Daily Devotional

February 22

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC Website

We are not ignorant of his devices (2 Corinthians 2:11)

In the last analysis ... [there is only one] cause of spiritual depression—it is the devil, the adversary of our souls. He can use our temperaments and our physical condition. He so deals with us that we allow our temperament to control and govern us, instead of keeping temperament where it should be kept.

There is no end to the ways in which the devil produces spiritual depression. We must always bear him in mind. The devil's one object is so to depress God's people that he can go to the man of the world and say, "There are God's people. Do you want to be like that?" Obviously the whole strategy of the adversary of our souls, and God's adversary, is to depress us and to make us look as this* man looked when he was passing through this period of unhappiness.

Indeed I can put it, finally, like this; the ultimate cause of all spiritual depression is unbelief.
For if it were not for unbelief, even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks. This is why this psalmist keeps on saying to himself: "Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him...." He reminds himself of God. Why? Because he was depressed and had forgotten God so that his faith and his belief in God and in God's power, and in his relationship to God, were not what they ought to be. We can indeed sum it up by saying that the final and ultimate cause is just sheer unbelief.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 19-20
*(The Psalmist, as recorded in Psalm 42.)

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”