Mental Health

So often when we think about Jesus coming to bring healing, we think of physical ailments, but do you realize Jesus also brings mental and emotional healing? The Bible shows us examples of people in deep depression, but they always trust God to bring them through.

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Message

Today we end our series on the Mind of Christ by looking at a painful gap between the Mind of Christ and the mindset with which many Christians struggle.

When we speak of having a mind like Jesus and thinking the way Jesus thought, we imagine a life of peace, quiet confidence, joy and satisfaction. We see Jesus as a man able to give fully of Himself and show love toward others at any moment. He could courageously face enemies in one instance and yet cry alongside the grieving family after their brother Lazarus died. He experienced the full gamut of human emotions; yet, through all the difficulties, He was able to move consistently toward the purpose for which He had been sent: He was here to die on a cross so that we might have the hope of a brighter future.

Unfortunately, many do not experience this serene life. Mental health challenges limit them in what they can do, what they will try, and where they will go. Many stay at home in the dark, unable to get out of bed. Others can’t understand why they cry constantly, often triggered by the most mundane of circumstances. Some fight through their symptoms, battling to maintain some level of normalcy in life; yet each night they are exhausted and haunted by their recurring thoughts.

In case you haven’t noticed, mental illness is reaching a crisis level here in America.

• In 2009, 26% of high school students had periods of persistent sadness or hopelessness.
• In 2021 a CDC study of 8,000 high school students found that the number had jumped to 44%.
• Even more concerning is that when considering only the girls in the CDC study, the number was an astounding 57%! Nearly three in five. The study also found that one in four high school girls seriously contemplated suicide.
• It’s not just young people. As of 2019, 20% of adults received mental health treatment.

Mental health is on the decline, causing emotional suffering for over 60 million Americans every single year. Nearly every one of us is impacted by the suffering of a loved one. The suffering manifests itself in a myriad of ways: extended periods of sadness, fear or worry, or a feeling of being out of control, numb or empty. Mental health issues come under a wide variety of diagnoses and names: depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, personality disorder, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, and many more. Ultimately, if left unaddressed, these disorders can leave people with a sense of hopelessness.

Christian or not, this issue hits us all; and it steals the joy, peace, and satisfaction Jesus desires for all of us. It leaves a giant chasm between the life Jesus died for us to experience and the life we suffer through. While I would love to say that being a Christian protects you from these issues, statistics show that the likelihood of experiencing mental illness is similar among Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims and people of no faith at all.

I know you’re thinking of the people you know, including yourself, who struggle with their mental health. We all want the answers to two questions: Why is this happening? and What can we do about it?

The church has remained silent on this common yet mysterious topic for many years. We’re tackling it today because as followers of the One who came to bring life, we should be a church who wants to offer life and hope to the millions of people whose suffering is stealing the joy and hope Jesus made possible.

Proposed Solutions to the Mental Health Crisis

As you might imagine, different people in different fields of study give various reasons for the crisis and the corresponding steps for its correction.

Physicians and medical professionals diagnose mental health issues as a disease. They see the challenges as the result of a genetic disposition of chemical imbalance in the brain. Since they see the illness as a disease, they provide a drug as the cure. When doctors find illness or disease in our bodies, we are more than willing to take medicine to help us feel better. Diabetics take insulin. Cancer patients take poison in the form of chemotherapy. We do this happily because it often helps our bodies. If a brain is producing too little serotonin, a medication that can help the brain release more serotonin can be similarly helpful.

Psychologists and therapists diagnose mental health issues through the lens of experience and circumstances. They see the patients’ challenges as the result of the environment, the trauma, and the stressors our bodies are ill-equipped to deal with. They commonly provide cognitive therapy to help the patient cope with the factors and thoughts that create the struggle. With the rise of social media and the more recent pandemic that completely altered all of life, there is much evidence that these environmental factors have contributed greatly to the rise of mental illness in America.

If that’s the case, is therapy all we need to get out of this hole we find ourselves in?

Other professionals trying to deal with the mental health epidemic are found in our churches – pastors and ministry leaders. For many years, leaders within the church have downplayed the biological and environmental issues leading to various mental health disorders. Instead, they have pointed to the spiritual battle waging war for our minds. They have offered greater prayer and greater trust in Jesus as the one and only cure. Sometimes they have hinted that the mental illness was brought on by a person’s sin and is their own fault.

Why do so many people across the nation struggle with their mental health? This cuts across both genders, all ages, all faiths, and all income brackets. Here’s my opinion: Our world is broken, and that brokenness impacts all areas of our lives!

