You Can't Disappoint God

When I was a legalistic preacher, I'd often speak of God's attitude toward us as if He were disappointed because we kept blowing it when it comes to the matter of sinning. I set out what I presented as His expectations about our behavior and went on to show how we let Him down when we failed to live up to those divine expectations.

My whole approach to the matter was wrongheaded. To suggest that God is ever disappointed in us is one of the guilt and shame techniques that the enemy uses against us to keep us wallowing in self-condemnation. And sadly, this view is often taught in churches everywhere. But the truth of the Scripture is this – it is impossible for you to disappoint God. You can’t disappoint Him. God is disappointed in you when you do wrong? It's simply not possible.

Why? The answer rests in the meaning of disappointment. Think about it for a moment. Disappointment is the result of an unfulfilled expectation. To be disappointed means that a person expects that an outcome will be one thing, when in fact it turns out in a different way. So the idea, then, that God would be disappointed means that God does not know everything. He thought we'd do one thing and then we went and did another!

No, that won't ever happen. God doesn't expect anything. He knows everything in advance with 100% certainty. What could possibly disappoint God? Nothing you've ever done or will do catches Him by surprise.

To suggest that sins disappoint God is to fail to appreciate His full work at the cross. I remind you that when Jesus absorbed your sins into himself on the cross, He saw clearly, every sin you would ever commit, He saw all your sins of omission and commission, He knew exactly what you would do. He saw them and dealt with them - all of them. God knows everything you’re going to do in your lifetime and He has taken care of it at the cross. We might be disappointed in ourselves, but God can never be disappointed in us.

God expects nothing of you because He realizes that you’re incapable of doing anything on your own. The scripture says no flesh will glory in his sight. Flesh is that self sufficient determination we reach down into, to try to do the things that glorify God. It’s living out of our own dogged determination. God doesn’t expect anything to come of that and we set ourselves up for failure when we do. It's pure, undiluted legalism to think that you can overcome temptation to sin by your own resolve. In fact, Jesus said 'apart from me you can do nothing.'

Just because I say God is not disappointed in you when you do wrong, doesn’t mean that he’s okay with it when we sin. Your Father loves you and hates to see you hurt yourself, which is what sin always does. The reality is, though, that it’s not God that punishes us for our sins, it’s our sins that punish us for our sins. Our own sins punish us. There are still consequences, afterall.

It’s the consequence of our own choices, but we certainly don’t disappoint God. He loves you and He adores you and expects nothing of you. That's why He wants you to depend on Him as your strength in the face of temptation. If you think this reality will cause people to want to go out and sin, you're missing the core meaning of grace. God's grace teaches us who we are and then motivates and enables us to live like righteous children of God. But, when we do otherwise, it never catches Him off guard. He's already there to pick us up when we fall.