Puritans counseling the spiritually depressed on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast, I'm delighted to have with me, Dr. Joel Beakey.

He's a chancellor and professor of homiletics and systematic and practical theology

at Puritan Reform Theological Seminary.

He's a pastor of the Heritage Reform Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan,

editor of Puritan Reform Journal and Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth.

He's a board chairman of Reformation Heritage Books, a frequent speaker at reform conferences

around the world, and he's a prolific author. Dr. Beakie, it's always so good to be with you,

brother, and I'm so grateful to allow our audience to hear you even today on this topic. So thank you for being with us.

Thanks for having me, Dale. Now, we're going to talk about the concept of being depressed and then how

the Puritans approach. I can't think of a better person to really help us to take Puritan thinking

from the scriptures and apply so deeply to an issue that is so common to humanity.

So I want you to first talk about what did the Puritans mean when they were

approaching this concept of spiritual depression?

Yeah, for the Puritans, spiritual depression was an important part of what they called

melancholy, kind of a sadness that overcame people.

Word spiritual refers particularly in their mind to our relationship with God.

So a sense of divine desertion, a sense of, I just can't find contact with God. My life isn't what it used to be.

And it produces guilt. It produces sorrow. It brings him down. And Richard Baxter actually gives in his

Christian directory 35 symptoms of coming into 35 of them.

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