He gives strength to the weary, And to him who lacks might He increases power. ³⁰ Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly, ³¹ Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.

Isaiah 40: 29-31

 

What do you want?  What do you seek?  What do you desire?  

Waiting on God is an important part of the Christian journey.  In fact, waiting is central to the Christian faith.  If you are a Christian, then you join the chorus of millions who anxiously await the return of our Lord.  We cannot be Christian and not be waiting, it is who we are.  Our faith and our hope both grow in seasons of waiting.  However, if you ask most believers what they are waiting for, the return of Jesus is likely not going to be the first answer.  I recently had a woman tell me that she wanted Jesus to return, but not yet because she still had things to do.  While that is not the correct theological answer, it can be understandable to carry these desires, and I believe that God, knowing that we are merely dust stood upright for a while, gives us grace in some of these desires.  Perhaps your dreams include loved ones receive saving faith, possibly the dream of being a parent and rearing children to walk with God (and of course receiving a spouse as well), perhaps you have a clear vision for your calling and you want to make an impact on the world for the kingdom of God.  Whether right or wrong, all of our hearts hold dreams and we desire a kingdom. Maybe we would not describe it that way, but for reasons that will become clear, I find it quite important to begin to think about it that way in our walk with God.

As we move down this path on our faith journey, it is of critical importance that our time of waiting is not wasted time.  This is not a call to busyness, but rather quite the opposite.  Waiting on God is the most important heart work that God will do in us after saving us and replacing our heart of stone with a heart of flesh.  Martin Luther wrote that “whatever our heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god!”   John Calvin likewise wrote that the human heart is “an idol factory.”  Both of these Reformers were calling attention to the same problem that we all face, that is a recognition that our hearts are deceitful and desperately sick (Jeremiah 17:9).  Since Jesus told us that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our hearts, soul, mind and strength, it is important that we explore how to do so.  We must be careful to not be like the Church at Ephesus who had a thriving ministry and the Lord commended them for it, but pointed out that in their busyness they had forgotten their first love (Revelation 2:4-5).  Or be careful to not be Martha, who was anxious to be a good host.  Jesus was in her home, but she was so busy hosting that she did not make time for Him.  Jesus told her to relax and be more like Mary who was sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to every word (Luke 10:38-42).  These are just two examples of how we can think we are doing good, yet we are off course.  Waiting on God is always a time to recalibrate our hearts towards Christ, our magnetic north.  We need to slow the pace of our outer lives in order to slow the pace of our inner life, in order to hear what God is calling you to do.  We need to be still before God to quell our anxiety, our fear and our discontent hearts as the first step towards rightly ordered loves.  While we may be waiting for good things, blessings that God created for our joy, we must also be mindful of which way our hearts point.  Our rightly ordered priorities will place our love for God first with Christ on the throne of our hearts.

Psalm 37:4 says that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, He will give us the desires of our heart.  From the very beginning, man was designed to worship. We are designed to worship because we are designed to love, and we cannot, not love.  We are creature who desire, and we desire the things that we love, so we need to be aware of our loves and desires because that is what determines what we worship.  Psalm 37:4 is a well known verse among those waiting on God, but the passage is packed with deep meaning which I will severely summarize.  Psalm 37 invites us to ask the question, “what does it mean to delight ourselves in the Lord?”  The passage calls children of God to trust God wholeheartedly, do good works, consider God in all that we do, rest and wait patiently, do not be jealous or envious, do not compare our lives to others, be humble, be content with little, trust that God is establishing our steps daily, to know in our hearts that God has us when fear and anxiety attack us, and lastly, serve God while you are waiting!  Let us be sure to not gloss over the framework of delighting in the Lord for two reasons.  First, these are the practices that shape our heart in the formation of Christ in us (Romans 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 4:19).  Second, the shaping of our hearts reveals the authenticity of our desires as God honoring or idolatry. 

