Biography
Edward V. Hill, a Texan by birth, graduated from Prairie View A&M College. He holds numerous honorary degrees, among them an LLD from Union Theological Seminary in Houston, Texas, an LLD from Biola University in La Mirada, California, and a Doctor of Divinity degree from the California Graduate School of Theology in Glendale. Dr. Hill has been pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Los Angeles, California for the last twenty-five years. He also serves as vice president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. of which he is a Life Member. He is president and director of The World Christian Training Center, and chairman of the board of directors of the Work Experience Program of the Center. Dr. Hill is also on the board of directors of the Billy Graham Association, the board of reference of African Enterprises and a Life Member of the NAACP. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"How to Get Into and Out of Depression" 
I want to talk about how to get into a deep depression and how to get out of it. I hope I don’t run out of time before I get to how to get out of it because I don’t want to leave you in it.

All around the country there is a truism, there is a reality, and that is that many believers are faced with the fact that they have periods of great depression. Now there are several ways that you can get into depression as I know.

First of all, you remember in II Kings 6:15, there was a young man with a prophet. The prophet was an experienced sage who was a Godly man, but this young man wasn’t. He saw, when he was awakened, the enemies all around the camp and he was just overwhelmed. He awakened the prophet and said, “We are surrounded. Everywhere I look we are surrounded. We just have enemies on every hand.”

And that’s my first point. My first point is that you can become greatly depressed because you are overwhelmed and there are just so many things that can overwhelm us daily. The newspapers, the headlines: somebody shot somebody, somebody is about to drop a bomb on somebody, some other country is about to get the bomb, somebody had a fight. Just reading the newspaper can overwhelm you.

I remember my wife and son went off for nine days, and just opening up the mail for the eight days that she was gone, overwhelmed me. I didn’t know she had so many charge accounts in all of my life. I mean, from every account including a place called The Lost Woman, I got a bill. And I was just overwhelmed by bills. The unwanted bills — I mean the light bill, the gas bill, the water bill, the car bill — children hollering, the children screaming, the dishes, the diapers — just everything can overwhelm you.

And wherever you look there is a problem, there is a need, there is a condition, and so we live in a world where you can just be overwhelmed and it will cause depression.

There are just so many hindrances in life. Everywhere you go, you are running into something, and there is such slow progress in life, seemingly, on what you are trying to do and trying to become. It doesn’t seem to move fast, and that can overwhelm and you can become depressed.

There are so few “thank yous”. When I think about the millions of people who have listened to this broadcast on radio and television these eighty years and been helped by them, I would suggest to you there have been so few letters that have been written in, based on my own experience, saying that I was helped and I thank you, and here is some help.

So if today you find yourself completely depressed, and I’m talking to believers, because there seems to be the feeling that Christians are immune to the daily task of living and the problems of living. I do want to say to the sinner that I can understand your depression. But I want to address myself to the believers who are depressed.

There are preachers who are depressed. We are having a great exodus out of the ministry — one of the greatest that we have ever had — and when I sit down and talk with them and hear, “I am overwhelmed, I am depressed, nobody appreciates what I have done, nobody says thank you, nobody says we appreciate what you have accomplished, and I’m just depressed, and I’m just overwhelmed.”

Those are some ways you can get into a great depression, a depression that Valium and all of the others can’t help, in my judgment. You can just be overwhelmed. You can have just so much to do. You can try to do so much. You can just run into so many hindrances, and then you can see such little progress, and then you can get so few thanks for what you do. Until you sit there in the living room, just as you are doing right now, and say, “It doesn’t pay.”

You fold up in your own little cubbyhole and you don’t have anything to do with anybody because you are depressed. I want to rush to tell you how to get out of that depression and make life worth living.

No. 1 — I want to say to you very frankly, and copy down what I’m saying now. I mean make a note of this because I want you to do something about that this week. Your depression and your feeling down in the dumps and your seeing no way out may be purely physical. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t have anything to do with being born again, it doesn’t have anything to do with being spirit filled. You’re just plainly tired. You have a physical condition. And I want to make that as a first suggestion. Have you checked up on yourself physically? Has your doctor checked you out?

