How to Handle Disappointment

Thanks for joining us today. Such a pleasure to have you with us. I'm Phil Pringle. This is my podcast where I'll be sharing the Word of God, which will strengthen you, inspire you, equip you, and empower you for life. Let's go. I'm really excited to share this because I know that this message will bring help and hope to people who are struggling. And it's not a lightweight background that I bring these messages for.

It's certainly not for entertainment or for a little motivation or inspiration or something. We've got a crisis in Australia where the major killer of men between 25 and 44 is not not the road. It's not road smashes. It's suicide. And it has eclipsed it in recent times. And this last year was the highest on record for people taking their lives because of depression, because of suicide, anxiety. Often it's because of relationship breakdown, especially amongst young men.

And I feel burdened to bring a word like this to try and help people navigate those those really emotionally low moments and mentally low moments so that they are able to emerge.

Victorious and as an overcomer. But honestly, I've got no idea how people are trying to cope with this because for every person who does take their life, there's obviously another hundred or so who are not feeling so good about the experience. And logic is of no power in the face of those kind of emotions to try and say to a person, what's wrong with you?

I mean, you live in a the beautiful country and you live on the Northern beaches, you live in sunshine, you've got a good job, you've got food, a roof over your head, you're in the top 2% of people in the world. That logic and rationale is powerless against overwhelming emotions that drown people in feelings of despair and depression. In Proverbs 13 verse 12, which is where we're starting, it says, hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when desire comes, it's a tree of life.

And so throughout Scripture, Jesus tells us how you can pursue a desire and bring it to pass. He gives us the keys in life of using faith, using patience, using wisdom in terms of bringing your dreams into fruition. But when hope is deferred, the heart becomes sick when we're disappointed in life. And when you're disappointed with people, it can make you distrust everybody.

Instead of just trying to deal with that situation, we bring out a big brush and say, I'm never going to trust anybody again. And we make little covenants with our own soul. And so if it is a young person, we build our hopes up about something our father told us and then it didn't happen. We can make another little covenant with ourselves. I'm never going to get my hopes up again because you just get wounded and the emotional pain is more than I want to bear.

So I'm just not going to get excited about life. And instead of guarding ourself, which we're trying to do from those disappointments, we actually imprison our heart from feeling and from loving and from getting joyful and excited about life.

It is inevitable all of us are going to face disappointing moments in life, disappointments with people, disappointments with circumstances, even disappointment with God. And I want to take us to a story about that shortly. But the fact is, sometimes we are believing for things and and hoping for things, we have an expectation that actually is misplaced. And that is going to cause you disappointment. For example, we live in a really fast world.

You can get to Brisbane and back in a morning, like on a plane just many years ago in Bible times, you had to walk there. And it took a long time. The fact is, everything about God takes longer than we want. And we are constantly trying to make things go quicker and faster in every sphere of life. We've got microwave ovens. But there are some things you cannot tamper with to make it faster. A tree still takes forever to grow out of the ground.

You can't get those tomatoes popping off the vine any quicker than they will grow. A baby still takes nine months to form in a womb. It'll be be a misplaced expectation to think that that tree's going to jump out of the ground, the baby's going to form in a few days. And sometimes we are asking God to do things in a time frame. That is to our quick thinking. And when it doesn't happen, our faith disappears and we get jaded with God and cynical about promises.

But it was just that he's going to take a little longer. God, he's notoriously slow. He takes forever to do all kinds of things.

And you just have to get used to that fact. He's not moving at the pace we want him to in our world. And part of the reason for the stress and the anxiety and the depression that's in people is because we're living at a pace sometimes we're just not designed for. And we're trying to accommodate for this great clutter of activity and this great clutter of weight in our world.

When if we could simplify and reduce our expectation, we might find ourselves feeling a whole lot better about things that we're getting disappointed about. I wanna take you to a story in Luke. Luke 24, verse 13. It says, now behold, two of them, These were disciples, were traveling that same day, the day that Jesus had risen from the dead, to a village called Emmaus, which was seven miles from Jerusalem. They're on a seven-mile journey out of Jerusalem.

