Quotes from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones ·  300 pages

Rating: (3K votes)


“To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say “Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?” And they hesitate. And then I say, “What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?” And so often people say, “I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.” And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, “Well, I don’t think I’ good enough,” but it’s a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, “I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,” you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn’t matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“We are all in such a hurry, we want everything at once. We believe that all truth can be stated in a few minutes. The answer to that is that it cannot.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“Abraham had the same experience (Genesis 15).”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure



“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“this other man within us, has got to be handled. Do not listen to him; turn on him; speak to him; condemn him; upbraid him; exhort him; encourage him; remind him of what you know, instead of listening placidly to him and allowing him to drag you down and depress you.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“In other words, the man who is dejected and disquieted and miserable, who is unhappy and depressed always shows it in his face. He looks troubled and he looks worried. You take one glance at him and you see his condition. Yes, says the Psalmist in effect, but when I really look at God, as I get better, my face gets better also—‘He is the health of my countenance’.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“There is nothing more futile, when dealing with this condition, than to act on the assumption that all Christians are identical in every respect.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“Physical conditions play their part in all this. It is very difficult to draw the line between this and the previous cause because temperament seems to some degree to be controlled by physical conditions and there are certain people who constitutionally, almost in a physical sense, are prone to this condition. In other words, there are certain physical ailments which tend to promote depression”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure



“If you recognize, however, that the physical may be partly responsible for your spiritual condition and make allowances for that, you will be better able to deal with the spiritual. Another frequent cause of spiritual depression is what we may describe as a reaction—a reaction after a great blessing, a reaction after some unusual and exceptional experience. I hope to call attention sometime to the case of Elijah under the juniper tree. There is no doubt in my mind that his main trouble was that he was suffering from a reaction, a reaction after what had happened on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19).”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


About the author

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Born place: in Cardiff, The United Kingdom
Born date December 20, 1899
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“If love is easy, you're not doing it right.”
― Sophie Kinsella, quote from Surprise Me


“My first choice would be to give you more god children, but that would be far too cruel a thing to do—to them.”
― Allison Tebo, quote from The Reluctant Godfather


“One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?


“The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Great Reckoning


“The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature


Interesting books

Another Country
(10.1K)
Another Country
by James Baldwin
Dogshit Saved My Life
(134)
Dogshit Saved My Lif...
by Karl Wiggins
Fixed on You
(44.1K)
Fixed on You
by Laurelin Paige
Full Dark, No Stars
(75.4K)
Full Dark, No Stars
by Stephen King
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
(13.6K)
Goodbye, Columbus an...
by Philip Roth
Dombey and Son
(11.6K)
Dombey and Son
by Charles Dickens

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.