Stop listening to John MacArthur.

Do it for Mental Health Awareness Month!

Image via Religion Unplugged

I’m just full of hot takes lately.

I’m no stranger to that bristling, uncomfortable moment when a random stranger says something ignorant about mental health. The amount of times I’ve held my tongue when “I’m a little OCD” comes out of a person’s mouth is *the limit does not exist*. It can be frustrating that in The Year of Our Lord 2024 people still know so little about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but, hell, I didn’t know that much about it until I was diagnosed in my mid-twenties. We can’t require everyone we meet to be equally as educated as we are on a topic just because it affects us in a deeply personal way. The best we can do is either choose to have grace for their ignorance and say nothing or offer a gentle correction if we feel it’s worth the potentially awkward conversation.

HOWEVER.

There are times when a direct challenge is required, and this, my friends, is one of those moments.

If you haven’t heard the news already, John MacArthur, well-known author and megachurch pastor of Grace Community Church in California, stuck his foot in his mouth last month when he claimed that mental illnesses such as PTSD and OCD are little more than “noble lies” peddled to the public by Big Pharma. According to MacArthur, “there is no such thing” as the disease I live with every day of my life, the disease I once begged God to forgive me for having because the experience of what was happening in my brain felt so contrary to who I was that it could only have been brought on by sin.

I don’t need to repeat what so many others have already written about the irresponsible, dangerous claims of this influential man who should know better. What I’d rather do is talk to MacArthur directly about how his view of mental illness is laughably one-sided and, perhaps, offer him a richer perspective on what it’s like to live as a Christian with one of these disorders.

So pull up a chair, John. Let’s have a little chat.

I’m surprised at you, even though I shouldn’t be. You’re not the first pastor to criticize mental illness as sin in disguise or avoid any attempt to give it credence as a public health issue. In this culture, we’re quite skilled at cultivating systemic problems and then punishing those who fall victim to them. Perhaps you’ve noticed the Church has a similar thorn in its side. Whatever the root issue of our collective struggles with mental health might be, I can assure you that no one has dug deeper than I have to discover when and how the obsessive-compulsive seed was planted in my brain. Was it trauma? Some genetic predisposition? Or even, as you theorized, grief? Although I have some ideas, it’s not for lack of searching that the exact answer eludes me to this day.

The implication of laziness on my part is clear in your comments. You claimed “if you can’t navigate grief, you can’t navigate life,” but I wonder at your own efforts, as a decades-long leader of the faith, to walk your parishioners through their grief? Do you accept that their emotions, if not their brains, are complex and multilayered? Or do you tell them they’ve been lied to by some corporate entity and advise them to simply pray? Now, do not misunderstand me. Prayer is our most powerful tool and God can, and has, healed many a person with less than a word. But you, John, are not God. So what is your strategy when a hurting person comes to you for pastoral care with an issue you have never experienced? Do you listen and acknowledge their suffering is valid, or do you dismiss it as unreality, as you have done to what I expect are the thousands of congregants living with mental illness who sit before you every Sunday?

It’s a shame, John. And do you want to know why it’s such a shame?

Because learning to live with OCD is the fire that burned away all my barriers to intimacy with God, and I can see Him now for the glorious, gracious Father He has always been.

You see, if you refuse to acknowledge the mere existence of a disease because you’re convinced it’s all a ploy, you dam up the very spring that might bring the Water of Life to someone who desperately needs it. You put a limit on God. A refusal to accept what He has revealed to us through science is foolish as well as dangerous, and you, John, are a shepherd making playthings of your flock. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothes.

We must be able to name a truth in order to understand it. You might feel compelled to dismiss this statement as psychobabble, but it’s not. It’s the Word of God. Take a look at Jacob, a man whose very name means “supplanter.” He stole his brother’s birthright and then ran away from the mess he’d made and built a new life far, far away. Later, when he decided to return home to face his past, he met God on the journey and wrestled with Him. All night long they wrestled, until the dawn approached and God touched Jacob’s hip socket, knocking it permanently out of place.

Still Jacob refused to surrender, demanding that God offer him a blessing.

But first God asked for his name.

