God's Not Disappointed

Faithful on the Clock

Faithful on the Clock is a podcast with the mission of getting your work and faith aligned. We want you to understand Who you're serving and why so you can get more joy and legacy from every minute spent on the clock. Thanks for joining us and taking this step toward a more fulfilling job and relationship with God!

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In this episode...

God's Not Disappointed

https://faithfulontheclock.captivate.fm/episode/gods-not-disappointed

Intro teaser paragraph:

People often stay away from God because they misinterpret Him as angry. But they also can stay away because they think He’s disappointed. Episode 80 of Faithful on the Clock looks at how that connects to our work life.

Timestamps:

[00:04] - Intro

[00:33] - People often think that God is either not merciful or doesn’t care.

[01:22] - Scriptures such as the story of Noah reveal that people give up on God, not the other way around. His punishments don’t come out of the blue, but rather after repeated calls to repent.

[02:00] - Most people looking at the story of Job try to see the story from Job’s perspective and to understand why bad things happen to good people. Our sense of justice says God shouldn’t have let him suffer.

[03:07] - In Job’s story, God wasn’t testing Job so much as he was putting the devil back in his place. Job’s suffering was necessary to do that.

[04:04] - Even though Job suffered, God didn’t enjoy that suffering. The bigger picture was to keep the right order of things. Later, Jesus, who also suffered although he had not done anything wrong, would put the devil in his place for the final time.

[04:43] - People tend to transfer their experiences with others to God, comparing what they know of people to how He will be. Our sense of identity can get wrapped up in performance, too, so that if we stumble or don’t do well, we ultimately think God sees us as a letdown like everyone else does.

[06:09] - Not all suffering is to test you or has to do with your performance. Sometimes it is about God teaching the devil.

[06:41] - God is prepared for you to mess up. Like a parent who doesn’t get upset with a child who can’t pull their pants up but who really wants to succeed at it, God doesn’t get upset with us when we fail, either, so long as our hearts are in the right place.

[08:06] - All of us our priceless portraits on God’s gallery wall. There is nothing we can do to erase the beauty we have that comes from the experience He had painting us.

[10:11] - Prayer

[10:54] - Outro/What’s coming up next

Key takeaways:

• People can get confused about God’s nature, thinking He either doesn’t care or isn’t merciful. But scripture repeatedly shows that it was people rejecting God, not the other way around.
• In the story of Job, God wasn’t desiring Job to suffer. But just as Jesus suffered on the cross as an innocent, Job suffered so that, in the big picture of things, the devil would be kept in his proper place.
• People often transfer their experiences with people to God. They believe that if others have been angry or disappointed, then God must judge them the same way, and that bad things happening must be a result of their own shortcomings.
• Not all suffering is to test you or has anything to do with your performance. And God is prepared for your humanness — He gave Jesus knowing we’d all fall short.
• God created us all as unique portraits. Only He gets to decide the value we have, and that value is permanent based on the unique experience He had creating each of us.

CTAs:

• Each time you feel like God is disappointed in you, remember Psalm 18:19 and reflect on the fact that your rescue is not an accident.

What’s coming up next:

Psychological safety is a foundational element for a healthy, productive culture. What core elements are necessary to create it? Faithful on the Clock Episode 81 explores.

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