I resisted reading Spiritual Depression for awhile because the title sounds, well, depressing.

But the book is anything but depressing. 

The book is actually a collection of sermons that Martyn Lloyd-Jones delivered on consecutive Sunday mornings at Westminster Chapel in response to the need for more joy among Christians. It was originally published in 1965 and has since become a classic among Christian literature.

Enjoy this short excerpt on the connection between joy and knowing God.

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Excerpt from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure

Man is meant to know God. So the question is: Do you know God?

I am not asking if you believe in God, or if you believe certain things about Him.

To be a Christian is to have eternal life, and as our Lord says in John 17.3: ‘This is life eternal to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.’

So the test we apply to ourselves is that. Not, `Have I done this or that?’

My test is a positive one: `Do I know God? Is Jesus Christ real to me?’

I am not asking whether you know things about Him but do you know God, are you enjoying God, is God the centre of your life, the soul of your being, the source of your greatest joy? He is meant to be.

He made man in such a way that that was to be the position, that man might dwell in communion with God and enjoy God and walk with God.

You and I are meant to be like that.
– Martyn Lloyd-Jones

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This excerpt originally appeared in the series, 31 Days of Books. Find more excerpts here.

I put this quote on a sticky note. I posted it on my bedroom mirror to remind me to keep first things first.

The primary thing God wants from us is not improved moral behavior (which will come), but to love God because he first loves us.
– James Bryan Smith

It’s important to keep things in proper order.

The first thing is to know that God loves us. Then our love for him will follow, as will our behavior. 

Enjoy this excerpt below from an excellent book by James Bryan Smith. 

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Excerpt from The Good and Beautiful God

Our thoughts about God will determine not only who we are but how we live. We can predict the “spiritual future” of a person just by knowing what they think about God.

What we think about God—what we think God is like—will determine the relationship we have with God.

If we think of God as harsh and demanding, we will probably cower in fear and keep our distance from God. If we think of God as a vague and impersonal force in the universe, we will probably have a vague and impersonal relationship with this god.

That’s why it’s crucial that we have the right thoughts about God. It will determine everything we do. If we have low or false views of God, we are actually committing a form of idolatry, worshiping a false god.

What I have discovered is this: when I came to know the God that Jesus revealed, I absolutely fell in love with God.

The more I grasp about the nature and work of the triune God, the more I am enthralled with the truth, goodness and beauty of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I want to turn your attention to the God Jesus reveals.

His God is good and beautiful, loving and trustworthy, self-sacrificial and forgiving, powerful and caring, and out for our good.

– James Bryan Smith

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updated from the archives

God doesn’t love you because you’re so wonderful (although I’m sure you are!). If you’re trying to earn and keep his love through your goodness, forget it.

A better way is to put on Christ, and let God love you as he loves Christ. That is a perfect love that will not and cannot ever fail.

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Excerpt from Trusting God

This infinite, measureless love of God is poured out upon us, not because of who we are or what we are, but because we are in Christ Jesus.

Note that in Romans 8:39, Paul says that “[nothing] will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The love of God flows to us entirely through, or in, Jesus Christ. The term in Christ is one Paul uses frequently to refer to our spiritually organic union with Jesus Christ.

Jesus speaks of this same union in His metaphor of the vine and its branches in John 15. Just as the branches are organically related to the vine in a life-giving union, so believers, in a spiritual sense, are organically united to Christ. Just as the parts of the body are organically related to its head, so we are spiritually related to Christ in this same way.

It is very important that we grasp this crucial concept that God’s love to us is in Christ. Just as God’s love to His Son cannot change, so His love to us cannot change because we are in union with the One He loves. God’s love to us can no more waver than His love to His Son can waver.

We are constantly tempted to look within ourselves to seek to find some reason why God should love us. Such searching is, of course, usually discouraging. We usually find within ourselves reasons why we think God should not love us.

Such searching is also unbiblical. The Bible is quite clear that God does not look within us for a reason to love us. He loves us because we are in Christ Jesus.

When He looks at us, He does not look at us as “stand alone” Christians, resplendent in our own good works, even good works as Christians. Rather, as He looks at us, He sees us united to His beloved Son, clothed in His righteousness. He loves us, not because we are lovely in ourselves, but because we are in Christ.

Here then is another weapon of truth that we should store up in our hearts to use against our doubts and the temptation to question God’s love for us. God’s love to us cannot fail any more than His love to Christ can fail.

– Jerry Bridges

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My book review of Trusting God

Thanks for all the comments you’ve made during this month of book quotes. I read and value each one! I also appreciate the book recommendations you left. More for my to-read list . . . .

Sarah Young’s daily devotional is written in first-person God voice. That’s probably the biggest problem people have with it. And I get that.

But if we can realize the author is just sharing what she hears Jesus whispering to her, we can all glean much by listening and discerning his voice ourselves through these writings and the scriptures she draws them from.

(As a side note, we’ve probably heard or read many, many more preachers or authors or ordinary folk speak for God with a lot less humility and a lot less scriptural truth than Sarah Young, yes?)

This is the reading for today.

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Excerpt from Jesus Calling

October 30

I AM WITH YOU. I am with you. I am with you.

