Welcome to the Illuminate Church podcast.
We hope today's message is encouraging to you.
Good morning. It's always an honor to be able
to be asked to go and be before the Lord and hear what He has
for his people. And this message is no different
in that I believe the Lord has something He cares so much
about, and that is you. And He cares so much about your
wholeness and your health and your healing.
And so today I'm just going to get out of the way and let him
bring what He wants to bring. Will you pray with me?
Holy Spirit, we invite you to come and have your way in this
place. Shut out any voice that's trying
to speak. Counter the to the truth of your
word. Create any distractions or do
anything that would prevent your people from hearing the truth
that you have for them that you came to give them life to the
full. And so with this, I step out of
the way. It's your mouth, it's your body,
it's your mind, it's your heart. Do what you want to do.
And anyone who wants to receive the truth of the word would
wholeheartedly say Amen, Amen. We're in a series called Weeds
in My Garden. And the reason that we're doing
this lengthy, wonderful series is because you matter.
And because we want you to know and God wants you to know that
this is a place that you can freely and safely and please,
you should say I'm not OK when you're not OK.
And that you will know that in the safety of who God is and how
much He loves and cares for you, this is the best place inside
the church to say I'm not OK. Will someone help me take me to
Jesus so that I can be made whole and healed with somebody?
Say Amen. We are not trying to replace the
medical community or suggest that people may not ever need
medical intervention or clinical treatment to support your
healing journey. But what we are saying is that
no journey to mental health, wholeness and healing can be
separate from your spiritual journey because you are a
spiritual being inside of a physical body.
And your spiritual being and your physical body are so
intimately intertwined, they cannot be separated and hope to
have healing without the complement of what they mean to
each other. And so this morning I want to be
honest and say on the topic of depression, I do not want to
minimize your pain. In no way do I believe the Lord
wants to minimize your pain and say that if you just prayed
harder and you believed a little more, you'd be fine.
It's not what we're saying. But you know what else I don't
want to minimize the goodness of God and the hope and the healing
that exists and understanding how He made you was to be
victorious in your physical, mental and emotional health.
And if you are ready to receive that, would you open your hands
and say, Lord, I want it all. So I'm asking you to hold this
tension that as I begin to speak about the spiritual and the
physical components of mental health, specifically depression,
that you will resist the need to counterbalance what is being
taught by your reality. What I mean by that is if it
starts to approach something where you're saying like I don't
think you have any idea what I really feel.
I don't think you really have any idea what I'm going through,
and you start to push back or lean away from the truth.
I ask that you would lean in and let the Holy Spirit, by the
truth of the Word and the text for this morning, minister to
you. Would you hold out hope that
wherever you are today is not the end, that there's more that
he has for you? Because today we are discussing
depression and depression is recognized as the most common
mental health illness globally. 246,000,000 people are
recognized globally to be affected by depression.
And those are just the ones talking about it, right?
So let's get really specific about what depression means.
Depression is like sitting under a giant, heavy weighted blanket,
pressing down on and around you, pushing down upon every part of
you. But it's not comforting.
This is not a comforting blanket.
It's a suffocating, crushing, pressing down sadness, Feeling
gloomy and low in your spirit, feeling weak or dull,
discouraged. Maybe Things that used to
interest you are just like, yeah, I don't care about that
anymore. Things that used to bring you
joy or pleasure. No matter how hard you try, it's
just not there. Basic functions, getting up and
going to work or taking care of yourself or your family, They
feel impossible. This is depression, but I don't
want you just to take my word for it.
I want you to listen to some of the 100 people who were willing
to speak and say what it felt like to them to be depressed.
They gave this information to a website called My well-being.
Will you listen to their voices? Depression feels like everything
I know is gone and I'll never be able to get myself back.
Like you can't breathe deep enough to expand into
significance. Complete blankness, losing sight
of the answer to why anyone really does anything that
doesn't have great purpose like small talk, going out, getting
dressed, or wearing makeup. Like happy memories from my life
before my depression hit aren't real, and that depression is the
actual reality. Suffocating.
Depression feels like I'm living on another planet where I don't
belong. At first glance, no one would
think anything of my being there.
I look just like everyone else, I act like everyone else.
I seem to function just like everyone else on this planet.
But the air and the gravity are different, and my body hasn't
acclimated to this new environment.
I can still function on this planet, yes, but it's a little
bit harder to breathe, a little bit harder to run or jump, and I
get tired out a little bit faster.
