Expect Great Things From God: A Theology of the Unsearchable
To expect great things from God is to realize that our own imaginations are often the smallest rooms in the house of faith. I was sitting recently in a corner of a midtown café, watching the frantic choreography of the morning commute, where every face seemed etched with a specific, measurable ambition—a promotion, a seat on the express train, a successful pitch. It struck me then that our prayer lives often mirror this frantic, transactional urbanity. We approach the Creator with the same bureaucratic precision we use to fill out a tax return, asking for exactly what we think we can manage, or at least what we think we deserve. We treat the throne of grace as a cosmic suggestion box for the middle-management of our lives. But the invitation of the gospel is far more disruptive than that. It is an invitation to step out of the shallow end of our own desires and into the deep water of a sovereignty that refuses to be measured by our metrics of success.
The problem is not that we ask for too much; it is that we are far too easily satisfied with the mundane. We find ourselves trapped in a cycle of asking for the predictable while a world of “unsearchable things” lies just beyond the horizon of our current crisis. When we truly begin to expect great things from God, we stop trying to negotiate the terms of our deliverance and start looking for the King whose kingdom is not of this world, yet is breaking into it every hour.
The Architecture of Our Small Desires
In the high-rise offices of Manhattan, success is often defined by the “ask”—the ability to articulate a clear, achievable goal and the strategy to reach it. We have brought this entrepreneurial spirit into our prayer closets, and it has left us spiritually malnourished. We pray for “safety” and “travel mercies” and “favorable outcomes,” all of which are good things, but they are also safe things. They are things that keep our lives comfortable and our egos intact. To expect great things from God requires a shattering of that comfort. It requires us to acknowledge that the God of the burning bush and the empty tomb is not interested in merely optimizing our current lifestyle. He is interested in a total renovation of our affections.
