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Tune in to hear messages from preachers across all our gatherings. Updated regularly.
Welcome, and thanks for joining us for this episode of the c 3 church podcast. You're about to listen into a message from 1 of our gatherings. To find out more about our community, where we gather both in person and online, and how to get involved, head to c free church dotca. Now, let's listen into a message from a recent service.
Speaker 2:When we talk about potlucks and food being more than enough, I just want to remind you that, you know, our God is a super generous God. And I remember hearing Pastor Phil talk about, you know, so what if there's leftovers? It's important that we actually show extravagance at things. And when we had our potluck in our Kelowna location last week, we had somebody say, you know we're a kind church because there was bacon left at the end of the event. Right?
Speaker 2:You were there, right, Mark? There was bacon left. So, yeah. So that's just, there also was a lot of bacon there, so that, you know, does help, but you know, it is true. So, I wanna share about disappointment today, you know, now that Because disappointingly, there wasn't enough bacon here in your Vernon location.
Speaker 2:So, I thought it'd be fitting to do that. You know, disappointments seem to be everywhere. I don't know about you, but I seem to find them everywhere. There was, I was told that an unemployed youth planned on attending a class on how to handle disappointments. But, when he arrived, the class was cancelled.
Speaker 2:I mean, such is life. Right? So, but I find that disappointment seems to lurk in wide open spaces. You know, those places. And I'm not really like a born optimist.
Speaker 2:I don't know about you, but you know, to be optimistic you have to have a feeling that, you know, you're hopeful about the future and about success that's gonna happen, you know, to in something particular not once, but all the time. And, you know, as a Christian, I believe there's more to us as people who are called believers than just being optimistic. Right? So I think that that sometimes comes with some challenges. But to remain positive and, when, you know, facts and feelings are less than ideal, And we have to speak like sincere life giving hope and faith versus, like, just flattery and good vibes.
Speaker 2:Like, I I really wanna be a person that that is a person of faith because I know that faith pleases God. Right? So living a life that finds hope in every situation, not just a feeling of hope, but like a sincere, genuine person that believes that my God has this. Whatever's going on, my God has this. And you know, faith is not something that you just say, it's actually something that you have to see.
Speaker 2:And you know, knowing that I don't actually have to will myself just to feel good about a situation or about the future. But, I need to remember that I serve a living God that has a good future for me. Yeah. And you know, there's a scripture that talks about our good futures, right? And I'm sure most of you know, Jeremiah 2911 says, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.
Speaker 2:They are plans for good, they're not for disaster, they're to give you a future and a hope. There is a God that can and will turn my disappointments into something good. Even if I only if I see the glass half full or half empty. However, I do know that we do have I've been known, and I'm sure some of you've been known to respond rather badly when disappointed. Do you ever feel like there's some people that exist in your world to spread disappointment like seeds in your life, you know?
Speaker 2:They're ready to sprout randomly at any time throughout your most hopeful times. And you know, there's a little video clip that I wanted to share with you that I, you know, to get myself to sleep at night, I I watch comedians. And I hope most of them are Christian community comedians, but they're not. But, so Job is somebody in the Bible who had every reason to feel disappointed because, you know, the devil had taken everything from Job. So, there's this little clip I want you to watch.
Speaker 3:I mean, think about Job in the old testament. Think about Job's wife. She must have been a real piece of work. I mean, the devil took everything from Job, man. Killed his kids, killed his servants, killed his livestock, covered Job in boils and sores, but his wife did not die.
Speaker 3:That's saying something right there, isn't it? Like, hey, devil, Job's wife's right over there. I know. Trust me. Leave her.
Speaker 3:I know what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I just thought, you know, I don't know. How do you react when something doesn't go the way you planned? Do you feel like the devil's out to get you? Or maybe something a little less diabolical than that? You know, a break up or a cancelled flight, all our thanks to WestJet the last, you know, little while.
Speaker 2:Losing a potential customer, maybe a long standing relationship or a negative health diagnosis. Maybe it's as simple as you're starving and the wrong pizza gets delivered to your house. Do you get angry?
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 2:throw a tantrum? Or do you shrink back into your cocoon and just sulk? Perhaps it's neither. Either way, we can't help but feel disappointed. And a disappointed person tends to be angry and lash out, but too often it's usually on people who are unrelated to what has gone on and about things that are unrelated.
Speaker 2:You know, that's kind of 1 of the characteristics of disappointment. Its effects spill over into other aspects of life. Someone or something has or was not as good as you had hoped or expected. It makes us unhappy because our hopes and our expectations are unfulfilled. We sort of we feel let down.
