Walking When It Hurts
(Isaiah 40:27-31)
I. An Age-old Problem
A. Disappointment with God
B. Conclusions and responses
1. God is not
2. God is, I’m the problem
3. God is and beyond my understanding
II. An Ageless God
A. Eternal Creator
B. Infinite in power and knowledge
C. Provider of all that is needed
III. A Timely Answer
A. Weakness is a universal experience
B. But strength comes to those who hope in God
C. God’s strength comes to us in three forms
1. Ecstasy—“mount up with wings”
2. For a special task—“running”
3. Daily strength—“walking”
Introduction
This morning I’d like to address a subject that is geared especially for Christians. I am intentionally pointing out this fact because I will be dealing with a subject that many Christians try to deny. I will be talking about the “dark side” of our faith experience—the part we try to hide, cover up or otherwise refuse to admit—and yet when we are all alone, it is very real and haunting. I am convinced that our investigation this morning will take us to a place where each of us has been—a look at a universal phenomenon that every believer has faced, will face and/or may presently be facing.
The universal experience to which I am referring is the valleys we all go through from time to time in our Christian walk. I don’t believe that there is anyone here this morning that can honestly say that his/her life as a Christian has only been “ups.” All of us have walked through the valleys of life. All of us have been hurt. We have all felt the pain of disappointment. And whether or not we have actually vocalized what it is that we really feel inside concerning those experiences (that is, if we didn’t feel as though it were heretical to utter), I would imagine that we would all admit that we have been disappointed with God. In one way or another, we have felt as though God has let us down.
For each of us there are many differing circumstances that have helped to foster these feelings of disappointment with God. You may have prayed earnestly for the recovery of someone who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. You had faith that God would heal according to His Word. But after going through agonizing months of pleading, watching and waiting, your loved one just continued to weaken and eventually died. Perhaps you believed that placing your faith in Christ would save your marriage. You really tried to be the loving, submissive spouse the Bible talks about. But you received the divorce papers anyway. Or, you may have done everything within your ability and knowledge of the principles of God to raise your children in the right way. You took them to church. You had regular family devotional and prayer times. But now they are far from the faith that you instructed them in. We have all been through the valleys of life. We have all felt disappointment with God.
I’m going to be honest with you. The message I bring this morning is not an easy one for me to deliver because I have felt the sting of disappointment with God just as you have. It’s also not easy because I have no easy answer for this problem we all face. I’m not going to give you “Three Easy Steps to Avoid Disappointment with God”—I’ve yet to discover them. But what I give you today I hope will enable you to better understand what you are going through and help you to find the strength to continue to walk when it hurts and it doesn’t make sense to keep on walking.
This morning we will take a look at an OT passage that addresses the subject of disappointment with God with a twist. The twist is that we will be looking at it from God’s perspective. What God is saying to us this morning, through the mouth of this prophet, is that we will find the strength to walk when it hurts as we come to a proper understanding of who God is and we willingly exchange our finite strength for His infinite power. Please turn with me in your Bibles to Isaiah 40:27-31. (For those using the Bibles found in the pews, this passage is found on p. 540). We will investigate this passage in sections rather than read it in its entirety.
An Age-old Problem
Isaiah begins by addressing an age-old problem. Look at v. 27.
I can see myself so plainly in the grievance that the people of Israel were bringing against God: Why me, God? Why have you turned your back on me? Why don’t you listen to my cries? Don’t you care about what I’m going through? Is it too much to ask that you enter into my problems and solve them? Is this how you repay me for casting in my lot with you while those you hate you prosper? What’s the deal? Is anybody listening?
Disappointment with God
Disappointment with God is almost as old as time itself. Throughout the scriptures and in the biographies of great men and women of the faith, we find countless examples of believers in God who experienced disappointment with God. Even in the Gospels we discover that Jesus, the Son of God, was not immune to feelings of disappointment with God. When He was carrying the full weight of the world’s sin upon Himself as He hung on the cross of Calvary, darkness swept over the face of the earth blotting out the brightness of the afternoon sun. In despair, Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” As the people of Israel looked at their situation, they came to the same conclusion that you and I often reach when we look at our own lives: “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God.”
Conclusions and responses
Philip Yancey, in his book, Disappointment With God, suggests that there are three fundamental questions that plague us as Christians, yet we are generally hesitant to ask them aloud. The three questions are: Is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden? When we consider the disappointments we experience with God, we find that they involve one or more of these questions. The manner in which we choose to answer these questions then directly affects our perception of God and how we will live out our faith. There are three basic conclusions and responses that we can come to.
