Hope for 2022

Last week, in our devotional, we quoted the famous atheist Bertrand Russell and his encouragement to embrace unyielding despair as the only rational foundation for life. In effect, he recommends that we face reality and stop denying the facts. Let’s take a moment to review his counsel:

“. . . Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

What a prospect! The ancients deemed the unconsidered life not worth living. If Russell is correct, the opposite is true; the considered life isn’t worth living. It’s just too bleak a prospect, a “truth” that we’d all rather forget.

With that said, however, as we lean into 2022, I want to suggest one way Russell is correct. The Christian should entertain unyielding despair regarding his own ability to work his way into God’s favor. In his book, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, JI Packer once observed, “The index of the soundness of a man’s faith in Christ is the genuineness of the self-despair from which it springs.” This morning, I was struck afresh by this while reading Dane Ortlund’s new book, Deeper. Lamenting his own heart as a “fallen factory of filth,” he mirrored Russell’s words above (but for different reasons):

“ . . . the only sure foundation on which we can build spiritual growth is the solid ground of self-despair. To the degree that we minimize the evil within, we lower the ceiling on how deeply we can grow. We take a painkiller and go to sleep when we think we have a headache; we undergo chemotherapy when we know we have a brain tumor. The severity of our condition dictates the depth and seriousness of the medicine we know we need. If you view your sinfulness as a bothersome headache more than a lethal cancer, you will see tepid growth, if any. You won’t see yourself as needing to grow all that much. But when we see how desperately sick we are and how profoundly short we fall of the glory for which God intended us, we have already taken the first decisive step in bridging that vast gulf between who we are and who we were made to be. “Learn much of your own heart,” wrote the Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne, “and when you have learned all you can, remember you have seen but a few yards into a pit that is unfathomable.”

Too often, when it comes to sanctification, I think of God’s working in me and my working out my salvation as two concurrent but ultimately separate realities, as if God does His part and I do mine. This is another one of those half-truths which can easily become a whole un-truth if told as the whole truth. We must not deny our active role in sanctification; we are, after all, the ones who must put on Christ and put sin to death, etc. Yet, we must never forget that we cannot conduct ourselves in a Christ-like manner and mortify the flesh alone and without God’s empowerment. For it is God’s working in us to will and to do for His good pleasure that forms both the foundation and the force behind our ability to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

What practical difference should this make in our battle towards godliness? Well, quite simply, we should constantly try to remember that every time we strive to resist sin, to refuse a lying lust, to reject a satanic insinuation, that we must do so always looking to Christ, leaning upon Him, and living in union with Him.
The best illustration I can think of to describe this dynamic is the tag team wrestler. As a child, I loved watching these showmen battle it out against one another. There was always one big guy on each team and one little guy. Invariably, sooner or later, the little guy would get trapped in the ring with the bigger of his two opponents. And, of course, the big daddy would just go to work on the little man. He would throw him into the corner post, guillotine him, body slam him, and then belly flop onto him, sometimes jumping off the ropes to do so. As a little boy, I would watch in horror. Outgunned, every chance he could, the little guy would reach out desperately for his partner’s assistance. But, you remember, the partner couldn’t come to his aid unless he could reach his hand without letting go of the tag rope attached to their corner with the other. None of that, of course, stopped the little guy from reaching out every chance he could.

It should be a little like that in our battle against sin. At no point should we try and go it alone as we pursue godliness. With the hands of our soul, we should constantly be reaching out to Jesus. In this battle, praise the Lord, no tag rope limits Jesus’ reach. He can come, and He will come to our aid the moment that we cry out to Him. We should lean on Jesus in the same way that opera singers rely on their diaphragm for breath support while singing. They won’t sing a note unsupported, and neither should we, for neither can we.
If we go wrong here, we will proudly head into 2022, having built on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, relying upon our own futile efforts to work our way into God’s favor, and with Oscar Wilde come to admit, “I can resist anything except temptation!” Far better to make Philippians 4:13 our theme verse for the New Year, “ I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!” Press on, my beloved flock, for if God is for us, who can stand against us?