The Eighth Step — The Step of Despair

1When he came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him.

A hiker who loses the trail and is stranded will be gripped by fear, but if they do not give up hope that rescuers will come, they can hold out. When a child goes astray, parents live on the hope that one day the child will understand their hearts and come home. And a pastor who keeps teaching the truth to the congregation can give everything to the work, so long as there is hope that those people will one day grow into true Christians. Hope gives people the courage to endure. But if someone keeps disappointing the earnest expectations we have of them, hope will fade and despair will take its place, and so the relationship will break.

God knew that the world and human beings are the same at heart, yet because he loved people, he went on giving them his love to the very end. But like pigs trampling beautiful pearls, people cast away that great love and chose the world. When they betrayed God’s love, he was greatly angered and judged the world. In Noah’s day he covered the corrupt world with the waters of death. Later he brought Israel out of Egypt after four hundred years of slavery; but when they complained that they missed their days as slaves in Egypt, he made them endure terrible hardship. He even sent ten plagues in his effort to change them, but the result was despair. They talked of going back to Egypt, and he put them through the fire in the wilderness for forty years, and he kept them out of Canaan until the whole first generation had died, for their own sin had shut them out.

Even now, many people sneer at and mock those who obey the word, just as they did when Noah was building the ark. The Lord has said that the time of the final judgment will be like the days of Noah. Today, as in Noah’s day, the world sets itself against God, tampers with genes, and shows the signs of the end that Jesus foretold.

God is not absent just because we cannot see him, and his work does not stop just because people refuse to acknowledge it. God’s plan will be carried out just as he ordained it, and every word of Scripture will be fulfilled down to the last detail. For those who mocked Christ and his people and clung to the world, the chance of salvation will vanish forever when the angel’s trumpet sounds. We must turn back, then, while God still gives us the chance to hear the gospel. When the final judgment falls, no one will be able to repent, however much they want to, and no one will be able to die, however much they long to, because death will flee from them. Now, while the Holy Spirit groans over a world where sin is strong, is the time of opportunity, and I hope you will see it.

You will have helped many who were weak in faith along the way of Christ. And as you watched them leave God, you must have been wounded as well. Like you, Samuel poured out his love on King Saul; and when Saul abandoned God and chose the world, Samuel was crushed and heartbroken. He had anointed Saul as king and prayed for him so much that Saul’s turning from God plunged him into a despair he could hardly recover from. When he set Saul up as Israel’s first king, Samuel had longed for him to be a king who would lead the people of Israel to God.

But Saul used worldly power for himself and fell into the proud notion that he could do perfectly well without God. Such is wicked human nature, yet Samuel kept praying to the end that Saul would be changed. He pleaded with God for Saul to turn back, but God commanded him to stop praying for Saul. Nothing could be sadder than being unable to pray for someone you love. And no word is more frightening than God saying he will not listen, however much you pray for the one you love, since it means that even the prayers of a prophet as mighty as Samuel go unanswered.

I hope you will never cause someone who is praying for you to lose hope, since that person may be the last one praying from the heart for your soul. I have a habit of giving things away freely, even something I have just bought, if it seems someone else needs it more than I do. Things like that are easy to give to someone in need, but letting go in my heart of a person I have held in love and prayer takes a long time, because when I let that person go, there must be nothing left to regret and nothing to be sorry for before God.

You hope to help someone grow in faith, and then you see them embrace the world and know you must let go. That aching heart is despair. When you deal with many people, you feel despair more often than hope. Some people, after all, are kind and of fine character as human beings, yet spiritually they reject Jesus Christ.

You may have a good friend, someone you can share your heart with; yet when you see that they do not fully accept the word and have not been born again by the Holy Spirit, there are times you despair. If it grieves us so to see people like this, we can begin to understand how hard it must have been for God to judge a world grown strong in evil.

Jeremiah 33:3

3‘Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great and difficult things, which you don’t know.’

When Jeremiah was shut up in the court of the guard, the word of Yahweh came to him. Yahweh introduced himself, saying, “I am Yahweh who does it, Yahweh who forms it to establish it,” and then said, “Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great and difficult things, which you don’t know.”

In a world where the strong seize power, it is unimaginable that Yahweh would promise to answer the prayer of someone as weak as Jeremiah. Yet God is the Almighty, who becomes a shield and a hedge for those who obey him and helps them to work.

Anyone who believes in God can receive answers from the God who works beyond the bounds of the world. All the people of Israel were terrified at the Red Sea, but the faith of Moses, who told them to look and see what God would do, parted the surging waters. When Joshua told the sun to stand still on Gibeon, and the moon to stop in the valley of Aijalon, the miracle came to pass: the sun stood still and the moon stopped. When Hezekiah pleaded in faith, another miracle took place, and the shadow on the sundial went back ten degrees.

When you call on God, trusting that he will act, you will see wonders greater than the world can bear. Joshua, Moses, and Hezekiah were all ordinary people like you, but because they were filled with the Holy Spirit, miracles took place that moved heaven and earth. The answer Jeremiah received from God was that Judah should surrender to the Chaldeans and save their lives. Israel had sinned against God and refused to turn back, worshiping idols without end, and for that God judged them by the hand of the Chaldeans. Jeremiah urged them earnestly, delivering the word that they must surrender to the Chaldeans, but instead they threw him into a pit.