God is not
The first is that we can conclude that God is unfair, God is silent, and God is hidden. We can choose to view God as a cruel cosmic being who delights in our suffering. When we choose to believe this way, we usually wind up determining that God is not. Our disappointment with God can lead us to believe that what the Bible has to say about a loving, nurturing, responding God is all false—just wishful, “pie-in-the-sky” ramblings—because we didn’t see the evidence we needed to validate such claims. Unfortunately, this has been the decision of many.
God is, I’m the problem
The second resolve that we can come to is that God is not unfair, that He is not silent, and that He is not hidden, so the problem must be with us. This is perhaps the general consensus of most believers. There must be some sin or defect in our faith that is the reason behind the suffering we are experiencing. God is chiding us or trying to teach us some wonderful lesson. And generally, the supposed lesson that we are to learn is simply to “have more faith and then the problems will disappear.” The results of such a conclusion are just as devastating as for those who com-pletely turn from God. Let me explain.
What I have observed about those who cling to the sin/defective faith theology is that they always live in defeat. Some of us have become so disappointed with our Christian experience, in general, and with God, in particular, that we have resigned ourselves to living complacent, miserable lives. We have arrived at the belief that this is what our faith experience will always consist of, or that this is perhaps all there really is to Christianity after all—not much different than the life anyone else leads, just more rules and a faint hope of an afterlife that will make up for all the grief we have had to endure in this life.
God is and beyond my understanding
The third choice we can make is to believe that God is not unfair, that He is not silent, and that He is not hidden, but that we simply do not understand all there is to know about God or how He is working in the world, in general, or in our lives, in particular. Instead of blaming ourselves for the troubles we experience, we leave room for the fact that God operates on another plane—in an unseen realm—but that He is working just the same. This does not minimize the disappointment we experience, it simply gives us a different vantage point from which to view our circumstances.
I believe that much of our disappointment with God stems from the fact that we have misconceptions about who He is coupled with misinterpretations of many biblical promises. Each of us has an idea of who God is and how to apply His Word in our lives. How we view God and His Word has a profound influence on the satisfaction level we experience in our relationship with Him. Let me give you just one example.
One of the most disappointing times I have had with God was after I graduated from seminary. I finished my degree in May of 1987 and soon began sending out my resume to different districts in order to secure a position in the pastoral ministry. I had assumed that this would be a short process. After all, I had God’s call on my life. I had prepared myself for this vocation in the best way that I knew how. I had promises from the Bible like Psalm 37:4, Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. I had done all the right things, now God was “obligated” to uphold His end of the bargain.
Much to my dismay, instead of being overwhelmed with letters and calls to invite me to candidate, I received numerous rejections. It seemed that most churches were not interested in a pastor who was not married. I recall that one District Superintendent told me that the only position open to single men in his district was as a youth pastor, and that he didn’t have any current openings—end of conversation.
I was devastated. Seven of the best years of my life had been spent in preparation for vocational ministry, and this was the way that God decided to treat me? My disappointment with God stemmed from the fact that I believed that he somehow “owed” me. I assumed I had the right to demand recompense from God for all that I had done for Him. The problem was that I misunderstood who God is and how He works.
An Ageless God
This is the place to which Isaiah now points the complaining Israelites. He shifts from the fact that we face an age-old problem to the reality of an ageless God. Let’s read vv. 28-29.
Isaiah begins by reminding the plaintiffs of whom it is that they believe they have a case against. I love the way he introduces this section: Do you not know? Have you not heard? I imagine a hint of disbelief in the prophet’s tone as he asks these questions. He is appalled that they would respond this way toward God in light of who He is. The truths about God that Isaiah was about to rehearse were not foreign to them—these were the things they were taught to believe from their earliest days. It was to the people of Israel that the clearest revelation of God had been given. What Isaiah is saying in essence to them is, “Have you for-gotten who God is? Don’t remember any of the lessons you learned in Sunday school? Did you skip ‘Theology 101?’ Everyone knows these basic truths about God.” Listen to these essential facts about God that Isaiah mentions here.
Eternal Creator
He starts with the reality of the eternality of God and His relationship to all things as their Creator. God has always been and He will always be. Without God there is nothing. He is the one Reality upon which every other reality is dependent. Remove God from the picture, and the picture ceases to be. He is the One who created all things and in whom all things continue to exist and have their being.
