Listened to a talk by CJ Mahaney today on Humility (Isaiah 66), my first CJ talk and I enjoyed. Also last month I read the book ‘The Enemy Within‘. Both Mahaney and Lundgaard quote Martin Lloyd-Jones’ book ‘Spiritual Depression’ and this idea of talking to yourself. In defeating sin, and specifically defeating pride (the opposite of Humility), and the fear and worries that come from the pride of being self-reliant, Lloyd-Jones offers the remedy of talking to yourself. What does that mean? I think it’s probably two things: reminding yourself of who you are in Christ, your status before God - now justified, being sanctified, awaiting glory. And second, reminding youself of your status before God - a creature dependant on the Creator, sons in need of a Father, sheep in need of a Shepherd. Hymn writer Joseph Scriven summed it up when he wrote:

O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

I say that we must talk to ourselves instead of allowing ‘ourselves’ to talk to us! Do you realize what that means? I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realised that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him he starts talking to himself. ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have had but little experience.

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.

Martin Lloyd-Jones - Spiritual Depression