Introduction to Mental Health Talks

Greetings in the name of the Lord and you're back for another Brevist talk. In season three we will talk about mental health and mental illness in the church, and so let's get started. I do want to say first of all that we are unapologetically and clearly coming from a Christian perspective. That does not mean that non-Christians can't listen and benefit, but we want that understood. We are Christian people, we are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. John 14.6,. Christ said I'm the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And then John, chapter 10. We are told that God wants us to have abundant life. Christ came, he said, to give us life, and that more abundantly. And so that's the perspective that we're coming from. Jesus fulfills our life and Jesus uses many, many things to help us. He uses God's word, he uses other Christians, wise people, and you will talk about this later. He uses medication in some sense, and some of the Christian world does not know how to deal with that or they flat out reject it and that's unfortunate. But we will talk about that. We'll be open, we'll be honest, we'll be forthright. We're not going to be argumentative. I'm going to tell you my personal testimony. I don't hide my mental deficiencies anymore. I always thought a strong leader didn't show things and was always strong at all times, in all situations. And yet the Holy Scripture speaks against that. The Lord said in 2 Corinthians that when we are weak, he is strong and juxtaposed I would say that when we're strong in our flesh, that is, then he is weak only from the scenery of the ability to do a work through us, because we are self-sufficient in and of ourselves and we'll work off and we'll run off the power and the limitations that we have. But when we let the Lord do what the Lord can only do, we run with an unlimited, infinite source and resource of power. So we're going to have these conversations. These conversations will be. They'll have minimum editing. I own all the bloopers, the respeaks. I'm sure I'll repeat myself. I own all of that. I don't want this to come across as put out commercially and I just want to be honest with you. I want to share my heart and I hope the Lord will use it. I hope it'll prompt discussions about the pain that people suffer in their minds. You know we're in the church world. We're okay with a broken leg. If you have a broken leg. You go and you get a cast put on it and the doctor says don't put any weight on it. And then if you are immobile, sometimes people will come beside you and help you. They'll carry you or help you to keep that weight off of it. Well, we need to do the same thing concerning those who have broken minds. We can't see that with a naked eye, but I tell you, a broken mind is no less real than a broken bone or a broken leg. I have 42 years in ministry experience, and I don't say that to impress anyone. A young minister asked me recently what to do in a situation and my answer was well, I can tell you what not to do. But in that 42 years, I've seen some things over and over and over. I have seen brokenness among the church people. I've seen pain and I have seen a pain that they felt like needed and had to be hidden. I've heard the wrong answers, the trite and the simple answers that were given to these people in such a way that they didn't dare ask again because they thought they were the odd man out, if you will, or the minority. I will tell you, in pastoral experience of better than 35 plus years more than that. That pastor, if you're listening to this, there's probably 20% of your congregation that is on some sort of medication. That's just the reality. If you don't like that or you have a problem with it, some individuals I know of faster that I've crossed his path many times. He believes that if you have enough faith you don't need any medication for anything. That's problematic because is he suggesting that every Christian get off medications for diabetes, hypertension? There are those who will say well, it's not in the Bible, therefore we're not going to utilize it. Well, central heat and air conditioning is not in the Bible either. The automobile is not in the Bible. Do you really want to go down that path and down that hill? But they'll tell people you don't have enough faith and you need to faith it if you will. And what happens is people can't faith it and they're not fixed and they're not any better than they fake it. They faith it and it doesn't work, and so they fake it and they'll tell everyone I'm just fine, I'm doing fine, and so any church Sunday morning and probably any area. We've got some religious faces, we've got some facades, we've got some folks that are broken, but they dare not show it. So let's have an open conversation, or have open conversations about this. Again, I'll tell you my personal testimony, where I'm coming from and I have gotten help and I am doing much better. And I'll tell you my family's testimony, and much of it is beyond heartbreaking and I don't like to tell it, I don't like to relive it, but if it will help some someone, then it's going to be retold. So depression is not something that you're going to knock down in a fell sweep. You don't knock a tree down with the swing of an axe. One time it, the tree, comes down chip by chip by chip, and so we'll be talking a lot about punching a hole into darkness, punching a hole into a dark wall or a dark cloud in your life, and so it's not going to be a one swing. So don't get discouraged. If you do some things that you ought to do and you're just a little better, be encouraged because you're going in the right direction. And one step. You know every walk, every journey, every trip begins with one step, and so if you take a step in the right direction, you are doing well, and I want to encourage you concerning that. You know God uses a multitude of things. I just was honored to have a funeral service that I had a part in, of a saint who was just shy of 98 years of age. Godly, godly lady, much wisdom. Only heaven