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[Music] The Kane Syndrome [Music] [Music]

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Give attention to God's Word written as it is recorded in the book of Genesis, chapter 4, beginning at the verse number 1. "Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, 'With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.' Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

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Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering,

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but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?

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But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it.' Now Cain said to his brother Abel, 'Let's go out to the field.' And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

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Then the Lord said to Cain, 'Where is your brother Abel?' 'I don't know,' he replied. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' The Lord said, 'What have you done? Listen, your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground,

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which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.' Cain said to the Lord, 'My punishment is more than I can bear.

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Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence. I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.' But the Lord said to him, 'Not so. If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.'

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Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.

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To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad was the father of Mehuzhael, and Mehuzhael was the father of Methuselah, and Methuselah was the father of Lamech. Lamech married two women, one named Ada and the other Zillah. Ada gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock.

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His brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the harp and the flute. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naam. May God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All of us have bad days. I would like to talk especially with those tonight for whom every day is a bad day. William James, the great psychologist, suggested at one time that you could draw a line through your life,

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and you could say that every time in your life which was above that line was a time of brightness and sunniness, and every time in your life that was below that line was a time of darkness and shadow. Above the line, you are the master of your moods. Below the line, you are at the mercy of your moods. Above the line, you are in charge of your life. Below the line, events are controlling you in life.

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To live below the line is to be depressed. Depression means a sense of continual defeat. It is dismay with the circumstances of your experience. It is a feeling of futility as you confront the difficulties in life which are yours. It is to be broken-hearted or broken-souled. It is to be severe and self-castigating about yourself.

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It is to be exhausted and tired and without the energy that you feel you need for life. It is to be suspicious of yourself, your motives, your desires, and also suspicious of others. It is in its most extreme form the wish to die rather than to live. Depression. It is one of the oldest ailments recorded in medical literature.

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We have references from as long ago as 2,000 years which discuss depression. Its ancient name, of course, was melancholia. More people suffer from depression than from any other psychological debility. It is, if I may say it, the common cold of the field of psychology.

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But I have good news for you tonight, and that good news is this. God knows all about depression. The scriptures speak quite openly of depression. Job says, "I wish I had died in my mother's womb. My troubles never end."

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One of the psalmist wrote, "Oh God, you seem so far away. My depression is suffocating." And then on the very earliest pages of scripture, we have the story of a terribly depressed person. That person was Cain. Now, the story of Cain is told to us in very terse and abrupt terms.

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We have only a skeleton outline, as it were, of his life. The narrative comes to us in a kind of telegraphic code. It's about two brothers, one named Cain, the other named Abel. Cain is the older. Dr. Carl Koenig, in his studies, has pretty well demonstrated that the oldest in a family

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is generally the most aggressive or ambitious of the children. And we see traits of this ambition in Cain. Now, on one occasion, Cain, who was a farmer, brought the offerings of the field to God. At the same time, his brother Abel, who was a shepherd, brought the offerings of his flock to God.

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And the offering of Abel was accepted by God, but the offering of Cain was not. Now, no indication is given to us in scripture as to why the one offering was received and the other was not. There is a rather vague reference in Hebrews which suggests that Cain's offering was brought without faith, but there is no evidence for this anywhere in scripture.

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Perhaps the most profound comment about this has been made by Gerhard von Raad, one of the handful of great Old Testament scholars in our century. Von Raad says that in the acceptance of the offering of Abel and the rejection of the offering of Cain, we have testimony to that truth of scripture which is announced in Exodus chapter 33,

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where God says, "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." In other words, it is God's sovereign will to accept what he wishes to accept and to reject what he wishes to reject. That may be exactly what we are seeing in the acceptance of one offering and the rejection of the other.

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One thing, however, is certain, that while God did reject Cain's offering, he did not reject Cain himself. For God says to Cain, "If you do right, you will be accepted." In other words, he rejects the offering, but not the offerer, Cain.

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Unfortunately, Cain does not see what happens in those terms. He feels rejected by God, personally rejected by God. Now, it's difficult for us to understand that. It's difficult often for us to understand how other people respond in given situations,

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but put your own experience under a microscope for a moment, just as I have done with mine. Five years ago, I was in the hospital for cardiac bypass surgery. The operation was a success, but just the day before I was to go home from the hospital, I contracted a very serious infection,

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and I was told that I would have to remain in the hospital for an additional six weeks, receiving intravenous medication every six hours, 24 hours around the clock for that time period. Now, it was a very bad winter, the worst winter we have had in Pennsylvania in more than a decade. There were many times when the nurses and doctors could not get to the hospital,

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and visitors rarely got there. Not only that, but some members of my family were ill and others were far away, and so I had virtually no company. And I found myself becoming progressively more depressed.

