What Do You Expect?

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

What is faith exactly?  Well I presume that we would know it’s a lot of things.  But maybe we ought to start with what its not.  Faith is not a desire. Sometimes we think it’s that way.  But it’s not “wishing and hoping and praying.”  You know since Buck started singing, I’ve just been trying to compete with him.  Sometimes these things can lead to faith but they’re not faith themselves.  Its also not pretending, like saying things are really good when they’re really bad. It’s not trying to con yourself.  It’s also not a feeling.  I really think a lot of people think maybe it is.  I’ve had many people come up to me and say, “You know, I just don’t feel God’s presence in my life,” as though that equates with faith.  Now, like love, its great to have feelings, but love and faith are based on facts.  Faith is the evidence of things not seen.  It is also not really a leap.  Often faith is described as a leap, like a leap of faith.  Certainly sometimes faith has to be exercised when you don’t have all the facts in, but it’s not this idea of standing on a precipice and there’s complete darkness and you just have to jump out!  One of the best examples of describing it this way is the Indiana Jones movie “The Last Crusade.”  Indiana Jones is just about to get to the Holy Grail, and there is a huge chasm in front of him.  He has to step out with no evidence that there is something there.  It’s not quite like that.  Someone once said that faith is better described as a positive expectation.  You know expectations are exceptionally powerful in our lives.  Often the biggest hurts that we have are because we had a certain expectation that was not fulfilled.  They’re very powerful in our lives. 

Expectations.  I think that’s a great word for faith.  It may not be everything that faith is, but it is certainly a big part of it.  But it’s not simply expectation by itself.  It is an expectation based on who God is, His character and His power.  It is interesting to me that in the Bible God is not described exclusively in terms of power, the all-powerful One or the person who can do this or that.  Or even as in the Muslim world, God is great.  Well certainly, God is all those things, but God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.  God is the God of David. God is the God of Israel, of the church, the God in relationships.  And faith is the expectation of a person who loves us, and who is all-powerful and great.  Faith is a positive expectation of the Lord. 

In Matthew 9, we see these expectations and I want to read this as a scripture lesson to you.  Now it’s a little bit of a lengthy passage but I want you to hear the story because there are several episodes in it as it goes along, all having to do with faith as expectation.  Listen to God’s word as it comes to us from Matthew 9.

Then John’s disciples came and asked him, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”  Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bride groom morn when he is with them? The time will come when the bride groom will be taken from them.  Then they will fast.  No one sows a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment for the patch will pull away from the garment making the tear worse.  Neither do men poor new wine into an old wineskin.  If they do, the skins will burst.  The wine will run out and the wine skins will be ruined.  No they poor new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”  While he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died but come put your hand on her, and she will live.”  Jesus got up and went with him and so did his disciples.  Just then woman who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak.  She said to herself, “If only I touch His cloak, I will be healed.”  Jesus turned and saw her, “Take heart daughter, your faith has healed you.”  And the woman was healed from that moment.  When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd he said, “Go away! The girl is not dead, but asleep.”  They laughed at him.  After the crowd had been put outside he went in and took the girl by the hand and she got up.  News of this spread through out that region.  As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out have mercy on us Son of David.  When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him and he asked them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”  “Yes Lord,” they replied.  Then he touched their eyes and said, “According to you faith will it be done to you.”  And their sight was restored.  Jesus warned them sternly, “See that no one knows about this.”  But they went out and spread the news all over the region.

This is the reading of God’s holy word.  Amen

Would you pray with me?

O Father, we come before you and ask that you would open our ears and eyes, according to our expectations.  Help us to expect that you will be here among us.  Help us to know that you are here, touching our hearts and our minds.  We pray in your name.  Amen.

