A Disappointing Kingdom?

Was doing an event a while back, and someone asked me if it'd turned out as I expected. My reply? “No, because I wasn't expecting anything.”

Now, this doesn't mean that I didn't believe that God was going to do something – in fact, I was absolutely convinced that He would (and, indeed, did), but quite simply that I had no idea whatsoever what it would look like, and all I could do is be there, be open, and pray that I spotted the Kingdom when it broke in.

Y'see, I think we're so often disappointed within the church because we think we know what the Kingdom's going to look like when it breaks into a particular situation – in truth, that we think we know exactly how God should do it (always a fatal flaw!) - that when it doesn't happen how we thought it would/should, we assume that it hasn't happened at all! Of course, this is an incorrect assumption (I won't go into the whole thing about thinking we know better than God), but because of it we so often miss what God is doing/has done.

Truly, His ways are not our ways, so is it surprising that the Kingdom coming hardly ever looks like our expectations of it? But then we shouldn't be surprised – this is, after all, exactly the story told in the gospels; that the religious establishment of the day were so convinced that they knew exactly what the messiah would look like and what he would do when he arrived, that they were completely unable to even conceive of Jesus as fulfilling the messianic mandate. They totally missed what God was doing, because they were focussing on what He wasn't doing, i.e. - fulfilling their expectations of how He should be doing things!

So, where does this leave us? Do we give up expecting the Kingdom to come? Clearly not! But perhaps we do have to let go of our expectations of what it'll look like when it does come, and instead wait humbly before God, remaining open and alert, in prayerful expectation that the Kingdom will come, and that God will give us eyes to see and ears to hear it when it does.

Originally posted 24/04/10