The Eighth Step — The Step of Despair

1When he came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. 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. 4Jesus said to him, “See that you tell nobody, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”

A hiker who loses the path and is cut off will be gripped by fear, and he can bear it if he does not throw away the hope that people will come to find him. If parents have the hope that a child going astray will one day understand their heart and come back, they will live on that hope. And so long as a pastor has the hope that steadily preaching the truth to believers will one day grow them into Christians, he can do his utmost. Where there is hope a person finds the courage to be patient. But if behavior that betrays an earnest expectation continues, the hope will disappear and despair will take its place, and the relationship will be cut.

God knew that the world and human beings are the same in their nature, and he loved people all the same and gave his love to the end. But people threw that great love away and chose the world, like a pig trampling a beautiful pearl. When they betrayed God’s love he was greatly angered and judged the world. In Noah’s day he covered a fallen world with the water of death. Afterward he brought Israel, enslaved four hundred years, out of Egypt; and when they complained that they missed their days of slavery there he let enormous suffering come on them. He gave even ten plagues in the effort to change them, and it was despair. He refined for forty years in the wilderness those who said they would go back to Egypt, and did not let them into Canaan until the whole first generation had died. Their sin is what kept them from entering Canaan.

Even now many people laugh at and mock believers who obey the Word, as they did while Noah built the ark. He said that the time of the last judgment will be like the days of Noah. The world now opposes God as in Noah’s day, manipulates genes, and shows the last signs Jesus spoke of.

God being invisible does not mean he is not there, and people not acknowledging him does not stop his work. God’s plan will come about as he has determined, and all of it will be fulfilled exactly as scripture says, without a hair’s breadth of error. For those who mocked Christ and his believers and lived clutching the world, the chance of salvation will disappear forever when the angel’s trumpet sounds. So you must turn while God is giving the chance to hear the gospel. When the last judgment comes you cannot repent even if you want to, and you cannot die even if you want to, because death will pass you by; so may you grasp that now, while the Holy Spirit groans over a world grown strong in sin, is the opportunity.

Until now you will have helped people of weak faith go the road of Christ. And you will have been wounded, watching them leave God. Samuel too, like you, gave his love to King Saul, and was deeply frustrated and grieved when Saul abandoned God and chose the world. He had anointed Saul as king and prayed much for him, so when Saul abandoned God, Samuel was wrapped in a despair hard to recover from. Setting 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 was seized by the proud thought that he could live well enough without God. This is wicked human nature, and Samuel prayed to the end to change Saul. Samuel prayed earnestly that Saul would turn, and God commanded Samuel not to pray for Saul any longer. There is nothing sadder than not being able to pray for someone you love. And there is no word more fearful than God saying he will not listen however much you pray for someone you love. It is because even a prophet as powerful as Samuel prays and receives no answer.

May you not give despair to the person who prays for you. That person may be the last one who prays sincerely for your soul. I have a habit of giving away even something newly bought, without begrudging it, if someone else seems to need it more than I do. Things can be given easily to whoever needs them; but it takes a long time to let go, in the heart, of someone I have held in love and prayed for. It is because when I do let that person go from my heart, there must be no regret left and nothing to be sorry to God about.

Holding the hope that you can help someone’s faith and then watching them take the world into their arms, and having to let go — that aching heart is exactly despair. Dealing with many people, there are more times of despair than of hope. It is because there are people who are kind and of good character humanly, and who spiritually refuse Jesus Christ.

There are times of despair, watching someone who is a good friend to share a heart with, and who does not take the Word in whole and is not born again by the Spirit. If it grieves even us to see such a person, 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 in the court of the guard, the word of Yahweh came to him. Introducing himself as “Yahweh who does it, Yahweh who forms it to establish it,” he said, “Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great and hidden things which you have not known.”

That Yahweh promises to answer the prayer of a frail Jeremiah is unimaginable in a world where the strong take the power. But God is the almighty who becomes a shield and a fence for a believer who obeys and helps him work.

A believer who trusts God can receive an answer from a God who works beyond the world. The people of Israel were all afraid before the Red Sea, and Moses’ faith, saying look at God’s work, split the surging Red Sea. When Joshua said to the sun, stand still over Gibeon, and moon, you also stand still over the valley of Aijalon, the miracle of the sun standing and the moon stopping happened. When Hezekiah pleaded in faith, the miracle of the shadow on the sundial going back ten steps happened as well.

When you believe God will work and plead with him, you will see astonishing miracles the world cannot bear. Joshua and Moses and Hezekiah were all ordinary people like you, and the miracles that moved heaven and earth happened because there was a fullness of the Holy Spirit. The answer Jeremiah received from God was that Judah should surrender to the Chaldeans and keep their lives. Israel sinned against God and did not turn, and sinned endlessly by worshiping idols, so he judged them by the Chaldeans. Jeremiah preached earnestly that they had to surrender to the Chaldeans, and they shut him in a cistern instead.

