"...that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations...You are witnesses of these things." Luke 24.47,48 ESV
In 2008 I fell into a black hole of depression. It was so bad that when I went to see my doctor at the time, within the first sixty seconds of my checkup he had written me a script for a powerful pharmaceutical that was supposed to cure me. After a couple nights of hideous nightmares, I felt I was better off without both the drug and that doctor. The depression remained, though. What I didn’t have in my hands was any way to be able to do anything about it.
That’s what I thought.
God has often called me down narrow lanes that have seemed impossible from my perspective. Even more challenging, as He called me through those difficult places, there was a simultaneous call to turn loose of things that seemed to offer aid and comfort but really were only making everything worse. God could see the illusion even if I was yet to be disillusioned. He knew that the best thing for me was to simply follow Him—and follow closely—if I was to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, which is a metaphor for this life.
The indwelling Spirit of God gave me some truths to speak over myself in those dark days from 2008 to 2012. Yeah, I was clinically depressed for about four years. I know what I’m talking about when I say that depression, when boiled down to its essence, is really just what happens when you awake to an awareness of the vast emptiness of your own self-obsession. I had come to the end of my own way and discovered how dead it really was. The way out of this place is both narrow and obvious, once you see it. I had to engage it again and again. I had to learn persistent repentance.
One thing I learned to do was to speak truths that made confessions I didn’t believe in, at least while under the cloud of depression.
One of these was, “God, you are God and I am not.” This phrase, spoken many thousands of times in situations that needed the light of truth, was a spark in the night. It guided me toward freedom. Even from myself.
Another was, “God, I worship you from this place.” I remember standing on a street corner in a late winter’s evening fog, wondering what I was supposed to do about a seven-figure failure in business and our house having gone into foreclosure, and the Holy Spirit caused this beautiful confession to rise within my soul. When we can offer up worship from the desperate and seemingly hopeless places of our lives, when we step over the line into total surrender, oh how God is moved!
Both of these confessions cut right to the heart of self-obsession and utterly dethrone it. Both are repentance; both are expressions of worship. This is the kind of stuff that heals broken hearts, that sets captives free, that releases from the prison of depression. I love that, in my own experience, God has made it abundantly clear that He alone is the source and the destination for these works. If it were any other way, I would still be bound.
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