Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The speaker begins by praying for guidance and discussing the topic of depression. They emphasize the importance of recognizing and sharing feelings associated with depression. They also mention bodily symptoms and changes in behavior and activities as signs of depression. The speaker then moves on to discuss the role of thoughts in depression and introduces ten false thought patterns commonly associated with depression. They explain that these thought patterns can lead to a negative spiral of emotions and behaviors. Alright, let's pray and get started. I would pray that you would open our eyes to see the truth of your word, that we would be as a result of having spent time here together this morning more mindful of you and our calling as Christians. In Jesus' name, Amen. We have been looking at the topic of depression for the last few weeks. This week we're going to be continuing what we started last week, hope to end it, which is looking at some of the conditions of depression, what it might look like to be depressed. We saw, just like life situation in general, that it's very hard to see what your own life is like, therefore involving others is important and even key to healthy engagement with the way your life is going. Sometimes just pausing and reflecting on what's going on will make you see that, yeah, something's not right here. Things are off-kilter, especially in a culture that's running so far and so fast. We also saw that there are these feelings, these particular kinds of feelings that we experience that can be the condition of depression. What are some of the feelings, what are some of the ways that people who are depressed feel? Okay, angry with God and with others. Feeling sadness, good. Feel that life is worthless and what was the one thing that we saw about all these kinds of feelings? It's very important to recognize and to let other peoples know about those kinds of feelings. That's right, it is that those feelings are not inherently non-Christian. Those are the ways that Christians can, have, and will feel, so it's not something that should totally and completely shock us. Oh, there we go, a moment of sadness, feel that life is worthless, feel extreme anxiety and panic that God hates you and is far away, and then lastly, kind of the culmination of all that, just feeling suicidal or longing to die. There might, as we saw last week, you probably have some of these feelings at some point in time. I know I do. Now, they're to varying degrees and it doesn't always come on in the same way. You might say, well, I've got like the angry with God thing and the anxiety thing, but I don't really feel that God hates me or that life is worthless. That's fine. This isn't like a, you know, seven point diagnosis of scale one to five and if you score over this then you're depressed and you need to go get some help. Rather, these are the kinds of things that if found in you and are unexpected and are just kind of, this is the way you're generally feeling, might be a sign of the fact that you're depressed. So following on from that, then we're going to just bodily symptoms. See, I'm not a doctor or anything, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time here. All I would like to say here is that, as we saw a couple weeks ago, we are, as human beings, both body and spirit. When something goes wrong with our bodies, often times, things go wrong in our spirit or just kind of our brains, it affects our spiritual state before God and just our thoughts and all that kind of stuff. So what are some general signs, what do you think, if you've been depressed or whatever you can speak from personal experience, what are some just physical signs that maybe you're depressed? Yeah. You sleep a lot? Anger? Yeah. You eat a lot? You don't eat. You also might not sleep because of the anxiety and everything. You go, wait a second, Jeremy, there's times when I sleep a lot, times I don't sleep at all. I mean, just give me the diagnosis, this is the thing, there's not like this one specific thing. Really, what happens with the bodily symptoms is your body doesn't act normally, so I don't usually sleep very much. I know that I am down when I just want to go to bed and, as we've said, there's a difference between just feeling down and being depressed. Most of us, if you have not felt down, you're wrong, right? You're probably deceiving yourself. There have been periods where you're just like, you know what, I am done with today, I am done with this week. Sometimes that happens on Monday, right? You're just like, yeah, I'm checking out for the rest of the week. Sometimes it doesn't take until Sunday, sometimes you've got a great week, but if your bodily symptoms are off for an extended period of time, man, maybe something's up. It could be like, it seems like it's always an overexpression of one thing, so like, you want to sleep a lot, or you are overly sad, or you are angry at some extreme, or whatever. Right, yeah, and it's usually going to be the thing that's extreme and opposed to the kind of way you usually are, or like, if you like to sleep, cool, some people