And I'm trying to hide all this from the planet's residence
because if they find out I don't belong here, I'm not sure how
they will respond. Like every negative thought I
have of myself becomes my true experience.
Not finding joy in anything. It physically hurts.
I feel confused and betrayed by my joints, back, knees and
brain. It feels like there isn't time
to be an adult and to rest. So I rest and rest and life
piles up. It physically hurts.
It's like life piling up and there's nowhere, no place to
find joy. This is depression, but it's in
stark contrast to what Jesus said he came to give us in John
10/10. He said he came to give us life
and to give it to the full or to give it to us abundantly.
That's the framework of why we exist as a church, to help
people find abundant life in Jesus.
And so the message that God has for us today is that he loves
you so much. He's so full of compassion that
he does not want any of his children to live with chronic
depression. So there must be another way.
Today we're going to explore what is going on in our physical
bodies, our emotions, and our spirits and learn how to win the
war over depression. If you could use a little of
this for you or someone else, would you raise your hand?
Yes, to do this, we've got to tackle a giant lie that is
living very rent free in the church.
And I don't mean just this church, I mean in the capital C
church. That lie is this.
God's people don't battle depression, not the ones that
really love him, right? This is a lie straight from the
pit of how all you have to do is look into the Bible and see a
victorious king named David who battled depression and very
difficult circumstances. You need only look at Elijah.
Elijah who had one of the greatest victories recorded in
all of scripture. History 850 Anti God spirits
Spirits of Baal were annihilated in a victorious way and the
moment that was over Elijah went out into the wilderness crushed
of spirit and said, God, I'm the only one.
I'm doing this all by myself and I think I'd rather die.
That's just in the Old Testament.
What about Jesus when he went into the garden facing the agony
of the cross, and he was so much in despair that his body sweat
blood through his pores? And what about Paul when he said
in Second Corinthians 18, we think you ought to know, dear
brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the
province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed
beyond our ability to endure and we thought we would never live
through it. Paul the victorious drastically
changed, full of the Spirit, apostle to most of the New
Testament churches struggled and faced with difficulties that
cause depression. This is a lie and we cannot
believe it or tolerate it anymore.
So let's revisit it one more time.
This is the lie. If you are under a sustained
blanket of heaviness, you aren't a good Christian.
That's again, it's a lie from the pit of hell.
And so we are going to shatter that today and learn what God
wants us to understand regarding depression.
And here's our first truth. We will all face experiences
with the potential to evoke periods of depression.
It's called life on planet earth.
You were made for heaven. We're passing through this life
and in this life where sin has rule and death has reigned apart
from what Jesus has done for us, right?
We are going to experience things that are going to cause
difficulties, cause crushing, cause pressing that could evoke
periods of depression. In Proverbs 1814, we read the
human spirit can endure a sick body, but who can bear a crushed
spirit? And that word for crushed there
includes depression. So what is the Scripture saying?
Like our bodies can get sick and we can recover, It'll be all
right. But a crushed spirit, I'm not
sure we can get over that. Who can bear a crushed spirit
that leads us to this next truth?
Isolated periods of depression can become chronic depression.
But here is what God is telling us.
We were not meant to bear the crushing things on our own.
The Lord is trying to lead us to a new way of handling the
pressing, the heavy, the potentially crushing.
And it comes from Psalm 34, verse 18.
The Lord is close to the broken hearted and He rescues those
whose spirits are crushed. Something about our proximity to
God when we deal with the crushing things is the key to
our understanding how to win the war over depression by Jesus
sacrifice through the power of the Holy Spirit.
God wants to show us something new today, how to face the
pressing, how to face the crushing.
What He wants to do is set our baselines and He wants to build
our resilience. What do I mean by that?
Your baseline. My baseline is like the way I
face my everyday circumstances. It's the perspective I have when
I face my life, the day in and day out, things that happen.
It's my standard mood, the way that I perceive what's going on
around me. And resilience is the ability to
bounce back from difficult things.
So God wants to set our baseline and he wants to help us with our
resilience. So if you think right now, today
I want to show you a graphic and explain just a little bit on the
vertical axis, you see the words Lovejoy and peace.
This, the higher you go up, the higher and more abundant the
Lovejoy and peace is what Jesus came to give a full and abundant
life. And then on the horizontal axis,
you'll see your lifetime. It's just you and time going by,
right? So what I want to ask you today
is if you were being honest, where is your current baseline?
If your current baseline is really low, like on this
graphic, then the pressing and the depression and the pushing
is going to push that line even farther down right.
