Bill Johnson - Overcome Disappointment, Embrace God's Promises, and Dream Again
All right, you guys, are you all ready? A couple of funny things I’ve read in the last month or two that I just put together. I figured after eating all we had for Christmas, this might be an encouragement to you. I’m just here to serve. What do we learn from cows, hippos, and elephants? It’s impossible to reduce weight by eating green grass, salads, and walking, right? Amen! People need to learn the difference between a want and a need. I want a nice body, but I need banana pudding. This one is one of my favorites ever right now. Doughnuts are healthier than Romaine lettuce! I have waited my whole life for this moment. 2018 was filled with quite a few vegetable recalls. I remind you there were no recalls on bacon! And then the last one I just read the other day said, «My stomach is flat, but the 'L' is silent.» You have to picture it—never mind. All right, 2 Corinthians chapter 1. My stomach is flat, but the 'L' is silent. Just write it down, you’ll get it later. Yeah, so one person said, «I didn’t go to the gym this morning.» That makes five years in a row! All right, 2 Corinthians 1.
Let’s get going. About a month or so ago, I took two Sunday mornings to talk about perils or challenges, difficulties that we face as believers, just as people. The first one was bitterness and resentment; the second, jealousy. Bitterness and resentment are a contaminating influence in people’s lives. The Scripture warns that bitterness in one person will defile many; it’s contagious. If you watch the news, be careful because much of what you hear is through the spirit of bitterness. You’ll find that the influence of bitterness enables you to become offended easily.
When you see that stirring up, make sure that you rise to protect your heart from the contamination of somebody else’s bitterness. Both bitterness and jealousy hide under the guise of discernment. They hide under the notion that you see into the heart or the motives of another person, and the Scripture is pretty clear that nobody can know their own heart, let alone the heart of another person. When we start moving into the area of trying to figure out the motives of another person, we’re actually entering a taboo area. Bitterness is an attachment to the past; jealousy is also an attachment to the past. Jealousy reads into situations. Jealousy actually works hand in hand with entitlement, which assumes that I am owed certain things in life.
When someone else gets blessed instead of me, when someone else has the favor, the open door, the opportunity, whatever it might be, it makes me feel very less and very insecure in who I am because of their breakthrough, their blessing. Jealousy is a contaminant as well, and so I took a couple of weeks to talk about those two perils, and today I want to talk about the third. So, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! It’s a happy day; we are happy people. I’ll try to remind you throughout the message that this is happy, this is happy. The third area I think is the most devastating and damaging of all three, and it’s called disappointment. Disappointment robs people of the courage for the future. Think about this: disappointment is anchored to yesterday. Bitterness is anchored to yesterday. You were born for tomorrow; you were designed to make a difference in this present moment that impacts the course of history. That’s who you are.
The Apostle Paul dealt with this subject uniquely two different times. One time, in Romans 8, he was describing that nothing can separate you from the love of God. He goes through that angels can’t do it, and nobody can, and then he mentions things present and things to come. Notice he didn’t mention the past—things present, things to come. Why? Yesterday can’t remove you from the love of God, but it can shut down your awareness of the love of God. Both bitterness and regret, disappointment are attached to yesterday. The enemy uses those things to redefine who we are, where we are, and what our purpose is. That’s right.
I played a lot of sports in school and had some interesting injuries through the years—broken bones, etc. A couple of surgeries. The one that affects me every once in a while—hasn’t for a number of years now—is this left knee of mine that will get dislocated. I actually, in Weaverville, a number of years ago, it dislocated, and Chris happened to be there. I said, «I need help!» He came over, and I told him what to do to get it back into place because it’s not something you can do on your own. I told him where to put his foot, where to pull, and where to straighten, and then we heard this big pop as the joint reset. It was glorious! I wish I could inspire all of you and get a whole bunch of pity in the process—it would just be beautiful! He helped me put it back into place so I could get up and function.
