On Being Let Down
“You’re never gonna let, never gonna let me down…”
I get a little nervous whenever we sing that song. Part of me sings it with conviction and joy. The other part of me protests. But-but-but!! I feel a certain level of responsibility that the things that we sing and say and think are right. As A.W. Tozer once wrote, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." What we believe about God is the structure and foundation of our lives. If you've got a faulty structure, faulty foundation, lean in the wrong place and you'll come tumbling down.
“Maybe one of the hardest things we can learn to do is to be honest with God about our disappointments, especially when we are disappointed in him.”
I believe it. God will never let us down. But there's a BIG implicit caveat there, because how we receive those words depends entirely on where we're placing our hopes. I think that if we're honest...we feel we're being let down all the time. We pray for a job, and then we don’t get it. We ask God to mend our family wounds, and the resolution comes less quickly and less abundantly than we hoped. I prayed every day for my father to be healed of cancer—prayed to the God who I knew had the power and good will to do so—and he passed away six years ago this December. Human life is full of disappointment, both frivolous and profound. Jesus promised it would be so. “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart…" (John 16:33)
Christians aren't typically great at disappointment. We pretend it doesn't affect us—or if it does, not for long. "When God closes a door, he opens a window!" We think it's a mark of our faith to bounce back quickly, to not let our trust or affection for God be weakened when we're hurt or dismayed. Maybe one of the hardest things we can learn to do is to be honest with God about our disappointments, especially when we are disappointed in him. "God, why didn't you...?" It's hard to say. We don't want to accuse God of wrong, because we know he does no wrong. It's easier to avoid the mismatch between our experience and our beliefs, hitch on a smile, remind ourselves it's unto a greater purpose. We go to church and sing that he'll never let us down.
But after one hurt too many, those words can be so jarring. Held up against the pain of life, they can make you bitter and hard or blindly optimistic and disconnected from reality. But neither serve the truth. It's just not honest. And it doesn't help us see what's beyond the pain of momentary disappointment. I think we've all seen the pitfall there, where a misunderstanding of a God who we think is supposed to make everything better can lead to a loss of faith when things get hard. There is only one way to sing those words that connect with the gospel that makes them true—with an eye toward eternity.
In an eternal sense, God will not let us down. Romans 5 speaks to us of a lasting hope—”hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” The fact that Jesus died for us when we were his enemies is our strongest assurance. He is the only one who is wise enough, kind enough, good enough, strong enough, loving enough to fully, truly do what is best for us. He's the one who, in the end, will satisfy every desire, wipe every tear, heal every sorrow, realize every hope for those who trust in him. It doesn't mean that there won't be times on the way when in our broken world we feel very let down indeed. By God himself. It's important to understand that. But it does mean, as Tim Keller puts it, that God does what we would want him to do if we had all the information he has.
It’s not a simple thing, the tension between what we see in the now and what we know will be true for eternity. The path we walk with our God is sometimes so, so hard. But I write in hopes that when we sing that song together, and others like it, we sing and rejoice with a right understanding of our good God.