Speaker 2:Right? And disappointment is not a clinical condition. It can't be medicated, unfortunately. It's an emotional state that emerges from unmet expectations. In other words, it's it's not really dependent on truth or on the incident, you know.
Speaker 2:It's about how we actually feel about something. You know, and sadly, many things in life don't actually go as planned. Right? And that's not necessarily bad. Right?
Speaker 2:Because our disappointments force us actually to think differently. And, you know, they create the necessary resistances that we need to aid our human growth, our progress, and they require us to go to God for his perspective in things. You know, I don't deny that actually disappointments, you know, they can be highly inconvenient and they are a little derailing. You know, so, if you ever wondered like, why do we get disappointed? So, you know, there's a couple thoughts I had.
Speaker 2:So, what 1 of the things is that we have to ask ourselves, like, what what do I actually believe? Like, what do I feel that the truth is? You know, and there's some room for doubt there and uncertainty because I feel different about things depending what the day is or about depending who's in the world that, you know, I'm feeling disappointed with. And today, I may believe that I'm really well prepared for this exam or this job interview or that my partner is faithful to me despite what their words and their actions actually seem to contradict that. I could believe that, you know, I deserve the best life and that I'm a loving person and that I'm competent and I'm honest.
Speaker 2:And that's your truth as it is. But then there's also like, what do I want to believe? You know, like, so, that's what you want the truth to be. Right? So strange if we're really certain about what that, with no confusion or doubt.
Speaker 2:I want to believe that I'm so well prepared for this exam or this job interview that my partner really loves me and that they can't actually live without me. That 1 day my boss is gonna wake up to know that, you know, the whole, you know, everything would fall apart if I wasn't there. That I'm the most competent person for the job. And, I'm indispensable to them. And, you know, that's your truth as you want it to be.
Speaker 2:So, what do you believe and what do you want to believe? And then there's what's actually the reality of what's going on? It may not even be close to what you believe or what you wanna believe. But, you know, reality seems to be unaffected by its admirers and its critics. Right?
Speaker 2:The reality may be actually that 90% of the candidates for that job or for that exam are better than me. That actually my partner is already talking to a divorce attorney because they can hardly stand the thought of spending another moment with me. And, you know, it could be that I'm actually at the top of the list of the people that are gonna be laid off or fired first from the job. The greater the mismatch between what I believe versus what I want to believe and what I perceive as reality, the more disappointed I'm going to be. You know, old beliefs and what we're told is reality do not actually determine what truth is.
Speaker 2:We need to have a transformation of our minds to clear a path for truth to take the ground that it needs to take. So, what do you do with milk that's gone past its use by date or medication that's expired? You check them. Right? You treat them.
Speaker 2:You treat, limiting beliefs the same way. You discard them.
Speaker 1:Good. Do you
Speaker 2:know, I, I grew up attending a lot of rural, schools. Just my dad worked for, the government, and so we I went to 19 elementary schools. So, and so I lived in very small places that you've probably most of you have never heard of. But 1 thing that happened regularly, and maybe that was happening all over, but it was happening in my little schools, is that we would have dentist visits. I don't know if there were dentists or hygienists.
Speaker 2:And they would come into the school with toothbrushes and toothpaste and we would all get lined up and have to go to the bathroom and brush our teeth and then, you know, with our new toothbrushes that they gave us. And then they'd give us these little pink pills and you'd chew on them and then they would show you where all they, they were called, disclosing plaque tablets. I looked them up. And see, just like that. And so, and then you would chew on these little tablets and you would see how much plaque was left on your teeth.
Speaker 2:So my mother was a little ahead of her time and I wasn't allowed to have those little pink disclosing plaque tablets because she didn't
Speaker 1:know what kind of chemicals were
Speaker 2:in them. That was several years later, I'm cleaning up my grandmother's about 20 years ago, I'm cleaning up my grandmother's medicine cabinet, and I find these pink pills in her medicine cabinet. I'm so excited that I get to share this experience with my own children that I was deprived of. So I call my 4 little kids in and I have them brush their I send them off to the bathroom, brush their teeth, and, you know, I give them each 1 of these little pink pills, and I'm like, okay, smile for me. And I'm like, oh, they couldn't brush their teeth that very that good because I couldn't see any plaque on their teeth.
Speaker 2:So I gave them each another 1, and they chewed on it and then I and it still wasn't right. So I look at the back of the the pink pills that I found in our medicine cabinet, only to discover that they were pink correct all laxatives. And, so, you can believe certain actions will produce certain results, but you can be wrong. And our reality might be labeled incorrectly or have faded in time. And the truth is we might find ourselves with very different results than what we were expecting.
