There is a script that runs quietly inside many Christians with mental illness, and the church needs to know it is running.
The script says, in various forms: this is happening to me because I have done something wrong.
The depression is divine discipline. The anxiety is a result of insufficient faith. The intrusive thoughts are proof of a corrupted heart. The panic attacks are God's way of getting my attention. The bipolar cycles, the schizophrenia, the long unhealable wound — somewhere underneath, the believer with these conditions is running a quiet equation. Mental illness equals divine displeasure.
They will rarely say this out loud. They have learned, over the years, that saying it out loud makes other Christians uncomfortable. So they carry it silently. They carry their illness, and underneath the illness they carry the additional weight of believing that the illness is, in some way, deserved.
The church has often not helped.
We have sometimes implied it directly. Are you sure there is no unconfessed sin? Have you been reading your Bible? Maybe God is trying to teach you something. These sentences land on a believer who is already running the equation, and they confirm it. They tell the suffering person that the suffering is, indeed, a verdict.
It is not.
The disciples once asked Jesus the very question that lives underneath the script. They saw a man born blind, and they asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? (John 9:2). They wanted to know whose fault the suffering was. The equation was already running for them, too. They were just asking Jesus to confirm which side of the ledger to charge it to.
Jesus' answer is one of the most important sentences in the Gospels for the mentally ill among us.
Neither this man nor his parents sinned (John 9:3).
He refused the equation. He refused, in a single sentence, the entire framework that says suffering can be neatly traced back to a specific moral failure in the sufferer or their family. The man was blind. The blindness was not, in this case, anyone's fault. The disciples' question itself was the wrong question.
Jesus does this again with the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices, and with the eighteen people killed by a falling tower in Siloam. Do you think they were worse sinners than all the others, because they suffered this way? No, I tell you (Luke 13:2–3). He directly contradicts the assumption that suffering is a moral measurement. He says it twice. He goes out of his way to make sure the people listening do not walk away with the equation intact.
Job's whole book is a forty-two-chapter argument against the same equation. Job's friends, with great theological eloquence, kept trying to find the sin that had caused his suffering. They were sure it had to be there. They worked through every category they could think of. At the end of the book, God himself appears and rebukes them. My anger burns against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right (Job 42:7). The men who insisted that suffering must be punishment were, the Lord said, speaking wrongly about him.
The equation is not in the Bible. The equation is in us. And the Bible, again and again, refuses it.
The reason this matters for mental illness, specifically, is that the script lands differently here than it does for, say, cancer or a car accident.
When a believer has cancer, the church mostly does not whisper what did you do. Cancer is read as biological. The body, we understand, sometimes does this. Nobody asks the cancer patient if their tumour is the consequence of unconfessed sin.
When a believer has depression, the script comes back. Suddenly, somewhere in the conversation, the suggestion arises that the depression might be spiritual rather than biological. That the believer might need to examine their walk. That perhaps the medication is masking what God is trying to teach them. The mental illness gets pulled, in a way physical illness does not, into the moral realm.
This is theologically wrong and pastorally cruel.
The brain is a physical organ. The neurochemistry of depression and anxiety and bipolar disorder is as biological as the cellular biology of cancer. The body of a mentally ill believer is doing something the body sometimes does. It is not, in any biblical sense, a measurement of their faithfulness, any more than a person's blood sugar is a measurement of their faithfulness.
The whisper that says otherwise is the whisper of Job's friends. It is the whisper the disciples brought to Jesus about the man born blind. It is the whisper that the Lord himself, more than once in the Gospels, explicitly refuses.
If the whisper is running in someone you love — or in you — it needs to be named, and refused, and replaced with what the Bible actually says.
For the believer who has been carrying the equation, the work of healing is not first about the illness. The illness will be carried, with or without the equation. The first work is about untangling who God actually is from the role the equation has assigned him.
The God of the equation is angry. He is keeping score. The illness is a punishment from him, or at minimum a tool he is using to discipline the believer. Every flare-up of symptoms is a reminder of his displeasure. Every relapse is a further verdict.
The God of the Bible — the God Jesus revealed — is not this God.
A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out (Isaiah 42:3).
This is the God who is with the mentally ill believer. He is not standing over the bruised reed waiting for it to fail. He is not holding a fresh accusation each time the smoke flickers. He is the one whose explicit posture, named in his own prophet, is to not break what is already bruised. To not snuff out what is barely burning. He is, in the very nature of who he is, the protector of fragile things, not their further breaker.
The illness is not from him in the way the equation thinks it is. The illness is from a fallen world, a worn body, a complex interplay of genetics and history and circumstance — a world that, in Paul's words, is groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now (Romans 8:22). God is not the author of that groaning. He is, in Christ, the one who entered it and is working to redeem it.
The suffering is not your fault. The suffering is not the verdict. The God who sees you is not waiting for you to perform your way out of his anger. He is, in the words the Lord himself used at the baptism of his Son, looking at you and saying with this one I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17). His pleasure with you, in Christ, is not contingent on your symptoms cooperating.
If there are people in your congregation carrying the equation, the church has a specific work to do.
We have to stop saying the things that confirm it.
We have to stop suggesting that prayer alone is the answer to clinical depression. We have to stop framing medication as weak faith. We have to stop asking the diagnostic question — what is God trying to teach you through this? — as the first move. We have to stop linking mental illness to moral failure in our sermons, even subtly, even when we did not mean to.
And we have to start saying, plainly and often, what Jesus said. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. The suffering you see is not, in most cases, a verdict. The believer in front of you, struggling with their mind, is not in breach of contract with God. They are a person with a body that is doing what bodies sometimes do, and the gospel is for them exactly as it is for anyone else — entirely, unreservedly, without reservation.
Help them lay the equation down.
It was never theirs to carry.
Part 1: Sharing Bread without asking why
Part 2: Bringing them into your House
Part 3: The Sanctuary Outside the Building
Part 4: Suffering is not Punishment