And the lows are going to be low.
And even the highs of life, the things we should be enjoying,
aren't going to feel like highs because they're not because our
baseline is living in the basement.
But what God wants to do is this next graphic, and I would say
even higher. He wants to set your baseline
with a fullness of abundance, love, peace, and joy such that
the highs are all out of this world high and the lows are not
that low. And your resilience and your
ability to come back to that baseline is strong.
And what I'm not talking about is plastering a Jesus smile on
your face. I'm not talking about pretending
you're so happy and full of joy that if you were any better,
you'd be two people, right? That's not what I'm talking
about. I'm talking about the real,
lasting, sustaining, abiding fullness of Lovejoy and peace
that Jesus came to give us. God wants to set that baseline
in your life really high, and He wants to make you resilient and
strong so it's easy for you to come back to that high when you
face difficult circumstances. This is what we're going to be
talking about today. What if it is possible to build
habits and rhythms that fortify you against the pressing and the
crushing? This is what Jesus was talking
about in Matthew 7, verses 24 through 27.
He said anyone. Does that leave anybody out?
Does it leave anybody out? Anyone who listens to my
teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house
on a solid rock. Though the rain comes in
torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against
that house, it won't collapse. Why?
Because it's built on the bedrock.
That bedrock that Jesus is talking about is, if you want to
learn my ways, your baseline, your bedrock can be really high
on abundant love, peace and joy. But what happens if we don't?
Anyone who hears my teaching and doesn't obey it is foolish.
Like a person who builds a house on sand, when the rains and the
floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will
collapse with a mighty crash. You notice Jesus, Jesus doesn't
say if the winds and the rains come.
What does he say when when the winds and the rains come?
Jesus is giving us the key to win the war against heaviness
and depression. And here it is.
Build your house, build your life on the solid rock.
This will be your baseline of abundant Lovejoy and peace.
And today the Lord has for us treasures from the Word and from
science to help reveal what the Spirit is teaching us.
He wants to raise your baseline abundant living and increase
your resilience to do that. We're going to start by talking
about your amazing body. Everyone say I've got an amazing
body. God put inside your body
something called neurotransmitters and the
neurotransmitters are the communicators.
They're the they're the messengers that help all the
things our body needs to do get translated information wise from
cell to cell. So there's a cell here, a giant
gap and another cell. It's not really giant, but you
get what I'm saying. So across that gap, the chemical
messenger goes and says, hey, we just enjoyed that, you should
feel great. And then it keeps going and your
mind says that felt great. Somebody tell me, have you ever
heard of adrenaline? You've ever heard of that?
That's a neurotransmitter. It's a chemical messenger that
says we've got to do something, get all your energy up.
What about endorphins? Anybody believe the lie that you
can run long enough that you'll get an endorphin high?
I said that in first service there were 4 runners.
Like in the 4th row. They're like, yeah, I was like,
not you, No, OK, but those are chemical messengers.
Those are ones we're kind of familiar with.
But pleasure, memory, muscle action, and regulation of mood
are all controlled by neurotransmitters.
So the important neurotransmitters when it comes
to mood are serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.
I'm telling you those now because you're going to hear in
just a moment how God made your incredible body to have a high
baseline and strong resilience. Are you ready?
I'm going to tell you three things pretty quickly.
Number one, everybody say tears. Your tears are amazing.
And if you've ever had a good cry, you notice you feel better.
Yeah. When you think about
antidepressants, the medicines that are used, and sometimes
they are necessary. I'm not saying they're not.
But what they do is they attempt to increase serotonin and
norepinephrine. They do it a couple ways.
They can increase the bucket, add stuff to it.
They can prevent it from breaking down so you can use it
better. Or they can help the neurons
talk to each other better, right?
That's what the medicine seeks to do.
But listen to what God put inside of your amazing body.
You have three kinds of tears. Two of them are the regular
everyday keeping you healthy and alive.
Basal tears keep your eyes wet, Just the normal wedding.
And then you have reflexive tears.
If I was standing next to you, Daniel, and I cut an onion, your
eyes would make some reflexive tears to get rid of that toxin,
right? But did you know you have
emotional tears? Scientists studied the chemical
composition and looked at it under a microscope.
The substances in your emotional tears are completely different
than your basal and your reflexive tears.
Why? Because God gave you an outlet
and a way for your body to come out of fight or flight or to
come out of a lot of pain and to emit neurotransmitters and
regulate your mood through your body.
