S2, Episode 7: Waiting
Waiting is not a topic we like. We only learn about waiting because we have to! When we inevitably get to a season that gives us no choice but to wait, we desperately try to understand why we need to. But more importantly, we want to know how we can get out of waiting. We want our breakthrough. I have to be careful not to get cynical here, but the truth is if I wrote a book titled “How to get your breakthrough” I would probably be an overnight sensation. I say this to demonstrate how unwanted waiting is and how desperately we want to get past our waiting seasons. We presume that waiting stands in the way of the thing that God really wants us to experience. But we demonstrate our misunderstanding of waiting when we are in such a rush to pass through this inevitable stage of life that has so much to give us in deepening our faith and enriching our relationship with God.
Three Types of Waiting
There are a few different types of waiting.
Timeframe AND Clarity
This is the waiting where you have some idea of how long you must wait and precisely what you are waiting for. Like when your partner goes on a longer-than-usual work trip. It’s definitely unpleasant, but you can sustain yourself because you know the value of what you are waiting for…AND the timeframe is specific
No Timeframe but Clarity
This is the type of waiting where you know what it is you wait for, but you have no idea how long your season will be. You don’t know how to plan for this. This is the type of waiting that usually presents those deep-seated control issues that you don’t really realise you have. Even the least controlling person has control-based survival mechanisms. They just aren’t usually noticeable because they don’t necessarily enforce them on others. But this is the season it’s most likely to rear its ugly head…because in this instance it feels like the time is controlling you.
No Timeframe AND No Clarity
This is by far the worst kind of waiting I have ever experienced. Back in 2017, I got this incredible sense from God that my life was going to change and something big was coming. I had no idea what or when it would all unfold…and the fact is I’m actually still on that path. During a season like this, doubt can tempt you frequently. You may even feel a little crazy! But there is something in you that just KNOWS. And that is all you have to rely on.
Our Modern Times
We really can’t talk about the topic of waiting without recognising a few things about our modern times. Waiting is not something we are encouraged to do by the world. Full stop. There really doesn’t seem like there are any benefits to waiting.
Firstly, the times change so quickly. So often if you were to wait for something, you may just miss your opportunity to have what you desire. Consider the iPhone. If you were to work hard and put your pennies away to buy the newest iPhone outright, there’s a good chance that by the time you get it, it's already out of date. For some. Or what about buying a home? If you didn’t take out a mortgage, it would probably take you a whole lifetime to save the whole value of a property. But the types of houses you were saving for probably wouldn’t be within that price range by the time you can buy them.
Secondly, we are often trying to fit in as much as we can in our limited time…that we just don’t really have the time to wait. Some of you parents out there, literally don’t even get 10 minutes alone in a day. So when some preacher on a Sunday tells you to soak in the presence of God and wait for the Lord's response…does that really feel achievable for you? Not at all.
Thirdly, we have so many resources within reach that are specifically designed to minimise how long we must wait. Just consider credit cards. We have these little plastic rectangular objects that allow you to spend money you don’t have. Now I’ve had seasons where credit cards are the only thing getting me through, so I’m not against them…when I’ve had agonising tooth pain, my credit card saved me from months of agony. So I know credit cards aren’t all bad. Again, I am just using this example to demonstrate that our relationship with waiting has changed significantly over the generations and our society in general doesn’t encourage us to wait.
So you are right to think that the odds are against us as Christians when we have to wait for God to act. Or wait for something to come to pass. It is truly hard to do when we have been brought up in a culture that does not value waiting. And whilst we might believe we are different to the world, in this area of waiting we are quite the same. We eat the food, we use the equipment, we follow the systems…that make us severely devalue waiting. If you don’t believe me, consider these few areas that we are known to participate in and utilise.
The greatest appeal of junk food is the fact that it’s convenient. You can drive through a McDonald’s and in around 5 minutes, you are shovelling food that would probably take you 30 minutes at a minimum to make. And almost every youth group I know has a McDonald’s they meet up at after the Friday night pack-up.
There are multitudes of weight loss products and services that promise to shed kilos quicker and more consistently than the age-old task of eating wholesome food and keeping active. Sidenote: I love when you meet someone and they’ve lost weight, and the first question that comes out of our mouths is “how did you do it?” As though there really is some other way of sidestepping the most obvious and effective health management system to ever exist: good food and activity.
After several conversations with Christian people, you will discover the various programs that Christians have signed up for in order to manage their weight. Keto, Vegan...Lap Band surgery. Intermittent fasting. I know some people do Keto and Vegan diets out of genuine concern for their health. But I also know that it can be inspired by a desire to lose weight quickly…sometimes without physical activity.
