NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - Why You’re Still Sad After 10 Sessions Aired: 2025-04-23 Duration: 01:04:38 === Why We Need Reviews (03:18) === [00:00:00] Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. [00:00:04] I get it. [00:00:04] It's annoying. [00:00:05] Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why. [00:00:07] When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds. [00:00:16] You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't. [00:00:21] We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears. [00:00:29] We are witnessing the birth of a new priesthood. [00:00:32] They wear cardigans instead of cassocks, quote Brene Brown instead of the Bible, and dispense diagnoses in the place of absolution. [00:00:41] And for millions of Americans, they've become the final authority on matters of the soul. [00:00:47] In just one generation, we've gone from God save a wretch like me to my therapist says. [00:00:54] The modern language of self care and self love have replaced self denial and love for God. [00:01:00] All the while, rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide have climbed, not fallen. [00:01:06] The numbers are staggering. [00:01:08] Nearly one in five U.S. adults is in therapy. [00:01:12] Over 40 million have been diagnosed with anxiety. [00:01:16] Even children are being trained to identify as mentally ill. [00:01:21] But here's the real crisis it's not just that our nation is mentally unwell, it's that the church is copying the world's prescriptions. [00:01:30] Christians now outsource the care of the soul to secular professionals who deny the soul even exists. [00:01:37] Historically, the church called this. [00:01:40] An affliction called melancholy. [00:01:43] A burden of body, yes, but also a trial of the conscience and a grief of the soul. [00:01:49] The Puritans didn't dismiss this pain, but they also never called it neutral. [00:01:55] They traced it back to disordered loves, guilty consciences, spiritual darkness, and then pointed people to Christ, not a fainting couch. [00:02:05] This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Rees Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our generous donors. [00:02:14] You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate. [00:02:26] Today we're asking a hard question What if our therapeutic age is not a solution to our suffering, but a refusal to see it rightly? [00:02:36] What if our feelings are not enemies, but rather signposts? [00:02:40] And what if the church still holds the cure, not in a padded office, but in word? [00:02:46] Sacrament, and the communion of the saints. [00:02:49] Let's dive in. [00:02:59] All right. [00:02:59] Good afternoon, gentlemen. [00:03:01] Happy Wednesday. [00:03:01] Good to see you all again today. [00:03:03] Excited for this episode. [00:03:04] Before we get started, just want to remind you if you are listening to the video or watching it, please go ahead and hit the like button. [00:03:12] Another thing that we don't mention very often, but all the cool podcasts and YouTube channels do, is share the video. === Therapy as a Signpost (03:21) === [00:03:18] Apparently, that's magic in the algorithm as well. [00:03:21] That's the quintessential way. [00:03:22] Send it to your sister in law who's going to therapy. [00:03:24] This will be really helpful. [00:03:25] She'll love it. [00:03:26] She'll appreciate it. [00:03:28] Better yet, send it to her therapist. [00:03:30] Yeah, there you go. [00:03:30] There you go. [00:03:32] All right. [00:03:32] Well, that is the topic going on today. [00:03:34] We're going to be diving into the question of therapy and counseling and just this whole idea of mental wellness. [00:03:44] Mental wellness is kind of a new term. [00:03:47] I'm not sure that it's necessarily new in Christian thinking, but it wasn't really ever called mental wellness until recently. [00:03:56] So, one of the things that I did in preparing for this episode was I did a little bit of research into some of the statistics of How many people are going to counseling and therapy and things of that nature? [00:04:08] Is it increasing? [00:04:09] Is it decreasing? [00:04:11] And one of the things that I found was I was surprised on the one hand because I thought the number was maybe a little bit higher. [00:04:19] It's a little lower than I thought, full disclosure, but it's still a lot and it's increasing quite a bit year over year. [00:04:26] More and more people are going to counselors, going to therapists. [00:04:30] And one of the things that has contributed greatly to this is the fact that. [00:04:36] A lot of new companies are either forming or existing counseling companies are adding on digital or distance counseling options. [00:04:49] And in fact, one of the things I'll talk about later is that this is specifically this online counseling is becoming a really, really big industry where you don't actually have to go see someone. [00:05:02] You can just log into Zoom. [00:05:04] There's always a therapist of some sort available. [00:05:06] You can talk through your issues. [00:05:08] And I thought to myself, What a brilliant business model. [00:05:13] The moment someone is feeling nervous or anxious or depressed or whatever, which happens to many people, possibly many times a day or throughout the week, it's not like you have to say, well, I've got an appointment scheduled for two weeks from next Tuesday. [00:05:28] I'm just going to have to dig in my heels, put on my big boy pants, and get through until I can go see my therapist. [00:05:36] It's I can Zoom immediately in the moment of some sort of anxiety. [00:05:41] I can log in through Zoom or through some digital service. [00:05:44] $55 copay. [00:05:45] I don't know what it is. [00:05:46] I'm making that number up. [00:05:48] And immediately talked to someone. [00:05:49] And I thought, man, if there's ever a way to get people addicted to a service of some sort, that is one of them, right? [00:05:56] I've seen them targeted too. [00:05:57] Like it'll be ads just for men specifically. [00:05:59] Like, men, are you feeling down? [00:06:01] Or the other ones are like LGBTQ, like, oh, you're gay. [00:06:04] And we have counseling specifically for these special interest groups. [00:06:08] So it's not just broadly like you can log on, you can do this from the privacy of your home. [00:06:11] It's also you very much belong to this group or to that group. [00:06:14] We have counseling perfectly for you for the low price of whatever it is. [00:06:18] I provide specific counseling for those who are gay, and it's perfect for them. [00:06:22] Like, you can call me, I won't even charge, and I can give you my counsel right now to everybody who's listening. [00:06:29] You pick up the phone, you call me, hey, I'm really struggling, I feel depressed, you know, I feel anxious, I'm gay. [00:06:33] And then I would just say, stop it. [00:06:36] And they're like, stop being depressed. [00:06:38] No, stop being gay. === Targeted Online Counseling (08:37) === [00:06:40] Just stop that, and things will vitally improve. [00:06:44] Fantastic counsel. [00:06:45] Some of the best counsel I've ever given. [00:06:46] Absolutely. [00:06:47] Good, solid biblical counsel. [00:06:48] Stop it. [00:06:49] Stop it. [00:06:49] Yeah. [00:06:50] I think that was a sketch, right? [00:06:51] A comedy sketch. [00:06:52] Yeah. [00:06:52] Yeah. [00:06:52] It wasn't a biblical sketch. [00:06:54] It was pretty funny, though. [00:06:55] Well, it was actually a show. [00:06:56] I think it was Boy Meets World, actually. [00:06:58] Oh, I think Vivek's. [00:06:59] Vivek's. [00:07:00] What? [00:07:01] It was on Mad TV. [00:07:02] Oh, Mad TV. [00:07:03] Okay. [00:07:03] I was going to say Vivek Ramaswamy's hardest hit. [00:07:06] Where, like, this woman walked in and said, I, you know, I have this terrible phobia of being buried alive. [00:07:11] She goes in to see a counselor. [00:07:11] Yeah, exactly. [00:07:12] And he's like, she's like, oh, well, tell me about it. [00:07:14] You know, and she's like, well, I imagine that I'm in a box and it's closed and I'm put underneath the ground and they begin piling the dirt on. [00:07:20] And he's like, oh, my goodness. [00:07:21] The counselor, he's like, that's terrifying. [00:07:23] And then he's like, all right. [00:07:25] Well, I'm going to provide for you some incredibly effective counseling, you know, and, And she's like, Should I, you know, she gets out a pen and paper. [00:07:32] Should I write it down? [00:07:33] He's like, I found that most people can remember. [00:07:35] You know, he's like, It's two words. [00:07:37] Stop it. [00:07:38] Stop it. [00:07:39] What do you mean? [00:07:39] It's like, She's like, But it's terrifying. [00:07:41] I can't help it. [00:07:42] And I start, you know, I just start imagining the dirt piling on. [00:07:44] I'm being buried. [00:07:45] And he's like, Stop it. [00:07:47] Just stop it. [00:07:47] Stop imagining that. [00:07:49] So, anyways, yep. [00:07:50] Yep. [00:07:51] Good counsel. [00:07:52] It is, actually, that would go far. [00:07:54] So, what I want to do today, before we jump into kind of some of our own