What do you do when the Word leaves you cold?

May 13, 2013  David Murray   1 comment

“What do you do when the preaching of the Word no longer impacts you as it once did?”

That’s the question I was asked by an earnest young man recently who appears to be sincerely seeking the Lord.

Many of us can identify with the question as we’ve been there ourselves. We remember the impact sermons made on us in the past – deep impressions, piercing convictions, powerful drawings – but now we feel like cold lifeless statues as we listen to the same preachers preaching similar sermons. What’s gone wrong? This will vary for different people, but let me suggest a few possibilities.

1. Tiredness
The main cause for unprofitable hearing of the Word is fatigue, even exhaustion. We work too long and too hard throughout the week. We sit down and sit still for the first time on Sunday morning, and surprise, surprise, our eyelids begin to feel like lead, and our bodies start sliding down the pew. An extra hour of sleep each night can revive our souls.

2. Distraction
Saturday afternoon and evening are a good time for tying up the loose ends of the week and preparing for Monday. If we don’t do it on Saturday, we’ll be doing it on Sunday in church.

3. Indiscipline
If we are not reading our Bible and praying in a regular disciplined way throughout the week, we can’t really expect to be spiritually tuned in and sensitive on Sunday.

4. Sin
As unrepented sin forms a barrier between us and God, we need to make sure that there’s nothing major in our life that is blocking God’s blessing.

5. The Preacher
it may be that the preacher is preaching a series of sermons on a book or subject that doesn’t fit your spiritual needs at the moment. Although this tests our patience, taking a more long-term view can mitigate our frustration. No, you don’t need these truths/this series so much right now, but you can store it up in your mind and heart for when you will need it in the future. Maybe we can also mortify our selfishness by praying, “Lord I’m not getting anything from these sermons, but I’m thankful others are and I pray for your blessing upon them.”

6. Sovereignty
God may be testing our faith by allowing us to experience a period of coldness under the Word. Will we walk by faith even when there are no feelings to help us along?  Will we listen, trust, and obey, even when we’re not being inspired and moved by the preaching?

7. Humbling
God can also use such periods to humble our hearts and show us how much hardness remains within us. “I’m listening to the most beautiful truths and it leaves me stone cold. The preacher is pouring his whole heart into this and I can’t even be sure I have a heart.” Such painful experiences reveal how much sanctifying work remains to be done in our hearts.

8. Encouragement
The fact that we are upset about our spiritual coldness is a reassuring sign. If we are unmoved about being unmoved, unconcerned about our lack of concern, that would indeed be worrying. However, the very fact that we feel this, and grieve over this, should encourage us that God has worked in out hearts. We can remember sitting under the Word without an ounce of spiritual life and it didn’t bother us in the least.  That it bothers us now, and makes us pray for a changed heart, reveals a heart that has been sovereignly changed.

What do you do when the Word leaves you cold?

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May 13, 2013  David Murray   0 comments

Healthy Rhythms
My friend, Kevin Galloway, is a church planting pastor in Michigan City and Portage, Indiana. He’s just started a new blog which I believe you’ll find worth subscribing to or bookmarking. In one of his first articles he addresses a question asked by pastors everywhere: “How do I establish a daily rhythm that will better my health and work performance, while giving more time for my family?”

Ordinary: Christian Living for the Rest of Us
A Challies special. He says what the rest of us are trying to think.

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8 Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes that provide significant positive changes for a person’s mental and physical health.

Husbands: A Warning against Bitterness
“Here’s the reality: Most men treat their wives’ harshly. If men did not struggle with harshness God would not waste his time commanding against it. Unless you have been sanctified beyond the norm you regularly sin against your wife by bitterness.”

Track Athletes Notice They Look Alike, Find Out They Are Sisters
A good news story for your Monday morning.

Support Crossway
A flood swept through Crossway’s headquarters on April 18. About two feet of water poured into 32 first-floor offices due causing extensive damage. Repairs will take 5-6 months and a large chunk of the costs will not be covered by insurance. You can support Crossway’s rebuilding efforts here.

I wish I’d died in your place

May 10, 2013  David Murray   8 comments

2 Samuel 18 is one of the most tragic chapters of the Bible as it graphically narrates the gruesome death of King David’s rebellious son, Absalom.

However, as with every Old Testament chapter, we must ask, “What does this reveal about God?” and even more specifically, “What does this reveal about the coming Savior?” These questions have additional focus in this case as the New Testament describes David as “the man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22). So what does David reveal about God’s own heart in this chapter?

1. Don’t let him die
Despite all the agonizing pain that Absalom had caused David, he begged his generals, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.” He did not want him to die or even to suffer rough treatment at the hands of his soldiers. Similar to the God he mirrored, David had no pleasure in the death of the wicked but rather wished that Absalom would turn from his ways and live (Ezek. 18:23).

2. He deserved to die
The previous chapters make clear that Absalom deserved to die for his wicked and ungrateful rebellion against David, despite all the “second chances” David gave him. Even the manner of his death, being hung by his haughty head and stabbed through his hard heart remind us that he merited the ultimate penalty of execution.

3. I wish he hadn’t died
David’s public grief upon hearing about Absalom’s death was so great that the army had to sneak quietly back into the city in shame rather than openly and in triumph.

“My son, my son, my son, my son, my son!” Yes, five times in one verse! This was not just understandable natural grief. This was spiritual grief as David wept over the lost spiritual condition in which Absalom entered eternity and went to the judgment. David opens a window into the heart of God who said: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11).

