Sermon Tone Analysis

!! Disappointment with God - Phillip Yancy

 

for many people there is a large gap between what they expect from their Christian faith and what they actually experience.

People feel disappointment, betrayal, and often guilt.

Disappointment occurs when the actual experience of something falls far short of what we anticipate.

!!! God Within The Shadows

!!!! Hearing the Silence

 

Where is God in our emotional pain?

Why does he so often disappoint us?

Can God be trusted?

If so many small prayers go unanswered, what about the big ones?

Struggles seem almost to mock the triumphant slogans about God’s love and personal concern that I often hear in Christian churches.

Yet no one is immune to the downward spiral of disappointment ... first comes disappointment, then a seed of doubt, then a response of anger or betrayal.

We begin to question whether God is trustworthy, whether we can really stake our lives on him.

Some Christians I know would reject the phrase ‘disappointment with God out of hand ... the Christian life is a life of victory and triumph ... any other state simply indicates a lack of faith.

!!!! Up In Smoke

How can you have a ‘personal relationship’ if you’re not sure the other person even exists?

Richard was feeling a pain as great as any that a human being experiences: the pain of betrayal.

The pain of a lover who wakes up and suddenly realises it’s all over.

He had staked his life on God, and God had let him down.

!!!!

The Questions No One Asks Aloud

Does God really care?

If so, why won’t he reach down and fix the things that go wrong - at least some of them?

Three large questions about God that seem to lurk just behind the thicket of our feelings:

1.

Is God unfair?

2.    Is God silent?

- What kind of Father is he?

Does he enjoy watching us fall on our face?

If God has a wonderful plan for my life, why doesn’t he tell me what that plan is?

3.    Is God hidden?

It seems as if God deliberately hides himself, even from people who seek him out.

True atheists do not, I presume, feel disappointed in God.

They expect nothing and receive nothing.

But those who commit their lives to God, no matter what, instinctively expect something in return.

Are those expectations wrong?

!!!! What If?

“If only”, Richard had said.

If only God solves those three problems, then faith would flourish like flowers in springtime.

Wouldn’t it?

Exodus described the very world Richard wanted!

It showed God stepping into human history almost daily.

He acted with utter fairness and spoke so that everyone could hear.

Behold, he even made himself visible!

If God has the power to act fairly, speak audibly and appear visibly, why then does he seem so reluctant to intervene today?

Perhaps the record of the Israelites in the wilderness contained a clue.

/Question: Is God unfair?

Why doesn’t he consistently punish evil people and reward good people?

Why do awful things happen to people good and bad with no discernible pattern?/

Imagine a world designed so that we experience a mild jolt of pain with every sin and a tickle of pleasure with every act of virtue.

The OT records a ‘behaviour modification’ experiment almost that blatant.

God’s covenant with the Israelites.

God resolves to reward and punish his people with strict, legislated fairness ... dependent on one condition that the Israelites had to follow the laws he laid down.

The results of this covenant based on a ‘fair’ system of rewards and punishments.

Within fifty years the Israelites had disintegrated into a state of utter anarchy.

Years later when NT authors looked back on that history, they did not hold up the covenant as an exemplary model of God relating to his people with absolute consistency and fairness.

Rather they said the old covenant served as an object lesson, demonstrating that human beings were incapable of fulfilling a contract with God.

It seemed clear to them that a new covenant (testament) with God was needed, one based on forgiveness and grace.

/Question: Is God silent?

If he is so concerned about our doing his will, why doesn’t he reveal that will more plainly?/

How do we know whether what we have heard is truly a word from God?

God simplified matters of guidance, I discovered when the Israelites camped in the Sinai wilderness.

Should we pack up our tent and move today or stay put?

For the answer, an inquisitive Israelite need only glance at the cloud over the tabernacle.

God set up other ways, like the casting of lots and the Urim and Thummim, to directly communicate his will, but most issues were pre-decided.

He had spoken his will for the Israelites in a set of rules, codified into 613 laws that covered the complete range of behaviour from murder to boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk.

Few people complained about fuzzy guidance in those days.

But did a clear word from God increase the likelihood of obedience?

Apparently not.

I also noticed a telling pattern in the OT accounts: the very clarity of God’s will had a stunning effect on the Israelites’ faith.

Why pursue God when he had already revealed himself so clearly?

Why step out in faith when God had already guaranteed the results?... in short, why should the Israelites act like adults when they could act like children?

As I studied the story of the Israelites, I had second thoughts about crystal-clear guidance.

If may serve some purpose ... but it does not seem to encourage spiritual development.

In fact, for the Israelites it nearly eliminated the need for faith at all; clear guidance sucked away freedom, making every choice a matter of obedience rather than faith.

/Question: Is God hidden?

Why doesn’t he simply show up sometime, visibly, and dumbfound the sceptics once and for all?/

We want proof, evidence, a personal appearance, so that the God we have heard about becomes the God we see.

What we hunger for happened once.

For a time God did show up in person, and a man spoke to him face to face as he might speak with a friend ... God and Moses

God did not play hide-and-seek with the Israelites; they had every proof of his existence you could ask for.

But astonishingly - and I could hardly believe this result, even as I read it - God’s directness seemed to produce the very opposite of the desired effect... God’s visible presence did nothing to improve lasting faith.

Would a burst of miracles nourish faith?

Not the kind of faith God seems interested in, evidently.

The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.

I came away from my study of them both surprised and confused: surprised to learn how little difference it made in people’s lives when three major reasons for disappointment with God - unfairness, silence, and hiddenness - were removed; confused by the questions stirred up about God’s actions on earth.

Has he changed?

Has he pulled back, withdrawn?

!!!!

The Source

Simply reading the Bible I encountered not a misty vapour but an actual Person... deep emotions.

Again and again God is shocked by the behaviour of human beings ... I know, I know, the word “anthropomorphism” is supposed to explain all those humanlike characteristics.

But surely the images God ‘borrows’ from human experience point to an even stronger reality.

I marvelled at how much God lets human beings affect him.

These three questions about disappointment with God are put into a new light.

They are not puzzles awaiting a solution.

Rather, they are problems of relationship between human beings and a God who wants desperately to love and be loved by us.

People disappointed with God focus on the human point of view.

When we ask our questions - Why is God unfair?

Silent?

Hidden? - we’re really asking, Why is God unfair to me, silent with me, hidden from me.

But what is God’s point of view?

Why does he seek contact with human beings in the first place?