So we now return to the question, “what do you want?”  In Matthew 5:6, Jesus says, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”  Consider this for a moment – have you ever been hungry?  Have you ever been thirsty?  Have you ever been famished or parched?  In those moment, we desire food and beverage, in fact we need them to live.  Hunger and thirst have specific connotations that evoke memories, or at least the ability to imagine the longing to have food and beverage.  By way of analogy, imagine our desire for food and water as a barometer to measure our desire to be righteous, holy and Christ like?”  Whether or not we have made that connection in our life of faith is less important at the moment, what is important is to know that in our faith journey, this is our goal, every one of us who finds our identity in Christ.  Our first nature is biological and we require food and water to live.  When we don’t get it daily, several times a day, we get hungry and thirsty.  When we go for extended periods of time in the mode of being hungry and thirsty, we then tend to be irritable, impatience, perhaps even angry.  Our culture now has a term for this, “hangry!”  (Our first nature also produces these traits when we do not rest and sleep).  As creatures who are composed of body and soul, we need to begin to see that our desires of hunger, thirst and rest in our first nature, must be cultivated in our souls to be second nature.  We are not called to merely agree with the gospel and give intellectual consent.  Though our faith journey begins by thinking, as we heard the word of Christ and received faith (Romans 10:14-17), and the Holy Spirit used those thoughts to speak to us regarding our sin, the righteousness of Christ and the judgment of God (John 16:8-11), we begin to hunger and thirst in our desire to be like Christ.  After receiving faith and being born again, we move to repentance (Ephesians 4:21-22), as we are guided in truth by the Holy Spirit (John 16:13; John 14:17), and by the word of truth (John 17:17), so that in our new “self” the righteousness and holiness of the truth (Ephesians 4:23-24) moves us towards becoming true worshipers in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24).

²³ But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

John 4:23-24

This is the deep work being done in us during our season of waiting, in which God is exposing the motives of our hearts which drive the desires of our hearts!  Can we seek first the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33), if we do not desire the Kingdom of God?  Jesus tells us that if we seek His Kingdom in all that we do, then God will meet all of our needs (Matthew 6:25-34; 7:7-11).  Seasons of waiting are to periods of self-examination, in which we invest time to weigh our loves for things that are not God, with God Himself.  Waiting is the season of our lives where we must face the reality that we are not God.  Our initial reaction might be fear because of the possibility that God is going to ask that we give up something loved, or shift gears or impart something into our lives that was not part of our plan.  This is what I have termed, our ‘Abraham – Isaac’ moments, in which God asks us to place something on the altar, often something that we have not held loosely.  This is where we deepen our roots in Christ to walk by faith and trust.  We can trust that because God is good, because God loves us, because God cannot deny Himself, and because God has given us His Son, He will surely give us all things (Romans 8:28-39; Matthew 7:7).  We can know by faith that His plan is best, even if His plan is not what we imagined.  The scriptures say that when Abraham was tested, he placed Isaac on the altar knowing that God can raise the dead (Hebrews 11:17-19).  This is the tremendous level of faith that we are to seek and the lasting fruit from a season of waiting.  We should also be aware that seasons of waiting can be fruitless, but as we grow deep roots in the winter of our faith, we can be assured of producing fruit at the appointed time, perhaps the springtime of our faith (Psalm 1:1-3).

So, in regards to waiting on God, we must consider whether or not our desires have been molded by delight and communion with God?  Has waiting exposed any sin that needs to be addressed?  Are my loves properly ordered? Will receiving the desires of my heart bring my closer to God or place distance between me and God?  Am I trusting God in a way that I know, without doubting, that God can do the impossible and will put His glory on display in my life at the appointed time? (Luke 1:37; Matthew 19:26).  These are good places to begin self-examination and ask God to reveal what is in our hearts (Proverbs 16:2). Other areas to explore on the topic of waiting on God include Hope and Despair, The heart work in us, The heart work in others, Things Asked and Imagined, The life of comparison, good things and the God things, and the sum of all these things in the recalibration of our hearts during the work of waiting!  

Prayer: Eternal God, heavenly Father, you have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.  Send us now into the world in peace and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord. Amen!