The last directive of our expectations that we want to talk about is God. We have all sorts of unmet expectations of God. We think He’s going to work a certain way and He doesn’t. We think He’s a system that’s controlled and predictable. He’s not. We think He’s just there to listen to us and give us things and do whatever we ask of Him, and we think He can be manipulated. He can’t. We think He wouldn’t really send us to hell for our bad behavior, but . . . we think you can see where this is going.

 

There is a personhood of God that we must understand. He has His own will and His own plans and His own desires, and He can make His own choices. We discuss having a right view of God in the Know God section, but do you realize how often we expect God to act in a certain way and are disappointed? That hurts! And it turns us toward mistrust and disobedience if left unchecked. Really, what this comes down to is that we want our own wills to be done ahead of God’s. And it’s OK to ask for our wills to be done—Jesus even did that (Matthew 26:39), but He also concluded that God’s way was better.

Now, sometimes our expectations of God are unmet simply from us not getting our way when we ask Him for something. Other times, we project our expectations on God based on the performance of others. We expect that God is not trustworthy, that He won’t help us, that He doesn't care for us and our desires, all because other people acted that way toward us.

 

In the same way that our unmet expectations of others lead us to isolation, our unmet expectations of God lead us to build walls in our heart to keep Him out. We hide from Him to avoid the hurt of disappointment from the one whose love matters most. But what do we do with this pain? What do we do with our expectations? What do we do with our disappointment?

Continue to What Do You Really Want? ->