EXPECTATIONS
"My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him." (Psalm 62:5).
We all
have expectations. We expect to be
reasonably healthy in our lifetimes and to grow old before we die. We expect to be financially stable and be
able to care for ourselves and for our loved ones. We expect to be valued and respected as
individuals and to be treated justly by those who rule over us. Those are just a few of the big things that
we expect, but it goes much further than that.
We expect that our favorite sports team will always win. We expect that every light will turn green
for us when we are in a rush, and that we won't get behind any slow or elderly
drivers. We expect that our private time
be respected and not interrupted by unplanned phone calls, visits, or requests
for assistance or time. Needless to say, our expectations are all too often
dashed. We are told to "hope for
the best," but by doing this very thing aren't we setting ourselves up for
disappointment knowing by experience that things don't usually go as planned?
James, a
half brother of Jesus, addresses the subject of expectations in his letter to Jewish
believers in Christ. He writes, "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or
tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business
and make money.' Why, you do not even
know what will happen tomorrow. What is
your life? You are a mist that appears
for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the
Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.'
As it is, you boast and brag. All
such boasting is evil." (James 4:13-16 NIV). James’ point is that when we make plans for
the future we make a number of assumptions that we have no control over at
all. We don't even know if we will be
living in the next ten minutes or not. All such planning boils down to mere boasting
about how we think we are masters of our own destiny. Instead, James tells us that we should submit
our plans, expectations, and future to the Lord and to His plans for us. As
believers in Christ, we have agreed to follow Him, but we live our lives as if
we expect Him to follow us.
Instead of laying our desires and demands before the Lord and expecting
that He fulfill them, we should be laying our lives at His feet and seeking for
His will to be accomplished in us. It is all too easy to forget that our lives
are not our own - we have been purchased with the blood of the Son of God. Because of this, we must constantly remind
ourselves that God does indeed have a plan for each of us and it may not
include exactly what we had envisioned for ourselves. Several of Jesus disciples were
fishermen. They probably saw themselves
doing that for the rest of their lives and, hopefully, being able to set back a
little money, and set up their sons with boats and a living when they grew
up. After they encountered Christ on the
shores of the Galilean Sea, however, their lives dramatically changed. They became fishers of men and pillars of the
new church.
"For I know the plans I have for you, declares
the LORD, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a
hope. Then you will call upon me and
come and pray to me, and I will hear you.
You will seek me and find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I
will be found by you, declares the LORD." (Jeremiah 29:11-14a ESV). God
has plans for each of us. His plans will
bring wholeness and completeness to our lives: even in the face of disaster and
disappointment. When we can approach God
in complete faith that He has our best interest at heart, and lay our
expectations aside in favor of His, then we are in a position where we can pray
effectively to Him and see our prayers answered. As long as we are fixated on what we want God
to do for us, and not what He wants us to do for Him, He can't hear us. We are like spoiled children demanding our
own way when our parent knows better than us what is best. When we finally yield to our heavenly Father
and are willing to say, "Not my
will, but Thine be done," then we have given up our heart to Him and
He will show Himself to us in marvelous ways.
In the spiritual realm,
victory always starts with surrender.
I realize
all too well that, in reality, we often make wrong turns in life because of
faulty expectations or just plain bad choices.
Christianity is a learning process.
We have lived our whole lives up to the point that we accepted Christ as
our Savior making our own plans without even considering what God would want
for us. Old habits are hard to break
without God's help. Each episode of life
brings us different lessons, though, and we are ever learning that our Father
does indeed know best! Many choices we
make come with bad consequences, however, so it is best for us to submit
ourselves early on as believers in order to avoid many of the heartaches that
we may bring on ourselves.
Even when
we have made some really wrong turns, God is still able to get us back on track
if we acknowledge our mistake and seek Him.
How many of us have used a GPS device and had to deviate from the
suggested route because of a detour or just something that caught our eye that
was down a side road. Immediately, the
device will say, "recalculating" and then begin plotting a way to get
back on the prescribed route again. I
believe God is like that. No matter how
badly we have messed with His plan, if we are repentant about it and realize
our error, He can show us how to get back on track. I must warn you, though, that some choices we
make carry lifetime consequences. Some
can even make it much harder (but not impossible) to follow the Lord's
path. I am reminded of the importance of
the Apostle Paul's words to the Colossian church, "Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in
Him." (Colossians 2:6 ESV). It
is not enough to say, "I am saved" if we are unwilling to walk with
the Lord as a result of our conversion.
Faith without works (God's working, not ours) is indeed dead.
God sent
His prophet Jeremiah to the house of a potter to watch him making a clay vessel
on the potter's wheel. While he was
forming the vessel, something went wrong and the object he was making became
flawed in some way. Rather than throw
the lump of clay away and start again with a new lump, the potter simply worked
the clay back down and began over again.
God's words to the prophet were encouraging. He said, "Cannot
I do with you what this potter does with clay?...as the clay is in the potter’s
hand, so are you in My hand," (Jeremiah 18:6 KJV_2011).
God is
shaping our lives into vessels of honor for His glory. It would be absurd to think of a lump of clay
rising up and speaking to the potter who was working it saying, "Hey! What
do you think you're doing? Leave me
alone!" We don't hesitate to
question everything God does in our lives, however. We really can trust Him, even when He allows
storms into our lives to teach us that we can trust Him even in the midst of
the storms. We love Him when He speaks
to the wind and the waves, "Peace, be still," but without the storms
in our lives, then the times of peace hold no value to us because we have
nothing to compare them to if all we ever know is peace.
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