Here's the problem, especially if you're a gentleman in the
room. Anyone ever told you you
shouldn't cry? Yes.
Then we're denying ourselves the very tool that God has given
you. If you're a gentleman in this
room. I would say this to the ladies
too. Don't deny the very outlet that
God has given you for your healing, for your baseline to be
high and your resilience to be strong.
We've got to allow the emotional tears to do their work.
And that's just one example of your amazing body.
A second example has to do with sunlight and sleep.
Everyone say sunlight and say sleep.
When you are exposed to sunlight, especially in the
morning, you know what your eye does?
Your retina takes in that light and it tells your brain to make
serotonin. God made your body to respond to
light so that our bodies will help keep our resilience and our
baseline high. Ecclesiastes 11/7 says the light
is pleasant and it's good for the eyes to see the sun.
Now the author probably meant like if you see the sun
tomorrow, you're living right? So that's a good thing.
But could he also have meant God made you so that you interact
with the sunlight and your body has greater health both
physically and mentally? Isn't God amazing?
The third way that God is making your body a partner with your
mental health is your gut. Everyone say gut.
A healthy gut creates those neurotransmitters.
There was a study done at UCLA in 2024 and they looked at two
groups of people. They looked at groups who were
very resilient, didn't have a hard time bouncing back, right?
And then they compared them to a group that was very not
resilient. The things that knocked you
down, knocked you down for a long time.
What they found was fascinating. And this is the way one of the
physicians said it. He said resilience truly is a
whole body phenomenon. Wow, big surprise.
We have this whole community of microbes in our gut, and you
know what they do? They exude therapeutic
properties and biochemicals that help mood lift and resilience
strengthen. Isn't God amazing?
But do you know how your gut gets healthy?
By consuming the things that God made as close as you can to the
way that He made them. So could it be that we're
potentially getting off because we have more processed food at
our fingertips than ever before? So if we will nourish ourselves
with fiber, real food, plants, animals, whole grains, as close
to the source as God made them as possible, we will have
another boost in our baseline and our resiliency.
I'll say it again, God is amazing and as we move from the
physical to the spiritual, don't lose your wonder and your awe
because the physical is concrete and we can hold it right.
We get that we're going to move into the spiritual things that
God did, but hold that same confidence as I share these with
you, OK? In the same way that God
designed your physical body to support a baseline of excellent
mental health and resilience to stay there, He also designed
your spiritual body with very specific needs.
And the number one need that your spirit needs is to connect
with God. The overarching need to be
consistently connected to God is our #1 driver for our mental
health when we are disconnected from God or we keep part of our
life. You can have this part God.
You can have Sunday morning and maybe Monday night, but you
can't have my broken heart. You can have this part of me,
God, but you can't have my business.
You can have my personal finances, but you can't come
over here and business or you can't have access to this wound
because I don't know if I can trust you with it.
We're withholding the part that God wants to pour life, abundant
life into. And so today I'm going to give
you an assignment for this week. I want you to write down however
you choose to do it. Write down John 15.
John is one of the gospels. It records the teaching and the
life of Jesus and his disciples. And in John 15, if you will
study it, you will see the example or the image that you
are a branch and God is the vine and how intimate and how
dependent is a branch on a vine. Think about the life flow, the
nourishment when God was saying through Jesus you are a branch
and you have an amazing vine and you have an incredible gardener
that wants to tend to you. He is saying you've got to stay
close, connected, dependent, interrelated, communicating with
God. And so the number one spiritual
tool for raising your baseline and improving your resilience is
giving God access to all of you all the time, communication,
abiding and presence. I put it this way, we are going
to be real with God and we're going to let God be real with
you. You're going to be real with God
and let God be real with you. In this pace of life, we are
moving faster than ever. You know, you can travel all
over the world and back in a very short time.
You can consume all kinds of information that's at your
fingertips all the time, but the pace that you were designed to
run it in your spirit is slow. The slow, reflective interior
examination of your life is critical in your communion with
God. It's critical to your mental
health because God designed you this way.
Proverbs 2027 says this. The spirit of man is the lamp of
the Lord. Now you notice in that
scripture, it's a lowercase S, the spirit of man.
This is your spirit. You're a body and a spirit.
Your spirit lowercase S is a lamp to your body.
What does that mean? Your spirit connects with the
Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit searches the innermost parts of
your being. God knows what is going on
inside of you. And if we will make a practice
to sit with them and say, would you check me out by your word,
Holy Spirit, what's going on in me?
