Learn the Beauty of Waiting On The Lord

Our Monday Devotion comes to us from Council Member, Lahoma:

"Truly my soul waits upon God" Psalm 62:1 KJV

I read a story once about a little boy who had asked his father to pick him up after school because it was going to rain that day. The Father agreed, and asked the boy to wait inside the school building until he arrived. When school was over, the little boy came to the door and watched out the window for his father’s car. The rain was pouring down, and as the minutes ticked by, the little boy became anxious and very impatient and decided to take matters into his own hands. He bolted out the door and walked half way home in the storm before he heard his father’s voice calling him from the street. The little boy was soaked from head to toe, and the father simply said, “I was on my way, son. If you had only waited a few more minutes, you would have been able to ride home in the warm and dry car.”

There are times in our lives that we need to wait on God. For whatever purpose, He has not given us clear direction on how to proceed in the area of our life that we are asking Him for guidance on. When those times come, and they will, we must LEARN how to wait on the Lord. The Bible tells us many things about waiting upon the Lord. One of my favorite verses is Isaiah 40:31 which starts by saying “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength", and oh how we need God to renew our strength when we are weighed down by challenges in our life journeys. But what about the whole waiting thing.. why does that have to take so long? Just like the little boy in the story above, waiting is sometimes the hardest thing for us to do as humans. We try to evaluate our situation, we get impatient, and when we don’t see the results we are expecting, we are tempted to take matters into our own hands. If we do this, we may get “soaked” unnecessarily, and we will surely miss the point of God’s wisdom in asking us to WAIT upon Him.

Waiting upon the Lord includes silence. We must not be afraid to be silent before Him, thinking it is wasted time. He does not want us to be all the time talking–telling Him so many things about which He already knows more than we do. Time is needed for proper adjustment to Him, our vision properly focused, our hearts hushed, and minds subdued. It is in the silent times before Him, quietly waiting in His presence, that the miracle of communion with our Heavenly Father can be experienced as such a deeper level. The literal translation of our verse for meditation today from Psalm 62:1 is, "Truly my soul is silent upon God." This does not imply a time of prayer; it is not worship, it is not intercession or tears or laughter. It is showing me how my very soul, in utter hush and quietness, can be assuredly and confidently poised and still before the very throne of God.

Waiting on God carries the thought of expectation and hope. To wait upon God means to expect from God. It is SO necessary today that we wait upon God in the sense of expecting from Him. We are so self reliant at times, and when we allow ourselves to surrender and wait, we will experience the beauty of depending upon the power of the Holy Spirit and learning how to clearly hear His Voice and know His ways.

Waiting also means to watch, observe, take notice. The meaning is clearly shown in Prov. 8:34: "Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors." This verse pictures perhaps a servant or soldier, waiting at a door or gate. He does not know the moment his master may open the door to require his service, or maybe to give him a gift or direct him to go forth. It matters not to the servant who waits to serve or the soldier who only moves at the command of his leader, he/she merely waits for the command and knows how to recognize it when it comes. This is how we should be when God is asking us to wait upon Him: watching, ready, expectant, alert, able to move at a moment’s notice. Many believers today do not understand the movement of God in the world as He is speaking to us in our present conditions because they are not still enough to observe Him. I challenge each of you to spend some time waiting before the Lord. Lay your heart out before Him, walk along the beach and listen to His voice in the waves of the sea or in the song of a bird. “Cast your cares upon Him, for He cares for you” I Peter 5:7

When we learn the beauty of waiting, we are changed. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength" (Isa. 40:31). The word "renew" in the Hebrew literally means "change" -- they shall change their strength. It was a word used to denote a change of garments. Applying that to our verse, it would read: “They that wait upon the Lord shall lay aside their strength and put on, as a garment, strength from God”. I love that. I need that. I will wait for that. Let God CHANGE you while you wait, and then when it is time, move when He whispers your name.

Selah
Sister Lahoma

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