I think one of humanity’s biggest gifts and biggest burdens is our ability to manufacture expectations. I’ve never met a person who didn’t have them. All the trouble that I’ve caused I’ve done in the service of my expectations. We lay them on each other all the time. They are said, unsaid, written, unwritten, reminded, forgotten and above all, pursued.
We don’t just lay them on each other: we preeminently have them about God. We expect that He’ll make our lives easier, that He’ll answer our prayers as we pray them, that He’ll keep us from harm, that He’ll arrange only good and not bad for us, etc. Then, when He doesn’t! Oh my, has God failed us. The reality of this situation is that leveling expectations upon God and then holding Him to them is akin to my 8 year old doing the same with me. Seriously.
This is very clear when it comes to ultimate issues: God should see that I’m basically good; He should not be too hard on me simply because I’m human; God should realize His standards are too high…blah blah blah. Baxter brings this thinking to the fore:
Do you think to bring down Christ and heaven to your own terms and to be saved hereafter with less ado? Sure, you cannot be so foolish: for God will be still the same; and Christ the same; and his promise has still the same condition, which He will never change; and godliness will be the same and as much against your carnal interest hereafter as it is now.
If you cannot leave sin now, how shall you leave it then? It will still be as sweet to your flesh as now; or if one grow stale by the decay of nature, another that is worse will spring up in its stead and though the acts abate they will all live still at the root for sin was never mortified by age. So that if ever you will turn you may best turn now.
Our expectations we will always have with us but the opportunity to lay hold of Christ by faith and be saved from our sins is here one moment and gone the next. Do not delay to turn to Christ.
Pastor Gabe
Bent World 