Next to Moses, Elijah was probably the most impressive man in the Old Testament and yet he suffered with depression.

Elijah had the ability to perform tremendous miracles: Heal the sick, raise the dead, call down fire from heaven, stop the rain from falling for three years and then make it start up again. . .

On one occasion he single-handedly withstood and then killed 450 of the false prophets of Baal. Malachi talks about how before Jesus Christ’s second coming to set up His kingdom, Elijah will return on the stage of events in the ‘last days.’ In Rev. 11, you see him again performing miracles.

“Elijah’s a key figure in Israel’s history,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “He established the school of the prophets. His ministry forestalled apostasy in Israel for decades and generations.”

Nevertheless, I Kings 19:4 reports that Elijah “went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”

Jordan says, “He goes right down into the pit. He’s not just going to quit, but he says, ‘C’mon, Lord, just kill me.’ Everything’s reversed itself suddenly and now Elijah is running for his life out in the wilderness, sitting under the juniper tree all in a punk; in the throes of despair.

“And you have to appreciate he’s going from the mountaintop of Carmel in chapter 18— where he wins a great victory in his ministry and life—to the slew of despond under a tree in the desert in chapter 19, asking God to kill him.

“It was an overnight event. It didn’t take a long process to get there. Sometimes depression comes on you that way. Sometimes it comes on quickly. Sometimes you move from the joy and excitement of victory right into the agonies, defeats and dark doldrums.”

In I Kings 19:10, Elijah explains of himself, “I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

Jordan says, “Now if you can’t see the series of bad-thinking in that you’re not listening. Elijah’s whole problem is he’s got unrealistic thinking and expectations; some misplaced dependencies. He says, ‘Look at what I’ve been doing.’ He’s talking about his own activities. Where’s his dependency been? ‘Israel’s failed, but I alone. . .’ You know, in reality there were 7,000 other people who were faithful too. Elijah thought he was all by himself and yet there were 7,000 men in Israel who hadn’t bowed their knee to Baal. But all Elijah sees is himself. He misplaced his dependencies onto what he’s doing and then he’s got expectations.

“Self-pity blinds his eyes to the resources that he has. And it maximizes the difficulties that are against him. And that’s always what happens. In your life, when you begin to focus on yourself, it’s the self-pity that’s present in every depression. I don’t care what it is, where it came from, how it’s induced; it always has an element of self-pity in it. That’s the part of the formula that you have to attack.

“Self-pity involves two forms of thinking. One is past thinking, where you remember; you rehearse the insult, the injury, the rejection, and you just go over it and over it and over it in your mind.

“And then the other is future thinking where you project the insult or the injury into the future and you begin to have anxiety and foreboding and worry and fear about it happening in the future; about it coming into your life in the future. And those things will eat your lunch. You won’t live above the snake line with thinking like that. That will put you in an absolute tailspin of despondency and despair.”

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In some notes I took from a Mother’s Day sermon Jordan gave a while back, he observed, “You ever notice how a mother can put up with an erring child? She’s like that because she’s like God. I mean, God put up with Jonah, didn’t he?

“God gave Jonah a job and Jonah hit the road. He ran. They threw him out of the boat, the whale swallowed him up, he goes down into hell, the whale spits him out, resurrects him, burps him out on the land.

“He goes prophesying, preaching to Nineveh and 120,000 people are converted. You’d think he’d be excited about that. But Jonah goes over and sits down and says, ‘I’m mad at you God for doing that! Why did you save them?! I knew you’d save them. You oughta have killed them bums.’

“Now, you know what a daddy would have done? Walk over there, grab Jonah by the neck, pick him up, kick him the seat of the pants and said, ‘Boy, I told you to do something and when I tell you to do something don’t argue with me!’

“You know what God did, though? He said, ‘Doest thou well to be angry Jonah?’ I mean, where did that response come from?!

“Jonah had already been tossed out of a boat and a whale picked him up, he died, went down into hell and came up. I mean, he knows better than this! A daddy’s approach would be to grab him by the collar and shake him real good, but do you notice how a woman can just put up with kids and put up with them and put up with them? You’d swear they couldn’t do it.”