Overcoming Discouragement: The Role of Scripture, Community & Endurance

In this episode, CCEF faculty discuss discouragement and its various dimensions. They emphasize the importance of language in articulating discouragement and how honest expression can lead to deeper conversations with God. The conversation also delves into scriptural insights that provide hope and encouragement, highlighting the role of endurance and prayer.

Mentioned in this episode: Looking for biblical counseling training? Check out Westminster Theological Seminary's Master of Arts in Counseling, offered in collaboration with CCEF faculty. You can learn more at wts.edu/mac.

Hi, welcome to Where Life and Scripture Meet, a podcast of CCEF where we are all about restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church. My name is Alasdair Groves and I am joined today by my colleagues Darby Strickland. Darby, can say hi

Hello.

Esther Liu, Esther, you say hello?

Hi everyone.

And Gunner Gundersen. Gunner, you want to say hey?

Hey everybody.

This way people get to know our voices and put them with the name. Before we actually jump into our conversation today, I want to just mention something that I think might be helpful to a lot of our listeners. One thing we often get is that people begin to get a taste of biblical counseling, whether that’s from reading CCEF books or coming to a conference or whatever, and they find it really helpful for their own souls and their walk with the Lord, and they start realizing they want to help others have the same things they’ve experienced, and they actually want to get to be a part of helping people grow in these ways as the core part of their vocational calling in life. So if counseling is something you’re thinking about vocationally, I have good news. CCEF actually closely collaborates with Westminster Seminary who offers a master’s in counseling, where all the counseling classes are taught by CCEF faculty. We’ve worked really hard to support this program being a robust biblical counseling training available literally anywhere in the world. It’s 100% online, you can start any term during the year, it has significant hands-on components to it, and we believe it will set you up to be someone who gets to be a beacon of light from Christ, bringing his help and his hope into the darkest places that human beings can find themselves. So if this is something you’re interested in learning more about, just go to wts.edu/mac.

So let me ask you a question, guys. What comes to your mind when you hear the word discouragement?

I think discouragement is just a really resonant category for me and term for me. It can be just such a common experience that has like a whole spectrum of things that it can be about or ways that I might think about it or experience it. And so I think it's really helpful. I've noticed in myself sometimes if I'm going through a pretty dark or difficult season that I start wondering, am I depressed? And that language seems so heavy and weighted with just cultural meaning to it, clinical meaning to it, that I'm almost wondering if that's the place where I'm at. And discouragement is a much broader word. And it helps me realize that at the very least, I know I’m discouraged, and what might the Lord say to me in that and how can I be discerning about what's going on and how to respond? And so I just find the word discouragement to actually be helpful and pretty broad to just place some of what might be going on.

I think that's really helpful even thinking on the lower end of things, right? We often face disappointments in our day. Last night I was disappointed because the ice cream that was in the freezer wasn't the flavor I was looking forward to, right? Just disappointment. And there's more significant disappointments in my life too. But when I think about the word discouragement, I feel like it's just a heavier feeling. It's feeling like there's something I have to work towards, something I have to overcome. It comes with lot more doubts and just seems to me like there's going to be something I have to work towards overcoming just in a season, just a prolonged sense of suffering that caught me unexpected. Something wasn't supposed to go the way that it did and it's particularly hard.

Yeah, when I think of times of discouragement in my own life, it's usually, yeah, something isn't going the way that I hoped or wanted or would have wished. And that being disappointment and yet leading to the sense of sluggishness, the sense of it's hard to keep going, it's hard to keep trying, it's hard to keep putting myself out there. That sense of lack of motivation or, yeah, just I keep thinking of the word sluggishness. My footsteps feel heavy. My feet feel heavy. Like I have to drag through. That's usually what I think of when I think of discouragement as a word. And yeah, usually it does accompany moments of disappointment, of that's not what I wanted and that wasn't what I was working for. And yet this is what my reality is. And yeah, I'm still called to persevere in the midst of it, but it's hard to persevere. That experience seems to capture discouragement for me, or a slice of it.

