“How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1, Psalm 79:5, Psalm 89:46).
I’ve seen people close to me wait on the Lord. Have you? It’s an amazing thing to witness. When you know their hearts are longing and desiring something that just hasn’t come about, and instead of complaining or dwelling on it, they release it to God. Over and over again, every day. Instead of choosing to strategize, tap every earthly resource, forge connections that weren’t there before, they surrender to the Lord’s timing. Stories like this preach to my heart. Patience, one of the fruits of the Spirit, is something many of us need to rely on God for. Waiting indefinitely doesn’t come naturally to many people. Seeing the patience that comes from trusting the Lord’s timing is a sure sign of His work in their hearts.
I’ve also seen people rush ahead, making things happen for themselves. You can see this when you sense striving, strain, and difficulty to find opportunity. God’s Word repeatedly instructs us to wait on the Lord (Psalm 27:14, Psalm 37:7, 34). We choose for ourselves what we do with our limited time here; we can choose to wait on God’s timing, or we can choose to build the Babel of our own desires.
When we’re talking about ourselves, it’s very easy to miss the difference. We tend to be convinced that our own desires are good, that our desires are God’s will for us, our desires are there simply because they are supposed to be satisfied. So we push. We try to make things happen. I’ve done this myself and seen it over and over again with many others. It’s what the world and the culture is convinced is best for us to do. In a world that worships being self-made, we need to make it happen, right? Well, if you look at the history of God’s people, actually, not so much.
Abram and Sarai, for example. They wanted to have a child, and God promised them children. But Sarai was desperate to make it happen, and had her servant Hagar bear Abram’s child in her place when he was 86 years old. Instead of waiting on the Lord or trusting in the Lord’s timing to fulfill her God-given desire for a child, this was an act of striving that reached outside of God’s will. God’s will was always to give Abram and Sarai a child. Striving for that apart from God led to a very costly sin. God gave them new names, Abraham and Sarah, when, 14 years later, His perfect timing came to give them their son, Isaac. Isaac became a forefather to Jesus, through whom God desired to provide salvation for all nations, by His grace, including those descended from Hagar.
Saul, who later became Paul, provides another example in the Bible of pushing ahead, instead of earnestly listening and waiting on the Lord’s direction. Saul was a Jewish Pharisee, pushing to kill people based on what they believed, convinced he was doing the right thing in God’s eyes (Acts 7:58, 8:1&3). My guess is that he hadn’t asked God about whether it was right or not. Jesus Himself got Saul’s attention by blinding him and speaking audibly to him, saying that he would be told what to do (Acts 9:3-6). Saul didn’t know God’s will at all, even though he was convinced that he did, enough to approve of another soul’s murder! It is a risk to act based on anything but God’s direction.
God’s timing is often not what we would like or expect it to be. King David, the man after God’s own heart himself, wrote, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). No matter how close we are to God, we are all bound by time. We all struggle to wait patiently for God. We all eventually become aware of the fact that our time on this earth quickly runs out. We expect God to operate in this way in our lives too.
But God operates very differently. He tells us nothing is impossible with Him (Luke 1:37). He tells us in His Word that there is abundantly more than we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20) in His plans for us. He tells us to trust Him and wait on Him. Who will we trust, our experience in the world, or God?
“And Elijah came near to all the people and said, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the people did not answer him a word” (1 Kings 18:21). It all comes down to what we choose to believe about God (see Characteristics of God series).
Paul sums up the tension between following our own desires and following the Spirit, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Paul describes the struggle every person has of falling into sin even when actively trying not to sin. “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:18-20). Only Jesus Christ can provide deliverance from the sin that derails our actions (Romans 7:24-25).
It isn’t just failing to wait on the Lord that can cause us to stumble in our walk of obedience. Another kind of waiting can trip us up; when God tells us the time has come to take action, but we wait instead. We procrastinate, ignore responsibility, or simply run away. Waiting isn’t the right thing to do when God is calling us to act.
A famous example of that is the story of Jonah. God tells him to go to Nineveh, but he runs in the opposite direction instead (Jonah 1:2-3). It was another costly sin of disobedience, and yet in God’s grace, after three days in the belly of a whale, Jonah had another opportunity. He eventually went to Nineveh in obedience to God’s will (Jonah 3:2-3). Has God nudged you to move forward with something in your life, but instead of immediately carrying it out, you waited? Maybe you’re in that situation right now. He asks us to trust that His timing is perfect. But when we miss it, God in His grace can make a way, even when we’ve waited past His timing.
I have spent weeks, months, and years trying to make things happen on my own strength (for more on this, check out All About Trust). But there have been many things in my own life that God’s timing (not mine) was perfect for. The things I couldn’t control like getting jobs, finding churches, meeting friends—all had a divine timing that only required surrendering and receiving the gift. There was no striving or making-it-happen involved; these moments were pivotal to where my life went in that season, by God’s mercy. We may not be patient with God, but thankfully God is always, always patient with us. Halleluiah!
The more I learn to trust that God is in control, the easier it is to surrender the fear of missing something. The more we trust God, the more patient we can become, as we grow in our knowledge that God’s timing is always perfect. Amen.
“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7).
“In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?” (Psalm 56:4).
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