Spiritual Depression; Its Causes And Cure - Philippians 1:12-21 Series

The book of Philippians is a very emotionally transparent book. It's the most emotional book in the New Testament. That's because Paul is sharing his emotions with them, but he's also processing his emotions with them, and he's also encouraging them to process their emotions in a good way. So as we look into the book of Philippians, we're targeting specifically that aspect of it so that we can manage our emotions in our own lives.

I think if we were to take the book of Philippians or the whole writings of Paul, in fact the whole New Testament, and we were to try to understand emotions, there would be a map that goes like this with these three particular kind of emotions. One is anger. The second is sadness. And the third is anxiety.

If we were to see this on a map we see, as we talked last week in Philippians 1:7-11 about anger and love, the two are on a continuum. You can't have a lot of anger and a lot of love. It just doesn't work. That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 – Love is not easily angered. So if you're trying to work on your anger problem that you have in your life, then you want to increase your love, the practicing of love that you do, because it squeezes out the anger. It moves it away. If you've got a lot of anger in your life, you're not going to be able to love very well. So that whole continuum is an important one.

The next one is sadness and joy. We're going to look at that today a little bit more at verses 12-18. We're going to actually go up to verse 21. But this passage that talks about this idea of sadness and rejoicing, because joy and sadness are on two opposite sides of a continuum. And so we're going to be looking at that as well.

And then anxiety and peace. We'll come to that in chapter 4 and maybe see it a little bit before then as well.

The point is that there are a lot of emotional challenges that you and I face every day. In order to deal with those emotions, we need to have a plan. I would suggest we need a plan for anger, a plan for sadness, and a plan for anxiety that includes the Lord in our lives. We're going to see today what that looks like in this middle one that has to do with sadness.

So let's go there. I'm going to just talk about sadness for a moment so you understand what it is. This is a group of emotions that include discouragement, disappointment, despair, depression that all kind of make us feel sad. So there's this group of emotions that we group under sadness that we experience every day. I mean I think that we experience sadness regularly. Disappointment – you know you get out on the road, you see there's traffic, you go, “Oh I’m disappointed.” Or you get home from the store and you realize you've forgotten something you wanted to buy. So you're disappointed. I mean, those are small disappointments. The five-year-old who wants to ask Mom if he can have some more video time and Mom says no. That's disappointing for a five-year-old. Ten-year-old who wants to go to an event and Mom says no, we don't do those kinds of events. So he's disappointed. The 15-year-old, who expects to get a grade on his paper and that grade doesn't come through. He gets a worse grade than he thought. So he's disappointed with the grade. Those are small disappointments. They may not seem small to those people at the time. But on the bigger scale of things are small. Then there's those big things that that we experience. Like the loss of a loved one, or the loss of our health, or the loss of a job. Those are big losses.

Sadness is always a response to a loss. Keep that in mind, a loss of something we value. In fact, sadness can be used as a trigger to see what is important to us in the moment. There are some times when we have to understand, we have to process this sadness in a way that that is just godly indeed. Because I don't know. I mean I don't know if you could imagine what it feels like, but if I go back to some of my disappointments and I imagine them, my heart just pulls down. I just feel like it's hard to recover from the disappointment that we experience at times. It just draws the energy right out of you.

Because there are different kinds of losses that we experience, I don't think there's one just simple answer to that, like put on a happy face. Because some of the things are really valuable to us, and they should be, and we're grieving the loss of those things. In fact, let's look at sadness on a different continuum. Some of Paul's writings here that talk about moving sadness to joy. Because I'm going to talk about three different kinds of things that we do.