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TAMING MY MOOD SWINGS

Ashley Petersen was just a 14-year-old high school girl when reporters stuck microphones in front of her and wanted her opinion about a friend of hers. “Andy was just a great, loving and fun guy,” she told them. And they pressed her. “You mean, way back when, he was a great, loving and fun guy?” No, she replied. Just a week ago, one week before Charles Andrew Williams took his dad’s eight-shot, .22-caliber handgun out of his backpack and began shooting his fellow students at Santana High School, killing two of them and wounding 13 others.

And I guess that’s the great mystery which will always bedevil child psychologists. Why does a boy who seems relatively normal and happy all of a sudden have his picture on the TV news because he decided to become a mass murderer? How does that happen in one week? What sort of mood did he enter on or about March 5, 2001, where he went from being a decent kid to being an instrument of death?

It’s a scary thing, isn’t it, to realize that our moods, too, are so subject to change. Psychologists talk about “violent mood swings,” and even if you have both feet firmly planted on the ground, you can look back at the wake behind your own boat, so to speak, and suck in your breath at how far to one side or the other you can go with your attitudes.

I can think of times I looked into the files, the archives, of some of my early sermons . . . and groaned to myself. “Oh, no!” Did I really express my thoughts that way? Come to think of it, did I actually even believe that back in 1975? There’s many an author who looks back at the first or second book he or she wrote, and winces in embarrassment. “Call the publisher; please burn all existing copies!” We often come around full circle from those early convictions, from the belief system of our younger days.

Well, friend, speaking of full circle, that leads us right back to the question we’ve been asking all week: IS THAT GOD’S VOICE I HEAR? It’s been our contention here in this series that when God speaks to you through the Word of God, that’s His reliable voice. God doesn’t contradict Himself; He doesn’t speak out of both sides of His mouth. He doesn’t send us a message through a godly prophet in one generation, and then amend His own constitution to a subsequent generation.

But when it comes to impressions or dreams — OUR dreams — then we have to be careful. Dreams can come from God, and they can also come from other sources. There can be good prophets and false prophets, reliable preachers and unreliable ones, faithful radio ministries and unfaithful ones. And really, the only sure way to know if you’re hearing God’s voice is to compare, compare, compare. Take what you’re hearing today — in that magazine article, in the sermon you listen to next Sabbath or Sunday, even in the words coming through this radio station right this very moment — and put them right up against the Bible. Because the Bible IS the eternal Word of God.

It’s a plain fact of life, friend, that we go through spiritual moods. One day the idea of creation seems like the most rational thing in the world to you. You watch your child being born, and you whisper, along with King David, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s not at all difficult THEN to believe what the Bible says in Genesis 1. The next day, though, as you find yourself in the world of science, of Internet research, where smart, mouse-clicking geniuses and web site wizards and the NABT – the National Association of Biology Teachers – talk compellingly about evolution and how the men and women in the laboratories have proved such-and-such . . . all at once, Genesis 1 is a lot harder to hold onto. It’s the same with what the Bible says about the Resurrection, about Calvary, about heaven, about life beyond the tomb. Our moods fly all over the place, and we begin to wonder what we believe. Where is there an anchor for our attitudes and convictions?

There’s a marvelous essay to be found on this very topic, and it comes from a Christian who spent a good share of his life on the atheist side of the fence. C. S. Lewis writes about moods, and how easy it can be to slide all over the map as we listen to the voices inside our own heads.

“Faith is the art,” he writes, “of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.”

Now this is an interesting confession coming up. Listen:
“I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”

That’s fascinating, isn’t it? The mood pendulum swings wildly back and forth for the atheist, just like it does for the believer. Here’s a bit more of his essay:

“This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.”

Now, what he’s saying here is closely linked to our concept of identifying the true voice of God, because, really, what IS faith except to know God well enough to completely trust Him? That’s faith, pure and simple: knowing God. Trusting God. Which happens more and more as we can sort out His voice from the alien voices competing against Him. And right here C. S. Lewis gives us a perfect antidote for those false voices out there.

“The first step,” he writes, “is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.”

Now friend, the last thing I would be qualified to do would be to analyze the mind and the thinking of this disturbed young man: Andy Williams. But let me just ask this hypothetical question. What if he had firmly fastened in his mind the promise found in Isaiah 43:1?

“Don’t be afraid. I have redeemed you. I have named you. You are Mine!”

When kids at Santana High ragged on him, beat him up after he got a haircut, called him a “faggot,” would his mood swings into hatred have been held in check by that verse? When he faced hostile peer pressure, when other teens teased him for being skinny, for being kind of jug-eared, would it have helped him to have memorized and said over and over and over to himself this line from Philippians 4:13?

“I can face any situation with Christ who gives me strength.”

There’s a great Old Testament verse that, at first glance, you might think works against this argument. King David, in his incomparable 119th Psalm, has this to say:

“I have hidden Your Word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.”

Immediately you say — and rightly so — “What a failure that was! All these verses in David’s brain were zero protection from the mood swing of lust he got up on the roof that hot August night. His libido swung him right into the arms of Bathsheba . . . and having the seventh commandment of Exodus chapter 20 in his mind didn’t do a bit of good.” True enough. But friend, imagine with me the incredible discouragement David must have felt after he got caught in that horrific double sin: adultery and murder. It was absolutely shattering to be found out by the prophet Nathan, and to hear those words shouted at him: “Thou art the man!!” He must have felt like committing suicide that night, or at the very least chucking his friendship with God. Quitting it all. King David was a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off. And yet that story takes us right to Psalm 51, where David’s mood swings are held in check by his belief that God was forgiving.

“Have mercy on me, O God,” he pleaded. “Blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”

Listen, friend, we weep over the Andy Williams tragedies and the Columbine scars of the world. But imagine how many more there would be if we didn’t have the Bible protecting us from our own mood swings? How many suicides have been prevented because discouraged men and women were able to look beyond the darkness of today and know that God still loved them despite how they FELT? How many killing sprees have been thwarted by a person taking a deep breath and remembering that the Bible tells us to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to leave vengeance to the Lord?

Yes, friend, there’s no greater protection against the voice of my moods . . . than the never-changing voice of God.