I’ll be honest. I hate waiting. I don’t think anyone enjoys waiting, but it is especially hard when we wait on the Lord to answer our prayers. Perhaps you are waiting on God, as I am. Perhaps like me, you have been praying for what seems like years, and you are growing discouraged.
I’m waiting for healing. I’m waiting for prodigals to come home. I’m waiting for promises to come to pass. It has been a difficult season for me. However, I have to admit that during this time, the Lord is teaching me some hard lessons. Lessons that I know would be impossible for me to learn, if I was not waiting for them to be answered. Let me share some of them with you and hopefully encourage you not to give up.
The first thing that I began to realize during this season, is how many people in the Bible had to wait for their promises to come to pass. Abraham had to wait 25 years between the time God promised him a son and the time Isaac was finally born. Joseph was about 17 when he was given two dreams of what was to come. He waited 20 years, 13 of those spent in prison, before he saw those dreams come to pass before his eyes. David was anointed king of Israel as a teenager by Samuel. Then he spent the next 13 or so years running for his life because King Saul wanted to kill him. These are just the more famous stories, but there are many others who also had to wait.
I also realized that God uses these periods of waiting to test our hearts. Proverbs 17:3 tells us “The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, but the LORD tests the hearts.” The comparison between a refining pot and a furnace is not lost on me when it comes to waiting. Metals are heated up to refine them and purify them. The dross or impurities are then skimmed off. I would suggest that waiting is also a furnace that heats us up and allows what is really in our hearts to come out. Which brings me to another lesson learned during this season.
While we wait on God, we have choices. We can choose to take matters into our own hands, like Abraham and Sarah did. (Genesis 36) Even though Abraham was called a friend of God, he was very much human, just like you and I. He and Sarah found it difficult to understand how God could give them a son when they were old. They were in retirement age, to say the least. They decided that since they were well past childbearing age, perhaps Sarah’s maid Hagar could give Abraham a son. What came about was Ishmael, who sadly became a thorn in their side when Isaac, the promised son born from Sarah, came into the world. The jealousy and anger towards Isaac was no joke.
Or, like Joseph we can become angry with those who have hurt us and perhaps caused us to wait for those promises from God. (Genesis 37) When Joseph saw his brothers, almost twenty years after they had sold him to slave traders that took him to Egypt, he was so angry with them that he sent them to prison for three days and did not reveal himself to them for quite some time. It was not until he realized that God had allowed the whole situation because it ultimately saved his entire family from starvation, that he forgave them and told them who he was.
Sadly, we can also choose to give up, or maybe even lose our faith, as Zacharias the priest did in Luke 1:18. Zacharias and his wife had spent many years praying for a child. Judging by how old they were, decades had passed. Now the old priest was standing in the Holy of Holies in the temple in Jerusalem when suddenly an angel appears to him and tells him that God has answered their prayers and that he and his wife will have a son. This was no ordinary angel. No, this was Gabriel, an Archangel. His response to seeing this angel and hearing that their prayers were finally answered is sad, but understandable. “And Zacharias said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is well advanced in years.” Ouch! Clearly, the angel did not react well to his response. Gabriel rebuked him and told him that because he didn’t believe him, Zacharias would be struck mute until these things came to pass. He could not speak until his son John (later called John the Baptist) was born.
And then there is David, the future king of Israel. David was anointed as king by Samuel and then the trials began almost immediately. King Saul was so jealous of him that he tried for years to kill him but never succeeded. What was David’s response? He wrote many of the Psalms during those difficult and painful years. Clearly his response to waiting was to praise God and trust Him to bring it to pass.
Why was his response so different from the others? I am by no means suggesting that David was perfect and was never upset or struggling with the wait, but I do notice that after King Saul did some things that were contrary to what God told him to do, Samuel the Prophet told him in 1 Samuel 13;14 “The LORD has sought for Himself a man after His own heart, and the LORD has commanded him to be commander over His people, because you have not kept what the LORD commanded you.” Paul tells us in Acts 13:22 “And when He had removed him (King Saul) He raised up for them David as king, to whom also He gave testimony and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will.’
So why was David different in his reactions? We are given a clue in the above statement. David did all of God’s will. David, you see, surrendered to God. He surrendered his own will, his own desires and plans and perhaps most important, his own understanding of things. There were many times when David had opportunity to kill King Saul, but he chose not to. He chose instead to wait on God’s timing. We are told in 1 Samuel 24:6-7 what David told his men, after he had an opportunity to kill Saul in a cave. “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, to stretch out my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the LORD.” So David restrained his servants with these words, and did not allow them to rise against Saul. And Saul got up from the cave and went on his way.
David was given several opportunities to take matters into his own hands. He chose not to. He could have become angry, he chose not to. He could have lost his faith and given up, but instead he waited. And in the waiting, he wrote dozens of beautiful psalms praising the Lord that are an encouragement to us today. I have read many a psalm during difficult days and felt comforted.
Many of the promises and prayers that I have prayed are still in the waiting period. I have waited for years for them to be answered. I will not claim to be like David. However, during this difficult time, I remind myself regularly that it is not because God does not care about me, or because He won’t answer my prayers. No, instead I look at the lives of those faithful men and women in the Bible and learn how they waited. And I pray that God would help me to surrender to His will, His plans and His purpose and to give me the grace to overcome the temptation to take matters into my own hands, give up, become angry or lose my faith.
Perhaps you are also in a waiting period. You probably would not have read this far if you weren’t. I encourage you to not give up. Trust Him. His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. I have learned over the many years that I have walked with Jesus, He is faithful and He always hears our prayers. Wait, I say, on the Lord.
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