Wounds that Heal - Week #4

The longer I live and walk in the Lord Jesus, the more blown away I am by how radically different the Gospel of Jesus Christ is from any other religion! And I also realize how very offensive His unrelenting and unconditional love for weak humans is to the flesh…we tend to get very uncomfortable with staying in that place of receiving His radical love. I’m learning to deliberately let God love me in Jesus; my response of love is then soundly based on receiving His love for me (I John 4:19). This book is a fresh look at the love of God dramatically shown in the cross of Christ!

Just this week I was talking with a friend and we were enthusiastically agreeing that reading this book is underscoring very much the reality that there is not one area of human suffering that Jesus did not taste in His suffering. So far the author has dealt with Jesus’ suffering the areas of rejection and shame; this week’s chapter (chapter 4 – Why Have You Forsaken Me?) deals with abandonment and disappointment with God.

Seamands begins with two stories, both about Christians who went through devastating experiences. One was a pastor whose wife divorced him, the other an active Christian woman whose husband died suddenly when he was 40 years old. Both experienced deep disappointment in God and as a result, the pastor found himself no longer desiring to pray, and the Christian wife turned her back on God and quit going to church for 15 years.

The Effects of Disappointment with God
The author gives 3 things that can happen in our relationship with God when we experience disappointment with Him becayse He seems to have abandoned us.
1. Disappointments with God damage our trust receptors. “Damaged trust receptors make it painful to reach out to God. Memories of past disappointments convince them God will always be indifferent. They also stir up shame. Feeling that God abandoned them confirms they are worthless.”
2. Disappointments with God fuel anger at God. “Years after some painful experiences, we may still be angrily clenching our fist at God without even realizing it…As a result of anger fueled by disappointments, many sincere Christians work at cross purposes with themselves. One hand is open, reaching upward toward God…But the other hand is a clenched fist raised upward against God. It’s as if they are driving a car with one foot on the accelerator while the other is on the brake!”
3. Disappointments with God expose our idols. “…We assume that in exchange for our service God is obligated to grant our desires. What happens when God doesn’t fulfill them? We feel let down, sometimes even betrayed…So our disappointments with God are often the children of our false expectations. And behind our false expectations lurk the idols, the false gods we worship.”

Bringing Our Disappointment with God to the Cross
Jesus expressed His disappointment with His Father with the words from Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This was His own cry of dereliction (abandonment), but it was also His cry on our behalf. “He gave expression to all of humanity’s…groaning cries of disappointment with God. On the cross, our cries are both anticipated and caught up in his.”

Seamands speaks to the tendency among Christians to NOT freely express our disappointments and anger but rather cover them over with religious ideas of resignation: “’If God has allowed something to happen, what right do you have to cry out against it?’…Better then to resign ourselves to what God has ordained, accept it, no questions asked. Churches are not often places where people feel free to voice disappointment with God or raise hard questions. Those who dare to do so are frequently shamed into silence.”

I remember many years ago when I was a young missionary and the Spirit began to teach me to be honest with my feelings. He discovered to me that I was calling anger by other names, thereby disguising my true emotions even to myself. This took the courage of the Spirit in me because I was trained in the religious school of thought that considered negative emotions as sinful. Because I sincerely wanted to please the Lord, I found ways to negate what was really going on inside me. But in the Lord’s goodness and gentleness, I began to recognize what was going on and “dared” to begin to be honest with Him about it. This was liberating for me because I could release freely to Him that which would have stayed hidden and done its damage deep within. I found that the least little offense or hurt or disappointment that I experienced would lose its power to poison if I would take brief moments to process them with Him.

I continue to find this imperative in my earthly walk for keeping my heart tender. It’s the tiny daily issues that, if not dealt with regularly, accumulate to harden the heart. And the tragedy is that one can have a hard heart and not know it because it happened so slowly.

Frank Lake takes Psalm 42 and shows how the psalmist processes depression, and the first step is to be honest with God about his emotions. There are subsequent steps, but Lake says (and I’ve come to the same conclusion) that this first step is the one most difficult for many believers. So I encourage you to take strength from Jesus’ cry of disappointment with His Father and know that this is a legitimate step in the process of coming into healing.

Stephen Seamands quotes Pierre Wolff: “If Jesus in all his perfection had the audacity to ask his Father, ‘Why?’ we can express to God all our whys, since the why of the Son of Man embraced ours. None of our whys can be excluded from his, because all of our whys are healed through his.”

Overcoming the Effects of Disappointment with God
All three of the effects listed above were part of Jesus’ crucifixion:
1. Damaged trust. “This cry (‘My God…why…?’) is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus doesn’t address God with the personal, intimate ‘My Father,’ but instead uses the more formal, distant ‘My God.’…God seems mysteriously divided from God. God forsakes God…Separated from each other, the relationship between the Father and Son seems to break off. Yet at the cross, the Father and the Son are never more united, never more bound together. They are one in their surrender, one in their self-giving. The Father surrenders the Son…The Son, in turn, surrenders himself to the will of the Father…held together by oneness of will and purpose.” Jesus’ final word from the cross is also from the Psalms (31:5): “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus trusts His Father in the midst of His questions, and it is His faith that we can draw on as we meditate on our losses in the light of His experience of abandon-ment and disappointment. (Galatians 2:19,20)
2. Anger against God. “Christ became the willing, innocent victim of their rage. But not only their rage – ours too…Our anger at God’s failure to deliver us and our indignant protests over life’s injustices emerged in full force at the foot of the cross…What then should we do with our anger fueled by disappointment with God? Christians often hesitate to admit they are angry at God…The cross proclaims that our anger does not intimidate God. He is able to handle it. In fact, the cross is the great anger absorber of the universe. The rage, the anger of all humanity against God, was borne in Christ’s broken body…There we can own it…And then we can disown it and give it to Christ there. Instead of carrying the anger ourselves or venting it on others, we can let him carry it for us."
3. Exposed idols. The 180 degree change of the crowd from their cheers for Jesus to their cry for His crucifixion was because of their disappointment over Him, and this disappointment was based on their false expectations. And behind the false expectations was hidden the idol that they worshiped: military and political power. Just today, once again, I cried out to the Holy Spirit to make the real Jesus known to me; I want to know Him for who He truly is and not the false Jesus that I make up. In meditating on the cross in submission to the Spirit of Jesus, we will discover His real presence and very likely will have some false expectations of what He is like exposed to us. When this happens, it’s important to face them and allow Him to destroy them so that we have our conscience cleansed from dead works to serve the living and true God.

(A reminder again that if it helps you process the material, the author ends each chapter with a few questions.)

The Lord is with you, and He will shepherd you this week! Holy Spirit of Jesus, show us more of what He accomplished in His sufferings, not only for our personal healing and restoration but for that of those You have placed under our influence. Accelerate Your work in us for the sake of Jesus and the Father! Thank You for hearing our heart cry…

For next week we will read chapter five: He Led Captivity Captive.