Only Jesus can truly change your life

Depression: “a hopelessness, that is not consistent with reality”

Psalm 42:3-5

My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?" These things I remember how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

2 Corinthians 1:8

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.

Matthew 26:38

Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Psalm 42:5

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Deuteronomy 30:19

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life...

Choose life by controlling your thoughts

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Choose life by controlling your thoughts

My response: Replace the lies with God’s truth

Choose life by Fixing your eyes

Matthew 6:22-23

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

We are choosing life by fixing our eyes

Response: I will guard what I let come into my body

Choose life by setting your hope in God

John 11:20

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

John 11:27

Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

John 11:21-22

“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

John 11:25

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Choose life by setting your hope in God

My Response: I’m going to focus on, not on what I see but on what Jesus said

“And as we mature, we begin to realize that the Spirit of Christ is actually within us. The cross emerges off the printed page, it stands upright before us, confronting us with our own Gethsemanes, our own Golgothas—but also our own resurrections through which we ascend spiritually into the true Presence of the Lord.”

- Francis Frangipane, Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God