Yeah I was going to say it makes a lot of sense to me, because often when I'm feeling discouraged, I'm either replaying my failures, or I'm looking at all the things that have to happen for something to work out, there's just an impossible-ness to it. So when I'm discouraged, other things, barriers, whether they're my own failings, or the circumstances surrounding something, they are grabbing my attention, and it's really hard for me to see past those things.

Darby, you used the word disappointment earlier and it almost strikes me that for me, disappointment seems like it requires kind of time and perspective to move through and past, whereas discouragement requires endurance. I'm carrying something inside me, circumstantially, but it's affecting me. And what you described, Esther, as a sluggishness really resonates as well as one of the things I see in myself and one of the things that I need the Lord to help me push through and other people to help me push through along the path.

Esther and Darby, I was struck by Gunnar's comment that it's a helpful word, that discouragement is a helpful word. Would you agree with that? Are you like, “Gunner, what are you talking about? Helpful? Nothing is helpful about that word or the experience.” How do you think about that?

I think it's helpful because it helps me understand that I'm overwhelmed. And just being able, when you're overwhelmed, sometimes you feel overwhelmed before you can actually process why you're overwhelmed. So even finding out that, oh I'm discouraged. What does that mean? Often for me, that means I lack hope. And what was I hoping for? What am I hoping in? Where do I go for help? So I think just processing that feeling of being overwhelmed, having a category for it has been super helpful. And just identifying, “yeah, I am overwhelmed and so I'm losing hope” actually gives me something to do to move out of that season, something else to focus on.

Yeah, and on top of that, I feel like, just adding to that, having the word . . . I probably feel discouraged often, and yet because I'm on autopilot mode, or I'm just living life, or trying to overcome the barriers, or trying to muster up the strength and motivation to keep going, I can be so lost in that process in and of itself that I haven't slowed down to even articulate for myself, oh, I'm discouraged. And actually that opens up a whole new way of going about things that isn't so much, I need to muster up, I need to figure this out, I need to get out of this, but becomes a conversation point with the Lord of like, God, I'm discouraged. And I feel like actually that has been such a turning point for me in so many seasons of life is naming what I'm even experiencing and allowing myself to name what I'm experiencing. And then once I name it, realizing I haven't really taken that to the Lord. I haven't really had an honest conversation with the Lord about where I am and where I need his help. And those moments where I'm like, oh, I'm discouraged, like this is a season of discouragement for me, has opened up a conversation with the Lord of then turning it to him of, I need your help here. Like I don't have the strength to keep going. And it gives me permission to be reminded of who God is and what I need from him and the help that I need from him in that season that I was trying to produce on my own by my own strength up to that point. So like Darby said, there's power and there's helpfulness in naming an experience even if the experience itself is unpleasant.

There's this multi-authored book on the Psalms called Language for All Seasons of the Soul, and I think discouragement gives us another piece of vocabulary for a season of the soul, just like the Psalms do. And one reason it's helpful to me is that language is one of the main tools God's given us for discernment. Once we can name something, it helps us to understand it and to understand what's baked into it, and what the Word of God says is a helpful response, and who God the Father is, and who Christ the Son is, and who the Holy Spirit is for us in that, and all the other ways that he works with us in our discouragement and helps us in it. So I find it helpful because it does give that tool of discernment to me, and if I'm not placing it, like Esther said, in the right way, it can just be confusing. It's not wrong that I can't find language, but it just is more confusing, and it can remain disorienting. And so, it's such a gift to have some of these pieces of language that Scripture gives us.

I think that's so helpful too, because discouragement is loud, right? And it speaks to us. And so what you're really saying, Gunner, is we have to learn to speak back to it. And what better way to do that than to use Scripture to do that? If I just let the discouragement carry the day in my mind and my emotions, I'm kind of left at sea. And so I kind of have to learn to speak into it instead of just listen to it. And that's a hard pivot. But if I'm not recognizing that’s what's happening internally, yeah, the way the discouragement, it lands on me. It's harder to reckon with.

