Disappointments - Part.I

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.   

 

 The Christian Life certainly has its helps, its hindrances, its hopes and its fears. We all know that disappointments are a part of the life. But what are they? It’s good to remember disappointments are simply unrealised hopes. That’s all they are.

    Three things generally cause disappointments. 

    Situations. 

    People. 

    God. 

    We might as well face it that sometimes Christians feel disappointed by God, generally when our prayers are not answered. The classic Biblical example is Jonah. He was disappointed the Lord did not destroy Nineveh. Was Jonah’s attitude right? No. But he demonstrates human thinking. We do have expectations of the Lord. Here are some people who had their share of disappointments, as recorded in the Bible:
    1 Samuel 8:1-7 - Samuel was disappointed in his sons.
    He was disappointed by the people.
    He’d worked hard at his job, served the Lord, and yet the Israelites did not want him, nor his family, to continue. 

    In 1 Samuel 15:34-35 we learn that Samuel was disappointed by Saul, the one the Lord had told him should be king. But note it, the Lord himself was disappointed in King Saul. 

    Our Lord Jesus appears to have been disappointed by the disciples slowness to learn. He had to rebuke Peter at one point, and on the night of his betrayal he says ‘have I been with you so long Phillip and yet you do not know me? He who has seen me has seen the father.’
    In addition, it appears the Lord was disappointed by mankind in the time of Noah. We can read about this in Genesis 6.6 It's a good lesson to learn that we can cause the Lord disappointments, or, to put it another way, we can disappoint the Lord. Yes, we can let him down.

    Helps - the Lord wants us to learn from our dashed hopes. Firstly, that all human sources of hope and expectation will, at some point, fail. For instance, a congregation may have high hopes of their pastor, but it is inevitable that he will disappoint them at some time. This might be because the hopes are unrealistic or misplaced, or that the thing it is hoped the pastor will do is beyond his power.  
    We may have hopes for our children, and yet inevitably they will disappoint us at some point, just as the children may hope something of their parents, but are disappointed by them. A relative of mine had asked his father for a toy gun for his birthday. The lad’s father bought him a bow and arrow instead. The boy was exceedingly disappointed by his father, and spoke often of this incident, well into his adulthood. But we must learn a lesson from disappointment - firstly, that the only source of true satisfaction will be found in the Lord.
    And when he disappoints us, when we feel he hasn’t answered our prayers, we can be sure that the problem lies in what we hoped and prayed for, and probably in our misunderstanding of what love truly is, and what the Lord’s purposes are.  Because God always knows the best outcome, and gives us opportunities for learning. I know a couple who were married a number of years ago. On the honeymoon, it looked like the wife had fallen pregnant. Her monthly cycle was delayed, first a week late, then two, and she and her husband thought — maybe we’re expecting a baby. But then, it came to pass that obviously she was not pregnant. Whether the baby was lost, or whether it had never actually been conceived they do not know — but they were disappointed. However, they learnt a valuable lesson. That it is foolish to think you can just have children when you want, because Scripture says it is the Lord who opens and closes the womb. So they changed their whole approach from thinking we’ll have child A in this year, and child B in this year, instead they put the whole matter in the Lord’s hands and received children when he gave them. In this way their disappointment helped them, for they learnt a lesson from it.
    Secondly, a disappointment can help us by spurring us on to a new thing that we would never have looked for, had we not been disappointed first. I failed my last semester at Bible College. I was bitterly disappointed, but it was because of that failure that I took up doing a Master’s degree at Exeter University. I was greatly helped by doing that degree, in some senses what I learnt shaped my preaching. It certainly shaped my thinking. But it would not have happened, but for the earlier disappointment....

  Hey, in a busy world where you have many things to do,  thanks for taking the time to read this. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you today.