The Kingdom of God and Expectation Management
Expectations come naturally to humans. Whenever we think about certain future events or experiences, we can’t help but speculate. Will it be fun? Should we dread it? What will my life be like when I get married? When I take the new job? When I finally get finished with school? Human beings think about life in narrative form, and we are all hoping for a happy ending.
But expectations are also dangerous. If reality does not match our expected vision of the future, disillusionment and discontentment can easily set in. It becomes tempting to unfavorably compare what God has actually given us with the fictional dream world of our imagination.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured this dynamic well in Life Together, his profound book on Christian community: “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”
Bonhoeffer keenly described a dynamic I’ve seen many times in ministry. Whenever a Christian approaches life in the church with rigid expectations—Bonhoeffer’s “dream”—he or she will undoubtedly be let down by the real thing. Bonhoeffer claims that such an approach destroys the possibility of genuine Christian community because the dreamer enters the community with demands.
It’s impossible to love people while demanding that they play their part in your dream. You won’t benefit from the community if you’re preoccupied with complaining about it. If we’re comparing every clumsy real-life interaction with actual imperfect people against the bright standard of our imagined stock photo dream, we will miss out on the riches God intends for us.
But here’s the truth—Bonhoeffer’s observation doesn’t only apply to Christian community; it applies to all of life. So often in life, false expectation is the enemy to joy. I can’t delight in my wife as she is if I’m expecting her to conform to an imagined ideal. I won’t find contentment in an evening at home with my family if I looked forward all day to my dream of what a perfect evening should look like. I won’t find contentment in my vocation if I can’t stop likening it to the career I always hoped to have. Expectations too often mandate that God and the people around us play their parts in our own personalized screenplay where our happiness is everyone else’s greatest concern.
Jesus spent a lot of time on expectation management. Again and again, we see him teaching his disciples about the “kingdom of God.” He knew that the very mention of the phrase would awaken all kinds of false expectations in his hearers. Every first-century Jew was waiting on God’s kingdom, and every one of them had a specific vision of what it would look like when it finally came. So, when Jesus began his ministry preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2), he knew he was going to need to engage in kingdom expectation management.
Without getting into all the specific features of God’s kingdom as taught by Jesus, one conclusion stands out. Christ’s kingdom will be nothing like what any of us expect, yet Christ’s kingdom will be so much better than anything we were expecting. In Christ, the real thing is always better than our dreams.
Consider Andrew Fuller’s diary reflection on this topic: “We shall, one day, see we could not have been so well in any other condition as in that which the Lord has placed us, nor without the various afflictions we meet with by the way. I have lately thought that religion is not designed to please us now, but to profit us, to teach and dispose us to please God. And those who please him, he will please them hereafter.” For Fuller, God’s providence assures us that we are always right where we are supposed to be circumstantially, provided we see our growth in Christ’s likeness as the goal.
You’re not going to stop having expectations, and I don’t believe that should even be our aim. However, you can loosen your grip on those expectations as you submit your life to the actual conditions God has lovingly orchestrated for you. You can choose to stop demanding that others fulfill your dreams and instead trust the all-wise God who is currently working “all things” for your good in Christ (Rom 8:28-30). You can choose to believe that God’s present and God’s future is better than any dreamworld you could have ever imagined.
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