need 8, 9, 10 hours of sleep a night, but if it goes to like, 12, 14, and you're always dragging, and you're like, I can't get enough sleep, or you don't want to be anywhere but bed, maybe that's a sign of something. Yeah, okay, right, so you, yep, especially in the workplace, that sounds like it's coming from personal experience. Yeah, right, there's some weird vibe going on, throws you off big time. So, not only do we have these bodily symptoms, but also behavior and activities. This is one of the more interesting things. A lot of times people who are in true, real depression will stop doing things that they enjoy, or have ordinarily enjoyed, and begin doing things that they never did before, and this isn't like a midlife crisis that I'm talking about. I'm talking about usually the things that they begin doing are things that are harmful to them or to others. So you will begin to say, like, think about people, possibly, who are, especially in a very deep depressive state, or for an extended period of time, like, they're not even the same person that I used to know, or you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, who the heck am I? I don't even recognize myself, because my behavior and activities have changed so radically. I don't like the things that I liked anymore, and now I'm just totally drawn to all these other kinds of things. People change over time, so if you're like, man, I used to love building model airplanes, and now I don't, maybe I'm depressed, probably not. This is more a general sense of a desire to usually be self-destructive, which, again, you might look at this and go, especially if you think, this is really the hardest for people who are not depressed, but experiencing people with depression, and you see how kind of much they're destroying their own lives, you go, what? The world? And it's at that time that you can feel that way, but try and refrain from saying it that way, and at the moment that you find it hard to not just judge the heck out of somebody, just remember the life situation, all the different feelings these people have, the bodily symptoms that they're probably going through, the fact that they're just lashing out and being self-destructive is kind of an inevitable result of a lot of this stuff. It's a sad one, it's a tragic one, but it should be understandable by us. Usually. And also stopping doing what you used to do. There are people who are generally just less social than other people, so if you're like, well, it would be wrong to say, if you're not just the life of the party, you're probably depressed. That's not even remotely true. Exactly. Right. Yes. Yeah, so in my case, if I disappear off the scene, I'm just like, I don't want to hang on to anybody. Everybody's going to be like, what the heck is going on, because as most of you know, the more people in my general presence, the merrier. My wife is not the same way. She's an introvert. So if she's not always going, then it would be totally normal. So it's really the kind of people that we are. It's not a general attitude. Again, as we've seen from the beginning of this whole thing, as we've seen throughout bioethics, humans are complicated creatures. And therefore, there's not these kind of general standards. Everything is kind of a gray area. We've got to be perceptive and wise. So the area we're going to spend the rest of our time on this morning, and try and move through these, is the thoughts. This is the biggest area that affects and is affected by depression. One book puts it, our perception of an event or experience powerfully affects our emotional, behavioral, and psychological responses to it. How we perceive things. Proverbs 23.7 says, as a man thinks so he is. You and I have a very difficult time figuring out all of life, and what life is going to bring us. And we can't often change what ends up happening to us. You and I are very much in this life, the passive recipients of the actions of others in the world in which we live. What's the one thing that we can seek to work on? If we can't work on controlling our environment, some of us try that on a regular basis, fail miserably, and get upset about it. But what is the one thing that we can control? Ourselves. That's right. We can seek to do that. Seek to perceive things in the right kind of way. How we think about our lives is something that plays a large role in depression, and is also a major sign of it. So, as we're going to see, for those caught in these depressive states, these things all combine together to turn into a big raging tornado of badness. So we're going to look at ten false thought patterns. These show up in almost every book on depression. So I didn't come up with any of these. I just came up with the examples. But you're going to actually come up with the examples for me. So, I'm going to explain that every one of these is a false way of thinking. We're going to try and think of three aspects of this. We're going to think of just what a life situation would look like, what a spiritual situation would look like, and then we're going to look at a biblical example of this. To, again, show that these thought patterns are not