thoughts or the history of what the Christian church has thought about this topic, is Just to look at a little bit of data about the current situation. [00:08:07] This is all US based data, but Nathan, let's go ahead and show graph number one here. [00:08:14] So, this is what age groups are receiving mental health treatment, okay? [00:08:21] Treatment for the listener in quotation marks. [00:08:25] So, 18 to 25 is receiving 26, well, what is that? [00:08:32] No, 26% of 18 to 25 year olds, 26.7%. [00:08:36] Are receiving some sort of mental health treatment. [00:08:39] 26 to 49 year olds, 24.5 of them are receiving mental health treatment. [00:08:44] 50 plus year olds, 18% of them. [00:08:46] And actually, in other data that I researched, if you go up to like 60s and 70s, it drops down to like 4 or 5% of really the elderly are receiving mental health treatment. [00:08:58] What this tells me is that even though the overall average number is about one in five people in America who are receiving this treatment, It's a trend among younger people. [00:09:10] And when you say one in five, can I just, you might have a graph for this, so I might be beating us to the punch, but I do not. [00:09:14] I'm going to guess that that one in five number is going to be one in like three women. [00:09:22] Well, and one in like seven or eight men. [00:09:24] It is much more. [00:09:25] It's, it's, the men was actually higher. [00:09:27] Okay. [00:09:28] It is higher than the women? [00:09:29] No. [00:09:30] It's higher than what I just said. [00:09:31] That's fair. [00:09:32] There's no way it's higher than the women. [00:09:33] Yep. [00:09:33] I was about to give some of that biblical. [00:09:35] No, no, no. [00:09:35] 100%. [00:09:36] Stop your line. [00:09:37] But there has been, to Wes' point, There has been targeted advertising to men to normalize this idea of going to therapy. [00:09:46] And in fact, my brother works in the trades in Wisconsin. [00:09:49] And so most of the people working in trades are men. [00:09:54] And they have a monthly kind of community event where they have someone come in and talk about the state of the industry. [00:10:02] And they had someone come in one month and was talking about the mental health epidemic that is afflicting men in the trades and how they're the overlooked. [00:10:12] Demographic in America, and a lot of them have anxiety and worry. [00:10:16] And it's like, well, it sounds like they're just men trying to provide for their families and they face the brunt of that. [00:10:20] Like, right. [00:10:21] And they probably should. [00:10:23] Well, my brother in the QA time stood up and said, Do you think any of this is spiritual? [00:10:29] And the lady doing the presentation said, No, we don't really see a link there. [00:10:33] It's just more, you know. [00:10:35] So, but to that point, even at a trades monthly meeting, they were there trying to convince employers to make Mental health counseling services available to their tradesmen. [00:10:48] Right, their companies. [00:10:49] It's a business. [00:10:50] They get paid. [00:10:51] 100%. [00:10:53] It's just one more thing that you can make any company with more than whatever, 30 employees or 50. [00:10:57] And then you can, if you work hard enough, you might even get able to lobby and pass it as legislation. [00:11:03] And now there's a law to where every company of this size must have on its payroll a therapist or mental health day once a month. [00:11:09] Yeah, exactly. [00:11:09] And so then all these companies, therapy companies, just mandated by force of law that they get to stay in business and keep bamboozling a bunch of people. [00:11:20] Actually, Joel, you can do the math here on the fly. [00:11:23] I forget what your one in, one in eight. [00:11:25] You may have been about right. [00:11:26] This says around 25% of adult women have received some form of mental health treatment in the past year compared to about 15% of men. [00:11:36] Okay. [00:11:36] So one in four women. [00:11:38] One in six. [00:11:39] Yeah. [00:11:39] One in six. [00:11:40] 25%? [00:11:40] Well, he said 15. [00:11:42] Yeah, 15%. [00:11:43] So 15% would be like one in, what was that? [00:11:46] One in 6.66? [00:11:49] Yeah. [00:11:50] It's like one in seven. [00:11:51] Well, so one in four women and then one in six men. [00:11:53] Yep. [00:11:53] One in, closer to seven. [00:11:55] One in 6.66 men. [00:11:58] Versus, so one in seven versus one in four. [00:12:00] You called it. [00:12:01] Yep. [00:12:01] Close enough. [00:12:02] Quite a few teens, like, think about this, like, young, like, young, so not children, thank God, but teens. [00:12:10] About 17% of teens have received official mental health counseling or therapy of some sort. [00:12:17] A lot of where this is going on is in schools. [00:12:20] And there's been not only targeted at men, but there's been a massive campaign on college campuses, especially to make, Mental health counseling available for free by some sort of resource officer or whole department of the university now that is responsible. [00:12:37] And I have a friend who taught for a little while at Stanford, which you think, you know, high performance school. [00:12:44] And he said that his students, he said at least half of his students were regularly seeing counselors for anxiety and depression, which is just crazy. [00:12:56] Big in the military, too, when I was in, big push on. [00:12:58] And understandably, you of course have men that have come back from war and they would actually. [00:13:03] Hey, there's services, there's people available. [00:13:05] That's a little different. [00:13:06] That's one thing. [00:13:06] But generally speaking, we're talking about platoons and groups of people that have never been to combat, but they were always just about every time the squadron came together, like, be aware, there's mental health resources. [00:13:16] You have a family readiness officer, very much so, like, we're here, we're here, we're here. [00:13:20] Yeah. [00:13:21] Yeah. [00:13:21] Okay, Nate, let's show the next graph. [00:13:23] This will be a shot to absolutely zero people, but the number of therapists, the statistic, the percentage by gender. [00:13:32] So, not surprisingly, About three quarters of therapists are women, and about a quarter of therapists are men. [00:13:41] So, three quarters of therapists are women. [00:13:44] Yeah. [00:13:44] That checks out. [00:13:44] Yeah. [00:13:46] And well, because like, it's the same as like, why are you know, why are you look at every HR department with some Fortune 500 company, and it's the same thing. [00:13:55] It's like three fourths, in many cases, probably even higher 80, 85, 90% is staffed by women, you know, and so, and then with therapists, it's staffed by women, you know, and all these types of fields are particularly staffed by women. [00:14:08] Why? [00:14:09] Because they're mom jobs. [00:14:12] That's why. [00:14:13] Because women have an inescapable desire and sensation to want to mother, sympathize, nurture. [00:14:22] It's a domestic feminine impulse that God placed in their ego. [00:14:29] It's a good thing. [00:14:30] It's a good thing. [00:14:31] But because so many people are foregoing childbearing, and so many women don't end up being actual biological mothers in the familial sense, the traditional sense. [00:14:43] Then they go and fulfill that desire elsewhere. [00:14:45] So they're like, well, if I can't have, you know, babies because they've bought into some feminist lie, you know, whatever, then they're like, well, then, you know, the workplace, that'll be my home. [00:14:55] And all these grown men will be my babies. [00:14:58] And I will be telling, I will be treating, you know, 35 year old men as though they're my toddler. [00:15:05] And I think there's a lot of people who just as the family system is breaking down, they didn't get a sort of good, solid fatherly counsel and motherly nurturing growing up. === Rising Rates, Falling Health (06:09) === [00:15:17] And so I remember, um, One of the jobs that I worked at, the manager there, I mean, she was, she did more counseling than actual job managing. [00:15:27] People were always in her office complaining about this hard thing about life or this conflict or this drama with this other person. [00:15:34] And she was like, her entire, like 50% of her job was people coming to her because they had no one else to talk to about the difficulties in their life. [00:15:41] And so when people don't have truth that they're getting in a church and Godly counsel that they're getting from brothers and sisters in Christ, They are going to go somewhere to find someone who will, at best, pat them on the back and at worst, like stroke their ego with the modern counseling techniques that we have. [00:15:59] So, I just pulled it up like percent female majors. [00:16:03] So, social work, 85% female major. [00:16:06] Health professions, close to 80%. [00:16:08] Same thing with education and psychology, all above 75% majority women. [00:16:13] Yep. [00:16:13] Yep. [00:16:14] As I've done research in some of the episodes over the last couple of weeks and months, I find this really interesting. [00:16:20] What