Crazy things about a joint that is dislocated—a shoulder or fingers—they’re yours; they’re alive, they’re not severed, but they don’t function. Life is still there! I can’t walk on it, I can’t straighten it, I can’t do anything with it until it gets put back into place. Disappointment dislocates a person from their purpose and their destiny. The enemy works hard to keep us focused on what didn’t work so that we’re of no use for what could work. Disappointment is the mother of depression; it is depression in diapers. Not dealing with it in the early stages deeply affects our emotional, mental, and spiritual health. There’s a great verse in Proverbs that I quote often; it’s in chapter 12 or 13—just read both and keep reading when you’re done with those two. It’s all so good, but in chapter 12 or 13 (I forget which one), it says, «Hope deferred makes the heart sick; desire realized is a tree of life.» Hope deferred makes the heart sick!
So what is it saying? Disappointment actually makes us vulnerable to spiritual disease. It’s like our immune system shuts down in disappointment. If we don’t know how to strengthen ourselves in those moments, we will be affected by circumstances that didn’t turn out the way we wanted, the way we prayed, or the way we believed for. Everybody in this room has had all kinds of things happen that were not planned, that were never supposed to happen—disappointments, losses, betrayals, criticisms—all the junk. We’ve all experienced them, and no one ever likes them. We’re not supposed to, but how we navigate these adverse situations, these adverse winds, can actually position our sails to advance against the oncoming wind. With the correct attitude of heart and biblical mandates—if we pray over and meditate on them—we actually make personal advancements in the most adverse moments.
In fact, I’d like to suggest that what you were born for is on the other end of adverse winds. What you were designed for requires the adjustment of the heart—trusting God, learning to trust Him when there are things you cannot control or explain. Trust Him in those moments because it will help you. Even though it feels like you’re going backward, it actually causes us to advance in the most difficult times, and that’s where strength is formed. Disappointment is a thief. It robs us of a sense of vision and purpose. In fact, disappointed people are those who hide behind their disappointment and secretly accuse God of not being faithful. Many would never want to think that consciously, but what it does is protect that, in a wrong way, protects that offense toward God because things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to.
I don’t think it’s possible to get where God has designed us to go—individually, as family units, or as a church family—without learning how to navigate through this issue of disappointment. God is the God of promise. There are over 7,700 promises in the Bible. I only know that because I have a friend who memorized them all in multiple translations just because he could. He was an amazing man; he’s in heaven now with the Lord, but he would memorize all these promises, and he would rattle off things to encourage people. He was the most fun person to be with because he was just one big fountain of encouragement, using God’s Word to say, «This is what God says about this; this is what God says about that.»
So think about this: When Adam and Eve sinned, the first thing that happened after the sin is God gave a promise. Genesis 3:15 shows the promise of a redeemer. He actually had the promise prepared before there was a problem because God is the one who has solutions before we make the mess. Everything was thought of ahead of time, and He set the stage so we could be restored to Him, forgiven of sin, and healed in our sense of identity and purpose.
So here we’ve got this verse out of Proverbs that says, «Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire realized is a tree of life.» So there’s the opposite side to the coin: hope deferred can make you sick, while desire fulfilled—realized dreams, answers to prayer—that whole area of life, desire realized, is a tree of life. The Tree of Life is mentioned in three books of the Bible: Genesis, Proverbs, and Revelation. At least from my perspective, Genesis talks about what was; Proverbs talks about what is; Revelation talks about what’s to come. So the point is that the Tree of Life, if you just turn back to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, they’ve got the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they can’t eat of, but they can eat from all the rest. Once they sin and eat the forbidden fruit, an angel goes to guard them from eating from the Tree of Life. The thought behind it is this: If I become a sinner and break covenant with God and I now eat from the Tree of Life, it won’t fix my problem, but it will instead make me an eternal sinner with no hope for redemption. In other words, it locks me into a predetermined eternal purpose.
So think with me now: If desire realized is a tree of life, what is it saying? It’s saying part of your eternal purpose is revealed in fulfilled dreams and desires. God gives us promises not to entice us. It is impossible for God to lie; He’s not a tease. He doesn’t set up false hope and then cause us to crash and burn; He’s a loving Father. This Father presents us with promises to inspire and instill in us the capacity to dream. Many believers, because of disappointment, have lost the capacity to dream. Many believers, because of the loss of promises, have lost the capacity to dream. I just heard recently, «Promises are the invitation of God into a relational journey where together we labor to see things happen in the earth that reveal His nature.» Thanks; I’ll pay you later!