Speaker 2:Sometimes even really crappy results. And, you know, if you develop the courage to face the truth and work with it, you will discover that disappointment can be transformed. You know, despite appearances, I do not naturally always see the good in people and or situations. I mean, my heart hides snarky criticism, fragile insecurities, unjustifiable judgments. Sometimes I have to work and harder than you would think at being cheerful and pleasant and encouraging.
Speaker 2:And I fail repeatedly. You know, words on social media or conversations that didn't go how I wanted them to go will jolt me awake. My eyes fling open. I jump out of bed. Well, no, actually, I I don't jump out of bed.
Speaker 2:I just toss and turn and go over imaginary conversations in my mind about things that I wish I'd said or how I should've responded or what they said. And I have these full on conversations. You know, there's conversations or texts that hadn't given me a second thought until they woke me up in the middle of the night. You know, and all of a sudden But
Speaker 1:disappointment is actually a noun. It's the feeling
Speaker 2:of sadness or displeasure. Because we've been defeated, that are caused by defeat of one's hopes or expectations. And, you know, the disappointments in my life have been many. And the selfish, immature part of me wants to lay them out before you all because your kindness and pity would make them go away. But that's not really true, is it?
Speaker 2:Our circumstances, yours and mine, they're different. But we all have them. Don't we? We all have disappointments. Yours are as real and crushing to you and painful as mine are to me.
Speaker 2:You know, they linger. They're needling our hearts. They're waking
Speaker 1:us up in the night despite our best intentions to leave them behind.
Speaker 2:So, how do we deal with disappointments that come disappointments that come in our life? The first thing we need to realize is that God has a plan. We need to believe that he has a plan. And he is a miracle worker. He parts water.
Speaker 2:He moves boulders. He heals the dead. I mean, not just the sick, but the dead. I mean, he saves, he destroys, he blesses, he curses, he can do anything, he can do everything. You know, and it's beyond what we could ever think or imagine.
Speaker 2:He has been doing it for Christians throughout history. There's a scripture in Isaiah, Isaiah 5589 that says, my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the lord. My ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts. When I say you need to believe, I mean you need to believe that God has this thing in his hand.
Speaker 2:And he's looking out for you. He's working out a bigger plan than you could ever imagine. And you're going to be better off for it. Remember Jeremiah 2911? He has a plan for your future.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, sometimes sometimes it takes painful disappointments to teach us a skill or strengthen our faith to put us in the right place at the right time. We don't know his thoughts. We don't know his ways. We just have to believe his promises. You know, after you've recognized that God has a plan, you need to take some time to grieve because things have not gone the way you wanted them to.
Speaker 2:Right? Your hopes and your expectations have been defeated. You need to spend some time being sad, mourning the way that things could have been. You might find yourself crying. Maybe you exercise.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine why, but maybe you do. Maybe you read. Maybe you break something or bake or eat chocolate. You know, whatever it takes that releases the sadness, the disappointment, the defeat, the suffering. And then eventually, you have to stop grieving and move on.
Speaker 2:Because weeping may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning. Psalm 35. Disappointment does not mean it's not meant to define you. My friends, it's not meant to hold you hostage or weigh you down in the mire of depression. You know that God has a plan.
Speaker 2:You take time to grieve and then you pray. You knew that was gonna happen. Right? Right? Spend some time talking to your heavenly father.
Speaker 2:Tell him about the heartache that you have. Tell him about the plans you had and ask him why. Why he took them away or to show you a reason. I promise that he has good in this for you. And he's okay if you ask him what that good is.
Speaker 2:You know, in Romans 828, it says, and we know that God causes everything to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes. Talk to him like you talk to your best friend. You know, it don't have to be a really pretty prayer. It just has to be honest and come from your heart. Because there are big things that happen when we pray.
Speaker 2:And you know, sometimes those are blessings beyond anything we could expect. Sometimes they happen right away. Sometimes it's much later. You know? But if we keep waiting on God's love and his grace, I know that your prayers will be answered.
Speaker 2:Give your burdens to the Lord, and he will take care of you. He will not permit the godly to slip and fall. Psalm 5522. You, my friend are the godly. You're chasing after God, trying to do the right thing, seeking a better understanding of him.
Speaker 2:Aren't you? I think that's what we're all trying to do. He's talking about you. Philippians 4 6 and 7 says, don't worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything.
Speaker 2:Tell God what you need and thank him for all he's done. Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything you can you've taken some time to grieve and you've prayed. Then, you're gonna look for the good. You know what? That is such a miserable time to try to be thankful.
