Looking Beyond Our Disappointments - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, January 22nd.

As a believer in Jesus, God is always with you, even when He may seem far away. Here's part one of Looking Beyond Our Disappointments. When you experience disappointments in your life, how do you respond? You respond by suddenly, immediately blaming yourself. What did you do wrong, if out of this or if out of that?

Or do you look around to see somebody else you can blame? Well, oftentimes, we face disappointments in our life and we don't know exactly how to respond, what to say, what to do, how to react to them, because oftentimes, we can't quite identify what the real cause is, what the purpose is, and so sometimes we get stalled right where we are, and we get stalled right on dead center, and we can't reach our goals, and we can't reach our desires, and oftentimes, instead of moving on in life and progressing in life and using each of those times of disappointment as times to learn and to move on and use them as stepping stones in life, we just get stalled right there. And so we will either find ourselves stalled and derailed out of God's will in our life, or we'll find ourselves beginning to understand what God was up to, moving on in life and learning from those disappointments and beginning to experience the joy of the Lord and progress in our life in areas that we never even experienced before.

But the issue is how do we respond to them? So I want you to turn, if you will, to the 11th chapter of John. This chapter is full of truth about many different subjects, and the one I want to talk about here is simply this, looking beyond our disappointments, because if you don't learn to look beyond them and find out what God is up to, they will stall you dead in your track. They will derail you.

They will absolutely cause you to give up and surrender God-given goals in your life simply because you get disappointed. So beginning in verse one of this 11th chapter of John, the Scripture says, Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. So the sisters sent word to him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom you love is sick. But when Jesus heard this, He said, This sickness is not to the end of death, He says, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it. Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that He was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was. Now, let's move over, if you will, to the 17th verse.

So finally, of course, we know He does come. And so when Jesus came, He found that He had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. Martha, therefore, when she heard that Jesus was coming, went to meet Him.

But Mary stayed at the house. Martha then said to Jesus, listen to this, Lord, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha said to Him, I know that He will rise again in the resurrection on that last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection of the life. He who believes in Me will live even if he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?

She said to Him, yes, Lord, I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God, even He who comes into the world. Now with that in mind, the one thing I love about the scripture among many things is it doesn't gloss over anything. It deals with hard core emotions that you and I have to deal with in life. Nothing's glossed over, nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails, everybody goes through difficulties, hardship, pain, suffering, trial, disappointments in life. God doesn't gloss over all that. But rather He gives us the principles by which we face these experiences in life and we know how to respond in a way we don't get stalled, we don't get derailed, we use every disappointment as a stepping stone to learn, to move forward into God's purpose and plan for our life. Now why do we suffer these disappointments?

Well, we live in a fallen world. We live in a world where there is sin and disobedience and violence and self-sininess and selfishness and greed and envy and covetousness and all the rest and so we get disappointed. We get disappointed with people, we get disappointed with circumstances and situations and sometimes, for example, we have expectations that we place upon ourselves, expectations of things we want to accomplish and achieve and we fail to measure up to our own expectation so we get disappointed in ourselves and sometimes these expectations are so very unreal if we just stop to think, what am I capable of doing, even in trust and glory, what's the will of God for my life? And so sometimes we set these goals or we set these expectations for ourselves that are beyond what God intends. Sometimes those circumstances are such that it's a misunderstanding that we have with someone else and so we're greatly disappointed. We thought, for example, that He was going to show up at this time or we thought we had this appointment or we thought this was going to happen or we thought this was part of the transaction and we get disappointed because people don't sometimes measure up to what we thought, what we expected and oftentimes we get disappointed because we have expectations that we thought were very, very clear. For example, let's say if I should ask you, is there any woman here who would not be disappointed if her husband forgot their anniversary? Absolutely you would. Or the husband might say, well, you know, I can't believe that yesterday was my birthday and you didn't even remember it.

And kids think, well, Dad, you absolutely forgot that my game was at six o'clock and you showed up at seven thirty and the game was over and I played and I made four goals and you weren't there. Disappointed? Absolutely. There are big disappointments in life, there are little disappointments in life, but there are disappointments in life.

The little ones we can sort of handle. It's those big ones where personalities, people we love are involved. Or maybe your employment's involved or maybe something that you had saved your money for a very long time and maybe a house that you had your mind and heart set on and you had it all worked out and the deal was going through and I mean you were so excited and all of a sudden can't buy it for some reason. And so you're disappointed. How do you respond? Well, people respond in different ways. Naturally, depending upon the nature of the disappointment, depends upon who's involved, how many people are involved, oftentimes particularly who's involved.

