The key to entering in to the deeper life was absolute, complete, and total surrender of your will to God. If you got to the place where you were willing to do anything God asked you to do then you entered into this holier state. If you didn’t enter in, it was because there was something that you were holding back from God.
I was determined to enter in. They would have people give sermons on the deeper life and then they would invite you to come forward to pray and make total surrender to God. I answered virtually every altar call for the first three semesters. And I didn’t enter in. I didn’t become experientially dead to sin. Which meant, according to the theory, that I was holding something back from God. Which gave me an incredible burden of guilt.
Which was exactly the wrong thing to have happening as I entered into my first experiences of full blown winter depression due to seasonal effective disorder. For the record, I had no idea what was going on. Seasonal effective disorder wasn’t even identified as a diagnosis for more than a decade after I started to be afflicted by it and anti-depressant drugs hadn’t even been invented yet.
Depression effects me like a slow leak in the tire of my self control. It just gets harder and harder and harder to do everything you are supposed to be doing, including things like spending the amount of time in prayer you would like to spend. All I could figure out was that I was a bad person who was on the road to getting worse. If I could just surrender everything to God, I would be given the power to do good. I didn’t have the power, so there was some aspect of sin I loved more than I loved the Lord. What a perfect formula for turning mild depression into deep depression!
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