Yesterday came suddenly.” Even Paul McCartney was forced to confront the brevity and absurdity of a life lived apart from faith in Jesus Christ. In just a few years your whole life is passed and gone, and for what? He wrote, “Suddenly, I’m not half to man I used to be, There’s a shadow hanging over me. Oh, yesterday came suddenly.” Are you ready for the tomorrow that follows this life?
There is more treachery in doubting the grace of God to restore a sinner than there is in the sin itself, by which he fell.
After a Christian sins, he may collapse into a paralysis of guilt and despair. What he ought to do instead is trust God for mercy, resolve again to live by the Spirit’s power, and keep moving forward. Imagine a soldier stumbling over a trip-wire in a battle; instead of continuing to fight, he just lays there sobbing, “my commander must hate me! I am a failure!” The commander yells back at him, amid the noise of bullets whirring past, “I knew you were weak on your own beforehand, that is why I am with you! Now get up and fight for me and your brothers! You are no good on the ground—stand up, man! Fight!
Overcoming Despair About Personal Change
If our only hope of personal change was to let time and nature do their work, we might lose hope that ourselves and others would ever be brought to faith or holiness. Yet one of the deepest works of personal transformation to ever occur was that which happened within Saul on the road to Damascus, and this was accomplished in an instant by the Spirit. [Acts 9, 22] One moment Saul viewed Jesus as his enemy. Then a light appeared from heaven and a voice spoke, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” As the bitter Pharisee beheld the fearful glory of the Son, a more mysterious light suddenly appeared within his heart—faith, the gift of God. Now in a moment he believed Jesus was his greatest benefactor, for having died to reconcile him, an enemy of God, to the Father at the cross. The greatest change imaginable happened in the twinkling of an eye, when a spiritually dead man was resurrected by God through new birth into spiritual life.
Jobless, Single, Penniless: Letter to a Man in Despair
The following is a response I wrote to a person who had sunken into despair over what he felt to be his sorry circumstances in life. He publicly lamented that he was shadowed by “a particular agony and frustration building from joblessness, singleness, and pennilessness that found expression in intense anger, jealousy, and envy toward others who ‘have it all’.”
I empathized with his position and grief. Besides the usual share of hard lumps, I consider the period from August 2009 to June 2010 to have been among the worst periods of my life in terms of desperation and listlessness. Yet this was also the time when I came to grips with my circumstances through an intense, albeit somewhat unintentional study of what it means to be “in Christ” both personally and providentially. I learned that it is one thing to say, “it is no longer I who lives, but Christ” and another to embrace the paradigm practically and heartily. From this vantage I wrote as follows,
