ABOUT WAITING:PART 1

 Isaiah 40:31

³¹ But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

James 1:4-8

⁴ But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Waiting. It is an antithesis to this generation. In our world of fast food, fast internet, fast gratification with credit cards, orders with the click of a button, fast money, fast cars, fast planes and so on. Patience is not regarded as a virtue, instead speed is considered to be much more important. We also see it with lists like Forbes 40 under 40, the obsession with youth and lack of reverence for age, the obsession with the new etc.

But the Bible tells us opposite.

Waiting is the virtue. Patience is the virtue. Patience is how we achieve perfection.

We are in a world, where acting on our impulses, being men and women of action is considered the virtue, doing is the verb every one regards as the high value, no one asks, how do you wait for a living, instead the questions are what do you do for a living, what are you going to do; when you answer, I’m going to wait, you are looked at as if you were an alien. It is believed that waiting is some form of passiveness, but the wisdom of God is different.

The initial text at the beginning of this article says that waiting on God is the path to strength renewed, it is the way to fly like an eagle, it is the way to running and walking without being tired.

The question is why wait? Why wait when I can go out there and get all I want and need, why should I wait on the Lord?

Waiting has been, is and will always be the Plan.

The Bible makes it clear that God is always at work and has been at work since creation, even in the books of Esther and Ruth, where the activity of God is little mentioned, we have the benefit of hindsight and we see God working, weaving His fingers and His hand through time from eternity to accomplish His purpose and plans for all His creation. He has, He is and will always be in-control.

And we are His creation. Though we lost something at the Fall, we recover it when we find Jesus. We lost our purpose which was to rule over the earth, in Jesus, we have recovered that purpose, but we must be careful not to make the same mistake that Adam made; we must wait on God. At creation, God instructed Adam that He could eat everything except the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, the interesting thing is that He was not previously barred from the Tree of Life, but Adam impatiently ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil; he was seeking to be like God, to know good and evil. The temptation to be like God is so great, there are several men who overtime have fallen to this temptation; Adam had spoken to God, He had seen the splendour, the majesty, the glory, the greatness, and He could not wait to be like Him, this was His error. God always intended to make us like Him and not Him, Adam and Eve, only needed to be patient and they would have become like Him, they could not wait.

Waiting is the Plan, there is no other plan.

To be like Him, we must wait. We will never be God, He only is God, and we are His children, gods, sons of God, which is what we are and created to be but we must wait.

Jesus’s Example of Waiting

Jesus understood this when He came to earth.

When He was tempted in the desert, He waited before He ate to regain strength in His body, turning stone to bread would have been easy but that was against God’s word, hence He waited till He found bread to eat; He could have jumped and landed on His feet, but He knew that this was against God’s plan for the season, He could have bowed to the devil and received all the kingdoms of the world at that moment, but He knew, that was not the time and He had to wait more than 2000 years when the kingdoms of earth and heaven will become the Kingdom of our God. He knew that waiting was God’s way. God created time for us to wait. Time is his instrument to accomplish His purpose, so that we may become all that He has purposed. Time is an instrument of perfection.

Even God the Father waits, He waited before Jesus came down, He did not send Him immediately, He is waiting to vanquish the devil, He waited for the salvation of every man who is saved and continues to wait for everyone who will be saved, He waits to see His will on the earth. Waiting cannot be removed from the order or things. Jesus waits to rule the earth.

The Holy Spirits waits for us. He waited for us to receive Him and His Power, He waited for us to be convicted of our sin and turn to Him for grace. He waits for many today and continues to wait according to the will of God.

God is a God of Patience (Romans 15:5)

We must wait, learning to wait is hard but we do well if we wait.

The times of waiting are peculiar, they may seem like nothing is being accomplished but only if we could see with our spiritual eyes what waiting accomplishes. The spiritual controls the physical and we need our spiritual eyes to see what waiting does for us. Isaiah does an outstanding job of describing what waiting does for us. Paul comes second in describing it as what perfects us.