Thanks for coming along as we continue to explore what it means to become people of depth!
Such a person, whom we call a deep disciple, is one who apprentices with Jesus to become more like Him over time. We intend to increasingly think, act, relate, and love as He does. It is a journey of inner character formation that results in less anxiety, anger, and control, and more generosity, relational shrewdness, and joy.
As we’ve discovered, this quest for depth often involves more receiving than giving, more being than doing, and more resting than running. I know that all sounds very non-Western, but so be it.
Somewhere along this path, Jesus invites us to spend some time in the Inward Journey—a period of exploring the hidden places of our hearts with Him and perhaps a trusted friend. We embrace what’s known as double knowledge—that to know God we must know ourselves, and we can only truly know ourselves in God.
The Inward Journey involves uncovering many wonderful things about God, as well as about how God has created us: our marvelous personality quirks, talents, and affections. To spend time celebrating that you are made in God’s image, the utterly unique work of a divine, loving, and infinitely creative artist, is healthy and good.
The Inward Journey also explores any differences between our beliefs and our ideas.
Our intellectual beliefs are those truth statements to which we mentally agree. Our ideas are powerful, largely unconscious assumptions and principles that govern how we see and operate in the world. These ideas are shaped by deeply formative forces such as our families of origin, cultures, spiritual experiences, suffering, celebrations, and relationships.
Many people can articulate their beliefs. Far fewer can name and describe their ideas.
As I noted last time, most people invited into the Inward Journey don’t venture forward, primarily because uncovering our hidden ideas requires self-compassion, gentleness, courage, time, and some pain. It is, however, a necessary step in the discipleship journey.
We’ve already looked at a few of our common ideas about God, compared to our intellectual beliefs:
That He doesn’t really like us
At this point, it’s probably obvious that if we mentally insist that God is good, delights in us, and is impartial, but function from the idea that He is not good, doesn’t care for us, or plays favorites, our willingness to experience Jesus at deeper and deeper levels will wane. Even if our belief statements are theologically sound, our formative experiences will exert far greater influence on us.
This disconnect between our mental agreements and our experienced realities blocks us from the deep life, the with-God life, which is why the Inward Journey is so essential.
We function from numerous other common ideas of God, perhaps that He is distant or disinterested. Let’s take a look at one more common idea before we move on: that God is disappointed in us.
It’s important I clarify a point here: sometimes God is disappointed. You can’t read the Gospels without noting a few times Jesus’ friends frustrated Him. Just as any loving parent would be, when we do and say harmful things, God gets disappointed.
However, I’m not talking about His temporary response to our harmful or foolish choices. I’m talking about functioning from the idea that God’s normal and consistent disposition toward us is disappointment.
To put it another way, one idea is that God enjoys a settled posture of relational delight that may include moments of grief and frustration. The other is a settled posture of disappointment with occasional moments of approval.
The question isn’t whether God is ever disappointed in us. The question is whether we assume that disappointment is His default posture toward us.
Chances are, we aren’t born with the idea that God is perpetually disappointed in us. That idea is formed over time, usually through relationships and experience. Parents, teachers, coaches, pastors, and other figures help shape our earliest sense of how authorities view us.
If approval was inconsistent, if affection depended on performance, or if our mistakes were met with withdrawal, shame, or anger, we may have been formed by the idea that love is fragile and must be maintained. Long before we had language for theology, our hearts were already “learning” what authority, acceptance, and disappointment feel like.
Those early ideas aren’t confined to childhood. We carry them into adulthood and, often without realizing it, project them onto God.
If a father was distant, God may feel distant. If a mother was anxious and hard to please, God may seem perpetually obsessed with our shortcomings. If a church environment emphasized obedience without relational safety and intimacy, we may come to experience God primarily as an evaluator.
We may consciously affirm that He is loving and gracious while unconsciously assuming that He is watching closely, waiting for us to fail.
Culture reinforces this damaging idea. We live in systems built around measurement, achievement, comparison, and improvement. Schools rank us, employers evaluate us, social media compares us, and even churches can reduce discipleship to intellectual progress and productivity.