Infinite in power and knowledge
Then Isaiah speaks of the power and knowledge of God. God is an inexhaustible resource. He has never experienced fatigue or weakness in even the most remote sense. Even when His might is displayed in some great act, such as the creation of the universe, it was of no consequence or strain to Him. His power is so great that we are told the He merely spoke the worlds into existence: “Let there be”…and it was so. And His knowledge, we cannot even begin to imagine comprehending. God is a limitless source of knowledge. There is nothing that takes place that takes God by surprise. There are no new discoveries. No new frontiers. Nothing escapes the mind of God or is unknown to Him.
Provider of all that is needed
Isaiah then moves on to remind the people of Israel of what God does for them. V. 29 states, He gives strength to the weary, and increases the power of the weak. The very thing that we are in need of most when we experience disappointment with God is what He already offers to us and supplies us with. He is the source of all strength. The very strength that you and I enjoy is an outflow of the power of God. Our vitality is a result of God’s blessing upon us. Since God does not grow tired or weary, He can be depended upon for strength and refreshing at any moment.
Isaiah asks, Do you not know? Have you not heard? The problem that the people of Israel had in relation to their knowledge of God is the same problem that we have today—the same problem that a seminary graduate will suffer if he is not careful. We run the risk of accumulating all the facts we can about God but never consider the implications of those facts and their application to our lives. In addition to this, we are also guilty of assuming that we have all the facts—that we understand all there is to know about God.
In the situation I described earlier, I thought I understood all the facts. It was a simple equation: a + b = c. The problem was I forgot that I was dealing with God—the eternal, Creator, all-powerful, all-knowing, life-giving God. I didn’t have all the facts and I never will. I became disappointed with God because He didn’t pass my test, yet I failed to keep in mind that He is not answerable to me or any test that I might administer. You would think that after all of the biblical and theological training I had received I would have learned a lesson from Job who said, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (42:3b).
A Timely Answer
In the final two verses of this passage, Isaiah gives us an ageless God’s timely answer to an age-old problem. Look at vv. 30-31.
Weakness is a universal experience
In v. 30, we are given a universal truth that we often times forget: Everybody experiences weakness. There is not one person on the face of the planet who has never been tired and who will not be tired again. We can only go without rest for so long, and then we must stop and regain our strength.
I love the picture that Isaiah paints for us here to illustrate this point. Those of you who have small children will identify with Isaiah’s words immediately, especially if you have been blessed with a tiny package of “perpetual motion” as Judy and I were. I never understood what my parents were talking about until I experienced it for myself.
I can recall literally becoming tired just from watching my then toddler son, C.J., as he would run from here to there in an attempt to use up all the energy he had stored up inside. “Let’s play basketball.” “Let’s get in the swimming pool.” “Help me build a robot.” “Carry me on your shoulders.” “Let’s go to the playground.” And when we would finally say, “Enough is enough” because we couldn’t keep up with him anymore, C.J. would still be busily looking ahead and say, “We can do that later.”
But even his energy would come to an end. He had to stop some time—it might be after lying in bed with him for an hour to coax him to sleep—but he would finally become too tired to continue. Isaiah reminds us that even the strongest, the least likely to falter, eventually give in to fatigue. It is a part of the natural order that governs the world we live in.
Weakness is a perfect euphemism for describing the source of disappointments we face, including our disappointment with God. We experience disappointment because there are inherent weaknesses in the world in which we live. There are also weaknesses in our understanding of the world in which we live. When things don’t turn out the way we perceived that they should, we become disappointed, and more often than not our real disappointment is aimed at God.
Isaiah explains that weakness is a universal experience. It is part of the world order in which we live. Another way to say it is that it is simply a part of life in this imperfect world. Since weakness is part of life and the real source of disappointments, then it is important that we clearly recognize the difference between God and life—by life I mean the sum of our experiences of living. God is not life. Life is not God. Don’t confuse God with life. Bad things happen in an imperfect world—that’s part of life. I blamed God for the circumstances I experienced in my search for a place to serve Him. It was later I realized that it wasn’t God’s fault—life was happening to me.
But strength comes to those who hope in God
In v. 31 we are given a word of hope to help us to make it through life’s disappointments: But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. We will become weary. We will meet with life’s disappointments. But that is not the final word. There is strength offered to those who will reach out and receive it.
The Hebrew verb translated as hope in the NIV, conveys the idea of expectancy. This is teamed with the verb translated as will renew, which is used to suggest an exchanging of strength. The idea here is that one comes to the Lord who is weak, full of disappointment, and makes an exchange of strength—human weakness for Divine omnipotence. The means through which this strength exchange occurs is by hoping in the Lord—an unwavering belief that God will intervene and restore the strength that has been lost.
