For nineteen years Adekunle left his house in Surulere at half past six every weekday morning. He was the kind of banker other bankers trusted. He refused the envelopes that were quietly offered, he stayed late at month end, and he gave generously to the building fund at church. Years earlier, at a crusade in the national stadium, a visiting minister had pointed into the crowd and declared that a man in a blue shirt would one day sit in the managing director’s chair. Adekunle was wearing a blue shirt. He wrote the date in the front of his Bible.
Then the bank merged with a larger one. There was a long meeting, a short letter and a severance package that would cover about eighteen months of school fees if the family was careful. He was fifty-one.
He did not tell his wife for eleven days. Every morning he knotted his tie, picked up his briefcase and drove away at the usual time. He would buy a sachet of water and a newspaper, then go and sit in the empty auditorium of his church, where the cleaners were sweeping between the plastic chairs. He sat in the same seat each day, three rows from the back, with his Bible open on his knees at the page where he had written that date.
I found him there on a Thursday. I had come in to collect something from the office, and there he was in his suit at ten in the morning. When I sat down beside him he did not pretend for long. “Pastor,” he said, “I have been asking God what I did wrong. And I cannot find anything. I did everything I was supposed to do.” Then, more quietly: “I do not know what I believe any more.”
He was not a weak believer. He was an honest one. Something he had built his life upon had given way, and he did not yet know whether God had gone down with it.
That is the question this teaching is for. When life does not go as you expected, what do you hold on to?
Assumptions we mistook for promises
Disappointment is painful, but it is also revealing. When an expectation collapses, it shows us what we had been leaning on. Very often we discover that some of our firmest convictions about God were never actually promises from God. They were assumptions, absorbed from sermons, from culture, from our own hopes, and repeated so often that they began to feel like Scripture.
Here are a few that many Nigerian believers carry. If I am faithful at work, I will be promoted. If I pay my tithe, my business will never struggle. If I marry a believer, my marriage will be easy. If I pray enough, my children will not wander. If a man of God declared it over me, it must happen. Each of these contains something true. God does honour faithfulness. Generosity does matter. A shared faith is a great gift in marriage. Prayer for our children is powerful. But none of these statements, in the form we often hold them, is a guarantee that God has signed.
It is worth saying clearly that not every word spoken over you in a meeting is the word of the Lord. Scripture warns about prophets who “speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:16). That does not mean every minister who encourages you is a deceiver. Many are sincere people who spoke beyond what they knew. But it does mean you are free to set down a declaration that has not come to pass without concluding that God Himself has failed. His faithfulness is measured by what He has said, and He has told us plainly where to find it: in the Scriptures, supremely in Christ.
This distinction matters because a broken assumption feels exactly like a broken promise. The pain is real either way. But the conclusion you draw is completely different. If God broke His promise, then nothing He says can be trusted. If an assumption broke, then something in your understanding needs to be corrected, and God remains exactly who He has always been.
PunchlineAdekunle had not been betrayed by God. He had been carrying a word that God had not given him, and when it fell, it nearly took his whole faith with it.
The psalm of the man who nearly slipped
Psalm 73 was written by Asaph, one of the worship leaders David appointed in the house of the Lord. He was a professional singer of God’s goodness. And he opens the psalm by confessing that he almost lost his footing: “But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped” (Psalm 73:2).
What unsettled him was the gap between what he expected and what he saw. He had assumed that the righteous would do well and the wicked would come to grief. Instead he watched arrogant, violent men grow fat and comfortable. “Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches” (Psalm 73:12). Meanwhile his own careful obedience seemed to be producing nothing but trouble. “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning” (Psalm 73:13-14).
Read that slowly. A worship leader in Israel wrote down the thought that his holiness had been pointless, and the Holy Spirit preserved it in the Bible. God is not embarrassed by the honest record of a believer’s confusion.
Asaph did not stay there. “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end” (Psalm 73:16-17). The turning point was not a change in his circumstances. Nothing in the psalm suggests that the wicked stopped prospering or that his own troubles lifted that week. The turning point was a change of place. He brought his pain into the presence of God, and there he began to see differently. Then comes the passage that has carried many believers through seasons they did not understand:
Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my reins. So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee. Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. For, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee. But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have put my trust in the Lord GOD , that I may declare all thy works.
