I realize we are quickly approaching Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but this year I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Palm Sunday. Believe me, I love the reminder of the resurrection and what Jesus did so that I can be saved, but I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to Palm Sunday until this year. Maybe it’s because I’m in a strange season of life, trying to determine where or what God is tugging me toward, or maybe it’s because I just needed to see something to shift my perspective a little bit.
Less than a week before Jesus was betrayed, brutally beaten and crucified, He had come into Jerusalem to a grand reception! It isn’t called the “Triumphal Entry” for nothing! He was riding on a borrowed donkey’s colt, and the multitudes came out to greet Him. They laid their cloaks before Him on the road and waived palm branches before Him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” as He rode to the temple. Just think of that sight! Crowds hailing Him as King and publicly acknowledging Him as Messiah. So what in the world happened that caused them to turn on Him so quickly and strongly? How do you go from one extreme to the other in a matter of a few days? The answer really lies in one word: Expectations.
Expectations are interesting things. The dictionary defines “expectation” as a strong belief something will happen or to be the case. Our expectations in life depend on the information we have been given and the way in which we interpret that information. For example, I expect that my husband is going to do the yard work because he said he would do it. I believe he will do it, but I also have my expectations of when it will happen and what it will include. When he does finally go out to do the yard work, he decides not to weed the flowerbeds or sweep off the sidewalk, and I get upset. Why? Because he didn’t do things the way I believed they would be done. 
There may be a good reason why he did things differently, but all I see is my unmet expectations. In my original conversation, all he said was that he was going to take care of the yard. He did not reveal other details of what he planned to do, and I created additional expectations based on the way I would do things. My expectation that the yard work would be done rests on believing what he told me. My expectation of HOW it would be done rests in everything else I assumed from his statement. Our expectations are colored by our past experiences, and they deeply affect our emotions. When we expect something bad to happen and it doesn’t, we get excited and happy. When we expect something good to happen and it doesn’t, we become upset, sad, depressed or even angry. We’ve all experienced the reality of that roller coaster when we interpreted something differently, and suddenly our world is turned upside-down because something unexpected took place.
So back to Palm Sunday, it was a day filled with people who definitely had expectations! Some lived in Jerusalem and some were traveling there for the Passover celebration. They had read the prophesies of old and knew that God was coming to deliver them. They were being oppressed by Roman rule, so when Jesus, their “King,” showed up, they were excited. Deliverance was on the way! They expected Him to ride in and destroy their enemies, deliver them and set up HIS kingdom. They expected to see fire and fight in Him. They expected a political leader. They thought their day had finally come, so they exclaimed His praises as He rode through town. This was a GREAT day for them, but then things started to change quickly. They listened to things He was saying and when His message didn’t fit their expectations, they turned on Him. He said His Kingdom wasn’t of this world (John 18:36). He didn’t argue or even defend Himself when He faced His accusers (Matt 27:12-14). He didn’t answer the charges or even respond to them. By all standards, He appeared weak. He certainly did NOT look like a King about to take over! As a result, it must have confirmed (in the minds of many) that He was not the Messiah, and if He wasn’t the Messiah, then He was definitely a blasphemer as charged. So in a matter of days, the shouts of the crowd went from “Hosanna” to “Crucify!” When given a choice of who to release, they chose to put a convicted thief and murderer back into their community rather than someone who had only done good to others. They were THAT convinced it was impossible He was who He claimed to be, because a King would not come as He came. A King would not just lie down to be slaughtered.
The crowds that shouted Hosanna on Palm Sunday found themselves with serious unmet expectations. The Messiah they longed for and believed in did not show up like they expected Him to, but He did show up, and He did deliver them, and also all of us. They just couldn’t accept God had a plan far greater than their temporary political situation. It was hard to understand after years, or generations, of expecting something different that this could actually be their Messiah, but God was at work on His master plan to change everything for humankind. He was working things out for their good, even when they couldn’t see it or refused to see it.
How many times in our lives have we lived out our own personal “Holy Week?” I have been in difficult situations where I was depending on the many promises of God. I believe He knows and cares about what I’m going through, has the power to deliver me, and is working things out for my good. I have shouted “Hosanna” in my expectations and perceptions of what He has said, but then He starts working things out differently than what I expected. He starts doing or allowing things that I just don’t understand. If we aren’t careful, we watch what’s happening and start to think that maybe He isn’t who we thought He was. We look around and start getting angry that He isn’t doing more “smiting” of our enemies or my circumstances and is instead leaving you or me alone to fight for ourselves. It doesn’t take long for us to think on these things before we end up angry because it seems He doesn’t care enough to take care of us. In our own way, we go from shouting “Hosanna,” to shouting, “Crucify!” We start letting our doubts, or even anger, that arises from unmet expectations to drive our perspective, and we can end up choosing to set free the worst of ourselves rather than to trust God knows what He is doing.
