Imagine what the devil is facing as he seeks to oppose the advance of Christ’s kingdom. The Bible says that we Christians, Satan’s human enemies, are arrayed with an awesome combination of both offensive and defensive weaponry. In 2 Corinthians 10:3–5, Paul describes our offensive weapons with unforgettable language, saying they have “divine power to destroy strongholds,” which are satanic concepts and patterns that oppose the knowledge of God. And there is no defense Satan can erect that can resist the power of those weapons!
In the same way, our defensive armor is fashioned by the hand of God and is perfectly effective, actually impenetrable by any weapons Satan can devise. In Ephesians 6:14–17, Paul describes the “whole armor of God,” including a breastplate, a helmet, and a “shield of faith,” which is so effective it can “extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (emphasis mine). When Satan swings his sword of lies and we raise “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” and the swords clash with a resounding crash, we know ours is unbreakable, for “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35), but his weapon will disintegrate! So when we are arrayed in this kind of armor, none of Satan’s weapons will do us any harm at all.
So what is the devil to do? His only option is to employ deception: he must lie to us sufficiently before the battle so that, completely demoralized, we never even get dressed for the battle or pick up a single weapon. If he can achieve this, he will stand unchallenged in the field while our powerful and skillfully wrought arsenal lies unused on the ground. Satan’s top priority in stopping the advance of the church is discouragement.
Reasons Why Church Revitalizers Get Discouraged
All Christians get discouraged from time to time, no matter their ministry. That we are human, with inherent weakness in our hearts and bodies, makes discouragement common. Against the direct Satanic attack I mentioned a moment ago, we are frail, helpless novices compared to the vicious experience of our evil foe. He knows all our weak spots.
Church revitalizers are especially susceptible to spiritual discouragement. Let us start with the discouraging setting of the church. Perhaps the church is in an economically depressed region with a high unemployment rate, resulting in individuals leaving the community to find jobs. Perhaps the church is in a rural area away from a population center. It has not had a visitor in months, while the average age of its members steadily creeps higher. Perhaps the church is in an urban setting in an aging building that has very little appeal to newcomers in the community. Perhaps the church has a poisonous faction of power-hungry leaders who make it their business to oppose any vision for a new direction the pastor may cast. Or perhaps the church is in a nice suburb but saddled with a large debt because of its beautiful new building. Or perhaps it’s dying because of a church split five years ago. The challenges facing scenarios like these seem insurmountable.
To make matters worse, all church revitalizations involve some level of internal division and opposition. Personal attacks, questioning of motives, factions and cliques, gossip and slander, anger and finger-pointing, and climactic church votes are almost always issues. There may even be lawsuits or prospective lawsuits (as was the case at FBC). Along with all of this is the fact that God doesn’t promise that any local church that has begun a slide toward extinction will at some point reverse course and begin to flourish again. Despite the best efforts of godly people, the end result may be the death of that church.
Even Bible Heroes Became Discouraged
One does not have to look long to find how prevalent spiritual depression is in the Bible. Job said he was in misery, bitter in soul, and longing for death (Job 3:20–21). Jonah yearned for death outside the walls of Nineveh, saying that it was better for him to die than to live (Jon. 4:3). Hannah was overwhelmed with sorrow concerning her continued barrenness and refused to eat (1 Sam. 1:7). King Hezekiah was deeply depressed because of his apparently terminal illness, feeling that God was hunting him down like a lion to break all his bones (Isa. 38:13). Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet, and his personal mourning and anguish reach a peak in Lamentations 3: “My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD.’ Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me” (vv. 17–20). Elijah, the day after his triumph over the prophets of Baal, ran for his life from Queen Jezebel and ended up greatly discouraged: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers” (1 Kings 19:4).
In the New Testament, John the Baptist, languishing in Herod’s prison for his own execution, sent messengers to Jesus to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3). Another? Someone other than the one he called “the Son of God” (John 1:34), about whom God had testified from heaven and on whom the Holy Spirit had descended in the form of a dove? This can be nothing other than discouragement. And at the end of his amazingly fruitful ministry of church planting and Scripture writing, the apostle Paul said, “All who are in Asia turned away from me” (2 Tim. 1:15).
Most stunning of all is an insight I have gleaned from Isaiah 49:4 about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That verse is in the middle of an amazing prophecy about the “Suffering Servant” who would come not only as the Savior of Israel, but also as the “light for the nations” who would bring God’s salvation to the ends of the earth (Isa. 49:6). Jesus said through Isaiah, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my right is with the LORD, and my recompense with my God” (Isa. 49:4). I have come to the conclusion that, in this passage, Jesus was speaking prophetically from the perspective of the cross, similar to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1). So in the dereliction and vast emptiness of the cross, it would have seemed at that moment that his whole life and ministry had been a failure. All of his disciples had deserted him and fled for their lives (Matt. 26:56). Peter had denied him three times. And at the foot of the cross, all that was left after his perfect life of ministry was his mother, a few female friends of the family, and John. “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” I claim this is only reflective of the apparent failure of Christ’s ministry. Apparent failure is not the final word—he immediately says “yet.” “Yet surely my right is with the LORD, and my recompense with my God” (Isa 49:4). In other words, “Father, into your hands I commit my ministry. Do something with this!” And the Father effectively answers, “Sit at my right hand until I make your name greater than the greatest men in history, and reward you with a multitude of worshipers from every nation on earth!” (see Heb. 1:13).