If it's someone that you love very dearly, someone that you hold in high esteem, someone whose relationship or friendship that you treasure and then when they disappoint you it's very painful, very hurtful and causes us sometimes great distress. So how do we respond? Well sometimes we're just sad. We just have deep regret. We just get quiet on the inside. We're too sad to talk about it. Sometimes we become very angry. Can't believe that you would do this.

Can't believe that you could forget. Sometimes we get very angry. And so that anger sometimes can turn into vengeance, sometimes into hostility. It can turn into an attitude oftentimes that we would never even think that we would have.

Sometimes it's loss, loss of faith in a person, for example, because they let us down. We were betting on them. We were trusting in them. We were depending upon them. They let us down. Sometimes it's a loss of faith in God. I don't mean a loss of faith in your salvation, but you had asked the Lord for something and you believed you had a promise from Him and you were absolutely confident and assured you'd heard from God and He was going to answer your prayer and it didn't happen that way at all. God, what's going on, God?

What's going on here? What's what you promised? I'm trusting you. I've believed you. I've followed you.

I've obeyed you. God, where are you? So oftentimes a person's faith in God begins to waver and they think, well, why pray anymore? I put my trust in the Lord.

I believed in Him. Am I disappointed? Yes, I'm disappointed because God, you didn't do what I asked and it was so very important. You know how important it was and you didn't answer my prayer. Now I'm embarrassed.

Now, God, where am I? So we can build a big case against God over our disappointments. And so we respond in different ways. And sometimes those responses are not the best in the world because they don't create anything good whatsoever. Sometimes our response is we find ourselves withdrawing from somebody. We just withdraw.

We become estranged from them. It's like, you know what? You disappointed me. You disappointed me once. You disappointed me twice.

That's it. And so relationships are broken, families are broken, marriages are broken because of disappointment or whatever it might be. And so oftentimes rather than doing what is always the right thing to do, we come up with some excuse. It's okay to be sad when you're disappointed. It's okay to feel regret over some things when you're not disappointed. But unforgiveness is never acceptable. Unforgiveness is never an acceptable response to disappointment. If you and I have been disappointed by someone, we cannot afford to be unforgiving. No matter what. Because when you and I are unforgiving, our disappointments not just double, they quadruple.

And probably more than that. Because not only are we dealing with the hurt of disappointment, now we have to deal with an unforgiving spirit. And an unforgiving spirit is one of the most devastating attitudes and emotions a person can hold in their life. Because the longer you hold an unforgiving spirit, the more emotional poison absolutely covers your whole attitude, penetrates your attitude, and begins to influence and impact your actions as well as your attitudes. You can never afford to hold on to an unforgiving spirit no matter what.

It is never the right way to deal with the disappointment in life. And so all of us go through them, all of us face them, all of us have been disappointed by people, and all of us have disappointed somebody else at some time or probably many times in our life. Because oftentimes people that have expectations of you, they expect you to live up to something that you couldn't possibly live up to. This goes on in families with children, among their parents and their children. It goes on with the employer and employees, well, I hired you, so I expected you, or son, I sent you to college, paid your way, expected you to do this and so, and yeah, you are making C's and I expected you to make A's.

When I was in college, I made A's, why don't you make A's? And here's a kid who can't make A's, he's not an A student, and so he lives the disappointment of his father or his mother or her mother, for example, and they live with that. Instead of trying to understand, we have to understand this, God has forgiven you and me of many things. How in the world can we hold an unforgiving spirit towards someone else who has displeased us or disappointed us? And as we said, you can't disappoint God. If you could disappoint God, all of us would be standing in line and saying, Lord, forgive me for this and this and this and this, but he had no expectations. But we do have expectations, and so the issue is, how do we handle our disappointments? Well, let me just give you a little idea of what's happening in this passage because this passage deals with disappointment.

Now, here's the question. Was Martha disappointed in Jesus or was she disappointed in the fact that her brother had died and now he's gone? I don't think you and I could say that she was disappointed in the person of Jesus. She was certainly disappointed in what happened. But to say that she was disappointed in the Lord Jesus, whom she believed to be the Messiah and the Son of God, now I don't believe she was.

She was disappointed that Jesus for some reason did not come and allowed her brother to die. But here's what she says. She says something following that, that's very, very encouraging, which we'll come to in a moment.

So here's what happens. And then, of course, they had this conversation. She goes back to the house, sends Mary out. Mary comes out.

What does she say? Lord, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died. They certainly had been discussing it. They'd agreed upon the fact. If Jesus had showed up, he wouldn't be dead.

He didn't show up, and there was no word from him. And so their brother died and they were disappointed now. So let's get it down there where it is, reality. That's what reality is all about. We all get disappointed.