wholly kind of just apart from the biblical revelation. False extremes is the first one. So this is where the world is black and white. Wonderful or the worst, nothing is in between. Some of us already have a tendency towards this. You know it when you see it, though. This would be the kind of state of manic-ness. These are both at the same time. People who are depressed don't only see things as bad. They would see other things as just like the most wonderful thing in the world. But there's never anything that's like, that's pretty good. So, thinking about somebody who's depressed, and in this very sense of extremes, think of just a life situation where the thinking would be often just thinking in these extreme ways. Anybody? All right, good. I'll get us started, maybe on the next one. So you forget somebody's birthday. All right. You have forgotten everybody's birthday because you're on Facebook, and you don't log into Facebook one day, and you see that one of your close friends is on Facebook and has a birthday, and you don't realize it until the next day, and you immediately conclude that you are the worst friend in the world, and begin to say, how can people even like me? I am so terrible as a friend that I didn't enter happy birthday, exclamation point, smiley face, in Facebook. That would have shown my deep and abiding love and gratitude for that person. I didn't do that. I am the worst friend that ever lived. So that would be just a life situation. What about a spiritual false extreme? Okay, so I didn't read my Bible today. That's a statement of fact, but then where does it go in the extreme sense? That's right, maybe I'm not saved. I'm going to hell because I didn't read my Bible today, because Christians read their Bibles, and so I must be going to hell. That's the extreme part of it. Let's look at a biblical example of this in Job chapter 13. Job 13, verse 24. Here Job is talking to God, and he says, Why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy? Job was in a period of intense suffering, and that suffering led him to the conclusion that God was his enemy. Running all the way there, going to a complete extreme. We, the readers, know that that's not actually the case in the book of Job. But Job is expressing that. So that would be a false extreme. Now a false generalization. This is something that happens to us when something isn't received well, and we're convinced that the same will always happen to us going forward. Everything. So name a life example of something like that. Okay, you get fired from your job, that's the example. Then what's the generalization? Exactly. I'm never going to get a good job. I'm unhireable. This is just going to keep happening. I don't even know why I work. Good. What about a spiritual example? Okay, I've sinned. Great, yeah. So the generalization category, I'm going to always be doing this thing. I can never get out of this thing because I did this this time. So I am stuck in this pattern for the rest of my life. Great. So here's a good example. We saw this when we were preaching through the book of Genesis, but we'll look at it in Genesis chapter 42. In Genesis 42, we're in the midst of the Joseph narrative, and this is where Joseph's brothers are seeking to get their father to allow... They're seeking to get their father to agree to send Benjamin with them in order that Simeon would be released from prison, who Joseph has wisely put in prison for the sake of bringing the whole family to Egypt. But in Genesis 42, verse 36, Jacob, their father, said to them, You have bereaved me of my children. Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more. And now you would take Benjamin, and all this has come against me. He's assuming that Benjamin is going to get taken too, which is a generalization. And in the case of Jacob, it's going to be a false one. Oftentimes, this is what happens. This happened. This happened. Therefore, it's always going to happen. Now, let's just pause here for a moment. I won't ask for a show of hands, but I would assume that most of us, to some degree, fall into the camp of falsely thinking in extremes quite often. Maybe I'm just, you know, wanting to find other people in my camp. Or that we falsely generalize in these ways. These are conditions that we often have. There are signs that... This is not just like therapy for depressed people, although if you are depressed, hopefully this is some encouragement to you. But if you find yourself going down these paths, especially if you've been depressed in the past, you know how easy it is to just run down these rabbit holes real fast, because these things speed off each other. And hopefully what these things are, will stick in your brain as like triggers and going, yeah, I should not be that way. This is dangerous. I need to watch out for these kinds of things. And if you hear other people speaking in this way, you go, yeah, I don't know. False filter. In the false filter category, we somehow only remember and think about the negative parts of life. The positive parts of our life are downplayed or non-existent. So, that's all of these. In this case, what the false filter is, all of