And they talked together of all these things which had happened. So it was while they conversed and reasoned that Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were restrained, so they did not know him. They didn't recognize that Jesus was walking right next to them. He said to them, verse 17, what kind of conversation is this that you have with one another as you walk and are sad? That's a great question. What kind of conversation are you having in your head

that's making you depressed? Depressed. What are you fixating on and obsessing about that negative replay that you just keep rewind, replay, replay. It goes over and over and over. And all it does is make you feel more miserable and more miserable all the time. It's misery begetting misery. But there are times when you are having conversations with other people that are equally as miserable. A conversation is two people, at least. One's listening, the other's talking.

If I'm hearing something that is going to drag me down, I'll say, I don't need to hear that. If I'm hearing something from another person that's trying to pull a person down and the tone is critical, backbiting, the Bible says, as the north wind drives away rain, so an angry countenance drives away a backbiting tongue. So when somebody starts to backbite to me, I just look angry and they go, what are you doing? I say, I don't want to hear that. I like that person. I love those people.

Just last week, I happened to say to somebody, you know, I've been at Hillsong and they said, oh yeah, you know, and I said, hey, they're good people. I'm going to reverse that conversation because I know exactly where they're going to go within a few seconds. I don't want to be part of that conversation. I mean, because I'm not here to pull down. I'm here to build up. It's too easy to be a critic. Everybody can be a critic.

Any fool can criticize and most fools do. And the fact is the media and the press and the whole world is full of this whine, just whines. It's got big nasal twang. You turn on the radio, whine, whine, whine. Look at the news, whine, whine, whine. Nothing good to say about anybody, it seems. But I plan to be the light of the world. I plan to be salt in the earth. I plan to be brightening, not darkening. I'm not walking around with a heavy cloud on my head.

What kind of conversation are you having, Jesus is saying, that as you walk and talk, you're getting more miserable? Figure it out. What you're talking about is dragging you down. So he's walking with, what kind of conversation is this that you're all so miserable? This is the same day that Jesus has risen from the dead. This is the very same day that Jesus has risen. This is Sunday. They're still stuck in Saturday. They're still stuck in Friday.

But I've got to tell you that days pass by and you've got to get out of Friday, get out of Saturday's conversation and get into resurrection conversation because this is Sunday. This is a good day. This is a blessed day. The son of God has beaten death and the devil. He has come out of the grave, for goodness sake. And you have got a conversation going on that's making you miserable. He's preaching to you.

Hey, everyone. I believe in the local church. Ever since we started our church way back in 1980, we've been planting churches all around the world in major cities, villages, towns. And we have seen ourselves plant churches now in over 60 nations in the earth. Last year, we planned to plant 20 churches, and we ended up planting 45. This year, we're going to plant another 42 churches.

I'd like to invite you to become a partner with us in this grand plan that God has called us to, planting His magnificent church all around the world. It's not an inexpensive exercise to plant churches. It costs a lot to support pastors when they're just starting out and their families and their structures, their circumstances, renting houses, needing a car. And in some of these places, they're very poor and we want to help them rise up and plant great churches in their nations.

You can help us by jumping over to our website, C3 Church Global, and there you will find Find a giving section and you can give towards helping us plant churches all around the world. I'm praying for you that as you give, the blessing of God will rest upon your life in abundance. In Jesus' name, God bless you. It said their eyes were restrained. They couldn't see that Jesus was right next to them. Depression will make you blind to God.

Your conversation locates you. Even when people say the right thing with the wrong spirit, they're revealing that poisoned attitude. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. When we've been disappointed, our attitude goes south. Proverbs 4.23 says, Guard your heart with all diligence because out of it are all the issues of life. People are going to like you or hate you. And I'm not talking about Facebook. I'm talking about actual interpersonal face-to-face relationships.

They're going to accept or reject based on what's coming out of your mouth. Paul says in Ephesians, let no corrupt communication come out. The word means literally sick. Let no sick word come out of your mouth. Your words are contagious. They are infectious. They will bring something of a spiritual life with them. And if our heart is sick, our conversation will be sick.