Would you show me what's in me? Because your Spirit connects
with the Holy Spirit, examines what's going on inside and
brings forth the information. So when we start to notice our
baseline is dropping, the very first moment we notice our
resilience is not bouncing back. We need to start asking this
powerful question. Holy Spirit, what is going on
inside of me? The psalmist in Psalm 42 says it
this way so powerfully, and you could write this question down.
It says, why so downcast? Oh my soul.
But that's not a question you can ask on the go.
That's not a question. I mean, you can, and I'm not
saying you shouldn't, but this is a practice of stillness, of
nearness, of set time with the Lord and your weekly, daily
rhythms to ask Him Lord, what's going on inside of me.
And when we do that, the Holy Spirit will do amazing things.
Sometimes the Holy Spirit corrects us because we need it.
You're off. That's why you need to sleep,
eat, get out in the sun. You need to move your body.
You need to get off your phone. You need to stop listening to,
reading or watching, whatever. It might be, right?
It might be correction, It might also be wisdom, it might be
healing, but it might be perspective on what God is up to
in your life that you cannot currently see.
That's what happened in Second Kings chapter 6, verse 15
through 17. What you need to know just a
little bit of context in this passage is that Elisha is a
prophet of God. He's full of the spirit.
He's doing what God has called him to do, to speak to the
nation of Israel and to say when they're off, right?
Or to speak to other kings and say of other nations.
This is what God is going to do if you don't listen.
So he had a few enemies. Can you imagine?
So in this context, He had no one warring on his side.
He was with his servant here. And in this conversation, we're
going to hear what they're thinking about what's going on.
In verse 15, it says when the servant of the man of God got up
and went out early the next morning, he saw an army with
horses and Chariots had surrounded the city.
Is this depressing? Yes.
Oh no, my Lord, what shall we do?
The servant asked. Don't be afraid, the prophet
answered, Those who are with us are more than those who are with
them. And the servant was like, I
don't see anybody. I don't know what you're talking
about. And then Elisha praised the
prayer that we must pray. Open his eyes, Lord, so that he
may see. And then the Lord opened the
servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses
and Chariots of fire all around Elisha.
Are these things in the natural? No, in the natural, they're
alone, they're surrounded, they're doomed.
But in the supernatural, God, what are you up to?
Open my eyes so that I can see. Why did I lose this job?
What's happening, what's going on in this relationship, what's
going on in me? If we will cultivate A nearness
with God and being real and letting Him be real with us, we
can then say, open my eyes and let me see, and God will do it.
But we must slow down. We must notice when our baseline
or our resilience is dropping. And we must ask, why so
downcast? Oh, my soul.
And with this practice, there's one more thing that our spirit
needs. Our spirit needs to cultivate
gratitude. Now, you notice that I did not
say do gratitude. You notice that it does not say
be grateful. It doesn't say be happy.
What's the word that came first? Cultivate.
I've got a cultivator here in the front couple rows.
How do you cultivate? You dig, you prepare the soil,
you plant the right seeds, you water it with the right things
and it grows right. This is the way gratitude works.
But something amazing about your amazing spirit and body is that
God designed you those neurons that when you practice
something, the more you practice it, the easier it is for your
brain to do it. Science calls it hebbs law.
Everyone say Hebbs, Hebb's law says remember those neurons and
the gap, The more you use this neurotransmitter, the easier it
is for them to find each other. And when you truly practice
gratitude. And what I mean by that is
saying in the last 24 hours, where did I experience joy?
Not like this. Not like, oh wow, I'm so
grateful that I have 14 piles of laundry because it means I have
people in my house that I love. That's not what I mean.
Unless laundry brings you joy, and if so, you're a sick
individual. No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding. What I mean is the practice of
slowing down and saying, where in the last 24 hours did I
experience joy? Let's see, for me, I got to sit
at my son's baseball game and watch him play a sport that he
loves with my older son there cheering him on.
I got to watch our oldest and our youngest interact in a way
that's so special and unique and that brought me joy in the last
24 hours. And this is the way you
cultivate micro little gratitudes and big gratitude.
You can go on to the big things. If nothing else, we can always
declare, Jesus, you bring me joy because you bring me life
eternal. When I know you as Savior, you
stood in my place, You took what I deserved and you resurrected
to do to new life, defeating sin and death.
I am grateful for that. And when we build daily, weekly,
yearly rhythms of looking for the joy within our day-to-day
lives, I mean actually writing them down.