life comes to you. Everything that's good, you just forget about. That's not even like affecting who you are. It's only the negative parts that you're like, that's my life. You're filtering out all the good, and you're just focusing on the negative or the bad. Give me a life example of that. Okay, my kids won't stop fighting. They never do anything but fight. Right. Because they did this thing? Good. Yeah, so it's just, my kids are always, this thing is always happening, which is not true. It might be generally true. My life example here was that you preach and someone points out something small, and you question your ability to do good work. They say, there's this one thing that you said, I got dinged on my sermon from last week for mentioning Charlton Heston, which if you are over the age of, I don't know, 35, you're like, duh, like Charlton Heston, Ten Commandments, that's great. Unless you're a college student, in which case you go like, who the heck is Charlton Heston? I had no clue who you were mentioning. I could have heard that, and thankfully I didn't, and go, I can't figure this preaching thing out. Forget this garbage, I'm out of here. Because there was also a lot of positive things said by that individual. But I could just easily just grab onto that one nugget of badness and ride that train. What about spiritual? Okay. And what are you filtering out? Okay, so you're filtering out the gospel and who God is, that's true too. Huh? The fruit that you can see in your life. Right, so you're all, I mean, you're all super spiritual or whatever. That's good. You're thinking about the God thing, but in this case, remember, this is the false filter of my life. So while it is true that you are filtering out who God is, but you're also filtering out, like, yeah, I sinned in this thing, in this event today, but I also did these 7 or 25 million positive things seeing the fruit of God in my life. I don't see any of that. All I can see in my actions, I'm filtering out all that stuff, all the good stuff, and I just see this thing that I did. I'm too stuck on that. The greatest example of this would come from the book of 1 Kings, chapter 19. One of the most ridiculous things that happens in the Bible, by far. If you have never done it before, don't do it this morning, please, but read 1 Kings 18 and then read 1 Kings 19. It will blow your mind. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah and the prophets of Baal have a showdown. One of the most amazing and spectacular acts of God take place in which Elijah makes fun of over and over and over again. The prophets of Baal, they can't see anything happen. Elijah's like, dump water on my sacrifice, we're going to see who's got it better. Keep dumping water, keep dumping water, boom, praise, everything's gone. Amazing, and then all the priests of Baal are slaughtered and you think, yeah, Elijah's winning. And then in Elijah 19, all he has to hear is one little thing that Queen Jezebel is going to come and get him and he takes off and runs away and hides in a cave and in Elijah's case, in chapter 19, verse 10, we see Elijah says this, he says, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars and killed your prophets with the sword. I, even I, only I am left and they seek my life to take it away. He was incredibly foolish in the fact that he filtered out the fact that God had just absolutely decimated the sacrifice that he had offered, that the prophets of Baal were slaughtered, that Elijah was alive and God's going to let Elijah know, hey, I got 10,000 more of you. I don't need you. It's one of the most, like, non-expected comforting things of God. God's like, I'm sorry. Oh, you think you're special? Yeah, no. You're not. Filtered out, though, everything good that God had done and could only focus on the bad. Next, false transformation. So someone takes something said or thought that is positive or seemingly neutral and defaults to make it negative. Think of a life example of this. You hear something or you think something that is positive and you turn it negative. Think of an example of that in your life or in life in general, not your life specifically. Well, the plan tells you that what you did today, for instance, is good, for instance, like, something went bad and negative in that day. Okay. And, you didn't hear down about that thing that happened. Okay. But a lot of other things happened before that. Right. And so, you said, I got a picture of a camera but, you know, I just feel bad about whatever. And she inferred to me something. Okay. I go, yeah, but this, you know, like that. Okay. Yeah, but this is what actually happened. This was really that thing. Or, you know, and not to say it's what she said. That's the truth. Right. You know, change it into something that would fit how I'm feeling right now. Okay. So, what you're doing, that might fit more like the filter category, right? You don't hear what she's saying. You're just taking that and you're going, yeah, okay, that's true, but there's all this over here still. But, try and think of a situation where Kim says something to you and you change what she says into something negative. Kim, you