A May 7th article about antidepressants in the Washington Post online cited some interesting data. Pharmaceutical companies pursuing FDA approval of their antidepressant medications must provide data supporting the claimed benefits. A comparison of patients who are given the antidepressant versus a control group who are given placebos (sugar pills) is standard procedure.

According to the article, the majority of such studies in the past few decades has revealed two things - that antidepressants work, and that sugar pills work just as well, if not better. Many patients who received placebos showed results indistinguishable from those who received antidepressants. But when these patients were told, after the study, that they had been taking placebos, their condition quickly deteriorated.

Obviously, what we believe has an impact on how we feel. Further, what we believe has an impact on how we live. Jesus told Martha "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Then He asked her the kicker - Martha, do you believe this?

That question is an appropriate one for our times as well. Remember what happened in the few years after Christ’s death? Paul and his companions “turned the world upside down”! He told the Colossians the gospel had been preached “in all creation under heaven”. David Lipscomb’s comment on this phenomenon was “It seems strange that the gospel had been preached among all the nations; but, if we consider the earnest character of the Christians, who gloried in persecutions and death for Christ's sake, it will not seem so strange. The greatest hindrance to the gospel in our day is the lukewarm and indifferent character of professed Christians.”

Think about it. How different would the world be today if our belief in the Great Physician was as motivating as those placebos mentioned earlier? Jesus told the Laodiceans to anoint their eyes with salve so that they could see their true condition. In the midst of material abundance, they were spiritually bankrupt. So here we are, in the most prosperous era in human history materially, and still we’re depressed in record numbers.

Where’s the joy so often mentioned in the New Testament, even in sometimes bitterly difficult circumstances? It is one of the fruits of the Spirit isn’t it? How many of our modern day maladies are really spiritual in nature? Perhaps we had better seek out some eye salve.