on 14 April 2022
Dear all at IPC,
One of the children of the church asked me recently if I would preach a sermon on ‘how to get out of a bad mood’. It’s a brilliant question and one that we all struggle with at times. Our different personalities will come into play and some of us will be more prone to moodiness than others. For me, Sunday nights and Monday mornings are often difficult after a Sunday. There’s a heaviness that’s difficult to lift sometimes.
We mustn’t be naive about living as a Christian. There is great joy in knowing the Lord Jesus and we are commanded by the Apostle Paul to, ‘always be rejoicing’. Yet we know, accompanying that joy, there are many sorrows and heartaches. Joy and sadness can and do co-exist in the believers heart.
The Kingdom of God has come, but it has not come in fullness; there is a tension all the way through the New Testament of the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. We are not home yet, and we mustn’t expect heaven now. As we saw in our sermons on contentment, Philippians 4 teaches us that we can be content as Christians even in the hard and difficult times. As Christians, we must be realists and as Jesus said, ‘in this world you will have trouble’.
We also need to realise that sometimes being in a bad mood is a result of not getting enough sleep, not being active enough, or not getting enough food resulting in us ‘feeling hangry’. We are physical beings and so getting to bed on time, not lazing round the house, getting fresh air, eating regularly are good gifts of God, to help us and sustain us. It is one of the reasons why taking the Lord’s Day each week, resting from your work, allowing yourself to switch off is not only for your spiritual good but your physical health too.
We then need to see that God has given us emotions. It is right sometimes to be sad, and there are occasions when it is right to be angry. The Lord Jesus himself was described as ‘a man of sorrows’. Remember, he wept at the graveside of his friend. We see when he was confronted by stubborn unbelief and sin that he became righteously angry. We must not feel as Christians that we can’t express sadness and anger. As we keep reading the gospels, and keep meditating on Psalms, they are so helpful in showing us the healthy emotional life of a believer. We live in a world that is not as it is meant to be. Frustration has been written into this world by God to remind us we are looking for another world, for the new creation.
Having said all that, there are times when we can get ourselves in a bad mood. It is often because of what someone else has done, but there are also those occasions when we don’t really know why we’re feeling so grumpy. How do we deal with ourselves at those times?
We need to recognise our tendency towards self pity, to feel we’ve been hard done by and wronged. It may well be that we were in the right but as we dwell on how we feel we’ve been badly treated, it can overwhelm us and grow. It can easily turn into anger with God that he is being unfair to us. Self pity is so dangerous because it can lead us into further sin, where we indulge ourselves thinking ‘I deserve this’ or ‘because of what has happened, it’s understandable that I can sin’.
The way out of a bad mood is to recognise it for what it is. Are there legitimate reasons why I’m feeling grumpy? Or is this because of my own sin and stubbornness? There are examples in the Psalms when the Psalmist goes to God with his complaints, he does’t hide them from God but takes them to him in prayer. I love the verse, ‘pour out your heart before me’ (Psalm 62:8). The true Christian finds themselves praying at times, ‘Lord, I don’t know why I feel like this but I do: please help me’.
We also need the truth of God’s word to shake us out of our self pity, to remind us of the ultimate realities. God is not against his people, but for them.
God also uses other people – parents or a spouse, or a good friend – but they will need to speak the truth to us, painful though that might be. Sometimes, even not allowing us to wallow in self pity. Jack Miller, who was an American Pastor, famously used to say, ‘Cheer up, you’re worse than you think’. There are times when we need to be prodded out of our moodiness and it’s one of the reasons God has given you a Church family to encourage you.
Ultimately we must look to Jesus: he is sympathetic, he is meek and lowly and humble in heart. He was awfully mistreated, he bore our sins and our sorrows. He was falsely accused, maligned, accused of things he was innocent of and yet he bore all of that for his people. He knows what it is to enter into a world that is unfair. We can entrust ourselves to him.
We ask him to take away our guilt, our sorrow and our shame. We pray his benediction back to him that he would make his face to shine upon us and be gracious to us. The Psalmist in Psalm 3:3 ‘You O Lord are a shield about me, my glory and the lifter of my head’. It has been my experience as it has been yours that God can lift your head. He can get you through. That isn’t always into unbridled joy though. It may be that you need more help, and there is no shame in asking for that from a Christian friend or a Dr. But to allow yourself to wallow in your self pity, will only bring harm and more sorrow.
We look to God and not ourselves, we turn away from self pity to serve others. We endeavour to stop thinking of ourselves and think more on Jesus Christ and his Cross because it is there that we find the answer to our sorrows and pain.
Your Minister and Friend
Paul