"Purpose In The Waiting"

“He leads the humble in doing right, teaching them his way.” (Psalm 25:9, NLT)

“Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.” (Psalm 27:14, NLT)

“The LORD is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the LORD.” (Lamentations 3:25-26, NLT)

“For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:19, NLT)

If there is one thing that we are almost universally not good at, it’s waiting. We get frustrated at stoplights, irritable in drive-through lines that take more than a few minutes, and annoyed at web pages that take more than eight seconds to load.* Eight seconds, and our capacity to wait is maxed out.

The problem is, God is never in the kind of hurry we are. The pace at which we make plans and set out to accomplish great things and check items off our to-do lists is rarely the pace at which God moves.

Our God is a God who waits, and we are not people who know how to wait very well.

But learning meekness and living with the kind of selflessness required of a meek man or woman will, without a doubt, require us to wait. In Scripture, meekness and waiting are held closely together. Colossians 3:12 says, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (ESV, emphasis mine).

Waiting is one of God’s greatest means of sanctification, of making us a little more like him. Waiting reveals so much about us: our true motives, our first loves, even the things we idolize that capture our affections more than the heart of God.

Waiting forces us into a posture of surrender as it reveals how little we really control about our lives. Seasons of longing for “the next thing” drive us to the reality that whatever it is we want so badly, it’s actually not ours. Everything we have is from the Lord, and we don’t get to demand when we are given anything.

We can’t strategize our way through waiting, and we can’t attempt to bypass the wilderness God leads us to. In fact, any attempted shortcuts will probably prolong our journey. Why? Because it’s really not about the destination. It’s about what God is doing in us on the way there. His will is going to be accomplished, and he doesn’t need us to do anything for him. The Bible is one long story of God’s people really messing up what they were supposed to do for God and him constantly course-correcting everyone. We jump off the track; God lifts us up and puts us back on.

But he is, graciously and almost unfathomably, pleased to use us for his purposes if we will cultivate the meekness to live on mission for him. And meekness is forged in the waiting, in the seasons of our lives when our need for the Lord can’t be filled with anything else, when we can’t distract ourselves with anything the world has to offer. We get a taste of true meekness in those elusive moments in life where nothing but Jesus will suffice.