The world lies within God’s plan. Jeremiah, who heard God’s word, told Judah to surrender to the Chaldeans; but because Judah did not think as he did, they turned on him instead. If God told his own people to surrender to the Chaldeans, they should have asked why. Instead, Judah threw away the one way to survive. Had they believed that Jeremiah’s prophecy was God’s will and surrendered, they would have suffered for a while, but their lives would have been spared. But they said it ran against their own thinking and prepared for war with Babylon. Many of the people were killed, and seventy years of captivity began.

Judah knew God’s will yet clung to their own, and they fell into death. When all Israel had sunk into hopelessness, Jeremiah alone, who cried out to God for their sins to the very end, became their hope. Because there are people like you who cry out as Jeremiah did, the nation and its people can live. Your prayers will have become someone’s hope, and even now they must be shining as a lamp for your nation and people.

Matthew 8:2-3

2Behold, a leper came to him and worshiped him, saying, “Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean.” 3Jesus stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, “I want to. Be made clean.” Immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

Jesus made clean the leper who cried out to him in faith, and this event shows what it means to hold on to hope in the midst of despair. Everyone has times of hopelessness too heavy to bear, and this man was no different. With no effort able to free him from the disease, his whole life was despair. At first he would not have let go of the hope that a skilled physician could cure him. But as time went on and he realized that no one anywhere could heal him, a terrible despair overwhelmed him. As the disease grew worse, he longed to lean on someone, but no one would take his hand; even the words of comfort his family offered were despair to him.

Then, when he had given up on life, word about Jesus reached him. It was joyful news: that Jesus was the Son of God, that he had come to atone for human sin, and that he healed diseases by his word. Barred from entering the town as a leper, the man had waited for Jesus to come to him, and at last his chance came. As Jesus came down the mountain with great multitudes following, the man cried out that he believed the Lord could heal him if he wanted to. Every means on earth had failed to cure this man, and you know without hearing it how desperate his confession must have been.

What God desires is the faith of this confession: knowing that the world offers no hope and pleading with Jesus for life. Perhaps the leper held not so much a firm conviction that Jesus could heal him as a hope that he might. Yet his earnest longing came back to him as a blessing.

There must have been many other lepers outside the town at that time. Of all those sick people, only one responded to Jesus in faith. Just as Jesus knew the heart of the woman suffering from bleeding, who pressed through the crowd to touch his garment, he knew this man’s heart too.

The moment Jesus turned his attention to him, the man’s life was completely changed. His time of death became a time of life; his frustration and despair became hope. To meet Jesus is to begin a blessed life. Whoever responds to Jesus in faith will be set free from the hopelessness they have known and protected from Satan’s attacks.

When the world was covered with water, the ark was Noah’s hope; when every baby boy was being killed, the basket of reeds was Moses’ hope. The prayer Jeremiah cried out for his nation and people was Judah’s hope, and the faith with which the leper fell down before Jesus was his hope.

Only human beings can hold hope and despair at once; yet just as there is no middle ground in faith, there is no middle ground between hope and despair. Faith or unbelief, hope or despair: these are the two sides of a coin, and as you live, you choose which side to show God.

God’s wrath will bring despair to the world through the return of Jesus Christ. And God’s wrath will be hope for Christians. The deep love of God, who poured out the grace of salvation to the very end, will come with the trumpet blasts of the angels, as hope to his people and as despair to the world.

I imagine there have been times when you poured yourself out for the salvation of one person, then watched them stay unchanged and wanted to let go of their hand. You held on in hope for the sake of that soul, yet when the thought came that perhaps it was time to let go, you must have been discouraged and defeated. But if we think it through, perhaps putting our hope in people is itself despair. For it is foolish to place our hope in those who are, at heart, no different from a world that will be judged, and to believe they can bring us some kind of joy.

Just as Jesus was betrayed by his disciples, we may be deeply wounded while preaching the gospel or showing love. Only when you know that people may turn back to the world, though you give yourself to them to the point of death, can you proclaim the honest truth without wavering. The gospel does not belong to you. If you entrust even that soul to God and take up your calling, you will lead many more souls.

Despair and hope probably live side by side in you as well. When someone seems to be accepting the gospel, you hold on to hope for a while; then, when you see them slip back to where they were, the hopelessness that floods in is hard to withstand. So we must rely on the Holy Spirit if we are to overcome it. Pastors and church officers in particular cannot avoid being disappointed in people again and again, because unless they rely fully on the Holy Spirit, they begin to parade their own righteousness, thinking of how hard they have labored. If you have made every effort to share the gospel and the other person does not receive Christ, even the time you spent seems thrown away; and unable to overcome that emptiness, you will find your own faith shaken.

But preaching the gospel and saving souls is not a human domain. We preached as the Holy Spirit led; the outcome, then, we must leave to God. Yet because we long to see the fruit with our own eyes, we swing between hope and despair depending on how the other person chooses. This is why the step of despair is the last one God’s people must conquer.