Life is hard. We were never promised that it would be easy. As a matter of fact, we are told repeatedly in the Bible that we will have trials and struggles, but God is always working for our good. It’s just so incredibly hard to accept that as truth when our reality feels so much like the opposite. Yes, God has the ability to come riding into our circumstances, proclaim Himself as King and destroy whatever or whoever is oppressing us, but we can’t see the big picture. Sometimes He is working on a much grander and better plan for our deliverance than we can see. Just because it doesn’t make sense to us, doesn’t mean God isn’t who He says He is, or doing what He said He would do.
There are many beautiful pictures in the Easter story – pictures of grace and mercy, of sacrifice and redemption – but this year my prayer is that we remember the crowds. I pray we remember the way their unmet expectations of HOW God was going to deliver them caused such a drastic change in a matter of days. 
Unmet expectations can cause us to doubt what we know to be true. When we hold so tightly to our version of what our deliverance should look like, or how it should come, we end up spending our lives looking for the next best solution. We waste our energy trying to resolve it ourselves and end up sacrificing our peace and joy in the process. Sometimes our deliverance comes through waiting. Sometimes it comes through struggles. And sometimes we are yelling “Crucify” at the very One who is delivering us – all because He isn’t doing it as we expected.
So look up, my friends, and I will look with you. I will look to the cross and see not only love and redemption, but also a reminder that God is working a master plan for my good. And when it seems like God is doing nothing, He is doing something exceedingly, abundantly above all I could ask or think. I just need to stop shouting my plans at Him and trust in the fulfillment of His own.
Blessings and a very happy Easter to you all!
I’ve thought a lot this week about hoping and wishing for things. There was a situation in my personal life that looked like it was going to work out better than we had expected, but then it just didn’t pan out the way we had hoped or wished. It seems to be the way of life for us, and you’d think we would learn to not expect anything at all. After all, it would be easier to not hope for anything and be pleasantly surprised, than it would be to think something is going to work out and have it fall through. Does this sound like days, weeks, or even years you have experienced in your own life? When I consider the possibility of abandoning hope or expectations that things will work out, it flies in the face of what I have believed. I’ve always believed God is working everything out for my ultimate good, but what happens when you feel let down over and over until you stop asking for things?
When my situation came up this past week, it looked like God was doing something above and beyond for us, but then it didn’t happen. Do you know what that made me think? I started thinking “here we go again; God must be disappointed in us to dangle this out there and then yank it away.” I was totally disappointed in God and it temporarily undermined my trust in Him. Yep, my so‑called faith took a tumble into the abyss for a little while. But why? Because my perspective was out of whack on two points:
Gratitude does not come easy in the storms of life. When we start jumping to conclusions about what God is or isn’t doing in any given situation, instead of leaving things in His hands and trusting Him to do what is best for us, we often end up disappointed. The majority of our issues, however, come from thinking that the “best” means the most lucrative or easiest. Our definition of “good” and “bad” are based on what we can see with our own eyes, or ideas, but God has the vision and perspective of eternity and knows every aspect of our situations. My uncle used to say, “We don’t really want to trust God to take care of us because what if He doesn’t take care of us like we want to be taken care of?” I think that is more accurate than most of us would like to admit. God doesn’t want us to get so conditioned by life that we lose our passion, joy and peace. He doesn’t want us to ask Him for things and not care what the answer is. He wants us to be content in the outcome of our requests as a result of understanding who He is and how much He loves us, not because we simply stopped expecting anything from Him.
As people of faith, we know that eventually everything works out for our good, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to deal with tears, discouragement, anger or depression along the way. What matters is how we keep walking in spite of it. It doesn’t mean we won’t have times where we are so tired or discouraged that we curl up into a ball to try and catch our breath; what matters is what we do with that breath when it returns. Will we use it to perpetuate the darkness around or within us, or will we lift our voice like Paul and Silas in prison and praise the One who loves us and has promised to take care of us?
A few years ago, I had an experience at a church association meeting that was so egregious that I was compelled to write about it. If you haven’t read that post, it’s worth the read. (
I once had a pastor tell me that the reason Eve was deceived instead of Adam was because the serpent knew that women were totally susceptible to believing a lie. Basically, that she was an easy mark, so-to-speak, which is why she was deceived and Adam was not. In so many words, he said that Satan figured he had a better chance with her because she was a woman, and the fact he was successful in deceiving her proved his point was true. This pastor went on to say that the reason women “as a class of humanity” are more susceptible to deception than men, is because it is part of our “innate female psyche.” By nature, Eve was not equipped to make the kind of decisions that the serpent presented to her, because she was not capable of weighing objective facts and coming to an appropriate decision. Although this pastor did state that there were exceptions to the fact that women make decisions based on a value system rather than on objective facts, he also stated these stereotypes are backed up by scripture AND scientific data (like the Meyers Briggs test). Whether you are a man or a woman, I imagine you are scratching your head right about now. Trust me, it didn’t sit well with me at the time either, but I later realized no amount of discussion or rebuttal could ever change the heart of that pastor. Only God can do that, and it is for God alone to handle.
