Disappointment and the Christian Life
Being Built Up in Faith By the Holy Spirit and His Community of Hope
Good Morning,
Disappointment can strike your heart and soul in different ways based on a number of factors, usually outside your control. Whether it is a professional or a personal let down it can be an odd emotion to sense. Some of us notice it more than others and are drawn to deeper feelings born of its regular appearance. On Sunday morning the last weekend of April at Bethany we are going to be hearing a sermon from Job 14 which touches on how the suffering servant of God dealt with the burdens which were piling on from seemingly every direction. The struggling heart of the believer is a common target for the devil to take that passion that we call disappointment and turn it into something more devious and destructive.
For today’s prayer and worship help we are going to meditate a little on how it is Christians should deal with this weakness and turn it into an opportunity to grow in faith and love. When things don’t turn out the way we want, regardless if they were of our own making or not, it can cause us to wander in mind to places that are unhealthy. Like a lot of things in the believer’s life doing the ordinary things ordinarily can provide us with an answer before we know we need to ask the question. One of the verses that we can point to here is in Romans 8. There the promise of the third person of the Trinity’s involvement in prayer is given by the Apostle to help us rejoice in the benefits of justification and new life in Christ. He writes:
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . . Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” – Romans 8:16, 26
The first verse is why the second verse is of such great comfort. Our being adopted into the heavenly family and receiving all the benefits thereof is actually the real source of peace in a time of disappointment. These worldly matters pale in comparison to the bounty we have been given by grace through faith alone. No matter if it is a job, an opportunity, a family matter, or whatever the case may be our hope in trial is always buoyed by the fact we have more than conquered in Jesus Christ. The house built upon the Rock is able to withstand the attempts of those circumstances outside ourselves, no matter how important they seem at the moment, to bring us down or cause us to doubt God’s goodness to us in His love. We who have been bound to God in our Savior’s blood can look unto that blessing and know that we are most satisfied in Him who has brought satisfaction to us through the gift and grant of membership of safety in the household of the Lord. Hence why the second verse brings such comfort in a time of need.
Hearing the promise repeated that, the Holy Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, is meant to lift up the soul to help us see more clearly what it means when we read in various places in the Bible that we are united to Christ by faith and that we are the new temple in Him. There is a hope grounded in truth that no amount of difficulty in the believer’s life should shake them from resting in the peace which passes all understanding.
There is a reason why the writer of the Proverbs tells us that we are not lean on our own understanding of the world, it’s because we are often, if not nearly always, wrong about what is actually happening. We are to be at peace precisely because God is not only in charge in the sense of providentially managing the world as it spins on its axis, but has decreed all things that come to pass according to Paul. If this is the case, and it is, for what reason then should we then allow disappointment to rule how our soul reacts in things both great and small?
It is a serious question we should be asking ourselves any time we feel that emotion. It’s not, as we will hear next Sunday from Job 14, that we should be stiff upper lip stoics who are not outwardly or inwardly bothered by what has taken place, but that in our sadness and tears we do not then allow it to overwhelm our hope. We have all been in the situation where something we have been waiting on in all joyous expectation just doesn’t come to pass, and regardless if we know why that happened we are left almost feeling empty, done by, and left out in the cold. The Holy Spirit is here to tell you that you are not, you weren’t, and you are warm and toasty in the presence of the Godhead. The Lord has a purpose for all things, even if we never find them out.
Part of the blessing of the church is that as we commune together in love in the fellowship of the saints, we are given a great cloud of witnesses to bear through all matters together. Part of how the Holy Spirit witnesses to us in dealing with trials is through the brothers and sisters He has provided for us in the body of Christ. If we are not cultivating those relationships by being present in the house of the Lord in morning and evening worship or in prayer meetings and other fellowship opportunities, we are missing out on one of the most important plans of God. We cannot live in this world and hope to succeed unless we are resting in the ways of our Redeemer.
In closing, to go back to those verses from Romans for a second there is a continuity seen in the life of both Job and Paul that is instructive for those of us who live this far down the historical line. Think about how both those men lost all that they had, either through robbers and death or by imprisonment and capital punishment. Yet each of them in the end received more than they had before. We read in the last chapter of Job how the Lord rewarded Him with a greater household than he had before and how Paul received the great mercy of life forever in the heavenly places where he had opportunity to see the flowering of the seeds of grace and love of which we in 2025 are the heirs of because the gospel went forth generation after generation.
Last word:
https://www.challies.com/articles/the-practice-of-accepting-disappointment/
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church