The world is inside God’s plan. Jeremiah, who heard God’s word, told Judah to surrender to the Chaldeans, and Judah thought differently from Jeremiah and persecuted him instead. If God told his own people to surrender to the Chaldeans, they should have thought about the reason; and Judah threw away its own way of living. Had they believed Jeremiah’s prophecy was God’s will and surrendered, they would have suffered for a while and kept their lives. But they said it differed from their own thinking and prepared for war with Babylon, and many of the people were killed and seventy years of captivity began.

Judah knew God’s will and held on to a human will, and fell into death. When all Israel had fallen into despair, only Jeremiah, who cried out to God to the end over their sin, became their hope. It is because there are people like you, crying out as Jeremiah did, that a country and a people can live. Your prayer will have become someone’s hope, and will be carrying the role of a lamp for a country and a 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.

This event, in which Jesus cleanly healed a leper who cried out in faith, shows what it means to hold on to hope in the middle of despair. Everyone has times of feeling a despair they cannot carry, and this man too could not escape his disease whatever he tried, so his life itself was despair. At first he would not have let go of the hope that meeting a capable physician could cure him. But as time passed and he came to grasp that there was no one in the world to cure him, a terrible despair covered him. As the disease deepened, he wanted to lean on people and no one took his hand, and even his family’s words of comfort were despair to him.

And then, to a man who had given up on life, the report about Jesus came. It was the glad news that Jesus is the Son of God, that he had come to atone for human sin, and that he heals disease with a word. A leper could not go inside the city, so he could only wait for Jesus to come to him — and at last his opportunity came. Toward the Jesus coming down from the mountain with a great crowd, he cried out that he believed the Lord could heal this disease if he were willing. You do not need to hear how earnest the confession of this sick man was, who could not be cured by any method in the world.

This confession, knowing there is no hope in the world and begging Jesus to save him, is exactly the faith God wants. Perhaps the leper held not so much a settled faith that Jesus could heal him as a hope that he might. And his earnest wish came back to him as a blessing.

There must have been many other lepers outside the city at that time. There were a great many sick people, and only one responded to Jesus in faith. Just as Jesus knew the heart of the woman with the flow of blood, who worked her way through the crowd to touch his clothes, he knew this sick man’s heart too.

The moment he received Jesus’ attention this man’s life changed completely. A time of death became a time of life, and frustration and despair became hope. A person who meets Jesus comes to live a blessed life. A person who responds to Jesus in faith will be set free from the despair they have known until now and will be protected from Satan’s attack.

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

Only a human being can hold hope and despair at once; and just as there is no middle in faith, there is no middle between hope and despair. Like the two faces of a coin, you live choosing which side to show God — faith or unbelief, hope or despair.

God’s wrath will give the world despair at the return of Jesus Christ. And God’s wrath will be hope to a Christian. God’s deep love, which held out the grace of salvation to the end, will come with the trumpets of the angels as hope to believers and as despair to the world.

You too will have had times when you did your utmost for one person’s salvation and, watching them not change, wanted to let go of that hand. You held on with hope even so, wanting to save that soul, and there will have been times when you lost heart and were frustrated, thinking that now you ought to let the hand go. But thinking about it, holding hope in a person may itself be despair. It is because holding hope in a person whose nature is the same as the world that will be judged, and believing that person can be some kind of joy, is itself a foolish thought.

Just as Jesus was betrayed by his disciples, believers too can be badly wounded while preaching the gospel or while showing love. Only by knowing that people can take hold of the world again however devotedly you serve can you preach the honest truth without being shaken. The gospel is not yours, so entrust even that soul to God and carry your calling, and you will lead more souls.

Despair and hope will be living together inside you as well. You hold hope for a moment when the other person seems to be taking the gospel in, and when you see them go back to where they were, the despair that floods in will be hard to overcome. That is why we can overcome only by leaning on the Holy Spirit. Pastors and officers, moreover, cannot help being disappointed in people often. Without leaning wholly on the Holy Spirit they display human righteousness, out of the thought that they have labored until now. If you worked at preaching the gospel and the other person does not receive Christ, it feels as though even the time you worked so hard is thrown away, and unable to overcome that emptiness your own faith will be shaken.

But preaching the gospel and saving souls is not a human matter. You preached the gospel as the Holy Spirit led, so the result must be entrusted to God. And believers want to see the fruit for themselves, and that is why they hold hope and despair according to another person’s choice. That is why the last thing believers must conquer is exactly the step of despair.

