How to Refashion our Disappointment

Last week, we considered how we must see God’s fatherly love when we face disappointment. Now we’re ready to go back and explore the many realms where we so often feel disappointed.

Proverbs 3:1-10 consists of five pairs of verses (each with a command and a consequence) that address five specific areas of life. Each pair contrasts our meager expectations with God’s unbelievable rewards. We may find echoes of these rewards in our day-to-day lives, but if we mistake the echoes for the essence, we’ll miss the point and end up disappointed. The essence is found in God’s rescue mission accomplished through Jesus. And when he rescues us, he also lovingly disciplines us to desire what he desires for us.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore our struggles with disappointment about the following life issues:

1. Longevity
2. Relationships
3. Guidance
4. Health
5. Finances

I’ll connect Solomon’s sayings to the rest of the Bible and to our lives using the following categories (I’ll link back to here from each of the next few posts to remind you of the details):

• “Command” observes the command.
• “Consequence” observes the consequence.
• “Our meager expectation” states a common misinterpretation of these verses.
• “God’s unbelievable reward” uses other Proverbs to illuminate what Solomon (and thus God) meant.
• “Echoes” uses examples from Solomon’s Bible (books or stories that were available to him) to show how God taught and foreshadowed this reward through real-life object lessons. If we confuse these echoes with the essence, we will expect the wrong thing and end up disappointed.
• “Essence” describes how Jesus was denied the promise so we might be granted it. Then it explains how God trains us to love what he loves.

Stay tuned!

This post was first published in 2013 and is part of a series walking through Proverbs 1-9.