And what about the internet, not only is it so effective at sourcing information…it accesses it at any time of day immediately upon your request. And we Christians use the ‘whatever’ out of the internet. I’m not at all slagging on the internet of course, because I love it. But I think You get my point. If we decided we wanted to become really good at waiting, we would have to reject literally everything in society.
I say all this, not only to validate my earlier statements…but to provide you with some context as to why waiting seems so foreign to us today and why it seems so unbelievably hard to do. We may be the most waiting-averse generation the world has ever seen.
And yet, when we consider the various narratives within scripture, waiting is a very common theme. Abraham waited for a son for about 40 years. David waited 15 years between being anointed and becoming King. Joseph waited 13 years till the dream came to pass. In all of these very well-known biblical examples, not only did they wait longer than what we consider reasonable these days…but they also had significant signs of going backward before going forward. In Joseph’s case, he went backward about 3 times before going immediately forward.
Waiting is not only inevitable, it’s quite possibly the most critical aspect of the journey. It just may be equal in value, and maybe in some cases more valuable, than arriving at the place you desire to be. But again, we have not comprehended how deeply valuable waiting is. And so we are going to go deeper.
So what is the value of waiting? What is the value in the passing of time?
In scripture, waiting is more often than not coupled conceptually with the idea of hope.
When you consider the various types of waiting I listed earlier, really what determines the severity of each is hope. We don’t realise how critical hope is to our living, and just how vulnerable it is when we have to wait.
For believers, our waiting is supposed to be rooted in our hope in Jesus. We don’t simply wait because we have to, we wait because we are confident of who Jesus is. He is our hope. David used such statements often: my hope Lord is in you (Psalm 25:21), we wait in hope for the Lord(Psalm 33:20), and my hope is in you (Psalm 39:7). There are about 30 occasions in which David makes this kind of statement.
Therefore, our ability to wait and how well we fair in the waiting is directly related to the degree of hope we actually have in Him. This may give you some indication of why waiting has been so difficult. And if our ability to wait stems from the hope we have in God, then it stands to reason that the whole task of waiting and hoping is reliant on firstly…having a deeply held personal conviction of His character…and secondly, having our hope wholly and solely in Him alone.
So let’s just break this down.
Jesus’ Character
Having a deeply held conviction of Jesus’ character isn’t referring to an intellectual acknowledgement of His character. I too can rattle off the qualities of Jesus without thinking about the reality of those traits in the God that I seek and have given my life to. There is a big difference between having an awareness of someone and knowing someone. I have heard that Keanu Reeves is like this super nice guy. If you google “nicest guy in Hollywood”, Keanu Reeve's name will appear time and again. But I don’t know him personally and I can’t validate whether this is true or not. Now knowing Keanu Reeves personally, even if he is a nice guy is not going to be critical to my own wellbeing. But how about knowing your own Dad? Would it have been enough for me growing up, to have known about my Dad? Of course not! That is not going to make up for the chance of knowing him personally. This is validated societally and in research. Children without fathers are more likely to experience a whole set of challenges, purely by being fatherless. Knowing about your Father isn’t enough. The same goes for God. We may know a whole bunch about Him, but that’s not what’s going to make the difference in life. Knowing him personally is where the rubber hits the road. This is often what we are really trying to do when we read the word, we are forming a deep knowledge of who He is.
I have hope in God because I know Him as faithful. I’ve experienced His faithfulness first-hand. I know he is kind because I’ve experienced it. I’ve experienced His comfort. I am confident that He will be these things for me in the future, and the hardships that may come my way because I already know them to be true. All of these personal experiences with His character make waiting easier. But waiting gets hard when I haven’t experienced God in some light. For example, I know God is a protector, but I can’t say confidently that I have experienced Him as my protector. And so when I put my hope in Him through a season where I may need to know His protection, the waiting is all the more painful. Because my hope struggles to be grounded in the knowledge of a God who protects when I am personally not certain that He does.
Waiting therefore is so critical to our relationship with God because it forces us to take stock of what we actually believe about Him. And not what we say we do. Do we know Him as a healer? Do we know Him as our provision? Do we know Him as our companion? Just like Peter who declared Jesus as the Messiah…who we think He is, makes all the difference.
Hope in God Alone
I mentioned in the relationship between waiting and hope, as seen in scripture, that it relies on us being vigilantly committed to God as our sole source of hope.
How often have you started a sentence with “if only…”
I can tell you a few that I’ve heard.
“If only I could get this promotion people would take me more seriously”
“If only we had more money, we wouldn’t need to stress”
“If only we were at a church that valued my particular spiritual gift, I would really be able to grow in my relationship with God”
“If only my husband spent less time working, we would have a better relationship.”