Do you know what happens in your amazing body?
Your amazing brain hardwires these positive pathways, making
it easier for your brain to find positives over time.
We started a gratitude practice and I found myself in Marshalls
the other day. If you've ever been to
Marshalls, you know the torture I'm about to describe.
They have a corral like Disney. They expect it to be an hour
long wait and they have all kinds of distracting things in
line. You know what I'm talking about.
And I was standing there thinking I'll just pull out my
phone and just scroll, right? Like who's what's happening on
phase one? But I decided instead to keep my
phone away. And I just stood there and said,
let's see what happens. And joy thought joy things.
Gratitude came to my mind. Gratitude came to my heart.
Why? Because there's been an
intentional practice of cultivating gratitude.
And when I gave it room, I had joy in line at Marshall's.
I'm telling, hey, you can clap for that.
Yes. But what you should really clap
for is this. There is a chemical benefit to
cultivating gratitude in your body.
It triggers the release of, guess what, dopamine and
serotonin, enhancing your mood and your willpower, which I
would call your baseline and your resilience.
Did God know what he was doing? Yes.
In Philippians 44, the apostle Paul gives us this challenge.
Rejoice in the Lord always. And again I say rejoice.
Why? Because it's good for us and
because God is real and He's active and He's at work
everywhere. And if we will choose to see and
say open my eyes, there is no circumstance that we will be in
where we cannot see and feel and know His presence.
Where we cannot ask Him to show us what He's up to and join Him
where He's working. So if we practice habits, build
our lives in such a way that we nourish both our physical bodies
and our spirits, our baselines will rise and our resilience
will strengthen. But what happens if we face a
circumstance that plunges us into despair?
What happens if you lose a spouse or your child gets sick
or you literally run out of every dollar that you have?
When you're facing destitution, When your body starts breaking
down? What about these places, Pastor
Christine? Will our baseline and our
resilience be enough at that point?
Is it possible to navigate these seasons of life with abundant
Lovejoy and peace? I would say yes.
Now, I don't mean you're going to enjoy them, and I don't mean
that it means happiness. What I mean is that there is a
deep, indwelling presence of God that can satisfy our every need
regardless of what we're going through.
But we've got to do some specific things.
We have to commit to not evading or pretending that it's not
happening, and we also have to stop setting up camp there.
Those are not the only two options.
It's not just avoid it or say, I guess I'll die here.
Jesus is showing us another way. We go through it with God and
with good community. Saint John of the Cross talks
about these seasons as a dark night of the soul.
Aren't those powerful words? Mark Buchanan calls them winter.
And winter is not something that we often drip into, right?
We're often plunged. We don't expect it.
We didn't ask for it. It's a wintery plunge.
Now, I'm about to tell you right now, I'm a native Floridian and
I openly confess I have never experienced winter, not in the
natural. And So what I'm about to tell
you, you've just got to trust me that I have read about it.
And I do know some people that have told me some things.
But when you face a spiritual winter, I would confess to you
that as a leader in the church, I believe we have not done a
good job of teaching believers how to winter because we pretend
like we shouldn't get there. We should live an eternal
summer. Right?
When I faced the wintriest winter of my life, I was ill
equipped and ill prepared for that season.
I didn't know it. I'd been in church 30 years and
no one had ever taught me, and I own that.
So if you're here today and you're like, are you telling me
that if I'm under heaviness it's my fault?
No, I'm telling you it's probably our fault for not
teaching you how to winter with Jesus.
Because we can be present with Jesus in every season of our
soul. And when we winter with Jesus,
it changes things. In fact, it's the only way it
changes things. We must learn how to winter and
that is what I'm going to close with today.
I want to share with you about my winter and I want to tell
you, I want to tell you that I wish I had known what I know
today before I faced it. Because in winter, what we've
got to do, it's going to sound familiar.
It's the same things that establish your baseline and
build your resilience. But what's different in this
season is that like in physical winter, you might need to stop
almost everything else and focus on the most vital need at hand.
What do I mean? You might need to be ruthless
about any inputs or outputs that are not making you whole and
getting you closer to being near Jesus in your winter.
If you came to Illuminate Church in 2016, you would not have
known likely who I was. That might sound strange to you
because Tim was the lead pastor, but in 2016, a wise counselor
said to me as I was leading our daughter, we were leading our
daughter through a health crisis.
Physically. They said you've got to pull
back from anything that's not necessary.
Isn't that what you do in winter?