I had a young lady come to our office several months ago and she said, “I’m just down. I’m just tired. I can’t move. I can’t concentrate. I can’t think. I don’t have any get-up-and-go.”

And it reminded me of how I felt about ten years ago. I was that way. I thought the Lord’s Spirit had withdrawn from me. Everybody got on my nerves, and I went to the doctor and the doctor found that I had — first, low potassium, and second, that I had low thyroid. And either one of those can put you in the dumps. If your potassium is low, if your thyroid is low, you just don’t get up and go. You just feel as though you have had it. And so I want to use that illustration.

And as that young lady talked to me, I said, “When have you been to the doctor?”

She said, “Oh, about a year or so.”

I said, “Would you check this week? As a matter of fact, go to my doctor. Tell him I think you have what I had.”

She went to my doctor and discovered she had a chronic case of a lack of potassium.

It may be purely physical.

And that’s one of the things that God has blessed us with in the United States, and that’s one of the things that I want all Christians to do — and that is, get your physical check-up. It may have nothing to do with the Spirit, nothing to do with whether you prayed or didn’t pray, whether you fasted or didn’t fast. You just may be sick, and even more than that, you may be tired, just plain old tired.

I had another person come into me and he had three jobs, seven days a week, a nagging wife, plus being sick. He said, “Pastor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Well, first of all — the three jobs. Bedroom, bathroom, table, job; bedroom, bathroom, table, job. You’ve got to hurry to bed so you can be the first one to the bathroom, so you can rush to the table, so you can get to work, so you can get off early, so you can get to bed, so you can get to the bathroom early, so you can get to work early, so you can get to bed early, so you can go to table early, so you can go to the bathroom. You’re just tired, just plain tired. We were not meant to be slaves. It’s even illegal in the United States. We were not meant to be slaves — you need some rest.

There is in I Kings 19 a Biblical account of someone who was just tired and weary. It was Elijah. And the Lord caught up with him after he had made this dramatic appearance on Mount Carmel and had seen the fire fall and seen his enemies destroyed, and then got a letter from this woman and ran out of town and just didn’t want to live any more.

When the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him, he said, “Get up and eat and then go back to sleep. You’re just plain tired.”

So the first thing I want to suggest to you is that it may be physical. I hope you’ll take that. I’m not anti doctors, and I believe in spiritual, divine healing, but I want you also to know, that God uses medical doctors to work with our physical bodies.

Second of all — if you want to get out of a depression, I want you to remind yourself that it hasn’t been this way always. One of the things that my wife and I are doing is that we plan to write a book because through all of our lives we have intentionally only remembered the great moments: the joy, the laughter. My wife and I have been married 31 years, and we have had a lot of silly fun. So that whenever moments of depression come in our house, the first thing we do is sit down and remember the great moments, the great times. We have always had problems like this since we started having problems. We remember when we didn’t have this problem, when it was hard. We remember when our first child was born. We remember how she was a nurse and she shook me. She said, “Edward, it’s time,” and I thought she meant it was time for her to go to work.

And I got up and tried to put her uniform on when she was trying to say, “It’s time to go and have the baby.”

And there we were in the middle of the floor, I was trying to put the uniform on her, and she’s trying to tell me, “I need to go to the hospital.”

These have not always been hard times, and we can never have a depression over money because we always remember when I came into the house and there were candles everywhere in the house. And I said to her, “Why do you have these candles?”

She said, “Well, I just thought we would have a candlelight supper.”

It was groovy to me, you know, a candlelight supper. So we were just going to have a candlelight supper. All of a sudden I went into the bathroom, and she forgot to put a candle in the bathroom. And I turned on the light to find out that the lights had been cut off. Here my wife tried to cover it over, and so we were going to eat by candlelight when, in fact, we didn’t have any money to pay our light bill and the lights had been cut off.