So the issue is, how do we respond? How do we respond to disappointments in life? Because no matter who you are, you're going to experience them, and more than likely, you may experience one this coming week.

You could experience one before you get home today. Disappointments are out there. So I want to give you several principles in this passage that if you'll jot them down, I am absolutely sure in content they will help you. They've been tested and tried by millions over the years, and I can tell you personally, every single one of them works.

No matter what you're going through, they will work. And the first one is simply this. When you think about all the principles in this passage, I just want to draw out these that have to do with disappointment.

The first one is this. God has a purpose for allowing the disappointments of our life. He has a purpose for allowing the disappointments of our life.

He's God. He could prevent them if He wanted to. He could change any circumstance of our life to prevent any kind of disappointment if He wanted to. And you and I can look around us and say, well, how could He have prevented that? Because He's God. And so He could prevent them if He chose.

But He allows disappointments in our life for very specific reasons. Now, He could have spoken or He could have arrived in time to save Lazarus from death, but He didn't. And the Scripture is very clear why He didn't. In fact, He said to His disciples, when He had heard that He was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was. And then afterwards, of course, He said, now let us go to Judea. Well, when He said that, they said, now, wait a minute, rabbi, they said, the Jews just now seeking to stone you, and you're going there again? And then He talks to them about the value of time and so forth, and He says, Lazarus has fallen asleep. Well, they thought he meant really fallen asleep.

So they said, well, if he's fallen asleep, then he'll recover. They didn't want to go because they were afraid if they'd stone Jesus, they'd stone Him. But finally, here's what Thomas said. Thomas said the rest of them, when they found out He was going anyway, they said, let us also go so that we may die with Him. I mean, it's a suicide journey as far as they were concerned. If He went, they were going to stone Him to death, and if they stoned Him, they stoned them.

So this is it. He said, I'm going. Well, but He waited.

Watch this. When He waited too late, it appeared for Mary and Martha and Lazarus. But the issue is, what is God's purpose? So I want you to see what He said. Because in this particular passage, He says here, He says, for example, He said in verse 15, I'm glad for your sake through disciples, that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to Him. He said, the reason I didn't go is because I have a higher purpose than just healing Lazarus' body.

I have something more important to do than that. So what was His purpose? His purpose was to glorify God. His purpose was to be glorified Himself. His purpose also was to teach them to trust Him, to believe Him. And certainly His purpose was to do something in the life of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. They would never forget as long as they lived.

They would live with this legacy that He died and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, raised Him from the dead, living proof as long as they live, this Christ is the Messiah. His purpose was higher. Now, whatever disappointment God allows you and me to go through, He doesn't just ignore it.

Now watch this. We are quick to claim this verse of Scripture, but oftentimes we fail to apply it in the nitty-gritty of life. When we have difficult, hurtful, painful, disappointing experiences in our life, what about Romans 8-28 when He says that God is engineering our circumstances for our good? Well does He engineer our circumstance for our good?

Sometimes, most of the time, all the time. Because He is God, He does it all the time. Whatever disappointments we face in life, whatever He's allowed, He has allowed them for a purpose. Listen, for a purpose that is, listen, that He will turn for our good and oftentimes to our surprising good if we will respond in the right fashion. And that's simply to trust Him.

And so He had something far more important in mind, He had something far more glorious in mind, something far more exciting and surprising in mind. Because what He did, He raised Him from the dead. That is, He could have just healed Him.

But you know what? He'd healed many people. Healing, healing was nothing new to Jesus. He'd healed many people. He started out in His ministry, He was just healing people. All those who came, He laid His hand upon them, spoke the Word, He healed them.

Listen to this carefully, Jesus' primary purpose for healing was not to relieve pain. That was not His primary purpose. Was He compassionate? Yes.

Was He a passionate man? Yes. Did He want to see people healed? Yes. Did He want to see them overcome their disease?

Yes. But His ultimate primary purpose for healing was to give clear identity to who He was. This is the Son of God. This is Israel's Messiah.

This is the one you're looking for. That was His ultimate reason. His secondary reason was to release them from pain and hurt and sorrow.

So think about this. God always has a purpose in allowing us to go through difficulties in life. He always has a purpose that is for our good. This is why I titled this message, Looking Beyond Our Disappointments. Because when they come, we don't want to get stalled in the midst of them.

We don't want to get derailed in the midst of them. We want to ask ourselves the question, God, what is it that You have in mind in this disappointment in my life? What is it out there that You want me to learn?

What is it about You, You want me to know? What is it about the way You work that I am to learn? So God always has a good purpose in allowing us to go through these disappointments in life.

And His purpose will always be for our good. Thank you for listening to Looking Beyond Our Disappointments. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.