got an idea? Yes. Right. That's right. Right. That's right. Yeah. I hope there's no personal spirits there. So, right. So we got, yeah, you look nice today. Are those new clothes? And you hear that as, that person thinks I'm fat because I've got to be wearing these new clothes because my old clothes don't fit me anymore. Look at me. I'm trashy or I'm always trashy. The only reason they're complimenting me on my looks or on my clothes or something is because I look like a dirt bag every other day and I'm not I look like a dirt bag every other day. Man, I'm terrible. Yeah, so you take the pot and you, ah, maybe they just thought you looked nice. Just take it for what it is. Okay, spiritual example of this. Transformation. In transformation, once you have been called by God, you are to Yes. Sure. and we will go out of our will time and time and fill in that Sure. So let's, let's take, let's take this like, so we're supposed to be transformed. We're not always transformed. So let's say this. I'm, I'm, I'm over here and I'm, I'm doing good. Alright. I'm doing decent. I'm, I'm acting like this and I'm praying and I'm like, God, thank you that today went pretty well and immediately what I begin to do is I begin to condemn myself for pride. Now let's say today actually went pretty well, right? It was a good day and instead of just thanking God and rejoicing in the fact that today was a good day, I could, I just transform and go, I'm so prideful. I can't believe it because I'm just, I'm so useless. Very easy to do. So we would be transforming that. We saw the transformation last week of, of Jonah where Jonah is taking the fact that the Ninevites have actually, really asked for forgiveness from God. Don't bring that and God will not bring judgment and Jonah takes that good thing that has happened and is like, I can't believe you didn't decimate. I knew this would happen. Transforming a good thing into a very negative thing. This is kind of similar. As you can see, none of these are kind of totally separate from each other. I said in the beginning the only reason they're good to break these down is for the sense of kind of taking the time to think about them. Many times these will play into each other. False mind reading is the next one. Taking looks or things that are said or just thoughts about others and acting upon assumptions without any rational reason for doing so. I know nobody in here does this ever. Me neither because I'm a pastor. Give me an example of false mind reading. Yeah. I know why you said that. That's right. But you don't have a clue. Right? You don't have a clue. You don't have the first idea. Any other ideas on this one? So and so doesn't talk to you at church today? That person is a judgmental prideful jerk. Right? Won't even talk to me. What are you talking about? Or somebody like look, if this ever happened to you, it's like crushing. Even in the best of times where you like wave at somebody and you're sure they're looking at you and maybe they are looking at you and they look away and you're like Oh! Okay! Alright! We're no longer friends. That person hates my guts. Or you've probably done that 15 times and there's nothing harmful about it. So you're reading people's minds and then acting upon it. What about spiritual impact of this? Okay! Oh! Okay! Okay! So in this case we're actually trying to read the mind of God which is something we all do like way too often. We're just like Yeah! Okay! I'm going to figure this out. I know that God acts in these ways. If you think that by the way, first of all I'm sorry because your life is probably not going too well and second of all welcome to the club and thirdly stick around for the sermon because we're about to see some craziness in the book of Exodus. It's very easy to begin to try Here's an interesting example in the book of Psalms. Let's go to Psalm 116. In Psalm 116 I'll begin reading in verse 8. For you have delivered my soul from death my eyes from tears my feet from stumbling I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed even when I spoke I am greatly afflicted. I said in my alarm all mankind are liars. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. Interestingly this thing I am great I believed even when I spoke I am greatly afflicted. I said in my alarm all mankind are liars. There's this sense in which he's realizing that what he was thinking about the way he views is wrong. It was not actually the case and he's come to this realization that this is actually the way that things are in the world. Reading other people's minds is something that we are insanely good at or tempted to do. Next is false fortune telling. This is another good one. Regardless of the reality of things the future is going to be a mess. I live in this zone I should just walk around with one of those fortune teller turbans on because I am into this one. I term it realism. I don't know if anybody else is in this camp. I'm just a realist. Life is going to go miserably. There's a real proneness to getting thrown off and becoming extremely discouraged for a period of time by just saying like it's all garbage. It's all garbage. Can you think of a life