are. [00:16:22] Marketing or not. [00:16:23] Not marketing, but growth reports on industries same. [00:16:26] In other words, people are running financial analysis to determine whether a sector or an industry is a good option for investors to invest in, and so this is one of those reports and it's saying that the the therapy market, or the mental counseling, the mental health treatment market, is going to grow by 5.9 per six per year. [00:16:49] Currently, it's at about, I think, if I remember about 4. [00:16:53] $5 billion a year in the US, and they're expecting that by 2033, so eight years, it'll be up to a $7.3 billion industry, which people would want to know that to know if they should invest. [00:17:05] And there have actually been quite a few fairly large mergers where I didn't even know that there are these massive counseling networks that have merged together in part to be able to offer a more robust online option for a lot of this counseling. [00:17:22] So, this is an industry that is embracing technological innovation. [00:17:27] And really targeted advertising, like we said earlier, and it's only growing and increasing. [00:17:32] And the thing about it is that I admit that there are people who have times in life where they need advice, right? [00:17:43] Sure. [00:17:43] But when you're told any moment of anxiety or fear or worry or being depressed is a mental health incident, because a lot of the things, when you dive into the numbers, you say, well, what are the mental illnesses they have? [00:17:59] Schizophrenia. [00:18:00] Bipolar, no, a lot of it is like a person felt anxious. [00:18:04] Well, that sort of person is being told now when you feel anxious, you need to schedule an appointment with a quote unquote qualified professional. [00:18:13] And so, the more that people are told that, the more they're going to say, Oh, I feel anxious multiple times a week. [00:18:20] Really, multiple times a week? [00:18:22] That's odd. [00:18:23] That's not normal. [00:18:23] Yeah, that's not normal at all. [00:18:25] You need a therapist. [00:18:26] In fact, let's get you signed up for three times a week, you know? [00:18:28] And so, it is going to, I think, The direction it's going, it is an industry that's only going to increase. [00:18:34] And I think, I'm sure there are well intentioned people out there, but I think what we're going to find is that it really is something that preys on the fears and anxieties of weak women and weak people who are not getting good, solid counsel in other places. [00:18:53] Yeah. [00:18:54] So, cool. [00:18:55] The last chart I wanted to show before we kind of move on from the state of the situation in America is really, really interesting. [00:19:03] So, Nate, let's look at this one. [00:19:05] This one has two trend lines on it. [00:19:06] So, the black. [00:19:08] trend line is the change in the rate of those getting mental health care. [00:19:14] And so this starts back in 2002 and it starts at a flat line. [00:19:18] So it's just a change in the rate. [00:19:20] It's not objective numbers. [00:19:22] But the trend line generally goes up. [00:19:25] In 2004, it dropped a little bit. [00:19:27] But more and more people it's showing are getting mental health care to the point where now, well, this was from 2021, I think, 32% more people in America were getting mental health care. [00:19:41] Than in 2002. [00:19:44] Well, you see on the chart the trend line, it goes in basically almost the opposite direction, especially recently, where the change in rate of people who are reporting excellent mental health. [00:19:55] Initially, back in 2001, 2002, 2003, it seemed like mental health, this is reported rates, it's not an objective metric, but it seemed like it really spiked. [00:20:06] People were saying, I am more mentally healthy than I was before. [00:20:11] But what you see on the graph, for those of you listening, is Especially coming into about 2012, 2011, somewhere in there, as the rate of people going to mental health counseling increases, the rate of people who said, I feel like I am in excellent mental health drops and drops and drops until it plummets right around 2019, 2020. [00:20:36] And so the point of this graph is to show that while mental health counseling options and appointments have increased significantly in the last 20 years, The relative or the perceived mental health that people have has dropped off a cliff almost at the same rate, especially over the last 10 years. [00:20:57] It was funny, it was literally just on Monday, the episode we talked about the Pope, and we talked about he's elected in 2013. [00:21:02] And that really is the part where the zenith of everything that you could call what we're opposed to really begins to rise. [00:21:09] And I would say the peak of it being 2018, 2019, 2020. [00:21:13] And I don't think it's a coincidence. [00:21:14] Obviously, more people are going to therapy. [00:21:16] That's not great. [00:21:17] But also, too, I don't think it's a coincidence that people's sense of whatever it is, be it their self worth, be it Their ability to maintain a job, all of these different things, they just fall off. === Wealth vs Mental Wellness (02:25) === [00:21:26] You go from holding relatively steady through, for example, a great global depression, recession. [00:21:33] If you have the recession, you can only see a huge change. [00:21:35] Tons of people lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods. [00:21:38] At the end of the day, they didn't, in mass, just lose their mental health. [00:21:42] But then you get to whatever this was, and it's white privilege, and you should feel guilty, and America's racist, this, that, or the other, and you need to be in therapy, and your mental health just tanks off a cliff. [00:21:51] Yeah, yeah, the lowest recorded. [00:21:53] Yeah, yeah. [00:21:54] Okay, we're going to hit our first commercial break. [00:21:56] When we come back, we're going to start to talk a little bit about how the church, especially through the Puritan times, talked about some of these real issues that people experience, but how they diagnosed it and what kind of solutions they offered. [00:22:12] Our sponsor, Private Family Banking, wants to help you with one money move that'll implicate itself in multi generational wealth building starting the first day. [00:22:21] They help you to avoid taxation and to draw compound interest to your money. [00:22:26] Now, if you're a high net worth individual, someone who has maybe even $10 million in net worth, then they can help you even more. [00:22:35] W 2 workers, contract workers, business owners, it's all about cash flow and making tax deferred gains on all your money for the rest of your life. [00:22:45] Don't avoid this. [00:22:47] It's a big move, but it's a great time to make it. [00:22:49] Click the link below and you can get on Chuck de La Torrante's calendar and he'll go over your background and what you want to accomplish. [00:22:57] And he's going to help model a program that exactly fits your needs. [00:23:01] So go ahead and send an email to Chuck at Private Family Banking.com. [00:23:07] Again, that's Chuck at Private Family Banking.com. [00:23:10] Or you can click the link below. [00:23:12] Make a free discovery call now. [00:23:15] America is a country that was founded for the purpose of allowing Christians to do their duty before God, not to have their consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men. [00:23:23] Reese Fund exists in order to see the Ten Commandments properly applied, not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in business as though. [00:23:31] Their commandments from God that we're supposed to obey. [00:23:34] Our goal is to find businesses and to buy them and to build them up. [00:23:38] We want to find manufacturing businesses and use them to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here. [00:23:45] Reef Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed. [00:23:51] All right, welcome back. === Commandments in Business (15:17) === [00:23:52] Gentlemen, towards the end, just so you know, I'm going to ask a couple questions about the legitimacy of what we term now to be mental illness. [00:24:03] Wes, I'm curious from you with your background and research about if you've done anything in like legitimate mental illnesses. [00:24:11] There are some people out there who say that if you have like OCD, a legitimate OCD or multi personality disorder, that this is basically just demon possession. [00:24:24] So I'm curious with kind of your research into neurology and things like that, Wes. [00:24:29] I'm going to lean on you a little bit later on. [00:24:31] But the categories that we now call mental health. [00:24:36] Are not necessarily new. [00:24:38] The Puritans talked quite a bit about it. [00:24:41] They were overly introspective, and maybe that's why they dealt a little bit more with it. [00:24:45] But they had terms like the dark night of the soul, where they felt like God had abandoned them to depression or anxiety or just long periods where there seemed to be no hope. [00:24:58] What Spurgeon called his own sort of the black dog, something like