The Strength To Wait
Sermon
Together In Christ
Sermons and Prayers For the Christian Year
At the height of the Christmas shopping season, a young boy was standing at the bottom of a department store escalator, staring intently at the handrail as it moved along and refusing to take his eyes away. A saleswoman asked, "Are you lost?" "Nope," the boy said, "I'm waiting for my chewing gum to come back."
That boy displayed an admirable patience, but most children find it hard to wait for the things they want. And at Christmas time, most children find that their patience totally deserts them! Advent is a time for waiting, and I'm sure that's what many children find most difficult about the holiday season.
"The hardest part is the waiting," most kids would say. "It's having to wait a whole month before getting your presents. It's especially hard when you see the presents all wrapped up in the closet or in the basement. They're all wrapped and waiting for you, but you still can't open them until December 25th." There are four weeks in Advent, but those four weeks can seem like an eternity to a child who has to wait.
Now, suppose the child's friend comes along to say, "Maybe your parents are going to take all those presents out of the closet and bring them back to the store. Maybe they got mad at you for some reason and changed their mind about Christmas. Maybe they won't give you anything for Christmas because they don't love you!" Plant a seed of doubt in the child's mind, get the child feeling sorry for herself and the wait becomes even harder.
Of course, grownups can also have a hard time waiting for the things they want, not just during Advent, but at any time of the year. This is fairly commonplace, since we live in a consumer culture of instant gratification - "Get whatever you want, and if you don't have the money for it, don't worry, you can buy it now and pay for it later!" Millions of families have succumbed to that seductive siren song and gone deep in dept. Now they will spend years digging themselves out from under their debts, all because they had a hard time waiting.
Having to wait can also be a problem in our spiritual lives, which is what I'm more concerned with this morning. We come to God in prayer, and we want instant communion with Him. We ask God for something, and we want it from Him immediately. We seek God's direction for our lives or God's guidance on a decision we have to make and we want His answer right away.
Add to that the nagging voice of doubt which can play on our minds while we wait for God, the nagging fear that God's lack of an answer is due to our lack of faith. "God doesn't hear you; God's too busy to be bothered with you. Maybe God doesn't answer you because He doesn't love you. Maybe God can't answer because He doesn't really exist!" Just as the child's friend made the waiting for Christmas more difficult by planting seeds of doubt, our own waiting for God can be made more difficult in much the same way.
The Bible tells us, however, that waiting is a part of life. Remember how after the Israelites escaped from Egypt, they still had to wait forty long years before they could enter the Promised Land! Remember how Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, but he had to wait fourteen years before Rachel's father would let him marry her.
Remember in our text from Luke how the angel brought Mary her fantastic news and then Mary had to wait for Jesus to be born. Imagine carrying that secret and waiting all that time, knowing that God's only Son was growing inside of you! And on the other side of Jesus' earthly life, remember what Jesus told His friends right after Easter. There they were - all on fire and excited because they had seen their Risen Lord - and Jesus told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait (Acts 1:4). We all have lived long enough to know that sometimes in life, all we can do is wait.
The Bible also makes it clear that waiting can be a natural part of our spiritual life as well. Do you think you must always be instantly and intimately in touch with God whenever you call upon Him and anything less means that your faith is weak? Well, listen to the Psalmist's words, "For God alone my soul waits in silence" (62:1), and "for Thee I wait all the day long" (25:5).
Listen to what Isaiah wrote, "I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding His face ..." (8:17). "We look for light but behold darkness" (59:9) and "God works for those who wait for Him" (64:4). And Micah wrote much the same: "As for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation" (7:7).
Sometimes we want an answer, a vision, a direction from God for our lives, and it doesn't come right when we ask for it. What are we to do then? The prophet Habakkuk says,
For still the vision awaits its time;
it hastens to the end - it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay (2:3)
There are at least three things to be said in favor of developing a spirituality which is willing to wait for God.
First, waiting for God shows the strength of faith, not an absence of faith. It shows a genuine, authentic faith, not a "give it to me now" consumer faith. People who want God's instant presence when they pray, God's instant answer, God's instant granting of their requests, these are people more in tune with their own will than God's will. They are more interested in their own timetable than in God's. They are only prepared to hear what is already in their mind rather than waiting with an open mind to hear what God might have to say.
