“You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong – you want only what will give you pleasure.” (James 4:2-3 NLT)
Expectations can be killers! But they can also be joyful revelations.
Shortly before my 16th birthday my dad invited me to go with him to pick up a car he had purchased that was about 50 miles away. I assumed he was getting the car to sell, as he often bought and sold used cars to supplement his income. This was in 1963 and the car he bought was a 1960 TR3 Triumph Roadster. It had a soft top and plastic side curtains (that were missing), which was a bit of an issue as we were driving home in a driving rainstorm.
Imagine my surprise when on my birthday my parents invited me to go look on my bed for my birthday present. It was a set of new side curtains for the Triumph – my birthday present I never expected!
Remembering that day causes me to think of the many times my heavenly Father has surprised me by giving me gifts I hadn’t expected. I never expected to go to college or to Seminary; I never dreamed I’d have two beautiful children and have the privilege of watching them grow into responsible adults, one of whom fathered my only grandchild. I couldn’t have imagined how precious she would become to me.
There are many more ways my heavenly Father has blessed me unexpectedly in phenomenal ways, but my point today isn’t how He’s blessed me, but about your expectations considering all the ways He’s blessed you. As your eyes open to the light of a new day, what are your first thoughts? Are you excited to be alive and enthusiastic about facing this new day filled with expectation that God will intersect your life in positive and good ways?
Or do you have to drag yourself out of bed, forcing yourself to do what you must to get through another day with little or no expectation of anything but what’s happened the last untold numbers of days. Just same ole, same ole, filling space and time until the end comes. Is that how Jesus lived His life? Of course not, so why should we as His kids live that way?
It’s sad on many levels that the ones who knew Jesus as He was growing up were most blinded by who He was and was becoming. How so? Because they had no expectation that He would be anything more than any other commoner with whom they grew up. Their friends didn’t become Rabbi’s, didn’t preach in the Temple, didn’t perform miracles, and transform people’s futures, so why would they have expectation that anyone else who grew up with them would?
The Bible tells us in Matthew 13:58: “And so He did only a few miracles there because of their unbelief.” Ron Hutchcraft said regarding them: “He did miracles everywhere but there, and the people who knew the most about Jesus saw the least supernatural because they weren’t expecting anything.”
Is that you, faithful church attender? Are you so familiar with the miracles your knowledge has blinded you to the miracles He wants to do in your life? As we age we can be dulled to miracles by the realities of life all around us, but what if instead of being blinded we let our circumstances open our heart and mind to the miraculous?
The wife of a couple in our Senior Couples’ Group had a stroke recently. “Poor her,” right? WRONG! No feeling sorry for her! Why? Because she believes in a God of miracles! So, what did God do? He healed her completely! She’s in her late 60’s and there’s no indication that she ever had a stroke!
And that’s not all, their son, in his late 40’s, has a serious cancer. What do you think they’re expecting? Yep, you guessed it! They’re (we’re) trusting God to heal him as though he’d never had the cancer!
How about you? As you look at your life and the circumstances that seem so grim – what do YOU expect?
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 