“For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me.” -Psalm 38.4
“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” -Matthew 11.29-30
Over the past several months I have found myself in very unusual place spiritually. Since November 2007 God has been doing a mighty work in my life and at every turn he has been changing my perspective, changing my attitude, changing my expectations. And along the way, in seeing these new things, I have become extremely wrapped up in the depravity of man. Not in an experimental way, but simply in that I have been learning afresh the myriad ways in which the human heart is wicked; how even though we view these days as being peculiarly evil, they are, in fact, no more evil than all the days which man has inhabited the earth. And focusing on mankind’s wickedness I started focusing on my own, and every little slip, every misstep, every wrong thought in my head or angry word spoken to my wife or daughter hit me more and more acutely than they ever had before. I began to read and meditate on the penitential psalms like Psalms 6, 38, 51, and 130. My sin, as David says in Psalm 51.3, was ever before me, and it depressed my spirit.
I think this depression was aided by my attitude towards certain ideas. I am always weary of resting on those light and optimistic verses like Philippians 4.12 or Jeremiah 29.11 because I have been jaded at their rampant misuse in the “Church-ianity” of our day. Yet in taking this attitude I also managed to miss out on the optimistic words that were lying at the end of the very psalms I was reading and being brought down by.
Take Psalm 38. It starts out, “O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath! . . . there is no health in my bones because of my sin . . . My wounds stink and fester because of my foolishness” (v.1, 3b, 5). So, I would read these words and ruminate on how ugly my wounds are, how deserving I am of God’s discipline and wrath, and it tore down my soul. And in my arrogance I did not spend time in the closing lines, “But for you, O LORD, do I wait; it is you, O Lord my God, who will answer. . . . Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!” (v.15, 22).
Or what about Psalm 6: “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes” (vv.6-7), and yet, “The LORD has heard my plea; the LORD accepts my prayer” (v.9).
I saw the sadness, the brokenness, and cried out with the psalmist about the burden of my own sin. I was broken, beat down by the weight of my own lingering filth, even after God’s transforming work on my heart. I was just so frustrated at the remaining flesh warring, and many times winning, against my spirit. But it wasn’t until the other night when God lifted the veil, removed the temporary blinders I had put on and forgotten about the glory of grace. It was my flaw, my failing, that I had become so upset about my own unrighteousness that I neglected Christ’s righteousness.
This is so difficult and I can’t say as I have fully rectified all that I am thinking. There is such a fine line between the obedience we are called to and the holiness that we cannot on our own attain. There is so much frustration in my bones when I find myself as Paul saying, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7.15). And yet, at the end of the day, the one amazing truth is that “God made [me] alive together with [Christ], having forgiven [me] all [my] trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against [me] with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2.13b-14).
I thank God for opening my eyes to better appreciate his grace, which, though I was unable at first to see it, he so providential wrote about right next to the very words that had fed my depression.
