Blessed Desperation

I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. (Psalm 119:147)

The world runs on progress, graphs going up and to the right. Graduations, personal bests, trophies, and year end performance bonuses. We build, we conquer. 

This is good — well, it can be. The Lord has given us dominion over His creation (Genesis 1:26). It is still fully His, but He calls us to be cultivators. Cultivators grow things, and are satisfied with the harvest. Progress is good.

There is a spiritual danger to this mindset, though. If you apply this go get ‘em mindset to your life with Jesus, you may find yourself on a pedestal in a ditch. 

I do not mean to say our spiritual growth does not take ambition and effort. It absolutely does. We should have an ambition to be more like Jesus, for our new self to emerge more fully and our old self to wither and die. We should give full effort, laboring for holiness. And we should rejoice when we see Christ being formed in us.

It’s just that you never graduate from being utterly desperate.

The Pharisees thought they were religious graduates, complete with robes and tassels. They liked to demonstrate their religious superiority through long prayers, knowledge of the Scriptures, and piety. Jesus was pretty hard on them. He was not impressed. Why? Because of their spiritual independence. They wanted to be godly without God. To the Pharisees, the Messiah didn’t need to come fulfill the law and atone for their sins. They had it pretty well figured out. Except they didn’t.

Christianity is counterintuitive in that the more we grow to be more like Jesus, the more we know we need Jesus. The more holy we become, the more sinful we realize we are. It is a contradiction of conviction and joy, each increasing intensity as time passes. This is the beautiful paradox of spiritual growth.

I love Psalm 119:147 (above). I think about this often as I gather my Bible, reading glasses, and journal in the morning. I cry for help. I need to be grounded, led, corrected, and encouraged by God’s word. I need to be filled with the Spirit. I need to be reminded that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. I need.  

Jesus said that the poor in spirit are blessed. It’s good to be aware of your spiritual poverty. That’s not because He wants you to be perpetually sad and ashamed, but rather because He wants you to be low enough to look up to see Him. The poor in spirit are rich in the joy of their salvation.

As you seek to grow spiritually, remember that progress is a good thing but it grows in the soil of blessed desperation. So rise before dawn and cry for help. The Lord will meet you in that place of need.