As adults, we can find it difficult to understand young people who are disappointed with life. Even as youth ministers, is far too easy for us to look at our students and think: What do they have to complain about? They have no reason not to excel in life. But to assume this would be a tragic mistake.
Unfortunately, the details of life we can observe do not always tell the whole story of our students’ experience. Teenagers are often troubled by many things:
- events happening around them: wars, corrupt leaders, prejudices, crime and injustices.
- experiences happening to them: pressures to perform, betrayal, abuse, and broken relationships.
- emotions happening in them: struggles with sin, mental and emotional struggles, and general unsettledness with life.
As we walk with our students through their hurts and disappointments, Psalm 33 shows how the Lord’s unfailing love comforts and heals their broken hearts.
Like so many of the psalms, Psalm 33 provides medicine for our students’ disappointed hearts. Here are three invitations from the psalm as you shepherd students through their heartbreaks and disappointments.
Convince your students the Lord is good and deserves their praise.
We are worshippers by nature. In other words, we give our attention, love, and our cheers to things all the time. Psalm 33 opens with the call to praise the Lord: Sing (v. 1)…Praise (v. 2)…Sing (v. 3). Then every line following expresses why the Lord deservers our praise.
I wonder, though, if we mistakenly think the Lord is just a better version of us. But Psalm 33 blows that idea to pieces. His greatness and goodness is unmatched (vv. 4-22). As creator, savior, and king of the world, the Lord deserves our praise. He alone is holy. Who else deserves our praise like the Lord?
As they live in this world with all its heartache, we can encourage our students to praise this God. This is the God who “loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love” (v. 5). So you can confidently assert to your students that they can put their hope in God no matter what confronts them.
Reveal to your students their need to praise the Lord.
Psalm 33 tells us: “it is fitting for the upright to praise him” (v. 1). I love that word fitting. It reminds us that praise is part of who we God has made us to be.
As a huge Philadelphia sports fan, I watch the Eagles very differently than I watch other teams: I am pretty animated; I yell in frustration and cheer in excitement. My actions match my love for the team: they are fitting of my status as a fan. Likewise, praising the Lord is the most fitting response for those created in his image.
Praise also feeds faith. It opens our eyes to see that “the earth is full of his unfailing love” (v. 5). It deepens our love and draws us closer into relationship with him. Praise makes us more aware of his presence in our lives.
The problem is that most of us, adults and teenagers alike, give ourselves to things that do the opposite of drawing us to the Lord. Recently, top-ranked golfer Scottie Scheffler expressed this reality in an interview about his success:
“[Golf] is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart. There’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life and then you get there and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world and they’re like, what’s the point?”
The deepest places of our hearts are the places we feel most intensely and long to satisfy the most urgently. Our problem is not that we have those places. In fact, if we embrace those places, they will draw us to the Lord. Our problem is that we try to fill those places with the wrong things: accomplishments, popularity, possessions, relationships, hobbies, helping others, and more. None of these are, in themselves, bad things. But they will only feed our dissatisfaction in life when not kept in order.
If our students don’t give their praise to the Lord, they will absolutely give it to something else that will let them down. But if they draw near to the Lord, find his love filling those deepest places of their hearts, and give him their praise, they will find him to be faithful in all he does (v. 4).
Remind your students that the Lord will never let them down.
There are two things I know for sure. First, anything in this world we put our confidence and hope in will eventually disappoint us: government, intelligence, strengths, accomplishments, possessions, people, etc. None of those things can handle the weight of filling the deepest places of our hearts. They will crumble under our expectations and will disappoint, fail, and embarrass us.
Second, the Lord will never let us down:
We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name.May your unfailing love be with us, Lord, even as we put our hope in you.
Psalm 33.20-22
The Gospel For Disappointed Students
How do we know God’s love is unfailing? How can we confidently put our hope in him? We look to the Lord Jesus, who endured the sorrows of life all the way to the end. He is the creator who entered creation, the righteous Judge who was judged, the Almighty who became weak. His obedience for sinners, death in our place, and resurrection power deliver a salvation from the penalty of sin, the power of sin, and one day, the presence of sin.
The psalms teach us how to bring our anxiety, disappointment, anger, and brokenness to the Lord. Sometimes it even sounds like complaining. But the healing and comfort is always found in God’s steadfast love. By God’s grace, we remind our students the gospel guarantees the Lord’s total commitment to our good.
We wait for the LORD;
Psalm 33:10-22
he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O LORD,
be upon us, even as we hope in you.
If you’re looking for more gospel-centered Bible teaching resources, try Rooted’s Bible-based curriculum for teenagers, available on Rooted Reservoir.