Notice how honestly he describes his earlier state. “So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee.” He does not pretend his bitterness was spiritual insight. But look at the next word. Nevertheless. Even while he was behaving like an animal before God, God was still holding his hand. “Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand.” Asaph discovers that his grip on God had been weak, but God’s grip on him had never loosened.
Then he moves to what he knows. God will guide him with counsel. God will receive him to glory afterward. God is the one thing in heaven or on earth that he truly needs. And then the line that should be printed on the hearts of every disappointed believer: “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”
A portion in Israel was an inheritance, a share of land that belonged to a family and provided its living. The priests and Levites were given no land in Israel, because the Lord Himself was their portion. Asaph is saying that if everything else is taken, he still has his inheritance, because his inheritance is God. The body may fail. The heart may fail. The bank may merge. God remains.
NuggetWhen your assumptions about God collapse, God Himself has not moved. Bring the wreckage into His presence and let Him show you what was never in danger.
Bring the disappointment into prayer
Many believers handle disappointment by hiding it. They feel that admitting it would be a failure of faith, so they keep testifying with their mouths while their hearts go quiet. They still attend services. They still say “God is good” when the worship leader prompts them. But they have stopped talking to God about the thing that actually hurts.
Scripture shows us a better way. Another psalm by Asaph records a man who could not sleep for distress, and who put his darkest questions directly to God:
Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? Selah. And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High. I will remember the works of the LORD : surely I will remember thy wonders of old.
These are frightening questions. Has God cast me off for ever? Has His mercy run out? Has He forgotten to be gracious? Asaph asks them out loud, in prayer, and the Bible calls this worship. Then he does something important. “And I said, This is my infirmity.” He recognises that his perception has been shaped by his pain. Then he chooses to remember: “I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High.”
This is the pattern of honest prayer in difficult seasons. You tell God the truth about how it looks and how it feels. You do not dress it up. And then, having spoken honestly, you deliberately turn your mind toward what He has revealed and what He has done. The psalm does not skip the first step to reach the second. Honest complaint and deliberate remembrance belong together.
“Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:8). Pouring out is not the same as sprinkling a few polite words. It means emptying the container. The disappointment, the confusion, the anger you are ashamed of, the questions you have not dared to ask in church, all of it may be brought to your Father. He already knows it. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13-14).
When we bring disappointment into prayer, it begins to lose its power to define God for us. While it stays hidden, it whispers its own interpretation: God failed you, God does not care, God has moved on. When it is spoken in His presence, it is placed back inside the relationship, where His voice can answer it.
Return to what God has revealed about Himself
When Asaph went into the sanctuary, he was returning to the place where God had made Himself known. For us, that place is the Word of God and, above all, the Son of God. If you want to know what God is like when life makes no sense, you must return to what He has actually said about Himself.
He said it to Moses on the mountain, after Israel’s great failure with the golden calf: “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). That self-description echoes through the rest of the Old Testament. It is quoted by psalmists, prophets and even the reluctant Jonah.
He said it through Malachi: “For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6). The people’s survival rested on God’s consistency, not on theirs. James echoes it: God is “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). Shadows move as the sun moves. James says there is no shifting shadow with God. His character does not rise and set with your circumstances.
And He said it supremely in Jesus. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). When you look at Jesus touching the leper, weeping at a graveside, feeding a hungry crowd, forgiving the woman who wept at His feet and dying for His enemies, you are looking at the unchanging character of God made visible. The Jesus of the Gospels is the God you are dealing with in your disappointment.
There is also great freedom in admitting what God has not told us. Moses said to Israel:
The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.
There are secret things. God has not explained every event, and He has not promised to. There are revealed things too, and those belong to us. Faith in a difficult season does not require you to solve the secret things. It invites you to stand firmly on the revealed things. You may not know why the merger happened, why the contract was cancelled, why the scan showed what it showed. But you do know that God is merciful and gracious. You know that He does not change. You know that He gave His Son for you. Those things have been revealed, and they belong to you and to your children for ever.
