Day 2418 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.


2 Kings 5:11 NIV

How many times have we been instantly upset because something didn't go how we expected it to go? Safe to say that we've all been there countless times! We dream up these grand illusions of these perfect circumstances and remain completely unaware of the fact that we're probably just setting ourselves us to be disappointed. Life never goes how we expect it to go. And when it comes to our faith, well, we may as well throw everything we thought we knew out the window and prepare to be surprised.

It’s not that we don’t trust God’s plans. It’s not that we don’t want His will to be done. It’s often just that we want His plans and His will to go along with our expectations. Our expectations make sense to us. We’ve spent plenty of time tinkering and tweaking our desires and goals so that they fit just right with what we understand. If it doesn’t make sense to us then it makes us doubt everything. If something doesn’t go according to our plans then we’re liable to freak out and spin off into some sort of tantrum.

What we need to understand is something that we’ve talked about in so many of these posts. God’s plans are vastly different than ours. Things just may not go according to how we want or expect them to go. We can’t see the whole picture, don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and can’t begin to imagine what lies ahead. But God can do all of the above. So while we may expect things to go a certain way, all that really matters is that they go according to God’s will.

Reading through this story last night and I couldn’t help but feel the personal connection. We take our wants, worries, and problems to God and ask Him to help. But maybe we don’t get the help we want. Maybe we don’t get help right away. Maybe God asks us to wait, to trust, or to do something that doesn’t make any sense to us. But that’s what faith requires. He needs us to trust in Him and His timing above our ideals and desires.

God will help us through whatever comes our way. He will help us every step through every day with every challenge that we’re going to come up against. Just don’t be surprised if it doesn’t go like you expect. Personally, I’ve found that expectations only lead to disappointments. But when we lay down that desire to control or dictate the outcomes of life then we can simply embrace faith that God knows what He’s doing and that it will all work out in the end.

We have to stop setting up stumbling blocks in our own lives. Faith is hard enough as it is, we definitely don’t need to make it worse by expecting things to go a certain way. Odds are that what God has in store is nothing that we could begin to imagine. So there’s just no point in spending our time getting our hopes up that it will all go a certain way only to see all that time wasted when things inevitably go differently. That time we spend trying to figure out life or find a way through what lies ahead would be better spent asking God for the humility to trust in His plans instead.

If we want God to do His thing then we should understand that He’s going to do it His way. While some other path may make more sense to us, all that really matters is the final outcome. Don’t build yourself up on hopes that things will go a specific way. Just trust that God will get us where He needs us to be and will help us along the way. It doesn’t matter how He does it, all that matters is that He does it!

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