Oswald Chambers’ book, My Utmost For His Highest, opens the year with Philippians 1:20. “…my ernest expectation and hope that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death.” What Paul seems to be saying here, is that his expectation of himself is that he will always bring glory to Jesus. He expected himself to be bold and unashamed in the way he lived for Jesus and in the way he died.
One of the things people always want to know when someone undertakes something as big as the World Race, is what they expect to get out of the experience. When I sat down to write this post, I was thinking about all of the things I could say about my expectations. I could say I’m expecting God to do great miracles, like heal the sick or multiply food. After all, those are the kind of stories you expect to hear from the mission field. I could could go on and on about how I’m expecting to see revival fall and multitudes of people get saved; how the Holy Spirit is going to fall on me and my team members and we will have huge, life-changing revelations through our experiences. Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are great expectations to have. But in some ways, I feel like if I express my expectations in this way, I’m sort of limiting God and what He could do through me.
My expectations of what will happen on this journey shouldn’t be about what God could do for me; they should be about what I can do for God. That being said, my expectations for this journey are that I will surrender myself to a place of being continually broken and reshaped and refined. I want my life and the way I live it to be a perfect reflection of God and His glory. There are no actions I could take in my own strength that would accomplish this goal. But I expect that through this journey, if I surrender myself into God’s hands, I just might grow a heart that beats with God’s heart; a heart that breaks with what breaks His heart; a heart that is big enough to love the whole world.
