Expectations

This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Romans 5:5

Life is full of disappointment.  Anytime we create expectations we set ourselves up to get disappointment.  And anytime anyone creates an expectation of us, they too, can be disappointed.   We are very good at not being perfect.  No one sets out to create faulty expectations.  We only create expectations that have an end result - somebody else's perfect behavior.  

If I go on a diet, there is an expectation that I will achieve a different weight.  Anything else, is disappointing.  If I set a sales goal for an employee, I expect them to make it.  The examples of setting expectations are unlimited.  And yet, how often are these expectations actually met?  I submit almost never.

Results driven expectations are faulty for us mere human beings.  As long as we create them, we will be disappointed.  And as our disappointment mounts, how are we supposed to react?  Do we fire our employees? yell at our children?  seek a divorce?  Or learn that we were at fault in creating the expectation to begin with?

Simply put, we cannot be pleased with the actions of others.  Others will disappoint us.  Nobody is perfect and nobody creates faulty expectations of others.  Regardless of the measuring stick, we will not measure up.  As a result, we are all going to feel like a failure at some point in our life, and if we are honest, it will be many many times in life that we feel like a failure. It is a fact of life.

We learn best in this expectation setting environment by understanding how God deals with His expectation of us and our failure in meeting these expectations.  

God calls us to be perfect in Matthew 5:48."Be perfect therefore as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Does God expect us to be perfect then?  Is it possible that God develops the same unrealistic expectation of us that other people develop and that we even develop for ourselves?  Not really.

God is grieved by our sin and he says so in Ephesians 4:30.

But to stop here is to misunderstand the God that created us and made us perfect in His eyes.  God knows mankind is not perfect.  History has proven this over and over in that NEVER has there been a perfect person absent maybe Jesus.  As a result, of human imperfection, God did something that is rather unthinkable.  He did something that is completely illogical.  And by doing this, he fixed man's worst fault - our inability to meet expectations.

In the Bible, God often refers to a good person as a "righteous person."  He destroys cities because he cannot find one righteous person in the entire city.  Solomon states in Ecclesiastes 8:28 that among men, he found one upright man in a thousand and there are no upright women he found.  The Bible has story after story of messed up humans.  Even the best of them fail God's expectations every time.

But God fixed this disaster by telling humankind that he was sending a sacrifice to cleanse all of the human screw-ups.  God sent his son to us so that he would cleanse us from every mistake, every disappointment, every fault.  And he tells us that he "credits righteousness" to us when we believe in Him.  He makes us perfect as a result and that is all he sees is a perfect person.  He overlooks every fault, every failure, every disappointment as if it never happened.  And as a result, we are in fact perfect - without any disappointment at all.  We achieve the perfection that God wants and that he refers to in Matthew 5:48.  And he is no longer grieved by us and our actions.  

So God makes us perfect.  And as perfect people, we can no longer disappoint God nor fail to meet His expectations.

Sure, we will continue to disappoint every other human being on this planet.  Such is life.  But we can learn to be more like God in that we do not create expectations of others that are destined to fail.  And when others fail, we must become better at forgiving and knowing that we failed when we set expectations of another.

We are called by God to encourage one another.  No where are we called by God to set expectations of another.  

Encourage one another then.  Forgive those that are setting expectations of you.   Treat others as a special person loved dearly by you and, more importantly, loved by God.  He created you as you are for a reason only He knows.  And you are best just the way you are - as His creation.  

Listen  less to people and listen more to Him.  He won't set expectations.  His hope that is placed on your heart will never disappoint. He will always love you and he will always be pleased with you.  Our expectations of people will identify more mistakes.  Maybe the mistake is creating the expectation in the first place!