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.  Our expectations are all too often dashed, however.  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 will 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.  When we are fixated on what we want God to do for us, and not on what He wants us to do for Him, He won't hear us.  We are like spoiled children demanding our own way when our parents know 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 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 to avoid the heartaches that we may bring on ourselves. 

 

Even when we have made some 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.  God is like that.  No matter how badly we have deviated from His plan, if we are repentant about it and realize our errors, He can show us how to get back on track.  I must warn you, though, that some choices we make carry lifelong consequences.  Those can 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 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 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 amid 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. 

 

We know we have matured some in the Lord, when we can say with the psalmist, "My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him."   

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