Spiritual Depression: Seeing Clearly

Lloyd-Jones titles chapter 4 of his book, Spiritual Depression, “Men as Trees, Walking.”  He calls our attention to Mark 8:22-26, an account of Jesus healing a blind man in two “attempts.”  I put the word “attempts” in quotation marks because Lloyd-Jones argues that the first attempt, which resulted in the blind man seeing of sorts (men walking as though trees), was not successful at producing perfectly restored sight.  Lloyd-Jones argues that this miracle was a parable of sorts.  He says it’s placed here in Mark’s gospel as a lesson to the disciples, “to enable the disciples to see themselves as they were” (p. 39).  Lloyd-Jones contends that the disciples were beginning to see Jesus, but they were not yet seeing as fully as they ought.  They were in process.  Their understanding was not yet whole.  They were, like the man in Mark 8, blind and not blind.

In this sermon/chapter, Lloyd-Jones describes the problem this way:

I am concerned about these Christians who are disquieted and unhappy and miserable because of this lack of clarity.  It is almost impossible to define them.  You sometimes talk to this type and you think: “This man is a Christian.”  And then you meet him again and you are thrown into doubt at once, and you say: “Surely he cannot be a Christian if he can say a thing like that or do such a thing as that.”

Whenever you meet this man you get a different impression; and you never quite know whether he is a Christian or not.  You are not happy in saying either that he does see of that he does not see.  Furthermore, the difficulty is that not only do others feel like this about these people, they feel it about themselves.  Let me pay them that tribute, they are unhappy because they are not clear about themselves.  … [T]hey are as troubles about themselves as other Christians are about them; they feel they are, and they feel they are not Christians.  They seem to know enough about Christianity to spoil their enjoyment of the world, and yet they do not know enough to feel happy about themselves.  They are “neither hot nor cold.”   Keep Reading...