One writer has compared the need to wait for God to the experience of entering a darkened room. When you first enter the room, you must wait for your eyes to get adjusted to the dark before you can see. In the same way, our minds must get adjusted to God when we seek His guidance or come to Him in prayer. We ought not just rush in, demanding instant gratification from God and expecting God to adjust Himself to us.1
A second and related point is that waiting for God is a sign of humility, which itself is a sign of authentic faith. Waiting for God to reply to us or guide us recognizes that God is in control of our relationship with Him and not we ourselves. It is a sign that God is the power in our relationship with Him, and not we ourselves. How else can it be if we are talking about - not some small, "jump and fetch it" deity of our own creation - but the Lord God Almighty and Everlasting, Maker of heaven and earth?
Yes, waiting for God is a regular part of the true Christian's piety and devotion. It is a sign of faith and humility. It unites us with the experience of psalmists, prophets and apostles, whose words about waiting I just read to you. Rather than being a sign of a sterile or empty faith, waiting for God is a sign of real Biblical spirituality, a sign that we are approaching God in a way which allows God to guide us and enlighten us.
But there is still a third point to be made about the spirituality of waiting. You see, the Bible adds a whole other dimension to the question by saying that God has to wait for us. That's right: when we get impatient with God, when we doubt God or complain about waiting for Him to answer our needs or show us His will, we are forgetting how long God has been waiting for us!
The first letter of Peter refers to "God's patience" dating back to the time of Noah (3:20), but in truth, God has been waiting patiently for us in every age. God told us to worship Him alone and He is still waiting for us to put away our many idols. God told us to love our neighbor as ourselves and He is still waiting for our love to conquer our hate. God told us to trust in Him completely and He is still waiting for us to let go of our worldly fears and faithlessness. How can we presume to complain about waiting for God when God has been waiting for us so long?
I think of the life of William Wilberforce in this regard, a devoted Christian and abolitionist leader in England in the last century. He worked tirelessly his whole life to outlaw the practice of slavery, but he never complained as decade after decade passed and his efforts seemed to bear no fruit. After all, he had just been waiting those past fifty or sixty years for slavery to end; God had been waiting for centuries for men and women to give up this odious evil. Finally, as Wilberforce lay on his deathbed, exhausted from a lifetime of struggle, Parliament passed the law which eliminated slavery in the British Empire.
Of course, it's easier to wait if we know that our waiting is not in vain, that there is a purpose and a promise in our waiting. After all, we are not waiting for some playwright's "Godot" who will never come - we are waiting for God, so we know that the waiting itself is an act and a sign of faith.
During the Second World War, a group of Scottish soldiers were languishing in a Nazi POW camp until one day a prisoner heard over a smuggled radio that the Allies had landed on Normandy. Word spread quickly through the camp and all the prisoners began cheering. Their guards thought them crazy, but the prisoners knew better. They knew that their waiting was not in vain and that the victory was already won even if it wasn't there yet.
That's how we can be when we are waiting for God. Sometimes people receive what they seek from God right away. Sometimes, like William Wilberforce, they wait a whole lifetime. But through it all, "Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength," as Isaiah says in our text today. They are renewed and strengthened as they wait for God because they know that their waiting can never be in vain. They know that the victory has already been won, even if it isn't fully here yet.
God has already promised Himself to us, sometimes we must wait awhile to see how that promise is realized. If it seems slow, wait for it patiently and faithfully; but know that it will surely come, in the fullness of God's love and time.
There is a true story of a family in New Jersey which enjoyed taking long swims in the ocean together. They were all strong swimmers and would sometimes go quite far from shore.
One day, the father and daughter were swimming together when suddenly they were separated and the father saw that the current was taking them further out to sea. He called over to his daughter, "I am going to shore for help. If you get tired, turn over and float on your back. You can float that way all day if you have to and I'll come back to get you."
