Spurgeon points to the sorrowing Savior to defend those of us who experience depression from people like Job’s friends, friends too hasty with their help. Is another’s sorrow and fear warranted and proportional to what he or she is experiencing? After all, to cry about crying things and to feel frightened by frightening things are not sins. We weep with those who weep.

Charles Spurgeon spoke of depression as the soul relentlessly bleeding out — like one who dies again and again, hour upon hour.

The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour. (Spurgeon’s Sorrows, 16)

According to Spurgeon, our depressions of various kinds make us like those who “traverse” the “howling desert.” We endure “winters.” We are “bruised as a cluster, trodden in the wine-press,” and we enter the “foggy day” amid storms, like those “caught in a hurricane.” “The waters roll continually wave upon wave” over top of us. We are like those “haunted with dread” in the “dark dungeon” or “sitting in a chimney-corner under an accumulation . . . of pains, and weaknesses, and sorrows.” We “sit in darkness, like one who is chilled and benumbed, and over whom death is slowly creeping.” We are as “panting warriors” and “poor fainting soldiers,” crying out for relief from this “long fight of affliction” (49).

His sermons use the metaphors that Scripture offers for the sorrowing, titles such as “the frail leaf” (Job 13:25), the “wounded spirit” (Proverbs 18:14 KJV), the “fainting soul” (Psalm 42:6), and “the bruised reed” (Isaiah 42:1–3).

Spurgeon described his personal experience with depression while standing before his congregation to preach. They’d been through thick and thin together for many years.

He who now feebly expounds these words knows within himself more than he would care or dare to tell of the abysses of inward anguish. . . . Terrors are turned upon me, they pursue my soul as the wind. (48)

I am quite out of order addressing you tonight. I feel extremely unwell, excessively heavy, and exceedingly depressed. (78)

We know Charles Spurgeon as the prince of preachers, but Spurgeon became a friend and pastor to the depressed, answering letters, visiting, and being visited.

Sympathetic Savior

The garden of Gethsemane, which Spurgeon called the “garden of sorrow,” becomes for us a consoling picture of the “mental depression” of Jesus. “Bodily pain should help us to understand the cross,” he says, but “mental depression should make us apt scholars at Gethsemane.” “The sympathy of Jesus is the next most precious thing to his sacrifice” (75).

So, when the book of Hebrews says that Jesus “in every respect has been tempted as we are,” and that “because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 4:15; 2:18), Spurgeon readily applied this sympathy of Jesus to include not only our physical weaknesses but also our “mental depression” (75).

The result? Sufferers of depression can find a place to rest within the storyline of Jesus. “How completely it takes the bitterness out of grief,” Spurgeon explains, “to know that it once was suffered by him” (62–63).

Sometimes in our depression, the cross, the empty tomb, and the future return of Jesus offer little or no felt comfort. In such moments, what our anxious, howling sorrows need is the man of Gethsemane.

With Us in the Garden

In Gethsemane, we realize that ours is no distant king, staying back in safety while sending his soldiers to fight and die or overcome on their own. In Gethsemane, we see our King go first. Here is no aloof monarch but one among us, leading from the front even when it comes to sorrows.

He hungers when his people do. He thirsts when they thirst. He puts aside the cup of water offered to him, passing it to a fellow soldier who looks more faint than himself.

Therefore, we who see him fight and suffer among us begin to believe that we too can endure.

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