Redefining Faithfulness To Include Pain: G-d May Actually Let You Down

Today at worship, we listened to a lyric that went as follows.
“You’re never gonna let me down….”
As someone who used to believe that line, I vehemently disagree.
We take faithfulness as a promise that G-d is going to bring us a life with no testing, no trial, no pain, we are going to be saved from the wrath that will come on the earth, etc. and…
We have defined G-d’s faithfulness in a very limited scope, that does not include us experiencing pain, and instead includes us only experiencing a life of “abundance” according to our definition of abundance.
Wrong.
G-d gives you abundance the way He views abundance, AND IN THE SEQUENCE THAT HE WANTS TO DISPENSE THAT ABUNDANCE.  And there might be prosperity and provision in many points.
But it’s not merely material provision.
And news flash: given you are moving form glory to glory and from faith to faith, there are going to be times when G-d lets you down in something.
There are times when your dad should not have done that thing he should have done to you.
There are times when people are suffoccated and their spirits are shattered or their souls are divided.
Now, does G-d have your best interests in mind and at heart?
Absolutely!
And does He himself act with respect to those interests, and does He place his actions in the context of your interests?
Yes.
But are there going to be times when you thought He should come through in a certain way and He did not?
Yes.
We still have the truth of free will. And it is used for greatness and for nastiness.
True, His grace intervenes ahead of time.  We call that “prevenient grace”, and that truth was delineated in the canons of the Second Council of Orange in 529, and valued by those of us who trace spiritual heritage through the Wesleyan branches of our like precious faith.
But He may not violate the free will of humanity on their way to assaulting us.
We have taken this idea of G-d never letting us down, and inserted it into the doctrine (teaching) of G-d’s faithfulness, and the results of that assetion that G-d will never let us down have been disastrous for the church and for those who would be part of the church.
So, we have required that, in order for G-d to be considered as faithful, nothing bad can happen to us.
It is not right to take G-d’s faithfulness and make our safety and, by extension, a violation of the free will of man, a qualifier of whether or not we see G-d as faithful.
There are times when He lets us down.
There are also times when we feel G-d lets us down, and we have left G-d on the hook with this expectation of “never letting us down” and it has bred offense in many of us when He fails to meet an expectation we had of Him.
G-d’s faithfulness does not mean He will never let us down.  What it does mean is that he will father and shepherd us through all things.  That includes pain, strain, testing, trial, and other nasty things that are inflicted upon us when people engage in jackassery through the use of their free will to engage in destructive behaviors.
We need to know and understand and approach His faithfulness in the context of painful circumstances, and in the context of our right response to that pain.
Painful circumstances do not contradict the faithfulness of G-d; rather painful circumstances are an element of that faithfulness.
We need to reject the idea that G-d will “never let us down” when it comes to our circumstances, and by implication make our circumstances painless.  He will do things that we do not understand.  He will allow pain to come our way as a deep method of moving along His purposes for our lives, that we might possess the specific birthright that He had for us all along.
Related to those painful circumstances that happen from day to day, and from week to week, the grace from one day that sustains us in dificulties will not often match the grace available in the next day.
We have to learn how to become experts at hunting out the grace of G-d, and tasting the flavor of that grace from day to day.
In short, we need to redefine faithfulness away from whether or not our comforts are met and our emotional needs are met or even the expectations we have of G-d that He did not promise to meet.
And on the other hand, we need to redefine faithfulness more in alignment with what He actually has promised us.
He will not leave us.
He will shepherd us.
He will raise us in His nurture and admontion, His discipline and correction.
He is faithful to raise us up, but it may not be in a fully safe, fluffy, pink-padded room.
But there will be times when He will let us down in terms of our unreasonable expectations.
It is in His interest to break our unreasonable expectations.
For example, this unreasonable appropriation of the Prayer of Jabez that hit the church 20 years ago.  Some people need to learn how to respond to pain.  There is a right response to pain.  There is a wrong response to pain.  There is also a Principle of Compensation.  For more details on this, see CD 7 in the SLG Series, Seven Curses and Blessings by Arthur Burk.  It’s called the Ammonite Curse.  The link is below.
https://theslg.com/content/124-the-seven-curses-and-blessings
It is further in His interest to move us into a place where we embrace the right frame, a frame that embraces the principles He has for us.
This positive-confession denial of reality is a violation of the fourth principle, and if you walk in denial, then you will have a hard time embracing the threefold Fourth Principle.
It is the Principle of Reality….
Sowing and Reaping…
Pain and Suffering…
Your offense will grow if you believe He will “never let you down”.  Your frame for what “never let you down” has got to adjust.
A firm wake-up call, and credit for much of this goes to my bride.
This is bitter medicine, bur real medicine, and it will protect us from the seasons of pain and heartache that must come, for they are growing pains.
So, my question to you is, “do you have the right frame for faithfulness?”.
And secondly, what are some ways in which you thought the L-rd would protect you, and He did not, and as a result, you allowed a bitter root to grow.
It is time to come out from the spirit of Wormwod:  that spirit that is making your waters bitter, tribe.
He really loves us, but He will send us into the midst of a real battlefield with real consequences.  This is ultimately an expression of the weightiness of the full measure of His love for us.  He sends us into difficult circumstances in order to prepare us to lead both ourselves and others.
We must be ready for that.
We must build a frame sufficiently great for the fullness of G-d’s faithfulness in order to include, as an element of that faithfulness, a right response to pain that WILL come into our life.  His assignment of pain prepares us for being strong enough and dangerous enough to effectively impact others through the authority that we will earn through that pain.  This is an aspect of earned authority, and is a reason earned authority is so important to the expression of both His bride and His son, us.
Just because pain happens in our lives does not mean that pain was not first approved by G-d.  Some pain is approved by G-d.  Further, some pain that touches us is not approved by G-d.  But G-d does not always get what He wants.  We do still have free will.  And as a result of that, when we experience pain that was not G-d’s will, we come away with the “why” questions of G-d and therefore have this view or perception that He has let us down.
Are we ready for this increase of our perception of our faithfulness?
Are we ready to move from the immature view of G-d not letting us down, to a place of being able to respond well to pain from G-d?
Pain from G-d is an element of the faithfulness of G-d.