What is Faith?  I think it is expectation.  In Matthew 9 we see the difference a positive expectation of God makes, example after example.  And in this passage Jesus is teaching about a new thing.  As the crowd says later, something that has never been seen in Israel.  And what is that? It is the new wine, if you will, of the Kingdom.  This new wine is powerful.  It is lively.  It tastes great.  It brings healing and love.  He was using the example of this new wine going into a new wineskin.  Perhaps for our purposes we might see again this new wineskin as the kingdom.  The wine is the kingdom and the wineskin is our faith.  In order to accommodate this new wine you have to have the new wineskin of faith or expectation, again, example after example in this passage.  The first one is a man who comes up to Jesus and says, “My daughter has died, but if you come, she will live,” amazing faith or expectation.  And so he goes to the place where this little girl is and the mourners are already there. In that culture there were people who are paid to come and mourn.  So they had the flute players and they had this and that.  They were already there and he tells them to go away.  She is just sleeping.  Now Jesus knows that she is dead.  But they laugh at him.  Again, a certain kind of expectation.  He goes and heals the little girl, raising her from the dead.  On the way, there’s a woman who’s been bleeding for twelve years.  She too has an expectation.  If only I can just touch the hem of his garment, I’ll be healed.  And Jesus says, “According to your faith, your expectation, you will be healed.”  Your expectation has healed you.   Then two blind men come, and Jesus asks a pointed question, “Do you believe or do you expect that I can do this for you?”  “Oh yes Lord.  Oh yes Lord, we believe.”  He says, “According to you faith, according to your expectation of how this is going to turn out, may it be done to you.”  And they were healed.  Then a little later in a part of the passage we didn’t read, Jesus goes and heals a demoniac, a man possessed by a demon.  Of course, this man couldn’t have any expectations, but again, the theme continues.  Because after he heals the man, the Pharisees say, it is by the prince of demons that he throws out demons.  These people had seen Jesus do miracles, but because they’d had certain expectations of the Messiah, they couldn’t see him as the Messiah.  But all the people were running around going, “Oh we’ve never seen anything like this in Israel.”  Their views were being changed. 

Now as we go through this, I want to pause and just ask the question, “What is your faith like?”  You may think you have great faith.  But think of it in terms of expectations.  What is your expectation of life?  What is your expectation of God?  Measure your faith by that word instead just talking about it in terms of faith. Faith has come to mean very little to us because we hear it all the time.  What are you expectations?  You see there is a scriptural principle of expectation.  That principle is that we tend to get what we expect out of life.  We see what we expect to see.  We feel what we expect to feel.  For the most part we act like we expect to act.  We achieve what we expect to achieve.  Expectations are exceptionally powerful.  We are what we expect to be. 

Norman Vincent Peel tells a story about going through the shops in the narrow streets of Hong Kong, and he came across a tattoo parlor.  In the shop there was a display of decorations that could be imprinted on your skin; one flag, slogans, anchors, daggers, crossbones, you name it.  One which caught his eye was the phrase born to lose.  He was so curious he went in and asked the proprietor who spoke a little bit of English.  He said, “Do people really get this tattoo?”  He said, “Yes, many do, in fact, the last one had it emblazoned on his chest.”  “Why on earth would anyone what to be brand with such a gloomy slogan like that?” The Chinese man shrugged his shoulders and said, “Before tattoo on chest, tattoo on mind.”  As an aside tattoos have become very popular in our culture, and I’m saying getting a tattoo is a sin. I’m not sure it is. But is sure says a lot about you, particularly what you put on.  The fact is we can live by fear or we can live by faith or positive expectation.  A lot of us live by the former.  Even our language betrays us.  We focus on what we don’t want.  “I don’t want to have a divorce.  I don’t want to get sick.  I don’t want to go bankrupt.  I don’t to lose this sale.”  We focus on what we don’t want instead of what we want.  Whereas Paul said, “I know whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day.”  I am not talking about a cockeyed optimism, but we are to positive because we belong to a God who is in control of all things and who loves us.

