Thirty years ago, I worked for a struggling software company. Our architecture was outdated and sales revenue had plummeted. Investments in new architecture meant expenses skyrocketed, and we were hemorrhaging money with no doctor in sight. Then our president had a heart attack.
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Our parent company asked me if I would consider becoming president. I was flattered by their great offer (and impressed with their great wisdom), but when I prayed, I sensed God say, “No.” His word felt clear and strong, and I declined.
Instead, I suggested a new vice president that I had recently hired and who had become a friend. Our parent company agreed, and my friend became our new president.
The next day, my president-friend began to attack me. In the following weeks, he reduced my pay, took away my office, demoted me, and publicly belittled me.
My friend’s blitzkrieg assaults stunned, paralyzed, and bewildered me. Each new day brought new disappointments. Everywhere I turned, I saw ambush and humiliation. All of this from a friend who had never been considered for the job until I recommended him.
And God seemed absent. At least silent. I felt abandoned by God to a betraying friend who appeared intent on my professional destruction. I had voluntarily obeyed God by declining a promotion. As a result, I was demoted, humiliated, discouraged, and scared.
What kind of God would do this to someone who tried to obey him?
I Lost Hope
I don’t want to seem more spiritual than I am (and any appearance of my spirituality is an apparition), but the biggest blow to me was God’s seeming absence. No words of encouragement. No sense of his presence.
My faith was shaken. If I had been fired because of a huge failure, I wouldn’t have liked it, but I could have accepted it. But I had been demoted because I obediently chose not to be promoted. And then God abandoned me. I felt alone in the fire.
I prayed, prayed some more, and I finally lost hope.
Our Beliefs Shape How We Feel
Two years after my friend was promoted to president (and I was reduced to whipping-boy), he was fired. Then two friends and I bought the company. I went from laughingstock to ownership-stock in a New York minute.
If I had known what would happen two years earlier, those twenty-four stormy months would have felt like a spring drizzle. If I had a glimpse of God’s plan, the deep darkness would have felt like a shadow. But I didn’t have a clue how things would turn out.
Our beliefs about God determine our experience of life. When Jesus addresses anxiety, he says, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap.” That is, birds can’t farm! But Jesus continues, “And yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
Jesus treats our anxious feelings by prescribing a belief about God: God himself thinks you are valuable (Matt. 6:26). Our cure for bad-feelings is found in good-beliefs.
Our Beliefs Also Drive What We Do
The great theologian, Saint Henry Ford, once said,
One man thinks he can and one man thinks he cannot. And they are both right.
Ford claims that our doing is driven by our beliefs. He is right. The belief that we can (or can’t) determines if we do (or don’t).
We fail to take risks because we believe our risks will fail; we fear honesty with friends because we think they will confirm our fears; we ignore concerns about church because we’re sure our concerns will be ignored; we remain entrapped in ruts because we’re certain our ruts have ensnared us.
Our problems is not bad circumstances; our problems is what we do in response. And our response—what we do (or don’t)—is always determined by what we believe.
What Do We Believe In?
It’s easy to trust God when the sun shines, our lattes are foamy, and the Wi-Fi signal is strong. It’s even easy to trust God when we are undervalued and demeaned, as long as God tells us in advance that he will promote us in two years.
So what is our faith in? Is it in the particular plan of promotions; or is it just … in … God? Not every two-year-demotion is followed by stock ownership. Sometimes it is followed by a pink slip.
Life in God has a pattern: Resurrection. But we never know what form that resurrection will take. If our belief is in a particular resurrection shape (or timing), our faith is no longer in God. It’s in that specific form and timing.
My obedience to God was weak (at best), and my “belief” was that God would bless me because of my obedience. When it didn’t happen with the form I expected, my beliefs crumbled. I had believed in the “blessing” and not in the “blessor.”
What Does God Want In All This?
Oswald Chambers says,
The test is to believe God knows what he is after.
If we knew everything that God will do tomorrow, we’d be happy today. But we don’t know, and we aren’t happy. Because our hopes are based on our fabricated outcomes. Someday, though, we’ll look back at our lives and we’ll say, “God knew exactly what he was after. I wouldn’t want any other life.”
God doesn’t reveal all he will do. Instead, he reveals himself. Which is all our hearts really need.
Sam
I’m moving my articles into podcasts with commentary. If you are interested in listening, search for “Beliefs of the Heart” in your favorite podcast app, and it should be there. This is my first attempt.
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I had a similar job experience years ago when I felt abandoned by God facing a dead end in my career. My story was the more, “when God closes a door, he opens a window” sort of thing. I was mad and disappointed, but looking back, what I thought was horrible at the time ended up being a protection and blessing. The good Lord knew what he was doing
Hi John,
Love your comments, and I loved golfing with you two days ago.
Sam
Hi Sam. I’m currently in a similar place you were as far as a relationship. As you know I have longed to be married and yet another relationship seems to have no recourse and will likely end.
This is in spite of all my prayers and it almost feels God dangled a carrot and then yanked it away.
I don’t know what the future holds and don’t even know the right course of action. I am at His mercy.
But I am also frustrated with Him.
Hi Joao,
I love how you can pray your suffering (and frustration). God didn’t like his people murmuring about Him, but then He LOVED when they murmured (lamented) TO Him. (Just look at the psalms, book of Job, and Lamentations.)
