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Ditching Your Disappointment
John 21:1-14
If you have your Bible (and I hope that you do) you can go ahead and open it to John 21.
It’s easy to get disappointed, isn’t it?
It’s easy when our hopes or expectations aren’t met, when we don’t get what we want.
We may work hard and do our best but life just doesn’t work out the way that we think it should.
Things don’t go our way.
We don’t get the job or promotion.
We didn’t make the team.
It may be something as simple as the grocery store not having your favorite brand of snack.
You know that feeling when you see the empty space on the shelf where the salt and vinegar chips normally sit.
Sometimes we’re disappointed when we get what we don’t want.
Nobody wants to get a flat tire or catch the flu.
We can get disappointed in others as well.
People don’t always meet our expectations, do they?
Have you ever looked up to someone and they let you down?
Have you had high hopes, high expectations for someone and they didn’t even come close?
But I think that most of us at some point have been disappointed in ourselves.
You know how that is, don’t you?
I can’t believe I did that again.
I am so stupid!
Why did I say that?
Why did I do that?
You’d think I’d know better.
What’s wrong with me?
We’ve all experienced disappointment.
Maybe you’re even disappointed this morning
God allows disappointments to come into our lives.
In a way, we could say that disappointments are His appointments.
It’s in those times, He has some things for us to learn.
Today, I want to look at one of the disciples who was probably pretty disappointed – not in Jesus but in himself.
When Jesus said that all the disciples would desert Him, Peter told Jesus that he would stand beside him through thick and thin even if nobody else would.
He was arrogant.
He was strong-willed.
He was sure of himself.
He expected more of himself.
But what happened?
Before the rooster crowed, Peter had denied Christ three times.
Peter was disappointed, not in Jesus – Jesus had met all of his expectations and hopes, the apostle had seen the empty tomb and had actually seen the risen savior twice – Peter was disappointed in himself
He’d let his Lord down.
He was a failure, a disappointment.
Let’s pray, read our text and see how Peter ditched his disappointment.
Pray!
Let’s look at seven ways to ditch our disappointment.
Don’t give up when you’re feeling down
When Peter was feeling down, he wanted to go back and do some of those things that he used to do.
But when he did, he found that it didn’t work.
I wonder if some of you are tempted to do the same thing.
Perhaps you’re going through a hard time right now and you just want to walk away this whole Christianity thing.
Maybe you feel like people have let you down so you just want to get away from everything.
Peter discovered the hard way that we can’t go back, but we can get through it.
Several years later, he wrote in:
As Rick Warren states, “You’ll never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.”
In fact, if you’re a Christian, God won’t let you find satisfaction in those things you used to do because He loves you too much to see you stray.
It’s interesting that they go back out at night but it shouldn’t surprise us.
It’s always dark when you decide to go back to the old gang, the old ways, the old spots.
It’s always dark.
Maybe you’ve tried it.
Maybe you’re thinking about going back.
Are you close to giving up?
With all that God has done for you, don’t walk away from Him or His church.
Keep serving Him faithfully no matter what happens.
We can do nothing apart from Christ
It’s amazing that there were at least three professional fishermen in the boat that night that knew how to fish but they didn’t even catch a thing.
Verse 3 tells us, “but that night they caught nothing.”
To not catch anything was pretty unusual and no doubt led to a deeper level of disappointment and discouragement among the disciples.
After all, they had decided to go fishing to get rid of the blahs.
But when you go back, it’s just not there.
It just doesn’t work any longer.
You come up empty.
Jesus was teaching them the truth of what He had said earlier in John 15:5: “…for apart from me you can do nothing.”
They couldn’t rely on their experience or their expertise to achieve anything.
But it’s so easy to go through the motions, isn’t it?
If we were honest, most of us rely on our own abilities instead of surrendering to God’s Spirit.
It’s so easy for us to be fooled into thinking that we’re accomplishing something for God.
But the truth is that we must stop going through the motions of religious routine.
Let’s allow those times of disappointment to reveal how easy it us for us to get bored with our faith.
Have we lost our passion for Christ?
When Jesus spoke to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2, He commended them for their hard work and perseverance.
They had certainly worked for the Lord, but Jesus points out that something was significantly wrong in verses 4-5:
Brothers and sisters in Christ, have we as a church forsaken our first love?
If we have, let’s repent and get back on track, refusing to settle for second best.
Jesus does not tolerate anyone taking His rightful place in our lives or in His church.
As we walk through trials and difficulties, as we experience disappointment, God strips away the junk in our lives so that we will see that we can do nothing apart from Him.
And when we realize that our “nets” are empty, we see the need for God to fill us.
And it’s at that point we will either bend our knees to Him, or we will be broken.
Maybe there is some bending and breaking taking place in your life right now, and that’s not a bad thing.
We can also take comfort from the next verse as Jesus tells Peter that he will get through the trying times because the Lord Himself is praying for him:
Obedience is always the right choice
In verse 5, we see Jesus call out to his disciples, greeting them as “children” and asks how the fishing is going.
He wants them to admit the obvious fact that they’ve caught nothing.
A true miracle takes place here as the fishermen actually say they caught nothing.
Fishermen always say, “You should have seen the one that got away.”
But there comes a point in life when you go back and realize it stinks, that there’s nothing there.
It sounded so good as you reminisced about the wind blowing your hair, the smell of fish in the air, the rocking of the boat and being with the boys.
It sounded so good when you thought about it, but when you actually got there, it wasn’t the way you thought it would be.
Jesus affectionately calls them children to show how He loves us even when we go astray.
He watches us rely on our own expertise, He sees our empty nets and wants to fill them up.
Max Lucado said it well: “He loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.”
And the way He changes us is through obedience.
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