that? [00:25:02] Yes. [00:25:03] That followed him. [00:25:04] Yes, exactly. [00:25:05] And one of the resources that I read over in preparation for this episode. [00:25:10] Is Richard Baxter's, he wrote a series of sermons on the topic of the melancholy of the soul. [00:25:17] And so, Christian thinkers, Puritan thinkers, have identified for a long time that there are legitimate things that afflict us, right? [00:25:28] Even the Apostle Paul, we speculate what the thorn was that the Lord sent him, the thorn in his flesh, but some have speculated that it was a despondency or a despair, a natural sort of despair where his Hope in the Lord had to overcome that. [00:25:47] It's not a new thing. [00:25:48] And so, the first thing I want to say is while there are a lot of good and proper reactions from Christians about modern mental health counseling and just kind of poking fun at how silly, how worldly those things are, even in Christian communities, like among the Puritans and among the English Puritans, there has been. [00:26:15] A category of deep and prolonged melancholy, like Baxter calls it. [00:26:22] And so we would be, we would do well to see that this sort of thing is not, the phenomenon is not new in our modern time. [00:26:31] I think what's new in our modern time is that people assume that mental health is the, happiness is the expected state of mental health. [00:26:45] That if you're not happy at all moments, you're mentally unhealthy. [00:26:50] That if you're not actively engaged in loving life, And if you don't have this overwhelming sense of wonder and joy at all times, of tranquility, then that indicates a lack of mental health. [00:27:04] And when you set people up for that, all of them are going to think that they're mentally unhealthy. [00:27:10] Richard Baxter goes so far as to say that some people who struggle with this melancholy do so because they have unrealistic expectations. [00:27:19] He says the body is frail. [00:27:22] And so, insofar, and he dives a lot into whether some of these things are physical or mental or spiritual. [00:27:27] But he says, even if they're all physical, the body itself is frail. [00:27:31] And for us to expect the sort of state of being that we will experience in heaven and in the eternal state now is simply like someone set that person up for a wrong expectation. [00:27:43] He says that all of life at one turn to the next will have disappointments, frailties, weaknesses, trials, tribulations, just in the natural fallen world that we live in, apart from spiritual affliction or sin or any of those things. [00:28:00] And so he said that one of the reasons why people give in to despair and to melancholy is even back then, he said they have been convinced that life is supposed to be much easier than what they are going through right now. [00:28:13] And I thought that was quite insightful coming from someone who lives in a time where they certainly dealt with more grief in some levels, in some areas than we do. [00:28:24] Him still saying to his parishioners, someone convinced you that your life is supposed to be easy, and that's not how it is under the curse, and you need to change. [00:28:34] Your perspective immediately. [00:28:36] The goal of this life is not ease. [00:28:39] That's what's promised in the next life. [00:28:40] The goal of this life is faithfulness, perseverance, hope, and those spiritual virtues that we're supposed to cling to. [00:28:48] So, for one point, I thought that was incredibly helpful, just on a purely physical level, that he recognized that that's a real error and temptation that even Christians fall into. [00:29:01] It could be said too, I've done a lot of thought about this because I used to love the Puritans. [00:29:06] More than I would now. [00:29:07] And if I could. [00:29:08] You used to love the past. [00:29:09] Well, I would say one of their shortcomings was they had a very strong introspection. [00:29:15] Right. [00:29:15] And to the point, now, introspection is good. [00:29:18] Naval gates. [00:29:18] Paul and Peter speak well of examining yourselves, that there are absolutely to be times in your life where you take stock of who you are and what you've done. [00:29:26] But if there's one thing that I could say about them in their personal theology and in their practice, there was very much so a meditation upon the inner thoughts, meditation upon the inner man. [00:29:35] What am I? [00:29:36] And often it was in relation to God. [00:29:38] So, how is my relationship to God? [00:29:39] How am I praying? [00:29:40] How am I thinking? [00:29:41] How am I edified? [00:29:42] How am I all of these things? [00:29:44] But at the end of the day, what I've seen and what I've experienced, I would have to say that that can very quickly become it's not just every couple of months or so, I take serious stock of my spiritual life and my thoughts and what I'm meditating on, but close to daily. [00:29:58] And then what you do, and I've done this before, is it's always this constant, I could do better. [00:30:03] And it's constantly thinking, like, is my love for God shallow? [00:30:06] I've spent time with friends and they're crying because they're like, I feel like God is so distant. [00:30:10] Well, Like, what are we talking about here? [00:30:14] We weren't meant to mediate, evaluate our relationship to God based on how I felt in the last week. [00:30:20] We obey, we do good. [00:30:22] We encounter him in the Lord's Supper. [00:30:25] We encounter him in baptism and the preaching of the word. [00:30:27] Like, those things are always as much as possible. [00:30:29] Like, God does not give us prayer as a means of grace, actually. [00:30:32] He gives bread and wine that are corporeal, they're bodily, they're physical, they're tangible. [00:30:37] And so, introspection, some of it, but there most certainly can be too much of it and lead towards exactly what Baxter is saying there. [00:30:44] I'm just thinking about what I'm thinking about all the time. [00:30:47] Even the Puritans work and do something. [00:30:49] Right. [00:30:49] No, you're right. [00:30:49] Even the Puritans, though, to be fair, I think some of them, at least later, Recognize that and began to speak against that by saying, Look up and look out. [00:31:00] Like when it came to assurance of salvation, for instance, many of the Puritans, John Bunyan would be an example. [00:31:06] There were many who struggled, had prolonged seasons of multiple years. [00:31:11] I think in the case of Bunyan, it was like seven years of wrestling. [00:31:13] Does the Lord really love me? [00:31:14] Am I really saved? [00:31:15] That's part of my own testimony and struggling with that for years. [00:31:19] But then some of the, Thomas Goodwin would be an example of a more hopeful. [00:31:26] Puritan and his preaching that really caused men when it came to assurance of salvation, particularly said, No, it's not you don't look inward, it's not incessant navel gazing. [00:31:37] It's not, Well, how do I feel? [00:31:38] Do I feel confident about my salvation? [00:31:40] Who cares how you feel? [00:31:42] Look up and look out, see Christ, see his love for you. [00:31:46] And so, I think that that's something that some of the Puritans course corrected on, but you're right. [00:31:50] I would say, you know, I like the Puritans, but I would say, too ideological. [00:31:56] That's one of the things that concerns me about the Puritans, it's too much. [00:32:00] Ideology and then too much of introspection. [00:32:04] And what both of those things, I think, like a common tie between them is just too much subjectivity, right? [00:32:11] It was too interpersonal, subjective, feeling based, and ideology. [00:32:17] It's like, what do you mean ideology? [00:32:18] Like the Puritans are known for their expositional preaching. [00:32:21] Yeah, but every time, I'll just say it like this the sermon I preached yesterday on Easter Sunday was very Puritan. [00:32:32] Yeah, what do I mean? [00:32:34] Um, well, it was exegetical preaching. [00:32:38] I talked about the faith of the paralytic and his friends who took him to Jesus to be healed. [00:32:47] However, I focused on about half of a verse, right? [00:32:51] And preached for an hour, right? [00:32:53] And I could easily preach the text again because I did not even get to probably 75 percent of the text. [00:32:59] Now, I actually stayed in the text, I was talking about the text, but my point is this. [00:33:05] There's a way of doing exegetical preaching where you can have too large of a text to where it's just a cursory gloss over it. [00:33:15] Yeah, fly over it. [00:33:16] You can't actually get into depth with anything because it's like my text today is the entire book of Exodus. [00:33:21] But there's also a way of like my text today, and Spurgeon was notorious for this. [00:33:25] And I like Spurgeon, but Spurgeon, with the parable of the four soils, he preached that and he preached an entire sermon. [00:33:33] I'm going to preach through this parable. [00:33:35] And he started with his. [00:33:36] First text, you would think the text is the parable. [00:33:38] Nope, not even close. [00:33:39] The first text was, A sower went out