knows how many people she helped with her godly counsel. I know I came across a lady, her name came up and this lady, with tears and rice, says to me about this elderly lady. She saved my marriage and she was about to toss it out the window and leave and she said no, no, no, you stay there. What you're talking about is fixable and through prayer and wisdom that particular marriage was fixable and it's now ongoing for many, many years. So God uses wise people. Proverbs talks about the wise counsel and we should all have some someones in our lives that we can go to, that have been in this walk with Jesus longer than we have, and they will give us wise counsel and they won't tell us what we want to hear. They'll tell us what we need to hear. They'll be honest, certainly, they'll be kind and they'll be gentle. They're not a trite, not going after your jugular, so to speak, but they will give a kind word, a gentle word, but it'll be a truthful word, and truth, you know sometimes hurts, and so you need some someone's like that. If you don't have a team of people like that, someone wise in the Lord and I would say, if you say you've got three of them, I would say they're not all bottled up in one little group. You've got one in this, your church, maybe you've got one that is down the road somewhere, maybe in someone else's church, and they're spread out and you don't talk to them in the same room at the same meeting, but you converse with them if you have questions on an individual basis, and quite often the wisdom that they grant you, they give you, is going to be consistent with what the other person said. It's just an amazing thing to see this, and I've seen this so, so many times. I've seen it in my own life and so have wise counsel. Again, we're going to punch some holes in darkness, going to suggest that there's some things that you can do. Here we are not giving medical advice. What we do is not to be taken above the counsel of your family physician or your health professional. You see them, and if you don't have a family physician and you're struggling with some sort of mental illness, please, please, go see or establish yourself with a family physician and a medical doctor. You need that, you absolutely need that. And then if you're down the road and you've sought treatment from a family physician and you really don't seem to have any victories there, or you continue to be feel like you haven't made much progress, I encourage you to get to a specialist. I'll talk a lot more about these specialists, but talk therapy. First of all, a counselor, it works, it absolutely works. James, chapter five speaks of confessing our sins or shortcomings to one another. There is healing in this. It is very therapeutic to be able to sit with someone and then, without being judged to have a listening ear, you can just spill if you will. And so the talk therapy, a counselor and you may have to see that counselor ongoing. You may have to see them for six months. You may be a year and a half later. You're still seeing that counselor. Please don't feel bad about that. There are lots of people that are under the care of a counselor and they need to stay under the care of a counselor. And then the specialist, a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, there's a shortage of them and they really do. The ones I know and I know some good ones I've had, have acquaintances and friendships. They really do know these medications, the mixture of the meds, what can and cannot be mixed. They really are specialists and they know so, so much more and they're not afraid to push the envelope where a family physician would not do some of the things that they do. So we're going to have conversations, we're going to talk about that which is in the church, we're going to be forthright and we are going to speak those things that need to be spoken. I am a fellow traveler on this planet. Anything I know is from the school of Hard Knocks. So so much I didn't learn from school or seminary and I'm grateful I had the opportunities to go to school. But there's so so much that just walking through the mud, walking through the mud with the others and then seeing others walk through the mud. Let's say something here about life. Life is tough. It is tough. Job said that. Man born of woman. His days are few and full of trouble. So life is tough. Let's not minimize that. There is a lot of pain in this life and if you live long enough, you're going to suffer a great, great deal of pain. Now I'm not when I talk about mental illness and specifically, I'm sounding off today about depression. I'm not suggesting to you that you won't go through trials, tribulations. I'm not suggesting to you that when you go through trials and tribulations and you don't feel 100% like you're having a grand day in the greatest season of your life, that this is something that treatment is going to help. We go through the furnace, just like the three Hebrew children. We go through the fire to be purified, that precious gold that's spoken over. Peter talks about it in the New Testament. So that's not no matter. No matter of therapy is going to short-circuit the work of Christ. You see the Lord when he's working on us. He's always working on us. He's working things out of us and he's working things in us. And so don't confuse the work of God, the trials, the tribulations that we go through that make us stronger in the Lord. Don't confuse that. And so it's hard to sometimes figure this out. Engage this. But let me tell you don't be the center of your universe. Don't think that if you don't get your way, all the time that you're being afflicted, you're being persecuted and people don't understand you. Sometimes you just need to look in the mirror and say there's the problem. So I, you know, tough love, whatever you want to call it. So this is not going to just be kids' gloves type stuff. I mean, when you're wrong, you're wrong and you need to understand that. Quite often you and I are wrong, but God uses many, many things to help us and to bring us to the wholeness. He restored