Living With Expectation

“All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation.” 1 Peter 1:3

In our home we have assigned seats at the dinner table. Well, we don’t really, but when the family is summonsed for dinner everyone comes in and sits in the same seat they have sat in for years. Why is that? Human beings are creatures of habit. We are highly predictable. For the most part, we don’t like the unexpected.

Peter tells us to live with great expectation, but what is it we are supposed to be expecting? God is often unpredictable. The Bible is full of things that we didn’t see coming. Joseph is sold into slavery and later becomes a ruler in Egypt. David, a shepherd boy, becomes king of Israel. Jesus, the Messiah, is born of a virgin. Peter walks on water and is later delivered from prison by an angel. Saul, a church persecutor becomes a missionary. The list goes on. These events were both unpredictable and unexpected. But God is the God of the unexpected.

We don’t seem to have any problem expecting negative things to happen in our lives. Sometimes we have more faith in Murphy’s law that “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong!” then we do in God. But what if we begin to expect God to do the unexpected in our lives? What if we looked at our circumstance and said, “God, I don’t know how you are going to answer this prayer, but I know that you raised Christ from the dead, so this is nothing for you”? Because of His great mercy toward us and His mighty power over even death itself, we can look to Him and live our lives with great expectation.