The World is Broken

The brokenness of this world all began in a garden. You may have heard the story: Adam and Eve and a tree they were told not to eat from. They rebelled and ate from it anyway; and in that moment, sin entered the world. God’s perfect creation was ruined. The consequences of their actions would not only affect them spiritually, separating them from God, but there would be physical consequences as well. Genesis 3 tells us that there would now be pain in the world. Difficulty. Hardship. Man and woman would now have to suffer the consequences of their rebellion and sin.

You may think it seems trite to blame mental health struggles on a broken world; but the consequences of sin have impacted the biological, environmental, and spiritual aspects of our lives. This drives the mental health crisis.

Biological. We accept that sin brought cancer, physical sickness and other diseases into our world. We must also recognize that it allows diseases to infect people’s lives, not as a direct result of a specific sin but because the brokenness of our world includes diseases which distort the muscle in our heads – the brain.

Let me tell you about Zeke, who has wandered the streets of West Des Moines for the past seven years without a haircut or shave.

When I first arrived at my last church, Zeke was a pleasant, smiling young man who was attending college classes and had a bright future. Then one day his brain snapped and he was never again the same person. I have since learned that schizophrenia can arrive that way anytime before the age of 27.

Since that fateful day, Zeke has been tormented by constant conspiracy thoughts and visions of random colors. He can no longer trust anyone. His condition has caused him to spend many nights in jail, but no one can help this young man who is unwilling to take the medicine that can slow down his racing thoughts.

I tell you this story because I want to make sure we all recognize that at times the brain’s chemicals or wavelengths truly are the culprit behind our sickness. In these moments, medicine is very helpful – sometimes even necessary.

You may be thinking that medicine is often over-prescribed and is just a crutch that doesn’t always deal with the root issue. In some cases, you are right. However, a crutch is, by definition, a tool that helps a person while they are recovering. Often a crutch is used only for a season while a hip or knee heals. Sometimes medicine can provide the same temporary support for someone with mental illness.

Environmental. Sin didn’t bring just physical disease into our world, but also broken relationships and evil actions. Kids bully other kids on social media. Countries go to war. Family members are killed by drunk drivers. A pandemic turns off all face-to-face connection for months at a time. We experience problems, trials, injustices and disasters in infinite ways throughout our lives.

For some people these circumstances become overwhelming and take over their ability to continue their daily habits. It’s not that they imagine terrors that don’t exist, but that they have experienced so many terrors in such a dramatic way that they are unable to process and move through the trauma.

The Bible doesn’t say much about mental health. Instead, what we see are moments in people’s lives in which they are so overwhelmed they wish they were dead.

• Elijah ran for his life away from Jezebel after having all her priests killed.

1 Kings 19:4 – . . . He himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

• Job was ready to die after having everything in his life taken from him.

Job 3:1-3, 11 – After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. ² He said, “May the day of my birth perish, and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’ … 11 Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?

• David, the young boy who killed Goliath, was promised at a young age that he would be king of the Israelites. We are told he had a heart after God’s. Yet he struggled with depression as clearly as anyone in scripture, and he recorded it in the Psalms:

Psalm 88:15-18

¹⁵ From my youth I have suffered and been close to death; 

I have borne your terrors and am in despair. 

¹⁶ Your wrath has swept over me; 

your terrors have destroyed me. 

¹⁷ All day long they surround me like a flood; 

they have completely engulfed me. 

¹⁸ You have taken from me friend and neighbor— 

darkness is my closest friend. 

Spiritual. Finally, and most obviously, we recognize that our broken world includes the spiritual war between God and our enemy, Satan, and his dominions.

To our secular world, this sounds like fantasy best reserved for movies – something that should have no power to bring healing to a person suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or any other mental health disorder. However, as believers in Jesus we understand there is often a spiritual component to what is going on. Sometimes it is spiritual oppression or constant temptation to continuously sabotage a person’s best efforts to find healing.

One story from Mark 5 tells of a demon-possessed man: “Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. . . .”

Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” 

“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” ¹⁰ And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area. 

¹¹ A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. ¹² The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” Mark 5:5, 9-12.

Unfortunately, stories like this have led many Christians to treat all mental illness issues as demonic or simply spiritual warfare. They ignore the other complex components. As a result, those who struggle with their thoughts keep silent for fear of being told they are influenced by demons.