Speaker 2:I don't know about you. But all I wanna do is actually wallow in the self pity of my broken dreams or unfulfilled dreams. But you know what? This is the, this time may be the hardest, but it's the most important to find the good, to grab onto it with both hands and to celebrate it. You need to find a new perspective and praise the 1 who created the good in the world.
Speaker 2:Disappointment is a door that actually will keep us from celebrating. There is a scripture that simple scripture that often we start, service with at Psalm 1 18/20 4. This is the day that the lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. I've come to understand that I wouldn't have found god if all my plans had worked out.
Speaker 2:If I hadn't had nights of sleeping fitfully, reminding myself of truth has been a very soothing and cathartic process. But man, it's taken so much longer to connect the dots than I ever thought it would. Like so much longer. You know, I had an opportunity a few months back to go to an event that kind of helped me process kind of what, you know, some of the reason why I was struggling with disappointment or I'd seen disappointment in different places. And through the that time, some of the sources of of the lies that I had believed about some of the sources of, of the lies that I had believed about myself and my identity.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, some of those things that you look for are like things that are in family slogans or in nicknames or family secrets and lies. And most, if not all of us, have some core identity belief that isn't actually based on truth. Right? And we live out of those beliefs and we live out of those lies. And those lies get reinforced just as as long as we believe them, those lies start getting reinforced.
Speaker 2:And those are what we start to believe our life is from those things. We believe they're truth. Or at the very least, we believe that they're reality of some sort. And lies set us up to be disappointed over and over again. And living in their wake of those lies, it validates disappointment.
Speaker 2:So, lies seem to contribute to who we say that we are, who we believe we are, even when those beliefs actually contradict who God says that we are. Right? And we let what we think our limitations of actually rob us of our freedom and the freedom that God wants us to have. Our future is affected by that. It limits who we are and what God can help us become for our future.
Speaker 2:And our normal then will keep us from the freedom that he has for us. Because our outward world will conform to our inner revelation. You know? And our feelings will impact our actions. So, what we feel.
Speaker 2:So, we need to have a renewing of our minds. We have to have a transformation of our thoughts. We have to give God permission to be our truth. And we we need to realize that the 1 who designed us wants to define us. Right.
Speaker 2:Rather than letting the world be the definition of who you and I are. Our next level with God goes beyond your current experience. And so, as a result, of attending this event, I recognized that there was a lie that had sort of formed in the foundation of my identity. A perceived truth. You know, that's a nice way of saying kind of a lie.
Speaker 2:It was a perceived truth. And that lie that I believed about myself was that I am a disappointment. And it was like, where did that, where did that lie come from? So about 20 years ago, the same grandmother, my grandmother who'd passed away, the paternal grandmother who had the laxatives in her medicine cabinet, I was going through more of her belongings. I was very close to my grandmother, so I wasn't just, you know, I had a reason to be going through her.
Speaker 2:I discovered birth announcements for the siblings that I wasn't raised with. So, I was raised they were raised by my mother and I was actually raised by my father. And so, my parents during that marriage had, 3 children. And the first was a son, their first child was a son who died at 3 months old of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. And I was the next 1 born, 9 months and 1 day later, like, after he had been born.
Speaker 2:And I was always told that I was conceived on the day of his funeral. So, and, then there was a little sister who was born 18 months after me. And, when I read my little sister's birth announcement that was tucked away in my grandmother's stuff, there was a handwritten note on the back of the card. And that said, that handwritten part on her birth announcement said, we were not near as disappointed this time to have a little girl as we were the last time. The last time they had a little girl, it was me.
Speaker 2:Right? So, I never really felt like I wasn't wanted. I felt loved. So, you can feel loved and still be a disappointment. But I did think I did feel like they'd wished I'd been a boy.
Speaker 2:But during that, event that I went to, the holy spirit reminded me of how often the concept of disappointment had dominated my life. I mean, there are manifestations that disappointment takes that had affected how I think, how I feel and how I have behaved. And so, 1 of the things, I'm not a competitive person. And because I think, well, I can't win anyways. Right?
Speaker 2:So I don't compete. So then I can't disappoint anybody with a loss or some surprise random win. I couldn't disappoint anybody doing that. And my kids, it was, you know, their words of of apology often included I'm sorry. I'm a disappointment to you.
Speaker 2:And I thought, somehow I had communicated throughout, raising them that I was always disappointed with them. And the other thing that it would show itself in, was in gift giving. So, I don't know how many of you guys have done the 5 love languages. Well, my primary love language is gifts. And so, I, I always it's a catalyst of emotions whenever there's a gift giving opportunity.