example of this? I think some actors that claim to be prophets give false messages to people that are really hurting and really want to hear the truth. They feel they put their trust in that person to tell the truth to them and that what they have to do don't come to pass. Right. And that will let a person down. That will let anybody down. And interestingly that actually the reason I'm bothered by those people to an extreme degree is because that will begin to shape people in particular ways where they begin to think that nothing ever good is going to happen because these pastors said good things were going to happen. So it kind of get back to this generalization idea that everything that's happening in the future is going to be bad because these guys never get it right. It will destroy the lives of people or we can think about somebody who's actually in the midst of depression and convinced that depression is always their state in life. Even though we know that almost every single person who is in depression will get better. It doesn't mean they're going to get better forever. It doesn't mean that it's going to be a quick recovery. But it's just this thing. It's always going to be this way. Or think about a spiritual state. Fortune telling. Yeah. How about this? Convinced that because you're depressed God will always be dissatisfied with you. God would be happier with me if I wasn't depressed. What is that really doing at the end of the day? What is that thought pattern doing? Okay, yeah. It makes you feel sad. What does it say about your concept of God? Yep, exactly. My salvation is based on my feelings. It's all about me. And God is a big fat jerk because there's obviously no plan to why I'm the way that I am right now. It's interesting how often our theological conviction of the real things that we believe about God come out when we're going through some difficult stuff and some difficult times. In John chapter 11 one of the most hilarious things any of the disciples have ever said. In John 11 we have Thomas. Jesus is going to go and heal Lazarus, his good friend, but it's going to put him in harm's way. And in John chapter 11 verse 16, so Thomas, called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, let us also go that we may die with him. It's like, look, alright, cowboy up, let's do this because we are going to die. One of the more humorous, I always wonder if like, they would razz Thomas about this post Jesus' victorious ascension to heaven and they're all still alive. I wonder if they're sitting around or like Peter, remember that time when Jesus told you to get behind me, Satan, just crack it up. I've got to imagine that had to have happened because they were human beings. If I was there, I would be absolutely knocking them down, but that's probably why I'm not one of the twelve apostles, thank goodness. False telling. False lens. Mistakes in life by ourselves or others get blown out of proportion. So, this is a mistake that is a real mistake but then gets amplified in our minds. Similar to kind of the false extremes, but in that case we're just always lurching from one side to the other. This is one thing where little thing becomes a big thing. Can you think of an example of that? ... You yell at your kids? You're upset with yourself? And that gets amplified to this thing where it's like, my kids are going to hate me when they grow up because I yelled at them. Now, what is the reality about the fact that you just yelled at your kids? What's the reality about the way that your kids are going to perceive that action? Okay, not well. True. In the moment. What about 15 minutes after that? Huh? That won't affect them, right? This is not like an argument for why you should yell at your kids or something like that at all. But, kids are resilient, right? You might be like, my dad yelled a lot. But it's not like, oh, there's that one time or whatever. It's probably blown out of proportion. Or, you blow things out of proportion with the way that maybe things happen in life. So, again, it kind of gets to the generalization and extremes and all these kind of play into each other. Where you take something that somebody's done to somebody else and you run to the end of the line with it. You go, oh, or you become extremely judgmental. So, so-and-so did something to so-and-so. You're like, oh, I can't, that is so terrible. Terrible. Probably not looking at it through the right lens. There's also this opposite effect of this where you view your positive actions, they really aren't very good. Looking through binoculars is the opposite way. So in the one way everything is amplified and in the other one everything is super small. There's no real balance. There's no seeing things correctly. Here's an interesting example just continuing on the Gospel of John in John chapter 21. John chapter 21. Looking at verse 3. You think, Jeremy, what the heck are you reading that for? They had just seen the resurrected Jesus in person. He had come amongst them and peace be with you and everybody's tripping out and he's like, well, put your hand on my side and all that kind of stuff and they realize that it's Jesus. Then