The innovative movie Inside Out tells the story of 11-year-old Riley as she endures a cross-country move with her family. Using five computer-generated animated characters, Pixar personifies Riley’s emotions. Through them we get a perceptive glimpse into her inner world. The emotions are Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.
For the most part, Joy pleasantly runs the show in Riley’s head. She keeps it fun and light, occasionally permitting Anger, Fear, and Disgust to play a token role. But Joy constantly tries to keep Sadness out of the picture. But it’s that suppression of Sadness that nearly destroys Riley.
Adjusting to life in a new city proves to be more than Riley can handle. The more Joy insists on Riley’s happiness, the more Riley’s inner world grows tumultuous. She breaks down in tears at her new school, lashes out at her parents in frustration, and attempts to shove her emotions deep down the “memory hole.” Eventually she tries to run away.
At last Joy realizes that Riley needs Sadness. As Riley faces her losses, she begins to discover that acknowledging Sadness is a natural and healthy response to life’s disappointments.
Most of us find it east relate to Riley’s struggle. If we have ever desired anything at all, disappointment has come our way.
But why does disappointment hit us from so many different directions? Friendships falter. The bottom falls out of a career. Marriage fails to meet our expectations. A couple is unable to have a child. Investments go bad. Vacations get canceled. Children rebel. And on and on it goes.
Over time, we notice that people are disappointed in us too—and we begin to feel disappointed in ourselves as well. We can’t shake that secret habit or keep our anger from getting the best of us. We feel stupid or inferior when we make a mistake. Sooner or later, we direct our disappointment toward heaven.
In his book Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey observed, “for many people there is a large gap between what they expect from their Christian faith and what they actually experience.” He said, “They learn to expect dramatic evidence of God working in their lives. If they do not see such evidence, they feel disappointment, betrayal, and often guilt.”1
It’s a dangerous myth to think that our belief in God will spare us from letdowns. Even God has met with disappointment. If he isn’t exempt from it, why should we expect a free pass?
Yet deep down, we sense that something is wrong with disappointment. Could it be that we don’t understand what is really going on? Let’s take a hard look at what happens when we’re disappointed.
Recognizing the Lies.
Disappointment easily misleads us. A false message can attach itself to our circumstances and deceive us. The deepest damage is not caused so much by our painful situation but by the lies that sneak in—for we suffer our deepest wounds from those lies.
Lies About Life. A friend recently said to me, “What I thought would make me happy doesn’t. And it seems that I will never get the things I really want. Life is one big cruel joke.”
My friend’s remarks sum up many of the lies about life that sneak in through our disappointment and settle into our minds and hearts. Lies like …
“Relationships are one giant letdown.”
“Love isn’t really possible.”
“People are just out to use each other.”
“Joy and fulfillment are only for other people.”
“No matter what we do, nothing is going to get any better.”
“Only a fool expects anything out of life.”
“It’s not safe to need anyone.”
These negative thoughts about life and relationships can be convincing. But the lies usually don’t end there. They become even more personal.
Lies About Ourselves. Once we know that people are disappointed in us, or if we fall short of our own expectations, we may be tempted to believe the lie that something is wrong with us. We may be pulled into believing we are unattractive and unwanted. Or we may begin to wonder if we are too weak and inadequate—although few of us would admit entertaining these ideas.
When disappointment is connected to sin, the lies can seems even more persuasive. They root deep in our minds as we continue to feel disappointment over our sin. Many of us define ourselves by our sin in a way that makes us feel hopelessly trapped and condemned. A man who was hounded by lies while trapped in a sinful habit said tearfully, “God’s never going to be able to use someone as rotten as I am.” He didn’t begin to find freedom until he stopped believing those lies.
Lies About God. Eventually, untrue thoughts about God can begin to show up. Thoughts like: He can’t be trusted. God doesn’t care about me.