my soul, the psalmist said in Psalm 23. I liken the fall of man and the fall was higher and greater, I think, than we realize making a glass vase and it falling off of something from a distance and just shatters. That's who we are. That's a picture of what we're like, and we can't put the pieces back together. You remember Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and the king's horses and all that couldn't put him together again. It's always been strange to me that horses would be able to put somebody back together, but anyway, it's a great story and Humpty Dumpty couldn't put himself together. You can't put yourself back together, and specialist and wisdom, all the things that I just about bragged on, they can't do it in and of themselves. The Lord, jesus Christ, restored my soul. He puts the pieces back together, and so there's that promise that we are fragmented, that we're broken, and the Lord is the great restore. You remember, at the pool of Bethesda and the Gospel recording to John, jesus asked the guy that was right next to the water do you want to be made whole? What a question. What a question. Do you want to be made whole? I hope you're not one of these people that hangs on to their problems because you're secure in that and you carry baggage, believe it or not. There are people that I don't think want to be made whole. They carry their baggage because they get some mileage out of it. Many years ago I taught a Bible study, a home Bible study, and this lady came and I'm not trying to judge her and be unkind, please. If you saw the situation, I believe you'd see it my way. She would come in and go to the corner and put a face on and just look around, but over and over she did this and it was like a script. Many, all of us at one time, would go to her and what's wrong and she would play her story. But when you try to help her, to get help, to get some help, to talk to people to be prayed with and prayed over, she wasn't having it. I don't believe that she wanted to be made whole. I believe that she wanted to continue to get the mileage or attention out of whatever she was getting out of that. She would somber look and her face low on the top of her shoelaces, so to speak, and she got the mileage out of it. When you ask about helping her and all that, she didn't have it. She absolutely rejected it forthrightly. I'm not guessing this, this is not my mind. She rejected any help of any kind. So tragic. So do you want to be made whole? Because Jesus is the great healer and again he uses people, he uses his word, he uses so, so many things. So he restored my soul. I want to close with a little story. I love stories. All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. Romans 8, 28. You hear the all things the good, the bad, the ugly, all things. It literally means all things your bad days, your good days, your trials, your fears. Everything works together. In the end, the sum total of this life for a believer in Christ is good. You take it as an equation Good plus bad, plus ugly, and then you just list it and behind all of that draw the equal sign the two bars, one on top of the other there, and the sum total of all that the word of God says is good. Now I want you to think about building, or building making a pie, wonderful pecan pie. For you non-southerners that are listening, it's a pecan pie, but it really is pecan and we'll forgive you if you don't say that correctly. I'm just joking. Well, if you spread the ingredients out across the table, you've got sugar, you've got flour, you've got pecans, you've got all these different things and if you do a taste test and taste each of these things, that's not so good. Can you just lick your finger and imagine putting your finger down in the flour and then putting the flour in your mouth? That's not so good. But when you take those ingredients and you put them together and they have to go through the oven, you mix them, you shake them. God takes all this stuff in our lives. He takes it, he shakes it, he stirs it Our lives are stirred quite often different ways and then he puts or we put, that pie, that stirred ingredients into an oven and we expose it to tremendous amount of heat for a certain amount of time. And just like that, the believer is stirred with all these things and then we are put into the furnace, the heat, for a certain amount of time and when it comes out, folks, I love a pecan pie. I don't apologize for that. I absolutely love a pecan pie, one that's well made. I've had some. I had a lady serve me one time. There was bragging about it. I was at doing a revival meeting the last night. Everyone had bragged about it all week and she made it and forgot one of the ingredients and it was not so good. God takes us out of the heat and the sum total of that is good in our lives. So we're going to go through much in this life, but getting help concerning mental illness, the brokenness, the restoring of the soul. It is picking someone up that has been knocked flat. It is picking someone up who's been knocked down so many times that they're so discouraged that they don't have anything left to pick themselves back up. But they want to get up and they want to be in the game, they want to live life and they want to have joy and friendship and be plugged into a church and have those things. But they don't know how to get started. They don't know how to get up and life has been terribly, terribly tough on them. Well, there's good news. The Lord wants you to get up, more than what you want to get up, and the Church of Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ, is to pick these people up and we're going to help these people, and so we're going to have conversations, because I found that light is the greatest antiseptic. When you shine light on something, you minimize its power. Well, god bless you. We'll stop there and we'll pick up a little bit later. Thank you for stopping by. Please tell people about the podcast and the conversations that we'll be having concerning mental illness and health. Jesus is Lord. Praise His holy name.