Let’s face it. Waiting is hard. It is usually stubborn family situations that get to me, of course, for they have been going on the longest and require the most patient endurance in the midst of waiting.
The good news is it is not up to us. The Holy Spirit enables us to wait. Gal 5:5 “Through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope.” Through the Spirit by faith… that means we get the opportunity to draw nearer the Holy Spirit while we wait for God to work our miracle(s) of righteousness. That puts my focus where it should be… on Him, not myself or others.
As we wait, we can choose to soak in the Lord Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. David wrote that he had “quieted his soul like a weaned child on his mother’s breast.” God speaks to our spirits, and our ears are trained to hear His voice (Isa 50:4). The mind wants to “go go go,” but God says this is serious error (Isa 30). Our noisy souls must be told to be quiet and submit to our spirits and to God’s Spirit. In this age of incessant cell phones, texting, Internet, and TV, we have to choose to be intentional to wait to hear God’s still small voice.
The Hebrew word ‘qavah,’ which is translated ‘wait’ in Isaiah 40:31, means ‘to bind together like a cord.’ As we wait on the Lord, it is like adding strands to a rope to strengthen it. Picture the process of making a rope by twisting or weaving (binding) thin cords together to form the rope. The more strands that are twisted or woven together in a rope, the greater its strength. We can assume that the more we are still to listen to God, the stronger we become. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says “… a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
Two Scriptural examples of people who did not wait on God show us the disastrous consequences of not waiting. God took the kingdom from Saul because of his impatience (1 Sam 13:8-14). When God’s people forgot Him and did not wait for His counsel, He sent upon them wasting disease or leanness of soul (Ps 106:13,15).
In this season of waiting, ask Him to encourage you when you are impatient with waiting for the answer to prayer that you have desired the longest.
Spending time asking God to reveal more of Himself to you, allowing your heart and mind to be bound together more closely to Him. Ask Him to help you rest in HIm with assurance that He is always on time even when it feels slow from our perspective. Ask Him to give you grace to keep your hope fixed on the God-of-the-impossible.
Learn more about waiting on God in Prayer Essentials For Living In His Presence, Vol 2, page 277-280. © Sylvia Gunter 2000. Click here to learn more and order.
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