I will pray. I know your desire, and I will pray.
Sam
Beautiful, and so deep. Thank-you for this. So many Christians never reach this understanding about God’s will in suffering, that we would know Him better, not just wait for God to reopen the good-works for blessings vending machine. Sometimes the thorn in our flesh goes away, sometimes not, but His grace is sufficient – GOD is sufficient, in fact.
Hi Havalyn
So great to hear from you. Yes, in all of this, God wants us to know Him better.
All suffering is loss. And in our loss, we always go deeper into our real comforts. So God has to come along and take away those counterfeit comforts so that (eventually) all our suffering will drive us into the real comfort, of Him.
Sam
Sam, this is sooo good. The whole end of the article is powerful. Love this especially…
“Life in God has a pattern: Resurrection. But we never know what form that resurrection will take. If our belief is in a particular resurrection shape (or timing), our faith is no longer in God. It’s in that specific form and timing.”
Thank you!
Hi Lori,
Thanks. I think I’m coming to realize (more and more) how my false image of God affects my life.
Sam
Great reminder, Sam, that we cannot marshal God’s plans into a corral of our own design. Trust…that is what God wants us to do.
Amen!
Hi Sam. No one has to tell you that every believer, who is totally committed to obey and follow God, will experience seasons of helplessness–seasons where someone has absolutely no fleshly ability to change or escape very difficult life issues, all planned and purposed by our Lord. But while we may be struggling to put one foot in front of the other, what might God be doing on our behalf? As a result of my own inescapable journey, this is what I sense He has made very clear to me. Even as we persevere, God is sovereignly walking right behind us, retrieving and safeguarding whatever fleshly abilities He removes from our lives, and in turn, using them to rebuild our lives so we will trust only in Him. On a different note, the tactics used by your friend-turned-president, are classic narcissistic abuse, with the root being insolent pride.
I love your image of our Sovereign God walking behind us, retrieving and safeguarding.
And at the same time, He goes before us, giving us the Promised Land.
Thanks!
It can be so hard to trust God during the most difficult times! It’s much easier to feel abandoned and lose hope.
A few years ago, after the shocking diagnosis of a life-threatening illness in a precious young loved one, I was feeling like the God that I’d trusted for years had wounded me deeply. Suddenly there was this wall between us. I threw it up quickly and I built it out of solid materials.
Over time God patiently tore it down. At first, brick by brick. Then, suddenly, after three long years, as I was struggling spiritually with yet another undeserved catastrophe in the same young person’s life, He provided a supernatural, peaceful acceptance that far transcended all my understanding (Philippians 4:7).
I was marveling over this unexplainable, unexpected blessing a few weeks later. Praying, thanking God, praising Him for knocking the wall down flat. Then the words entered my mind uninvited, unintended, “Help me to forgive You.” Whoa! How could I ever think such a thing? (My next thought: Is it too late to take it back, God? Can we just pretend You didn’t hear that?)
But that was how it felt. Like the pain ran so deep that of course He must have done something terrible to me, something wrong, something evil, something that I had a right to either forgive or continue to hold against Him. The god I wanted to worship wouldn’t do this to me. (Adapted from my blog at https://thosewhoweep.blogspot.com/2018/11/wounded-by-god.html)
I suspect that many of us in our western culture today (including Christians) hold this belief about God, whether we realize it or not. If He doesn’t do what I expect Him to do, He must be wrong, not me. As C. S. Lewis describes it in “God in the Dock,” we put Him on trial and make ourselves the judges.”
In my case, that wrong belief led to three years of pushing God away. If I had believed that He knows what He’s after even in the most difficult circumstances, I would have sensed His gentle, kind, loving presence as I was struggling to come to terms with the shock and pain that I was experiencing.
The incredibly good news is that, even though I was absolutely in the wrong, even though I was holding God in such low esteem that I believed that the restoration of our relationship actually required my forgiving Him, God still pursued me. He slowly broke down the wall that I’d constructed, then tore it down completely in one supernatural stroke.
Ann
Hi Ann,
Yes, many people are shocked at the idea of “forgiving God,” and (of course) he has done nothing wrong. We need to let his past actions go, and even embrace them; there is a kind of faith that says, “You really do know better than I do.” And me most need it when we see the sufferings of loved ones.
I’m happy for you that you gave in … that you gave in to God’s pursuit of you.
Sam
Hi Sam,
Now that you are doing podcasts, are you still going to be doing the articles? I hope so!!!!
Thanks for your encouraging comment, hoping I write more articles! You are a blessing.
YES! That is my plan. In fact, my personal podcasts are my own reading of my articles (I find lots of people like to listen rather than read), and then I add commentary after the reading. So I NEED an article even before I do a new podcast ?. Here is where my “Reflection” podcasts are: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1784464
I’m part of another podcast that I’ve been doing with a friend (Gary Barkalow) for twelve years. Except we also did them privately to a group of 50 people or so (online). This spring we decided to turn them into podcasts. Most of them are new, but we’re throwing in some old ones (all of which we recorded) when appropriate. You can find “Alert and Oriented” here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1763781
Again, I thank you for reaching out. I’m encouraged ?.
Sam