I Wait for the Lord

"I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning." Psalm 130:5-6

"Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when the heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and it is not anxious in the year of the drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit." Jeremiah 17:7-8

There is a great joy in waiting on the Lord to work, as I have been focusing on in the last couple of months. It's just the beginning but here is the most precious gem I have gleaned:

The scariest thing waiting and letting God run the course is wondering if the outcome is entirely not what you think is intended. What if it looks like a shipwreck at the end? Then again when God puts us in a place to rest/wait it is really on HIM not on the circumstances. If in the end this stirs my love for Christ more and I grow in the fruits of the Spirit it has not come to waste at all. The prize at the end of waiting…is a fuller sense of the beauty and majesty of Jesus Christ my Savior. That I can readily wait for with eagerness, come what may: temporal discouragement, heartache, or happiness.   

A heart can only be truly content when it's rock is Christ, because all other places will soon lack something and one will yearn for more or something entirely different (i.e. a better paying job,  bigger house, newer car, higher place on the corporate ladder, a more public service area in church, a different stage of life etc). It is waiting on the Lord to meet all my needs that I am learning to let my heart contentedly rest where true joy can only be found---in Christ alone.

What does it mean to wait on the Lord practically? It means allowing God to direct and guide. For Him to open and shut doors of opportunity. What is my duty? To obey what is clearly stated in His Word the commands we are to follow. It does not mean I have no feelings or have ambitions. It is coming to the Lord in prayer with those and asking if they align to His will and what He knows is best for me, and when I know they are not to confess that and ask for His help and grace in redirecting my affections to that would be pleasing to Him. Then it is my delight to recall to mind His faithfulness and submitting all to Him and trusting in a Heavenly Father that does not disappoint, change, forget, falter, or fail. There is hope because God is faithful, His promises are infallibly reliable! When I mediate on the above I am given a sense of peace, joy, and excitement; knowing God's plan for my life will be much better than any of my seemingly important and vital future agendas. I can only see from the shallow, selfish and temporal view, while my Heavenly Father sees it all and He will not withhold anything that will add to my best interest and joy, even as painful to allow a delay in a wish or to say no to a desire that I think I cannot live without. In all His responses He whispers, "Trust Me. That is all you need to know."


Elisabeth Elliot says it much better in the following article. I love when God teaches me something and I find a saint pen it out so eloquently of one who has gone ahead in this journey.

  "My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.' (Ps. 62:5) "In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace." Elisabeth Elliot

When we are waiting on God, which I think every Christian ought to be all the time, we do not have a time schedule in front of us. We don’t know when or whether God is going to answer a particular prayer or do a particular thing or get us out of a certain situation or change any of the conditions of our lives. And sometimes we think of our lives as being on hold.

I don’t think waiting on God is a merely passive thing. And certainly it doesn’t mean that our lives are on hold. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year we are meant to be living actively by faith. We’re talking about trust. And every second is real.

When I talk to young people, they often have this vague notion that the main thing is to get it over with, so that then they can “do something real.” We want to get to the real service for God, or the real job, or the real career, or the real life. That’s a dangerous attitude. I wanted a husband. I wanted a home. I wanted children. And so I began to pray about that and hammer away on God’s door, asking for His answer. Was He going to give me a husband? And He didn’t say yes, and He didn’t say no. He said, “Trust Me.”
 
Well, I knew that trusting God might mean that I was to be single for the rest of my life. But I came to the point after wrestling and a certain amount of agonizing in prayer of saying, “Yes, Lord, if that’s what You want, I will take it,”

One of my favorite verses and a verse that my mother gave me many, many years ago was Naomi’s answer to Ruth, “Sit still, my daughter, until thou see how the matter will fall.” The Lord had given my mother that verse when she was worried about the possibility of being a foreign missionary—she wasn’t worried about being a single missionary, but about being a missionary at all. She just thought it would be perfectly dreadful if the Lord should call her to be a missionary, perhaps in some awful place like Africa. When she began to pray about it, the Lord just said, “Sit still, My daughter, till thou see how the matter will fall.” She was also worried about the matter of marriage, and of course, the Lord took care of that—gave her a husband and also made her a missionary.
 
For whom do we wait? We wait for this God, this Creator God, this Redeemer, this Shepherd, this Savior, this Friend, this Lord, this Master. This kind of waiting is an act of trust. Waiting on God is a willed and deliberate act of trust. It doesn’t necessarily have to do anything with your feelings. It’s a matter of choice.

I came across this lovely paragraph in a little book called When Days Seem Dark:

“…There are times when we…do not know which way to turn. It may be just then that we shall learn for the first time how to stand still in perfect peace and quietness of soul, not idling away our time, not hopelessly limp and heedless of the outcome, but working on in such ways as may be given to us, observing with eager joy the way in which God will work it all out to a perfectly glorious ending.”

How do we wait, how do we trust Him, how do we wait on God? This requires my cooperation, a conscious, deliberate choice to put myself completely in His presence within those encircling arms, utterly at His disposal. Most of us are too vehement, too headlong, too impatient.


From Elisabeth Elliot’s “Gateway to Joy” program.  Series Title: Waiting on God, Dates: January 19 & 20, 1998. Copyright ©1998 Good News Broadcasting Association, Inc. (Back to the Bible), Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.  Originally republished in the Summer 1999 YLCF Journal, #24.