That's the old Martin Lloyd-Jones line, right? You spend too much time listening to yourself, you should spend more time speaking to yourself. That sort of Psalm 42/43, like, why are you so downcast, O my soul? Well, there are some pretty good reasons for that actually in many cases. And yet there's this push to myself, I must hope again, I will hope again, I need to remind myself that hope in the Lord is still possible here in this place of being deeply downcast of soul.

You know, as I'm hearing you guys talking, as we were talking earlier, I think I'm really struck by the helpfulness, as you put it, Gunner, of just the having language to capture experience. And you know, as all of us are saying, just that the ability to bring things to the Lord is somewhat at least dependent on the ability to get our hands around them enough to give them to the Lord. And as I think about, I remember listening to a Tim Keller sermon probably 20 years ago where he talked about praying our doubts. And that was a shocking thing to me the first time I heard of this idea of, oh, you could pray your doubts. And I realized you can pray your guilt. You can pray your temptation. When 1 Peter 5:7 says, “cast your anxieties on him because he cares for you,” which has long been one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture. I don't think it's limited to anxiety. Well, bring me your anxieties, but keep everything else hard to yourself, right? Cast your discouragements upon him as well. I hope that any listener to this podcast over any length of time would begin to get bored by the drumbeat of “bring it to the Lord, bring it to the Lord,” like, you can tell him anything. You can pray all the hard into this conversation that is an open invitation to him at all times, at all moments. And I found that helpful in my own life is, yeah, think increasingly it is probably my discouragements that lead in my prayers where something's just weighing on me, and I bring it to him and there's always a request for help. Could you please help me do X or could you please change Y? But that's actually not necessarily the fundamental thing I'm doing when I'm praying those discouragements. There is also a lament or even just a, Lord, this is just hard. I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm sort of processing with you in real time, oh Lord, of what is even happening here? And I've just found discouragement to be one of the most important places to connect with him because it is so instinctive to just settle down and you don't have the energy to pray, you don't have the energy to act, you don't want to take it, you just feel flattened by the experience.

Or I would add, many people that I speak with feel like being discouraged, they falsely believe that their faith is faltering. And so they struggle to talk to God because they feel discouraged that it must mean there's something wrong with me, that I'm lacking hope. They fail to understand it’s, they live in a broken world as a weak and limited person and the Lord wants to tend to them and they just have this strong burden of, my faith is faltering. So it almost heaps on to the discouragement in such a way that it prevents them from those sweet conversations you're talking about.

Can we jump off that for a second? Because I think that's going to be important for people. I know it's been important for us even. We're all coming to say this is a helpful word and this is a word that I hear us wanting to say, this is a valid piece of Christian experience. It is appropriate at times for a Christian to be discouraged given personal failure, life circumstances, some good thing that we desire on behalf of the kingdom being thwarted or blocked or put further away with many steps in between.

How would you guys go about saying, here's where we see discouragement in Scripture as an invitation, as a category of, yes, this is where Scripture would speak to that as an appropriate way to behave, this is where Scripture meets us in our discouragement. How would we, yeah, what would you identify?

One of my first thoughts, Alasdair, with so many different issues when I might be helping someone is I want to try to avoid dramatizing it. I want to avoid minimizing it. And I want to normalize it wherever I can. And again, normalizing without minimizing, helping them understand that these things may be, considering the world that we live in, considering what a person has been through, this is normal. Whereas people often feel, I think, as Darby shared, somehow abnormal, or that they're guilty for being discouraged, for example, when they're going through a very difficult time. And I say that to say I love how Scripture, in a sense, normalizes discouragement and shows us through all these different stories when you're waiting this long for a promise to come true, or where you're dealing with this kind of long-term oppression, or when you're facing this kind of difficulty, that's normal. And that would be a typical human response based on our experience, based on how God’s wired us, and based on our limitations of what we can see or not see. And so, even before I would share specific Scriptures, I’m so grateful for how those stories invite us in, and we can see our own discouragement within the characters of Scripture and the situations that they face.

I've been thinking about Paul talking about not growing weary or running the race, or how he opens every letter before he has to say hard things about their reality with so much love and affection that he and the Lord have for them. I think the other way to read it in Scripture is to see how much God’s people actually needed encouragement when we look at the story. And so, yeah, I just find it is just a regular occurrence, particularly in the epistles, of encouraging words. You're going to make it; it will be completed; he will get you to that last day; look where we are all headed. So I think it just has to be such a common experience, or Paul in particular wouldn't be casting a vision and being that cheerleader among the very hard things in our lives.