Looking back on your own life, you too will find times of despair, when you realize that the things you believed were right and clung to so earnestly meant nothing at all. But a despair like this is a feeling known only to those who have worked hard to fulfill their responsibilities. You believed you had lived with all your might, and when you sense that it was all vanity of vanities, you will lose all hope. Then the heart protests: “I gave them so much love, I lived so diligently, how could this happen?” Since that protest springs from your own mistake in taking despair for hope from the start, you can blame no one.

Only by seeing the world as despair from the beginning, as Jesus did, can we overcome. The Lord said that the world has already been judged. He came to this earth to save those who would receive him in faith when the gospel was preached to such a world. You bring someone the gospel with a loving heart, and they choose the world. Something comes crashing down inside you with a great noise, and that pain is despair. If you know that this despair is simply the world, and thank God, who sent you to preach the gospel, you will be able, with a mature faith, to carry the gospel to someone else.

Friends, unless people are born again through the Holy Spirit, they never change. When we share the gospel, we are showing a naked person how to put on clothes. If they are wise and go about properly dressed, we can simply be grateful. And if they find it more comfortable to go naked and do not do as we taught, there is nothing more to be done, so long as we delivered the word from the heart.

Now you will meet the final gateway, the step of despair. The sooner you meet it, the more it will help to set the direction of your life and the growth of your faith. That is because on that step you can realize that life is vanity, that human nature does not change, and that all you have lived through so far was not by your own strength and ability but by the grace of God. As you live with all your might, you will learn that in a world where despair cannot be avoided, Jesus Christ alone is the Savior and the wisdom of life.

Have you ever lost hope because of people or circumstances that would not change? Are you still hurting, unable to overcome that despair? That despair will not leave you. Because no one else can help you, your only way out is to rely on the Holy Spirit. Just as darkness must be lit by light and sin washed away by the blood of Christ, despair can be escaped only when you are made strong by the power of the Holy Spirit. When you endure to the end and live out the word, God will show you what an amazing grace it is to know a heart of despair.

One day, while I was praying, the thought came to me that there was one more step. That is what led me to write about the step of despair. I was so curious about what I had seen that I prayed.

“God, I cannot quite make out what that faint thing is.” And he answered,

“That faint thing you see over there is the step of despair, where those who have lived out a true faith stand.”

“How can anyone live a mature life of faith with a heart of despair? Is the step of despair higher than the step of the eagle’s faith?”

“It is. Only those who understand how I see the world can keep their hearts from being stolen by it and preach a gospel faithful to Christ. That is why I want my people to have this kind of faith.”

“The world is a place already judged, and because those who live in it think as Satan thinks, human effort will in the end come to despair.

“If you rely on the Holy Spirit alone and look at the world through the words of Christ, you will realize that a heart of despair is a blessing.”

“Inadequate as I am, I cannot understand right away how despair could be a blessing. But I will take your word to mean that I too must depend on God, and I will proclaim the gospel so that people may receive Christ.”

“When you first hear that you should not put your hope in people, it will sound cold. But you will learn that this is a heart large enough to embrace many souls. And you will find that to keep embracing people to the end, even knowing they may betray you, is great love.

“Only when you look at the world with a heart of despair will you keep from losing heart as you preach the gospel. As you proclaim Christ, you will realize that the world is despair; yet the more you realize it, the more deeply you will understand that Christ, shining in the darkness, is hope. That understanding will make your faith more mature, and it will bring many more people back to Christ.”

These are the words I heard in prayer. Preaching the gospel to people who have closed their hearts to God will bring moments of hopelessness. But if we accept that the world is a darkness bound to end in despair, then rather than giving way to disappointment and despair, we will keep striving to the end to save even one soul in that world.

Jesus Christ alone has the power to turn despair into hope. The step of despair is the finest gift God gives, and when you have conquered it, your faith will stand unshaken like solid rock. My hope is that you will no longer set your heart on an empty world or on people, but will give all your love, with your whole heart, to Jesus Christ, our only hope. Only if you live leaning on the Holy Spirit will you be able, when you reach the step of despair, to stand on it unashamed before God.

From now on, let us run toward the step of despair. Only those who know that this step exists will refuse to cling to the world, will not give way to greed, and will not live for the lusts of the flesh. Whatever attack Satan makes, they can judge rightly and take refuge in the Holy Spirit, since they already know that the world is despair.

One day, when you reach the step of despair, may you smile brightly and say that because you knew this step was there, you did not give your heart to an empty world. And when God calls your name, I pray that you will open the gate of heaven beside the step of despair and go in. May you be held in God’s embrace and commended as a good and faithful servant.

As long as we have life, we must live in a world that is despair; yet so long as the Holy Spirit is with us, we need not be afraid. For the Holy Spirit will help us as we preach the gospel, and he will work ahead of us so that many fellow workers can labor together for good. Even if loving those who stand on every step of faith brings you to despair, I hope you will trust that the Holy Spirit will act, and give yourself all the more to the work.

Now I bring these sermons on the stairs of faith to a close. My hope is that you will climb every step of faith and praise Jesus Christ forever, Christ who, without ever changing, served as the ladder to help the faith of his people.