Animals hibernate, right? They go and they hide and they
sleep because their body's got to do what it's got to do to
stay alive. Now, I'm not telling you to
isolate from people of God. I'm not telling you to isolate
from God. I'm telling you run to God with
people of God and winter and keep the main things, the main
things. And what are the main things?
Worship. Washing yourself in worship,
speaking truth over yourself when you can't believe it,
asking the Lord to show you. Where are you at work in this
that I cannot see? Where can I join you?
It's about being in the Word almost exclusively.
Nothing else. You might be playing worship
music in your house and in your car 24/7.
You might be reading nothing else or allowing anything else
into your mind gate other than the Word, and it might be like
this. Oh God, I don't know what you're
doing. I don't know where you are, but
I know that you're good and in you is no darkness.
There is light in you and no darkness at all.
So if I'm experiencing darkness, I need to see you.
I need to know where you are. It's wrestling with the Lord.
And in Psalms 126 five it is said this way, and I believe
this is one of the best explanations for winter.
It says those that plant in tears will harvest with shouts
of joy. They weep as they go to plant
their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest.
Because the truth of winter is that it ends, but we don't get
to control when it ends. Winter will end.
The spring will come. The blossoms will rebloom.
There will be new life. The pruning will make way for
new life. But we don't get to control when
winter ends. And so until it does, we plant.
We plant like this. Oh, God.
I don't know what you're doing with Audrey.
I don't know. Are you going to take her from
me? Literally on my face.
God, are you going to take her from me?
What are you doing? Open my eyes that I may see.
You see. She came home from school sick
one day. She was about 8 or 9 years old.
She came home early and that sickness did not go away.
It's shake. It's shapeshifted.
It changed. And over a course of 3 1/2 years
we spent day after day, night after night, crying out and
searching for a Doctor Who could help, someone who could answer.
Crying out to God. Would you heal her?
She was 45 lbs at 845 lbs at 945 lbs at 10.
And while we knew it was digestive and something was
going on, no one could answer it.
And at my breaking point of me saying, I guess I can't fix this
on my knees with the Lord, I said, are you going to take her
from us? Is this what's going to happen?
And he said, Christine, I love you and you're going to wait in
this winter. He didn't say winter.
He said you're going to wait. You can wait with me or you can
wait without me. You choose.
And on that day I learned what I wish someone would have taught
me, like the Lord is teaching you now.
That winter with God in His presence is the only way that we
don't get crushed. It's the only way that the
Spirit of heaviness doesn't come and sit on us and take us over.
Because the Holy Spirit gave me counsel that day.
As soon as I said your way, Lord, I'll wait with you.
Whatever you say, I'll wait with you.
I heard something I had not heard any other time in this
journey. And the Lord said I will feed
her when it makes no sense and she is an oak of righteousness
on display for all the world to see my splendor.
And I said, Lord, I don't know what that means.
He said that's OK. What I want you to do is every
time you get scared, every time you get sad, every time you feel
like you want to control this and wrestle it, I want you to
say to yourself, and I want you to get everyone around you to
say, oh, no, no, she's an oak of righteousness.
I know what you see in the natural She's an oak of
righteousness on display, a work of splendor for all of the world
to see the Lord's glory. And as we came through those 3
1/2 years and the people around us joined us in prayer and got
close, and I shunted everything else away and spent time
literally like this. God, I know what you said.
I know that it's true, and I don't.
I don't know what to do with what I see, but I believe if
you're going to feed her when it makes no sense, and I believe
that she's an oak of righteousness on display, full,
alive and healthy. And so I rise and I say, OK, I'm
going to declare that again and again and again.
And the healing did not come overnight.
It came in waves. There were stretches of good
days and lots of bad months until the stretches were lots of
good months and short bad days. Until today.
She's 19 years old and she's 100% physically healed.
Yes. There were gifts of this winter
season that I could not have gotten any other way and I would
not give them back. Dependency on God, awareness of
how to abide with Him in the darkest and most painful places,
ability to hear His voice and to stand in faith and declare what
I see in the Spirit over what I see in the natural.
I would never give those back, but I would never have asked to
get them that way. Not for her, not for me, not for
her brother older or younger, not for my husband, not for our
family. But you see, the only way to
winter is to shut everything else out.
Get so close to the Lord. Stay in a posture of worship on
your face, on your knees, listening for the truth and
declaring it until until the blooms breakthrough and the
spring comes and new life is born.
The only way to winter is with God.
That word that the Lord gave me. She's an oak of righteousness.
