Let me tell you a little secret about the Christian life: God spends a lifetime taking the simple things you know and making them experienced realities.
When I look back on my Christian life, I realize how quickly I assumed I had learned simple lessons—like how to trust in God, what faith and confidence in him looked like—only to realize I have to keep learning them over and over, and I’m not done yet.
It’s like I’m a ship sitting there in the harbor thinking, “I’m awesome!” Then God takes me through a hurricane, and all these leaking holes get revealed, so he works with me to patch them up. “Now, I’m really awesome,” I think. Then God brings me through another storm, and I realize there are more leaks, so we do it again and again.
It’s one thing to sing, “I trust in God, my Savior, the one who will never fail …” It’s another to be at a point where you have no hope in yourself, where you feel like you’re under a sentence of death. Your only hope is a God who raises the dead, and you have no choice but to put your confidence in him.
The three most deadly words in the English language are “I’ve got this.” Where God takes us to a place where we don’t “got this,” he’s teaching us to depend on him.
Can I tell you a few places he’s done that with me?
1. Unanswered Questions
I often ask, “God, why would you do this that way?” Sometimes these questions are theological—questions about suffering, hell, the obstacles of evangelization, and why God often allows bad people to succeed unpunished. And sometimes, when I’ve gotten to the end of my understanding and read all that I know to read, I still don’t know what to say. In that valley, I’ve learned the reality of my favorite Psalm, Psalm 131:
"O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore."
This Psalm tells me that God wants me in a place of trust, sure of his heart, even when I don’t understand his thoughts.
I know that when I finally see him face to face, and I look backwards on my life, I’ll say with all the saints, “Just and true are your ways, O God, O King of the Nations! Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable were your judgments and how inscrutable were your ways!” (Revelation 15:3; Romans 11:33). And until then, I can rest like a contented, trusting child in his mother’s arms, unsure of how it all works but confident that if I’m with her, it’s all going to be okay.
But I had to learn that posture of trust through unanswered questions.
2. Unfair Accusations
I’m not without my critics [citation needed]. Sometimes it just feels unfair, especially when you try to do something sacrificial for the ministry, only to have it turned around and used against you. The Apostle Paul felt that way—though, to be clear, I’m a few shipwrecks, a couple of imprisonments, and several beatings short of his status. But read over 2 Corinthians, and you’ll quickly realize that the same guy who authored most of our New Testament was belittled as a weak, ineffective leader in his own day.
I think Paul had tougher skin than me. I try, I really do, to let the unwarranted accusations brush off my back; I even have a file of screenshots called “Mean Tweets” that I wanted to save for posterity, with the goal of laughing about it. And some of the attacks truly are laughable. But it’s never fun to have people drag your name through the mud. And there’s a world of difference between a mean tweet from a stranger and the accusations of a close friend.
Maybe you’ve been there, too. A friend really lets you down, questions your motives, lets you down, betrays or backstabs you. In those moments, I’ve felt like the Lord has said to me:
Learn from them.
There are some things you need to learn from your critics because sometimes they are right. And maybe, just maybe, I’m doing all of this because your reputation matters a bit too much to you.
Deepen your ministry.
If it’s unfair, now you know a little bit more of what Jesus felt, and now you can better minister to people who’ve been lied about or maligned. In that weakness, God taught me more to depend on him and treasure him.
3. Unanswered Prayer
Sometimes I’ve been pressed to trust God because of unanswered prayer: “God, I feel like what I’m asking you for is reasonable—why won’t you give it?” Every parent I know, for instance, deals with this in some way. We want such good and holy things for our children; the trouble is, they’ve got hearts and minds of their own. And God won’t let us control his mind or theirs. Frustrating, I know.
Here’s how that looks in your prayer life: “God, we did everything like we were supposed to. I know we weren’t perfect, God, but we raised them right. And then they walked away from the faith. Why?” What makes it worse is you see parents who weren’t nearly as intentional about their faith as you—some of them were outright terrible or negligent—and their kids turn out great. So you’re left asking God, “Why, Lord? Why my kids?”
I have some thoughts about all of this. But this isn’t the place for it. The point is, I don’t know all the answers. If you’re in that place of unanswered prayer, I encourage you to join me in continuing to bring your requests to God. Most of Jesus’ parables about prayer boiled down to one point: Pray and never give up. You don’t have the power to fix your kids. But you do have the chance to keep pressing into God’s goodness. Never give up.
4. Unmet Expectations
Like me, you’ve got good things you’ve been hoping for, and praying for, and yet you feel like you're further away today than you were years ago. Worse than that, it seems like people who are doing all the wrong things keep getting what they want. And you're sitting there confused, hurt, bitter, and maybe even questioning, “Why—if it’s the wicked around me who are prospering—should I keep pursuing what's right?”
It’s some comfort to realize that this exact circumstance was shared by a whole host of Bible writers. The Psalms are full of this kind of frustration. Job asked God this same question. As did Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Malachi, and Ezekiel.
Unmet expectations can drive us away from God. But that wasn’t the response for these Bible writers. They voiced their frustrations to God, bringing their circumstances into God’s presence and asking for his presence, his justice. As I’ve heard it said, the only thing that’s worse than disappointment with God is disappointment without God.
When you look backwards over your life, you’ll likely see that the most valuable things in life that you learned, the things you want to pass on to your kids or the next generation, are the things you learned in unanswered questions, unfair accusations, unanswered prayer, and unmet expectations.
So which is it for you? Which of these unwanted gifts has God given you? Where is he asking you to trust him, in a new way, today?
Pastor J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Chick-fil-A, serves as a Council member for The Gospel Coalition, and recently served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastor J.D. and his wife Veronica are raising four awesome kids.
"Editor's Note: Pastor JD Greear's "Ask the Pastor" column regularly appears at Christianity.com, providing biblical, relatable, and reliable answers to your everyday questions about faith and life. Email him your questions at [email protected]."
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