despair

Just as you are justified as a sinner (though unjust you are just), so in the elevation of doubt you are in the realm of truth. And if all this comes together and you are still desperate about the meaning of life, the reality of your despair is the fleshing out of the meaning that you are still living. Take hope, brothers and sisters, you are after all just human.

The desperation of life is the loss of hope. Kierkegaard on: "This form of despair is: despair at not willing to be oneself; or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self; or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another than himself, wishing for a new self." To accept Jesus and be filled with His spirit gives us all the hope we need to cope with life, or at the least to help with it. Again, we have a responsibility to those that despair. "If our gospel is hid, it is hid to them that are lost. In whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God should shine upon them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed but not in despair. Persecuted but not forsaken. Cast down but not destroyed. Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life also of Jesus might be manifested in our body."

Do not the prophets of of old denounce the oppression of one who labors and is not filled? Prophets today should do the same. We are not only to seek to save those that are lost but to deliver those that are captive, to give rest to the weary. The preacher hated life "because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? Yet shall he have rule over all my labor wherein I have labored and wherein I have shown myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity. Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor which I took under the sun."

Those without the hope of eternal life is to unconsciously wish for death. Did you know that most suicides are committed in the Christmas season? What an indictment on Christianity. To despair so much that you wish for death in the midst of agony is really a desire for extinction but they hope not for eternal life. It would be better not to exist than to endure such pain. There must be a certain point where physical agony produces an end of thought and all is left is a longing to have all this come to end in the oblivion of nonexistence. Kierkegaard again: "When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death." All in all, life will go on but many are going to hell, church. Take this seriously. Paul suffered persecution for the sake of Christ "that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life. But we had the sentence of death in ourselves that we should not trust in ourselves but in God..."

For those of us in the last days ministry, we know that we too shall be in dire circumstance when the weight of affliction and oppression is upon us for bringing our message. But look at the luke-warm church. Most of them are comfortable, they do not despair because they are not persecuted. They hope in a heavenly calling because they think that they are saints and will be delivered from judgment. They are not reviled because their luke-warm pastors teach what their itching ears want to hear and they repeat the same. They are asleep and do not want to be awakened. They do not trim their lamps because they are full and have need of nothing. It is time for desperate actions on our part. It is not hopeless unless we do nothing.
[95, 134, 359, Ecclesiates 2, II Corinthians 4]



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