TEXT: I Kings 19:1-18

SUBJECT: Spiritual Depression #6: Disappointment with Others

Today, with God’s blessing, we’ll move on with the study we began last month called Spiritual Depression. ‘Depression’, you know, is a sorrow that stays with you for weeks, months, or years. And ‘Spiritual’ depression is the kind that has no medical cause. If you’ve been down for a long time, and can’t imagine why, go to the doctor. He is God’s gift to you, and you mustn’t be ashamed of taking what the Lord has given you.

The depressions I have in mind, however, cannot be healed by doctors. They can treat them and cover them up, but they cannot get rid of them because spiritual sicknesses need spiritual cures. Which come to us, most of the time, through the reading and preaching of God’s Word.

Last week, we looked at unrealistic expectations as a prime cause of depression. As Americans, we think we have the right to be happy, and as Christians we think it is God who guarantees the right. When we’re not happy, it’s because someone has robbed us of our happiness, and this makes us mad, and when the anger cools down, it turns into depression.

Today’s topic is similar to this, but it’s sufficiently different to merit its own sermon. It is Disappointment in other people.

I needn’t spend much time describing this feeling, since we’ve all felt it, and some of us are feeling it right now. We expect people to be better than they are—more loving, more just, more loyal, and easier to get along with.

When they’re not the way we expect them to be, we become disappointed in them, and when they fail time and time again, we slide into bitterness, and, when that’s not repented of, we give up all hope and fall off into depression.

Other things may contribute to the depression, but the real cause of it is disappointment in other people.

Is disappointment in other people wrong? No it isn’t. Our Lord Himself felt this way more than once, and it cut him to the bone. Two scenes come to mind, one in Annas’s courtyard, the other a few minutes before in the Garden of Gethsemane.

On the night of His arrest, our Lord told the disciples they would panic and forsake Him. They all said they wouldn’t, but Peter, in particular, assured Him he would be loyal to the end. He wouldn’t be, the Lord warned him, but to no effect, for Peter remained as cocksure as ever.

A few hours later he did just what the Lord said he would do—

When the final oath was just out of his mouth, Luke says—

He doesn’t describe the look He gave him, because He doesn’t need to. It wasn’t a look of hate or scorn or pride, it was a look of deep and intense disappointment. No wonder the poor disciple went out and wept bitterly.

If the disappointment He felt in Peter hurt Him, our Lord was hurt, even worse by another friend who did Him wrong. When the other disciples went with the Lord to the Garden, the other man went elsewhere. Knowing what a good and generous man he was, the others thought he had gone to help the poor. But it wasn’t their pockets he was filling that night, but his own. Thirty pieces of silver were given to him to find and identify his Master. Which he did, in the most vulgar way—

That’s what he was doing. Although our Lord knew from the start what kind of man Judas was, and what he would do, He was the traitor’s friend, and looked at him with an excruciating disappointment.

It is not wrong to be disappointed in other people; the only one who never feels that way is the cynic, a person lacking the three things most needful: faith, hope, and charity.

If it is not wrong to be disappointed by the actions and attitudes of other people, what is wrong is to let the disappointment rob you of your joy and peace and obedience.

No chapter in the Bible features this kind of depression more clearly than the one we read a few minutes ago, I Kings 19. Elijah is the prophet of the Lord. A few hours before, he met the king of Israel and four hundred prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, with the whole nation in attendance.

He proposed a contest between the true God of Israel and the false. Baal’s men would build an altar and ask their god to send fire from heaven to burn it up. If he did, Baal is God.

If he didn’t though, Elijah would rebuild the altar of the Lord and ask Him to send fire. If He did, He is God.

The people thought this was a very good idea. The prophets of Baal went first, and cried out to their god all day long, but he did nothing for them because he himself is nothing. Baal flopped big time in public.

Late in the afternoon, Elijah built an altar to God, put a butchered animal on it, and drenched it with water, hundreds of gallons of water. He told the people to come near, for he had no trick up his sleeve. He prayed and the Lord answered with fire!

The people were awestruck at God’s power and grace, and they shouted with one voice—

If the Lord is God—Elijah said—take the prophets of Baal down to the river and kill them all. Which they did. At last, after years of halting between two opinions, the people had made up their minds and would return to the Lord with all their hearts.