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Now, I recognized that God had given me warning pains in the chest in time to have this surgery, rather than perhaps a fatal heart attack. I recognized that I had been given the gift of great doctors. I recognized that God had led me through the operation successfully.

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I recognized that I was in a fine hospital. I knew all of those things, but somehow, the experience of having my prayer to go home rejected. Somehow, it seemed to cut me off from God. I felt as if my prayers were going no higher than the ceiling of the room in which I was imprisoned, shall I say.

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And in that circumstance, I went into a deep depression. I would suggest to you that Cain's experience was similar to that. He was rejected only in terms of his offering, but somehow he felt that this separated him from God. The scriptures say that Cain, and this is the way it probably reads in your Bible at home,

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that Cain was very angry and his face fell. But new linguistic evidence, which we've just gotten on this passage, indicates that that translation, common to most of our versions of the Bible, is really not correct. That phrase should read that Cain was deeply grieved and in a dark despair.

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And God saw this. That's the reason God speaks to Cain when he sees him in deep grieving and dark despair, in this depressed mood. When he sees the countenance of Cain, he responds, "Why are you so depressed? If you do right, will you not be lifted up?"

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Now, don't get the idea that this is some ancient story not relevant to our time. As recently as the last two years, doctors Beck and Lehman have isolated the fact that one of the clearest signs of depression is a downcast or melancholic expression on the face. And it was just this that God saw in Cain.

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You see, to Cain, he had lost his love object. The one that he worshipped, the one to whom he brought the offering, was God. But God rejected the offering. He felt rejected by the one he loved the most. And 92% of the people who are in serious depression today indicate in their consultations with the doctors helping them

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that they feel precisely that same rejection. Not only that, but Cain also felt that he'd lost his father. Not his father Adam, Adam was still alive, but his ultimate father, the father who had made him and breathed into him the breath of life. His relationship with God was gone. God as the object of his love and God as his father.

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And so he lost confidence in himself and slipped into a deep depression. In my reading of the literature of depression, I have been able to isolate from various authorities a number of principal causes for depression. There is, for example, the experience of failure or rejection. Or there are the transitions of adult life, when you feel that the doors of your life are closing and new opportunities are not opening to you.

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There's the feeling of being abandoned by God. That can lead to depression. There is the loss of a loved one by death, especially if that loved one was the one who gave you your sense of value. There is negative internal conversations. That is, when all of your thoughts concerning yourself are dark and forbidding and condemning thoughts.

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There is the anger that can be directed inward when you are dissatisfied with yourself and rage against yourself. That can lead to depression. There is a guilt, not a general guilt, which is part of the coming and going of our society, but a deep neurotic guilt. Or there are exaggerated hopes, setting goals that are too high, and then the deep disappointment that comes when you don't reach them.

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Those things can lead to depression. Sometimes depression runs in families. It can have a hereditary factor to it. Sometimes it's a matter of body chemistry. Sometimes it's a deep existential depression, a suggestion that all of life has no meaning and no purpose.

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Now, if you look over all of those causes for depression, you will find that eight out of the eleven are present in the experience of Cain. He felt rejected. He felt abandoned by God. He felt that he had lost his ultimate father, that he was dead to him. He had deep internal conversations about himself that were altogether negative.

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He was full of rage and anger. He had a sense of guilt. He had exaggerated hopes, wanted his offerings to be accepted above Abel's and found that that did not come to be. And then maybe there was some of this existential depression in him too. Maybe he thought when this happened, "What's the point of life and everything that's part of it?"

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And so we see in Cain all the symptoms and expressions of deep, soul-crushing depression. And God sees it too. And he says to Cain, "Don't be depressed. Do right and you will be lifted up. We are still in touch. Get hold of yourself. You can," he says, "master this thing. It is at the door, but you can control it." But tragedy upon tragedy, Cain rejects the counsel of God and he projects the anger that is in him against his brother Abel.

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When I was hospitalized, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, and was alone so long and feeling so depressed, the friends who did visit me or talk to me over the telephone told me that I became extremely hostile, that there was in me that which was always ready to lash out, that I said things completely contrary to my normal attitude and demeanor.

