Waiting on God

The topic today is waiting – specifically, waiting on God. There is so much here to talk about, if we wanted to, we could do a longer message series on waiting. We could discuss waiting on God to perform a miracle, waiting on Him to provide, waiting on Him to come down from Heaven and for His Second Coming, among other things. Although all of these are worthwhile and God willing, we will discuss these in the future, today we will narrow it down and discuss the difficulty of waiting on the Lord for His blessings.

When we think about waiting on God to deliver His promises to us, it seems that this should not be so difficult. After all, if we wait a little while, God will provide more than we can imagine. So why is it that we never seem to have any patience? After all, we love our microwaves so that we can eat out food quickly. We love our fast food and getting rich quickly. We will spend hundreds of dollars a year so we can have our web pages load quickly. We have no patience for slow web links, doctor’s office waiting rooms, and oil changes that take more than 10 minutes. We add salt to our water so it will boil quicker. We can’t wait for water to boil, popcorn to pop or a computer to boot up. We want to lose 20 pounds in a week. We want our car to warm up in seconds. We can’t wait to get to the end of a long movie, a long book or a long sermon.

We are by nature impatient. However, patience/long-suffering is part of our fruit from the Spirit. When we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior and give our lives to him, we become new creations. The old is gone, the new is come. We may not have patience immediately after we pray to our God to forgive our sins and make him our Lord, but He immediately starts working in us to grow the fruit of the Spirit that will allow us to have that patience. We need to let that grow in us and let go of our old ways of having our needs immediately fulfilled and instead learn to let God work in His timing. After all, if we truly believe He is God, then His timing will be perfect and He will never fail to do what is best. So what are we in such a rush for? Do we think we have a better handle than God on what is good and when is best? We need to learn to wait on God!

G Campbell Morgan says “Waiting for God is not laziness. Waiting for God is not going to sleep. Waiting for God is not the abandonment of effort.  Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.” In other words, we need to only do what God has asked us to do, be ready to do what He asks us to do and not to do anything until He asks us to do it. This can be hard because we don’t like to wait. We want to do things now.

When Moses realized that God had a plan for him to set the Hebrews free from Egyptian slavery, he immediately went and killed an Egyptian. This landed him in the desert for forty years. Our instinct is to do something now, to do something immediately. But even when it might seem to be what God wants us to do, if we are not doing it when God wants us to do it, we are doing it under our own power and not that of God. If we want God to do this for us, we need to do not only what He wants but when He wants it.

However, even though we are new creations and we truly believe in what God can do in our lives, we are still impatient as we wait for God to do something in our lives. Why are we like that? Because there are several risks for us when we wait on the Lord. We worry, doubt and fear as we wait. We worry that our opportunity will pass us by, we fear that we will not be able to persevere as we wait and we doubt that God really will do what He says He will.

Where’s your faith?! Are God’s arms so short?! We all have times when we worry, fear and doubt. The important thing is to make sure that these things do not get in the way of what we need to do for God. We need to try to remember when we doubt, that the Bible has made it through thousands of years and has never been found wrong yet. When we fear, we need to remember that Jesus died for us and rose again and lives at the right hand of the Father right now and is strengthening us more than we even know. When we worry, we need to remember the words Jesus gave us when he taught us that God knows every hair on our head and He will provide for us when we seek His kingdom first. Keep your faith strong. Do not fear. Do not worry about anything. Remove your doubt – Our God is the creator of the universe, maker of heaven and earth – He can do all things. His arms are not so short!

God is working – just not the way we expect. He hears all our prayers, but He answers not in a way to make us happy, but in a way to bring us more in line with His own thinking, His own will. As we merge our thinking and our will with His, our prayers become more like what He requires. As our prayers match up more and more with His will, we find them being answered more and more in the way we expect.

However, even as we go through this process, God is still answering our prayers. It may not be the answer we are expecting, but it is always the right answer, the answer we actually need. When a child asks a parent for things, the parent will always give the child what they request, as long as it is what the parent would want for the child. But if the child asks for something that could bring pain or danger, the parent answers differently. They might give nothing or they might give something similar but without the dangerous side effects, or they might give something completely different, but this gift will bring the child to a place they needed to get to. For instance, I’m sure Joseph never asked to be hated by his brothers, thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, falsely accused of sexual assault, and imprisoned. However, God used all these things to bring Joseph to a place he himself never envisioned himself – second most important person in the known world. Joseph had to wait, but what was meant for evil, God made for Good.

We need to learn to trust God in everything we are doing. Our human instinct is to trust no one but ourselves. Sometimes a close loved one. But God is another story. Is it because we don’t physically see Him? Is it because we haven’t recognized what He has done in our lives – that we think He hasn’t done anything for us, that He hasn’t been watching over us – a feeling of abandonment? Is it because when we prayed for Him to bring something into our lives, He didn’t do it? Whatever the reason, we certainly seem to have a hard time trusting God with running our lives. The solution is actually very simple. We need to come to that place of trust and faith. We need to finally stop doing those things that are important to us and start doing those things that are important to God. Then we will find ourselves growing, find our faith deepening and find ourselves being blessed by God. Then it will be easy to trust God.

As we continue in our lives, doing those things that God is asking us to do for Him, we will find ourselves growing in faith and becoming blessed. Are you ready to be blessed? Are you looking for something more in life than the usual struggles? Then you need to not only receive the forgiveness that comes from God through Jesus, but you must make Him Lord of your life. This means doing what He commands, when He commands it and doing nothing else but His commands. You need to give up your fear, worries and doubts and let Him hold you up and protect you. You need to trust Him and have faith that He is what He said He is and that He will do what He said He will do.

When you do these things, you will find your impatience dying down and your ability to wait on the Lord will become greater and more easily accomplished. When you wait on Him, you will find His blessings raining down on you.

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Last modified: Nov 11, 2006