Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, former minister of Westminster Chapel in London, wrote a book called Spiritual Depression. In it he says: “The devil’s one object is so to depress God’s people that he can go to the man of the world and say: There are God’s people. Do you want to be like that?” Lloyd-Jones goes on to say: In a sense a depressed Christian is a contradiction in terms, and he is a very poor recommendation of the gospel. We are living in a pragmatic age. People today are not primarily interested in truth, what they are interested in is results. The one question they ask is: Does it work? They are frantically seeking and searching for something that can help them. (…) Nothing is more important, therefore, than that we should be delivered from a condition which gives other people, looking at us, the impression that to be a Christian means to be unhappy, to be sad, to be morbid, and that the Christian is one who scorns delights and lives laborious days. (…) Satan can’t rob us of our salvation, but he can definitely rob us of our joy. His great concern is to prevent anyone becoming a Christian, but when that fails, his one object then is to make them miserable Christians so that he can point men who are under conviction of sin to them and say: ‘That is Christianity; look at him or her. There is a picture of Christianity! Look at that miserable creature. Do you want to be like that?’

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1965, Spiritual Depression, Michigan: Eerdmans, p.19-20, p.69)