A woman going through a devastating divorce said, “If God really cared about me, He would keep my husband from leaving me!” Such damaging lies about ourselves, life, and God feel true. And when people try to help with advice like “Stop living by your feelings,” we begin to feel even more guilt—for not handling our guilt well! More than that, our struggle makes us overlook what is really going on. These lies are part of a well-designed and cleverly concealed attack.
Three Enemies. All of us face three enemies in this battle. The Bible refers to them as the world, the flesh, and the devil. Each have their own ways of misleading us in our disappointment. And all three are very real.
The World is our visible enemy. It’s an organized system that has pitfalls of artificial joy and many roads that lead to empty fulfillment. Whether we crave a job with more prestige, more money, new clothes, a new romance, having a perfect body, whatever … the call is the same: “Indulge yourself.” This enemy’s tactics can surface when we listen to the radio, watch television or movies, read, or surf the Internet. A common denominator in all these lies is that God is left out. Without God, the world will always leave us feeling even more empty and vulnerable to the lie that just a bit more indulgence will chase away our disappointment.
The Flesh is the enemy within, and is bent on managing life apart from God. It is the selfish nature inside each of us that demands relief or revenge right now. In moments of disappointment, the flesh tries to take over and get us to do the opposite of what our redeemed hearts want to do (galatians 5:17). The apostle Paul candidly described the war inside him when he wrote, “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it” (romans 7:20). When we give control to our flesh, our ability to see truth becomes impaired. As Proverbs says, “The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble” (proverbs 4:19).
The Devil is our invisible enemy. He isn’t mythological. He is a reality, and our main conflict is with him and his agents of evil. He is the god of this world. The apostle Peter described him like this: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 peter 5:8). Jesus said that the devil is plotting to “steal and kill and destroy” the life that our Lord wants for each of us (john 10:10).
As we experience disappointment, we don’t just come up with a flood of negative thoughts or impressions about life on our own. We get help—more help than many of us realize. Satan is the ultimate source of the lies that come to us in our disappointment. He and his demons use the cover of our disappointing experiences to place false ideas designed to deceive us where we are the weakest.
Our sinful nature was born out of the devil’s lies in the Garden of Eden (see genesis 3:1–5). Lies are his primary weapon. Jesus said that Satan “was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (john 8:44). Satan can even lie to us through our family and friends.
He is behind thoughts like: No one cares about me. People can’t ever be trusted. When we sin, he’s the main instigator of such self-condemning thoughts as: How could I do such a thing! or I’m beyond God’s forgiveness.
The apostle Paul drew a clear connection between the “excessive sorrow” that can overwhelm a Christian caught in a sin and the schemes of Satan (see 2 corinthians 2:5–11). Ironically, evil often mocks us with the truth of a bad choice only after we’ve fallen into sin: You’re such a fool. What were you thinking! You should know by now that it never works.
It’s alarming that the devil’s plays rarely appear on our radar screens. Many Christians don’t seem to recognize that the evil one is assaulting them. In the book The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis suggests that the first message the evil one tries to sell us about himself is, “I am not here.” A forgotten enemy is the worst kind of enemy.
We may believe that living in a technologically advanced and enlightened society puts us out of range of satanic attacks. Ironically, with the evil one’s deceptive help, many of us have forgotten that he is the deadly adversary the Bible tells us he is.
However, we must be careful not to put too much emphasis on Satan and his tricks. If we obsess over him, we’ll lose all sense of proportion and attribute every negative thought to him.
The Power of Lies
When lies go unchallenged they become reinforced. Even though a negative thought isn’t true, if we are tricked into believing it, the influence on us is destructive. Lies can shape our beliefs, and we react to experiences based on distorted thinking.
The lies that lead to distorted beliefs also influence how we relate to others and can strongly affect the person we become (or don’t become). We may start to think we can’t do anything right. Or spend our lives controlled by efforts to prove our worth. Perhaps we believe people are out to use us, and so we pull away from everyone, unable to let anyone get close to us. If we are convinced that God doesn’t care, we put up walls, only to miss the joy of knowing Him as our Father, friend, and lover of our souls. The lies we believe in our disappointment can cost us our freedom to be who we are in Christ and the joy of loving God and others.
