her mind. At that moment she realized that her depression was more serious than she had imagined. Now everything became more complicated. Should she tell anyone? Mention “suicide” to someone and you are bound to get a reaction, and she was concerned that the reaction would land her in a psychiatric hospital. So maybe she should keep it to herself. But could she defuse suicide if she said something? And how could she be sure that she wouldn’t act on impulse and actually take her own life.

She talked to a counselor at her church, who talked to someone else—no one wants to be the only one who knows about suicidal thoughts. But no one overreacted. The counselor asked if Anna would come and talk more, and the counselor asked Anna to bring a trusted friend with her.

The conversation seemed more formal than usual. There were lots of questions, but the questions helped Anna consider some contributors to her suicidal thoughts; for example, she had some paralyzing fears about her singleness and fears of being alone. That meeting brought needed direction, and Anna was relieved to have people walking alongside her.