Looking back over your life you too will have times of despair, grasping that the things you believed right and clung to had no meaning at all. But a despair like this is a feeling only someone who worked hard to carry a responsibility can feel. You will despair when you feel that everything was a life of vanity of vanities, when you had thought you were living hard. The feeling that says, I gave so much love, I lived so hard, how can this be — that comes from your own having mistaken despair for hope from the start, so there is no one to blame.

You can overcome it only by seeing the world as despair from the start, as Jesus did. The Lord said the world has already been judged. He came to this earth to save the people who received him in faith when the gospel was preached to such a world. When you preach the gospel out of a loving heart and the other person chooses the world, the pain of something collapsing loudly inside you is exactly despair. Grasp that the despair is the world, and give thanks to the God who had you preach the gospel, and you will be able to preach it to yet another person with a mature faith.

Friends, a person never changes unless they are born again through the Spirit. Believers preaching the gospel is telling a naked person how to put on clothes. If the other person is wise and wears the clothes well, be thankful for that; and if they say going about naked is more comfortable and do not do as they were taught, then if you preached the Word sincerely there is nothing to be done.

Now you will meet the last gateway, the step of despair. The sooner you meet the step of despair the more it helps the direction of your life and the growth of your faith. It is because standing on the step of despair you can grasp that life is vanity, that human nature does not change, and that living until now was not your own strength and ability but God’s grace. Living your utmost you will come to know that in a world that can only despair, Jesus Christ alone is the savior and the wisdom of life.

Have you ever despaired over people and circumstances that do not change? Are you still hurting, unable to overcome that despair? That despair will not leave you, and no one can help you, so you can escape it only by leaning on the Holy Spirit. Just as darkness must be lit by light and sin must be washed by blood, despair can be escaped only by growing strong through the power of the Holy Spirit. When you are patient to the end and live it out by the Word, God will show you what an astonishing grace it is to know a despairing heart.

One day while praying, the thought came to me that there is one more step. That became the occasion for writing about the step of despair. I was so curious about that vision that I prayed.

“God, I do not know what that is, showing faintly there.” Then he said,

“What shows faintly there is the step of despair, where believers who have lived by a true faith stand.”

“How can a life of mature faith be lived with a despairing heart? Is the step of despair higher than the step of the eagle faith?”

“It is. Only the one who grasps how I see the world can preach a gospel that agrees with Christ without having his heart taken by the world, so I want believers to hold this faith.”

“The world is a place already judged, and the people living in it hold the same thinking as Satan, so human effort will end in despair.

If you lean on the Spirit alone and see the world through Christ’s word, you will grasp that a despairing heart is a blessing.”

“Lacking as I am, I cannot understand at once that despair is a blessing; but I take it as your word that I too must lean on you, and I will proclaim the gospel so that people receive Christ.”

“Hearing at first that you are not to hold hope in a person will sound cold, and you will come to know that it is a large vessel able to hold many souls. You will come to know that holding them to the end, knowing they may betray you, is a great love.

“Only by seeing the world with a despairing heart will you not lose heart while preaching the gospel. Preaching Christ, you will come to grasp that the world is despair; and the more you do, the more deeply you will grasp that Christ, shining in the darkness, is hope. That grasp will mature your faith further and will bring more people back to Christ.”

This conversation is what I heard while praying. Preaching the gospel to a person whose heart is closed to God will bring a despairing heart; but admit that the world is finally a darkness that can only despair, and rather than being disappointed and despairing you will work to the end to save even one soul out of that world.

Jesus Christ alone is the power that turns despair into hope. The step of despair is the finest gift God gives, and once you have conquered that step your faith will not sway, like solid rock. Now set your heart no longer on an empty world and on people, but give your whole heart in love to Jesus Christ, the only hope. Only by living leaning on the Holy Spirit can you climb onto the step of despair, when you meet it, in a state that is no shame before God.

From now on, may you run toward the step of despair. Only the one who knows there is a step of despair will not cling to the world, will not be greedy, and will not live for the cravings of the flesh. Whatever attack Satan makes, you will judge it accurately and can flee to the Holy Spirit, because you already know the world is despair.

When one day you stand on the step of despair, may you smile broadly, having known that this step was there and so not having let an empty world take your heart. And when God calls your name, may you open the door of heaven beside the step of despair and go in and be held in God’s arms and be commended as a good and faithful servant.

A believer has no choice but to live in a world that is despair while there is life; and so long as the Holy Spirit is with you there is no need to be afraid. The Holy Spirit will help believers who preach the gospel, and will work ahead of them so that many fellow workers can work together for good. Even when you love the believers standing on every step of faith and a despairing heart comes, may you believe the Holy Spirit will work and be a believer who devotes himself all the more.

Now I would like to close these sermons on the stairway of faith. May you be a believer who climbs every step of faith and praises forever the Jesus Christ who carried, unchanging, the role of a ladder in order to help believers’ faith.