Perhaps You’re Not Hopeless Enough
This post is for those who feel stuck…stuck in sin, stuck in despair, stuck in fear. Perhaps you’ve been in this place for some time now, and you’re wondering if you’ll ever get out. You’ve tried everything you can think of, everything your loved ones have suggested, and everything your pastor has recommended all without any lasting change. Your relationships are experiencing strain, your work life is suffering, and your will to perform basic tasks is waning. You think the best word to describe the way you feel is “hopeless.”
With much sympathy, I want to suggest a reason you might be stuck in this place: Perhaps you’re not hopeless enough. This is what a pastor friend suggested to Bob Kauflin as he was confessing the hopelessness he felt with his losing battle against the fear of man. I’m sure that must have sounded offensive to his ears at first. As deeply despairing and trapped as he felt, to have someone convey that it wasn’t enough must have come across as uncaring. But Kauflin’s friend went on to explain, “If you were completely hopeless, you’d stop trusting in what you think you can do to change the situation and start trusting in what Jesus Christ has already done for you at the cross.”[1]
Often a sense of hopelessness in our sin struggles only leads us to try harder, to keep working the problem from a different angle. So, we double down on our strategies and intensify our efforts only to throw up our hands in despair because we’ve failed again. We turn to self-trust and find that, left to ourselves, we are powerless against sin. Consider Paul’s words to the Colossians concerning their legalistic strategy of battling the flesh:
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Colossians 2:20-23)
Notice three things about this legalistic strategy: 1) it appears wise, 2) it promotes self-made religion, and 3) it profits nothing in the fight against sin. This strategy is deceitful because it looks like you’re taking sin seriously (appears wise), but it is centered on you and your efforts in confronting sin (self-made religion), which is why it fails in the fight (no value). Trusting in strategies like these will never deliver you from sin. You need to abandon any hope that you can slay the enemy within. As long as you harbor even a shred of hope that it’s in your power to do this, you will keep running back to your powerless, self-made religion.
So, how do you get unstuck? Paul answers this in the previous two verses:
Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.” (Colossians 2:18-19, emphasis mine)
The lead false teacher in Colossae was teaching the church a kind of Frankenstein religion; pulling together different elements of error to form the lies he was touting. In all of this, his core problem was that he was not clinging to Christ—the Head—by faith. Paul is clear that the only way God grows Christians is through their union with Jesus. Therefore, Jesus must be central in your efforts to be free from your trappings.
In Colossians 3, Paul goes on to explain that you who are “raised with Christ” must “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (v. 1, emphasis mine). Only then will you be able to “put to death what belongs to your earthly nature” (Colossians 3:5, CSB), or, if you like, get unstuck.
Considering this, the question is: are you hopeless enough to abandon all your futile, self-trusting efforts to change? And are you hopeless enough to flee to Christ, your Savior, whose death and resurrection ensures that you have everything in Him that you need to live faithfully?
After the conversation with his friend, a light turned on for Bob Kauflin. As he says, “I began to see that my inability to live in the good of the gospel was rooted in my desire to find hope in something I had done rather than in what my Savior had done.”[2] As a result, when he began to feel anxious and hopeless, he started preaching a new sermon to his heart: “I am a hopeless person. But Jesus Christ died for hopeless people.”[3]
This is not “let go and let God” theology. It is simply confronting your sin with the only power that is sufficient for the task—the power of Christ. It is out of His power that you forsake sin and embrace holiness. It is out of His power that you refuse to serve yourself and instead serve others. It is out of His power that you reject the pleasures of the flesh and delight in the pleasures of the gospel. Brothers and sisters, you are completely hopeless left to yourselves, but completely hopeful as you flee to Jesus.
[1] Bob Kauflin, “The Fear of Man, Hopelessness, and the Gospel,” https://worshipmatters.com/2006/10/16/monday-devotion-2/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.