The Struggle Against Depression

You know, somebody said everybody is born either an optimist or a pessimist. And I know full well what I was born. I was born a pessimist. Furthermore, I was brought up to be a pessimist. I mean, my parents were good people, but in my home, if you weren’t worrying, you should be worrying about the fact you weren’t worrying.

And I was saved, baptized in the Holy Spirit, and had a ministry, but I had not overcome pessimism. And the expression it took in my life was depression. And although other people were getting saved, I was struggling ceaselessly against this dark cloud that settled down over me.

And I did everything. I mean, I knew the scriptures fairly well. I know that you have to reckon yourself dead. And I reckoned myself dead so many times, it just didn’t have any meaning. But it didn’t solve the problem.

And then, one day I was reading

“Isaiah chapter 61 verse 3,”

and I read

“in place of the spirit of heaviness, the garment of praise.”

And when I read the phrase ‘the spirit of heaviness,’ the Holy Spirit said to me, “That’s your problem.”

And I suddenly realized I wasn’t dealing with myself. It wasn’t my mental attitudes. It was a person that was tormenting me day and night. And I realized he was a person that had known me from childhood. He knew my every weakness. He knew just when to attack me. Furthermore, I realized that it was what we would call a familiar spirit. It was a spirit that had come down through my family. I identified exactly the same condition in my father.

And I called on the name of the Lord, and I was delivered from that demon. Oh yes, I was saved. I spoke in tongues. I preached the gospel, but I needed to be delivered from a demon.

I was so ashamed of that that I didn’t tell anybody for 10 years. And then the Lord forced me out into the open by confronting me with a demon-possessed woman in front of my pulpit on Sunday morning. And I had just been preaching that no matter what the devil does, God has the last word. There was this woman writhing like a snake in front of the pulpit, the same woman that used to play the piano for our worship meetings.

And I knew I either had to prove it or stop saying it. And that was when I was thrust out into the open. And that woman was delivered, but it took me 10 years from the time I was delivered myself before I was willing to face the issue in public.

But why I say that is because once I was delivered, God showed me he had done for me what I could not do for myself, but he would not do for me what I could do for myself. And he showed me I had to change the way I thought. Every time a negative suggestion or reaction came to my mind, I had to meet it with something positive out of the scripture. And that did not happen overnight. It took at least three years. But by the end of that time, I was no longer a pessimist.