You have now come face to face with a God whom you do not fully understand. You have met a God who has not lived up to your expectations. Every believer must come to grips with a God who did not do things quite the way it was expected.

You are going to get to know your Lord by faith or you will not know Him at all. Faith in Him, trust that is in Him . . . not in His ways.

Today you are resentful of those who so callously hurt you. But no, not really. The truth is you are angry with God because, ultimately, you are not dealing with men, you are dealing with the sovereign hand of your Lord. Behind all events, behind all things, there is always His sovereign hand.

The question is not, “Why is God doing this? Why is He like this?” The question is not, “Why does He not answer me?” The question is not, “I need Him desperately; why does He not come rescue me?” The question is not, “Why did God allow this tragedy to happen to me, to my children, to my wife, to my husband, to my family?” Nor is it, “Why does God allow injustices?”

The question before the house is this: “Will you follow a God you do not understand? Will you follow a God who does not live up to your expectations?”

Your Lord has put something in your life which you cannot bear. The burden is simply too great. He was never supposed to do this! But the question remains, “Will you continue to follow this God who did not live up to your expectations?”

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no one can fully understand the pain you feel as you suffer your present situation. Whether it came upon you because of circumstances or by the deeds of men, one thing is certain. Before this present tragedy entered into your life, it first passed through the sovereign hand of God.

 
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 Gene Edwards, The Gene Edwards Signature Collection: A Tale of Three Kings / the Prisoner in the Third Cell / the Divine Romance (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2016).

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Missionaries must be willing to commit the national church and its leaders to the Lord. In the early days of independence many a missionary feels like Uzzah, who put forth his hand to steady the ark of the covenant (2 Sa 6:6-8). But the ark of the covenant was also “the ark of God” and He was well able to take care of His own ark. The same is true of the church. The church is His church, not theirs. He is at work building His church and Jesus Christ has declared that “the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). The missionaries must do what Paul did with his converts—commend them to God and to the word of His grace (Acts 20:32). And he did this even though he knew beforehand that fierce wolves would come among them and scatter the flock.

 J. Herbert Kane, Understanding Christian Missions

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By now you see how serious the sin of offense is. If it is not dealt with, offense will eventually lead to death. But when you resist the temptation to be offended, God brings great victory.

 John Bevere, The Bait of Satan, 20th Anniversary Edition (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2014), 21.

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I will not construct carnal walls to safeguard my heart from hurt. I will live with an open heart and will not become imprisoned by my own walls of conditional expectations.

 John Bevere, The Bait of Satan, 20th Anniversary Edition (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2014), 21.

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I will not filter my life through past hurts, rejections, or experiences. I will never doubt the goodness and faithfulness of my God, nor will I judge Him by the standards set by man.

 John Bevere, The Bait of Satan, 20th Anniversary Edition (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2014), 22.

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Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value.… To them big churches are successful churches.… To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavor. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers!… Mankind goes down to America to learn how to live the earthly life; but to live the heavenly life, they go to some other people. It is no special fault of Americans to be this-worldly; it is their national characteristic; and they in their self-knowledge ought to serve mankind in other fields than in religion.

 

Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 271–272.

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David Brainerd, 18th-century missionary to the Native Americans, wrote:

When I had been fasting, praying, obeying, I thought I was aiming at the glory of God, but I was doing it all for my own glory—to feel I was worthy. As long as I was doing all this to earn my salvation, I was doing nothing for God, all for me! I realized that all my struggling to become worthy was an exercise in self-worship. I was not worshipping him, but using him.… Though I often confessed to God that I, of course, deserved nothing, yet still I harbored a secret hope of recommending myself to God by all these duties and all this morality. In other words, I healed myself with my duties.

