When God Doesn’t Meet Your Expectations
“Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.” — Matthew 11:6
We all have expectations.
We expect certain things from our families, our marriages, our careers, our friendships, and, if we’re honest, we also develop expectations about God. We pray, and somewhere in our minds we imagine how the answer should come. We trust Him with a situation and assume we know what the outcome ought to look like. We believe that if we are faithful, obedient and prayerful, certain things should follow.
But what happens when reality doesn’t match our expectations?
John the Baptist found himself in that very place. John had preached about a Messiah who would come with power and judgment. He expected the One who came after him to deal decisively with evil. Yet John was sitting in prison while Herod remained on the throne. Evil hadn’t disappeared, and the man who had faithfully proclaimed God’s truth was still in chains.
Meanwhile, Jesus was doing wonderful things, but not necessarily the things John expected Him to do.
That kind of disappointment can be dangerous because unmet expectations can slowly become spiritual confusion. We begin asking, “If God is really who I thought He was, why is this happening?”
The answer Jesus gave John is fascinating. He didn’t explain everything. He didn’t give John a timetable or tell him why his circumstances had unfolded as they had. Instead, He pointed John back to the evidence: the blind were seeing, the lame were walking, the deaf were hearing, the dead were being raised, and the gospel was being preached to the poor. Jesus was still doing exactly what Scripture said the Messiah would do.
John simply wasn’t seeing the whole picture.
Neither do we.
There will be times when God’s ways don’t make sense to us. We see one piece of the puzzle; God sees the completed picture. We see today’s circumstances; God sees eternity. Faith doesn’t mean we never have expectations. It means that when our expectations collide with God’s ways, we ultimately surrender our expectations to Him.
Sometimes the most mature prayer we can pray is not, “Lord, make this happen the way I want,” but, “Not my will, but Yours be done.”
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