The Bible tells us that in Christ, we are all the same (Galatians 3:28). Of course, we all fulfill different roles in life, and God calls us all to individual places of service for which He also equips us. Having different traits, backgrounds, or abilities should not divide us. God sees us the same, even though we are each unique in so many ways. Different is not worse. Different is not less. Different does not give us license, as people of faith, to look down on anyone or consider them to be less than we are. Yes, there are many things God tells us to refrain from or be mindful of, but He reveals to us in Proverbs 6:16-19 the seven things He actually hates:
What a contrast to what so many churches and leaders have become these days. Jesus doesn’t say to love your neighbors unless he/she is of a different race or religion. He doesn’t say to love your neighbor as long as he/she isn’t a homosexual or because he/she gossips, drinks or acts in other ways that seem contrary to God’s word. He doesn’t give us permission to not love anyone, because He didn’t exclude anyone from His love. He so deeply loved every single person, even those who hated and abused Him, that He was willing to die for them…for us. Yes, there are many behaviors and activities in which He doesn’t want us to engage, but I find it interesting that what God chose to list, through His inspired word, as things He truly hates are those behaviors that reveal our pride, arrogance, and ignorance. He is concerned with our hearts and our character. We are all sinners, and if we try to hide behind our church buildings or cover up our prejudiced opinions of others being beneath us, then we have not only failed in the two commandments that Jesus declared hold up every other directive, but we have displayed the very behaviors that God hates. After all, the only antidote for prejudice is humility.
Sometimes it can get really discouraging when you are continually faced with people who are not honest. We’ve all been there, those times when you are either lied about or lied to. Sometimes it is intentional, and sometimes it happens out of exaggeration without thinking. Either way, it reveals something about a person’s true character when it happens, and if it is us doing the lying, it reveals the same about our character as well. Recently, I have been lied about and lied to. When it occurred, I was both discouraged and disturbed by it. Although I forgave the people involved and tried to understand why it might have happened, I lost a great amount of (if not all) respect for them. I was blessed to have had the lie revealed in these situations, but that doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes we just have to continue walking in integrity and trust that God will take care of the situation(s) in His time and in His way, even if we never know it happens or get to see the result.
The only way to battle dishonesty is with truth. If we try to battle against lies with reason or even anger, we will probably just end up frustrated with the results. That’s because lies breed other lies! When someone lies to or about you, and they are confronted, don’t be surprised if another lie is told to try and get out of the uncomfortable or awkward position in which that person finds themselves. Depending on the reason for the untruth in the first place (as mentioned above), that same force will often drive a second or third lie in order to cover it up or keep the charade going. The ONLY way to face dishonesty is to shine the light of truth on it. But before you start cheering, “Yeah, expose it,” we probably need to consider something else.
As people of faith, we know the guidelines of forgiveness. We know we are to love our enemies and pray for those who mistreat us (Matt 5:43-48). On one occasion, Peter asked Jesus how often he needed to forgive, thinking seven times was plenty. Jesus responded with “seventy times seven” (Matt 18:21-22). That doesn’t mean 490 times and then stop, but rather that forgiveness is a process. We are human, and forgiveness does NOT come easy to us. It isn’t usually enough to forgive someone just once and walk away. In our hearts, we tend to hold grudges and hang onto hurt, pain, and betrayal. We may not outwardly give someone a cold shoulder or treat them poorly, but inside we often have to forgive them every time the hurt, anger or pain rears its head again. We need to forgive so that we can let it go. We need to sometimes forgive over and over internally until we reach that point. We read in Matt 18:23-35 about a servant who was forgiven of a huge debt he had no way of ever paying back. He begged for mercy and forgiveness and his master granted it and forgave his debt – lavishly! Almost immediately, that same guy went out to someone who owed him a very small amount and when that man begged for mercy and forgiveness, the guy not only didn’t forgive the debt, but he threw the man into prison. When the master found out, he went back to the servant and scolded him for his lack of mercy. As a result, he also rescinded the debt forgiveness and put him into prison himself. Jesus follows this parable with the statement, “This is how the Heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” OUCH!
As I said earlier, “lies are complicated,” and spending our energy trying to figure out why someone is dishonest will rarely bring an answer we find satisfying. Lies or misrepresentations can quickly become a web in which most of us do not want to be stuck – no matter if you are the spider or the fly. Instead of focusing so much on the dishonesty we come across almost every day, wouldn’t it be better to focus on the truth? Turning from anger to forgiveness frees us to live abundantly. And if, perchance, you are struggling with a “justice gene” of your own, maybe it’s time to go back to that model prayer Jesus gave us. Maybe it’s time to remember how lavishly we have been forgiven, with no strings attached, by the One who has every right to demand justice, but instead, chooses love.
The Cadence of My Soul 