This doesn’t look like the picture …

If you haven’t had the “pizza experience” as pictured above, you’ve likely had a similar encounter with a product.

From the half empty bag of chips to the taco filled mostly with lettuce, what is advertised about products often don’t meet our expectations once we’ve purchased them.

I recently wrote about having expectations with people, and how that often leads to disappointment as well. But have you ever noticed how our expectations regarding God are different from those we have for others or things?

When it comes to God, we either saddle Him with expectations that have no biblical basis to them, or we just don’t expect anything from Him.

We often toss at God our list of wants in a fast prayer, and then depart mentally from Him, expecting Him to get busy accomplishing for us what we have asked. When it doesn’t work that way, we return to make our complaints. Expecting God to be a divine provider of our selfish desires results in failed expectations.

“… Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong — you want only what will give you pleasure,” James 4:2b-3.

God never promised to do anything we asked so long as we prayed for it. What He did promise was this:

“Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires,” Psalm 37:4

When our desires are aligned with God’s desires, and when He is the delight of our lives, it is then that prayer yields great results. We can then have great expectations from God!

“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results,” James 5:16.

Those who trust God with their lives never have to be concerned about a disappointing “product” from God.

“Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think,” Ephesians 3:20.

Scotty