And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Romans 5:5 (NASB 2020)

After reading my last post, a family member reached out to me to ask if I was all right. He read I was in tears and feared the worst. I assured him all was well and, laughing at myself, confessed I had not made myself perfectly clear on my last post. So much for attempting to be vulnerable in four paragraphs or less! But it got me thinking about how we process tears as well as navigate disappointment in the Christian life, so as a way of issuing a correction to the previous post, here goes.

First, generally speaking, tears are a good thing in the Christian life. Jesus wept on several occasions¹ and not necessarily because the world was coming to an end. Rather, as we become more alive in Christ and our hearts are softened and able to process emotion in a broken world, tears are often the result. This at least has been my experience. The more time I spend with Jesus, the more I weep, not necessarily because I have just experienced something tragic, but more often because something that has been bottled up inside me for years has been unlocked by the deep work of the Holy Spirit. This is what I was describing in my last post: I was troubled and did not know why, but once I spent time in God’s presence, He showed me the cause of my unrest (fear of being disappointed), and with tears, the power of that fear was broken off me.

Of course, it is also true the more I spend with Jesus, the more I laugh. During a time of worship recently, a friend grabbed my hand and began to pray for me, and I found myself instantly filled with an inexpressible joy causing me to burst into laughter.²

But I wish to address the topic of disappointment, since I realize the relationship a Christian has to disappointment and how he or she navigates it is vastly different from one who is not. Outside of Christ, our joy or sorrow is based on our circumstances. If things go well, we are happy. If things do not go well, we are sad. One might say as far as joy and sorrow goes, we are enslaved to our circumstances, wholly dependent on them being favorable in order to be joyful and furthermore hopeful, since hope is the expectation of joyful circumstances in the future. Because of this relationship, we are, before long, rendered hopeless, since we grow fearful of getting our hopes up, and even begin developing an expectation of bad things happening.

But when we meet Jesus, something fundamentally changes. We find both hope and joy independent of our circumstances. I am not suggesting God does not bring joyful circumstances into our lives; certainly He does. But our relationship to circumstances changes. The love of God Paul describes as being poured out in our hearts simultaneously gives us a joy despite our circumstances and also a hopeful expectation of favorable circumstances in the future. After all: God loves us, and the deeper we come to know God’s love, the more certain we are there is no good thing He will withhold from us.

This is what gives the Christian (I am speaking of the best examples) unshakeable joy and hope in the midst of hardship and difficulty. Simply put, neither is a product of their circumstances: it comes from someplace beyond, namely God’s love. And if the joy and hope are genuine, it is a testimony of God to those around them, because it is really hard to fake either when you are going through it!

Lastly, when we talk about cultivating an expectation of good things happening in our lives, we aren’t doing so in order to simply be positive people or make ourselves happy. What we are really doing is aligning ourselves with the Kingdom of God, which Jesus is establishing in us and through us. My wife Catherine used to say, “Everything is going to be all right.” This is comforting no matter who you are, but it is profound because for those who are in Christ, it is fundamentally true, both now and for all eternity.