09/04/2025
Some food for thought. Shared from the Baptist For Life of Wisconsin website
Reach the Heart with Hope:
Job 6, Psalm 16
I have very little experience with counseling someone with a “Crisis Pregnancy,” and that makes me very thankful for those who have invested their lives in this kind of ministry. Reaching girls and couples at a crossroads is taking advantage of an opportunity and it expresses the mercy of our Savior, so I am sure that it pleases Him.
The few experiences that I have had stay with me, and I can vividly remember when JR and Tammy, about 17 & 16, came into my study with their eyes glazed over in fear. Tammy’s dad was a cop who weighed about 300 pounds and was entirely capable of killing JR when he found out that he had gotten his little girl pregnant!
Two things stand out from that situation, and one was that those two were totally unprepared for marriage, but they had seen on TV that that is what couples in their predicament did. They seemed to think that there was a grace period in which if they got married it would make up for their promiscuity! So we had to deal with that, but Tammy’s father helped to put an end to that notion.
The second thing that stood out in my mind was that couple’s desperation. They had more support than most of the girls you encounter, but it strikes me that desperation is a common denominator in most counseling cases. Certainly when you think of how unnatural su***de is, it runs against the instinct for survival which the Lord created in us. Then you think of how unnatural abortion is, running against an even stronger maternal instinct. What force drives people to take their own life or a child’s life? Hopelessness, despair, the terms are synonymous in Scripture, and that is what I want us to look at for a moment now.
1. DESPERATION
A. Suicidal Job 6:8-11 I am not sure how often you deal with people who are literally suicidal, as Job was, but this is the type of extreme desperation which we deal with when people believe that their situation is hopeless. Job was a righteous man, but even he fell into despair.
You and I may imagine the solution to a person’s problem to be as simple as walking down a hall and through a door. Now try that same action in total darkness, with monsters both real and imagined waiting behind all of the wrong doors! Without God’s light and strength and hope we ought to appreciate how a person can be frightened to distraction and they take extreme measures which only make things worse.
B. Superficial vv. 25,26 There are many good counseling principles in what Job is saying here, but notice how he points out the failure of his friends who were attempting to counsel him. They were focused on his words, along with the appearance of his troubles, and they were missing his heart. A desperate person is not interested in small changes. In his “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan pictures despair as a giant living in “Doubting Castle.”
Even if the words of Job’s counselors were “right,” they were making him sicker, which is the gist of the word “forcible.” The point that we can take from this is that winning an argument with a desperate person will not give them hope or win their soul!
2. DELIVERANCE
A. Of the Lord Psalm16:7-9 God alone sees into the hearts of men, so His Word is powerful beyond psychology or any worldly wisdom to provide counsel. Let me encourage you to study “hope” in the Scripture and use that to minister to the confused, and heart-sick, and suffering.
Prov. 13:12 “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life.”
B. For Life Psalm 16:10,11 Of course, these verses are prophetic of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, but this truth carried an immediate comfort for David. They also remind us that Jesus, as a man of “like passions,” encountered the same temptations to fear and despair that we face. The world is full of these temptations, and the Devil keeps it stocked. We just make things worse for ourselves by sinning and turning down dark hallways where all of the choices are bad!
Like the “tree of life” in Proverbs, the “path of life” here is an Old Testament expression for God’s way of salvation and righteousness. This path opens good choices to us. The best part, though, is the ultimate destination of eternal life in Heaven! This is the greatest hope that we can offer by far, and it is no small change either. This is just what the Great Physician has ordered for the heart-sick. It is the radical treatment and the only treatment that offers hope, a whole new life!
CONCLUSION:
I have been working on boldness in sharing the gospel and in prescribing significant change when I counsel people. This concept has helped me with that, Thoreau wrote that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Whether circumstances are bringing their hopelessness to a head, or they are still trying to keep it all together, people need more than a religious friend who is willing to listen. They need the truth, the Word of God which is able to cut to the heart. We do not need to apologize for ministering it to them.
Dr. Scott Jones
State Missions Director
Wisconsin Fellowship of Baptist Churches