to sow. [00:33:42] Right. [00:33:43] And now he's going to go 60 minutes on a sower. [00:33:48] What is a sower? [00:33:50] Went out. [00:33:51] What does it mean to go out to sow? [00:33:55] What does it mean? [00:33:56] And when you're getting that narrow, the reality is Spurgeon, who is known as being the prince of preachers. [00:34:04] So I'm not trying to cast shade on Spurgeon. [00:34:06] I really appreciate Spurgeon. [00:34:08] But Charles Spurgeon, Like, what did he do in that sermon? [00:34:13] I'm gonna say it. [00:34:14] People aren't gonna like it. [00:34:14] I'm gonna say it. [00:34:15] He made a bunch of stuff up. [00:34:18] That's what he did. [00:34:19] Jonathan Edwards, like sinners in the hands of an angry God. [00:34:23] The verse is, I think, from Deuteronomy, their foot shall slip in due time. [00:34:26] Right. [00:34:27] That was his text. [00:34:28] Well, to that point, the book that I read over, and it's a book. [00:34:34] I don't know. [00:34:34] This is online, but it would probably be 60 pages at least from Richard Baxter. [00:34:40] It's all based on the verse, Lest perhaps such a one would be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow from 2 Corinthians 2 7. [00:34:47] Now, he jumps off. [00:34:49] He says, Okay, let's talk about this now. [00:34:50] Let's talk about this now. [00:34:51] But. [00:34:51] To that point, yeah, that absolutely did happen. [00:34:54] I wanted to also, and I know you're probably going to hear Michael, so feel free if you want to. [00:34:58] I'm going to read something, but then we can go back if there's more you want to say. [00:35:01] But so we're talking about, you know, so one is just the what we've covered so far is like, so why does everybody think that they're mentally unhealthy, right? [00:35:09] So one of the reasons that we've covered so far is, well, for one, because people are delusional when it comes to their expectations of what should be the normative mental state of a person's life. [00:35:20] Like you're not supposed to be elated and happy all the time. [00:35:25] Sometimes you're bored. [00:35:26] Sometimes you're sad. [00:35:28] Sometimes you're a little anxious. [00:35:31] Like a man who says, Man, every day I'm anxious for a few hours every single day. [00:35:38] Yeah, well, that's part of that is just being a man. [00:35:40] I'm anxious a little bit every day. [00:35:42] And I understand the Bible says be anxious for nothing. [00:35:44] So I'd like to maybe pick a better word here, but I am actively concerned and thinking, How are my children going to survive? [00:35:55] Yeah. [00:35:55] How is my son, especially, how is he going to get a job and actually provide for a family in a world that hates him? [00:36:05] Because I have to think about like my kids as Christians. [00:36:10] And then in my particular case, I also have to think about my kids who happen to be white. [00:36:17] You know, the world literally hates Christian, heterosexual, white, conservative men. [00:36:24] And I have a son, you know, and so I'm thinking, like, what can. [00:36:28] And so for me, like, so I, you know, so how does that produce concern throughout the day? [00:36:33] You know, like, I want to avoid, you know, be anxious for nothing but with prayer and supplication, make your request known to God. [00:36:37] So I'm praying, but I'm also, I'm not just praying, you know, I'm not just lingering long in my prayers, you know, like Alfred's brother, you know, as Alfred's out there on the battlefield. [00:36:45] Like, no, I'm also doing, I'm acting. [00:36:47] And in my action, one of the things that I'm trying to accomplish is I need to do exactly the opposite of the boomers. [00:36:54] I need to, um, Because the world has been ruined and maybe it doesn't get fixed. [00:37:00] And so I need to work hard enough to where I can help my son by the time he's of marrying age and these kinds of things, as a young man, to be able to own his first home, to help provide some kind of family business that could be passed down to where he can have gainful employment, all these kinds of things. [00:37:17] I need to be ready to do that. [00:37:18] So, one problem is people just assume that the constant, perpetual state of mental. [00:37:26] You know, the constant, perpetual mental state of the average person is supposed to be just happy all the time. [00:37:30] So that's just wrong. [00:37:32] That's just wrong. [00:37:32] And so we need to lower our expectations, have more realistic expectations. [00:37:36] But then there's also the spiritual side. [00:37:40] And the spiritual side can be broken up into multiple categories, but here's one of them. [00:37:43] Here's one of them. [00:37:44] This is Psalm chapter 32, verse, let's start in verse three. [00:37:48] It says, When I kept silent, this is David. [00:37:51] When I kept silent, my bones waxed old. [00:37:55] My bones wasted away inside of me. [00:37:58] He's a physical. [00:38:00] Physical consequence. [00:38:02] When I kept silent, my bones waxed old through my roaring all day long. [00:38:10] Verse 4 For day and night, thy hand was heavy, weighing upon me. [00:38:17] My moisture is turned into the drought of summer. [00:38:21] So when I was silent, my bones wasted away inside my body, and God's hand was heavy upon me, and I began to dry up like a drought. [00:38:32] Then, verse 5 I acknowledged my sin unto thee, unto the Lord, and mine iniquity have I not hid. [00:38:41] I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. [00:38:50] One reason why a bunch of people are anxious and depressed, I'm just going to say it. [00:38:54] I've experienced it in my own life. [00:38:55] Christians experience this. [00:38:57] Unbelievers absolutely experience this. [00:38:59] One of the chief reasons why we have a bunch of mentally unstable, depressed, psychotic, and anxious people, country full of them, is because of unconfessed sin. === Unconfessed Sin and Despair (09:42) === [00:39:10] Yep. [00:39:11] People are in sin and they're not confessing their sin. [00:39:14] And whenever they do get even close to confessing it, it's not to the clergy, it's not to a priest, it's not to a pastor, it's to their family. [00:39:22] Female therapist who then affirms them in their sin. [00:39:26] So the moment that they even start to confess their sin, like, well, part of the reason that I'm really struggling is because I cheated on my wife and I never told her. [00:39:34] And immediately what happens is they're actually consoled and convinced that that's not even a sin. [00:39:40] Well, really, you know what? [00:39:42] Your job's been really hard, you know, and you kind of deserve that. [00:39:45] And you shouldn't be rested. [00:39:46] That was best for you. [00:39:47] And the fact that you didn't tell her is probably you just loving your wife because you didn't want to disappoint her and you're trying to hold the family together. [00:39:53] And the whole weight of the world is on your shoulders, you know, and they're. [00:39:56] Bust out the world's smallest violin, and you're actually not an adulterer, you're actually just great. [00:40:03] Now that you've confessed this, I'm actually more impressed by you, right? [00:40:06] Money, please. [00:40:07] That's right. [00:40:08] Money, please. [00:40:09] Don't forget to pay your front desk on your way out. [00:40:11] Yeah, I'm actually more impressed by you. [00:40:12] Oh, also, our 45 minutes is up, and you will receive an invoice for $700 on your way out. [00:40:19] You want to know why the country is losing its mind? [00:40:23] Depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, transgender people shooting up schools. [00:40:29] And kids, because we are a country that is laden with guilt and we know it, and we're not confessing our sin. [00:40:39] And if we do, and when we do, we confess it to all the wrong people who, instead of providing absolution for our sin, which is only found by someone who actually paid for it namely Jesus Christ on the cross we're actually given consolation and convinced that we actually have no sin at all. [00:40:57] But it doesn't work, and it doesn't work because we were made in the image of God, we have a moral conscience within us, we know that we're deadbeats. [00:41:04] We know that we're wretches. [00:41:06] So, all this language, all this therapeutic lingo, like we did in the Cold Open, we went from here I am a wretch. [00:41:13] Well, here's the deal. [00:41:14] With all your 20th century liberalism and all your therapeutic talk, the average person in their heart of hearts still knows that they're a wretch. [00:41:21] They know. [00:41:22] And R.C. Sproul used to say that all the time. [00:41:23] I remember him talking about apologetics and doing the work of an evangelist and arguing for defense of the faith. [00:41:31] And he would say, sometimes he'd be talking with an atheist or an agnostic or somebody who was particularly hostile and also. [00:41:38] You know, fairly intelligent and well read, you know, and they would be going back and forth and back and forth. [00:41:42] And for everything that, you know, Sproul said, the other guy's got a quip, you know, some counter that he says in response. [00:41:48] But