And as we start to heal up on here and we get renewed on the inside, we'll find we have words coming out of our mouth that march like soldiers to do battle, that walk like doctors to bring healing, words that build up like great carpenters coming out of your mouth that are gonna build people up and not tear them down. And out of our mouth, we define ourselves. You can tell what a person is like within three seconds of what's coming out of their conversation.

What kind of conversation are you having? So then verse 18, Cleopas answered and said to him, are you the only one, the only stranger in Jerusalem? And you don't know what's happened in these last days? He's a stranger to a negative mind. Jesus is right there. But as far as these guys who were disciples of his, they went to church every Sunday. They were faithful believers, but in their depression, they could not recognize Christ. He was a stranger to them.

And then he says, what things? He plays along. So they said, the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet, mighty indeed, and how the chief priest that our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we were hoping, everybody say that, but we were hoping, misplaced expectation guaranteed disappointment. Their only idea of a deliverer was a Moses who held up his rod and split the sea and all the Israelites went out of Egypt, out of slavery.

That was a physical deliverance like Gideon, like Jehoshaphat, like King David. In the Israelis' minds, a deliverer was somebody who sets you free from any oppressing nation. At that time, the Romans ruled over Palestine and they were there by military power and might. They expected Jesus, the Messiah, to rise up and somehow wave his rod and all the Roman military would fall flat and they would be once again delivered and be a set free nation. but he didn't they killed him.

Is on a cross. Our deliverer, our Moses, our King David, he's not even 40. He hasn't lifted a finger to deliver us. But we were hoping. We had an expectation on God that he never promised. We had an expectation on God that he would do things one way, but he did them a different way. They didn't realize that Jesus was not coming to deliver them from the power of the Roman army.

He was coming to deliver them from the power of darkness, from the power of sin, from the power of death, from the power of the devil, from the power of sickness, from the power of sin, from the power of a past life, from the power of unforgiveness, from the power of a diseased soul, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. So it doesn't matter what government you're ever under, you will live as free

men, as free women. and you will live as freedom because it's not a governmental freedom that Jesus has brought to the earth. It's not a military overpowering kingdom that he's brought. He has brought a power that has demolished the chains of sin and the chains of darkness that were gonna bury people in hell. Oh, my heart breaks when I think of people who mock the idea of hell. They say, oh, I'll have a party down there. There's no party there.

Everybody's so obsessed with their own pain Nobody even knows anybody else is there, completely isolated, alone in darkness. God has said, I'm gonna break the power of that over people's lives by dying on the cross and open the doors of heaven for anybody who wants to go in there. And I want everybody in there. So I'm gonna give you the chance. I'm gonna give you the opportunity. You don't understand why I'm crucified. You were hoping for this, But this is what I really came to bring you.

And now three days later, he's risen from the dead and they can't even see that.

I wrote the book Hope because I keep coming across people who seem to be despairing about their future, lacking a sense of purpose, not energized by a vision. And hope is something that God infuses into us the minute we meet Him. We have a positive anticipation about the days to come, rather than a sense of foreboding. In fact, He is known as the God of hope.

So once you're connected with God, you definitely connect with hope, discovering the reason that you are here, discovering your purpose in life. And so I wrote this book with that in mind, to help people find their pathway in this life. You can can pick it up at philpringle.com or at amazon.com. You can download the ebook or order a physical copy.

So in verse 22, yes, certain women of our company, they confused us. They didn't find his body. Said they'd seen a vision of him alive. They went to the tomb and they said it was just as the woman said. And then Jesus says in verse 25, oh, foolish ones. I love this. Now down, what would you say? I'd go, oh, you poor guys, you know, you misunderstood God. He just goes straight for you foolish ones.

He chides them. He's a tough guy. You know, he's not living in our world today where he's just gently tiptoeing on eggshells around everybody's hurt feelings. He says, you foolish ones and slow of heart to believe in all of the prophets have spoken. Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things? It was essential that he suffer. There was no glory if there was no gory, if there was no pain, there was never going to be a sacrifice.

It is prophesied. And then in verse 27, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.