Speaker 2:Both in the gifts I give and the ones that I receive. Or the lack of the gifts I receive. That really has something to do with it. Also, I'm as confident in the gifts that, that I give that they're not gonna be appreciated as the ones that I you know, my response to the ones that I receive. And there are many micro moments that validated my spirit that a life of being a disappointment was part of my core identity.
Speaker 2:So, disappointments that are undisclosed, develop into resentment and cynicism. And too often, we tend to give more credit to the cynics in our life than those that are faith filled. And the bible says we're supposed to guard ourselves against cynicism and against resentment, which is really, really just judgement and unbelief that's packaged as realism. Right? Realistic expectation.
Speaker 2:Reality. Just because it's a fact, doesn't make something the truth. Our supernatural God defies facts all the time.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? He things that we say are truth Yep. They are not necessarily truth unless the person who is truth says their truth. The enemy tries to get us to believe in a world view of reality. But you know, Christ came to overcome the world in all of its distorted views.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, the truth is, I am not a disappointment to God. I am wonderfully and marvelously made. I was chosen to be a girl by God before I was ever in my mother's womb. I was born at just the right time that my parents needed me to be born.
Speaker 2:And whether I win or lose, I'm not defined by those moments. Because I am a woman of faith. That means god is pleased with me. Yeah. Because faith pleases god.
Speaker 2:And the 1 thing I need to know is that God is not impossible to please.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Too often, we feel like we can't please people. And 1 of the things that I realized when I thought about disappointment, when I too often, seeing people and feeling like they were a disappointment is that I I recognize that the opposite of being a disappointment was that I was pleased. And so I really kind of dug into pleased with me? To remind myself and reinforce that there are moments and there are people that are pleased with me and my God is pleased with me. Those laws that I allowed to define my entity identity were not truth.
Speaker 2:They were not reality. They're not what I believe. They undermine my future and they tried to silence my value. They put lenses over my spirit that filtered up truth and caused me to focus on how often I would get disappointed, not just with myself, but I would get easily disappointed with others. The lies kept me tethered to worst case scenarios.
Speaker 2:I would try to figure out, okay, what will I be able to deal with this if the worst case scenario happens? Constantly waiting for my belief in people, individuals, to be mocked by their failures or their compromised integrity. Believing that if I anticipated things, that would be diagnosed as unrealistic expectations. Right? Worried that how I would demonstrate love would be seen as controlling and be misunderstood.
Speaker 2:And then, it wouldn't even be seen as me loving them. And then I would be disappointed by their response. I don't know what lies you might have let steal your identity, but I knew, I know that our God wants to rewrite the stories of our life. Every disappointment, every broken promise, every distorted identity belief. He wants us to see ourselves how he sees us.
Speaker 2:He wants us to to see how he looks at us. Right? I don't know. Can any of you relate to that? Do you ever feel like there's moments where disappointment has been managed in our lives, rather than actually being addressed for how often it's actually a lie or something that we need to recognize that God has purpose, that we we can see it reconstructed with a God focus, rather than just being a disappointment.
Speaker 2:Because 1 thing we know about God is he's a redeemer. He's a restorer of everything that's been lost.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:so, I know that I can trust God to dream again because I would limit the possibilities. Because I knew that if I dreamed too big, that there would be a clash of what reality was. But I'm not living in the realm of reality. I'm living in the realm of supernatural because I serve a God that is bigger than what this moment is. And so I wanna encourage you as people today that our God has great things for us.
Speaker 2:And don't let a moment that distracted you and weighed you down and felt like there had been a disappointment be what defines you. Or ends your ability to believe in other people and believe in the promises God has. Because he is a good God who loves you and has good things for you. So I just wanna pray. God, I thank you so much for your faithfulness.
Speaker 2:I thank you that you are not disappointed with any person, god. That you have promised that if we will seek you, god, that you will come and you will you will put us in the right place at the right time, that you will redeem every lost and broken dream. That God, you will restore the things that the enemies tried to take from us, God. And every outcome that has not gone the way we had imagined, we know that if we will ask you, you will show us. So, God, I pray that we would be courageous believers today as we defend that you are God in every situation.
Speaker 2:And God, we would trust in you, God, to lead us into all truth because you are truth. So God, I pray that you would deposit that revelation of who you are in the midst of our spirits that we might walk boldly forward into the future with great anticipation of a God who can do great and mighty things. We pray in Jesus' name.
Speaker 1:Thanks Thanks for tuning in today. Each week, we gather in cities across our region and online to explore the truth of freedom available to all in the message of Jesus Christ. To find a gathering near you or to find out more, head to c3church.ca.