Smash the Devil’s Most Deceitful Weapon
What do you do when your pain feels more overwhelming than your faith? What do you do when what you prayed for doesn’t just go unanswered, but instead, the unthinkable happens? What happens when you see others receive God’s breakthrough, and you have only disappointment?
In our disappointments lies the choice either to fall away or continue to follow Jesus. I have heard these phrases over the years: “If God was good, then …” or “If God was real, then …” We have attached His goodness and, even worse, His existence to our senses of fulfillment. This means our disappointments become indicators that He must not be real. We have sometimes linked our happiness and everything working out for us to God’s character. And conversely, we have attributed our pain to His actions. We have even associated our struggles with fellow believers as being the Father’s fault.
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Disappointment is by far an underestimated tool in the devil’s hand. He uses it as a blinding light to point us away from God. Disappointment, meant to lead us into conversations with God, is a wedge that works its way into the middle of our relationship with God. In our disappointments we often turn to friends, podcasts or therapists to try to make sense of things only God can resolve.
Situations like deaths and sicknesses become our ammunition either to fall away from or to follow more fervently after Jesus. These events, if not seen through the lens of faith and endurance, will create a view of God as destructive as leaving the faith. Your faith is a home in which you will rest, knowing your redemption, but its foundation is your views and beliefs. This is why we are to worship the one who made us in His image, not the God we made in ours.
“Fall or follow” is a phrase that came up in a discussion I had about handling disappointments as a Christian. I have witnessed many believers whose faith was shipwrecked because they didn’t know how to process disappointment. The Bible says that nothing can separate us from the love of God, but it never says we can’t willfully walk away from Him (Rom. 8:38–39). I believe more people leave the faith because of disappointment than we realize. If anybody knew of mistreatment from religious leaders, it was our Savior, Jesus. Sadly, many have chosen not to follow Him anymore because of their own brokenness and that of others. We are now at a pivotal time when we will either fall or follow.
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Our default reactions when we face disappointments or letdowns—or when we think we heard God but our experiences don’t align with what we think we heard—are often to ignore what happened or to throw a lot of Christian jargon at the situation instead of really facing the realities of our experience. I am primarily referring to those whose disappointment results from the sensation that God has let them down based on the promises found in His Word. Here are some examples of the types of disappointment I am not referring to:
— You prayed for God to have you marry an actor, and it didn’t happen.
— You asked God to prove Himself by telling Him to knock down a picture from the wall, and that didn’t happen.
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