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Depressed people often do that. Depression is when you feel that your life is out of control, that things are manipulating you. One of the few things that you can do when you are depressed, one of the few ways in which you can affect people around you, is by hitting out, is by anger and verbalized hostility. And Drs. Weissman and Pachel have demonstrated that that kind of anger and hostility is usually vented

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on the members of your family who are closest to you. So Cain kills Abel. Now make no mistake about it, Cain did not intend to murder Abel. After all, no one knew what murder was at that time. We're still in the earliest chapters of Genesis. No one has yet died. Cain would not have even known what death was. He had never seen death.

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He did not know how to go about creating death since he had never even seen it. Perhaps the concept itself was unknown to him in any meaningful form. And so when he raged against Abel and knocked him to the ground, I am sure that he fully accepted and expected that Abel would get up again.

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But Abel didn't. And when Cain bent low and discovered that the breath of life was gone from his brother, then this depression of his was even more awesomely magnified. And God said to Cain, "You have scarred yourself. You have scarred your life. You will never get out from under the memory of what you have done. You will have to leave this place."

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And Cain, thinking immediately of his own death, and most depressed people do that, the vast majority think a great deal about their own deaths and 15% try to take their own lives. Cain says, "Wherever I go, I'll be killed." And God says, "No, you will not be killed." And he proceeds to counsel Cain.

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First he expresses to Cain his judgment. Cain has sinned, and God is just and righteous and true. And that means injustice and unrighteousness and that which is not true to what the human experience is to be will be punished by God. And God condemns Cain for what Cain has done. But always in the judgment of God there is also mercy.

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Karl Barth, the most influential theologian of the 20th century, has said that God always says yes, and God always says no. But God's last word is always yes. Trace the records of God's judgment throughout the pages of the Old and New Testaments, and you will discover that no matter how severe the punishment visited upon an individual or upon his people,

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God always holds out a remnant of hope, an opportunity to begin again. Please turn your cassette to the other side. So God begins by judging Cain, and then he counsels him. And the first thing he does in counseling him is to get Cain to talk.

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Depressed people need an audience. They need the opportunity to ventilate what is in them. "Where is your brother?" God says. And Cain responds with the bitterness and hostility that's in him. "Am I supposed to be the shepherd's shepherd? Am I supposed to be my brother's keeper?"

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It comes surging out. And then God begins to deal with Cain's thinking and to turn it around. You see, what Cain was thinking in all of this, from the beginning of the story to this very moment, what he was thinking was wrong, and the way he was thinking was what led him into his depression.

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You see, the way we feel about things is much more determined by our thoughts than it is by the things that happen to us. Suppose it's very late at night, and I'm tutoring a girl in my home. And it's a little bit after twelve, and we come to the end of the particular lesson, and she thanks me and she goes, "I'm very tired.

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I wait until she's gone down the front porch steps, and then I flip off the porch light, close the door, turn off the lights, and start up the stairs to bed, exhausted. Halfway up the stairs, the doorbell rings. I turn around, I go back downstairs, I walk across the room in the darkness, flip on the porch light, and open the door.

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It's the girl, the same girl who had just been there. And she says to me, "Doc, I just thought of one more question." Now, there are at least two different ways in which I could respond to her coming back to my door. I could respond with, "What's the matter with this girl?

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I mean, it's after midnight, we finished the lesson, the lights were out, the door was closed. She's nothing more than a nuisance." Or I could think to myself, "She really wants to learn this thing. And not only that, but she's complimenting me by saying, 'I think you can help me learn it.'"

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Now, in both of those instances, the event, the girl coming to the door, is exactly the same. But my response to it, whether I am angry and impatient and hostile, or encouraged and flattered and uplifted, is determined by the way in which I think about the event that has occurred.

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Our emotions are not so much the fruit of our circumstances as they are the fruit of our thinking. So God begins to work with Cain because Cain's thinking is illogical. His thinking is depressing him. It is his confused thought that has led him from one step to another,

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into the darkness and tragedy that he now feels. And be aware of the fact that all of us do this. All of us slip into this negative, illogical thinking. We're not even conscious of the fact that we do it, but we do do it.

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Let me give you some examples of it, and perhaps you'll recognize yourself here. For example, there's the all-or-nothing person. This is the person who sees everything in absolute terms, black or white. They have one bad test in a course, and they come out the door and they say, "I'm finished.

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I'll never make it through the class." One test gone, and to hear them talk, the whole course is lost. That, of course, is illogical. But they are caught up in a real, serious consideration of failure because of one mistake.

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Or what about the individual who overgeneralizes? This is the girl who's sitting in class one day, and she didn't have time to prepare, and the professor calls on her. First time he's called on her in three weeks. She's not prepared.

