Dear Friends,

Are you, like me, depression prone?    Do you sometimes wake up and for no reason you can put your finger on feel down?    Today’s devotional should help you by lifting your spirits. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Nehemiah 8:10

  Nehemiah 8:10    English Standard Version
  10 Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Nehemiah 8:10

“It is very important that we should have right views concerning the resurrection as well as the death of our Lord. If I go down my garden tomorrow morning early, with my spirit drooping and disconsolate, and say to myself, ‘Alas! the world is in a very bad state, and the church is almost as bad as the world; everything is going wrong, everything is wretched, sad, and miserable, even the very birds might begin to say, “What is that man at? He is out of tune with us.” And if I look at the flowers, surely they also might well begin to chide me, and say, “Master, what art thou at?”   But if I go forth, with many burdens and many cares all cast upon the Lord, and with all the outlook, dreary as it is, still say, “The Lord liveth, and blessed be my Rock, and let the God of my salvation be exalted,” then surely the mountains and the hills shall break forth before me into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’ God means his people to rejoice, and the world, wilderness as it is, is to rejoice with them. ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.’ God fill your souls with sunlight, all of you who are his people!”

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1897), p. 245]