But there is something else going on, and it is as much a part of the problem as the lies we’ve been told. We must see the role we play in losing our freedom.
How Do We Respond To Lies? Unaware that we’re being ambushed, one of our first mistakes is to accept these lies as true. Once we accept one of them, it starts to control us. And with a little collaboration from our enemy within, the flesh, we start to respond with plans to handle what we believe is true.
Hiding. Many of us try to hide what we believe is ugly or weak about ourselves. A common way to do this is to try to be invisible around others. We don’t speak unless spoken to. We don’t look people in the eye. We quietly go about our business and try not to draw attention to ourselves.
Hiding is what Adam and Eve did when God came to visit them after they had eaten the forbidden fruit (genesis 3:8). It’s the approach King Saul took the first time Samuel tried to present him to the people of Israel. He had “hidden himself among the supplies” because he believed he was an inferior man from an inferior tribe (1 samuel 9:21; 10:20–22).
Overcompensating. Some of us try to cover up our self-doubts by overcompensating. We may use big words in an effort to sound intelligent, concoct stories that make us appear to be loved or important, or wear clothes that make us look more successful. The whole point is to distract others from what we think are our flaws and deficiencies.
Limiting Our Desires. In his book The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines a year as a “period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.” Those of us who accept that definition have already learned to restrain our desires. We won’t want or enjoy anything deeply. We put strict limits on how much we open ourselves up to receive or give love. As one man said, “I know what I want to be, but it’s impossible. So why want it?”
The Old Testament records the story of a childless wife who held a similar attitude toward one of her heart’s deepest desires. When the prophet Elisha announced to her that she was going to give birth to a son within the year, she objected. She pleaded with Elisha, “No, my lord. . . . Don’t mislead your servant” (2 kings 4:16). In other words, “Don’t mess with my desires. I don’t want to open up my heart again only to have it crushed by disappointment.”
Later, the woman’s son died, prompting her to say to Elisha: “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes’?” (v. 28). She had accepted the lie that it was foolish to want a child.
False Comforters. Once we accept the evil spin that lies put on our disappointment, most of us turn to false comforters. These are the things our visible enemy, the world, offers to us. Some of them are also good things like food or sex or a hobby. But we can turn to them for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. We look to false comforters for consolation because they not only promise to temporarily soothe our disappointed hearts, they represent something that we wanted deeply but didn’t get. We cling tightly to these false comforters. Trying to take them away from us is like trying to take away a steak from a hungry dog.
Growing Bitter. When the Israelites were miraculously freed from the bondage of Egypt and led into the wilderness, they soon became complainers with negative attitudes. We are often not much different. We might say we are just expressing our frustrations. In reality, we are voicing our bitter resentment. Some of us become demanding, requiring from others the love and respect we think they’re withholding. Others grow harsh and vindictive. We make it our goal to get even with anyone who has let us down. Even worse, we start to take out our resentment on those who had nothing to do with our disappointment. “Somebody’s gonna pay” becomes our unspoken motto.
Finally, we may turn our bitterness on God. We can blame Him for our disappointing circumstances, and then we resent Him for doing nothing about them.
Giving Up. Disappointment can wear us down until we give up. We become so exhausted that we want to quit a career, a friendship, a marriage. As one disillusioned husband put it, “I used to be angry. Now I’m only tired.” Many of us quietly resign ourselves to the fact that this is the way it’s always going to be. And some of us sink into depression.
We Prove the Lies Wrong. Generally speaking, we either accept the lies as true or we set out to prove them false—especially the lies about ourselves. But even if we refuse to embrace the lies, we often don’t do it in a way that frees us to live for God and others. When we believe we must prove them false, the lies still wield power over us.