eventually, if it wasn't really going anywhere, then he would just bring out the TKO, right? [00:41:52] The total knockout. [00:41:53] And the TKO was this he would say, All right, you know what? [00:41:56] Let's go ahead and just end with this, right? [00:41:58] We're not really getting anywhere. [00:41:59] We both disagree. [00:42:00] So here's my final question What do you do with your guilt? [00:42:04] That's right. [00:42:04] What do you do with your guilt? [00:42:06] He doesn't say, Do you feel guilty? [00:42:09] Yep. [00:42:09] No, no, no. [00:42:10] He assumes it. [00:42:11] You're guilty. [00:42:12] You're a wretch. [00:42:13] You know it. [00:42:14] So, how do you live with that? [00:42:16] Yep. [00:42:17] Because everyone has to live with that. [00:42:18] And the answer is, of course, for most moderns, how do you live with that? [00:42:23] Well, by paying $700 to my therapist and taking a bunch of drugs and maybe coloring my hair blue and from time to time shooting up a school. [00:42:32] Yep. [00:42:33] Maybe cutting off a genital here or there, you know, maybe murdering a baby in the womb here or there, you know. [00:42:39] That's how I deal with it. [00:42:41] But here's what's not debatable. [00:42:43] There's variants of ways of dealing with guilt, but what's not debatable is whether or not people have. [00:42:49] Guilt. [00:42:49] That's right. [00:42:50] The answer is yes. [00:42:52] Yeah. [00:42:54] There's a quote here from Baxter that goes along exactly with what you said. [00:42:57] He said, Too many persons in their sufferings and sorrows think that they are only to be pitied. [00:43:04] This is true. [00:43:04] When you have someone who is convinced that they are mentally unwell, they believe that they're entitled to pity. [00:43:12] And so he says, They think that they are only to be pitied and take little notice of the sin that caused them or that they still continue to commit. [00:43:22] And then he says this, and too many unskillful friends and ministers, I'm going to add, and therapists do not do only comfort them when a round chiding, that's a chastisement and discovery of their sin should be the better part of the cure. [00:43:41] And he was speaking here in a Christian environment of ministers. [00:43:44] And so how much more, you know, I think actually, I know there's common grace, but for unbelievers to expect that they would have any degree of mental health. [00:43:58] Is delusional. [00:43:59] Preposterous. [00:44:00] Yep. [00:44:00] Yeah, it really is. [00:44:02] That's one of the prophets' condemnations you heal the wound lightly. [00:44:07] My people are wounded. [00:44:07] My people are in sin. [00:44:09] And you've come along, you're looking at a fractured break, you're looking at traumatic bleeding. [00:44:13] Oh my goodness, we have got some bamboo band aids right here for you. [00:44:18] That's literally what it is guilt and sin and all these different things. [00:44:21] And it's like, it sounds like you need 45 minutes every other week to really get you feeling on the up and up. [00:44:26] Yeah. [00:44:26] Right. [00:44:28] So that's unrealistic expectations. [00:44:31] Unconfessed and sin. [00:44:33] And Baxter goes on to say that many people who are aware of their sin are still unwilling to let it go. [00:44:41] Right. [00:44:41] And so there's that, that just makes it even worse. [00:44:46] Unconfessed sin, but then also unconvinced of forgiven sin. [00:44:52] And then he points to a third one, and that is attacks by the devil. [00:44:56] He said, even the Christians, the devil shoots his darts at us. [00:45:00] But for unbelievers, especially, they are. [00:45:03] They have no defense against the schemes and the terrors that the devil, obviously, still, even for unbelievers under God's providence, you know, because sometimes God allows the devil to go so far that he terrifies people into faith and repentance. [00:45:20] Drives them towards Christ with terror. [00:45:22] Yes. [00:45:22] Yeah. [00:45:23] Yeah. [00:45:23] Bunyan, again, is helpful on this. [00:45:25] Just building progress. [00:45:26] Yeah. [00:45:26] Like, this is a generalization, right? [00:45:29] So, you know, there's some, you know, take it with a grain of salt. [00:45:32] There's some exceptions here, but. [00:45:35] At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think it is, it provides a certain measure of simplicity that I do find helpful. [00:45:40] When it comes to the devil, he has two primary strategies. [00:45:44] When it comes to unbelievers, primarily it's a strategy of deception. [00:45:48] Yes. [00:45:48] When it comes to believers, primarily it's a strategy of despair. [00:45:53] Yep. [00:45:53] So for the unbeliever, deception. [00:45:55] For the believer, despair. [00:45:57] So you think of Doubting Castle, right? [00:45:59] In Pilgrim's Progress, you know, with Christian and hopeful, and it's giant, what's his name? [00:46:04] Despair. [00:46:05] Yeah. [00:46:05] Right. [00:46:05] And so Giant Despair finds them, you know, asleep in his meadows because they had gone off the king's way and he captures them and they're shaking with fear. [00:46:13] They don't even try to run. [00:46:14] You know, so he captures them and he takes them and throws them in his dungeon, you know, in Doubting Castle. [00:46:21] And they're not deceived, they're despairing. [00:46:24] But my point is this for the unbeliever, where deception is the chief tactic of the enemy, well, the thing about deception is ultimately, if you don't come out of that deception by the grace of God, you will go to hell. [00:46:35] But in the meantime, in this life, so long as you're deceived, you can be deceived and rather happy. [00:46:40] But I don't know anybody who despairs and is happy. [00:46:43] So Christians may be less deceived, but they can. [00:46:46] Despair and so temporally in this life, they can be quite miserable. [00:46:50] Yeah, yeah. [00:46:51] Bunyan's personal testimony is such a good example. [00:46:53] I think it's seven years, so he is a drunkard, he's a reviler, and he gets saved. [00:46:58] But it's seven years he wrestles with assurance. [00:47:00] And there's one point where he literally feels, to your point, Michael, about that third category, he feels as if he's being attacked day and night deny Christ, deny Christ, be away with him. [00:47:10] And he says, like, even in just the slightest moment, he just even thinks it's not an articulation, it's most certainly not even him writing it down, but he says, He thinks the thought away with him, if you will. [00:47:20] And I think it was almost a year then later that he thought he'd committed the unforgivable sin that everyone else in church could be saved, but not him. [00:47:27] Despairing of salvation, despairing of life until he comes out on the other side of it through scriptures, through returning to the promises and saying, Wait, I don't have to despair. [00:47:36] Wait, I've been assured of this. [00:47:37] I've been assured of that. [00:47:39] I'm not without hope. [00:47:40] I can be saved. [00:47:41] And that literally set him free to sit in prison for 12 years for the truth and write Pilgrim's Progress because he said, I'm not despairing anymore. [00:47:48] And I have an assurance of the hope that I have. [00:47:50] Yeah. [00:47:51] Let's go to our second commercial break and we will be right back. [00:47:53] Are you a Christian struggling to find companies that align with your values and beliefs? [00:47:58] Well, then Squirrelly Joe's has you covered for all your coffee needs. [00:48:02] All of their coffee is hand selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers. [00:48:08] Try them out and you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to following God's teachings and upholding truth and righteousness, ensuring that your hard earned money. [00:48:21] Contributes to the growth of God's kingdom. [00:48:24] Stop giving your hard earned dollars to pagans who support evil. [00:48:28] Right Response listeners have access to an exclusive deal. [00:48:32] Your first bag of coffee is free. [00:48:35] All you have to do is cover the shipping. [00:48:37] So head on over to squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response. [00:48:42] Again, that's squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response to claim your first free bag of coffee today. [00:48:52] All right, welcome back. === Negative Thoughts and Protection (05:12) === [00:48:53] So, what we want to do here in this concluding episode. [00:48:56] Is just talk about one or two quick practical questions that face modern Christians, right? [00:49:05] As the world around us develops a deeper understanding of how the body works, what the connection between the brain and the body is, still questions about how that relates to the mind. [00:49:18] One of the things that we can be tempted to think, because we see in the New Testament, we see primarily that. [00:49:30] A lot of times, Jesus heals the afflicted, the ill, but then he also casts out demons. [00:49:38] And so, while demon possession is absolutely a legitimate category, there is the question of what is the connection to our minds? [00:49:49] Can our