What cannot be taken from you
When Paul wanted to show the Roman believers what could not be lost, he reached for the worst list of circumstances he could imagine:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Look carefully at the items in verse 35. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. Every one of them is a circumstance that does not go as expected. Paul is not describing what happens to faithless people. He is describing the ordinary experience of believers in the first century, including his own. He had been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, hungry and cold (2 Corinthians 11:23-27).
Then he quotes Psalm 44, and the choice is significant. In that psalm the people of God protest that disaster has fallen on them even though they have been faithful: “All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee, neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant” (Psalm 44:17). They insist that they have not turned to other gods, and still they are “counted as sheep for the slaughter” (Psalm 44:22). Psalm 44 is a lament of people who did everything they knew to do and suffered anyway. Paul takes that lament and places it inside the most confident chapter in the New Testament. He does not deny that faithful people suffer unexpectedly. He tells them what their suffering cannot do.
It cannot separate them from the love of Christ. Notice where Paul locates that love: “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It is not located in your circumstances, which change constantly. It is located in a Person, who does not change. As long as Christ remains Christ, the love of God toward those who are in Him remains intact.
And notice the word persuaded. “For I am persuaded.” Paul had not reached this conviction by avoiding hardship. He reached it by going through hardship and finding that God’s love held. The persuasion was forged in prison cells and storms. That is why it carries weight.
So when life does not go as you expected, here is something you can still know. The circumstances may be precisely the ones on Paul’s list. They may be worse than anything you imagined when you first believed. But they are all included in the “all these things” in which believers are “more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
Adekunle’s redundancy letter was on Paul’s list. So was the merger, and so was the shame he felt about telling his wife. None of it had touched the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.
The prophet who trembled and still rejoiced
Habakkuk is a short book with a surprising shape. It begins with a complaint: “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (Habakkuk 1:2). The prophet could see injustice everywhere in Judah, and God seemed silent. When God did answer, the answer was worse than the question. He was raising up the Babylonians, a cruel and powerful nation, to bring judgement. Habakkuk had expected deliverance. He was told to expect invasion.
The book ends with one of the most remarkable declarations in Scripture:
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD , I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet , and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. To the chief singer on my stringed instruments.
To feel the weight of these verses, you need to know that Habakkuk is describing the collapse of an entire agricultural economy. Figs, grapes, olives, grain, sheep and cattle were the whole livelihood of the nation. He is listing every source of income and food that a family in Judah depended upon, and imagining each of them failing. It is as though a trader in Lagos said, “Although the market burns, and the shop is closed, and the bank account is empty, and the customers do not come.”
Then: yet. “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” The joy is not in the harvest, because there is no harvest. It is in the Lord Himself. Habakkuk has found a source of rejoicing that does not depend on the fig tree.
It is important to read the verse just before this declaration. “When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself” (Habakkuk 3:16). Habakkuk was not calm. He was shaking. His rejoicing was not the absence of fear. It was a decision made while trembling. Faith does not require you to feel nothing in a crisis.
And look at where his confidence lands. “The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.” A hind is a female deer, sure-footed on steep and rocky ground. God does not promise Habakkuk that the mountain will be flattened. He promises feet that can climb it. Asaph said his feet had almost slipped. Habakkuk says God will give him feet that do not slip, even on the high and dangerous places.
Living without every explanation
One of the hardest parts of an unexpected season is the absence of an explanation. We want to know why. We feel that if we understood the reason, we could bear the pain. Sometimes God does give understanding, often much later. Joseph could eventually say to his brothers that God had meant their evil for good (Genesis 50:20), but that understanding came after many years in a pit, a prison and a foreign land.
Often the explanation never comes in this life. Job received a magnificent revelation of God’s power and wisdom at the end of his ordeal, but God never told him about the conversation in heaven described in the first two chapters. Job’s response was humility: “therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not” (Job 42:3). He was satisfied with God without being supplied with reasons.
Jesus said to Peter at the Last Supper, as He knelt to wash his feet, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter” (John 13:7). There is a now and a hereafter. In the now, we often do not understand what the Lord is doing. The hereafter is promised. But we are asked to trust Him in the now, and that trust rests on knowing who is kneeling in front of us.
You may keep asking questions, as Asaph, Habakkuk and Job did. But you can learn to live faithfully with unanswered questions without concluding that God has no answers or no care. The absence of an explanation is not evidence of the absence of God.