It is important that we don’t jump to the mistaken conclusion that if we hope in the Lord, then he will “zap” us with his supernatural strength and our disappointments will vanish in an instant. I don’t want to mislead you because it doesn’t often happen that way. In the last half of this verse, Isaiah describes the three ways in which God renews our strength. I want to warn you not to be too quick in your reading of these phrases, for the primary way that God renews our strength is most ordinary.
God’s strength comes to us in three forms
Ecstasy—“mount up with wings”
The first phrase he uses to describe God’s renewal is: They will soar on wings like eagles. What a magnificent picture! Isaiah chooses the image of one of the most majestic of all birds, the eagle, to describe this special impartation of strength by God. In a moment of ecstasy, God showers His strength upon the weary one in such a manner that the individual is “lifted” above life’s disappointments, like an eagle soaring on the wind.
When I am crying out to God for strength to overcome my weakness that is the kind of experience I’m usually looking for. I want to be lifted above the pettiness and disappointments I face here on a daily basis. I want God to intervene in my life in a spectacular fashion. And I believe herein lies the potential for disappointment. Church, soaring is the exceptional way that God sends us His strength to overcome life’s disappointments. It is rare to experience this kind of strength. That’s why I said that an instant “zap” is not the way that it usually happens. Praise God we He chooses to meet us in this way, but let’s not set our hope on that kind of experience—let’s set our hope in the Lord.
For a special task—“running”
The second way in which God may choose to renew our strength is described in the phrase: They will run and not grow weary. I envision Isaiah describing the kind of strength that came upon the prophet Elijah when he was enabled to outrun King Ahab who had a head start riding on his chariot (1 Kings 18:44-46). This is another incredible visitation of God’s power upon an individual suffering from weakness.
If mounting up with eagle’s wings is the exception, then I would have to say that this would be my second choice of how I would like to see God’s strength poured out on me when I am hit by life’s disappointments. If I can’t fly like a bird, it wouldn’t be too bad to be “faster than a speeding bullet.” But again this should be seen as only an occasional manifestation of God’s renewing strength. It is not the normal way in which he works in our lives.
Daily strength—“walking”
How does God’s strength usually come to us? Look at the final phrase, for in it we see the climactic way in which we are renewed: They will walk and not be faint.
On the surface it doesn’t sound all that impressive. How can I refer to this as the “climactic way in which we are renewed?” Think about it for a moment. Where is it most difficult to live? In the place where you soar in the clouds? In the place where you can run on endlessly? Or in the place where you simply walk and have to keep on walking? God’s strength usually comes to us in the ordinary ways. We don’t live life soaring in the clouds or running in the fast lane—life is a matter of persistent walking.
It is in the dark stretches of life that the most difficult thing to do is to continue to walk and not quit. It is when we are faced with disappointing circumstances that we need the strength to just “keep on keepin’ on” and not give up. God meets us where we live and renews our strength so that we can continue to walk when we feel like we just can’t go on anymore. There won’t be any great heights achieved or spectacular strength displayed, just the strength that we need to make it through—the assurance of His presence with us and in us. It’s been a long, slow, painful process, but I believe that I am finally coming around to under-standing that this is the type of renewal I need and should long for.
Conclusion
I haven’t made any lofty promises of a “pie-in-the-sky” solution to the problem of disappointment with God—there is no easy answer. The problem is real. It is intense at times. And it will be with us throughout our lives. It is part of life. We can’t escape it, so the real issue before us is, how are we to respond?
There is but one appropriate response to disappointment with God and that is faith. I’m not talking about a faith of facts. I mean a steadfastness that will not allow the earthquakes of life to move it. Faith that will continue to hope against all hope that God can be trusted even if there is no visible evidence to support such a position. Faith that does not assume upon God but allows room for Him to be God. Faith that stands firm and shouts defiantly, “Yes, I will believe God and His Word no matter what!” Philip Yancey writes, “If we insist on visible proofs from God, we may well prepare the way for a permanent state of disappointment. True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will” (Disappointment With God, p. 241).
I believe that God’s primary goal for us, as His children, is to move us to the place where we trust in nothing but Him alone. He wants us to be completely dependent upon Himself. And He will use whatever means to bring us to that place. Perhaps this is the main reason that we experience disappointment with God—He wants us to be free from everything that would divert us from relying only on Him.
When you face disappointment with God remember that it is an age-old problem—just part of life. But also remember that we have an ageless God who is able to give us strength to overcome our weaknesses. The answer that He gives us is to demonstrate unwavering faith in the face of our disappointments and keep on believing that He will come and renew our strength so that we can walk and not become weary. Disappointments will come, but God gives us the strength to keep on walking even when it hurts.
