Dealing with Disappointment God’s Way

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by Michael Jones · Week of July 26, 2026

There is a wound that every person of faith will carry at some point, a wound that does not bleed outwardly but aches deep in the marrow of the soul. It is the wound of disappointment. A prayer that dissolved into silence. A diagnosis that arrived like a thief in the night. A relationship that crumbled when you believed God was holding it together. The wise man wrote, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5–6). That is the invitation. But what happens when you have trusted and the path looks nothing like “straight”? This is the crucible where shallow faith either deepens or dies.

The prophet Jeremiah understood this crucible. God set him apart before he was born (Jeremiah 1:5) and placed a burning message on his lips. Jeremiah obeyed. He preached repentance to a stubborn nation and received mockery, imprisonment, and betrayal in return. His disappointment was so raw that he cried out, “You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed” (Jeremiah 20:7). There it is: blunt, unfiltered honesty hurled at the Almighty. And God did not rebuke him, because honesty before God is not rebellion; it is the language of a heart that still believes enough to speak.

But notice what Jeremiah said next: “His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9). Even in the pit of his disappointment, Jeremiah could not walk away. The fire would not let him. That is the mysterious grace woven into disappointment: it strips away every shallow reason you ever had for following God and leaves you standing on the only ground that will hold: God Himself. Not His gifts. Not His favorable outcomes. Just God. And this is where real transformation begins.

Paul knew it. From a Roman prison he penned words that have steadied millions of trembling hearts: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Not some things, but all things. The shattered expectation. The unanswered prayer. The loss that left you breathless. All of it is raw material in the hands of a God who wastes nothing. He does not promise to explain your suffering. He promises something far greater: His sovereign presence in the middle of it, working, shaping, redeeming what you cannot yet see.

So how do we walk through disappointment God’s way? First, be ruthlessly honest about what you feel. God is not threatened by your tears or startled by your anger. Jesus Himself cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If the Savior poured out His anguish before the Father, you have permission to do the same.

Second, anchor yourself to what is true when your feelings scream what is false. Your emotions will tell you God has forgotten you, that His promises have expired. But Paul reminds us, “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). God’s faithfulness is not a mirror of your faith. It is rooted in His own unchangeable character. When your grip on God weakens, His grip on you does not.

Third, look for God’s hand even when you cannot see His face. Joseph waited in a dungeon. David hid in caves. Paul carried a thorn he begged God to remove. None of them received the outcome they wanted when they wanted it. All of them discovered that God was doing something larger and more beautiful than their expectations could have contained.

Your disappointment is real. Your pain matters to the God who bottles your tears (Psalm 56:8). But disappointment does not get the final word. God does. And His word to you today is the same word He has spoken to every weary child who has stumbled toward Him in the dark: “Trust me. I am still here. I am still good. I am still working.” The deepest faith is not the faith that God will give you what you want. It is the faith that God is good even when He does not: the faith that holds on to His character when you cannot trace His plan, and discovers, in the holding on, that He was holding you all along. - MJ

Other congregations are welcome to reprint this. It may be reproduced in another congregation’s bulletin or newsletter without asking permission. An acknowledgement of Orange View Church of Christ is appreciated but not required.

Bible Questions & Answers

What about predestination and free will?

Few questions in theology generate more heat, and sometimes less light, than the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human free will. We ought to approach these texts with humility and careful attention to what Scripture actually says. Paul writes, “He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Ephesians 1:4). He adds, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (Romans 8:29–30). Read in isolation, these passages seem to teach that God individually selected certain people for salvation before time began. But responsible study never reads a passage in isolation. We must let Scripture interpret Scripture, and when we do, a fuller picture emerges.

The key word in Romans 8:29 is “foreknew” (Greek proginōskō). In Scripture, for God to “know” a people is not merely to hold information about them ahead of time; it is to set His love upon them and claim them as His own. Paul makes the point plainly: “The Lord knows those who are his” (2 Timothy 2:19). Notice, too, what God foreknew and predestined: a people “conformed to the image of his Son,” a group marked out for a destiny, not a list of names selected one by one. This matters, because the popular idea that God simply peered down the corridor of time, saw which individuals would choose Him, and then hand-picked those particular people asks the word “predestined” to mean almost nothing. It reduces God to rubber-stamping a choice He merely watched us make, and it ties us in intellectual knots to no purpose. Scripture offers something clearer and greater. Before the world began, God fixed the terms of salvation and marked out, as a people, all who would be found in His Son.

Likewise, Ephesians 1:4 says God chose us “in him,” that is, in Christ. God did not choose random individuals apart from any condition; He chose a plan. Before the foundation of the world, He determined that everyone “in Christ” would be holy, blameless, and destined for glory. The question is not “Did God pick me?” but “Am I in Christ?”

Scripture is clear about how one enters Christ: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3:27). We are baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). Peter commanded, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). Jesus declared, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). These commands make no sense if God has already determined who will believe and who will not.

The whole tenor of Scripture confirms that human choice is genuine. Joshua told Israel, “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). Jesus wept over Jerusalem: “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). Jesus wanted to gather them, but they refused. If God had predetermined their refusal, the lament loses all meaning. Jesus also said, “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (John 6:37), an open invitation to anyone willing to come. The Spirit echoes this call: “Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17). Paul told Timothy that God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Peter wrote that the Lord is “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). If God desires all to be saved yet not all are saved, the inescapable conclusion is that human beings possess the genuine ability to accept or reject His grace.

Here, then, is where we stand with confidence. God predestined a plan, not a roster. Picture it this way. Suppose I founded a school and decreed from the outset that everyone who enrolled, completed the prescribed courses, and passed them with a certain grade would receive a degree. The day I wrote that policy, I predestined exactly who would graduate, namely everyone who meets the requirements. At the level of the group the outcome is fixed and certain; yet at the level of the individual, no student’s name is engraved on a diploma until he actually does the work. In the same way, God has settled beyond all doubt that everyone in Christ will be saved, while whether you are among them is decided the moment you come to Him on His terms.

Before the world began, He determined that salvation would come through the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son, and that all who enter Christ through obedient faith, believing, repenting, confessing, and being baptized for the remission of sins, would receive the full blessings of that plan: forgiveness, adoption, the indwelling Spirit, and eternal glory. God’s sovereignty is not diminished by human free will; it is magnified by it, because He accomplishes His purposes through the genuine choices of free moral agents.

Your decision to follow Jesus is a real response to a real invitation from a God who genuinely loves you. Your choice to believe matters. Your choice to be baptized matters. Your choice to remain faithful matters. God has not made you a puppet. He has made you a person, created in His image, granted the dignity of genuine choice, and invited into a salvation planned before the stars were spoken into existence.

We hold all of this, finally, with humility, because God is not bound by the clock as we are. Time itself is a created thing, and God stands outside it. With Him “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8), and “from everlasting to everlasting” He is God (Psalm 90:2). Words like “foreknew” and “before” are borrowed from our world of past and future, and they can only point toward the experience of a God who inhabits eternity. So we say with confidence what Scripture says, that God is fully sovereign and that our choices are fully real, even when we cannot draw the diagram that shows exactly how the two meet in the mind of an eternal God. Trust His plan. Answer His call. He will honor your faith (Hebrews 11:6). - MJ