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the problem we have in walking in the Spirit, why his fruit is often missing from our words and actions: We don’t really grasp God’s love for us. Put differently, we don’t fully believe that he sees us, that he cares for us, that he is leading us, that he is defending us, that he is providing for us, that he is the single answer to all we need. Because of our individual stories of pain and suffering we chase after different things to have our needs met. Situations and circumstances tend to push us into the ruts of deeply worn habits of protecting and fending for ourselves. Turning to God in faith and trusting vulnerably in who he is for us is an afterthought, if a thought at all. And yet it’s God alone who is complete—only he can fill us with what we need—namely, himself.

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 Daniel Bush and Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014).

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Fear can cause us to do silly things. Our insecurity is what causes us to want people to stand in awe of us. We become pretentious; we try to keep other people from knowing who we really are and what we are really like. Sometimes I think the most attractive thing about Jesus as a man was His unpretentiousness. Jesus did not try to create an “aura of mystique”; even common people could relate to Him.

 
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We love to punish people by making them feel guilty. Those of us who are always sending people on guilt trips almost certainly have a big problem ourselves with a sense of guilt. Because we haven’t sorted out our own guilt issues, we want to make sure others wallow in the mire of guilty feelings with us. We point the finger partly because we haven’t forgiven ourselves.

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For the one who totally forgives from the heart, there is little self-righteousness. Two reasons we are able to forgive are:

• We see what we ourselves have been forgiven of.

• We see what we are capable of.

When we are indignant over someone else’s wickedness, there is the real possibility either that we are self-righteous or that we have no objectivity about ourselves. When we truly see ourselves as we are, we will recognize that we are just as capable of committing any sin as anyone else. We are saved only by God’s intervening grace.

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Total forgiveness is a lifelong commitment, and you may need to practice it every single day of your life until you die. No one said it would be easy.

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Total forgiveness involves an additional element: praying for God’s blessings to rain on the lives of your offenders. 

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I must add one caution: never go to a person you have had to forgive and say, “I forgive you.” This will be counterproductive every time unless it is to a person that you know is yearning for you to forgive them. Otherwise, you will create a stir with which you will not be able to cope. They will say to you, “For what?” It is my experience that nine out of ten people I have had to forgive sincerely do not feel they have done anything wrong. It is up to me to forgive them from my heart—and then keep quiet about it.

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Mahatma Gandhi appealed to a sense of valor and heroism when he said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” 

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 R. T. Kendall, Total Forgiveness: When Everything in You Wants to Hold a Grudge, Point a Finger, and Remember the Pain - God Wants You to Lay It All aside (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2010).

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Humility is one of the essential ingredients of genuine biblical reconciliation. It is the stuff of healed relationships.

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These adult bullies might more accurately be labeled spear throwers. They are those individuals hell-bent on damaging and threatening you—even destroying you or your reputation. Motivated by jealousy, they stop at nothing to make certain you melt into a pool of fear and shame at their words or actions. A book on the subject of overcoming wrongs would be incomplete without a discussion on the topic of spear throwers and how to deal with them from God's perspective.

Spear throwers like to see people squirm. They are self-absorbed, self-motivated, and self-deceived. And they do it all cloaked with verses of Scripture and hidden behind the loftiest motives. These people exist in offices, in neighborhoods, and sometimes within our own homes. Many of them claim deep relationship with God. They may be Sunday school teachers, social workers, and devoted parents. Amazingly, they can be caring and thoughtful—and mean and evil—all at once.

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They are threatened by anyone who might make them look bad; they are willing to take credit for what others have done but deny to others the right to succeed. These are people who will magnify the faults of others, but will "not own their own stuff" as the saying goes. In rages of jealousy, they become spear throwers who want to destroy what they perceive to be their competition. Of course, what they do is often out of sight; publicly they are well controlled and kind, but behind the scenes they plot another's downfall.

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the Law of the Grand Exception—I am not bound by the rules I make for you. Spear throwers play only by their own rules when they want their victim.

The spear thrower believes what he does is right simply by virtue of the fact that he does it. Reasoning with him is a waste of time.

 Erwin W. Lutzer, When You’ve Been Wronged: Moving from Bitterness to Forgiveness (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2007).