Over time, it becomes natural to unconsciously assume that God relates to us in the same way. We begin to operate under the assumption that He is most interested in our performance, our usefulness, and whether we are growing quickly enough. The idea persists not because it is true, but because so many authority figures in our lives have trained our hearts to expect it.
I’ve shared with you a spiritual practice of noticing that we teach and embody at Soil & Roots called Heartview. It is the practice of noticing ourselves in a way that reveals the unconscious ideas in our hearts, and we can engage it to determine if we operate from the idea that God’s disposition toward us is disappointment.
We do so by paying careful and gentle attention to eight specific indicators: our thought patterns, emotions, behaviors, words, relationships, health, and how we use time and money.
I once met a ministry leader who was convinced that God deliberately withheld donations from her organization whenever she sinned. This idea poured out in her words—she essentially said what I just wrote—and it also showed up in several other indicators.
Behavior: She frantically shared her version of the Gospel with whoever was in earshot, whether it was wise to do so or not, afraid that God would ding her if she didn’t do her part to “save people.”
Relationships: She found and let go of friends quickly. If you didn’t make her look good in front of people and God, you were summarily dismissed.
Money: She accumulated and spent large sums of money, without always considering ethics, because to have wealth meant that God approved of you. If you were broke, that meant God was disappointed with you.
Most of us will not express the idea this dramatically, but the same underlying assumption often appears in subtler forms. It almost always drives some effort to perform. After all, if the only way to cure God’s disappointment is to appease Him, we’d better get working. Living under the power of this idea is, obviously, exhausting.
The ideas we hold about God never remain private. They quietly spill over into every relationship.
If I operate from the idea that God is fundamentally disappointed in me, I will almost certainly become a disappointed person. I will be disappointed with myself because I never quite measure up. I will become disappointed with my spouse, my children, my coworkers, my church, and my friends because they don’t measure up either. I will find myself increasingly frustrated with culture, politics, and institutions because, consciously or not, I expect everyone and everything to perform a little better than they actually do. What begins as an idea about God eventually becomes a way of relating to reality. We are integrated people living in an integrated world.
This is why ideas matter so much. As I noted last time, cultures are not ultimately shaped by laws, policies, or institutions; they are shaped by the kinds of people who inhabit them. If enough of us become people who unconsciously expect disappointment, we will build cultures of criticism, performance, and fear.
But if we increasingly experience God’s settled delight in us—even when He lovingly corrects us—we become people who extend that same grace to others. We become less controlling, more patient, more forgiving, and more secure. In the end, every culture reflects the hearts of its people.
When we look at Jesus, we find someone who certainly corrected and rebuked. But disappointment does not appear to be His default posture toward people. He moved toward those who failed, stayed present with those who misunderstood Him, and repeatedly restored those who disappointed themselves. Peter denied Him, Thomas doubted Him, and the disciples routinely failed to grasp what He was teaching. Yet Jesus did not relate to them as a perpetually frustrated boss. His settled posture was invitation, compassion, patience, and delight.
So if we engage in the spiritual practice of Heartview and discover we may be operating from the idea that God is perpetually disappointed, what do we do? If influential, long-term relationships so powerfully formed that idea, how can it be re-formed so that it increasingly reflects God as He truly is?
The resolution is not simply to repeat that God loves us until we finally believe it. Hidden ideas are rarely changed through instruction. They are slowly transformed through an openness to experiencing God as He is, rather than what we have transferred onto Him.
Over time, we may discover that confession does not cause God to withdraw, that silence does not mean He has left, and that failure does not erase His delight. These are not merely new beliefs to memorize. They become new relational experiences that slowly reach the hidden places of our hearts.
This is why self-awareness, story-sharing, suffering in community, and spiritual habits matter so much. They create the conditions in which we can begin to notice the old idea, name where it came from, and risk receiving God’s delight in places where we have only expected evaluation.
So perhaps the better question is not, “Is God ever disappointed in me?” He certainly has been with me at times. The deeper question is, “What do I assume His face looks like when I enter the room?” If we believe His settled posture is disappointment, we will hide, perform, and control. But if we increasingly come to know that His authentic posture is delight, we become freer to confess, rest, and love.
Duc In Altum
Brian
Updated resource: This article serves as the primary foundation for a fuller evergreen guide: Why We Assume God Is Disappointed in Us.
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