Spiritual Atmosphere

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? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you?

It was on the strength of this passage, seen most recently at Amy’s blog, that I began reading Spiritual Depression by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It’s pretty good, but I haven’t found anything in it so far (I’m about a quarter of the way through) that surpasses these words.

I am not sure if “spiritual depression” is a label that applies to me. I experience joy in life. But I do seem to be burdened by a vague sense of inadequacy and unworthiness at least some of the time. I was noticing it especially last night when I went to bed. I felt I had failed, but as I looked back over the day, I couldn’t find a reason.

These are just habits of mind, floating in the atmosphere and occasionally gathering to drain away my energy and initiative — especially when, as I have this week in a small way, I step out of my comfort zone to do something in the hope that God will be honored.

I’m a high-functioning self-flagellator. Or so Rev. Lloyd-Jones would say; he believes that it’s self that whispers these self-defeating things to us. But I am willing to entertain the notion that it is not my self — which is hidden with Christ in God, which is a new creation, which is blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. I’m willing to entertain the notion that my self is only listening to the noise in the spiritual air of this fallen world — noise generated by a defeated enemy whose protestations as he falls are still audible to me, still “natural” feeling in the same way a person with an amputated limb still feels sensation from time to time in flesh that’s no longer there.

It’s not a matter of turning one half of my “self” to argue with the other. It’s a matter of rousing my whole self out of passivity and affirming the truth of who I am in Christ — redeemed and blessed and made able for the good work God has for me to do, not by natural abilities, but by the loving support of a God who needs only a willing heart to do his wonders.