In every one of those examples, there is an element of truth. There is a good chance that your relationship with your spouse would be improved by more time together. You would grow in your gifts if your church valued your spiritual gift.
But what each of these statements demonstrates, is that we are often more invested in circumstances we have decided need to come to pass, in order to experience the peace or validation that we seek. This means that our hope isn’t wholly and solely in Jesus. If we feel like people don’t take us seriously and we want that to change, our hope is in Jesus to advocate for us.
If you don’t want to be stressed about finances, not only is He your true provider…but he may just be allowing this challenge in an attempt to renew your mind about money.
In all cases, God is likely to have a totally different method in mind for meeting your needs. That has been the case for me, so many times it’s almost ridiculous. I genuinely try not to predict how something is going to happen anymore because I’m usually not right AND I have learnt that God is generally doing something new that I may not have the imagination for.
Other Benefits of Waiting
There are benefits that I’m sure you’ve heard about like waiting builds character, and waiting prepares us for the destination…but there are the ones that we don’t consider as often.
Waiting teaches you the truth about time. Now, why would we need to learn about that? Well, we misunderstand many things about time these days. Here are some common terms that demonstrate how confused we are about time:
Time Management - not really possible and hence why the industry has moved toward saying ‘Priority management’
Saving time - which obviously can’t do. You can’t stockpile time.
“We don’t have time” - which is usually not exactly true.
“I can’t wait any longer” - which you usually can and have no choice but to
“Time is money” - definitely not true and the reason why stay at home mums have not been valued in our society
“Time heals all wounds” - not really. It doesn’t. Healing heals all wounds. Time just suppresses their urgency. Just ask a parent who has had a miscarriage. Time doesn’t necessarily take away the hurt.
And I’m sure there are many more statements and terms that I’m just not aware of. We ultimately behave as though time is something we can manipulate. Because we realise that in our desire to progress and achieve, time is not really on our side. But the truth about time is that we all have the same amount of time in a day, but we don’t all have the same amount of time here on earth. Our desire to fit so much in is quite naive in that way. It’s all one big reminder that we don’t possess time, God does. Our methods of manipulating time, can sometimes stem from the fallacy that we believe we can control time. There is no better a time to remind us of this fact than a season of waiting. Because we often literally cannot control how quickly we arrive at the end of it. But it is critical to our maturity that we understand that time cannot be controlled, and it cannot be possessed. It is God’s and it is a gift. Time is not a curse. Time is a gift. Even that fact alone could change how we live.
2. Waiting Proves God's Faithfulness
When we are going through a waiting season, that is when we are most likely to doubt God's faithfulness. We can see this through the kinds of questions typically raised during a waiting season. Like for instance: “Has God forgotten about me?” “Why would God let someone go through this when He loves them?”
How many times would Joseph have felt forgotten about? And He was beaten many times by his fellow man. The cupbearer whom Joseph interpreted the dream for, forgot about Joseph for 2 YEARS! But God did not forget. It took 13 years before the dream God gave Joseph came to pass. And God was faithful to every detail. He did not forget, He was preparing the circumstances that every little detail might be brought exactly as it was meant to. It wasn’t enough for Joseph to rule, God made sure that His brothers would bow down toward him as the dream described.
Now the impression I don’t want to give you is that we should be all happy and joyful in our waiting. Because the Bible doesn’t demonstrate that either. There is a lot of lamenting in the Bible! They liked to lament. And much of it in response to the waiting and uncertainty that the Israelites found themselves in. David cries out constantly to God for the seasons He is going through. But the idea that God expects us to be silent in our pain is simply not correct. Waiting is painful, and furthermore, God absolutely wants to hear about it. He is not offended by our frustration with His plan. He just asks that we also remain faithful amidst the struggle. In other words - don’t change course, just keep going as He has asked you to.
Why do we need to talk about this?
But as we usually do, we have arrived at that point where we must ask this question: Why do we need to talk about this? What is missing? What will we find if we were to look deeper at this topic that we haven’t considered before?
There are many ways in which we mimic our creator. Waiting is a really significant one. There is no person or identity that has waited longer than God. He waits patiently to perfectly orchestrate every detail, for our benefit. Not for himself! So not only does He wait more than anyone else, but he waits with complete selflessness. It doesn’t serve his own selfish purposes. Just consider how long God has been waiting. Thousands of years have passed between Adam's sin and the establishment of the first covenant. Then there was a period of waiting again before the second covenant. And now He is waiting to return to earth in the second coming, which we are already 2022 years into. So God has been waiting a long time. Now maybe time is different to God, I don’t know since He does exist outside of time and space. But I’m sure He also experiences the flow on effect on time because He created time. How could He create something that He has no awareness of?...Look I’m going down an analytical rabbit hole here. Why does God wait so long? That’s what we really need to know. Because if He waits, it would stand to reason that His purposes for waiting are also partly ours. At least that’s what He would intend.