Before long, search parties combed the sea with boats looking for this girl until finally, after four hours, they found her. The crowd on the shoreline cheered as she was brought in, but the girl herself was rather calm about her ordeal. "Daddy told me I could float all day on my back," she said, "and so I rolled over and floated because I knew he would come."
Can we not strive for that same kind of faith ourselves? As we swim through the changing currents of life, the waves of trial and uncertainty may rise up and swell around us; in a storm, they can look fierce and threatening, indeed. That is when we must find the faith and the presence of mind to simply roll over and float, knowing that our help will surely come.
We are so conditioned to short attention spans and instant gratification in this secular, consumer culture of ours; but now we have Advent to interrupt all that. Advent is a season for waiting, we are waiting for the birth of our Lord. It is a time to learn the value of waiting and apply it to our spiritual lives.
You who seek a closer, more intimate relationship with God, remember this Advent lesson and keep it throughout the year. In your prayers and petitions, in your devotional life and your desire for communion with God; slow down! Wait for God! Be patient with God, who has been so very patient with you. Make the waiting itself a victory of faith, understanding that waiting for God is a natural part of the spiritual rhythm of Christian life.
Know that you can never wait for God in vain. The answer you seek, the guidance you pray for, the presence and the help you need are sure to come. God will come to renew your strength. He will come to mount you up with wings like eagles, letting you soar above the storm, gliding in the gulf streams of hope and love and grace. This is God's promise to all who seek Him in faith. Sometimes all we need is the strength to wait. Amen
Pastoral Prayer
Almighty, Eternal God, who has prepared the minds and hearts of Your children in every age for the coming of Your Son, and whose Spirit is working even now to brighten the darkness of our lives with His holy light, help us be fully prepared this year for the birth of our Lord. Do not let us be distracted from the real reason for the season. Do not let us get discouraged by the busyness of our days. Help us to make room for Him in our hearts, since there is no room for Him in the inn, that He may live in us and we may live anew in Him.
O Loving and Tender God, help us also to wait for Your word when we ask to hear it. Help us to wait for Your guidance when we ask to know Your will. Teach us patience as we come before You, and let our waiting make us strong in faith. Teach us to pray boldly and often, O Lord; and then teach us to stop speaking and start listening as we wait for Your reply. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen
1. Robert Wallalce in The Minister's Manual, (1974 Edition, Harper and Row, New York), pp. 93.4.
That boy displayed an admirable patience, but most children find it hard to wait for the things they want. And at Christmas time, most children find that their patience totally deserts them! Advent is a time for waiting, and I'm sure that's what many children find most difficult about the holiday season.
"The hardest part is the waiting," most kids would say. "It's having to wait a whole month before getting your presents. It's especially hard when you see the presents all wrapped up in the closet or in the basement. They're all wrapped and waiting for you, but you still can't open them until December 25th." There are four weeks in Advent, but those four weeks can seem like an eternity to a child who has to wait.
Now, suppose the child's friend comes along to say, "Maybe your parents are going to take all those presents out of the closet and bring them back to the store. Maybe they got mad at you for some reason and changed their mind about Christmas. Maybe they won't give you anything for Christmas because they don't love you!" Plant a seed of doubt in the child's mind, get the child feeling sorry for herself and the wait becomes even harder.
Of course, grownups can also have a hard time waiting for the things they want, not just during Advent, but at any time of the year. This is fairly commonplace, since we live in a consumer culture of instant gratification - "Get whatever you want, and if you don't have the money for it, don't worry, you can buy it now and pay for it later!" Millions of families have succumbed to that seductive siren song and gone deep in dept. Now they will spend years digging themselves out from under their debts, all because they had a hard time waiting.
Having to wait can also be a problem in our spiritual lives, which is what I'm more concerned with this morning. We come to God in prayer, and we want instant communion with Him. We ask God for something, and we want it from Him immediately. We seek God's direction for our lives or God's guidance on a decision we have to make and we want His answer right away.
Add to that the nagging voice of doubt which can play on our minds while we wait for God, the nagging fear that God's lack of an answer is due to our lack of faith. "God doesn't hear you; God's too busy to be bothered with you. Maybe God doesn't answer you because He doesn't love you. Maybe God can't answer because He doesn't really exist!" Just as the child's friend made the waiting for Christmas more difficult by planting seeds of doubt, our own waiting for God can be made more difficult in much the same way.