Every church revitalizer will come to a similar place in the work: “I have labored to no purpose. I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.” It is vital at that moment to entrust your life and ministry into the same hands that Jesus did—the omnipotent and loving hands of our heavenly Father.
Church history is full of accounts of mighty servants of God who struggled for a time in the “slough of despond.”1 Charles Spurgeon, the great nineteenth-century Baptist preacher, was among them. Despite leading thousands of people around the world to saving faith in Christ, he regularly battled depression. In his Lectures to My Students is a chapter titled “The Minister’s Fainting Fits,” which addresses this very issue. He writes, “Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.”2 Spurgeon included himself: “Knowing by most painful experience what deep depression of spirit means, being visited therewith at seasons by no means few and far between.”3
Church history contains many such stories:
All these heroes for Christ accomplished great things amid battles with depression. Satan was slinging all the flaming arrows he could at these choice servants of the Lord to keep them from damaging his dark kingdom any more than they already had.
Preach Yourself Out of Spiritual Depression
Perhaps the most important sermons you will ever hear are those you preach to yourself when your soul is sliding down the slope of depression. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote a classic book on this subject entitled Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure. The central text of the book is from Psalm 42:5, 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.” Just as the psalmist rebukes his own soul over the gloom that has cast it down, reasoning with himself that God is still worthy of praise, so Lloyd-Jones makes this observation:
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? . . . The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul, ‘Why art thou cast down?’ What business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself, ‘Hope thou in God’ instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then, you must go on to remind yourself of God, who God is, what God has done, and what God has pledged himself to do.11
My Lowest Point and How Psalm 37 Rescued Me
My journey toward church revitalization at FBC reached its lowest point just before a climactic church conference that would decide the doctrinal issue over which we had been fighting. The Sunday before that church conference was the hardest day of preaching in my almost seventeen years of ministry at FBC. The tension was so thick I could barely catch my breath or walk steadily to preach. The text was not a particularly difficult passage, but I was preaching to so many hate-filled faces that I found myself clutching the sides of the pulpit just to keep upright. After barely making it through that sermon, I went home to recuperate for the evening service. I lay down in a hammock out in the backyard and prayed . . . and cried.
As I lay there, I felt I was at the breaking point and could not take much more. A godly church member had recommended that morning that I read Psalm 37 for encouragement. That afternoon, I did. Line after line of this ancient psalm washed over my heart and eased my burdens. I felt as though God himself were speaking those words to me. The basic point of the psalm is stated right at the beginning: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness” (vv. 1–3). The clear message kept coming across in the Psalm: wicked people make plots and schemes against the righteous, but they will fail. In the end, the righteous will inherit the earth, and the wicked will be no more. So do not fret or be anxious, do not worry or be alarmed. Simply stand firm and watch the deliverance that God will bring about. God even comforted me about a potential lawsuit I had heard some of my opponents were planning: “The wicked watches for the righteous and seeks to put him to death. The LORD will not abandon him to his power or let him be condemned when he is brought to trial” (vv. 32–33).
Two verses especially resonated with me: “I have seen a wicked, ruthless man, spreading himself like a green laurel tree. But he passed away, and behold, he was no more; though I sought him, he could not be found” (vv. 35–36). This made such an impression on my heart that I rose out of my hammock, got a saw, and cut off a leafy green branch from a tree. As soon as the saw passed through that branch, the leaves were dead, though there was no appearance of the fact—they looked as leafy and healthy as they had a moment before. But soon the leaves would inevitably wither because they were cut off from the living source. I took that branch with me to work, and I still have it. The leaves are completely dead now, because I cut the branch nearly fifteen years ago. It represents the end of the era of unregenerate church members dominating the life of FBC.
That time of meditation and prayer completely changed my perspective in less than an hour. I knew immediately what would happen at that climactic Wednesday night church conference: the plots and schemes of the powerful men who opposed me would succeed in the short term, but the church would be healthy in the long term. In common language, we would lose the battle at the church conference but win the war for church revitalization. I went to work as usual on Monday morning, but the staff all saw a noticeable change in my demeanor. I was happy, confident, and excited about what was going to happen long term at FBC. Everyone around me relaxed as well—and waited to see what God would do. As I look back on all this, I now realize that my time of prayerful meditation on Psalm 37 was a pivotal moment in the entire church reform. If I had continued in my depression, and the vote had turned out as it did, I almost certainly would have resigned and taken another pastorate that was then being offered to me. I wonder if FBC would have been reformed at that point. God could have raised up someone else to lead, but the same battle still would have needed to be fought.
PRACTICAL ADVICE