One woman learned early in life the lie that her opinion didn’t matter. Today she has an extremely difficult time changing her mind once she’s made a decision. Even when she becomes aware of new information that calls for her to adjust her decision, she refuses to budge because she is on a mission to prove to everyone that her opinion counts. Her resistance to any change shows that she is still under the control of a lie.
Sometimes a lie that we try to prove wrong is directly related to a disappointing relationship. A man tells the sad story of how he spent much of his adult life trying to prove his father wrong about him. When he was growing up, his father told him repeatedly that he was never going to amount to anything. This stung him deeply, so he set out to prove his father wrong. And he did. He worked hard and built a successful business. But his plan consumed him. His life became out of balance and out of control, and he lost his family in the process.
It’s possible to trust in Jesus as our sin-bearer and receive forgiveness of sins, yet live imprisoned by old lies of disappointment. Many of us have been deceived for so long that we can’t talk ourselves into believing the truth. We need divine help to reinterpret the lies we’ve been taught in the midst of disappointment.
An overlooked part of the good news of Jesus Christ is that He wants to bring healing and freedom to our wounded and deceived hearts (isaiah 61:1–3; luke 4:17–22). More than any of us can imagine, Jesus longs to speak truth into those hurt and deceived places inside of us. Let’s take a look at how we can invite Him into our wounded hearts to confront the lies and see the truth.
Healing and Freedom
We’ve all been wounded deeply by the lies that come to us in our disappointment. Complete healing won’t occur until we meet Christ face to face. Until then, healing begins when we realize how we’ve been deceived in our disappointment and allow God to show us what is true. Finding the truth heals us by freeing us from the prison of deception and releasing us to be the people God intended us to be.
God doesn’t save us from our sins to leave us at the mercy of Satan’s deception. The apostle John wrote, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 john 3:8). Remember, one of the devil’s primary works is to deceive us. That is how he causes the greatest harm.
The good news is that Jesus came to put a stop to that. He wants to meet with us in our hurting and deceived hearts and speak truth that brings healing and freedom. He says to all of us who have accepted Him as Savior, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock” (revelation 3:20). We first invited Him in when we trusted Him to save us from the penalty of our sins. Now the Lord wants further access into those places inside of us that are disappointed and misled. But He won’t come in unless we invite Him as we did the first time He met us in our hearts.
Inviting God into the disappointed and deceived regions of our hearts is a deeply personal process. Sometimes it occurs in private moments of prayer and reflection. At other times it happens in the presence of a caring friend or spiritual advisor. Let’s look at what is involved as we move toward healing and freedom.
Awakening. It all starts with seeing what’s really going on in our disappointing experiences. We must recognize what is happening and admit that we’ve played a supporting role in making things worse—even though we do not fully understand it. We can then recognize our need to surrender to God and invite Him into the places where we’ve been disappointed and deceived.
Surrender. As long as we pretend to be self-sufficient, we won’t know God’s healing. We’ll resort to our old ways of handling life. Peter wrote, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 peter 5:5). Life can hurt so much that we will try almost anything to end our pain. Surrender is about giving up the right to escape our pain through false comforts. When we surrender, we’re acknowledging that we’ve sinned against God by leaving Him out. We admit that our ways of managing disappointment don’t work. We need God. A deeper level of surrender will occur in us when we admit that He is God and we are not. While we may struggle with doubt and ask Him many tough questions, a sincere prayer will emerge from our hearts similar to the one a disappointed and confused father once expressed to Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (mark 9:24).
Recognizing Old Disappointments. Once we surrender to God, the old disappointments will start to make their way to the surface. God will bring the truth of previous letdowns and wounds into our awareness. Let’s consider some of the kinds of situations where we can expect to see past disappointments emerge.
A disappointing event in the present often represents a letdown in the past. Present experiences can trigger old disappointments and push them to the surface. Rather than allowing a recurring disappointment to reinforce an earlier lie, we can ask God to help us connect a present disappointment to the first time we experienced it.
