Slideshow image

What is your most vivid memory of waiting?  Is it a time in childhood sitting on a curb waiting for a parent to pick you up?  Was it in college when you longed for the semester to end.  Moms know a little about waiting through pregnancy!  Waiting offers us a unique blend of passivity and expectancy.  Sadly, human nature and impatience focuses more on the passing of time rather than an active anticipation.  It is this latter quality which is urged in the Word of God.  Our heavenly Father delights to lead His children step by step.  He faithfully guides His followers through times of necessary waiting, offering His grace and courage along the way.  The maturing follower of Jesus discovers that God meets one just as much in the process of waiting as in the culmination the wait.

Understandably, this is a unique space.  It reminds us of the Israelites at the Red Sea (Exodus 14) or the time when the disciples were waiting after the ascension of Jesus (Acts 4:4).  In both instances, there was a command to halt action and enter an essential time of waiting, expecting a work of God.  Then, in His perfect timing, our Heavenly Father gives clarity and confidence as He commands us to move forward.  From 1990-94 the BBC broadcasted a sitcom entitled “Waiting for God”.  Diana, a resident of Bayview Retirement Home, is determined not to grow old gracefully.  Aided by fellow resident Tom, she spends much of her time finding new ways to make life difficult for the manager of the home.  Are you wrestling with a time of waiting?  Are you getting grumpy because God has put you into a period of pause?  When we authentically wait upon God, we are promised great blessing.  Rather than struggling and striving we need to say with the psalmist, “I waited patiently for the Lord” (Psalm 40:1a). 

Waiting on God welcomes all of God’s greatness to impact the weakness of our limited perspective.  Such waiting submits oneself to God’s timeline and tender care.  “True patience is the losing of our self-will in His perfect will,” wrote Andrew Murray in his classic, Waiting On God.  In Psalm 62:1,5 we are challenged to wait in silence and stillness.  In this way, our waiting is a form of prayer.  It is certainly a disposition that devotes oneself to God’s will and way.  Psalm 33:20 reveals that waiting includes hope and expectation.  In other words, waiting might require patience, but it is not passive – it is a lifestyle of dependence and expectation.

Waiting on God touches every facet of our lives.  We wait intellectually by thinking on the truth of God’s power to deliver us (Psalm 25:4-7).  We wait volitionally by choosing to submit to the time of God’s deliverance (Psalm 37:7-11).  We wait emotionally by resting in peace of God’s deliverance (Psalm 62:5-8; 46:10).  G. Campbell Morgan put it this way.  “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.”

We must also remember that this kind of waiting does not allow for manipulating outcomes.  Margaret Cowman, author of Streams In The Dessert (Zondervan, 1997, 24), wrote about once keeping an emperor moth.  “I happened to witness the first efforts of my imprisoned moth to escape from its long confinement. All morning, I watched it patiently striving and struggling to be free. It never seemed able to get beyond a certain point, and at last my patience was exhausted. The confining fibers were probably drier and less elastic than if the cocoon had been left all winter in its native habitat, as nature meant it to be. In any case, I thought I was wiser and more compassionate than its Maker, so I resolved to give it a helping hand. With the point of my scissors, I snipped the confining threads to make the exit just a little easier. Immediately and with perfect ease, my moth crawled out, dragging a huge swollen body and little shriveled wings! I watched in vain to see the marvelous process of expansion in which these wings would silently and swiftly develop before my eyes. As I examined the delicately beautiful spots and markings of various colors that were all there in miniature, I longed to see them assume their ultimate size. I looked for my moth, one of the loveliest of its kind, to appear in all its perfect beauty. But I looked in vain. My misplaced tenderness had proved to be its ruin. The moth suffered an aborted life, crawling painfully through its brief existence instead of flying through the air on rainbow wings.

In what kind of “cocoon of waiting” do you find yourself in today?  Don’t look for shortcuts to a God-oriented time of waiting.  Look to God and believe the promise:  “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust.”  (Psalm 40:4a).  In Waiting On God [ Read Online ] Andrew Murray expressed, “Cease from expecting the least good from yourself, or the least help from anything there is in man, and just yield yourself unreservedly to God to work in you: He will do all for you.  How simple this looks!  And yet this is the gospel we so little know.”