Spiritual depression is a part of the Christian life. Lloyd-Jones puts it this way: “You cannot isolate the spiritual from the physical for we are body, mind and spirit. The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.”

If you’ve been a Christian believer for any amount of time, you’re familiar with the feeling:

It’s like you’re . . . off. Foggy. You’re not connecting with God, even after you’ve asked Him to search your heart and reveal to you any unconfessed or secret sin. You are praying your guts out (or perhaps just exhausted from trying to). You read the Scriptures hoping to feel real again but can’t get past a verse or two. Your relationships are going well enough, but you feel distant and disconnected from everyone. There’s no reason to be in a desert, but here you find yourself. Wandering and wondering.

And you are not alone.

What you are experiencing is a reality of the Christian life. It is spiritual depression. And it affects us all at one point or another. Most likely at several points.

I experienced this particular feeling five years ago. I realized something in me was “off.” And there seemed to be no reason for feeling in a funk.

My first sign of hope came from my reading Scripture, specifically from the transcript of Christ’s temptation in Luke 4. I noticed Jesus was “led by the Spirit in the desert.” He didn’t do anything to get Himself there. The Holy Spirit led the Lord Himself into the desert for a specific purpose. This set me on a journey to find out more.

I soon learned that I was not alone in facing what is defined as spiritual depression: “The fact remains,” D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones begins in his book Spiritual Depression “that there are large numbers of Christian people who give the impression of being unhappy. They are cast down, their souls are ‘disquieted within them’, and it is because of that that I am calling attention to the subject.”

Spiritual depression is a part of the Christian life. Lloyd-Jones puts it this way:

You cannot isolate the spiritual from the physical for we are body, mind and spirit. The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.

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