One woman recognized that her husband’s failure to keep a promise triggered earlier feelings of disappointment from her father. As she noticed the connection between her past and present letdowns, she began to see that her greatest struggle was not with her husband. It was with her father, who rarely kept his word.
Moments of temptation can also cause earlier disappointments to show up. Not all temptations are connected to a past disappointment, but many are. When we are tempted to turn to our false comforters, we can do more than just resist. We can evaluate the temptation to see if it is a sign of a wounded and deceived place inside our heart where God wants to meet us.
A man who sought counseling learned to recognize a direct link between his urge to have anonymous sex and the pain of having an uncaring family. Rather than give in to the temptation and settle for another visit with a counterfeit comforter, he chose to see his temptation as an opportunity to be honest about a disappointed place inside him.
One woman began to look below the surface of her temptation to overeat. She was startled to see that she was using food to cover a lifelong disappointment in herself. Her husband had left her years earlier for another woman and she blamed herself entirely for the affair. She buried her feelings of self-contempt by abusing food. But the temptation also gave her a chance to be honest about her history of being left and how it was deceiving her.
Feelings of anger toward ourselves or others are often a strong indication of past hurts. A careful look at our anger may reveal that it is a cover-up for a deep disappointment. As we reflect on times when we’ve lost our temper or felt ourselves seething inside, we need to look closely at our anger and ask God to help us understand what it is telling us about our wounds.
Our Disappointed Places. Jesus may take us to an earlier disappointment the way He took Peter back to the night he denied Jesus three times (john 21:15–17). Christ reminded him of his lowest moments in order to reaffirm His confidence in Peter. We need to linger in our disappointed places, however they come up, so we can learn from them. We may have to set them aside temporarily so we can fulfill our daily responsibilities, but we must make it a point to come back to them.
It isn’t easy for any of us to spend time in the places where disappointment has paid us an unwelcome visit. We will be tempted to cover it over with anger or soothe it with a false comforter. Many of us would prefer to shove our disappointment back down and pretend it no longer exists. But we can’t invite God into parts of our lives where we won’t stay ourselves. Healing can occur only if we remain in them. We must spend time with the painful memories and emotions. Sometimes the memories are about a specific incident stamped with a date and time. Other times it is just a feeling that isn’t attached to any one particular event. Whatever is stirred up, we need to give it a name and feel our disappointment. We shouldn’t hurry through this. It’s helpful to describe the pain and permit ourselves to feel it.
One effective way to keep from rushing through our painful places is to write down what we are feeling. It forces us to pay attention to thoughts and emotions we rarely make time for. It can help us begin to recognize the lies we’ve been told and how we hold on to them. Journaling makes whatever is being stirred up inside of us real and encourages us to engage it with our heart and not simply our head.
We may also need to enlist the help of a caring friend or a Christian counselor to keep us on track. God doesn’t want us to bear our burdens alone (galatians 6:2). Others can help by listening, sharing honest feedback, praying, and telling us when we veer too far from the place we need to be.
Inviting God Into Our Unhealed Places. Waking up, surrendering control, learning to recognize old disappointments, and spending time in our disappointment is a good start, but we must go further. We also need to ask God to come into those unhealed places inside of us and surround us with His presence and truth. We need to ask Him to help us see more clearly the lies that we’ve learned. Any thought that makes us feel condemned or believe that we’ve lost our ultimate security and significance is another lie. It’s important to ask God to speak to us in our place of need. He desires to answer His children when they humbly cry out to Him for help: This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. . . .” Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; He rises to show you compassion. . . . How gracious He will be when you cry for help! As soon as He hears, He will answer you (isaiah 30:15,18–19).
God speaks to us more than we realize. He speaks to us primarily through His written Word. But He can also speak to us through people, music, stories, and many other sources. As we invite God into our wounded and deceived places, we must be open to any way He wants to use to show us what is true.