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She walks out of the class, and what does she say? "Why is it that they never call on me except when I'm unprepared?" That may have happened two or three times in her whole life. But she takes that circumstance and generalizes it across her whole experience.

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That kind of thinking is depressing. See, there are a lot of people who look at situations with a kind of mental filter. They exaggerate the false in their experience and ignore the positive things. They filter those out.

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I give speech criticisms in my persuasive speaking class, and I'll sometimes say ten or twelve things good about a speech and perhaps one or two negative things about a speech. When the class is over, the student comes out all upset, deeply concerned, depressed, anxious,

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because of those few negative things. He has succeeded in filtering out everything that is good. A lot of people approach life in just that way. Or they practice a kind of reverse alchemy.

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You remember the alchemists of the Middle Ages who were always trying to turn lead into gold? Well, people who practice reverse alchemy try to translate gold into lead. You go up to them and you say, "That was really a good job." And they think to themselves, "He's just saying that to make me feel good."

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"You really, really look nice today." "Yeah, well, he says that to me now, but-- and besides, if I wasn't wearing any makeup, he wouldn't say it at all." There are some people that no matter what you say to them,

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they turn the gold of a compliment into the lead of a criticism. That leads to depressed thinking. Some individuals jump to conclusions. Now, jumping to conclusions, those kind of people come in two varieties.

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First, there's the mind readers. You're walking down the street. Your friend is walking towards you. You say, "Hi." He doesn't say anything.

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Now, it might be that the noise of the traffic was so loud he didn't hear you. It might be that he's so concerned about something that's on his mind that he doesn't hear you. But you're a mind reader, so you say, "Oh, he doesn't like me anymore." And then mind reading often leads to fortune telling.

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You call somebody. They're not there. You leave the message for them to call you back. They don't return the call. "Oh." Now you mind read.

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"They don't care about me anymore." Now you fortune tell. "Well, the next time I see them--" And so the next time you see them, you're as frosty as a Klondike.

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The result is they become frosty towards you, and what you predicted becomes true. And you discover later the friend never got the message to call back. But what you have done, you see, by this attitude, is to, through totally illogical thinking, brought about that which is negative and depressing.

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You know what binoculars are like. Some people think like binoculars see. If you hold binoculars correctly, they make everything look big. If you hold them incorrectly, they make everything look small. There are some individuals who, every time something ugly comes into their experience,

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they look at it so it looks big. And every time something small comes into their experience, they look at it so it's very small. Or there are individuals who allow their opinion of themselves to be determined by how they feel at any given moment.

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On Tuesday you feel hopeless. So your whole life is hopeless. On Wednesday you suffer a defeat. So your whole life is just one defeat. On Thursday you yield to a temptation. So your whole life is without courage and without the ability to stand up against temptation.

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And people that do this often slip into the additional mistake of applying labels to themselves. You ever seen the individual who's lining up a putt on the golf course, and he putts, and he misses the putt, and what does he say? "I'm a terrible golfer."

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Or here's the person who buys one stock and it goes down. "I'm a terrible investor." What these people do is this. They make one mistake in one area of their lives and then judge their whole lives by it. You're a breather. You breathe, I hope.

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Would you therefore then think that by saying "I'm a breather" you sum your whole experience? Obviously not. You would not think that for one moment. The fallacy lies in the fact that nothing in life is perfect. The choir sang magnificently tonight, as they always do,

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but no one in the choir would say that they sang perfectly. Mr. Cornelison played the organ tonight with great skill, as he always does. And though I haven't asked him, I know him well enough to know if I went to him and said, "Bob, was your performance flawless?" he would say no.

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We say the floor is clean, and yet every one of us understands that the floor is not perfectly clean. If nothing in life is perfect, why when we encounter that in our lives which reveals our imperfections, do we suddenly say, "I am a failure. I am without hope. I'm lost in this world." I wish I could bring this home to you in terms of its final seriousness.

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Because, you see, this kind of thinking is present in all of us, just as it was present in Kain. Kain, you see, was an all-or-nothing person. Kain overgeneralized. Kain ran things through his mental filter. Kain reversed the positive comments of God. He looked at things through binoculars held improperly to his eyes.

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Kain labeled himself. Kain measured his whole life by the way he felt at that given moment. And what Kain does, we all do. And God says to Kain, "I'm going to give you new opportunity, new hope. What you must do is to master this way of thinking which is yours."