But they didn’t, of course. And neither did the prophet have long to savor his victory. For Queen Jezebel swore an oath that by this time tomorrow, God’s prophet would be as dead as her prophets.

Elijah panicked, ran off into the wilderness, sat down under a tree and prayed—

How do we explain the man’s breakdown? If you read his whole life, you’ll see several things piled up on him to break his mind.

He was lonely. For three-and-a-half years, he had been hiding out in a foreign country and without any fellowship. He was hungry, having not eaten all day long—at least and maybe far longer. He was tired, drained from a long journey alone and on foot. He was away from home and without a home. He was scared of Jezebel and he thought the work he lived for had come to an end.

All these things contributed to his depression. But they didn’t cause it. What broke his heart was disappointment in the people he loved and lived for.

The contest on Mount Carmel wasn’t a sporting event! But that’s how the people treated it. They cheered the winners, they booed the losers, and then they went back to the same lives they and their fathers had lived for more than a hundred years!

In spite of their high sounding words, they were as halt between two opinions as they had ever been. Elijah was crushed by what his people had done to him and by what he thought was the futility of his life.

Even he, as heroic as he was, slumped into depression, and chose death over life.

Elijah wants to die, but God says, No! You’re not allowed to kill yourself or wish you were dead either!

The Lord spared Elijah’s life, but this is not all He did. He went on to restore his balance and make him as useful as ever, and happier than he’d ever been.

How did He pull the man out of his despair? In two ways:

Firstly, He gave him something to do, vv.15-16—

Nothing feeds depression like ‘doing nothing’ or—more to the point—‘doing nothing for God’. If you’re depressed on Sunday mornings get out of bed, go to church, and stay till the afternoon service is over. You fear the hours will wear you out; they won’t, they’ll refresh you. Psychologically, they do because they get your mind off yourself and your problems. But, chiefly, they lift you up because they put you in contact with God—

Depression has a way of turning us inward. But we will find no peace of joy until we obey our Lord who said—

Busy work is better than nothing. I know a young woman who began her climb out of depression by doing three things only: getting up at eight o’clock in the morning, making breakfast, and washing the breakfast dishes. The rest of the day she could sleep away if she wanted to, but she had to do the three things. They gave her a peg to stand on, and within a few months, she was back to normal.

If busy work is better than nothing, loving work is better than anything. Our Lord said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. This means giving makes you happier than getting. But this is just what a depressed person wants no part of—giving from the heart and without gloating or feeling sorry for himself or being thanked to the high heavens!

Don’t think you’ll get better curled up in a ball. God has given you things to do, present things to do, and not just with your body, but also with your heart. Do them and see if you’re not better.

Secondly, He gave him something to hope for, v.17—

Elijah would not be in the world forever, and when he left it, the saving work of God would continue. Part of that work was separating the wheat from the tares. Elijah had done some of that himself, and before long, Hazael, Jehn, and Elisha would carry on the work in their own ways. When they died, God would find others, then others, then others, until He sent Christ to complete it.

This means Elijah’s life had not been futile and the disappointment he felt so keenly would one day be replaced with joy.

We are not allowed to live in disappointment because the Lord is still at work in the world and in the hearts of the people who have let us down. We may not see His work—Elijah didn’t—but we must believe in it and also believe what He is now doing invisibly will one day be plain for all to see.

Live in hope. Don’t assume the people who have disappointed you cannot change. They cannot change themselves, but we’re not asking them to. We’re asking God to change them, and—

But what if He doesn’t? May we then live in disappointment? No, we may not. Changing people is God’s work and we leave it with Him, knowing He will do it wisely and well.

Our task is not to change others, but to love them, and to love them as they are. This won’t save us from all disappointments, but it will save us from living in disappointment and what goes with it, depression, bitterness, and despair.

Are you depressed because someone has let you down? If you are, welcome to the club, everyone has been let down, including Elijah, and the Lord Jesus Christ. The disappointment hurts us badly—it hurt them badly, and Christ worst of all.

But Elijah did not stay down forever. Because God roused him from his sorrows by giving him something to do and something to hope for.

He has given you the same two gifts. Your job is to love the ones who let you down, and this doesn’t mean tolerating them, it means loving them, and love—

Loving others increases the likelihood that we will be hurt again. But this is the risk we must take, for Christ took it, and we’re called to follow Him.

And to put our hope where He put His—in the power, wisdom, and mercy of God.