the next day Peter's like, I'm going fishing. He wanted to just hang out and chill on the lake but because he was convinced that he had nothing to do with Jesus anymore. He's like, that was great. I'm glad he showed up and everything but Jesus is going to restore the relationship later in verses 15 through 19. That's the whole feed my sheep, feed my sheep, feed my sheep thing that Jesus and Peter go back and forth on but he was not seeing things the right way. I'd screwed up. I'd abandoned Jesus. It's over. I'm just going to go fishing. So, looking at it the wrong way. We are going to we're just going to fly through these real quick. We've got three more as we close. False feelings based reasoning. So, feelings determine truth. If I feel a certain way that way that must be true. Give you an example of this. I don't I don't believe that I'm a help around here. I feel useless. Therefore, I am useless because I feel that way. Or that Alex is useless. I feel he's useless. Therefore, he must be useless. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. False shoulds. Oh, here's a big one. Especially in our culture there are these perceptions that we have in our minds. We don't hit those expectations. Therefore, we're terrible. Give me a life example of that. That's right. Okay. So, you've got a stay-at-home mom who believes that what should be true about her home? Spotless. That's right. Sucker should be spotless. And it is never spotless. Why is it not spotless? Because people live there. And humans are dirty animals. Right? I mean, they are. They're gross. And that doesn't mean that everybody should just live in a filthy... This is not my personal argument for why I should live in a filthy home and shouldn't sweep floors. But you just go... Like, just chill out. Like, what you're doing is having a clean home is great and fine. I often say that if I was not married to my wife I would be homeless and people would go ha ha ha except that they know me Yeah, that's right. If they do know me. The should thing is saying and if it's the expectation of a clean home let's say that your home is clean and people are coming over and you're depressed what is the most likely thing that you're going to be thinking? It's not clean enough. Can it ever be clean enough? No. Why? Because I'm convinced that it needs to be the cleanest house in the world and so I'm going to find a problem. Because it should be this way. Lastly, false responsibility. Assume that you have responsibility for everything in the world even things that are outside of your control. So, for example, a husband does poorly at work and you assume it is because you are not providing a suitable home environment as the wife, right? That must be my responsibility. Could that be the case? Sure. But if these assumptions are like, that's why it is false responsibility. My child gets a D on English homework and what's the reason that that happened? I didn't tutor them enough. You know what? Maybe your kid is just dumb. Like, get used to it. Maybe they are extremely gifted in something else like eating lunch but it's just it might be you might be a terrible parent. That's a very real possibility. However, the assumption here is just going it's my fault. If I did better, my kids would do better. Which is interesting because that's not true in anything else in life but it's oftentimes it's just this one thing I would just be everything would go perfectly. So, I hope that these things are helpful for us in seeing the real easy way that is to get caught up in this stuff. I can guarantee you 100% that if you have ever been depressed or severely down you've got a multiple number of these things going on. Some of you have a tendency you might know that you have a genetic predisposition to depression. If some you're looking at this and you're going 1 2 3 4 I mean in all stars in baseball I'm batting a thousand you keep going like I got like 7 out of 10 I'm there you go what should I do just be cautious know that getting caught up in these ways is very easy and if you don't if you're going I never do that you're probably lying to yourself but know that how can somebody get suicidal how can somebody get so down that they could never see the way out well if you're thinking in these ways how could you ever see light so in knowing these things hopefully we'll be able to understand others better and to love each other and help each other in a better way let's pray God we thank you for the fact that you have given us hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ and we do pray that that would affect our thoughts we have seen this morning again maybe for the first time just how easy it is to get caught up in false patterns of thinking and we do pray that you would help us to think well to think rightly to be wise to truly spend the time it takes to get to know others and to see how they're thinking not so we can read their minds but so that we might be able to help if our neighbors are thinking wrongly and we can be the means possibly to make them think rightly knowing how difficult it must be to be stuck in these kinds of false thought patterns in Jesus name we pray Amen