So, in Genesis 15:13-16 we get a pretty good idea of why God had the Israelite people wait for 400 years. It says:
“Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgement on the nation that they serve, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
The Amorites were the inhabitants of the promised land. They were a perverse people. They were involved in ritual child sacrifice and incest just to name a few. But God says that their sin had not reached a level that would force His hand to bring judgement. In other words, He was giving them time still to repent. And time and again through scripture, God has done this. In Revelations 2:21 Jesus has been speaking to the church of Thyatira about the Jezebel in the church…but He explains that he hasn’t intervened yet because he was “giving her time to repent”.
In 2 Peter 3:9, the apostle explains why Jesus has not returned. He says:
“The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
He is giving as many chances as He can for people to repent. This is the compassion and mercy of God.
The part we miss when we are in our season of waiting is that our waiting may be for someone else’s sake. Maybe our waiting is a little less about our own personal fulfilment, and a lot more about the salvation and discipleship of many. Could we be more patient than? Because although He loves us, and He calls us beloved…this life is not about me. And it’s not about you either. It’s about our God accomplishing His all-encompassing, self-sacrificial plan for the redemption of the whole earth. I’m not sure how our individual waiting fits in, but it does. We have misunderstood the depths of His mercy and compassion if we think that He could afford to rush what demonstrates his intimate personal love for every individual in this world.
Waiting & Suffering
What about the suffering though? Does God really expect us to wait when we are suffering so? I know that some people out there have been carrying health issues and problems that they are waiting for a breakthrough on, that causes pain and hurt. I know, I’ve been there myself. Lets for a moment go back to the story of the Israelites.
There is a promise in our suffering. Its a really big promise. No matter what we go through, God guarantees that he will heal and restore those who have hurt or lost something. It’s painful, but He is faithful in comforting us. Even when we think He isn’t. It’s much easier if you are open to that healing, but even if you aren’t He still finds ways to keep walking you toward healing. I’ve seen it time and again. And furthermore, if we are faithful to Him despite our hardship, He promises greater resilience and a deeper relationship with Him. There is essentially no end to the love that He lavishes on us, and especially so when we are enduring the darkest of seasons.
But the opportunity for redemption is limited. Especially when it comes to salvation. God may have given numerous opportunities for both the Egyptians and the Amorites to repent…but once He dropped His gavel, that was it. There was no going back on His word. And such is the way with God. He never does go back on his word. Having gone through some disillusionment with church, I have had times when I have wondered how God could have allowed a minister to continue hurting people the way they were sometimes for years and years. But what I have realised is that God gives them a chance often for longer than what we are comfortable with, because when He executes the consequences for their disobedience there will be no turning back. So again, healing is always available. But the opportunity for redemption is limited.
I want to leave you with one last thought. In Luke 24:49 Jesus says to the disciples that they are to wait in the city for the Holy Spirit to come. The Holy Spirit was critical to the establishment of the church. So they had to stay in the city and wait for His arrival. They had no idea how long it would take. Jesus didn’t tell them. They just had to stay put. Theologians believe it would have been between 7 and 10 days of waiting.
That may not sound like a lot in contrast to other characters in the Bible BUT for a group of people who may have been eager to commence with preaching the gospel after seeing their very real and alive saviour…to be told to wait may have seemed counter-intuitive. And they had no other immediate instruction. They were simply to wait and pray. I’ve done an all-night prayer meeting and believe me it is hard work to sustain yourself physically. And they did this for 7-10 days. That is a really long time to be in a state of waiting and earnestly praying. But then the Holy Spirit comes and performs incredible mighty acts that none of us could perform in our own strength. He sets this little gathering on fire! He empowers Peter to share one of the most powerful sermons we will ever hear…a totally unscripted sermon that He could not have planned, spoken by an unqualified fisherman.
And that’s what the Holy Spirit does.
And once the Holy Spirit starts He can’t be stopped. He begins what I call the Holy Spirit growth strategy. Most churches would presume that a growth rate of 7% per year is a great sign of a healthy growing church. That’s what the experts say. But the Holy Spirit takes them from maybe 100 people to 3100 in one day.
Then after healing a man in chapter 3, the number goes up to 5000. Again in one day.
And the Holy Spirit did so much more than this. He healed, he united the believers, he broke through prison walls, gave powerful visions…The Holy Spirit was worth waiting for. All of us benefit, the whole earth benefits because they waited. The question I encourage you to ask yourself is…Who might benefit because we waited?