minds have legitimate ailments and illnesses, things like multi personality disorder, things like OCD, or other things like that? [00:50:01] So, Wes, I want to actually throw it. [00:50:03] Over to you, and just kind of get your perspective on this, having researched more heavily into the brain than the rest of us have. [00:50:10] Yeah. [00:50:10] I remember it was probably what, maybe a year and a half ago or so, that MacArthur gave some comments that were very controversial on mental health. [00:50:18] I think, particularly on PTSD, I think. [00:50:20] Yeah, particularly on PTSD, but speaking more broadly. [00:50:22] And he basically said, I think, for lack of a better term, pretty simply, I'm not trying to misrepresent them here, close to, if not, they don't exist as far as depression and anxiety. [00:50:31] Those would just be descriptions of sin. [00:50:33] So if we're describing anxiety as a condition, all we're describing is the sin of anxiety. [00:50:37] If we're describing depression, all we're describing is maybe the sin of despair. [00:50:41] Right. [00:50:41] Different things like that. [00:50:43] I don't think he's right. [00:50:43] One of the reasons is in psychology and other things, what we're always doing for one is we are looking at the word of God. [00:50:49] God has, church tradition has held two books. [00:50:52] There's the book of scripture, special revelation, but nature itself and the way our bodies are made are also a form of revelation. [00:50:59] And so when we do different studies and run the statistics and do these tests, what we're not doing is we're not just saying, well, there's the Bible and there's God's word and then there's just nature and everything over here. [00:51:10] God made both of them. [00:51:11] And so one of the tests that you'll use for statistics and for Like assessing depression is reproducibility. [00:51:17] Can I take this test and reproduce it and get the same results again and again and again? [00:51:22] And then can I observe correlations? [00:51:24] So, people that are above a certain threshold have a higher likelihood, for example, to commit suicide. [00:51:28] People that are less than this are better well adjusted. [00:51:31] And so, I really do believe that these different conditions, as far as they exist, many of them located in the body, although we are body and spirit, and there are spiritual maladies that can affect us. [00:51:41] So, not exclusively, but as far as multiple personality, OCD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, certainly. [00:51:48] They certainly can have physical, real ramifications that do have to be practically dealt with. [00:51:55] We're not talking about demon possession. [00:51:56] We're not talking about spiritual affliction. [00:51:58] We're not talking about the depression. [00:51:59] Which is not to discount that those things do exist. [00:52:00] Exactly. [00:52:01] They do. [00:52:01] They can, but not always. [00:52:03] So if you were depressed, it would not necessarily always be spiritual. [00:52:07] As far as your individual case, there are different individuals where you could look at them and say your depression could be stemming from the way you spend your time. [00:52:15] You're just, men especially, like men need a mission. [00:52:18] Like, you just don't look at a man, then it's like, well, what do you do? [00:52:21] And it's like, well, I get up around 10 a.m. ish in a given day. [00:52:25] Maybe I eat breakfast. [00:52:26] Maybe I eat lunch. [00:52:27] Maybe I play video games. [00:52:28] You don't look at a man like that. [00:52:29] How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast? [00:52:32] But I did eat breakfast. [00:52:35] Hang on. [00:52:36] But you don't look at a man that has no mission, and probably for the most part for women too, and say that's someone that is healthy, driven, focused, and happy. [00:52:45] You're going to look at someone that's very, as we were talking about earlier, introspective. [00:52:49] And so for one individual, it could be the way that they spend their time. [00:52:52] For another, it could be the patterns of thought that you've trained yourself to think again and again. [00:52:56] And you focused on the negative. [00:52:58] And women have a tendency towards this. [00:52:59] There are five personality traits openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. [00:53:06] That neuroticism, that final trait, is very high in women. [00:53:09] Women have a tendency towards negative thoughts. [00:53:12] Some of that is towards protecting children. [00:53:14] So they're inborn to be more wary of threats, more wary of sickness, more wary of something that could hurt children. [00:53:19] But for women to be aware, are you thinking negative thoughts and you're thinking them day after day after day? [00:53:24] You're not interrupting it to say, Hang on, I spent two hours thinking about how miserable this is or how terrible that is or how this could go wrong. [00:53:30] I haven't stopped myself. [00:53:31] I haven't quoted scripture. [00:53:32] I haven't prayed. [00:53:33] Well, if you haven't done those things and you just thought those same thoughts, you've done that for months, and then you take a standardized test that's reproducible and you have anxiety, well, of course you do. [00:53:43] You've thought about these things over and over and over again. [00:53:46] So, in some cases, it's how am I taking care of the body in my diet, in my activity, in my career, my profession, and others of it, how am I thinking? [00:53:57] And others of it, am I sleeping well? [00:53:59] So there's a myriad of causes for it. [00:54:01] I couldn't sit here and say, you're a man, you're depressed, it must be this, must be that. === Embodied Souls and Oppression (06:19) === [00:54:06] But they really do exist. [00:54:07] And all that being said, reading the Bible in and of itself probably isn't going to solve it. [00:54:12] Now, if it's spiritual and the malady is spiritual in nature, then you do have to go to the scriptures and say, God has said this and said this, and he will take care of me. [00:54:20] Nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus. [00:54:23] And I'm going to stand on that. [00:54:24] But also, practically, like some of you young men need to put on some boots and go get a job. [00:54:28] Oh, what a surprise. [00:54:29] I'm not depressed anymore. [00:54:30] Well, who would have thought? [00:54:31] And so, take an honest assessment. [00:54:34] What do I do? [00:54:35] What could I improve on? [00:54:36] I could sleep better. [00:54:38] I could work harder. [00:54:39] I could do this thing. [00:54:40] To address what are, I think, real categories that really just we live in a fallen world and our bodies themselves are awaiting the redemption and the resurrection when they'll be perfected and they won't have depression, anxiety, et cetera. [00:54:52] So, in terms of biblical anthropology, we are not bodies who have a soul and we are not souls who have a body, but rather we are embodied souls. [00:55:00] Embodied souls. [00:55:01] You're both. [00:55:02] So, when we go to a funeral, even for the Christian, you know, and it's an open casket, you know, and it's grandma and she was a Christian and we're about to put her six feet under the ground. [00:55:13] We don't just say, oh, that's an empty shell and that's not grandma. [00:55:15] No, that is grandma. [00:55:17] So, grandma is, in terms of her spirit, her soul, there is grandma who is with the Lord, right? [00:55:25] Paul says in scripture to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. [00:55:28] So, grandma is with the Lord. [00:55:30] And also, that body that I'm looking at at this funeral in this open casket that we're about to bury six feet under the ground is also grandma. [00:55:37] It's not just an empty, meaningless shell. [00:55:40] That's grandma. [00:55:41] And we love her. [00:55:42] And that part of her, namely her body, Is going to be resurrected by Christ on the final day, and the soul and the body will be rejoined. [00:55:52] And so she's going to have a prolonged existence in the soul with the Lord. [00:55:59] But upon the final resurrection in glorification, there's justification, there's sanctification, there's glorification, glorification, the resurrection of the body. [00:56:08] When that takes place on that final day, her body is going to be a resurrected body, a new body, but it's not a new body, meaning another body. [00:56:16] It's that same body that we just buried, made new. [00:56:20] So that body matters. [00:56:21] It has significance and it's going to be resurrected and glorified and rejoined with her soul. [00:56:25] And she's going to have an eternal existence as an embodied soul with the Lord forever. [00:56:31] That's the type of creature that we are. [00:56:33] We're not just bodies with a soul and we're not just souls that possess temporarily a body. [00:56:39] We are embodied souls. [00:56:40] And so, because of that, we're not Gnostics, meaning that we recognize that the physical does matter. [00:56:46] God created a physical, literal world, and upon its creation, God says, it is good. [00:56:53] Right. [00:56:54] God