We are in this relational journey where, in cooperation, we see His purposes manifest in the earth. Now, He can do anything and everything we can do better. He could position Himself on the planet in one place and cause every person on the entire planet to hear the Gospel as He preached if He wanted to, but He’s chosen not to do that because His desire is to work through sons and daughters. Why? Because the ambition of God the Father is to be revealed as the Father.
God can show up and reveal Himself as the Creator, as love, as the great judge, as the righteous one, the Holy One. But it takes a child to reveal the nature of a Father. Because the nature of the Father can’t reveal Himself by Himself, there has to be evidence somewhere. Just as the Creator creates to demonstrate His capacity for creativity, so a father’s effect on the well-being of a son or daughter is what gives proof or evidence that God is actually a perfect, wonderful, glorious heavenly Father.
If you take the Gospel of John and everything you can find about why Jesus came to earth, you’ll have a wonderful list. In 1 John, it says He came to destroy the works of the evil one. We know that He came to die in our place. We know that He came to redeem us. He came to die and to be raised from the dead. We know that He came to initiate the awareness, the realization of the kingdom of God at hand—within reach. There’s a great list of all the reasons why He came, but they are all subpoints of one primary point. The Gospel of John deals with it well: Jesus came to reveal the Father. Jesus came to reveal the Father. Remember, the Son, through His behavior, reveals who He’s related to—in other words, He only does what He sees His Father do; He only says what He hears His Father say. This is Jesus revealing the nature of the Father. In fact, the Scripture says that Jesus is the exact representation of the Father. There’s no deviation at all—exact representation of the Father.
So Jesus then tells His disciples in John 20, «As the Father sent me, I send you.» How did the Father send Him? To reveal the Father! How then are we sent? To reveal the Father! What’s the point? He is revealed for who He is through your answers to prayer, through the Tree of Life experience. The fact that you and I have this invitation to come before the almighty God negotiates—negotiates is the wrong word, so I’m not sure what one to use, but I’ll use it anyway—to negotiate over the affairs of man. He is interested in input. Promises don’t make me God, but they bring me into a relationship where through my time with Him, we negotiate over the affairs of men so that we can see His will and purposes accomplished on earth. He’s looking for that agreement; He’s looking for the co-laborer; He’s looking for the two to be made one.
In the Old Testament, you can’t receive an accusation against somebody unless there are two or three witnesses. Why? It’s the many becoming one voice. It’s marriage—the two shall become one flesh. It’s when you’re born again; you become one with Christ. This whole concept is that God takes the many and brings them together into one. The members of the body are called individual members that become one, as Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians, I think it’s 11.
So here’s this theme. Now let’s take a look at this. If you still have your Bibles open, if you’re courageous enough to keep it open, 2 Corinthians chapter 1, I’m going to start with verse 18. «But as God is faithful, our word to you was not yes and no. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, by me, Silvanus, and Timothy, was not yes and no but in Him was yes.» Now what was yes? The promises! All the promises of God. Verse 20: «In Him are yes and in Him amen to the glory of God through us.» Okay, it’s an awkward rendering; let me read it to you out of the NIV. Verse 20 says, «For no matter how many promises God has made—7,700—no matter how many promises God has made, they are yes in Christ.» Before you ever believed a promise, He determined yes!
I have some amazingly good news for you: Before you ever believed a promise, He said yes! All right, let me keep reading. Yes, it’s too late; you missed your chance!
No matter how many promises God has made, they are yes in Christ! Listen to this phrase: «And so through Him the amen is spoken by us to the glory of God.» So here it is, the Father decrees a promise, but He waits for what? The co-laborer! The one who says amen, the one who comes into alignment with His heart. People say, «Well, my prayers just aren’t getting answered.» Then change the way you pray! He doesn’t talk to me about what’s in my heart. Well, talk to Him about what’s in His! Discover what it means to seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be added. Go to His agenda first and see how He blesses yours.
