Have You Achieved the "Second Desperation" Yet?

Most people find at least enough attraction in their normal self-interested way of life to be repelled at the thought of any violent change. In fact, we are, as the Bible says, “deceived”, “blinded”, having been born in the delusion - the product of the Fall - that life is at most, a little religion, a few good works, satisfy any inner demand for some place in our lives for God and the service of others.

There has to come an awakening, a disillusionment, A FIRST DESPERATION, a sense of need and lack, to bring us to see that we are off the track. The first approach, therefore, that our Creator God has to make to us to get us within hearing distance of Him, is DESPAIR BEFORE REMEDY. It must be negative before positive; and this approach is what the Bible calls “Law”.

So we humans are challenged and opposed by what should be the natural law of our creation by God, the life of self-giving love. We have been seeking to make life work on the unlawful principle of self-loving love.
Law, then, is not God’s frown on us; it is the first form of His love. The Bible calls Law elementary religion. It is the delicate way in which God reaches us on the only level that we could be reached. Being self-satisfied and self-reliant, we would see no point in being told that we need God. Very well then, God meets us where we are in our self-centeredness. “You know what you ought to be. You say you can be it. Well then, be it. Here is the Law. Let’s see you keep it!” We aren’t conditioned yet for true religion, so God lets us have a religion on our own level - the Law.

The effect of this Law on us then stirs up two responses in us, in this order, hypocrisy, then honesty. As a fact, we all start by being hypocrites. That is, we pretend to ourselves and others that we keep the Law reasonably well, enough to salve our consciences. We have enough religion or a philosophy of some kind to cover our tracks.

Honesty is when by some means or other (God has a thousand original ways), we are brought up, suddenly or gradually, to be faced with the recognition that WE ARE JUST PLAIN NOT WHAT WE SHOULD BE! We are law-breakers. The moment of truth is when in our freedom we admit that fact. That is honesty, but that is also a total self-humiliation. The false front of our self-justifying religion or philosophy collapses.
We see that if we are at variance with God, we are at variance with life itself. We are WRONG!

Now when that is an admitted reality to me, I am conditioned for the truth. I now see the NEED that I didn’t see before, and I must have it met. What then can I do to make amends? But that is exactly what I cannot do as a self-confessed law-breaker with the built in consequences thereof.

God makes it clear that I can’t make amends, but Jesus Christ can! I accept His death and resurrection in my place and become a new creature IN UNION WITH CHRIST. I have come home and begun to be the “image of God” that Genesis said I was created to be. I now contain this new “love of God” and for the first time in my human history the love of someone more than myself.

What Now As a Christian?

However, this has not completed the exposure to us of our mistaken concepts of life as if it is we living it. We are so used to this illusory outlook that, though we have now recognized and admitted that we didn’t live our lives on God’s standards, and in our lost condition needed and found a Savior, we now think that, as Christians, we can set to work and live on a new level. We will seek to keep the commandments, to love God and others, to feast on prayer and Bible reading, to conquer the habits that previously defeated us. We will conquer our hates and fears and lusts and jealousies, to have God at the center of our domestic, business and social life, to attract others to our new-found faith.

Instead, what happens? We begin to find this new life tiresome. We don’t have what it takes to live it, neither sufficient love for God and our neighbor, nor sustained interest in prayer or the Bible, nor victory over our weaknesses.

We even lose the consciousness of Christ’s presence within us. We cannot handle our depressions, our failures, our relationship problems, the stresses and strains of modern life. We cannot handle our self-seeking in the jungle warfare of modern industrial, political, and even social and domestic life.

TO SAY THAT WE APPROACH A CONFORMITY TO THE ABSOLUTE DEMANDS OF LOVING GOD WITH ALL OUR HEART AND MIND AND OUR NEIGHBOR AS OURSELVES, IS
RIDICULOUS!

Maybe we had better give up. Maybe life was easier and more enjoyable without trying to be a Christian in a serious sense. We seem nearer to a breakdown that to the peace and rest and adequacy we thought the Christian life had for us.