I had no idea that it was somewhere in Scripture and when
I found it and read it, I want to tell you as we close our
service today that this is what God is offering us in the area
of mental health, spiritual, physical, emotional, wholeness
and healing is this passage. And it includes those words that
were Audrey's. God longs to provide for those
who grieve in Zion, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead
of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of
praise instead of a spirit of despair.
And they will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the
Lord for the display of his splendor.
And so God today, Yes, thank you, Lord, God today is standing
before you, each one of you. It's now about you and God, and
you've met with him and you've heard the truth and he's
offering you a couple ways to respond.
The first way is to say I've never received Jesus as my
Savior. I didn't know that what I would
get is a constant abiding filling of the Spirit and a
companion to do all my days of life with.
I didn't know what Jesus did for me.
We talked about it in communion, but I'll offer it again here.
Now, there's a gap between you and God, and God desires so holy
and so completely to be in a love relationship with you that
He sent his Son Jesus to die on a cross, to rise to bear your
sin, and to bring you victory over death and life.
He's calling you to follow Him, and that's called being a
disciple. And today, if you want to
receive Jesus as your Savior and walk with Him all your days and
into eternity, He's offering that to you today.
The way we do that here is we do it corporately together.
Everyone's going to say a prayer so that you know what the body
of Christ feels like around you when you choose to follow Jesus,
but you'll be saying it. If this is your first time,
you'll be saying it, confessing with your mouth, believing in
your heart, and you will be saved.
So would everyone join with me in prayer.
And if you're making that decision, declare it to the
Lord. Everyone repeat after me.
Holy Father, we see the links you went to, to rescue us, to
spend eternity with us, to abide with us today, and every other
way that we have sought to be made right with you is now dead
to me. I change my mind and I say,
Jesus, you are Lord, you are my Savior and I receive your free
gift, eternal life that begins now.
In Jesus name. We say thank you for all of
those being saved. And if that's you today making
this decision for the first time, knowing that abundant joy
and love and peace is what he has for you.
If you're declaring I received Jesus today, would you boldly
raise your hand and allow one of our ushers to bring you a card,
a gift that we want to connect with you?
Raise your hand in the air nice and high.
If you're declaring Jesus as Savior and Lord, Amen for the
first time, keep it up. Go ahead and keep it up.
Anyone else? Keep your hand up nice and high
until one of our ushers gets to you and brings you that card.
If you're declaring Jesus as Savior for the first time today,
we rejoice with you. And the last thing I want to
offer to you today before we close is that in the authority
that Jesus is giving you as a disciple, you have an indwelling
power and filling of the Holy Spirit, and you have the
authority to tell the spirit of heaviness to go.
Did you hear that in the Scripture that you would have a
garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair?
The spirit of despair is a bad counselor.
The spirit of heaviness is a bad counselor.
We have one spirit to counsel us rightly and truly, and that's
the Holy Spirit. And maybe nobody ever taught you
before today that when we open up the door and we say, I guess
I'll just die here, this must be my life.
We're inviting the spirit of heaviness and depression to live
with us. And if today you would say, I
think I've done this and I don't want this anymore, then I'm
going to ask you to stand boldly.
Stand right where you are at your seat and say I want to
break up with the counsel of heaviness and depression, self
pity, despair, anything that you believe is counseling you and
sitting on you like a heaviness. Thank you for being bold.
I encourage you stand and you're
standing. You're saying I want what Jesus
is offering me, what Jesus did for me on the cross.
I want abundant life and I want to break up with a spirit of
heaviness and despair. Continue to stand.
There's boldness in your declaration.
Anyone else? We're going to pray together
again. And I ask everyone to repeat,
and if you are standing, you are declaring in victory and power.
This will be yours today. Everyone repeat after me, Jesus.
Your death gives me life, Your spirit gives me power.
And I repent for listening to the counsel of any spirit other
than yours. And we're going to name them
ready. Depression, heaviness, self
pity, despair, fear, all of you must go by the blood of Jesus.
This house is full of the Holy Spirit and so no other spirit
gets to stay. And in the name of Jesus, we
seal these decisions. By your Holy Spirit and your
power, we kick out any spirit other than yours.
Holy Spirit, come and have your way.
Would everyone stand as we rejoice in what God is doing in
our midst today? Thank you, Lord.
Thanks for joining us today. We hope God is speaking to your
heart through this message. If you'd like to connect with
us, you can text connect to 407-588-0115 or visit Illuminate
dot church. Have a great week.