There are three things that I think we ought to know, and we find these things in a story of David.  What I like to do with the Bible sometimes is when I just want to be entertained or edified in a certain kind of way, I go back and read all the stories.  The Bible is full of them, especially in Genesis and Exodus, Samuel and Kings.  I really love the stories of David.  We’ve all heard of the story of David and Goliath.  You know you’ve heard of Goliath, a guy about nine feet tall and about this wide. Oh, well he must be a mythological figure.  Well I think I’ve met some of those guys on the football field.  I don’t know. I’m pretty big, but the guys I used to play against were a lot bigger than I was.  We’ve seen some people like this, huge people.  And here was this huge man who was terrifying the armies of Israel. He would come out every day and say, “I defy the armies of Israel and your God.  Send out a champion, and will fight to the death.  Who ever wins, wins the battle.”  Well all of the Israelites were terrified.  No one would come forward.  Finally here comes a teenager, a young boy.  He says, “Let know one lose heart on a count of this Philistine.  Your servant will go and fight.”  Audacious.  He says, ‘I’ve got a slingshot.  I can take this guy on.’  Here are his expectations.  He says, “The Lord that delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”  Even in the face of incredible odds, he expected the best.  He didn’t say, “Oh this guy’s too big.  We’ll never kill him.”

So the first principle here is that expecting the best honors God. When David goes up to fight the Philistine he says, “The whole world will know that there is a God in Israel.”  What he was going to do was be a witness.  “And those that gathered here will know that is was not by sword or spear that the Lord saves, but the battle is the Lord’s, and He will give all of you into our hands.”  The fact is, great expectations please God.  We honor God with our expectations. We dishonor God within the context of our faith, we expect the worst.  Again, sometimes the worst does happen.  But we have a promise from God that he is with us even in the midst of terrible things.

Expecting the best increases ability.  I’ve been a jock all my life, and I will witness to you it is true if you expect to lose, you will.  If you have a down in the mouth attitude when you face your opponent, it’s like the strength is sapped out of you.  There have been a couple of times in my career as a football player, when I walked out and felt like I could conquer the world, and I went out and played like it. Only a couple of times, but it did work out.  I wished I could have bottled it and sold it.  Some of the best games I ever played were when I expected to do well.  When we act in faith, we receive additional strength.  As David went out to fight the Philistine, it says he ran quickly to the battle line to meet him.  Reaching into his bag, he took out a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in the forehead.  What a shot!  He was obviously able to hit most anything, but in the midst of that pressure and having to hit it right at that moment, what a shot it was.  So expecting the best honors God, it increases our ability, but it also encourages other people.  David ran and stood over Goliath after he killed him, and he cut his head off.  Then the men of Israel surged forward with a shout and pursued the Philistines to the entrance of Gath into the gates of Akron.  Nothing like being on a winning team.

So how do you get this way?  How do we work on being more positive?  I’m not just talking about positive thinking.  I’m talking about positive thinking in the context of faith, in the context of expectation, that we have a God who is with us. 

The principle is, number one, start your day with faith and not doubt.  In Psalm 5, which was written by David himself, it says this:  “Morning by morning, Oh Lord, you hear my voice.  Morning by morning I lay in my request before you and wait in expectation.”  How many of you are naturally grumpy in the morning?  I’m gonna have to admit, you know sometimes we blame everything on genetics, but I will say this, you didn’t deal with my mother for the first two hours of the morning.  I have to admit I’m a little like that. I’m not a morning person.  But sometimes that is just an excuse.  When we wake up in the morning, maybe its not how we feel, but how we start.  Do we start with thanksgiving?  Do we start with expectation that God is with us?  That whatever we face, bad or good, that God will be with us.  You know one of the things I did not read when I was a kid that my wife when we got married, brought into the relationship, she brought in a lot of books.  She loves books.  She brought in Winnie the Pooh.  I had so much fun reading Winnie the Pooh, especially to my children. In that Winnie the Pooh there was a character of Eeyore.  I will read you a passage about Eeyore. Eeyore the old gray donkey stood by the side of the stream and he looked at himself in the water.  “Pathetic,” he said.  “That’s what it is, pathetic.”  He turned to walk slowly downstream for about 20 yards, splashed across it and walk slowly back to the other side.  Then he looked at himself in the water again.  “As I thought, no better from this side, but nobody minds, nobody cares.  Pathetic, that’s what it is.”  There was a crackling noise in the bracken behind him and out came Winnie the Pooh.  “Good morning, Eeyore,” said Pooh. “Good morning, Pooh,” said Eeyore gloomily, “if it is a good morning which I doubt.”  Some of us are Eeyore in the morning.  We wake up pessimistic.  The fact is, God says to start your day with faith or expectation. 