Listen To What God Is Saying. Listening to God is an intimate experience. Jesus said, “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says” (john 8:47). Later He said, “My sheep listen to my voice” (10:27). Listening to God doesn’t mean that we are going to hear an audible voice. We will hear Him speaking to us in our hearts. We will sense a “gentle whisper,” a “still, small voice” of the Spirit. Paul said, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (romans 8:16). God whispers to us from His Spirit to our spirit—heart to heart.
How can we know if it is God speaking to us? We must evaluate any idea or impression that comes to us by comparing it with the truth of the Bible. God is certainly not going to tell us anything contrary to what He’s already said in the Bible. We need to reject as another lie anything that draws us away from the wisdom of His written Word and the love of Christ.
Another way we can measure whether or not God is speaking to us is by what it leads us to. If what we hear leads us to feel discouraged or feeds a bitter attitude, it is not from God. If we sense something that justifies turning to a false comforter or away from depending on God, it is another lie from our enemy. But any thought that leads us to walk away from our false comforters or tear down the walls that keep us from God and others is of God. Hearing God speak is something that many of us aren’t accustomed to. But our ability to listen and distinguish Him from what is merely a random thought or another lie can grow over time. The more we become familiar with His written Word and remain open to however He chooses to speak, the better we are able to recognize Him when He is speaking to us.
While there is no way to capture all that God might say to us, we can know for certain that His message is true. As the psalmist expressed, “You desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place” (psalm 51:6). Many of us may know in our heads the sort of things God wants to say to us, but it’s like understanding them for the first time when He speaks to our heart. As we learn to pay attention to what He has to say, we can reject the lies that have held us captive and remind ourselves of the truth. Jesus said that as we believe what He is saying to us, we “will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free” (john 8:31–32).
As we open our heart to hear God speak, the truth begins to wash over us in a wave of undeniable freedom. The part we’ve played in hurting others and making things worse for ourselves becomes clearer to us. Although the truth of it all deeply saddens and disappoints us, we don’t feel condemned, because once we’ve confessed our sin the truth of God’s forgiveness and cleansing sinks in (1 john 1:9). We more deeply understand what Paul understood in the midst of his own struggle with sin—that we are not condemned (romans 8:1) or defined by our sin (romans 7:20). While we remain fully responsible for attitudes and choices we make from our sinful flesh, the core of our heart is redeemed and made new.
The War Rages On
The way of healing and freedom does not spare us from further disappointment. Nor does it protect us from being lied to again. We are still in a war. It’s the war of all the ages—the war between good and evil. Our lives are lived out on the stage of this ultimate battle between the forces of heaven and hell. And we, the ones who bear the glory and image of God, are what the forces are fighting over. Despite the fact that the death and resurrection of Jesus delivered a fatal blow to Satan, this war is not over—not by a long shot. And we can’t afford to ignore that we are in it.
Stay Alert. As he discussed the spiritual war we all find ourselves in, Paul said, “With this in mind, be alert” (ephesians 6:18). John Eldredge writes: “Behind the world and the flesh is an even more deadly enemy . . . one we rarely speak of . . . . Yet this is where we live now—on the front lines of a fierce spiritual war that is to blame for most of the casualties you see around you and most of the assault against you. It’s time we prepare ourselves for it.”2
The world will continue try to seduce us away from God with half-truths. The flesh will keep pulling us to forget God. And the ringleader, Satan, will keep trying to deceive us with more lies about ourselves, life, and God. Look for the lies. Remember that many of our negative, bitter, or self-defeating thoughts are not just coming from within us.
In the Bible, James reminded us of this great truth:
“God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (james 4:6–10)
If that seems counterintuitive, remember what Jesus said. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (matthew 5:3–4). As we recognize our need to mourn, we can exchange the deception of our disappointments for the grace and truth Jesus offers us.