GOOD! - GOOD, GOOD, GOOD! ALL THESE ARE EXCELLENT SIGNS! WE HAVE REACHED THE SECOND DESPERATION. In our former unredeemed life, we had to be so disturbed that we came to a final crack-up and admitted our failure before God, a total failure. Despair is the best word, because despair means that we are finished and there is nothing more we can do about it. We have to come there, having given up completely, before we can have eyes to see that when we could not climb up to Him, He had climbed down to us. What we could not do for ourselves, He had done for us.

Now, again, we have to come to a SECOND DESPERATION. Before, our recognition was that we had not done what we should have done in keeping God’s Law. This time, as redeemed Christians, we come to the discovery that we cannot do what we should do. Before, we learned our GUILT. This time, we learn our HELPLESSNESS. Before, we DID NOT, now we CANNOT.

Our SECOND DESPERATION is to bring us to see that our mistake was the idea that He would give US things, and that WE would thus become something. Actually we humans don’t exist to become something, but to CONTAIN SOMEONE! As a child of God by my new birth, I contain Jesus Christ - He comes to dwell within me in a living union with my human spirit. This transfers my attention from worrying about myself as the vessel not being this, or being that. Leave myself alone. I am just the container. I am containing a totally exclusive Person who gives nothing, but IS ALL.

The answer is the difference between activity from inadequacy which is strain, and activity from adequacy which is rest. If we are pulling the plow of our life’s problems, relying on our own resources, that is strain, because we haven’t got what it takes to meet them.

So the SECOND DESPERATION has brought us to the point of full Personhood. A human being is born with false self-appreciation. We start life by a false attempt at trying to make out that we are all right: “going about to establish our own righteousness”, the Bible calls it. That finishes when we are brought to the first self-desperation and become honest about ourselves in the sight of God. God makes us His children by a new birth.

Then comes the SECOND DESPERATION of Self (S capitalized to show the reborn Self). This makes us aware of our human weakness EVEN as a child of God. As newborn Christians, we are making the discovery that it is not in redeemed Self, any more than it was in unredeemed self, to be what we should be. So we are much more conscious of our failings, our inadequate human selves, than we are of Christ in us. We Stress our weaknesses, we speak of our hunger and need, our inadequate love for God, our sins. We say that if God does anything with our lives, it is in spite of us. This is the temporary phase of self-depreciation necessary for us to learn the truth about ourselves, but only temporary. It is spoken of in the Bible as the “wilderness experience”. This brings us into a beginning transformation of our soul mind into total TRUST in Christ within.

And finally we achieve what God had in mind for our life all the time - a true Self-appreciation. Now we can live as humans, yet really we know, and never for one moment of time cease to know, that the hidden life is Christ within us, the subterranean stream: “our life is hid with Christ in God... Christ is our life.” (Col. 3:3,4). This is when, in the oneness of our union, we have found definitively that we are only the vessels that contain God; but we are vessels who are really persons. And our HUMANITY is now the Self-expression of the Living God. WE are the light of the world. WE are Christ’s life and love in action. The truth is we have moved full circle from false self-appreciation to TRUE Self-appreciation. We have moved from the illusion of “independent-self’ to the realization of “dependent-Self’.

WE are not afraid of using our minds and wills on the daily decisions of our lives. There are times when we will lift up our faith thoughts in anticipation of guidance. But there are multitudes of occasions when we just decide and act, taking it as fact that “we have the mind of Christ”, and acting on the given basis of our Oneness.

This is the “I yet not I” life of Galatians 2:20 in its simplicity — the single eye of liberating Self-activity. This is man in action, WHICH IS GOD IN ACTION!

IF, IN OUR PRESSURES, WE TURN INWARDLY AS LIVING CONTAINERS IN UNION WITH CHRIST WHO IS THE ALL, AND BOLDLY TRUST HIM TO HANDLE THINGS, LIFE BECOMES REST IN THE MIDST OF THE ACTION.

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