"Waiting" isn't something that I do very well. I am a very impatient person. When I'm hungry, I want to eat now. If I decide I need something, I go buy it now. If I want to talk to someone, it is difficult to wait until they have time for me. I believe many of the people I deal with daily have the same problem. In this day of our "microwave-mentality" impatience seems to be pervasive. We adults probably aren't doing a very good job imparting patience to our children either. We text instead of call, we snap-chat instead of a personal conversation.
If you are like me, you may also have a hard time waiting on God. If you stop to think about it, we have to wait on God for lots of things. We wait on healing, we wait on divine interventions, we wait on our loved-ones to be saved. In our prayer life though, the devil (and our own personalities) tempt us to be impatient with God. The devil will tell you that "God isn't listening to you" or "God doesn't care about you" or the worst for me is "God would help you but remember the sin you committed? God can't help you now, you're not worthy".
Although we all have a finite amount of time here on earth, God doesn't live in time. When the bible said a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day to God, it meant it (Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8). Time has never started and will never end with God. He always has been and always will be. We want to put time boundaries on God for our needs because they seem so immediate to us but we must learn to wait. C.S. Lewis had a really insightful way of looking at it in his book "Mere Christianity". I am paraphrasing here; he said something like imagine that each one of us is a book and God is the reader. Each book has a finite start, end, and number of pages. God can "read" each book as he chooses and the book, in and of itself, is unconscious to the fact that God is reading or not reading. However, God can put the book down for 1,000 years and then pick it back up again right where he left off. This does not effect the books start, end, or the number of pages AND the book is completely unaware that 1,000 years went by between pages.
I said all of that to back up the fact that God does not operate under the same time constraints that we do. His expectations are different than ours but we can be sure that he knows exactly what he is doing.
You think waiting on God is hard? Think about poor Ezekiel and how God made Him lay on his side for 390 days, what if God asked us to do that?
Today, wait on God. Tomorrow, wait on God. The next day, wait on God. While you wait, enjoy Him. Worship and serve Him for who God is, not what He is going to do for you. While you wait, here are a couple of scriptures that may help. They've helped me.
Psalm 33:20
We wait in hope for the LORD; He is our help and our shield.
Psalm 37:7
Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for Him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.
No comments:
Post a Comment