That's a three-hour Bible study with Jesus. My Lord, he went from Genesis with Moses, starting at Genesis 1, he went all the way to the end of Malachi. If there was one Bible study, one Bible course in the world, in all of history that I wish I was at, it was that walking and talking to Emmaus and Jesus opening the Bible and saying, here, you see this red heifer? That's speaking about the Messiah suffering. Here, you see in Isaiah, this is the suffering Messiah.

That's Jesus, this man that you saw get crucified. And he goes through every passage talking about Jesus, talking about himself, revealing the word of God. And then in verse 28, they drew near to the village where they were going. He indicated that he would have gone further, but they constrained him saying, abide with us. There's a reason they said that. They constrained him. them, look, if I said to you, you can constrain Jesus for anything you like this morning,

what would you constrain him for? Pay off your mortgage? Get a new car? Get a better job? Fix up your family? They constrain him just to be there. He said, we just want you to come inside. There's a feeling about you. We want you to stick around. We want you to stay. And then it says in verse 30, it came to pass as he sat at the table with him that he took bread, bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they knew him. Then he vanished.

That's so God. That is so Jesus. As long as you can't recognize me, I'll hang around. But once you see me, I'm gone. I want you to walk in my faith, not side people. I want you. Yeah, I tell you, go ahead. Here's my passage. Here's my point. Verse 32. They said to to one another, did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us on the road and while he opened the scriptures to us? My God. They started with sick, miserable hearts. Their disappointment had demolished their faith.

They were on a journey towards being jaded, cynical, grumpy old disciples. And so many people are on that journey, walking away from the house of God, walking away from Jerusalem. Emmaus means hot baths. It means spa, physical comfort. They're walking away from the house of God towards the spa. Oh, I just want to nurse my poor wounded soul. But Jesus turns up. They don't recognize him because they're so depressed. Depression and negativity will always blockade your view of an opportunity.

You won't even see it when it's staring right at you.

Finally, they come into it. He comes into their house and he breaks bread. They'd seen him do that before and it triggered in their mind. That was at the Last Supper. Oh, my God. We remember when you did that. And then boom, their eyes are suddenly open and they see him. For some of us, we've been walking a long time and we have not recognized that Jesus is right there inside our lives.

There's coming a moment, it may be right now, here today, when you will say, my Lord, Jesus has been knocking on my door. I've heard that feeling. I felt that feeling. I've heard that voice say, come on. Open up. I want to come in, but I've been resisting. He says, oh, foolish ones and slow of heart to believe. Don't you realize I'm here for you? I'm here to love you, to bless you. I'm not a threat to your life.

And then they said, did not our hearts burn within us? They went from hearts that were sick to hearts on fire. In one three-hour Bible study, their hearts were healed while they walked with Jesus and looked into the Scripture. That Bible you've got in your hands has more healing power in it than every medical profession in the world. And God bless the doctors. But I'm telling you, there's healing in there. When you open the Scripture, fire will start to burn in your heart.

Excitement and passion for life, healing for a wounded soul, healing for a poisoned attitude, healing for a broken spirit.

There is healing in the Bible, my friend. And especially as you come into it with Christ on the inside of your life, you're going to find that healing begins to happen.

Immediately, those guys turned around and went back to Jerusalem. They said, we found him. Jesus Jesus did die, it was different to what we expected. It wasn't like we anticipated and we weren't disappointed. But I'm telling you, it was God doing something behind our back that we didn't even realize. And God is doing a whole lot more behind you than he is in front of you. There are things going on in your life right now that God has got his fingers

on and his hand on. And it may look disappointing, some of the things that are happening. But you need to understand, Dan, don't have the conversation that takes you down. Have a conversation in the Scripture. Jesus changed their conversation and changed their hearts. What kind of conversation is this you're having? Don't have that kind. Have this kind where we talk about Jesus, where we talk about Scripture, where we talk about the Word of God. The greatest thing you'll ever

do is find Jesus and then find Him in the Word. Find Him in the Bible.

Hey, thanks for jumping on this podcast today. It's been a pleasure sharing with you. Check out more content on Instagram or on my YouTube channel. Just search Phil Pringle. Or else you can go to my website, philpringle.com, and check out my latest books, artwork, and my blog.

Look forward to talking again soon. See you then.