PEOPLE'S EXPECTATIONS
One thing that I struggle with a lot as the oldest child in my family (on both sides I'm the oldest grandchild) is the fear that I won't live up to other people's expectations, especially those that I see as authority figures. I think most people deal with this at some point whether it's trying to please people or even trying to outdo low expectations. God's expectations and plans for our lives are usually far different that people's expectations and we can really suffer or mess things up if we try to do both.
Gen 5:28 talks about Noah's father's expectation. Noah's dad wanted a good life for his son like all parents do. It seems in this verse that he hoped through Noah, the curse God placed upon the land would be alleviated or gone altogether and that future generations would not have to work so hard. I know that is something I have heard before and is probably familiar to a lot of people.
God's plans for Noah, however, were very different. Instead of living a life of luxury God had Noah build a humongous boat to prepare for a flood- an event that, to anyone living in that time and place, would have seemed impossible. I wonder how Noah's family reacted when they discovered what he was doing; they probably told him he had gone crazy or that he was wasting his time and his life. There were probably times when he felt like a huge disappointment to them.
I think the only thing that could have kept Noah going was that he focused on his relationship with God and God's covenant. Later in Genesis 6 we see that God establishes a covenant with Noah. A covenant made by God can never be broken. How amazing and how worthwhile it must have been after everything was over to be able to look back and say, "Everyone else thought I should do X with my life, but I did Y because I was following God's will and look where it got me- I have had this amazing adventure and it's brought me so close to God, He's even established a covenant with me!"
If we are doing our best to accomplish God's will, even if we make mistakes, we can never be failures, no matter what anyone says, because God's covenant through Jesus makes us winners. We need to keep our hearts focused on God's approval instead of man's and our minds focused on God's plan and promise instead of our worries about what others think. That is the main thing I took away from the beginning of Noah's story.
Created over 2 years ago