4. I wish I’d died in his place
But David goes even further: “If only I had died in your place! O Absalom my son, my son!” This remarkable substitutionary instinct, or desire, is also found in Moses (Ex. 32:32) and the Apostle Paul (Rom 9:3). However, no ordinary human being can fulfill or accomplish this desire.

But God can.

And God did.

He did not just wring his hands and say, “I wish I could die in your place,” He comes to sinners in the Gospel and says, “I did die in your place.”

Moses, David, and Paul pull back the curtain a little and let us catch a glimpse of the substitutionary instinct that is embedded in the heart of God. But Jesus rips the curtain from top to bottom and reveals the blazing love of the God who dies for His rebellious people; the just for the unjust, the holy for the unholy, the good for the evil, the sinless for the sinful.

There’s hope for Absaloms everywhere.

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May 10, 2013  David Murray   0 comments

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The danger of heart neglect
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Crazy Talk: How we characterize mental illness
Amy Simpson argues that the church should be leading the way in de-stigmatizing mental illness.

Should we interpret Bible verses literally or figuratively?
This is a helpful starting guide to five different kinds of biblical literature and the different approaches each requires.

What is typology?
Another helpful primer on interpreting the Bible.

The little things I’ll miss
Barry York reflects on what he’ll miss when he leaves his congregation to become professor of practical theology at theReformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh.

The Puritans on Medication for Mental Illness

May 9, 2013  David Murray   5 comments

The Puritans not only accepted the existence of medical causes for depression and other mental disorders, but they also proposed various medical remedies. Admittedly, some of their “treatments” were extremely primitive, but they clearly understood that there was some physical or medical elelement to some depressions.

After listing various spiritual and social remedies (we’ll consider some of these tomorrow), Richard Baxter says “If other means will not do, neglect not medicine.”  Just as in our own day, there was sometimes significant resistance to medication. Baxter’s solution? Force it down their throats!!

Though they will be averse to it, as believing that the disease is only in the mind, they must be persuaded or forced to it. I have known the lady deep in melancholy, who a long time would neither speak, nor take physic, nor endure her husband to go out of the room, and with the restraint and grief he died, and she was cured by physic put down her throat with a pipe by force.

While we would probably end up in prison if we tried such methods, Baxter’s basic insights on the role of medication and doctors are sound and have abiding value:

1. Choose a physician who is specially skilled in this disease, and has cured many others. He advises against consulting young men and busy men who don’t have time to sit down and carefully listen to the depressed person’s story. Interestingly, Baxter didn’t have any hang-ups about calling this a disease and grouping it with other physical illnesses: “The thinking faculty is diseased and become like an inflamed eye, or a foot that is sprained or out of joint, disabled for its proper work.”

2. Medicinal remedies and theological are not usually to be given together by the same hand. He does allow for exceptions to this, but as a general rule he says that if you have access to “an ancient, skillful, experienced, honest, careful, circumspect physician, neglect not to use him.”

3. The root of depression is in the blood and is often accompanied by other physical problems. Baxter believed that the blood carried the human spirit, and that if the blood was diseased, so was the human spirit, and other organs that the blood served. Although we might laugh at Baxter’s archaic understanding of the human body, his instincts were right, in seeing physical causes and consequences of this “mental” disease [and maybe he’s not so far off the truth after all: A blood test for mental illness]

4. Sometimes depression is caused by sudden shock. Baxter had seen otherwise sound-minds “suddenly cast into melancholy by a fright, or by the death of a friend, or by some great loss or cross, or some sad tidings, even in an hour.” Baxter said that this proved that the cause was not always found in the body, but his understanding of the mind/soul/body connections helped him to see that even the shocking impact of such news or events on the mind impacted the body too.

But the very act of the mind doth suddenly disorder the passions, and perturb the spirits; and the disturbed spirits, in time, vitiate the blood which containeth them; and the vitiated blood doth, in time, vitiate the viscera and parts which it passeth through; and so the disease beginning in the senses and soul, doth draw first the spirits, and then the humours [bodily fluids], and then the parts, into the fellowship, and soul and body are sick together.

5. The physician and pastor need great skill to know where the depression started. He must find out if it began “in the mind or in the body; and if in the body, whether in the blood, or in the viscera, for the cure must be fitted accordingly.”

6. Even if the depression have a psychological cause, medication can still have a role in curing it.

Though the disease begin in the mind and spirits, and the body be yet sound, yet physic [medication], even purging, often cureth it, though the patient say that drugs cannot cure souls, for the soul and body are wonderfully co-partners in their diseases and cure; and if we know not how it doth it, yet when experience telleth us that it doth it, we have reason to use such means.

7. Even if the depression was caused by demonic influence, medication may help to drive the devil out.

It is possible physic might cast him [the devil] out, for if you cure the melancholy, his bed is taken away, and the advantage gone by which he worketh. Cure the choler, and the choleric operations of the devil cease. It is by means and humours in us that he works.

Editorial N.B.
One modern editor of Baxter’s writing says of this section: “Of course Baxter was as unaware of modern biochemisty and physiology as he is of modern pharmacology. Nevertheless his insights are still valuable today…It may be appropriate to summarize this section of Baxter’s work as follows: those with depression of a spiritual nature, require spiritual counsel. Those whose depression is a result of somatic illness need medical care to correct that cause. People who suffer from endogenous depression may require both spiritual and medical treatment, depending on their case. Baxter’s advice about physicians is pertinent at this point.”

Other posts in this series:

7 Questions about suicide and Christians
Mental illness and suicide: the Church awakes
Pastoral thoughts on depression
The problem with “mental illness”
Double Dangers: Maximizing and Minimizing Mental Illness
A Medical Test for Mental Illness
The Puritans and Mental Illness