Nor does it mean you should stop examining your situation sensibly. A season that goes wrong may call for practical wisdom. You may need financial advice, a change of direction, a hard conversation, a new skill, a medical appointment. If your disappointment has turned into a heaviness that will not lift, if you are not sleeping or eating, or if you have begun to feel that life is not worth living, please speak to your pastor, a trusted friend and a doctor. Receiving help is not a failure of faith. God often holds our right hand through the hands of others.
Holding fast in practice
“Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;)” (Hebrews 10:23). The reason given for holding fast is not our strength. It is His faithfulness. We hold fast because He is faithful, and when our grip weakens, as Asaph found, His does not.
How does this look in an ordinary week when life has not gone as you expected?
Begin by naming the disappointment to God. Do not wait until you feel more spiritual. Write it down if that helps. Say exactly what you hoped for and what happened instead.
Then separate the assumption from the promise. Ask yourself honestly: did God actually say this in His Word, or did I assume it? If it was an assumption, you may let it go without letting God go. If it was a genuine promise of Scripture, ask whether you have understood its scope and timing correctly.
Return deliberately to what is revealed. Read Psalm 73, Romans 8 and Habakkuk 3 slowly through the week. Write down what each passage tells you about God’s character. Let those truths stand beside your disappointment, not in place of it.
PunchlineTell someone. Asaph’s private confusion became a song for the whole congregation. Isolation magnifies disappointment. Find one mature believer you can be honest with.
And take the next faithful step. Habakkuk did not wait for the fig tree to blossom before he rejoiced, and you do not need to wait for every question to be answered before you obey. Do today’s work. Love the people in front of you. Pray the prayer you can pray. The high places are climbed one step at a time.
Adekunle told his wife that Thursday evening. He said later that it was the hardest conversation of his marriage, and that she was angrier about the eleven days of secrecy than about the job. Then she held his hands across the dining table and prayed for him, which he had not expected.
It took him nearly a year to find work. The job he eventually took was as bursar of a mission school in Ogun State, at less than half his old salary. It was not the managing director’s chair. He drives a smaller car now. The children’s school fees are still a monthly negotiation.
But something changed in that auditorium. A few weeks after I found him there, he showed me the front page of his Bible. He had drawn a single line through the date of the crusade. Underneath it he had written out Psalm 73:26 in his careful banker’s handwriting: “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”
“I lost something God never promised me,” he said. “And I found out that I still had what He did.”
Perhaps you are sitting in your own empty auditorium, three rows from the back, with an open Bible and a promise that did not come true. Bring the whole thing into the sanctuary. Tell your Father how it looks from where you sit. Then let Him show you His hand, which has been holding yours all along. The fig tree may not blossom this year. The Lord is still your portion.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which expectations have you carried that may have been assumptions rather than promises of God? How can you tell the difference?
- Asaph wrote, “Nevertheless I am continually with thee.” Where have you seen God’s grip on you holding when your own grip on Him was weak?
- What disappointment have you avoided bringing honestly to God in prayer? What would it look like to pour it out before Him this week?
- Romans 8:35 lists circumstances that cannot separate us from Christ’s love. Which item on the list feels closest to your situation, and what does Paul’s declaration say to it?
- What is one faithful step you can take this week before your questions are answered?
This Week
This week, write God an honest letter, the way Asaph wrote Psalm 73. Describe what you expected, what has happened instead, and what you have been afraid to say to Him. Do not tidy it up. When you have finished, copy Psalm 73:23-26 underneath it in your own handwriting, as Adekunle did. Each morning, read the letter and the psalm together, and then pray Habakkuk’s words aloud: “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” Before the week ends, share some part of the letter with one mature believer you trust.
A Prayer
Father, my life has not gone the way I expected, and I have been afraid to say so. I bring You the disappointment, the confusion and the questions I have hidden. Show me where I have leaned on assumptions that You never promised, and give me grace to let them go without letting You go. Thank You that You do not change, that Your love is in Christ Jesus, and that nothing in my circumstances can separate me from it. When my heart and my flesh fail, be the strength of my heart and my portion for ever. Make my feet sure on the high places, and help me take today’s faithful step. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.