Is God Ever Disappointed In Us?
A group of students got together this past Sunday and each wrote down a question on a piece of paper and put it in the middle of the circle. Once they did this, they discussed each of the questions. From what I heard, one of the questions generated a considerable amount of conversation and I think it’s a very penetrating question for us all to think through. It’s stated in the title of this blog, but here it is again, “Is God ever disappointed in us?” One of the students felt pretty strongly that the answer was no, but the others came to the conclusion that God can be disappointed with us at times, but still absolutely loves and accepts us. Well, it got me thinking last night and I wanted to share my belief with anyone willing to listen…
No, God is never disappointed with us when we are in Christ Jesus. Never. Although we are wretched sinners, still falling constantly (Rom 7), we have been set free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death (Rom 8). When we are justified by Christ, God feels about us the same way as He does about Jesus, whether we are doing very good or very bad. Christ’s perfect life has covered our sinful and rebellious heart so that God looks upon us as though we have lived like Jesus did. Jesus took the full condemnation, the full disappointment, the anger and frustration of God towards sin upon Himself when He bore our sin in our place so that we would die to sin and live to righteousness. He healed us through His wounds (1 Peter 2:24), he will present us holy and blameless (Col. 1:22), we are a new creation (Gal. 6), we are no longer condemned (Rom 8), we are counted as righteous because Jesus was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom 4), we have peace (Rom 5), etc.
When Jesus experienced the silence of God as he hung on the cross, He experienced all the disappointment that we deserve for our great sin. Our sin should not be taken lightly as nothing less than the Son of God dying on a cross would satisfy the requirements for us to be reconciled. As Tim Keller says, “We’re so bad that He had to die for us, but we’re so loved that He was glad to die for us.” Our sin is heinous and we don’t even have a clue as to how bad it really is, but thanks be to God in Jesus Christ that our sin was nailed to the cross and by God’s grace, we are now viewed as sons and daughters with perfect records in the midst of our actual flawed performance. We certainly need to repent and seek to live lives that glorify God, but our motivation is not to gain God’s favor or good will. We already have that in Christ. Our repentance is a gift from God to us and in our acknowledgement of our failure, His overwhelming acceptance of us drives us further into love with him and leads us to obedience. We are hidden in Christ.
This reality is difficult to swallow for most people, Christians included. We want so badly to incorporate our performance into the equation. We struggle to acknowledge the depths of our sin (if God can be disappointed in us, then He is all the time because we are almost always sinning in one way or another). We have such a difficult time believing that the cross and resurrection is our entire sufficiency and that Christ did it all. BUT, when we taste this grace, it’s impossible not to be filled with awe as it’s simply amazing. We get what we don’t deserve and what we receive is the answer to the longings of our soul.
