Living with great expectation means we can and should be excited and looking forward to Heaven, rather than dismissing it as something that happens at the end of this life when we’re finished accomplishing whatever we have in our own plans.
When you are excited about an upcoming trip it’s all you think about, the only thing you’re concerned with, it consumes your every aspect of living. Nothing can put you in a bad mood because you’ve got the countdown app on your phone and every time something less than pleasing happens you just shrug it off and say “oh well, in 3 weeks my toes will be in the sand and I’ll be falling asleep to the sound of the ocean.”
Why don’t we think of Heaven that way? Getting to Heaven is the trip of a lifetime…literally. So why do we let things that don’t pertain to Heaven bother us?
People somehow get this crazy idea that when you become a Christian all your struggles will be over. Actually, quite the opposite is true. The Bible even tells us that we will suffer for our faith, which is not the most compelling argument to use when you want to win people over to Christianity, but we also know that we have hope in Christ and that we won’t suffer always. How we respond to the trials we experience, however says a lot about our faith. Our faith is more precious than gold to God. It is so important to Him. (v.6-7)
Whether we waver in faith shows how much we trust God. Think of Peter walking on water. He began to sink when he began to doubt Jesus’s ability to keep him afloat, when he needed reassurance that Jesus could actually save him, when his faith wavered. Our faith will be tested by our ability to remain obedient in difficult times. Whether it’s with spiritual disciplines – will we continue to pray to God gratefully and sing His praises joyfully when we don’t know whether we’re going to get a job after we graduate or how we’re going to pay the next month’s bills? – or with following God’s commandments and promptings, our choice to be obedient speaks volumes about the faith we have in our hearts.
Understandably, it’s hard to put feet to our faith when we can’t see the very Person in whom we have faith. This is exactly what verses 8 and 9 refer to. It’s a little bit different than a long-distance relationship. When dating someone who does not share the same zip code, you may not see that special girl or guy often -- maybe every couple of weeks, maybe once a month – and even still you claim to love them. You trust them. You would die for them. Your heart skips a beat every time your phone notifies you that you have a text. You send back three smiley faces and a heart-shaped icon. You love them. You trust them. But you don’t see them. But with God, we try to love Him, we try to trust Him, but it’s not like we can see Him face to face once a month. God’s invisibility makes Him seem so distant, sometimes even emotionless. We begin to practice the out of sight, out of mind theory – we can’t see Him, so our thoughts of Him become less and less frequent.
When talking about love, people often have different definitions, interpretations, even ways of showing it. You could imagine that for someone as grand as God one’s love for Him would have to be pretty spectacular. It doesn’t compare to the love we feel for our parents or significant other, and doesn’t even touch the scale of the same love you have for your favorite food or activity. But the love of our Father – a love so deep that He would send the only son He had to die for sins that we committed, not the sin He committed, that’s love. And here, Peter is commenting on those who love God with such incredible passion. And we haven’t even seen Him! How is that even possible?
Wendell Berry’s famed literature character “Jayber Crow” says:
“I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all….”
Now, that’s someone incredible worth loving.
We wrap up this section with verses 11 and 12, which give us hope that the promises of Scripture will indeed be carried out. Just because things haven’t happened in the way we expect them at the time we expect doesn’t mean they won’t happen and they won’t be amazing.
Reflection Questions
- When does your faith waver?
- What do you think life would be like if we knew all of the details of God’s plans for us?
- Have you ever thought about living with expectation versus society’s practice of living for the moment?
- Does God’s invisibility make you feel as though He is distant or inaccessible?
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