“‘Jacob,’ he answered. Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.’” (Gen. 32:27-28, NIV)

Last weekend, our pastor preached on the significance of this passage and the offer available to each of us to name ourselves before God, to own all of who we are without shame. This is a prerequisite for the wonder-working power of Christ. We experience it in our baptism when we confess our sins and have them washed away in water and heavenly grace. To name what’s real is an invitation to be made whole, and just as the Lord did with Jacob, He gives us each a new name in turn: Victorious. Overcomer.

But this gift is only available in the wrestling.

John, I’m asking you to push back against your preconceived notions in order to see what is good, beautiful, and true on the other side. It’s not easy, I know. But if you never have the courage to face what is real about the human mind—that it breaks, changes, and heals as much as any other part of the body—then how can you face what is real about God? The mind is His creation, after all, and to deny what any biology textbook can show you about the physical workings of the brain is to deny both the body and the soul He designed. In doing so, you miss out on the mysterious wonder of a Father so creative He imbued our physical selves with emotional, relational, psychological, and spiritual identities. We are not mere parts, but whole creations, each with a complex history informed by our genetics, place of birth, socioeconomic status, lived experiences, and much, much more. If it’s not difficult to imagine how these realities might inform the way we function—since you were able to concede that a traumatic event such as war might negatively impact a person’s thinking and behavior—how, then, is it so difficult to imagine an illness of the mind? Is there no brain in your head, John? For if there is, could it not also experience harm the way your arm or your leg might?

But maybe I’m mistaken. Perhaps, John, this is an issue with your heart.

God causes us wrestle with hard realities, and He does this often. I’ve written before that while sin is not in God’s plan for our lives, suffering sure seems to be. It’s part of the human experience and it marks us every time, for better or for worse. After Jacob emerged victorious from his overnight struggle with the Lord he demanded a blessing and received it. But do you remember what happened after that?

Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his earthly life.

The wound God had given him as they wrestled remained a permanent fixture on his physical body, an ever-present reminder that although he had overcome a temporary strife, Jacob—Israel—was forever marked by the struggle. It impacted the way he moved, the way he lived, and the way he functioned in the world in a tangible way. Israel had a new identity, yes, but that identity did not remove his wound. God’s declaration over him in the early morning light gave Israel the ability to live with it, victorious and whole even while he learned to walk in a whole new way.

This is what life can be for those of us who live with mental illness.

But we can only live victorious if we are first able to name what is true.

My name is Wendi. I am whole in Christ Jesus and I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In particular, I live with the harm subtype. What this means is that my brain lights itself on fire at the mere idea of harming another person. More often than not, the intrusive thoughts I live with are those that tell me I will harm another person. On purpose. Can you imagine what this has been like for me as a mother? Can I tell you how, after my children were born, I followed my husband around from room to room all day long, afraid to be alone with them for even a moment, lest I stab or drop or abuse them? Do you know I almost took my own life because I couldn’t bear the malfunction in the neuronal loop between my frontal cortex and my cingulate gyrus, striatum, globus pallidus, and thalamus? Should I explain how when the amygdala, that tiny almond-shaped piece of the brain, perceives a threat, no matter how insignificant it might appear to you, it floods my body with cortisol and adrenaline, a physical process which causes hot flashes, dizziness, and increased heart rate? Can you set aside what you think you know and listen to what another person made in the image of God has to say about what happens to them every single day of their lives?

Perhaps this may surprise you, but I wouldn’t take back a single moment of what I’ve endured over the last fifteen years as I’ve learned to reconcile this debilitating disorder with a God who is our Healer, Comforter, and Friend. What I’ve discovered in my search is that Jesus is even better than I imagined Him to be and I would have lived the rest of my life not experiencing the richness of His mercy if I had never known the grievous sorrow of OCD. Pain was the conduit God used to access and heal the darkest parts of my soul, and though I will likely walk with a limp for the rest of my life, I am victorious. I have wrestled with God and He, in His wild, outrageous, unfathomable grace, has blessed me.

As a pastor, this news should cause you to rejoice. It is the power of God, beauty from the ashes of our deepest hurts, and every time you declare it a falsehood you stand between a beloved child of God and her Creator. You place a yoke upon her that is too heavy to bear and then punish her for buckling under the weight.

You want to please your Father, John? Misguided as your comments were, I truly believe that you do.

Then “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2, ESV)

You might just help save a mother’s life…and her soul.