Disappointment: The Thief of Courage

Unrelenting disappointment leaves you heartsick, but a sudden good break can turn life around.

Proverbs 13:12 MSG

Personal experience and daily observation have led me to a question. Why don’t we attribute the rise in despair, loneliness, anxiety, and estrangement to our inability to handle disappointment?

Unrelenting disappointment is all too familiar to me. It came early and often — adolescence delivered its share. But nothing was as unexpected as the disappointment I found in my spiritual life. 

Prior to becoming a Christian, I considered myself an agnostic. My reasons for unbelief were based on the behavior of religious people, not the truth about God. After all, I had barely read the Bible.  

I judged religious people the way I didn’t want them to judge me, which is what a lot of people do.  

In college, all of this changed. First, I read the Bible and discovered it was the truth I had sensed was out there but couldn’t find. Second, I attended a church that described themselves as a Bible church: they focused on the Bible over religious tradition and man-focused denominationalism. This is what inspired me to read the Bible in the first place and become a Christian. But after that, disappointment came quickly.

Initially, I was disappointed in myself because of my many sins and failures after becoming a Christian. What kept me believing despite facing this was the knowledge that there were so many people around me who seemed much stronger in their faith—they gave me hope that I could get past my failures. But then I learned that they too were human; they had weaknesses and lacked spirituality just like me. This led to even more disappointment. 

I soon discovered the source of my disappointment, and it was a discovery that turned my life around: my faith had been placed in the behavioral superiority of those who led me instead of the God of Scripture.

No one who trusts in you will be disappointed. But disappointment will come to those who try to deceive others. They will get nothing.

Psalm 25:3 ERV

… And the Scriptures give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises to be fulfilled.

Romans 15:4 NLT

The Christianity of the Bible is not based on human beings, their performance, behavior, or worthiness. The Bible is not a piece of academic literature or theology, but a spiritual book whose intent is to help us know God. Through the Bible, we are being allowed to know a God whose existence strains the limits of human comprehension. This is ultimately achieved through the life of Jesus Christ, who is God taking human form. 

My spiritual journey and yours is not about arrival but discovery. This discovery is how God transformed my disappointment into devotion to him rather than to human institutions or people. He saved me from my discouragement by drawing me closer to him.

The LORD is close to those who have suffered disappointment. He saves those who are discouraged.

Psalm 34:18 ERV

I write today to defeat our disappointment. Throughout our lives, disappointment (or its cousins, disillusionment and discouragement will invite us into a relationship with them. Their requirements are simple:

• Pessimism, so that we assume the worst. 
• Fatalism, so that we stop making the effort.
• Cynicism, so that we see everything as unfair. 

This, disappointment says, is all I require—that you give up living life with hope and accept disappointment. It’s safer and less painful that way.  

We can see this battle at play in the world around us—and more recently, during the 2026 FIFA World Cup that just wrapped up this past week. After weeks of competition, Spain concluded its inspiring performance and defeated Argentina to win the title. But what will remain with me is the resonance of this long-standing phrase often used by the English about football or soccer: “It’s the hope that kills you.” It describes the extraordinary pain of anticipating victory only to experience defeat. 

There are those who allow their fear of disappointment to steal their courage, and then disguise their fear with respectable names: Contentment. Humility. Being realistic. But those who have stopped hoping because hoping hurts too much are not content. They are afraid. They are broken.

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

Psalm 34:18 NIV

God doesn’t want us broken. This is why we must make the choice many football or soccer fans choose: courage. Whenever disappointment seeks to kill our hope, we must remember the promise of God found in Romans 5:

And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

Romans 5:5 NLT

There is not enough space here for me to map out in detail how the spiritual person responds to disappointment, but my experience overcoming it, and helping others do the same, may be instructive wherever your disappointment lies.

Help me God, as you promised, so that I may live. Do not turn my hope into disappointment.

Psalm 119:116 GW

Three answers have guided and transformed my life when faced with disappointment.

1. We must become spiritual rather than behavioral.

Increasingly, it is clear that the major key to Lincoln’s greatness is his spiritual depth.

Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership

My early and middle years of being a Christian were riddled with disappointments because I viewed and practiced Christianity behaviorally rather than spiritually. I lacked spiritual depth.

Behavior manages the outside. Spirituality transforms the inside. In the Bible, the apostle Paul explained the futility of behavioral Christianity to the Colossian church, explaining that rule-keeping looks wise but changes nothing:

Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

Colossians 2:23 NIV

He taught again about the powerlessness of that path in 2 Timothy, describing behavioral Christians as people who “act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly” (2 Timothy 3:5).

That powerlessness is the disappointment I experienced. My faith rested on behavioral superiority—my own and other people’s—but it was frustrating and futile. Only spiritual transformation from the inside out can produce the flourishing life God promises, as Jesus said in John 6:

The Spirit alone gives eternal life. Human effort accomplishes nothing. And the very words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

John 6:63 NLT

2. We must become God-focused rather than man-focused.

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. [2] I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. [3] Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.

Psalm 63:1-3 NIV

I put it this way in my book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is: “Keeping God as our central focus should not be considered a one-time project or campaign, but our life’s work.” We should pursue God until we discover that his love is better than life.

The failure to pursue God in this way places us on a trajectory to become like the New Testament church at Corinth, where they discovered divisive results of attaching their faith to people instead of God. Paul challenged their distorted focus, which was evident in the quarrels he was hearing about: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas'” (see 1 Corinthians 1:10-12). 

He wrote to the Philippian church about Christians who preached out of “envy and rivalry,” driven by “selfish ambition, not sincerely” (Philippians 1:15-17). Insincere. Or, in the language of our time, inauthentic.

Twenty centuries later, the same rivalry limits the influence and impact of the church. The numbers show it. As many as 15,000 U.S. churches may close in a single year, with roughly 8% of American congregations either shutting their doors or unable to afford a full-time pastor. Forty-four percent of Americans between 18 and 29 now claim no religious affiliation. Boston University theologian Wesley Wildman estimates that nearly a quarter of those still attending houses of worship reject a supernatural worldview altogether, coming for community and routine rather than God. Wildman describes a collapse occurring across four dimensions at once—affiliation, attendance, private practice, and intensity of belief.

This is not the decline of faith. It is the decline of denominationalism—religion organized around human rather than spiritual institutions. People may still practice in private, but when they see the same political polarization dividing the pews that divides the aisles of power, they conclude, understandably, that we are simply another self-interested organization. Purifying the church of selfish ambition, competitiveness, and rivalry is not housekeeping. It is survival.

3. We must become people who understand the times.

When David’s kingdom was forming, one tribe of Israel was singled out—not for their strength, but for their discernment:

… from Issachar, men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do …

1 Chronicles 12:32 NIV

Understanding the times means having intellectual, emotional, social and cultural awareness. Based on these areas, I see the global population searching for answers along ten frontiers:

1. Purpose
2. Relationships
3. The inner life
4. Work and calling
5. Money
6. Technology
7. Culture
8. Family
9. Hope for the future
10. Finding the truth

That last one is the deepest, and I believe it is a search for Jesus, whether people name him or not.
These are the spiritual frontiers. And they will only be answered by men and women who understand the times and speak to them—rather than arguing internally or isolating into bubbles. Talking only to ourselves and listening only to ourselves means ignoring a world that does not care what label we wear, how we vote, or who our rivals are. They care about finding their way.

That is where I intend to spend the rest of my life. Not defending a position but walking these frontiers with anyone willing to come. Disappointment invited me to stop hoping. I have declined the invitation.