Complex solutions for complex circumstances

How do we move forward to help improve mental health in the church? We must be willing to accept a spiritual component to these issues, but we also must be willing to admit the existence of the biological and environmental issues at play. As is so often the case in life, we cannot take the reductionist view that applies a simple, single solution to a variety of complex and multi-faceted issues.

Complex circumstances require complex solutions! This holds true in the area of mental health as well as other aspects of life. If we tell a person who is struggling with depression that all they need to do is pray more and trust more, it is every bit as unhelpful as writing a prescription for medicines and sending them on their way. Most situations require a combination of medicine, therapy, prayer and Christian support.

An unpleasant fact (and one we wish weren’t true) is that even with all these treatments, mental health issues can’t always be cured and put behind a person forever. We know that’s true with physical ailments like arthritis, epilepsy or blindness. We pray for healing and relief from the symptoms. We go to doctors for medication, or we see a therapist for exercises to deal with the issues. Sometimes, though, the ailment never fully goes away; we simply learn to cope with it.

Here is where a faith in Jesus is so critical to those who are suffering. Without a hope in the resurrection – a hope in the ultimate healing of all disease and even death itself – all the mental and emotional suffering you experience serves no purpose and has no end.

Looking to Jesus as the hope of something better – a life without sorrow, anxiety, bipolar episodes or whatever the case may be – you see that ultimately Jesus is the one and only guaranteed hope. Everything else brings relief for a time or helps you cope, but Jesus promises complete healing. Jesus is your support through the difficult times and your hope for a lasting and permanent relief from your struggles. He is truly your all in all.

What to do if suffering from mental illness

I can’t speak about this challenging topic without giving some very clear steps for those who suffer from mental illness; so here’s a quick list of what you should be doing to improve your mental health. This is not an a la carte list; all of these work together to bring healing and relief.

• Seek God – In the middle of your bouts with depression, anxiety, or any other thoughts, it’s difficult to want to focus on Jesus. Everything seems meaningless; you might think, “Why bother?” Remember, though, that even in his deepest bouts of depression, King David shows us that he still laid his heart bare before God.

Psalm 42:1-3

¹ As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, my God. 

² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. 

When can I go and meet with God? 

³ My tears have been my food day and night, 

while people say to me all day long, 

“Where is your God?” 

As we’ve already discussed, God is our ultimate hope and healer. Everything else can be helpful; but full, complete healing comes from the hand of the God who created you, loves you, and cannot wait to spend eternity with you. Don’t give up on Him!

• Seek Medical or Therapeutic Help – I hope I have broken down the barriers some you may have had by showing you there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking medical or therapeutic help. Some of the issues you face are best addressed with medicine and counseling; so don’t stop with seeking God, but also seek the attention of professionals. God has allowed us to identify these helpful medicines and therapies. Use them as necessary.
• Seek Connection – One common piece of advice I found while studying for this message had to do with the importance of relationship with others. Relationships and friendships – having a person to confide in and vent to, a person who makes you feel heard – are absolutely critical to finding mental health. Part of why the pandemic increased the mental health crisis is because it destroyed connection, removing one of the most important cures from people’s lives. We need to intentionally bring it back. This is the one aspect that we, as a church, are best suited to step into and help people who are struggling! In an online world, people have become distanced when we are meant to be a close-knit, supportive community. Let’s find ways to check in on people we know are struggling. If you are one who feels shame for your issues, reach out to a trusted person and share what you are going through. There is power in confessing struggles and weaknesses and asking for prayer.
• Seek Physical Health – Often, when you are not feeling like yourself, you do things that make you spiral. Maybe you stay up all night worrying or indulge in sugary foods or stop exercising, but a healthy body helps create a healthy mind. Eating right, getting enough sleep, and being active are more than just good things to pursue on January 1 of every year. They are absolutely crucial if you are dealing with a mental health issue.

Conclusion

Our world is broken, and people are suffering silently with an assortment of mental health struggles. As the body of Jesus Christ, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and ignore the epidemic of our age. Nor can we reduce the issue to one of faith and tell people to pray more. We must recognize these are complex circumstances requiring complex solutions.

Let’s break the shame and stigma of a mental health challenge and, instead, recognize that this is the opposite of what Jesus desires for us. Let’s ask Him for help, seek comfort from relationships with others, and take steps to move toward improved mental health.

This is not something the church can offer only to those who are a part of us. It is something we should offer to all who struggle. We should show them that the same Jesus who had compassion on little children, the blind, the lame and the mute also has compassion on all who struggle internally with their thoughts and emotions.

Jesus came to provide us with abundant life. That abundance includes a healing of our minds.