As you were talking about Paul, I was reminded of Romans 8 and what he says there and how encouraging it is and how much he uses where we're headed. Like you were saying, Darby, like there will be a day. He uses where we're headed to encourage in present day suffering. You know, one area of discouragement for me that you all are aware of by this point here in this room, the three of you, is just with my health and health issues and how discouraging it is to face unrelenting physical issues that seem to hinder me from doing everything that I want to be able to do and live out this faithful life that I envisioned of what faithfulness would look like and just falling short of that. And then thinking of Romans 8 and how much it starts to speak into why discouragement might be a reality. And you know, it says, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing, for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom and the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

And it keeps going and it goes on and on through the passage, but just that reality of, we live in this fallen world where our bodies don't work the way that they're supposed to and how it was originally intended. Relationships don't work the way that they were intended to. Our own hearts and their orientation don't function the way, and so we're just in this age where discouragement is so likely because there is all this brokenness within us and outside of us. And we feel the press of that and the draining of energy in that. And yet what Paul points us to is that there is a day coming and what we're headed towards is when all those things are made right. And that being a source of encouragement in the midst of discouragement is where we're headed and where we're going to end up. So yeah, Darby, I just really appreciated you kind of pointing to that future-oriented hope because I think that is something that has been so comforting to me in my own discouragement, is that it's not yet, but it's coming. And that gives me encouragement for today.

And yet, I'm hoping you're hearing me say, we can't rush to the ending, right? Because the reality is if we value what the Lord values, if we love the things that he loves, and if we love him, we are going to see so many things or recognize how short we fall that we're bound to be discouraged at the same time. It's a hard, it's not a balance, right? It's this hard tension I think we face the more we value what he values.

Esther, I love how in Romans 8 you have the creation that is groaning in verse 22, and then in verse 23 you have, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit are groaning inwardly for our final redemption. And then near the end, this is what's shocking to me in verse 26, the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And that shared groaning as the Spirit is interceding for us and pleading for all things to be made new finally, including us. And it's just such a beautiful reminder to me that God himself has joined us in this and the Spirit is groaning and interceding as Christ is at the right hand of the Father interceding. And it is so comforting to think that all of this is moving toward a final culmination and that the Spirit is with us all along the way, like you said, Darby, so that it's not that we just have to rush to finally get there, that he is actually with us along the way too, and continue stirring up that hope and just the endurance in us that we need, that I know I can't muster up on my own.

