How many times have your expectations failed you? Has anyone in your life failed to meet your expectation of them? When you think back to certain events in your past, did they happen exactly how you thought they would? There are times when our expectations give us false hope. On the flip side, you may keep extremely low expectations toward something and are pleasantly surprised with the real outcome. Either way, it is very important for us to have accurate and realistic expectations of others and of life in general.
Philippians 3:20 says “for our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” That word ‘conversation’ literally means “citizenship” in the original Greek. Do we walk about our day with the mindset that we are not citizens of this world, but citizens of a far better one? Do we wake up every morning with excitement knowing that at any moment, we could meet Christ in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:16)? Are we actually excited for our future eternal lives in Heaven, or are we so caught up in this temporal world, where moth and rust corrupts (Matthew 6:19-20)? If we live every moment expecting that Jesus could take us home in the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15:52), that should change how we live our lives. The imminence of death or the rapture should change how we use our time here on this earth. It should change how we think and how we act. It should cause us to double-check our priorities. This expectation of Heaven quickly approaching should fuel our reality; it would become our reality.
Rather than dwelling so much on the unrealistically high expectations we have of imperfect human beings, let’s shift our expectations to the fact that we are here on this Earth, just passing through, on our way to a much better place with a perfect God!