Not Now

“Wait for the gift my Father promised.”

Acts 1:4

When God says no to a prayer, it doesn’t always mean no; sometimes it means not yet. It’s the right request but the wrong time.

A few years ago, Lora and I were house hunting on Capitol Hill. We had lived on the Hill since 1996 when we were fortunate enough to buy a hundred-year-old row home during a buyers’ market. As our kids got bigger, our fifteen-foot-wide row home seemed to get smaller, so we started looking for a little larger place. We discovered our dream home less than a block away, and we decided to make an offer, but we also knew our financial limits. After praying about it, we came up with our best offer and felt like it was a fleece. If God wanted us to have the house, the owner would accept our offer. With the real estate market lagging and the time on market increasing, we were confident the seller would accept our offer. He did not. And as much as we wanted the house and as tempted as we were to go beyond our predetermined offer, we walked away. We had already done the interior decorating in our imaginations, so we were definitely disappointed. But we also had complete peace because we had prayed about it.

We stopped looking at homes for a year. Then one night, as we drove by the house we had tried to purchase, Lora said, “Do you ever feel like that is the house that got away?” We had driven by the house a hundred times, and Lora had never said a thing. But her casual comment must have been a subconscious prayer because the next morning a For Sale sign went up in the yard. That’s when I had a holy hunch that God’s no a year earlier was really a not yet and was about to turn into a divine yes.

What Lora and I didn’t know is that the owner had never sold the house! It sat on the market for 252 days with no buyer and then was taken off the market. When the same owner put the house back on the market, we decided to make the same offer. It was a calculated risk because he’d already said no once, but it was another prayer fleece. We told our real estate agent it was our final offer. We were willing to walk away a second time, but this time the owner accepted the offer — and God answered our prayer one year after we thought He would. What we thought was a no was actually a not yet that turned into a yes!

Sometimes we have to be willing to give something up to God in order to get it back from God. Like Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, it will probably be something that is precious to us. It may even be a gift from God, just like Isaac was to Abraham. But God will test us to make sure the gift isn’t more important than the Gift Giver, the dream isn’t more important to us than the Dream Giver. He’ll test us to make sure it’s not an idol. If it is, that dream, gift, or desire might need to die so that it can be resurrected. But God often takes things away to give them back so that we know they are gifts to be stewarded for His glory.

Going through a death and resurrection makes us appreciate our house more than we would have otherwise. And the beautiful thing isn’t that we own the house; it’s that the house doesn’t own us. When something is given back after it is taken away, whether it’s a house or our health, we don’t take it for granted.

Now here’s the icing on the cake. By waiting a year to buy the house, our house actually went up in value by 10 percent because the real estate market in D.C. had rebounded. So we got our dream house for the same amount of money and sold our old house for a lot more money than we would have a year earlier! It was definitely worth the wait. And tithing on the sale of our house was one of the easiest checks we’ve ever written because God’s hand of blessing was so evident.

Wait

I hate to wait. I don’t like waiting at red lights. I don’t like waiting at the doctor’s office. I don’t like waiting in drive-throughs for fast food. It’s never fast enough. I don’t even like waiting for December 25, so we start opening gifts on Christmas Eve!

You name it, I don’t want to wait for it. But waiting is part of praying, and praying is a form of waiting. Prayer will sanctify our waiting, so we wait with holy expectancy. And waiting doesn’t delay God’s plans and purposes. It always expedites them. Waiting is the fast track to whatever it is that God wants to do in our lives. And we’ll discover that on God’s timeline, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

In our impatience, we often try to do God’s job for Him. We treat Sabbath observance like a luxury instead of a commandment. We only obey it when it’s convenient, and then we discover that it’s never convenient. We work as though the world revolves around us and relies on us. Maybe it’s time to rest as though the world revolves around and relies on the Creator who hangs the stars and spins the planets.

Let me come right out and say it: we’re way too busy. In the words of the apostle Paul, we’re “busybodies.”^a We’re constantly trying to do more and more in less and less time. The net result is that we don’t have any margins in our lives. And that is when prayer gets marginalized. We think we have too much to do to pray, but the exact opposite is true: we have too much to do not to pray! Martin Luther once declared, “I have so much to do^b that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” The more you have to do, the more you have to pray!

After the ascension of Jesus, the disciples didn’t immediately “go into all the world.”^c Why? Because Jesus left explicit instructions: “Do not leave Jerusalem,^d but wait for the gift my Father promised.” Instead of immediately embarking on their mission, they waited in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit. They didn’t try to get ahead of God. They gathered in an upper room and prayed for ten days. Those ten days have been paying dividends for two thousand years.

After we pray like it depends on God, we need to work like it depends on us. But if we don’t pray first, our work won’t work. We can’t do something for God until we let God do something for us. He wants to fill us with His Holy Spirit, but we need to empty ourselves first. From the depths of our hearts to the depths of our minds, the Holy Spirit wants to fill every crevice that already exists and create new capacities within us. And when the Holy Spirit comes on us, we will think new thoughts and feel new feelings. It’s part of the package deal.

But you have to wait for it.

The question is this: How long are you willing to wait?

What would happen if we holed up in an upper room, knelt at an altar, or locked ourselves in a prayer closet and said, “I’m not coming out until I receive the gift my Father promised.” I’ll tell you exactly what would happen: Pentecost would happen all over again.

You cannot plan Pentecost. It’s not like Peter woke up on the day of Pentecost and had “speaking in tongues” on his to-do list. He didn’t plan on baptizing three thousand people that day. But if you pray for ten days, Pentecost is bound to happen.

Sometimes God’s no simply means not yet.