When Christians Despair

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair…When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out, he will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God, consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for Himself.”

-Oswald Chambers

Certain strains of contemporary popular Christianity encourage people to never be anything but positive. Some very popular preachers and teachers who are media personalities have taken the New Testament, mixed in some currents of positive thinking, and come up with the idea that a true believer need never be depressed. Other voices go so far as to condemn those who have yielded to downheartedness for any length of time as being guilty of basic un-belief.

But a certain amount of despair is unavoidable in the life of any believer whose perception of this world is not completely shallow. We live in a veil of tears and the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives does not somehow render us impervious to sorrow.

Read the book of Job, Jeremiah, or any number of the Davidic Psalms and it becomes quite clear that some of the giants of the faith have experienced feelings of despair during their journey through a radically fallen world. For those who would counter that New Testament believers are somehow immune to such “dark night of the soul” experiences it might be instructive to read 2 Corinthians 1:8 in which the Apostle Paul writes of he and his companions being “so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself”. No, the coming of Pentecost did not erase the potential of even the redeemed heart to experience times of anguish.

Life in the here and now can be tragic. A believer may go through ordeals that are not capable of being overcome overnight by positive confession of out-of-context Scriptures, Spiritualized self-help bromides or any other pop-Christianity cure-alls. Neither will anything we can come up with on our own suffice. Some things in life must simply be endured and endured without immediate promise of relief. That endurance is only made possible by the sustaining presence of God’s grace in our lives. It is not that relief will never come but it will be in God’s timing and by His terms. This was one of the messages Job learned during his exceptional trial.

I say none of this to minimize the pain someone reading these words may be experiencing even now. I have known great pain and sorrow in my own life and no one has wanted instant relief like I have, at times, wanted it. But God’s sometimes painful redemptive purposes often do not contain an immediate escape clause no matter how much we beg and plead for it. What must be remembered is that He truly, truly does “know what He is doing” with us and some day we will thank Him with tears of joy that he did not let us escape what was ultimately for His glorification and our true good. What He is working in us through times of terrible pain is achieving for us the very redemption of our souls.