Heaven’s bells continually peal with that promise of My Presence. Some people never hear those bells because their minds are earthbound and their hearts are closed to Me.

Others hear the bells only once or twice in their lifetimes, in rare moments of seeking Me above all else. My desire is that My “sheep” hear My voice continually, for I am the ever-present Shepherd.

Quietness is the classroom where you learn to hear My voice. Beginners need a quiet place in order to still their minds. As you advance in this discipline, you gradually learn to carry the stillness with you wherever you go. When you step back into the mainstream of life, strain to hear those glorious bells: I am with you. I am with you. I am with you.

Jeremiah 29:12-13; John 10:14, 27-28

– Sarah Young

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If I just had this. Or if I didn’t have that. Or if this person would only act right. Then I’d be content.

Or so we fool ourselves. This book by Stephen Altrogge helps us recalibrate our happiness meter. I reviewed it here two years ago after tornadoes ripped through nearby neighborhoods. That helped put things into perspective too!

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Excerpt from The Greener Grass Conspiracy

The truth is, biblical contentment can’t be learned unless something else is unlearned.

Contentment can’t be put on without first ripping something else out. The only way to grow in contentment is to undergo the process of identifying and destroying the idols in our lives. This always hurts, but the results are wonderful.

The world would have us believe that our discontentment is a circumstances problem.

Given the right set of circumstances, people could be happy everywhere and all the time. And these perennially happy people actually do exist. In beer commercials. Every such commercial seems to feature a group of twenty-somethings sitting around a campfire, tossing their heads back in unrestrained laughter, and knocking back a few cold ones. These folks obviously don’t have a care in the world, and if you drank lite beer on a regular basis you wouldn’t either. Or so the commercials would have us believe.

But the beer commercials are a pack of barley-smelling liars. Our problem isn’t a circumstances problem—it’s a worship problem.

You and I are all worshipers. Everyone is a worshiper. Worship is wired into our DNA. It’s what God created us to do.

In Isaiah 43:6-7 we read, “I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

God put you and me on Planet Earth so that we would worship him and give him glory. That is the fundamental reason that we exist. We exist to worship.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).

Worship isn’t limited to singing praise choruses on Sunday morning. Worship is loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength all the time.

– Stephen Altrogge

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Another great book on contentment is The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs. (I’m running out of days in October to tell you about all my favorite books.)

Pain is not the enemy, but the loyal scout announcing the enemy. . . . And yet only by learning to master pain can we keep it from mastering us.
– Dr. Paul Brand

While this book isn’t specifically about faith and spirituality, it is as much about it as any other.

Dr. Paul Brand writes this memoir about his experiences in helping others deal with pain and deal with painlessness (which often has more deadly consequences).

If you read his book through the lens of not only physical suffering but any type of suffering, much can be learned about how God can redeem our attitudes about pain.

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Excerpt from Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants

My professional life has revolved around the theme of pain, and by living in different cultures I have observed at close hand diverse attitudes toward it.

My life divides roughly into thirds—twenty-seven years in India, twenty-five years in England, and more than twenty-seven years in the United States—and from each society I have learned something new about pain.

I served my medical internship in London during the most harrowing days of the Blitz, when the Luftwaffe was pounding a proud city into rubble. Physical hardship was a constant companion, the focal point of nearly every conversation and front-page headline.

Yet I have never lived among people so buoyant; now I read that 60 percent of Londoners who lived through the Blitz remember it as the happiest period of their lives.

After the war I moved to India, just as Partition was tearing the nation apart. In that land of poverty and omnipresent suffering I learned that pain can be borne with dignity and calm acceptance.

It was there too that I began treating leprosy patients, social pariahs whose tragedy stems from the absence of physical pain.

Later in the United States, a nation whose war for independence was fought in part to guarantee a right to “the pursuit of happiness,” I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs. Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.

Pain relief in the United States is now a $63-billion-a-year industry [this book originally published in 1993], and television commercials proclaim better and faster pain remedies. One ad slogan bluntly puts it, “I haven’t got time for the pain.”

Each of these groups of people—Londoners who suffered gladly for a cause, Indians who expected suffering and learned not to fear it, and Americans who suffered less but feared it more—helped to form my outlook on this mysterious fact of human existence.

Most of us will one day face severe pain.

I am convinced that the attitude we cultivate in advance may well determine how suffering will affect us when it does strike.

– Dr. Paul Brand

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Read more here from Pain about Dr. Brand’s scare with leprosy

In this classic from C. S. Lewis, he says if we want to wake up to what God wants to do in us, we have to learn humility.

How? By trying to be good—and failing. And by realizing that every gift we give, first comes from God.

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Excerpt from Mere Christianity

You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud.

I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is that we fail.

. . . God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.

Then comes another discovery.

Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.

So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.”

Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is six-pence to the good on the transaction.

When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins.

The man is awake now.

– C. S. Lewis

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More thoughts from Mere Christianity

Every time I try to make me look good instead of God, I discount his grace. And according to John Piper, that is the opposite of faith.

