The mercy God offers us in Christ is far greater than the mercy we need, and should dominate over our worries or griefs. Our imaginations will be constrained or distorted by worry and doubt, particularly in the midst of anxiety and depression, but will be enlarged by what God says about himself (Ephesians 3:20).

Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century English Puritan pastor and—for a time—lay physician, was well-acquainted with the trouble of his parishioners. His counsel to Christians suffering from anxiety and depression, acute or chronic, remains as relevant and useful today as when he penned his counsel nearly four hundred years ago.

Baxter knew that despair and anxiety may arise acutely due to circumstances, complications in important relationships, or other factors. These afflictions may also arise from physical conditions, which Baxter recognized to be bona fide medical disorders. He offers wide-ranging advice to depressed and anxious Christians, from mild cases to the most severe.

Baxter’s counsel focuses particularly on our thoughts about God, and how wrong thoughts about God can cause or deepen depression and anxiety. He also shows how correcting our thoughts and behaviors can help us to endure our trying conditions with more grace, and to find eventual relief from them. Consider just a few examples of Baxter’s specific advice to those in the midst of anxiety and depression.

1. Think much about mercy.

Think and speak as much about the mercy you have received as you do about the sin you have committed. Similarly, focus as much on the mercy offered as on the mercy you need. (Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life, 92)

“The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works,” says the psalmist (Psalm 145:13). Baxter argued that when we have an inverted appreciation of God’s gifts—forgetting his faithfulness and kindness—we see the amount of mercy we need as more significant than the amount of mercy God offers.

But the mercy God offers us in Christ is far greater than the mercy we need, and should dominate over our worries or griefs. Our imaginations will be constrained or distorted by worry and doubt, particularly in the midst of anxiety and depression, but will be enlarged by what God says about himself (Ephesians 3:20).

2. Dwell on God’s infinite friendliness.

When you pore over the contents of your heart to search whether or not the love of God is there, it would be wiser to think of the infinite friendliness of God. (90)

In Baxter’s day, an awareness of sin and its gravity was conspicuous among those who wished to live a Christian life. Genuine believers were often beset with grave doubts as to whether or not the promises of salvation extended to them personally, though they had much less difficulty in believing the tenets of the gospel generally.

Perhaps the most famous example of such doubt is expressed by Baxter’s contemporary John Bunyan in his autobiographical Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. On his path to eventual peace with God through Christ, Bunyan struggled intensely — not for merely hours, days, months, but for years — before he came to see that Christ’s work availed even for John Bunyan. It was an agonizing trial for him. But, at the risk of making too short a summary of Bunyan’s struggle, it might be said that he focused so much on his sin that he underrated the friendliness and generosity of God.

Twenty-first-century Christians seem to struggle less with a sense of sin’s gravity than Christians in Baxter’s day. As a culture, we seem prone to struggle more with our suffering than with our sinfulness. Adversity for Western Christianity does, nevertheless, call into question the same attributes of God with which Bunyan struggled. “If God is so good, why doesn’t he…?” Baxter’s advice remains as applicable to our Western distortions of God’s character as it was to Bunyan’s.

Therefore, as Baxter writes, “When you do think of holy things, let it be of the best things: of God and grace, Christ, heaven, or your brethren or the church” (89). Think much of the friendliness of God in the gospel of his Son.

3. Praise and give thanks more than you confess.

Commit yourself to daily spending as great a part of your prayers in confessing mercy received as in confessing sin committed, and in praising God as in lamenting your own miseries. (92)

Baxter reminded his depressed and anxious parishioners that our duty to give thanks and praise for forgiveness outweighs our duty to confess our sin, misery, and complaints. Without neglecting the latter, we can enlarge upon the former, as doing so will tend to ease our worry and lift our spirits. “If you cannot mention mercy as thankfully as you would like or mention God’s excellencies with the degree of devotion and praise as you would,” Baxter continued, “nevertheless do what you can and mention them as you are able” (92).

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