It does really feel like, I think maybe each of you have even used this word already, but the word endurance is a key word which points us towards the need for hope. I mean, hope is one of the key ingredients of, one of the key fuels of endurance for sure. But just, when I think about my own life experience with discouragement, it almost feels like you hit some number of disappointments and you kind of look around and you realize like, I'm actually discouraged kind of life-wide. It's not just that there's one or two things that have been hard or hurtful, but there's, discouragement for me at least has the flavor of like, I've crossed the line into like, everything feels hard. Everything feels tough. Everything feels like, it's probably not going to go right or it's not worth it. Or those things that felt more hopeful yesterday in the face of some of the disappointments now feel today like, I mean, good things are still true, I guess, but the light has gone out of them, the color has gone out of them, and they're sort of true in a more gray scale kind of way. I think about, I don't know why this is the thing to flash to my head, there's certainly plenty of more recent things I could point to that are discouraging, but maybe three or four years ago, I remember there was a particular week where, oh, I can't remember. I think our stove broke and then, no, I think our washing machine broke and then our fridge broke, fridge and freezer broke within a week and a half span. You know, big money appliances kind of things. But perhaps even more galling to my particular soul, those of you who know me will understand this, is the fridge and freezer broke while we were away for the weekend, which meant you came back to completely spoiled food, which had to be thrown away, including like six pounds of salmon that I had bought at this fabulous sale. It was like $5.99 a pound for salmon. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And I bought all this salmon. And so I remember standing there with the open freezer and I'm pulling warm chunks of salmon and throw it, I literally had to drag the trash can into the kitchen from the garage and just throwing that and nasty old ice cream and burger meat and all these beautiful, joyful, delicious things that I'd had my hopes in. Anyhow, so there was something about that particular weekend, a couple other things happened, I can't remember what it was, but it was that conglomeration of, oh, hard, hard, hard, hard, and you just found like it was just hard to feel good about anything the next morning. And yeah, it just strikes me that one of the most difficult things about finding oneself in discouragement, for me, it's actually not even so much being overwhelmed or not being overwhelmed as just having this sinking feeling, having the struggle to be energized towards anything. And so endurance is meeting me exactly where that place is. Discouragement is, don't have the energy to keep doing good. I'm losing hold of Galatians 6:9–10. You're like, hang in there. Keep doing the good, it is worth it, it will bear a harvest. Do not grow weary of seeing good for what it really is, which is good, and doing it, and living into it. That's where, for me, discouragement can get me by the throat. And endurance is this, no, it is still worth doing good. Good is still good. God is still good. The things you can do today still matter. Scripture is still true when it says to love others and consider them and that the boundary lines have fallen for me in sweet places, and the sense of there are the salvation of my soul for an easy starting point, the love and tender affection of Christ for me in the midst of this as a pretty close follow-on second. And so I think just trying to find ways to increase endurance by grabbing onto the easiest, lowest hanging fruit of what is true, what is encouraging, what is hopeful around me has been helpful.

And I appreciate that you even bring up that experience and that description of what discouragement can feel like because there is something so difficult about the call to endure when you feel so depleted. It's like the opposite of what you feel like you're able to do is what you're called to do. So when you are deeply discouraged, it is very hard to endure, and yet endurance is what is needed in that moment. And so I really appreciate, Gunner, that you kept reading, continued reading through Romans 8 because in this equation, there are seasons, I can speak for myself, where the discouragement was so strong that I didn't even feel like I had the energy to pray. I was so discouraged that I didn't even know how to begin to speak to the Lord and I didn't even have the energy and the enthusiasm to do that. And then what is my hope at that point if I'm not even keeping that communication channel open? And yet the beautiful, going back to what Gunner was reading in Romans 8, the Spirit intercedes for us. And that is so hope-giving when I don't even have what's inside of me to keep doing the things that I know I should be doing to endure well. And there is Someone who's holding onto me, there's Someone who's holding me fast, there's Someone who's keeping me even in the midst of that discouragement when I feel like I can't keep myself. And just that even the visual image of the Spirit interceding for me, Christ interceding for me, that in itself, even though I'm down in the dumps, it gives me so much hope that, okay, it's really not all up to me. Because if it was, I would have no hope. There's hope outside of myself. There's Someone praying for me in the midst of my discouragement. And how much more beautiful, you know, when other people can model and reflect that to us as well. And when we have people praying for us and when we can do that for other people who are discouraged too, to reflect the God who intercedes for us and is interceding for us in the midst of our discouragement. I find that deeply comforting.

When I started realizing that the Psalms were meant to give me prayers to pray when I didn't feel like I had prayers to pray, because I feel that way so often, just like you shared, Esther, I started to realize that there's like four sources that I kind of ended up alliterating where these are prayers when we don't have a prayer. And one is the Savior. So Christ himself, as we said, interceding for us. The second is the Spirit in Romans 8, making clear that specifically when we don't know how to pray as we ought and we're too weak, the Spirit joins us and intercedes. The third was the saints, meaning other people, are so often praying for us, and I'm not aware of that, or have prayed for us, and God is continuing to answer those things and respond. And then the fourth was the Psalms that we've been given, the Psalms, and that's a P, not an S, but you know, because the S sound, it's how I remember it. So the Savior, the Spirit, the saints, and the Psalms, if I were to make a sermon out of it. But it just struck me that in the one realm of prayer, which is so significant, but there's many other ways that God encourages us, I have all these resources that I know I easily forget about in the snap of a finger when I really feel like I just don't have strength left. And the main thing I'm experiencing is that sluggishness that you mentioned earlier. And I'll just say to you, Esther, one thing that's really encouraged me is that you have consistently, in a non-dramatic way, been open with our team about some of the health challenges that you mentioned here. And it's enabled us to pray for you and it's enabled us to walk with you in that. And you've kept yourself open to community, which I think when there are longer-term challenges we face, it can be easy to withdraw. It can be easy to say to ourselves, I don't want to continue to be a burden. And it's been very encouraging to see the maturity with which you've kept that before us, but not in a way that silences or diminishes anybody else's things that are going on. And I think you've well understood that need for support. And that's been encouraging to me and been a model for me.