Faith is the act of our soul that turns away from our own insufficiency to the free and all-sufficient resources of God. Faith focuses on the freedom of God to dispense grace to the unworthy. It banks on the bounty of God. – John Piper

Faith is when I look at myself and know, “Not enough.” I need God now and in my future, with the future being the very next second from now.

Future Grace is a life-changing book. I’ve invested much time soaking in it to better appreciate and receive God’s grace, all time well spent.

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Excerpt from Future Grace

When I lost my footing as little boy in the undertow at Daytona Beach, I felt as if I were going to be dragged to the middle of the ocean in an instant.

It was a terrifying thing. I tried to get my bearings and figure out which way was up. But I couldn’t get my feet on the ground and the current was too strong to swim. I wasn’t a good swimmer any way.

In my panic I thought of only one thing: Could someone help me?

But I couldn’t even call out from under the water. When I felt my father’s hand take hold of my upper arm like a mighty vice grip, it was the sweetest feeling in the world.

I yielded entirely to being overpowered by his strength. I reveled in being picked up at his will. I did not resist.

The thought did not enter my mind that I should try to show that things aren’t so bad; or that I should add my strength to Dad’s arm.

All I thought was, Yes! I need you! I thank you! I love your strength! I love your initiative! I love your grip! You are great!

In that spirit of yielded affection one cannot boast. I call that yielded affection “faith.”  And my father was the embodiment of the future grace that I craved under the water. This is the faith that magnifies grace.

As we ponder how to live the Christian life, the uppermost thought should be: How can I magnify rather than nullify the grace of God?

Paul answers this question in Galatians 2:20-21, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. I do not nullify the grace of God.”

Why does his life not nullify the grace of God? Because he lives by faith in the Son of God.

Faith calls attention to grace and magnifies it, rather than nullifying it.
– John Piper

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More short quotes from Future Grace:

• Sandwich meat or sizzling steak? Part 1
• Sandwich meat or sizzling steak? Part 2
• Raking or digging?
• For every grace denied…

Andrew Murray says if you’re not growing in virtue, it’s because you lack humility, the root of all other virtues. His book Humility was first published in 1895. It’s challenging but rich.

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Excerpt from Humility

The highest lesson a believer has to learn is humility.

Oh that every Christian who seek to advance in holiness may remember this well! There may be intense consecration, and fervent zeal and heavenly experience, and yet, if it is not prevented by very special dealings of the Lord, there may be an unconscious self-exaltation with it all.

Let us learn the lesson—the highest holiness is the deepest humility; and let us remember that comes not of itself, but only as it is made a matter of special dealing on the part of our faithful Lord and His faithful servant.

Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience, and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses.

Yes, let us ask whether we have learnt to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in.

It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us or done to us is lost and swallowed up, in the thought that Jesus is all.

. . . The highest glory of the creature is in being only a vessel, to receive and enjoy and show forth the glory of God. It can do this only as it is willing to be nothing in itself, that God may be all.

Water always fills first the lowest places.

The lower, the emptier a man lies before God, the speedier and the fuller will be the inflow of the divine glory.

The exaltation God promises is not, cannot be, any external thing apart from Himself: all that He has to give or can give is only more of Himself, Himself to take more complete possession.

. . . He that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Of the truth of these words Jesus Himself is the proof; of the certainty of their fulfillment to us He is the pledge. Let us take His yoke upon us and learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart.
– Andrew Murray

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You can download Humility as a free eBook at manybooks.net. (It’s very short!)

My book review of Humility is here.

If you’ve been saved by Jesus, you’ve been set apart for his use, making you sacred. There is no more secular. That’s truth.

This is one of my very favorite books on the sufficiency of Christ and the beauty of grace, for so many reasons. 52 perhaps?

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Excerpt from 52 Lies Heard in Church Every Sunday

Lie #21 – There are secular and sacred things in life

What comes to mind when you hear the word sacred?

Many people would immediately think of church buildings, Bibles, clergyman, and everything else that could be considered religious. For them, the word secular encompasses everything else in life, which would basically be 95 percent of how people spend their lives and energy.

This is how this mind-set operates: Church life is sacred, but work life is secular. Our prayer life is sacred, but our entertainment choices are secular. On and on the list could go. It’s an artificial distinction we make, but it’s not true. And neither is it healthy.

We don’t have two lives—a “spiritual” life here and a “regular” life there.

Our life in Christ is one unified lifestyle, and it is who we are wherever we are. It may surprise you to know that you don’t move in and out of secular and sacred arenas in your lifestyle. It’s all sacred.

. . . Remember, we are in Him, and that is always true. Jesus Christ continually engulfs your life just like the air that sustains you physically.

Where you are, He is. When you go to church, He’s in you. When you go to work, He’s in you. Even if you were to go to a place not compatible with the righteous nature you have in Him, He would still be in you.

. . . Because you’re in Christ, everything about your life is sacred. Our role as believers is to allow “Christ in us” to move into every sphere of our lives, bringing His influence to homes, families, businesses, governments—even churches.

You don’t live in a defensive mode. You have every reason to invade this world and know with confidence that the very gates of hell cannot prevail against the Christ who is in you.

– Steve McVey

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My book review of 52 Lies Heard in Church Every Sunday