Wait

Psalm 62:1 – For God alone my soul waits in silence;

from him comes my salvation.

What do you do when God does not act as quickly as you want? What do you do when He seems to be silent? What do you do when the promise He made seems to be long time in being kept? The temptation is to take things into your own hands.

This is what we see countless times throughout the Scriptures. It is what happened when the people of Israel get tired of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with the Law of God. It is what preachers and churches and denominations do when they are distressed over the low number of converts and decide therefore that they must take things into their own hands. It is what young people will do when a young Christian life partner does not seem to be available.

The problem at Sinai was that even though God seemed to be taking a long time, He is still the only God they had and making another one out of gold did not solve their problem of impatience or make God come quicker. All it did was add idolatry to the list of things that now need to be dealt with. The problem with orchestrating converts is that the ability to budge the figures upward of those who have made professions of faith adds nothing to the Lamb’s Book of life. The problem with taking a mate who does not fit the qualifications laid down by God in His Word is that life with such a partner becomes a life lived in constant disobedience to God with all the repercussions that such a life produces.

If God does not act as expeditiously as we think He should we have no choice but to wait for Him. We cannot make a God who will do things better. We cannot force people into the kingdom. We cannot make life to be what we have prayed it to be. We dare not do such things.

So, we wait and we trust and we obey and we do all that we can biblically do while praying for God to hear us in our distress. And we believe that God knows what He is doing and that His timing is better than ours and that if this is what He wills then it is better than if things went the way that we had hoped.

What have you been praying for that you are thinking God is taking too long with His answer? Will it make you take matters into your own hands and do that which He has not sanctioned? That is no answer. Be as frustrated as you can be, but do not ever think that you can do better than the Almighty.

We do not know much of what God is doing in our lives or in the world. It is foolish and presumptuous and idolatrous to think that since God has made us wait that we have the right to run ahead of Him. We can never run ahead of God. If we do then we can know that we are sinning.

Trust in Him. Wait on the Lord. Wait, I say, on the Lord.