The point is you and I are indebted, in a sense, to reveal the Father. How? Through answers to prayer. It’s the breakthroughs. It’s the fact that you suffer a loss, and it matters enough to you that you get alone with God and cry out for the breakthrough so that loss doesn’t happen again. You experience disappointment; you have that person who’s facing a horrible disease, and you prayed, and they didn’t get healed; they died. What do you do? Well, you don’t just brush it off; you get along with God. Why? Because He gave a promise to you and to me about demonstrating His life, His love, His power through His own children.
You get along with God until you get breakthrough. It’s not complicated, but it is challenging. It’s not complicated! How do you get breakthrough? Take risks! What do you do if you don’t get breakthrough? Get alone with God! Then what do you do? Take more risks! You go into His presence, cry out to God, and go where there are hurting people, and you serve. You just keep that going back and forth until you and I learn to do what God’s called us to do.
Well, you and I may stink at the assignment, but it doesn’t give us the right to change the assignment. You are living and breathing because He has hope you will believe for the impossible. You are living and breathing because when the impossibilities of life yield to a son or daughter, the Father is revealed, and He is glorified. He is exalted. People look at certain things you and I do and say, «Well, they’re not that good; that must be God.» There’s one Psalm that says, «Certainly, the nations will say God is among them.» In other words, they’re not that sharp, but God must be there because look at what’s happening through them.
That’s what you want! You want to display the nature, the kindness, the heart of God in such a way that people around you are impacted by who He is. Promises invite us to dream, and I’d like to suggest that those who have lost the capacity to dream have lost sight of the promises of God. Our capacity to dream is fed, fueled, and inspired by our connection to the promises that God has given us that we’ve not yet seen fulfilled. Yep, it’s absolutely the truth.
Well, I love you too; thanks! In Him we provide the amen. It’s amazing to me that God would want to co-labor because He can do everything better. He just is that impacted by the role that you play that He actually makes Himself vulnerable to the desires of people. Promises don’t make me God; I don’t dictate to Him what He’s to do, but He does invite me into a relationship where I have influence on what happens. Why would He do that? I don’t know! He wants the mark of who you are in Him to be seen for what it is. There’s something about the nature of God revealed when He uses people like you and me to accomplish His purposes, and that’s the invitation!
The invitation is for us to believe for the impossible. I’ll tell you what, it’s been a whole bunch of years now for me, and it means breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough.You’re overwhelmed by what God is doing, and then there’s loss, and loss, and loss. You get alone with God, and you just say, «God, you’ve got to do something in me because this isn’t okay. This isn’t okay! It’s not okay that this child has this disease. It’s not okay that this has happened to this family. It’s not okay!» It has to matter enough.
I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks. I think it might have been Christmas Day—either that or a day before—sometime this last week. I woke up at like midnight. I had gone to bed late, so I woke up at midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep. I said, «Let’s just get up!» So we got up at 2:30, had breakfast at 3, as every good family should at least once in your life—get up and have breakfast at 3. I had just smoked some bacon the day before on my Traeger, so the will of God was all over this meal! We had that, the waffles, the eggs, and made some good strong coffee—so strong you can walk on it without faith! It’s the will of God for my life right there.
So at 3:00 in the morning, we’re sitting there eating breakfast, and I thought, «You know what? We’re up; I just need to go pray.» Often times, it’s just the Lord summoning us to step aside, talk with Him about the things that matter. See, the disciples saw so many things from Jesus. I can just imagine being one of the disciples and saying, «Can you show me that little bread and fish thing you did where everybody got to eat—and there are leftovers? Can you demonstrate that?» Or, «That walking on the water thing—it was pretty cool! Didn’t like the storm, but I liked the walking on the water; can you teach me that?» And yet, there was only one thing the disciples asked Jesus to teach them, which is strange to me because they were with Him for three and a half years and saw all kinds of stuff—more miracles than could be listed in any book—and they asked only one thing: «Would you teach us to pray?» They saw something about His life. He was an expression of this Father that He met with on the mountain day after day, and it so provoked them to a righteous jealousy that they said, «Can you just teach us that?!» They saw everything else somehow comes from that.