Thanks, Gunner.

Yeah, I think the other piece of that too is, I just think of Hagar. It's kind of the opposite experience where she felt unwanted and abandoned and she didn't really have a community. And we don't really even see her in Scripture turn and give it words and have access to the Psalms, right? And yet the Lord found her, right? And he pursued her. And so I just think that's an important, because there's been seasons of my life where, yeah, I know I should be praying, but I don't have the words. Or I know there was a time when I was raising my son with significant neuromuscular issues and everyone in my community's encouragement felt extremely discouraging at the time and I felt more alone. But the idea that the Lord saw and he pursued. And so I think that's just, again, because we're talking about discouragement as relentless suffering in a sense. And sometimes we're in those seasons, it's hard to find the energy to do those things that you guys are so beautifully able to do in your maturity. And there's some days that we're not, right? Like I just know that I'm not. So knowing that I have the Lord who's going to pursue me when I'm cast out or I'm so downcast and I can have confidence in nothing else that he sees and he cares and he's moved to act when I have no energy or no community to act on my behalf. That's just been a sweet reassurance to me.

Yeah, I feel that too, Darby, just that sense of the Lord pursuing me and putting things in my path and working things around me, from tiny little things that you look at and go like, you know what? That was a help to my soul that day, wasn't it? Even though I didn't see it at the time. To big things and to times when you're even able surprisingly to grab onto something in the moment that you wouldn't normally expect to, or that you certainly don't have a history of, just, yeah, the idea that the Lord pursues us. I love that you're highlighting that. It’s funny, was just reading through Gentle & Lowly, some highlights this morning for a sermon I'm working on. One of the quotes I'd forgotten about that stuck out to me was speaking of the Spirit's intercession, just imagine what it would be like to overhear Jesus praying for you in the next room. If he was one room over and he was praying, you get to overhear his prayer for you. That would be incredibly encouraging. And yet that is in fact the reality, we just don't hear it as easily. It takes more effort to go to Scripture to overhear him than we might choose, but that was a cool image of it for me, the idea of the Spirit's intercession.

Well guys, I really appreciate the conversation. It has been an encouragement to me. I hope it will be an encouragement to others. Just one of those many topics where it's a simple word and it opens up such intricate and sweet lines into Scripture and how Scripture meets us in the real stuff of where we really live. It's not a, Scripture is not a book that says, here's the things you're supposed to do, and I'm sorry you're discouraged, I hope you get over that. It's actually meeting us precisely in the places where we live and where we feel it. So appreciate the time. And let me just take a moment and pray for ourselves and for our listeners in the face of our discouragements.

Lord, we do easily land in discouragement and we thank you that you're a God who knows this about us and who walks with us in it and who gives hope and who gives endurance one day at a time. You don't give all endurance all in one sudden swoop. You give it piece by piece, day by day, helping us to walk one step at a time with you. And I thank you Lord, that there is a right, appropriate way to be discouraged because we share your heart, because we love what you love, or at least sometimes and sort of and we're growing in it. Lord, it's right for us to be saddened by the things that push away from your kingdom, especially when there are many of them close by around us. So would you help us to endure? Lord, would you help us to take particular courage from the fact that you are interceding for us, that the Savior, the Spirit intercede, that we have saints around us who are praying and to whom we can ask for help and that you've given us Psalms that we can read and let our eyes fall upon even when our hearts are struggling to get words into our mouths. We pray all this in your name. Amen.