didn't say he made the world and it's really bad, you know, and the body is really just a prison and the soul, you know, its ultimate endeavor and goal in life is to escape the prison, you know, and get out of the body. [00:57:05] No, the body is good, fallen because of the curse of sin, but good. [00:57:10] And so, all that being said, when we deal with depression, anxiety, and all kinds of mental disorders, there is the spiritual side. [00:57:18] One is just expectation, the mental side of just, we need to have realistic expectations. [00:57:24] Life has challenges, life has difficulties. [00:57:27] And so, to expect to be constantly and perpetually happy all the time is just an unreasonable expectation. [00:57:33] But then, as we go to matters of the soul, the dark night of the soul, melancholy, these kinds of things that the Puritans and others wrote about, we need to consider unconfessed sin. [00:57:43] We also need to consider demonic activity and oppression. [00:57:47] I don't believe that Christians can be possessed by demons. [00:57:51] I absolutely reject that. [00:57:52] So, I don't believe that for the Christian, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. [00:57:57] Who is in you, whom you have received from God. [00:58:00] You were bought with a price, therefore honor God with your bodies. [00:58:03] So, your body is a temple of the third member of the Trinity, and the devil does not like to be roommates with God. [00:58:11] And so, if you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit resides within you, and the Holy Spirit is not going to be roommates with the devil or any of his minions. [00:58:20] So, I don't believe that the Christian can be demonically possessed, but the Christian most certainly can be demonically oppressed. [00:58:28] And so, there can be demonic attack, demonic pressure, demonic activity, and oppression. [00:58:34] So, that's a matter of the soul as well. [00:58:37] So, with the soul, do I have unconfessed sin? [00:58:39] Also, in terms of a matter of the soul, do I have an assurance of salvation? [00:58:43] That's a huge one. [00:58:45] Am I confident in my salvation that Christ has provided? [00:58:48] Do I understand the foundation of the gospel, the security I have in Christ? [00:58:52] Also, am I fighting against the enemy and attacks from Satan? [00:58:57] And then on the physical side of the equation, start simple and then build up, right? [00:59:03] So, I am not of the position that you can never take any medication. [00:59:07] I think. [00:59:07] The majority of the time, we are an over diagnosed culture and we have a pill for everything. [00:59:13] So I think we should be extraordinarily wary about that. [00:59:17] But I don't hold just a universal position. [00:59:20] There can never be any medicine, period. [00:59:22] But start with the basics. [00:59:23] So, first, am I sleeping at night and am I going to bed at 2 a.m. or am I trying to go to bed at a reasonable time, wake up at a reasonable time? [00:59:32] In addition to that, do I have good eating habits and good diet? [00:59:35] In addition to that, exercise. [00:59:37] So, sleep, diet, exercise. [00:59:39] Then beyond that, that's all physical, right? [00:59:41] Because you're not just a soul that has a body, but you're an embodied soul. [00:59:44] The body is you, and the soul is you, both. [00:59:47] So, sleep, diet, exercise, and then beyond that, if you've done all of that, if you're confessing your sins, acknowledging your sin, repenting of your sin, trusting in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the assurance of salvation that he's purchased on your behalf, and you are praying and fighting against temptation and the tactics of the enemy and demonic oppression. [01:00:10] And you're also sleeping and you're also eating a healthy diet and you're also exercising, and there's still something that just is terribly wrong, then it might be time to consider some measured form of medicine. === Birth Control and Hormones (04:12) === [01:00:25] But that should probably be a last resort. [01:00:27] And I'm willing to bet that for the majority, this spike of just mental insanity that is a plague and an epidemic in our country, I think for the majority, it's not just because everybody has some medical case that needs some kind of. [01:00:45] Medicine, I think, for the vast majority, I'm chemical imbalance theories really falling out in the medical literature that used to be for a while. [01:00:51] Like, well, there's depression, it's because some people have a chemical imbalance in their brain, oxytocin, and exactly that's just for one. [01:00:58] SSRIs are not great for it, and uh, that theory just as we know more about the brain, it's really not holding up. [01:01:04] And so, don't buy into that idea like, oh, well, you're depressed, it's not anything you've done, it's just your brain is unbalanced. [01:01:09] You just need this little magical pill that also kills your drive, your ambition, keeps you in bed all day. [01:01:17] That's what you need to fix it. [01:01:18] Well, so for the vast majority of Americans, I think many of their problems, the vast majority would be solved simply by diet, exercise, sleep, and then, even more importantly, believing upon the Lord Jesus Christ, being secure in his gospel and his salvation, confessing your sins regularly to other brothers and sisters in Christ. [01:01:39] And in your confession, you're not just acknowledging your sin, but you're agreeing with what God says about your sin. [01:01:44] You're not looking to be consoled, but rather you're looking to repent. [01:01:48] Not looking merely to be consoled in your sin, but to repent of your sin. [01:01:52] And then the last thing that I would leave it with in the case of women who do struggle at a much higher degree than men is also consider getting off of birth control. [01:02:03] Oh, well, birth, if you are on birth control, you have to get off that. [01:02:06] Yeah. [01:02:07] It's just, it's terrible. [01:02:08] I'm not. [01:02:09] You say, if you are on birth control, just for the record, you are a woman on birth control. [01:02:12] Yeah. [01:02:13] Well, but they do prescribe it to men too for acne sometimes for other things. [01:02:18] But real quick, Wes, just because we've talked about this before, maybe we could kind of land the plane here because I can hear my family in the other room. [01:02:25] With birth control, doesn't that? [01:02:27] I'm not wrong there. [01:02:29] No, absolutely. [01:02:29] It increases, I think, the risk of suicide, the risk of cancer in women. [01:02:33] And this is the craziest one. [01:02:34] Women will date a man on birth control. [01:02:36] So they'll be on birth control and they'll find him attractive. [01:02:38] Because what birth control is doing, it's essentially mimicking a certain part of the cycle and all of this. [01:02:43] And a woman's, she changes as she goes through the month. [01:02:47] So the birth control mimics that artificially. [01:02:50] So a woman will be attracted to a man, start to date him, marry him on birth control, and then she'll go off of it and actually not be attracted to him. [01:02:57] Now, in and of itself, I mean, That's not like happens every single time. [01:03:02] But what he's getting at is that this is fundamentally altering something that we don't understand. [01:03:07] That a woman's cycle and the progesterone, luteinizing hormone, all the different things that ebb and flow during the month, God not create that you can just, oh, we're going to press a button. [01:03:16] We're just going to do more of this. [01:03:17] Everything's going to be fine. [01:03:18] You get crazy things, weird things, suicide, hormonal changes. [01:03:23] I mean, tons of women, they've done birth control. [01:03:25] I remember friends, and they're like, in the first couple months of marriage, we started it, and it was terrible. [01:03:30] Like, My wife was moody. [01:03:32] She was anxious. [01:03:32] She was snapping. [01:03:33] We got off of it. [01:03:35] She's like, Oh, I feel a lot better. [01:03:36] It is not anything aside from, I know endometriosis is one case where it's sometimes prescribed. [01:03:42] You'd have to look into it. [01:03:43] Typically, you actually do surgery to try to remove that. [01:03:46] But if you need to short term to manage it, that's one thing. [01:03:48] But generally speaking, I can almost not fathom a case where a Christian woman would need to be on birth control for years on end. [01:03:54] It was prescribed heavily for acne in teens, especially female teens. [01:03:59] And my wife, who does a consulting. [01:04:03] Service for with functional medicine, she's having to detox women still who are suffering from the effects of five years of adolescence on these hormonal birth control drugs, not for birth control, but for acting. [01:04:18] And it has just absolutely devastated their body's natural ability to gain health. [01:04:24] And I'm talking 10, 20 years later, still dealing with it. [01:04:29] All right. [01:04:29] Well, we hope that this episode has been helpful for you. [01:04:33] And Lord willing, we will see you guys again this Friday. [01:04:37] I'm done.