The Bible tells us, however, that waiting is a part of life. Remember how after the Israelites escaped from Egypt, they still had to wait forty long years before they could enter the Promised Land! Remember how Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, but he had to wait fourteen years before Rachel's father would let him marry her.
Remember in our text from Luke how the angel brought Mary her fantastic news and then Mary had to wait for Jesus to be born. Imagine carrying that secret and waiting all that time, knowing that God's only Son was growing inside of you! And on the other side of Jesus' earthly life, remember what Jesus told His friends right after Easter. There they were - all on fire and excited because they had seen their Risen Lord - and Jesus told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait (Acts 1:4). We all have lived long enough to know that sometimes in life, all we can do is wait.
The Bible also makes it clear that waiting can be a natural part of our spiritual life as well. Do you think you must always be instantly and intimately in touch with God whenever you call upon Him and anything less means that your faith is weak? Well, listen to the Psalmist's words, "For God alone my soul waits in silence" (62:1), and "for Thee I wait all the day long" (25:5).
Listen to what Isaiah wrote, "I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding His face ..." (8:17). "We look for light but behold darkness" (59:9) and "God works for those who wait for Him" (64:4). And Micah wrote much the same: "As for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation" (7:7).
Sometimes we want an answer, a vision, a direction from God for our lives, and it doesn't come right when we ask for it. What are we to do then? The prophet Habakkuk says,
For still the vision awaits its time;
it hastens to the end - it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay (2:3)
There are at least three things to be said in favor of developing a spirituality which is willing to wait for God.
First, waiting for God shows the strength of faith, not an absence of faith. It shows a genuine, authentic faith, not a "give it to me now" consumer faith. People who want God's instant presence when they pray, God's instant answer, God's instant granting of their requests, these are people more in tune with their own will than God's will. They are more interested in their own timetable than in God's. They are only prepared to hear what is already in their mind rather than waiting with an open mind to hear what God might have to say.
One writer has compared the need to wait for God to the experience of entering a darkened room. When you first enter the room, you must wait for your eyes to get adjusted to the dark before you can see. In the same way, our minds must get adjusted to God when we seek His guidance or come to Him in prayer. We ought not just rush in, demanding instant gratification from God and expecting God to adjust Himself to us.1
A second and related point is that waiting for God is a sign of humility, which itself is a sign of authentic faith. Waiting for God to reply to us or guide us recognizes that God is in control of our relationship with Him and not we ourselves. It is a sign that God is the power in our relationship with Him, and not we ourselves. How else can it be if we are talking about - not some small, "jump and fetch it" deity of our own creation - but the Lord God Almighty and Everlasting, Maker of heaven and earth?
Yes, waiting for God is a regular part of the true Christian's piety and devotion. It is a sign of faith and humility. It unites us with the experience of psalmists, prophets and apostles, whose words about waiting I just read to you. Rather than being a sign of a sterile or empty faith, waiting for God is a sign of real Biblical spirituality, a sign that we are approaching God in a way which allows God to guide us and enlighten us.
But there is still a third point to be made about the spirituality of waiting. You see, the Bible adds a whole other dimension to the question by saying that God has to wait for us. That's right: when we get impatient with God, when we doubt God or complain about waiting for Him to answer our needs or show us His will, we are forgetting how long God has been waiting for us!
The first letter of Peter refers to "God's patience" dating back to the time of Noah (3:20), but in truth, God has been waiting patiently for us in every age. God told us to worship Him alone and He is still waiting for us to put away our many idols. God told us to love our neighbor as ourselves and He is still waiting for our love to conquer our hate. God told us to trust in Him completely and He is still waiting for us to let go of our worldly fears and faithlessness. How can we presume to complain about waiting for God when God has been waiting for us so long?
I think of the life of William Wilberforce in this regard, a devoted Christian and abolitionist leader in England in the last century. He worked tirelessly his whole life to outlaw the practice of slavery, but he never complained as decade after decade passed and his efforts seemed to bear no fruit. After all, he had just been waiting those past fifty or sixty years for slavery to end; God had been waiting for centuries for men and women to give up this odious evil. Finally, as Wilberforce lay on his deathbed, exhausted from a lifetime of struggle, Parliament passed the law which eliminated slavery in the British Empire.