The word that I have felt over this next year is a little different than I normally feel. I’ve got great hope for the year, but I have a challenge that comes with it: This is a year of increased breakthrough with promises that are directly tied to an increase in prayer. I saw a quote in the last six months—I forget when—something from one of the great fathers of the faith. Some of you may know who it is; I’ve forgotten it! I would remember if it were mine, but it’s not mine, so it’s somebody else’s! He said, «You can tell the popularity of a church by their attendance on Sunday morning. You can tell the popularity of the pastor by how many people show up Sunday night. You can tell the popularity of God by the attendance at the prayer meeting.»
Let me turn that knife around while I’ve got it here. There’s this invitation by the God of the universe to come and meet with Him, and in that meeting, be changed and become a transformer. It’s in the dialogue with God. If you’re not getting answers to prayer, then change what you pray! Change how you pray! Do something because the problem isn’t on His end of the equation. If it’s not working, it’s not Him! If it’s not working, it’s not Him! So you get back to the drawing board and say, «Here I am again. Teach me how to pray! Teach me how to dialogue with You in such a way that things change around me and You’re honored and glorified.»
Do something in me and through me so that when we talk, transformation takes place. God has invited us into a co-laboring role—one that we never could earn for ourselves—a co-laboring role to have influence on the course of history. This is why you’re still breathing air; you’re part of that family, part of that team. When I put my kids to bed at night, there are a couple of things I would say to them over and over again, and one of them was, «When you go to sleep tonight, just remember you’re part of a team that’s here to change the world.» The other one that I repeated often was, «As you go to sleep tonight, ask God if there’s anything impossible that He wants you to do.»
So I’m saying that to you as though you’re going to sleep right now. Some of you already have! As you go to sleep, ask God if there’s anything impossible. You’ve got to be driven by a God-sized dream! If you’re driven by a dream that you could accomplish on your own, it’s not a God dream! In fact, let me take it a step further: If you’re not overwhelmed by what He has assigned for you to do, you’ve not heard what He has to say. Because His assignment is so overwhelming that it compels us to trust! I look at the assignment and realize this is not something I can do, so I either ignore the word, or I come into a relationship of trust.
So my prayer, my cry, is that God would give us grace for prayer in this next season unlike any previous season of our lives. We give You permission, Father. I give You permission to wake them up! That’s cheating, but it’s all right—I’ve got the mic! We do invite You to teach us to pray. We want to step more fully into why we are on planet Earth—the assignment that You’ve given us in different spheres of life. I ask, Father, that Jesus would be exalted through how we do life, and that You would teach us to pray.
There’s always a chance when we have this many people in a room that there are those among us who have never, as we would say, surrendered their lives to Christ—never put faith in Jesus for salvation and actually be forgiven of sin and changed from the inside out. The Bible calls it being born again; it’s a change that happens on the inside of a person that we could never perform ourselves, but it happens miraculously when people simply put their faith in Christ.
The Bible says, «Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.» This is a life-and-death issue. If there’s anyone in the room that would say, «Bill, I don’t want to leave the building until I know I’m right with God,» I want you to put a hand up just right where you are. I want to make sure I see anyone. Right back over here—wonderful! Another one right over here—beautiful! Another one—yep, yep! Another—there’s another one there! All right, anybody else? Right over here is another one—wonderful!
It’s so beautiful—this is the most incredible thing! I’ll wait just a moment longer. I want to make sure that I saw everyone. Just put your hand up if you don’t want to leave until you know you’re right with God. Put your hand up real quick!
I would like for those who put their hands up to come forward. Why don’t you all stand? It’ll make it a little bit easier and practical. I want you to come down to this area. We’ve got friends over here that we know and trust; I want them to talk with you and pray with you, and a miracle is going to take place in your life today!
Today! This is wonderful! Let’s have the ministry team come up. Let me pray one more thing: How many of you would say, «Bill, disappointment has robbed me long enough! I want to put an end to it.» If that’s you, raise your hand! All right, since it’s most everyone, put a hand on the shoulder of somebody next to you and say, «Jesus, deliver them from disappointment. Let them hear from You so clearly that they are never robbed in this way again.» In Jesus' mighty name! Jesus' mighty name!