She said, “Edward, I know how hard you work, and I know how you try, and I just didn’t want to embarrass you.”

So we can never be upset or depressed over no money because we started out that way with the lights cut off, but with a woman with such vision and with such grace that she didn’t want to embarrass her husband.

And no matter who you are or where you are, you can always think of something in the past that will make you laugh and rejoice that it hasn’t been this way always.

So in the book of Ephesians, the apostle says, “Talk to yourself. Talk to yourself. Recall the days when the sun was shining. Recall the moments when you had great joy.” So we make a list of all of our jokes. We recall the joke when our daughter was sixteen years old and announced that she was going to cook the Thanksgiving dinner. And she didn’t want anybody in the kitchen helping her. So we decided to let her have it. And there we were, sitting around the table, fixing to give grace, and this brown turkey, and I noticed something that looked strange, and that is I couldn’t find where the turkey had been opened up.

And all of a sudden we found that our daughter had baked a turkey that she hadn't cleaned. She had never cut it. And we laugh about it. She’s thirty years old now, and we’re going to see her for Thanksgiving and I’ve already told her, “Cut that turkey open.”

There have been great moments. We all try to remember when we made our first million. We all try to remember when we bought our first fifteen-bedroom home. We all try to remember when we were elected governor, or when we were elected President of the United States, and we try to hold our joy back for those great occasions, but there were little, small occasions, where your wife made you know you love her, and you made her know she loved you. But you need to talk to yourself.

I’m a pastor of a great church with 2,000 or more active members, but I remember that first church of mine with only 56 members and how gracious and wonderful they were towards me and how they brought food, and how they helped me through college with their little nickels and dimes. Talk to yourself. You’ve had great moments.

I remember my wife, just before she had an operation for gall stones. She woke me up about two o’clock in the morning and she said, “Edward, I don’t think I can make it. It’s hurting so; it’s hurting so.”

And I said, “What can I do? What can I do?”

And she said, “Oh, if I could just belch.”

And I said, “I’ve got it. There’s a Coke in the box downstairs. I just saw it.”

And I ran downstairs. I took the top off of that Coke and I ran back upstairs, and just as I reached the top of the stairway, I drank the last swallow. I rushed into her with the empty bottle, and she said, “Where’s my Coke?” and I said, “Oh no, this was for you.”

She began to laugh and I’m belching because of the Coke, and she’s belching because I was so stupid. And there we were — belching together. We’ve had great moments. Talk to yourself. Recall the great moments. Recall the great days.

There is another way to get yourself out of depression. I Corinthians 2:9 says that one of the reasons you ought not to be depressed is because this is not it! One of the great problems that we are having across the country today is that Christians are falling for the Satanic suggestions that this is heaven, and this is it, and if you don’t get it here, you’ll never have it. Therefore Christians are panicky because you don’t have what you think you should have and what you ought to have. But I want to remind you today what the Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 2:9, “But as it is written, eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

Oh praise his name. You who are depressed, you who are lonely, you who believe that life has nothing for you, you who believe in the Lord Jesus, you can not only come out of your depression because you remember the great moments and the great things and that God is with us, but you can get out of that depression by recognizing, “This ain’t it! This is not heaven! This is not our reward! This place is not our permanent dwelling place! We don’t have our heavenly bodies! We don’t have our reward! We have not yet entered into his presence, but one glad morning when this life is over, God has something for us!" Oh bless his name.

I close tonight by suggesting that God has blessed me and I appreciate his blessings. I appreciate the house I live in, and I appreciate the car I drive. I appreciate the clothes I wear. I appreciate that my children have been able to go to school. But this ain’t it! That car that I drive, though it be a Lincoln, it isn’t worthy. When all of this is over and when I shall behold him for myself, I shall have things that eyes have not seen, and ears have not heard. Get up off of that couch where you are, put your shoulders back, open up your eyes, pray to God, and let God dwell richly in your heart. You are somebody. You may not have much but what you do have, God bless you with it.

And God bless and keep you as you come out of the depressions that you are now in.

May God bless you.