Of course, it's easier to wait if we know that our waiting is not in vain, that there is a purpose and a promise in our waiting. After all, we are not waiting for some playwright's "Godot" who will never come - we are waiting for God, so we know that the waiting itself is an act and a sign of faith.
During the Second World War, a group of Scottish soldiers were languishing in a Nazi POW camp until one day a prisoner heard over a smuggled radio that the Allies had landed on Normandy. Word spread quickly through the camp and all the prisoners began cheering. Their guards thought them crazy, but the prisoners knew better. They knew that their waiting was not in vain and that the victory was already won even if it wasn't there yet.
That's how we can be when we are waiting for God. Sometimes people receive what they seek from God right away. Sometimes, like William Wilberforce, they wait a whole lifetime. But through it all, "Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength," as Isaiah says in our text today. They are renewed and strengthened as they wait for God because they know that their waiting can never be in vain. They know that the victory has already been won, even if it isn't fully here yet.
God has already promised Himself to us, sometimes we must wait awhile to see how that promise is realized. If it seems slow, wait for it patiently and faithfully; but know that it will surely come, in the fullness of God's love and time.
There is a true story of a family in New Jersey which enjoyed taking long swims in the ocean together. They were all strong swimmers and would sometimes go quite far from shore.
One day, the father and daughter were swimming together when suddenly they were separated and the father saw that the current was taking them further out to sea. He called over to his daughter, "I am going to shore for help. If you get tired, turn over and float on your back. You can float that way all day if you have to and I'll come back to get you."
Before long, search parties combed the sea with boats looking for this girl until finally, after four hours, they found her. The crowd on the shoreline cheered as she was brought in, but the girl herself was rather calm about her ordeal. "Daddy told me I could float all day on my back," she said, "and so I rolled over and floated because I knew he would come."
Can we not strive for that same kind of faith ourselves? As we swim through the changing currents of life, the waves of trial and uncertainty may rise up and swell around us; in a storm, they can look fierce and threatening, indeed. That is when we must find the faith and the presence of mind to simply roll over and float, knowing that our help will surely come.
We are so conditioned to short attention spans and instant gratification in this secular, consumer culture of ours; but now we have Advent to interrupt all that. Advent is a season for waiting, we are waiting for the birth of our Lord. It is a time to learn the value of waiting and apply it to our spiritual lives.
You who seek a closer, more intimate relationship with God, remember this Advent lesson and keep it throughout the year. In your prayers and petitions, in your devotional life and your desire for communion with God; slow down! Wait for God! Be patient with God, who has been so very patient with you. Make the waiting itself a victory of faith, understanding that waiting for God is a natural part of the spiritual rhythm of Christian life.
Know that you can never wait for God in vain. The answer you seek, the guidance you pray for, the presence and the help you need are sure to come. God will come to renew your strength. He will come to mount you up with wings like eagles, letting you soar above the storm, gliding in the gulf streams of hope and love and grace. This is God's promise to all who seek Him in faith. Sometimes all we need is the strength to wait. Amen
Pastoral Prayer
Almighty, Eternal God, who has prepared the minds and hearts of Your children in every age for the coming of Your Son, and whose Spirit is working even now to brighten the darkness of our lives with His holy light, help us be fully prepared this year for the birth of our Lord. Do not let us be distracted from the real reason for the season. Do not let us get discouraged by the busyness of our days. Help us to make room for Him in our hearts, since there is no room for Him in the inn, that He may live in us and we may live anew in Him.
O Loving and Tender God, help us also to wait for Your word when we ask to hear it. Help us to wait for Your guidance when we ask to know Your will. Teach us patience as we come before You, and let our waiting make us strong in faith. Teach us to pray boldly and often, O Lord; and then teach us to stop speaking and start listening as we wait for Your reply. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen
1. Robert Wallalce in The Minister's Manual, (1974 Edition, Harper and Row, New York), pp. 93.4.