The second thing we can do is look for something good in everyone or everything. You know in the military we are fond of saying we want people to watch our six, or the watch our backside.  In other words, that includes watching it against friends who may be out to get you.  People are not basically good, yet we are told to look for the good in people.  I really believe that.  The biggest example is Jesus himself.  Jesus was constantly looking for the good in His disciples even though they constantly didn’t get, they constantly did the wrong thing, and they even betrayed him in the end.  One time Jesus said, ‘how long am I going to have to put up with you guys?”  Yet he still wished for their good and looked for their good.  As Christians we look to the fact that as Romans says, “We know all things work together for good. Though not all good, they all work together.  For those who love God are called according to His purpose.”  All things don’t work together for good for everybody; they work for those who belong to God.  As someone said, “Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.” 

Watch your words.  Don’t let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but only what is helpful for building others up that it may benefit those who listen.  Reading this again has made me realize that I need to think about the goal of my words.  What am I trying to accomplish?  Even when I have to say a hard thing, what am I after?  Am I just simply out to gig someone, to hurt them or just to flash and burn?  Or is it to build someone up?  That includes our selves.  Our self talk is very important.  Like Eeyore says, “Pathetic.”  He looks at himself and says, “Pathetic.”  Is that what you say to yourself?  Now I realize looking in the mirror early in the morning isn’t that great of an experience, but we’re not pathetic.  Associate with positive people and avoid complainers.  “Bad company corrupts good character,” says Paul.  I am not saying we should associate with people who are yes people.  Again, an example in the army is that every now and then you hear when you do an action review or something like that, “Now we don’t want any complaining.  We don’t want any bad things said. We want positive statements.”  Well everybody goes ‘what are you talking about?’  The point is that it’s okay to say negative things, but there is a difference between complaining and saying things which might be helpful.

Last, but not least, when you pray, thank God in advance.  Thank God in advance.  Even Jesus says that.  “Have faith in God.  I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain. ‘Go throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes what he says will happen.  It will be done to him.  Therefore whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it.”  Notice the passed tense.  “And it will be yours.” Or someone translated this verse. It’s Mark 11:22, “when you pray believe you’ve got and you’ll get it.”  Faith is not believing as the secular world says, faith is not believing what you know isn’t so.  Faith is evidence of the thing hoped for.  Faith is evidence of the thing hoped for.  We go back full circle to the issue of character.  When we are told to have faith and expectation, it is not in the sky or the weather or just something out there.  It is in the God who loves us. When Jesus raises Lazarus, He walks up to the tomb and says, “Father, I thank you that you have already heard me.”  That’s positive expectation.  That is faith. 

As you go out in life, ask yourself the question, “what is your faith like?”  Or better yet, what is your expectation? And if you’re like me you find that your expectations aren’t what they should be, ask God for help to increase your expectations in His power and His rule of this world and His love for you.

Let us pray:

Father in Heaven, we give You our faith and our expectations.  We thank You that you love us wherever we are in life and wherever our faith is.  That You understand us and You bring us along.  But we ask You, Lord, to help us to have great expectations.  Not just in ourselves, but in You, who is the Lord of life and death and eternal life. We do pray these things in Jesus name.  Amen.