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That's what we all need to do. I know it sounds very simple, but it is in reality profound. And my problem tonight is to help you to come to the place where you'll recognize that this thing I'm talking about, though it sounds simple,

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is at the very hearts of any depression and discouragement that you feel in your life. Most of it centers in illogical thinking, which then expresses itself in depressed living. The next time someone criticizes you or something happens that depresses you, write it down. Don't let it buzz around in your head.

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Capture it on a piece of paper. Trap it with your pencil. Get it there where you can see it. And now begin to look at it and find out if your approach to that thing isn't really an expression of one of these distorted forms of thinking

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which I've been holding before you tonight. Are you overgeneralizing? Are you applying standards of perfection to yourself that don't apply to anything in life? Are you labeling yourself?

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Are you filtering out that which is good and seeing only that which is bad? Approach it logically. If someone criticizes you, you always have three responses. You can be sad.

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That is, you can think about it so that it becomes the dominant thing in your life, and overgeneralize and become very, very depressed over it. Or you can become mad. Your blood pressure goes up, your fists clench, your jaws tighten,

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your teeth grit, and your face gets red. Or if you don't want sadness or madness, you can have a kind of gladness. You can calmly look at what has been said. You can think about whether this thing is logically sensible or not.

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If the criticism is valid, you can correct it or apologize. If it is invalid, you can go ahead with a new self-esteem and a new courage. What I'm saying to you is what Scripture says. As a person thinks in his heart, so he is.

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God says to Cain, "I will protect you," and he does protect him. Cain thinks as soon as he goes out, he's going to be killed. But God puts a mark on his forehead. See, in those days, all the different tribes wore a tattoo on their forehead.

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And if you had the tattoo of a tribe, no one would attack you because they'd be afraid that your whole tribe would come after them. But if you went out without such a mark, you were fair game. So God says, "I will put a mark on your forehead.

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I will make it appear that you are a member of a tribe. Then you will be protected. And you can go out into a life where you can begin again. You can be recreated.

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You can never be what you might have been because the sin of killing your brother is still yours. And you'll carry the memory of that with you always. But you do not have to carry the fact of it with you,

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the continuing burden of guilt of it with you. I can forgive you of that. I can, just as the psalmist says, I can restore your soul. I can give to you the gift of hope.

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Now, hope is a very precious thing. God doesn't just splash it around. No, he hands it out only to those who seek it. Well, there are those who laugh at hope.

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They say hope is absurd, doesn't square with the facts. Or they say hope is subversive. You're thinking about the future when you should be thinking about the present. Or they say that hope is, well, that it's not very explainable

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because it doesn't square up with what we know. But hope is beyond all those kinds of categories. Hope is the gift of newness. Hope is God's granting forgiveness.

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Hope is living in accordance with all the possibilities. Hope is accepting the gracious love and the promise of God. And starting again. And that's exactly what Cain did.

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He went out. He started a new life. He found a wife. He established a city.

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He had some very fine children. Some of them were the world's first musicians. Some of them were workers in fine metals. The tradition that came from him was a noble tradition.

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Oh, the mark was always there. But hope was always here. He thought in his heart. He got his mind in tune with God.

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He majored in the majors, not the minors. And it made all the difference. And the best illustration of that difference I've ever heard, I can tell you in one minute, and then I'm done.

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In a little village in the American West years ago, there was a man who stole some sheep. He was apprehended, convicted, and as was the custom in that day, he was branded with the letters S.T.—Sheep Thief.

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At first he thought that he would run away, never to come to that place again. But then he thought, "No." Instead of that, "I shall begin once more by God's grace."

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And thinking God's thoughts after him, he built a life of integrity and courage and goodness and hopefulness. And one day, many, many years, decades later, a stranger passing through the town

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saw an old man walk down the sidewalk with a brand in his forehead. And he turned to the kid that was pumping gas into his tank. And he said, "Who is that old guy? And what are those marks on his forehead for?"

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And the kid said, "I really don't know. He's been around here for a long, long time. I guess nobody really remembers the story. All I know is he's a wonderful person."

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I think that S.T. is an abbreviation for "saint" in God's promises, and your heart is the possibility and the promise of sainthood for every one of us. Let us pray.

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Our Father, we become so easily depressed because we so easily forget thee. We become so illogical in looking at the circumstances of our lives and then react to our own lack of logic and become frightened and defeated and despairing and overwhelmed.

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Speak to us. Help us to think in our hearts as you would have us think. Bring out of us all that's good by pouring into us all that is your hope. Make us finally into your children, your good children, your rich children,

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your blessed children. May all the world, when it looks at us, know that we belong to you and that you belong to us. We pray it in Jesus' name.

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And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.

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Amen.